I told you I’m taking this swim-instructor course? So last night the woman teaching it called me over to explain butterfly stroke to a bunch of level 3 kids, which is to say, 8 years old and younger. I bent over at the waist, held my arms out and said, “Your hands should enter the water at 11 and 1,” among other things. And then I thought: Noooo, not an analog clock reference!
If you have young people in your life, be advised: They don’t understand analog clocks until they get older, some as old as fourth grade. I first learned this lifeguarding in 2023, when I was the only one who wore a watch and my colleagues, deprived of their phones, were always asking me the time. “Ten ’til one,” I might say, to a blank stare. “Twelve-fifty?” I’d say, and they’d nod. “Quarter after” meant nothing. You had to say “two fifteen.”
The wonders of technology. So I told the kids, instead, to start the stroke with their arms close to their head, like so. It’s humbling, when the world moves on without your permission.
Welcome to the end of the work week, a very long one for me. How to cheer myself up? Hate-reading another Tim Goeglein adjective party about a notable Lutheran church in Fort Wayne!
Zion Lutheran is indeed a lovely church. I don’t know what it did to deserve this, however:
As you drive down Creighton, Zion’s beautiful and lithe central spire rises like a phoenix as if welcoming an old friend.
I have found that steeple most inspiring on semi-foggy, semi-misty Hoosier Sunday mornings when the spire seems to lift itself heavenward as if peeking out of a cloudburst.
Zion’s sheer dimensions are awe-inspiring, and you can clearly see its unique cuneiform shape from the top of the Lincoln Tower when glancing southeast: 124 feet in length with its landmark transepts jutting out 80 feet.
Tim struggles with basic vocabulary. “Lithe,” for instance, means “slim and flexible,” which would seem to be the last thing you’d want in a church steeple. As for “slim,” aren’t all spires? Here’s the church in question:
Looks pretty standard churchy to me. But never mind that. The rest of that sentence is a disaster. For the thousandth time to the hundredth writer, a phoenix is a mythical bird that rises from the ashes of its own pyre (depending on the version of the myth) in rebirth, not to “welcome an old friend.” And again, flames are exactly what you don’t want near a historic church; ask the folks in Paris about that. Anyway, a building that’s been there for more than a century cannot be said to rise, even in a metaphorical sense. Let’s count the various mangled metaphors here, and on second thought, let’s not. As Alex said when I sent him this earlier this week, “Tim’s a late starter, having been a plagiarist until now.”
Indeed. Also, what is a cuneiform shape, in a building? One of you architects tell me.
We’ve had a lovely stretch of warm weather — high 70s on Thursday — and that has officially launched this tardy spring. I’m looking out the back windows at blooming trees and hostas in overdrive. The birds are already chattering when I leave for the pool or gym in the early dark. My plan to throttle down my paid work in favor of having more time to enjoy my dwindling number of springs and summers could be going better, but oh well.
Some miscellany ahead.
I don’t like to make too much out of women’s appearance, but mercy, has anyone seen Sarah Palin recently? What a tragedy, and I’m not talking about natural aging, but what plastic surgery has done to someone who was once strikingly pretty…
…and now looks like this:
She was a silly woman, wrong about everything, but she had the gift of a pleasant appearance. Looking at the 2024 version, I see evidence of chin, cheeks and lip work. The sunglasses are hiding her eyes, but likely there’d be something else going on there. And what on earth is a serious person (see above; she’s not) doing with a cartilage piercing that deep in their ear? You’re 61, not 17. Shudder. But this is what MAGA beauty standards can do, even to beauties, and say what you want about her, but Palin had that, at least. For a more standard-pretty girl like Kristi Noem, it just spells disaster:
Note: Eyebrows drawn with a Sharpie, those ridiculous false lashes (WHY?), and enough foundation to make her uneven complexion look even worse. Again, let’s compare and contrast. 2011:
And 2025:
Which one looks like the human being, which the fembot? Her eyes are disappearing into caves lined with kohl, and good lord, that hair. Nothing wrong with it, except that it’s the same hair every woman who passes through Trumpworld ends up with, the . High-maintenance bed hair, the tonsorial equivalent of a flag pin and MAGA hat.
OK, enough snarking for one day. The announced retirement of Dick Durbin prompted Neil Steinberg to unearth a few columns the senator appeared in. This passage, from 2006, was striking:
Had breakfast the other morning with Sen. Dick Durbin and Dan Seals, the young Democrat who just might unseat Mark Kirk in the 10th Congressional District next week. We were discussing that age-old question of whether the current election really is the most mean-spirited in history or only feels that way. Conversation naturally moved to George Allen, the Virginia senator who, having pretty much dug his own political grave with his mouth, is desperately lashing out at his opponent, Jim Webb, by pointing shrilly to salty lines culled from Webb’s war novels as if they were evidence of perversion. Durbin used a phrase I hadn’t heard before.
“George Allen is a spit tobacco senator,” he said. “One of four in the Senate.” Meaning that he dips and chews tobacco, a vile habit better left in the barn. But Allen doesn’t leave it in the barn. Durbin entertainingly described a flight down to Guantanamo he and Allen shared on a military airplane, and the cringing revulsion the clean-cut, dignified and ramrod straight military hosts extended toward Allen, a drooling nicotine addict dribbling brown saliva into a plastic cup. That’s a grosser image than anything in Webb’s novels.
Ewww. Happy weekend, all.
Deborah said on April 25, 2025 at 8:38 am
I had to look up tonsorial, I see that my autocorrect doesn’t recognize it either, it kept trying to change it to something else.
When my husband wakes up I’ll ask him what cuneiform means in architecture circles.
We had a late night at our first book club meet up last night. Out of 10 attendees, 8 enjoyed the book, 1 hated it (she’s a writer) and 1 was so so. The book was a graphic novel, My Favorite Thing is Monsters.
Back in the 70s when I lived in Texas there was a lot of good old boy tobacco chawing going on. Gross.
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Deborah said on April 25, 2025 at 9:15 am
According to my husband cuneiform is not an accurate architectural application of a term. It’s not a commonly used architectural term to describe a structure such as a church steeple. I looked up cuneiform on Google and it’s explained as meaning wedge shaped, coming from the shape derived from pressing the end of a reed into clay which the ancient Mesopotamians did to create marks to denote what we would call letters or numerals today.
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nancy said on April 25, 2025 at 9:25 am
Thanks Deborah, and I would guess that because a steeple is wedge-shaped, Timbo thought he’d fancy it up with a $50 word.
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Julie Robinson said on April 25, 2025 at 9:30 am
Cuneiform is an ancient system of writing. I believe Timmy meant cruciform, or cross shaped. Until the recent barn shed movement, most Lutheran and Catholic churches were cruciform. Zion really isn’t all that unique, sorry “matchless”, either, more dime a dozen in Fort Wayne.
They do have a great organ, though. Casavants rock.
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Icarus said on April 25, 2025 at 9:31 am
I motion that we refer to Kristi Noem as Dog killer, especially in public comments.
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alex said on April 25, 2025 at 9:42 am
Rather than wasting column space on a bunch of misapplied foofery, there’s a much more interesting story to be told about that particular church: that of its survival as a congregation more than sixty years after the “white flight” of its ethnic German congregation from the surrounding neighborhood, which got redlined into some of the worst desolation and decay in the entire city of Fort Wayne. Of course one would have to be a deft writer to avoid offending the sensibilities of those living there now, a job better left to someone other than Tim Goeglein. But the families who abandoned the neighborhood didn’t abandon the church and it’s still going strong. Apparently it even has enough money to do a first-rate renovation.
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Julie Robinson said on April 25, 2025 at 9:49 am
Alex, I went down the rabbit hole and looked at their newsletter, in which the pastor gently preaches with kind gravitas about all the good Trump has done. Don’t go there unless you want to be sick.
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ROGirl said on April 25, 2025 at 10:15 am
I said cuneiform and that’s what I meant, you godless, fact-driven liberals.
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Mark P said on April 25, 2025 at 10:40 am
Nancy, I was thinking how mean-spirited it was to make up the three stupidest paragraphs I have seen strung together in the last week or ten years. I was thinking, surely no one, even Tim Googlyeyes, could have actually written that and turned it in. But then I realized you were serious. But I think ol’ Tim’s playing eight dimensional tic-tax-toe and trying to see just how stupid his writing can be before his editor calls him out on it. Nice church, probably worth saving, but its story is probably more interesting than its looks.
I occasionally see a video comparing a well-known actress’s looks when she was maybe 25 to her current looks at maybe 65, and think, JFC, give her a break, everyone gets old if they are lucky. The ones that look the best are the ones that embrace their age. The most pitiful ones are those that get Walmart quality plastic surgery and end up looking like they stuck their face into a blender and fixed it with Bondo.
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Peter said on April 25, 2025 at 10:41 am
You know those anti smoking ads where they have someone with a tube trying to talk to scare the kids from taking up cigarettes?
The Lincoln Project ought to show those Sarah Palin before and after photos and tell women this is what you’re going to look like if you keep on loving Trump.
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Suzanne said on April 25, 2025 at 11:21 am
A sitting judge in Wisconsin was arrested for interfering with ICE agents.
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/25/fbi-arrests-judge-wisconsin-hannah-dugan-kash-patel
But sure, we non-MAGA people were being alarmist…
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Jenine said on April 25, 2025 at 11:34 am
I call that ‘mermaid hair’, carefully arranged in front of both shoulders. It was in for a broad swath of young women for a while. Now it’s stuck for the magas.
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tajalli said on April 25, 2025 at 11:38 am
Possibly a huge contributor to the deterioration of Palin’s looks is what she’s doing *with* her face, rather than what she had done to it.
In the more recent one, she has jutted out her jaw so her lower teeth are in front of her uppers, producing that weird square look. Maybe she’s attempting to look tough, given the biker or trailer trash style clothes.
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Bob (not Greene) said on April 25, 2025 at 11:41 am
“Cuneiform”???????!!!!
The word that dumbass is looking for is “cruciform” — in the shape of a cross. That’s what he’s referring to when looking at the church from above and seeing the transepts “jutting out” from the nave. What a dipshit. Can’t even use a thesaurus (or a dictionary, apparently) correctly.
Edit: I see Julie beat me to that. And she’s also correct in stating that far from “unique” a cruciform church design is probably the most common church design in Christendom.
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Jeff Borden said on April 25, 2025 at 12:07 pm
Some smart-ass has suggested that if a film biography of $arah Palin is ever made, Mickey Rourke should play her. He’s Exhibit A that men can mutilate themselves with plastic surgery, too.
Working my way through the A section of the NYT today has left me dispirited. Stories on tRump’s yo-yo tariffs, his whiny texts to his man crush Putin, European dismay at the U.S. surrender of Ukraine to Putin, obliteration of the Meals on Wheels program, cancelation of prestigious lectures and ongoing book bans at the Naval Academy in service of the anti-DEI effort, eliminating due process for migrants…it’s overwhelming. And it’s just the beginning.
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Sherri said on April 25, 2025 at 12:40 pm
Trump continues to improve my strength. At my meet last weekend, I squatted 286.5 lbs and deadlifted 292 lbs, both new PRs for me.
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