It really doesn’t feel like Memorial Day until someone reproves you for expressing happiness that you have a day off. There are MAGA scolds everywhere, especially since they jumped down Kamala’s neck for daring to tweet “enjoy the long weekend.” MAGA scolds spend the day in prayer and reflection, perhaps leaving church long enough to nibble on a hot dog and wave a little flag.
We’re having barbecued ribs here at the Nall-Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere home base. We are happy it’s a nice day. We are concerned these may be some of the last nice days the U.S. gets, as we have a lunatic president and a crew of enablers bound and determined to destroy it. Here’s his Memorial Day message:
Once again, I will say it: I can’t wait until this motherfucker is dead. I will celebrate. I will dance. I will open my windows and ululate.
This being MemDay weekend, it’s also Movement weekend, the big techno dancefest that seems to grow every year. For a while I collected drug stories around the festival, as stimulants and hallucinogens are pretty deeply embedded in the culture. (Not all techno fans, etc. etc. But when Kraftwerk plays an impromptu set at 4 a.m., a real thing that happened at an after hours a while back, that audience wasn’t staying alert on black coffee.) My fave was the tale, perhaps true perhaps not, of the dealer who set up shop outside one of the more popular nightspots in an RV, and served his wares out a side door, like a food truck. Detroit, and illegality, is a rich garden of economic innovation. However, my friends who do the festival regularly are now deep into their 30s, weed is fully legal, and I’m reliably informed that as the weekend wanes, you’re more likely to find restorative yoga brunches than a Xanax party.
We went to a Thursday-night jazz-cozying-up-to-techno set last week, and it was very nice. The trumpeter had an echo pedal on his mic, not something you see every day.
As I am an Elder, my main — my only — mind-alterer is a nice cocktail. Alan just served me one, in fact. Isn’t that a pretty mojito?
I appreciate the choice of the green straw. He’s always had an eye.
If I were a harder worker, I’d come up with a few paragraphs about the sacrifices of war. But today, I’m not. Enjoy the long weekend.
Sherri said on May 26, 2025 at 6:07 pm
Fuck the MAGA scolds. They might spend the day in prayer and reflection, but then return to the business of making sure people can’t get health insurance or food stamps or any help whatsoever. And non-white immigrants get sent to foreign prisons. And proclaiming empathy a sin, to make their greed and selfishness seem righteous.
I grilled salmon on my new grill yesterday and it turned out well, though I had to pay careful attention. The new grill gets hotter than the old one, and I prefer my salmon slightly undercooked. Still waiting for salmon season to begin so I can get fresh salmon; this salmon was previously frozen.
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Deborah said on May 26, 2025 at 6:22 pm
Also the MAGA scolds are kind of decimating veteran health care. I guess they’re OK with dead soldiers though, they’ll pay attention to them. The dead and the unborn are fine, but if you’re alive but poor, sick or disabled forget about it.
We had an unexpected storm here in Santa Fe this afternoon, quarter and nickel sized hail predicted and I was freaking out about all of our new planting getting shredded. But we only got pea sized hail, a lot of it actually, but the plants are fine. I quickly moved some of the potted flowers under the portale, but even the pots I left out on the patio were OK. All the ornamental grasses did fine too. Had me worried though. It was good to get moisture, always needed here.
Mmmmm Mojitos.
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alex said on May 26, 2025 at 6:29 pm
Hubby and I were about to settle down to some filet mignons when he turned on the grill and it started shooting flames out of everywhere and now it’s toast. And it was fairly new and quite expensive. A chipmunk came running out of it when he lifted off the cover and we suspect he and his little friends are the culprits. Our feral cat only patrols the front side of the house, ignoring the rich banquet to be had out back.
I’m thinking this time around we should get one of those Weber Traveler grills that folds up and stores against a wall inside the house.
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David C said on May 26, 2025 at 6:32 pm
The Trumpy head of the FDA says diabetics need cooking lessons, not insulin. I guess playing Julia Child for a couple days before dying of diabetic ketoacidosis is part of Dr. Oz’s statement that it’s your patriotic duty to stay healthy. Sorry, your mom, dad, sister, brother, grandparent died. They just weren’t patriotic enough.
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Ann said on May 26, 2025 at 8:01 pm
Here’s a real story for Memorial Day, written in 2007 by the father of a friend. Set mostly in Detroit. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2007/11/11/by-the-numbers-222/
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Deborah said on May 26, 2025 at 8:35 pm
Sherri, thought of you when I read this in the NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/26/well/move/jan-todd-strength-training.html
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Mark P said on May 27, 2025 at 12:14 am
Patriotic duty to be healthy? That’s just another bullshit lie, the very opposite of what they mean. They really think it’s the patriotic duty of old people, poor people, and the babies of poor people to die. That is literally what they want, and literally what they are working towards.
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Jeff Gill said on May 27, 2025 at 7:16 am
Never underestimate the power of black coffee.
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Suzanne said on May 27, 2025 at 7:55 am
MarkP, it’s soft eugenics. If there’s little or no medical research, no safety net for the poor and handicapped, no funding for healthcare, then only the healthy & wealthy survive and won’t life be great? They know that if they flat out kill those they deem unacceptable, there will be a public outcry, so the plan is to make it hard for them to survive so they can die of “natural causes”, thus eliminating them from the gene pool.
See what a great plan they have!
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ROGirl said on May 27, 2025 at 9:35 am
The eugenics angle crossed my mind, too. This version is less aggressive than killing defective or unfit people with poison gas; it’s more like eugenics lite.
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Deborah said on May 27, 2025 at 10:07 am
While there probably is a segment that is pro-eugenics, like some of the powerful tech bros seem to be but many conservatives have become anti-science (health and climate) because of government regulation anathema starting in the Reagan years. This link sort of describes what I mean https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/151/4/98/113706/From-Anti-Government-to-Anti-Science-Why
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Dave said on May 27, 2025 at 12:53 pm
Nothing to do with the topic here today, topics so depressing, but I see that Rick Derringer has passed away at the age of 77. I was thinking of Kate being asked frequently if she was related but Rick’s real name was Zehringer.
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Dexter Friend said on May 27, 2025 at 1:53 pm
At almost every venue, Trump invokes “the late great Alphonse Capone.”
He admires all sorts of these thugs, latest is this sheriff:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-pardons-scott-jenkins-bribes-rcna209173
This is simply an outrage.
I remember when my step-grandma always made a big deal of Decoration Day. For many, it was not just for war dead, but for all dead.
The family graves were adorned with elaborate floral displays.
We too used to par-tay on the long weekend. Now I always think of the guys I knew and/or served with who died in Viet Nam.
Now that my Honda Odyssey is finally dialed in mechanically, I will make the trip up to The Thumb to visit a buddy’s grave. I decided to wait a week post-Memorial Day because of all the high traffic volume I have read about. Once on a holiday weekend I got stuck in hell-traffic on I-75 and around Saginaw. I learned.
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Jakash said on May 27, 2025 at 3:09 pm
Yeah, Dexter, “the great Alphonse Capone” shtick is disgusting. Along with his valorizing of the January 6 criminals.
Of course, he identifies with Capone because he’s a felon who feels like he was unfairly hounded by the Justice Department. Right, “hounded” because Capone was a murderer and the orange guy is so crooked in so many ways one can no longer keep track. But Capone was a mob boss and the orange felon governs like a mob boss, so one can see the connection.
Why this is all fine and dandy with “law and order” Senators, Congressfolk and Republican voters remains outrageous. Though fearing for their lives if they oppose him may be the simplest explanation.
Meanwhile, this is making the rounds on Bluesky:
“29 Americans in 2023 were killed by an immigrant. 8,842 were killed by white men. Who is more dangerous?”
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Mark P said on May 27, 2025 at 3:44 pm
I frequent the Quora website, when I’m not reading stuff here. I just found an answer I posted about five years ago to a question about something Trump said about global warming. I thought I would pass it along here. Nothing has changed, except it has gotten worse, if possible:
Most of the answers so far are right about Trump: He is an idiot. He is both stupid and incredibly ignorant. I have grown tired of parsing his absurd statements. It’s just not worth worrying about whether he makes sense; he doesn’t. His statements are typically outright lies. If they are not lies, they are based on such a limited and flawed understanding of anything that it’s a complete waste of time to try to understand them. Entire books have been written about things he does not know. Libraries are full of books about things he does not understand. His ignorance extends to every subject. His ignorance is broad and its depths have not been plumbed. He is so ignorant that he is ignorant about how ignorant he is. There is no subject about which he is not ignorant. He sets a new standard of ignorance and has reached a level that will probably not be exceeded in our lifetimes. It may, in fact, be impossible for any other living human to know as little about as many things as he does.
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Julie Robinson said on May 27, 2025 at 4:02 pm
For anyone else who didn’t know who Rick Derringer was, his band was the McCoys, and their big hit was Hang on Sloopy.
T identifies with Capone because he thinks like a mob boss. Oh, the power.
We are faithful newspaper readers and we want them to succeed. It will go better if their circulation departments aren’t such weasels. We had a one year subscription due to expire in August, but they sent a card that they’d be charging an additional $292.42 on May 31.
Because I am anal about financial records, I could pull out my notes with the date, time, and person I spoke with. The new person, on a bad line and only marginally proficient in English, gave me a line about fuel surcharges or some such nonsense. But she folded pretty quick fast and agreed to honor the original deal. Honestly.
Have also been dealing with a colonoscopy appointment that disappeared from the calendar, an HVAC repair that has failed after two weeks, and squirrels eating through the solar tubes up on the roof for heating our pool. We’ve just ordered ultrasonic squirrel repellers on advice of the repair guy. I’ll let you know how they work.
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Sherri said on May 27, 2025 at 4:23 pm
Thanks, Deborah, fascinating article about Jan Todd.
Just heard that my local pharmacy has been bought by CVS. It was bought by Rite Aid before their first bankruptcy, and things got worse (lots of empty shelves because Rite Aid couldn’t pay their suppliers, and the online systems only sort of worked together.) I’m not particularly looking forward to CVS, but there aren’t many other options around. The only other pharmacies in Redmond are Costco, QFC, and Fred Meyer, the latter two being grocery stores owned by Kroger.
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susan said on May 27, 2025 at 7:45 pm
Julie- My brother got rid of squirrels in his attic using a strobe light. They were gone in 24 hours. Slick slick slick! No traps, no poison. Here’s a duckduck search page of strobe options. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=strobe+light+squirrel&ia=web
Even though he didn’t hear them skittering above the ceiling after 24 hours, he left the strobe on for a week, just to make sure they were gone. THEN he hired a handy-person to fix the hole in the soffit the squirrels had gnawed, which/that had given them access to the attic.
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Julie Robinson said on May 27, 2025 at 8:07 pm
Thanks, Susan. We’ve had trouble with rats in the attic at church and maybe that would help there. I’m not sure the neighbors would care for strobes on top of the roof. Apparently the tubing material that holds the water is tasty to them. These are solar powered and mount on top of the roof, where they emit ultrasonic cheeps twice a minute.
I fully recognize these are first world problems.
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