Oh, no. I haven’t written anything today. Or yesterday. I am sorry. But I was cooking for, and wrapping for, the birthday twins’ celebration, which was yesterday. We had dinner, cake, gifts, the first half of the Lions game. I didn’t sleep well, and today I’ve been dragging ass, as they say. But it was a good party.
The individual gifts aren’t as important as my one brainstorm for a family gift that all three of us November babies can enjoy (along with three friends): A two-hour cruise on the J.W. Wescott, i.e., the mail boat that services freight vessels on the Detroit River. It advertises itself as the only floating zip code in the country (48222), based on when it would deliver mail to ships on the Great Lakes for weeks at a time. Now that letters from home aren’t so important, they do package and food deliveries — yes, you can order a pizza or a shwarma to be delivered to, say, the MV Paul R. Tregurtha as it passes through town — as well as pilot changes, which is what I’d really like to see. They pull up next to a ship under way, match their speed, and send the new pilot up a rope ladder, and take on the guy coming off duty.
I think that’s also how they’d deliver a pizza, only with a basket or some sort of conveyance, now that I think about it.
It all sounds exciting, different, fun and very Detroit. I can’t wait. Now to herd all our cats aboard.
The Wescott website talks about how they got their start, ferrying letters to ships in a bucket tied to a rope, and it reminded me of the Columbus Dispatch bucket, the fifth-floor bucket the staff would drop to photographers coming back from breaking news, on deadline. They’d deposit their exposed film in the bucket, and by the time they got parked and back into the building, the film was being processed. Was it ever used by a particular photographer to purchase weed from his dealer down on the sidewalk? I’ll never tell.
(Yes.)
So that’s why I’m so tired and not particularly productive today. But tomorrow is another one, and it won’t involve cake and two bottles of wine. So let’s see how it goes.
alex said on November 17, 2025 at 9:58 pm
Ah, the things you could do at the office back in the day, before surveillance cams and whatnot…
At my first job at a publishing house, we had a prankster who was about as balls-out as any I’ve ever known. His name was Anthony and he drove a Jeep and he was a frat boy. I think he was a Northwestern alum, which kind of surprised me because he was definitely lower-to-middle-brow intellectually, but he was a cut-up, a clown and fearless.
I don’t know how he managed to pull this off, but it was just like the old Halloween trick of filling a paper bag with dog shit and setting it on fire and ding-dong ditching. Only he did this in front of our department manager’s desk. And she stomped it out and got shit on her shoes and became enraged like we’d never seen her, and she was one fiery bitch with a short fuse even on a good day. But the whole department maintained silence and purported to know nothing and so nothing ever came of it.
It’s not like Anthony was universally admired, though. His pranks annoyed a lot of people. We were constantly barraged with whoopie cushions and fake snakes and whatever else he could pull out of his bag of tricks. One day Anthony mentioned that there was an enormous brassiere hanging from a tree on a side road near our office. This was in a far north Chicago suburb where things were still pretty rural back in the 1980s. So a small group of us went out to see this amazing bra in the forest and indeed it was one of the biggest any of us had ever seen. We managed to get it out of the tree and took it back to the office. And then we stretched it over the front bumper of his Jeep. It was tight but managed to span the entire length of it. The most bra-like bra ever fitted onto a vehicle.
This was on a Friday. That weekend he was to be a groomsman at the wedding of a college buddy in Lake Forest and he drove up to the event in his well-adorned Jeep much to the amusement (or embarrassment) of those in attendance.
He was a good sport about it when he regaled us with the story the following Monday.
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Brandon said on November 17, 2025 at 10:23 pm
Your post from 15 years ago about Four Loko piqued my curiosity, and led me to this article:
https://www.modernretail.co/marketing/inside-four-lokos-plan-to-reinvent-itself-for-gen-z/
With the launch of its newest flavor in February called Camo — a sour citrus flavor that’s an homage to Four Loko’s camo print branding — the brand says it is seeing 20% international sales growth year-over-year. Data from July 204 by NielsenIQ tracking sales over 52 weeks shows that Four Loko was the top-selling new single-serve FMB in the U.S. In 2025, Four Loko plans to build out its product line and invest heavily in digital advertising to reach the sought-after Gen Z cohort.
…
“We’ve definitely tweaked the formula so it’s the best tasting it’s ever been. It’s the cleanest it has been.”
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nancy said on November 18, 2025 at 8:31 am
Alex, so-called “pranking” has escalated significantly in the TikTok era. I’m astounded at the shit I see online, and am honestly surprised no one has gotten their lights punched out. I’m talking physical assaults on people, all recorded by some asshole for “content.”
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Jeff Gill said on November 18, 2025 at 8:34 am
Looking forward to pictures! (No pressure.)
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basset said on November 18, 2025 at 10:43 am
You can get a pizza delivered by jetski at Destin, Florida… shallow party area just off the beach.
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alex said on November 18, 2025 at 10:50 am
I guess TikTok is the one rabbit hole that I never fell into. And it’s a good thing. I curse Reddit and Facebook and Substack and everything else that eats up my time and keeps me sedentary when I should be physically active and filling my mind with better stuff. Hell, today, quite by accident, I rediscovered an old Quora account that I haven’t looked at in years and I refuse to engage with it at this point.
I think I consciously avoid TikTok because I have a former colleague who posts inane videos of herself modeling jewelry and makeup and she’s a Trumper who claims to follow no news media whatsoever and gets all of her information from, guess where… TikTok. She was also a big proponent of the conspiracy theory that Wayfair was shipping child sex slaves concealed inside cabinetry. (Doesn’t that shit come unassembled?) And lately she has found Jesus which makes her all the more insufferable. And this is a woman with a college degree.
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Jeff Borden said on November 18, 2025 at 12:03 pm
Office pranks can backfire. One of my colleagues at the Columbus Dispatch snatched a notepad from the editor and would leave prank notes in our mailboxes signed with the three letters he alwayscused: CDB. I found one before I knew he was doing shit like this and was maybe two steps from his office door when the prankster came running up to intercede. God knows what would’ve happened if I’d entered that office, but I sure it would have been very bad for both of us.
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David C said on November 18, 2025 at 12:50 pm
The Wayfair flat pack sex slaves conspiracy theory was only slightly less odd than the adrenochrome baby one.
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Jeff Gill said on November 18, 2025 at 1:13 pm
So, somehow I missed out on that one. But chemtrails has come back to life…
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53416247
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Mark P said on November 18, 2025 at 3:28 pm
Some of the conspiracy theories are so ridiculous that I can’t believe they believe them. For example, are there people so ignorant and stupid that they actually believe the Earth is flat? I mean besides Trump.
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Suzanne said on November 18, 2025 at 5:14 pm
Yes, Mark P, there are otherwise perfectly normal seeming people who believe conspiracy garbage. I know a number of them. Obama isn’t a citizen, the COVID vaccine contains microchips, people make meth in the hotel Keurig coffee machines (or stash fentanyl in them, people secretly put syringes full of drugs in movie theater seats so when you sit down, the needle pokes you and drugs you up. I have heard all of these in person. All of the people that told me these things had jobs, families, homes, etc, but truly believe these things.
It’s mind boggling.
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Deborah said on November 18, 2025 at 9:18 pm
The older I get and especially the last few years it is amazing how many ridiculous things people actually seem to believe. I don’t know if it’s always been this way and I haven’t been paying attention or suddenly people are extremely gullible now for some reason. It’s driving me crazy. What is causing this gullibility? Is it social media?
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Sherri said on November 19, 2025 at 1:06 am
Maybe it’s social media. Or maybe it’s the rot in regular media: https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/moral-rot-elite-journalism-nuzzi-lizza-rfk-jr-trump
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Dexter Friend said on November 19, 2025 at 7:52 am
I have pulled a few pranks. In the huge clusterfuck , Oakland Army Base Replacement Center, we soldiers awaiting deployment to the conflict overseas known as The American War Against Viet Nam were assembled, thousands of us, and as our names were read, assigned to day-tasks called details. We then picked up our temporary Oakland IDs, and were herded off to do shitty work for 14 hours. My first detail was sweeping and mopping “Control”, the main office of the place. I noticed a tall stack of those temporary IDs used only there at Oakland. I ripped off a dozen and filled out my name as Johnny Q. Schwantz. My friend at Fort Ord, of Polish heritage, had told us schwantz meant dick, cock, in the vernacular, penis. Every morning the loudmouth lifer bellowing out names for work details got to the name Johnny Q. Schwantz. Finally, one morning he yelled out “Schwantz, report here immediately!” The phantom Johnny was laughing at that pig motherfucker. I was in that goddam place, which was more like a prison than an Army base, for 9 full days before busing out to Travis AFB for a joyride to Bien Hoa.
Those days I dodged those work details were spent hiding out relaxing with paperback novels and hanging out at the pizza kitchen that was there.
At that hellhole in Oakland, bunks were stacked 3-high. One malcontent soldier in a top bunk refused to get up one morning. A Master Sergeant did this: he climbed the little steps to that high-up mattress and rolled that soldier out , crashing to the hard floor. CRASH !
The guy was banged-up and hauled off to the medical dispensary. You can’t un-see shit like that.
When I first saw “Shawshank Redemption” and saw Clancy Brown beat “FatAss” to death early in the film, I thought of that mean Master Sergeant forcibly injuring that soldier in that top bunk. Mean.
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alex said on November 19, 2025 at 8:01 am
My, my. Nuzzi’s even more nutsy than I realized. Mark Sanford? Keith Olbermann? And I didn’t know this before, that Ryan Lizza was also old enough to be her dad. For shame. Are there any sources she hasn’t banged? You’d think Vanity Fair would be combing her body of work like the Epstein files before hiring her ass.
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