I saw the news about the Brown University mass shooting Saturday evening, and woke up to the Bondi Beach mass shooting Sunday morning. I have no thoughts about this other than: :::deep sigh.:::
No, just this: Mass shootings are a true American export, aren’t they? As always, more will be revealed about both incidents, but that’s my knee-jerk reaction.
So let’s wait a bit before we talk too much about it.
And it was such a pleasant weekend, too. Erected the tree, squired the out-of-towners around a bit, hit a Christmas bazaar, set up a wrapping station in the basement, spotted a Cooper’s hawk sitting on our back-yard fence. My plan to get the decks cleared by today isn’t going perfectly, but it’s close enough.
If you follow sports at all, you’ve probably heard about the travails of the just-fired University of Michigan head football coach, Sherrone Moore. It’s a tale as old as time: Sexually profligate man allows his sexual profligacy to get the best of him. We don’t know all the details yet, but it seems pretty obvious that his main side piece was his executive assistant, herself the daughter of an NFL scout and an Erika Kirk doppelgänger, minus the Tammy Faye Bakker level of eye makeup. Moore is said to have “grabbed butter knives” from her kitchen drawers in a confrontation, and threatened to kill himself with them and make her watch. I don’t know how she responded to this threat, but needless to say, it came up at his arraignment and, well. Like I said: A tale as old as time.
At least he was fired for cause, which means the university won’t have to pay out his bloated contract, as Michigan State University is doing with its own fired coach. For once, I find myself in complete agreement with Nolan Finley, the conservative ed-page editor at The Detroit News. I’m sure his column today is paywalled, but these two grafs are hammer-meet-nail dead-on:
Schools hire coaches who promise to take them to the mountaintop, sign them to lengthy, multimillion-dollar contracts, and when no championship banners arrive in two or three years, cut them loose and go looking for their next savior. Most end up stuck paying the salaries of both the old coach and the new one at the expense of students.
Look up the road to East Lansing, where Michigan State University will be paying $32.5 million over the next five years to fired coach John Smith, and $30 million over that same period to new coach Pat Fitzgerald. So the head coaching position will cost MSU roughly $12 million a year. And if Mel Tucker wins his $125 million wrongful discharge lawsuit, that figure will skyrocket.
I used to say the best job in America is to be the first ex-wife of a billionaire: Marry him, birth and raise the kids, then bail out with an eight- or nine-figure settlement when a spiritual sister of Lauren Sanchez enters the chat. Now I think it’s being a losing football coach with a multi-year contract.
One last note, a story that dropped online a few days ago, but I’m just getting to today, about how the loathsome Tate Brothers were sprung from custody in Romania thanks to the Trump administration, and yes, that’s a gift link. It’s as upsetting as you’d imagine, and my takeaway is this: No more hands off Barron Trump, that poor innocent kid, who appears to have blossomed into the apple that doesn’t fall far from the tree, or a grosser metaphor about assholes and shit:
Barron, now 19, admired Andrew (Tate), and spoke with him over Zoom last year, according to Justin Waller, a mutual friend who was on the call. During the call, they discussed their shared belief that the Romanian criminal case was an effort to silence the Tates, he said.
Maybe he never had a chance, being the son of a criminal and a whore, but he’s made his own choices.
Off to enjoy a very cold Sunday, if “doing some work” can be called enjoyment.
Deborah said on December 14, 2025 at 11:02 am
I agree, Barron sounds like an asshhole, how could he not be?
It only got down to 4º in Chicago, not the 1º predicted. But the wind chill was -19º, but not many out in it earlier. Bits of ice on the lake.
Our design project, the dementia center now in the Contract Document stage is coming in with very high cost estimates. The first estimate was high so we went through a redesign effort to bring them down then got a new estimate which is even higher. That’s sort of typical, the more a contractor knows about the project the more costs they pile on. So it’s back to the drawing boards. Prices seem about twice as high as they should be according to my husband who as an architect goes through this process a lot. Of course some of the high costs have to do with tariffs on materials, steel is high and wood too, we’ve got some cool timber construction in the plans so that’s not good for the design. We were supposed to start construction in March but that will be delayed now. This is in an existing building, it’s redoing a lease space of 10,000sf. It will have a cafe open to the public, convening spaces, an indoor garden, waiting areas and clinical exam spaces. There will be offices for therapists and social workers. It’s almost more for care givers than actual patients because there’s a huge need for that and it’s almost non-existant. My husband’s uncle’s family foundation is footing this and there will be a need for charitable dobations from others down the road.
Are any of you guys having construction work done? Are you noticing much higher costs too? Also, the fact that a lot of undocumented migrants have been kept from working or getting deported by ICE, so that doesn’t help at all, because workers are scarcer and work gets delayed and stretched out for longer periods. Not a good situation for lots and lots of reasons.
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Jeff Gill said on December 14, 2025 at 4:24 pm
Don’t know about construction, but I know Home Instead is charging $34 an hour for guaranteed aides (I’m told they aren’t supposed to talk about it, but they get $22 of that per hour) in dementia care. There’s been a . . . downturn in the number of people available and/or willing to do nurse’s aide work. You can set up your own for less per hour, but then they call you the night before or morning of and say “sorry, I can’t make it” plus the whole vexed question in justice & equity of taxes & FICA, so $34 is cheaper than it sounds. My sister has a friend who has an aide 40 hours a week with her mother still at home with her with major care needs, and when I heard the monthly amount I expressed some skepticism; it later arose that now the friend has to do all the driving and shopping for the aide, since she’s, um, not willing to go out in public these days. Again, cheaper often isn’t.
So if construction costs are up, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
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