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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tajalli said on December 14, 2025 at 6:09 pm
One of our international Zoom meeting crew was at Bondi Beach and witnessed the murders; physically fine but understandably upset. Whenever I hear of these mass murders, I remember an early one where 9 church members were murdered in their pews. The group pictures were stunning to me, such light-filled faces, gone in an instant, tour on Earth over.
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susan said on December 14, 2025 at 6:43 pm
I get why a friend emigrated to Europe earlier this year. She couldn’t take the boundless horribleness of the United States of America any longer, didn’t see why she should, and had the resources to do something about it for herself and her son. I bet she reads about the latest Second Amendmenting at Brown and sighs with relief.
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alex said on December 14, 2025 at 9:58 pm
I have friends who fled for Costa Rica in 2016 and now I have to say they were the most prescient people of anybody I know.
My dad was born in Hungary, but I wouldn’t want to claim any sort of citizenship there. Trump talks about shithole countries, but that’s the one in whose image Trump aspires to remake America. My hubby’s mom was born in Germany, so maybe we could get accepted there if we had to. She was from North Rhine-Westphalia and still has family there.
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Peter said on December 14, 2025 at 10:02 pm
Deborah, as my in-laws would say, you put the nickel in me.
I am stunned at the rise in construction costs – and I’m talking about in the past 12-18 months, so it’s not due to COVID and too early to be affected by tariffs, although that’s coming.
I worked on a 6,000 sf metal health clinic in a hospital office building. Prior to Covid, the hospital would budget $70-80/sf for a doctor’s office buildout. That went up to $110-120. This project came in at over $200.00/sf, and this job had hardly any plumbing, which is a major cost in a doctor’s practice.
The broker told me that downtown deals aren’t getting done unless there is minimal work to an existing suite.
I’m not smart enough to figure out the cause for the increase – it seems like everyone is trying to get what they can before the economy crashes, but construction workers aren’t getting more money, and you can bet architects and engineers aren’t getting more fees.
I could keep going, but you get the picture….
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Peter said on December 14, 2025 at 10:46 pm
And to top off a deadly weekend, TMZ is reporting that Rob Reiner and his wife have been found murdered in their house in Hollywood….
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Mark P said on December 14, 2025 at 11:29 pm
I am rebuilding the stairs for my front porch. There are two flights, coming down essentially one story. I have bought about two-thirds of the material I will need, and it’s more $1000 so far. That’s four stringers, a six-by-six, and enough composite boards for the stair treads. It will be over $2000 just for stairs. Fortunately I can do the work myself.
AP and CNN aren’t identifying the victims at the Reiner’s house yet, buy they are saying the victims’ ages are the same as theirs.
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alex said on December 15, 2025 at 6:54 am
Well we have a construction-related shocker on our hands. I thought our former tenants trashed our rental, but that’s nothing next to our latest discovery.
We had noticed what appeared to be water damage along the bottom edge of some dining room drywall so we decided to investigate. Behind the drywall are not one but two copper water lines entering the house from the floor. But the damp drywall isn’t the big worry. The slab underneath the dining room is apparently getting washed out and is cracked and sinking.
This is what we deduce from what we see. We have yet to call in the professionals.
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nancy said on December 15, 2025 at 8:44 am
Ouch. I wonder if that could have been rectified sooner if you had responsible renters and not trashy ones.
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basset said on December 15, 2025 at 9:00 am
Neighbor had a similar situation with his front porch, solution was to drill holes in the concrete and pump in foam which brought it back to level and hardened in place. Price was pretty reasonable, way less than replacing part of the foundation.
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Jeff Borden said on December 15, 2025 at 9:43 am
It looks like 2025 will go down for me as even worse than 2024, when ALS finally took my younger sister and my country elected a 34-count felon and rapist by popular vote. Too much ugliness to recount and all of it worsened by the nihilism of the MAGA movement. The destruction wrought in less than a year multiplies the angst. And it’s just getting started…
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Deborah said on December 15, 2025 at 10:47 am
And Jeff B, it seems to be doubling as the year ends.
It was shocking to read about the Reiner’s being murdered and now the media is saying their son stabbed them to death. Whoa.
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Julie Robinson said on December 15, 2025 at 11:53 am
So much awfulness in the world, so much pain. And Trump has written an unhinged screed that Rob Reiner was murdered because he had Trump Derangement Syndrome. I’ve only read a little, but apparently their son battled addiction and mental illness. I know too many families in similar situations and treatment doesn’t always take.
Alex, hope you don’t need piers, those are pricey. We’ve been through that, as well as water damage because construction codes didn’t require barriers. I’m sure we’ll find some when we finally do the second bathroom, as we did with the first, and at a previous house. The redo was supposed to be last year but between D getting sick, our contractor needing surgery, and spending money on a new car, we couldn’t pull it together. Kitchen is also reaching disaster status.
Anyway, we started the weekend with a lovely concert at Rollins College, put on by the local Bach Society. Very la-di-da, and pricey, but we snagged free tickets through the library. Not a note was out of place; even our son was impressed and that’s saying a lot!
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Scout said on December 15, 2025 at 12:58 pm
Last Thursday morning I woke up to water seeping between the tile and tub in our guest bath, which turned out to be a pressure leak in the main suite bath due to some workman cutting into the copper pipe (and then just covering it up) long before we bought this house. Once the leak was repaired, next came the water damage restoration people and then the asbestos abatement people due to the age of the house. Since Thursday afternoon we’ve had ginormous dehumidifiers in each bathroom that are cacophonous to the extent that we cannot even sleep in our bedroom. Luckily it is quieter in the guest room. We still don’t know if our house will be renovated before Christmas. I know this is a baby problem in the grand scheme of things, especially since our homeowners insurance is paying for it. The news this weekend was simply horrific and the demented sociopath president’s reaction to all of it is yet another unspeakable tragedy. The holidays feel very dark this year.
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David C said on December 15, 2025 at 2:49 pm
Being posthumously shit talked by someone would could make the first honest buck in his life by auctioning off the chance be the first to piss on his grave is kind of a compliment.
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Sherri said on December 15, 2025 at 3:00 pm
Beyond being an enormously talented person, Rob Reiner was a mensch. Trump denies the existence of mensches.
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alex said on December 15, 2025 at 7:17 pm
Just got off the phone with a foundation repair person who was recommended by a friend who’s an architect. He’s telling me that our county didn’t even have a building code before 1970 and he sees houses that were built without any footings whatsoever, so this could get interesting and not in a good way.
As for our squirrelly former tenant, she left things in bad enough shape that the house needs a major overhaul in any case.
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Jeff Gill said on December 16, 2025 at 9:09 am
For what it’s worth, Jane Austen was born 250 years ago today. She’s still a rewarding read. Like Dickens or Trollope or Eliot, there’s an adjustment, but it comes fairly quickly as you read, and then you’re in their world. (But I also happily commend “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver if you prefer your social commentary to be of more recent vintage, but with a goodly dose of Victorian heritage translated into Appalachia…)
Not a bad day to watch “Pride and Prejudice,” now that I think about it.
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Jeff Borden said on December 16, 2025 at 10:14 am
“Demon Copperhead” is a banger of a book. It offers a more honest and accurate look at rural poverty and its consequences than anything in “Hillbilly Elegy.”
The reaction to the Reiner murders by tRump isn’t surprising or dismaying. It’s who he is. What’s more dismaying is the silence of his party. Hardly a peep. Mustn’t upset our great and glorious “leader” no matter what he says. This is a party of gutless cowards.
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Jeff Gill said on December 16, 2025 at 11:30 am
Spoiler alert on the conclusion of the two-part Vanity Fair profile on Susie Wiles; here’s the last few lines.
As one former GOP chief put it, “She may be more consequential than any of us.”
“I think what he meant by that,” I told Wiles, “is that we’ve never had a president who governs so much by whim and who depends so much on one person: you.”
“Oh, good Lord,” Wiles said. “Trump doesn’t depend on anybody.”
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Dexter Friend said on December 16, 2025 at 12:48 pm
James Wood’s eulogy , seen on Morning Joe, was poignant and heartfelt. Yes, that James Wood. The MAGA sycophant. Rob Reiner was more-loved than I ever imagined.
The Honda hoopdee is done, just $914. Of course, everything in my life happens in 2s. The heater in the old F-150 quit. Ha! Fate has me by the balls. And I need the heat since I continue to reject my daughter’s and son-in-law’s invitation to move in with them in Port Ste. Lucie.
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Brandon said on December 16, 2025 at 2:13 pm
Jane Austen was born 250 years ago today
The year has almost passed with no major acknowledgement of the thirtieth anniversary of Clueless, but it was an adaptation of Emma. (Incidentally, Emma was published 210 years ago this month.)
https://www.flavorwire.com/527875/how-clueless-illuminates-the-timeless-genius-of-austens-emma
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Jakash said on December 16, 2025 at 5:27 pm
2 thumbs up to Jane Austen’s 250th and Beethoven’s birthday, 5 years before her.
“Not a bad day to watch ‘Pride and Prejudice'” Indeed, though so many to choose from, Jeff. If only you had time for the gold standard, the 6-part 1995 BBC miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth!
The same year that “Clueless” came out. That was certainly a fun movie.
Aside from those cheerier topics, I just wish that, at this late date, we could realize that the Fuhrer made some boorish, childish, self-serving statement, ostensibly addressing someone else in the news, without half of the national commentariat feeling the need to denounce it, which usually requires calling more attention to it. Aren’t we well past the point where we should just ignore nonsense like that?
Rob Reiner was a national treasure, and it upsets me that in appreciating his wonderful career and contributions to the world, so many have to waste a paragraph or two blasting Mr. Clueless.
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” In my case, multitudes of chips and pretzels, but still…
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Sherri said on December 16, 2025 at 5:47 pm
Okay, I read that two part Susie Wiles profile. Someone’s going to have to explain to me why I’m supposed to conclude that she’s so consequential. From what I can tell from this profile, she’s done nothing to curb Trump’s whims in any way, nor to put any boundaries on any of his people, even if they are creating problems, as in the case of Musk. She just redefines Trump’s whims as the right thing to do; it’s not retribution, it’s getting bad people out of government so they can’t do to anyone else what they did to Trump. Pardoning even the violent Jan 6 felons was okay because they’d already served more than the guidelines suggested (not true.) Trump is all about peace and wants to stop the killing, but destroying fishing boats in the Caribbean doesn’t count, because drugs.
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