I was thinking earlier today about that glorious run we had in the late ’80s, when one money-grubbing televangelist after another was going down in flames. Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were the biggies, but they were big enough to deflate the entire grift, and that was enough. Jeff Borden and I toured Heritage USA when he was living in North Carolina, and I believe it was after Bakker’s fall, when Jerry Falwell was running it. It was…sad, but served to cement so many of my feelings about both evangelical culture and the American South, which is not my kinda place, except for visits here and there.
There was another great time, during the Clinton impeachment, when Larry Flynt, pornographer and patriot, was taking down the GOP morals squad. Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, all those hypocrites. They didn’t all stay down, but it was great to see them take fire.
We need another run like that. I feel like it must be coming, but seeing yet another of the good guys, Tatiana Schlossberg, go out early? It feels terrible. Why her and not her terrible uncle? He’s the idiot who guzzles raw milk, and she didn’t even get to see her daughter turn two.
Mixed bag at midweek, so let’s go.
Those of you who live in Michigan know we had something called a “bomb cyclone” Sunday and Monday. The U.P. had a full-on blizzard, but downstate it was a little bit of snow, a 40-degree temperature drop from one day to the next and fierce winds that made that 22-degree final temperature feel like knives on the skin. I considered talking Alan into driving south to observe the seiche effect on Lake Erie, but that wind? :::shudder:::
A seiche (French for “wave”) is what happens when a fast-moving weather system pushes lake water so hard that it effectively drains part of the basin. Western Lake Erie was high and dry, while Buffalo saw their water rise by several feet. There was one earlier this year, and the pictures were amazing, but this one was better. Here’s one from a local meteorologist’s Facebook page, credited to Austin Lada. Anyone lose a snowmobile through the ice a few years back?
Those are zebra mussels covering it, by the way. Invasive species, but the war was lost long ago.
The next time this happens, we’re going, dammit.
Some excellent journalism to point you to, also. First, the Chicago Tribune’s long read about “Operation Midway Blitz,” better known by its popular name, ICE Assholes Invade Chicago Because It’s a Blue City. It’s very well-written, with excellent photos, too. I believe that’s a gift link; at least, I hope so.
I still have a few gift links to share before the month ends, so here’s a social-media talker: Robert Draper’s NYT profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’m not fooled by her apparent conversion, but there’s some spilled tea here:
For Greene, the decades that (Jeffrey) Epstein spent eluding justice for exploiting and sexually assaulting countless girls and young women while amassing a fortune, and the seeming efforts by the government to cover up the injustice, “represents everything wrong with Washington,” she told me. This September, Greene spoke with several of Epstein’s victims for the first time in a closed-door House Oversight Committee meeting. She knew that the women had paid their own way to come to Washington. She saw some of them trembling and crying as they spoke. Their accounts struck her as entirely believable. Greene herself had never been sexually abused, but she knew women who had. In her own small way, Greene later told me, she could understand what it was like for a woman to stand up to a powerful man.
After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”
Hmm. OK.
Finally, you’ve heard the expression “I did not have (astounding news event) on my bingo card,” I’m sure. Well, with the help of bingo-card generators, you too can have one. Here’s mine, from bingobaker.com:
Let’s see how I do. The next time we speak, it’ll be 2026. Remember: All we have is ourselves. Make it count.
john (not mccain) said on December 31, 2025 at 3:47 am
My father’s company had the food service contract for Heritage USA when it first opened. What I remember the most about the place was a really peculiar smell. Not as unpleasant as sewage, but in that direction. My dad said it was because of cheap concrete. The ceiling of the mall was sky blue, and every now and again clouds would move across it. I thought it was a nifty effect, but it reinforced how phony the whole place was. I was a heavy duty Heinlein fan at the time, and all I could think was this is how the Fosterites started.
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David C said on December 31, 2025 at 5:40 am
My wife wants to visit her sister in Tennessee and I want to stop at the Ark Encounter on our way down. I would thoroughly enjoy a few hours of young Earth creationism weirdness.
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nancy said on December 31, 2025 at 7:21 am
If you’re going anywhere near Nashville, the Country Music Hall of Fame is definitely worth a visit. Far exceeded expectations.
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ROGirl said on December 31, 2025 at 6:53 am
I had to look up the word “seiche” because it isn’t the word for a water wave that I remembered from my French studies, which is “vague,” as in “La Nouvelle Vague,” the new wave movement in cinema.
Here’s the first bit from the Wikipedia entry for seiche:
A seiche is a standing wave in an enclosed or partially enclosed body of water. Seiches and seiche-related phenomena have been observed on lakes, reservoirs, swimming pools, bays, harbors, caves, and seas. The key requirement for formation of a seiche is that the body of water be at least partially bounded, allowing the formation of the standing wave.
The term was promoted in 1890 by the Swiss hydrologist François-Alphonse Forel, who was the first to make scientific observations of the effect in Lake Geneva. The word had apparently long been used in the region to describe oscillations in alpine lakes. According to Wilson this Swiss French dialect word comes from the Latin word siccus meaning “dry”, i.e., as the water recedes, the beach dries. The French word sec or sèche (dry) descends from the Latin.
BTW, Richard Linklater’s movie “Nouvelle Vague,” c’est le pied (it’s very cool). End of French lesson.
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nancy said on December 31, 2025 at 7:20 am
Thanks for that! I just remember the phenomenon being explained in a Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine story about a seiche in the lower basin of Lake Michigan. It was driven by a summer thunderstorm, and the water sloshed back like a tsunami. It washed a bunch of fishermen off a pier in Michigan City, Ind., and three drowned.
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Suzanne said on December 31, 2025 at 8:43 am
Tatiana Schlossberg’s death hit me hard as she had the same type of leukemia that I faced almost 4 years ago, although I was fortunate enough not to have any of the problematic extra genetic mutations that she did. It’s the hard heartedness of the MAHA crowd that keeps me awake at night. Without the research that was done 30 years ago, I would be dead now, no question. And yet here is a young woman whose own close relative is willingly and uncaringly kneecapping cancer research that could save future lives, including those of his own family.
We live in a country run by lunatics.
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Jeff Gill said on December 31, 2025 at 8:44 am
Hat tip for the Fosterite reference. And this post calls for the GIF of Jerry Falwell doing a waterslide in a suit:
https://makeagif.com/gif/ptl-jerry-falwell-goes-down-waterslide-SId3U1
Happy new year, all!
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Dexter Friend said on December 31, 2025 at 9:23 am
I remember the Sunday I read in The Trib Magazine about the seiche in Lake Michigan. It was when people carried a thin mattress out to the beach to sleep because of stifling heat in their apartments. I recall the water came up to Balboa and onto Michigan Avenue. I don’t recall how many, if any, died. The story stunned me.
If “One Battle…” doesn’t win, well, hell. It is one powerful film and Leo is at his best.
I also got such a kick out of “Bugonia”, a thriller, a science fiction slant, and a horror film all in one. Jesse Plemons, who I never used to care for on-screen, really put it together in this romp of mental illness…or IS it?
UM has been killing off basketball opponents by over 40 points each game. I use to get almost all their games, in fact, many Big10 games, but I can’t find them much anymore. Last year I was getting all of Purdue’s games, now that stopped. Maybe after the Bowl Games basketball will be more prevalent.
A couple years ago Dan Campbell told his Lions before the San Francisco knock-out to really enjoy this, lay it all out there, because “…we may never make it back here again”.
And the 49ers agonizingly destroyed the Honolulu Blue & Silver dream.
Last year, they got the Commanders, and were heavy favorites, and young Jaden Daniels the QB was so good, the Lions fell easily.
OK, 2025 rolls around. The Lions are slight betting favorites to win the SuperBowl. The Lions have been eliminated.
I believe in Dan Campbell anyway. The Detroit Lions have so much damn talent, perhaps this season was an aberration, ya think?…maybe? Dan Campbell will stay, but if 2026 is another disappointment, I think he may chuck it in and move away.
And I feel horrible for the Schlossbergs and the Kennedys. I know so many people have leukemia in different forms and recover. My niece’s husband, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, many others. Then I remember my friend John Hoff from grade school. His dad owned a business in Waterloo. John and I were boyhood pals, Little League, riding bicycles, even stealing homemade wine from his dad’s cellar, my first buzz from alcohol. Then his father quickly died from leukemia. John died 12 years ago from cancer. And here I am all cheery for a new year.
I was directed to a video by Warren Buffet, and AI or not, he was giving advice on how to not do stupid things like buying $5 coffees when at home a cuppa is 25 cents…never buy a new NEW car, even he buys 4 year old cars, he says…avoid pay-day loan sharks…more, but so ironic it is that he said to stop buying lottery tickets, as they are a tax on the poor. Well, just hours prior, I had bought my last lotto tickets for 2025, until June, I say anyway. I bought a stack last night for my final blow-out, and won $0.00. Always listen to Warren Buffet, AI or real.
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David C said on December 31, 2025 at 9:29 am
I’m not sure what I would have on my bingo card. I’d enhance your Blue wave midterms with and Democrats pledge bipartisanship. Because of course they will.
I’d love to do Nashville, but Mary’s sister lives near the North Carolina border and a five hour side trip isn’t in the cards.
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alex said on December 31, 2025 at 9:47 am
Even though I have a NYT subscription, I took a pass on the MTG profile until now (it has been running for several days) because I thought it wouldn’t change my opinion of her, and it didn’t, but it wasn’t a waste of time. She’s perhaps a little less stupid and hateful than she let on, but not by much. What I didn’t expect, though, was that she has some small capacity for introspection and after four crazy years on the Trump Train she wants off.
I hadn’t read anything in the Tribune in maybe 25 years, and while that piece was well done, it still didn’t quite capture the horrors conveyed by the YouTube and Instagram videos that my old Chicago friends were sharing with me almost daily over the past several months. I was disappointed that more of these didn’t turn up in mainstream news.
It’s squirrel rutting season here and from my desk I’m watching quite the circus this morning in the treetops. Up and down the trees they go in a spiral, then break into lightning-fast acrobatics, flinging themselves all over the place, sometimes from tree to tree, and when they pause for a rest the males are all humping the branches. I had no idea there were so many of them inhabiting my little piece of paradise.
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Mark P said on December 31, 2025 at 9:50 am
Eliminating the hepatitis B vaccination for babies will kill people from cancer. But it’s like guns. We need to accept a few deaths from cancer so that we can be free from the tyranny of science.
And we need to kill NCAR so that we can be free from references to global warming.
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Deborah said on December 31, 2025 at 2:38 pm
I’ve been awake since 1am, I made the mistake of reading that Trib piece Nancy linked to, thank you for the gift to do that, I don’t have a Trib subscription nor do I want one. I found that article super depressing but glad I got to read it. I did some research about getting to some of the Broadview protests back when they were happening but the transportation there and back was complicated so I never went. All of the action in Chicago happened either when I was out of town or not in areas of awareness to me, or I was not in great health, so I didn’t see any of it personally. It would have been traumatizing to see firsthand so in some ways I’m glad I wasn’t there, I feel bad for the people who were victims of the horrific behavior of ICE and all of those assholes being violent and cruel. Never in my life did I ever think this would be happening regularly in the USofA.
Here’s hoping 2026 will be better. Of course the only one word I can think of for a 2026 resolution is “resist”. What else can I do?
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Julie Robinson said on December 31, 2025 at 3:12 pm
Persist? That’s a good one for me. This year has been pretty shite between Trump, Alzheimer’s, cardiac surgery for D, and constant insurance battles. I don’t see anything changing, so persistance and resiliency will have to get me through.
Suzanne, you may have shared a leukemia diagnosis with Tatiana Schollberg, but you’re still standing. All her wealth, connections, doctor husband, and living in a place with sterling health care available weren’t enough to save her. I keep thinking about her kiddos, and wonder if they will have any memories at all.
We decided to watch a funny and hopeful movie tonight. Stuck at Singing in the Rain right now–anyone with a better suggestion?
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nancy said on December 31, 2025 at 3:16 pm
I’m surprised more of you aren’t amazed by the snowmobile. I can’t stop looking at it.
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basset said on December 31, 2025 at 4:05 pm
Agree with Nancy on the Country Music Hall of Fame. The National Museum of African American Music is close by and also well worth seeing:
https://www.nmaam.org/
And there’s a most impressive guitar museum at Belmont University, off the south end of Music Row:
https://www.thegigatbelmont.com/
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Deborah said on December 31, 2025 at 4:49 pm
I missed that it was a snowmobile! I thought it was just a rock formation.
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alex said on December 31, 2025 at 6:27 pm
Somehow I was oblivious to the fact that the guy who bought the rights to TrumpKennedyCenter.org was one of the South Park creators, and boy is he having some fun with it. The site’s not madcap like you might expect from South Park but comes across as a sly and dry imitation of words you’d expect from Tubby himself, and from what I’ve been reading it has the right’s tits in a knot.
Here’s a look-see: https://www.trumpkennedycenter.org
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Ann said on December 31, 2025 at 8:12 pm
I once came across a small seiche and turned some photos into a short video here https://flic.kr/p/oa8vf7 The Lake Erie ones are astonishing.
My sister has CLL, one of the “good” leukemias, except that she had a particular genetic twist that made it a bad one, except that there was now a good therapy for that particular version. The therapy worked for five years until it wasn’t anymore but then they did some kind of not-terrible chemo and some pills and I guess there’s a chance it’s actually going to cure her? Bless all those researchers. Curses on the anti-science ghouls among us. I read recently that a doctor has found a line that works with some of his “vaccine-hesitant” patients: “the politics may have changed but the science is the same.”
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Ann said on December 31, 2025 at 8:23 pm
I thought I might be back quickly enough to add this very short video of what greeted us as Daisy and I went out for a walk during the storm. By the next morning we couldn’t even get that far. https://flic.kr/p/2rPqHJ3
But I gather it wasn’t really a bomb cyclone after all because the atmospheric pressure drop wasn’t great enough, or something like that. A real blizzard anyway.
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BigHank53 said on December 31, 2025 at 9:15 pm
Ah, dead vehicles on lake bottoms. New Hampshire got tired of lazy ice fishermen losing pickup trucks through the ice. The fine for leaving one there is a thousand bucks. Per day. As you can imagine it’s not cheap to have one hauled out; standard practice is a diver goes down with twenty feet of stout chain which gets looped around the frame, and then an enormous winch drags it to shore. There usually isn’t much left to salvage beyond the lug nuts.
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Jakash said on December 31, 2025 at 10:02 pm
“a 40-degree temperature drop from one day to the next and fierce winds”
We drove from Cleveland to Chicago on the Turnpike / Toll Road Sunday night. [Thought about stopping by as we passed the Bryan exit, Dexter. ; ) ]
As we started, the temp was 62°; when we arrived about 5 1/2 hours later, it was 27°. The wind picked up as we went. There was about 45 minutes of driving through quite a rainstorm in western Ohio (that I was pleased was not a snowstorm), but then it was just wind. I can’t be sure, but I think that wind cost us at least 10-miles-a-gallon of fuel economy in our Honda. (I’m guessing one of the knowledgeable folks here can tell me if that’s even possible.)
Meanwhile, Happy New Year, everybody!
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Gretchen said on January 1, 2026 at 12:45 am
I read a report that the death threats received by MTG’s sons were orchestrated by Trump himself. Is there any verification of that?
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Deborah said on January 1, 2026 at 2:27 am
As I start typing this it’s 1:25am January 1, we’re back from the Party we were invited to. I’m pretty sure this will have been the last NYE party we’ll ever go to.
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Suzanne said on January 1, 2026 at 8:24 am
Happy New Year! We stayed in last night. First we watched the Stranger Things finale (pretty decent, in my opinion), then watched the last bit of THE Ohio State drubbing by U of Miami, then watched New Year’s Rocking Eve with a bunch of singers and commentators that we had no knowledge of (a sure sign of old age) except Diana Ross, cheered the new year with a sip of scotch and went to bed.
I went to see the movie Hamnet yesterday with a friend. I had not been in an actual movie theater since before the pandemic. I had read the book Hamnet. The movie was well done and gave me a much needed cathartic cry.
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dull_old_man said on January 1, 2026 at 9:38 am
Deborah,
Sorry the party wasn’t more fun. Thanks for the opportunity to say that the average person will have lived her/his entire life without using the future perfect tense. There aren’t many opportunities for jokes about grammar.
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basset said on January 1, 2026 at 10:19 am
At least Deborah got invited somewhere. Our social connections have faded away in the last few years, invitations stopped, calls unreturned. Had a glass of wine with dinner and went to bed at 9:15.
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Julie Robinson said on January 1, 2026 at 10:58 am
We made it about that long too, basset, no wine, but we did watch Singin’ in the Rain. The finest entertainment of 70+ years ago! 93 yo in the house. The fireworks stopped about four hours later.
My alma mater, Indiana University, is playing in the Rose Bowl today. I’ve never liked football and I’m angry at IU going MAGA, but I am excited for the Brownsburg high school band, marching in the parade today. A friend’s granddaughter is in the band, and the whole community has been working together for 14 months to fundraise and make it happen. Those who have marched, or whose kiddos marched will get this…some band parents drove trucks with instruments and uniforms all the way from Indiana.
Their program this season was Make Our Garden Grow (Bernstein!), and their uniforms feature yellow cutaway jackets splashed with huge flowers. Interviews with excited shining youngsters have made my 2025 heart swell a few sizes.
And, I see it’s pouring down rain. I know LA Mary will tell us it’s needed, but I’m a little sad for the band kids.
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Deborah said on January 1, 2026 at 11:33 am
It’s not that the party wasn’t fun. It was a bunch of old folks who were struggling to stay awake until midnight and then we had a horrendous Lyft ride home that took an hour and a half to go a mile and a half. Then I was so wound up by the drive I didn’t get to sleep until nearly 3.
New Years rocking Eve was partly televised from Chicago a few blocks from where we were at our friends place that’s why traffic was unbelievable. Our friends had their tv on for the last few minutes and I must say Chicago never looked so good.
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Little Bird said on January 1, 2026 at 11:42 am
Happy New Year’s I guess.
I went absolutely nowhere because a) everything shits down by like 10PM here b) I don’t drive c) Stranger Things had its series finale and I was NOT going to miss it.
I was in bed by around 10 anyway and slept fairly well.
In other news the price of medicine is too damn high. I thought that Ol’ Lumpy was bringing down pharmaceutical prices. I tried to pick up a prescription yesterday and my Medicaid declined to cover a new one because of prior authorization issues and if I was to cover it out of pocket it would have been $700 for five pills. Five pills. It’s insane.
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alex said on January 1, 2026 at 12:07 pm
We stayed in and my dad and brother came over for gumbo. As I was in a mad rush to get it ready for dinner time, I used the food processor to chop all the veggies, and they came out pulverized and soggy as I’d feared. To my surprise, they melded with the roux much better than they ever did before and this was the best batch I ever turned out.
So it’s 2026. I have no resolutions, just steely resolve to follow some sage advice from my mother, who passed four years ago: “Don’t let the ugliness in the world make you ugly too.”
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Heather said on January 1, 2026 at 2:14 pm
Happy New Year. Yesterday I was running errands and an old Eastern European man tried to give me a package of bacon while I was unlocking my bike. Obscure cultural custom? Good omen for 2026? Still not sure. I told him he should give it to someone who really needed it and we fist-bumped. Hey, I’ll take any sign of random kindness these days.
For NYE I toggled between the Stranger Things finale and Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen on CNN. Andy started mouthing off about Eric Adams at the end, which was pretty funny. The ST finale was meh. Tied up a too neatly for my taste.
The snowmobile is pretty crazy. I’m sure there’s more than a few Divvy bikes in Lake Michigan that look like that.
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Sherri said on January 1, 2026 at 4:58 pm
Happy New Year. May 2026 at least begin to slow the destruction and start the process of building a new, better US.
My personal goals for 2026 are lifting related. I want to squat 140 kg (308.6 lbs), bench 80 kg (176.4 lbs), and deadlift 140 kg, in competition. My plan is to do two competitions this year, both involving travel: nationals, in Lombard, IL, and worlds in Houston.
My hope is that empathy makes a return in the world. The MAGAts are the worst offenders at showing no empathy, but there is a lack on empathy even among people who would never agree with MAGAts on almost anything when it comes to certain groups, like the unhoused or transgender athletes. Nobody is living their life to intentionally screw you over, and worthiness and dignity aren’t zero sum.
My wish is that a wave of New Democrats get elected who will force the current status quo-loving Democrats to move out of the way, so we can actually start at least talking about universal healthcare, expanding the Court, and restoring voting rights. We’ve got to start setting the terms of debate, instead of letting the GOP do so. Stop being afraid of what people who are never going to vote for us anyway say about us, and say what’s important to us.
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Julie Robinson said on January 1, 2026 at 6:42 pm
Lots of good shopping around Lombard. Or at least there used to be, back when we would stay at the Embassy Suites for family visits.
D is very happy about the IU football game, but the ESPN that’s part of Disney+ wasn’t carrying it, as had been indicated earlier. We ended up having to subscribe to Sling for a month, for 46 stupid dollars. What a racket. He’s not a bar person and wouldn’t enjoy going to one to watch the game, but that amount really chaps my hide.
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Sherri said on January 1, 2026 at 7:35 pm
At least he’ll get more than one game for that $46 dollars. It’s crazy how hard it can be to find out what’s available where, and Disney/Hulu/ESPN is among the most confusing about what’s included with what.
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Julie Robinson said on January 1, 2026 at 8:08 pm
And IU will be playing next week now, plus basketball, his true love. And there will be figure skating next weekend too. But it took half an hour to figure it all out. We tried to get a one day pass, but, oops, this game wasn’t included. It rejected our daughter’s credit card and my husband’s before accepting mine. His and mine are the same account, go figure.
I’m just griping about money because I’ve spent the day looking at prescription costs under our new insurance, and it isn’t pretty. D takes lots of cardiac meds now, each one pricier than the last.
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Brandon said on January 2, 2026 at 12:00 am
Happy New Year!
Re: Jerry Falwell on the waterslide:
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/09/11/Falwell-backslides-down-water-slide/2582558331200/
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