This weekend I learned that the German chocolate cake is not German in origin, but was in fact named for an American baker, Samuel German, who came up with the recipe as a way to use the semisweet dark chocolate he had…formulated would be the correct word, not “invented,” I guess. You can’t really invent chocolate.

I learned this while baking one, for an impromptu party thrown for an ex-editor. I also learned that “impromptu” and German chocolate cake don’t really go together. It’s a recipe that, if you’re devoted to scratch baking as I am, is pretty damn complicated. But it was the birthday boy’s favorite, and so I did my duty. Then I left my phone behind, so I’m enjoying a phone-free Sunday morning, and that’s a very good thing.

But it can’t last forever. I’m heading back over to his apartment in a bit to pick it up.

Work this week will be pretty wild, as we tick down the days to the Detroit Jazz Festival, the world’s largest free jazz festival, a phrase I probably wouldn’t have added before I started working on the social-media team, but that’s social media — marketing, not necessarily journalism. However, the job puts me face-to-face with great musicians and I get to hear some wonderful music in the bargain, so it only feels like work some of the time. It’s a good gig for the semi-retired.

Which is, as usual, my way of advance-apologizing for spotty blogging until we wrap on Labor Day.

That little factoid about German chocolate cake is the sort that sometimes gets me called something like “the walking encyclopedia” when I step out of journalism circles, where everyone is a walking encyclopedia. It goes with the job. “Did you know Dolly Parton had a disco album?” I remarked in a non-journalist text string last week after she died, and it happened again. I can’t help it, as I sit in a firehose of information all day. But today I found myself looking at the fresh New York Times and Free Press on my kitchen table and said, “I’m out.” You have to unplug from time to time, or your brain explodes. (Plus I already read much of it in the last few days, where the Sunday content is trickled out over the web. When our excellent newspaper carrier retires at the end of the year, I may cut back on one or more of our newspaper subs. Or I may not. Advertising in the print editions still supports many of them. I won’t be a party to killing a legit news source, even if they employ Mitch Albom.)

That said, I found a few stories to share today before I clock out:

We all remember the OMG SATANIC CHILD ABUSE IN DAYCARE CENTERS panic of the ’90s, right? Here’s an absolutely infuriating story about a woman who was swept up in it, served YEARS in prison for a crime she never committed, was finally released, and later received a formal exoneration, which would enable her to get compensation from the state of Ohio. However:

The exoneration cleared the way for Ms. Smith to seek compensation. She fantasized about being able to help her children — to pay off her eldest’s house and car and hire a lawyer to extricate her struggling youngest from legal trouble and child support debt. Maybe there would be enough, she hoped, to fulfill her lifelong dream of visiting the Vatican.

Ohio law is intended to make compensation for exonerees straightforward and quick, especially when the local prosecutor poses no objections. Under the law, Ms. Smith would receive at least $1 million. Mr. Tomlinson told the court he believed she had been wrongfully imprisoned and deserved recompense.

But then she ran into opposition from the state attorney general, Dave Yost, who stepped in and had Mr. Tomlinson’s statements stricken from the record.

[The original prosecutor] Mr. Rosenbaum, for his part, advanced a new argument: The exoneration should not have occurred, he said, because it had cleared the way for Ms. Smith to sue him and several others involved in her prosecution.

They were joined in their opposition by Tony Cillo, a Republican who had recently defeated [the prosecutor who supported the exoneration] Mr. Tomlinson, a Democrat, in his bid for re-election. Mr. Cillo called the exoneration “one of the most flagrant frauds upon the entire state of Ohio” and a conspiracy to “acquit and pay” Ms. Smith.

Mr. Yost’s office declined to comment on pending litigation, and Mr. Cillo did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Rosenbaum said, through his lawyer, that he had “prosecuted all his cases with the highest ethical standards, and the prosecution of Nancy Smith was no different.”

Yost, and all the rest of these terrible, terrible people, are slimy pieces of crap. A long read, but worth it.

Speaking of terrible people, Lucian Truscott’s Substack on Pete Hegseth is worth your time.

Finally, Dolly’s death got me thinking about Whitney Houston, for some reason. “I Will Always Love You,” a sweet song about leaving behind a lover (or maybe Porter Wagoner — accounts vary), is one thing in her voice, and quite another in Whitney’s, whose every recording carries the subtext of look what a belter I am. Not only that, she ushered in an age of belters that we’re still living through. Some years back, on a long drive, I cued up a Spotify playlist of various versions of “Lush Life,” a sad song about drinking yourself to death over a broken heart. The more recent the recording, the more likely it is to be belted by a singer who seems not to have actually read the lyrics. What do you think about this? Discuss.

I’ll be here this week, unless I’m not. Carry on.