It doesn’t qualify as a profound insight to notice that every child — hell, every person — alive today will have their photo taken a million times before they check out. Maybe more than that, if you throw in security cameras, which I’m not. I’m talking about how, as cameras have become omnipresent, we’re all more comfortable with having our picture taken.
If you grew up in the era where your parents might expose a single roll of film in six months, it’s a little unnerving. Yes, it’s great to have a bunch of pictures of your family. Yes, it’s also weird to point a camera at a child, and have them immediately step into a pose and flash a big insincere smile, the way mom and dad taught them. Where are the sullen teens of yore? Whatever.
Anyway, that’s all leading up to this: One of the things I did this weekend was go through some family pictures and artifacts my sister’s been keeping. I brought home my birth certificate, my high-school diploma, and a few snapshots.
My dad and his dad, whom I never met, c. 1943. My dad was meticulous in his appearance, and had his uniform tailored to his specifications. Looking at my grandfather, I can see it ran in the family.
I don’t know when that was taken, but St. Louis was a hot city. Imagine wearing a three-piece suit in that humidity.
Me and my brother, and me and my sister. This would be our house in Kansas City, most likely:
I had a bad problem with blinking when flashbulbs went off.
My very earliest memories were in that house; I think I must have been about…4? Maybe? After K.C., it was on to Columbus, where we settled and stayed.
Now these photos have been scanned and digitized, but I’ll keep the originals, where they’ll live in my family until Kate takes them, or throws them away, or they burn up in a fire.
I should toss my high-school diploma, though. Finishing high school is so bare-minimum, I wonder why anyone hangs on to theirs. But it seems wrong, somehow. Mine still has the sheet of onionskin paper that covers the precious diploma itself. It’s a thing of value! It cost the state of Ohio something to educate me. Better find a box to stash it in.
Also, this: I applied for a job a few years ago, not really wanting it, but curious what it might involve, and I was rejected for, get this, failing to attach a college transcript to my application, which was submitted online, of course. I think my college transcript must be in a moldy box in the basement of the registrar’s office, but never mind that, because it makes a pretty good segue to the bloggage, which today is a little dated. I’ve been throwing links into a blank doc for a few days now, so let’s lead with the evisceration of Indiana University, victim of a MAGA governor seeking to polish his national profile by gutting a fine institution. All in the name of “efficiency” and the needs of the job market, of course, which tracks with the right-wing insistence that college need be nothing more than a trade school for middle managers. (At least for your kids. The elite layer of the GOP will continue to send their offspring to the Ivies.) This Chicago Tribune editorial strikes the right note of are-you-kidding-me indignation, more so than any Indiana newspaper I’ve seen. But then, lots of IU journalism grads find jobs in Chicago, so no surprise there.
Here’s an amusing obit for a 105-year-old woman, a real GP OG, as I like to think of these dowagers:
Louise Booth, 105, passed away peacefully Thursday, July 3, 2025, at her home facing Lakeshore between Beacon Hill and Kerby in Grosse Pointe Farms. She was still of sound mind.
That’s a Booth of Booth Newspapers, back when owning newspapers was like owning a gold mine. They sold to Newhouse years and years ago, but they must have invested the pile wisely. Later paragraphs give the exact address of the house, in case any funeral burglars were confused. And while the obit isn’t amusing in the fashionable current trend of basically calling someone a lovable jerk — she seemed like a nice lady — I find any obit for someone who lasts that long into the postseason uplifting to read. Especially as she was still of sound mind.
The Sean Combs verdict happened so long ago it already feels like ancient history, but Monica Hesse at the WP has done a couple of good columns about it, which you can look up. This one, about so-called Alligator Alcatraz, is very good, too:
The point is that serious matters — the most serious matters, the matters of constitutionality, due process, citizenship and who gets to be an American — are, in this administration, being increasingly presented as cheap entertainment. You see it in the U.S. Border Patrol playing the power ballad “Closing Time” over footage of a scared looking young man being placed in handcuffs and shepherded onto a plane. You see it in the White House posting a video of detained migrants being processed for deportation, set to a hit from Bananarama.
Is it funny? Is it awful? Is it trolling or real life? The point is that we are not supposed to know. Alligator Alcatraz is a dehumanizing place, but when it is treated as spectacle, it’s not just the prisoners there who lose their humanity. We all do. The effect is to tell Americans not to take any of this too seriously. Families are being ripped apart, but it’s all for the lulz. We are dancing on the edges of constitutionality, but it’s making great television. We have become tonally incoherent, incapable of even determining tone. If Guantánamo Bay opened today, there would be a themed restaurant out back with happy hour specials taglined “Git mo’ at Gitmo.”
…I used to wonder about Roman gladiator battles. What kind of society would pack up a picnic lunch and go watch other humans, the enslaved or prisoners of war, forced to battle each other to the death? Another part of the gladiator legend is that these men were forced to fight large beasts, large carnivorous predators. But there was no physical evidence for that until just a few months ago in April, when archaeologists analyzed giant bite marks on the unearthed skeleton of a 1,800-year-old gladiator. Then it was confirmed: lions. In what society would this be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon?
Finally, a really interesting Atlantic story (gift link, as is the WP link above) about so-called customer-service sludge. Having recently spent 90 minutes on hold with the IRS without getting anyone on the line, I can identify. It’s maddening.
Dexter Friend said on July 9, 2025 at 1:33 pm
When I was discharged from active duty at old Fort Lewis, Washington, I was told to report to my local vet-rep to get on file for possible benefits, now or later. Years passed, decades melted, I occasionally checked in with the VFW rep, was told “you don’t have anything coming…”. I finally just quit asking. VFW Magazine always reported than any war-time claims must be verified by at least 1 or 2 soldiers in your platoon. I had no addresses , it had been like forever. Then I began hearing how Viet-vets were finally getting some benefits. I went to my new local rep, produced documents, including the invaluable DD-214, and the rep snorted and insinuated I had forged or doctored-up my papers which clearly showed Viet Nam service time. Phone calls, even , after I got agitated, photographs of me in jungle fatigues, didn’t speed up the process. Finally, some VA officer in Toledo/Ann Arbor verified that I was me and by gawd, I was in like Flynn. But first I needed more paperwork…my shrunken wallet-sized DD-214 was not acceptable, so the search began. I have a few old lock-boxes and small old attaché cases in a closet, and fuckin’ A ! I found my 6 year discharge, my high school diploma, and the full-size stack of copies of the DD-214. Also, 2 precious snapshots of my terrier, Ben, who was my best-buddy dog from 1957 until he passed in 1971. He hung on long enough for me to say goodbye.
Seven months later I was approved for a 50% disability with free medicines and free health care. It only took 44 years. I got a little back-pay, just exactly enough to kill off a big-ass credit card balance.
I framed the photographs of Ben, and I see them every day. I loved that dog.
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Sherri said on July 9, 2025 at 1:55 pm
Lest we forget, we are the kind of society that turns torture into public spectacle. Lynchings were spectator events: https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-public-spectacle-lynchings/
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Suzanne said on July 9, 2025 at 2:00 pm
After spending untold hours cleaning crap out of my mom’s house, I had a tidy fit here at home and decided to recycle some old magazines and ran across this article from 2023:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/03/tv-politics-entertainment-metaverse/672773/?gift=F58N5IOcUo4qAP_lFh-H9w46yAZk0VTCNj_fHcUE5DI&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
“Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.”
It’s an eye opening piece (that I hope I posted as a gift article) and helps explain the spectacle that the current administration is presenting to an audience happily taking it all in.
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jcburns said on July 9, 2025 at 2:10 pm
So glad you’re still of sound mind, Nancy!
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Jeff Gill said on July 9, 2025 at 2:39 pm
Working on finding a secured memory care unit that takes Medicaid, as we approach the end of our mother’s assets, and the answer is about what you’d think. There are places that take Medicaid, and there are places that still provide “ambulatory memory care” but the overlap circle is small . . . and you go on wait lists. Meanwhile, it turns out my sister’s accountant* gave her bad advice on how to compensate our brother in helping provide care, so our “look back” is going to leave us on the hook between the two of us for 18 months regardless. The Medicaid advisor we’re sent to is a private contractor (so can we really trust him?) who is strongly urging we shift her from the memory care facility she’s in to a Medicaid qualified facility immediately, so we can start the process of getting the waiver and covering the look back penalty period, but that means a facility with one star (barely one, flickering) and 50 miles away . . . or being consigned to a major payment each month until the end of this drama, all of which she’s blithely unaware of. We’re talking around $2,500 apiece for the privilege of having her close enough to visit regularly, when she doesn’t know who we are, but we do . . .
There are times it would be nice to be unethical. I doubt Trump visited Fred all that often his last few years, but I could be wrong.
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Julie Robinson said on July 9, 2025 at 2:57 pm
No clicks left for the Trib, but it’s not just IU, though the cuts there seem to be the most severe. (Including the defunding of the student newspaper.) Liberal arts programs are being eliminated at all the public schools, so if you want to study Spanish or French you’ll have to go private or out of state. My old department, Religious Studies, has a 404 instead of a webpage now, so I’m unable to even find out the impact in terms of professors and classes.
While I bitch about how thin and expensive the Orlando Sentinel is, they’ve been unrelenting in their pressure on DeathSantis and other politicians. One of Sunday’s editorials referred to the savagery implicit in “the imagery of brown people getting out of line and being ripped bloody by alligators or suffocated by snakes”. Today a columnist pointed out that the camp was built under an emergency order by DeathSantis due to the so-called Biden Border Crisis, an order that has been extended 15 times and now runs over 1000 days.
Several state legislators, including both my state rep and senator, showed up and asked for an inspection, as is their lawful right. They were there over an hour and were turned away by officials stating it wasn’t safe. One of them very logically asked how it could be safe for detainees if it wasn’t safe for them.
Add to this all the pols in Texas who consistently voted against warning systems for an area so flood-prone it was known as Flash Flood Valley? And a governor who responds to the safety question with a rambling statement on how everyone in Texas loves football? I’m not sleeping well.
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Alan Stamm said on July 9, 2025 at 4:48 pm
Ah, the perks of birthday, Christmas and other gifts from Great-Grandma Booth/Aunt Louise . . .
. . . who “kept in touch with her large family, providing emotional and financial support to her grandchildren, step-grandchildren, great-grandchildren and nieces in Virginia.”
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Deborah Beckett said on July 9, 2025 at 6:00 pm
I finished Not My Type, I’m commenting again about it, I couldn’t recommend it more. After hearing that there’s a delightful audio version read by E. Jean Carrol herself, I’m going to get it and listen to the hole fabulous thing. I can’t tell you how much it made me happy and hopeful, maybe if we try hard and push we can actually make something better, after this horrendous, long, episode of hate and incompetence.
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David C said on July 9, 2025 at 6:29 pm
While packing our stuff, I found a credit card sized copy of my college diploma. I don’t know what that was supposed to be for. Whipping it out of my wallet and saying “Bow down to me, I’m a graduate of Ferris State University” doesn’t seem quite possible. I still have the full size from their best copy machine and my transcript though. Neither seems like it would be of any more use than the credit card sized.
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Mark P said on July 9, 2025 at 6:32 pm
Ninety minutes on hold at the IRS and no one ever picked up? It’s working exactly as intended. It’s past time that we realized that we are living in the modern instantiation of Nazi Germany. If you’re in the party and wealthy, everything works. If you’re not, prepare to suffer.
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Deborah Beckett said on July 9, 2025 at 6:33 pm
Of course I meant whole and not hole.
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Brandon said on July 9, 2025 at 7:43 pm
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2015/fall/handling-photos.html
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Jeff Gill said on July 10, 2025 at 7:25 am
All hail the Bulldogs.
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ROGirl said on July 10, 2025 at 7:49 am
The Booth family founded Cranbrook over 100 years ago, a remarkable and influential cultural institution that’s still part of the community.
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alex said on July 10, 2025 at 8:30 am
Yay Cranbrook! I was recently surprised to learn at an architecture lecture that Eero Saarinen collaborated with a Fort Wayne building contractor, A.C. Wermuth, to build Cranbrook. They struck up a partnership because Saarinen spoke no English but was fluent in German and so was Wermuth.
Saarinen designed Wermuth a house and it’s a stone’s throw from mine and it’s incredible. https://phosimaging.com/ac-wermuth-house
At the lecture I also learned more about Cranbrook. It was modeled after Germany’s Bauhaus art school and became a refuge for Jewish architects, artists and academics who were being driven out of Europe. Hitler closed down the Bauhaus school in 1933 even though it was the envy of the world for all of its innovation.
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