Today’s to-do list:

Update blog
Pay two car insurance premiums
Think about the 9/11 anniversary on Friday.

So, to job no. 1, then: A couple weeks ago I wrote a check — a paper check, like the senior citizen I am — to Abdul el-Sayed’s campaign, and dropped it in the mail. The U.S. mail, also favored by we Olds. I did this specifically to avoid the fundraising platform Act Blue, through which I donated to Jocelyn Benson earlier in the year, and now spams me relentlessly, on every single channel of communication. Sorry, Dem Candidate Running in Arkansas, I wish you luck, but I don’t have the resources to help everybody. Every plea is a puppy looking up at you from the kill pen. Please please please our fundraising reporting deadline passed and we’re so far behind, etc.

Meanwhile, I’m getting the same pleas from El-Sayed, mostly on social media, and my check is still uncashed.

How often do you write checks? I just looked at my register, and it’s…eight so far in 2026. It would be near zero if my city would stop assessing a $10 service charge for online payments.

Just paid the car insurance, because I had to get up to pee and lost my train of thought here. Might as well get that out of the way.

So here we are at 9/11. As so often happens these days, I find myself arriving back at a state of disgust with my fellow American, at least the ones who voted for Trump. Like everyone else who is paying attention, I heard about Tubby’s remarks earlier this week on the subject. First, how envious he was of “the man in the red bandanna,” because that man, Welles Crowther, was briefly more famous than him, and Tubby doesn’t like that. Next, the statement that he went to lower Manhattan to help with the cleanup, and perhaps most outrageous, that he was rescued by two firefighters as one of the towers started to collapse.

Here, the Guardian has a roundup of a couple more 9/11 lies he’s told.

It’s just mind-boggling, how every stutter and hesitation and misremembering by Joe Biden was amplified and beaten like a bass drum, and the New York Times — the goddamn New York Times — called Trump’s lies part of an “evolving — and often disputed — account of his actions on Sept. 11 and in its aftermath.” Evolving! And often disputed! I mean, I know the NYT isn’t going to screech LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE, but to call this “disputed” is underselling it, I’d say.

I’m so disgusted. Two notes from the weekend:

1) Alan was watching the Take 6 performance, an a cappella group, wildly popular, at the jazz festival Sunday night. Between numbers, one of the vocalists remarked on the venue’s proximity to Canada, right across the river. “I love Canada,” he said, and the crowd roared its approval, at a near-ear-splitting level. Which you’d expect. Besides the proximity, some of the audience no doubt works in the auto sector, and the Detroit companies sell more than 600,000 vehicles in Canada, now tariffed at 50 percent.

2) I was sitting at breakfast Monday, alone at the bar in the hotel restaurant, chatting with a couple roughly my age, locals. We were talking about the temptation of moving to northern Michigan post-retirement, but then the husband said, “The only problem is, if you need a decent hospital, you have to come back downstate.” And I replied that the current administration had only worsened that issue, what with the rural hospital closings amid lower Medicaid reimbursements. The husband said, “Well, they voted for that.” No sympathy. And then he identified himself as a “real Republican.”

I know this doesn’t mean he’ll necessarily be voting for Abdul, but maybe he’ll stay home on Election Day, or leave that race untouched. One can hope.

OK, one bit of bloggage: While I know that when an allegation of child abuse is made, authorities must act quickly and not quibble over the trustworthiness of the accuser, hoo-boy the more that we learn about the accuser in the Pete Buttigieg accusation earlier this summer, the worse it gets:

While acknowledging that the evidence shows that her false hotline tip resulted in an “intrusive investigation of an innocent individual and his family,” the prosecutor determined the woman was not “capable of forming the requisite intent to support a criminal conviction.”

The caller has a long history of alcohol abuse and mental illness, E. Nelson Chipman Jr., a prosecutor in Indiana’s Marshall County, where investigators determined the call had originated, wrote to state police in a July 29 email outlining his decision [to not charge her with a crime]. Her history includes “hallucinations and delusional thinking which includes frequently responding to voices only she hears,” he added.

…The woman, who was not named in the email, is from Alabama but was visiting family in Indiana at the time of her call about Buttigieg. During her “relatively short stay” with relatives, she was involved in at least three separate police encounters, according to the prosecutor. The incidents included an arrest for domestic battery, during which her blood alcohol level was reportedly 0.32, four times the legal driving limit in most states.

Lordy. With that, I’m going to eat lunch and read a book on this rainy but otherwise very pleasant afternoon. Enjoy yours.