Among the many funny things Jeff Borden said during our time as across-the-hall neighbors was his offhand observation about exercise: “I could get into it if I could find one like…oh, like sex. You work a little while, you get a big reward, and then you go to sleep.” Ha ha.

I swam on Sunday for the second time in 72 hours, and reflected that it is the most paradoxical of the three or four workouts I most often do. It’s the one I have to work hardest to show up for, but once it’s over, I feel much better than after boxing, cycling or doing weight work. I don’t know if it’s the shower, or what. I certainly don’t get an orgasm out of the deal. But I always leave feeling not just exercised, but energized.

Then I go home, eat my weight in carbs, and fall into a food coma.

Swam 2,075 yards in 58 minutes, average heart rate 121. Nothing special, but it started the week off right.

Most of the weekend, I worked. I had to file 1,600 words on pickleball, and I now invite you to ask me anything about pickleball, a game I’ve never played. My favorite research was on the war between pickleball players and those who do almost anything else on a court. Pity poor tennis, now eclipsed by what appears to be a goofier form of ping-pong. In Santa Rosa, Calif. in 2021, pickleball courts were vandalized by a deliberate motor-oil spill:

The players also found a profanity-laced note printed on a piece of white paper lying on one of the courts. Its writer threatened to key the cars of any pickleball players who came to the courts, and called tennis players who didn’t do anything to stop the pickleball players “chickens.”

Don’t cross Big Tennis! They don’t mess around!

Then there’s this guy, who squats on handball courts in New York to keep picklers away:

His name is Paul Owens (or maybe Paul Rubenfarb or Paul Rosenberg); he claims to be 97, and his cryptic business card reads “Let’s go dancing,” while listing a variety of genres like “doo-wop” and “1950s red-light mambo.”

All they know for sure is that his life seems to revolve around arriving at the North Meadow Recreation Center as early as 7 a.m., well before Parks Department employees clock in for the day, and just as the earliest pickleball players begin trickling in. That is when he stakes his claim in the middle of the courts and, in a sense, holds the pickleballers hostage. He contends they are taking away space originally devoted to the proletarian sport of handball, historically favored by teenagers of color. (He himself is an ex-handball player, but like many old-timers, he has switched to paddleball, which is more forgiving on the knees.)

To anyone who asks why he insists on ruining the fun, he hands out a flyer in the style of a ransom note that slams “pickleball’s well-off aggressive elite.”

My dad played handball. He often called racquetball “a ladies’ game.” I wonder what he’d think of pickleball. My guess: Not much.

Otherwise, it was a pleasant weekend. J.C. and Sammy are swinging through tomorrow for a brief visit, and I’m very much looking forward to that. Thanks for your comments on my Belle Isle piece, also. I don’t have a lot to add, except that the man with this big idea went on something called the Charter Cities podcast to discuss it. I gather the concept of charter cities is the same as charter schools, i.e., a boondoggle that allows chartered individuals to step outside the law with the promise of innovating their problems away. I expect it will end the way the charter-school movement has, i.e. with wealthy people getting wealthier, the problems remaining and the rest of us, screwed.

Bloggage? A good WashPost dive into the state of the Kennedy Center (gift link):

So what is the Kennedy Center now?

For one thing, it’s getting a Trumpian revamp. He ordered new marble and the repainting of the exterior columns in austere white. Portraits of the first and second couples now hang in the center’s Hall of Nations, and the building exterior is occasionally lit up in red, white and blue (a move that, many staffers joke, makes the building look like the flag of France, not America).

…(Kennedy Center President Richard) Grenell, who directed his staff refer to him as “Ambassador,” quickly began overhauling the center’s leadership. Hires included Roma Daravi, a White House communications aide from the first Trump administration and a former ballerina, as head of the public relations team; and Lisa Dale, a former senior campaign adviser to Trump ally Kari Lake, as the senior vice president of development. He installed the former national chairman of the Young Republicans, Rick Loughery, and his longtime adviser Nick Meade in top roles. None of the three had any previous arts expertise. (Staffers quickly dubbed the trio “The Icks.”) Grenell spends a significant amount of time in California, where he primarily resides, and is rarely seen in the building, staffers say.

Ai-yi-yi. Can’t wait to see the new medals.

OK, time to make some dinner. Have a good week, everyone.

This has been a week. You might recall I’m taking a creative writing class this semester? Today was the last class. We were asked to read a selection from our final project, which encompassed short fiction, poetry and memoir. I read my memoir excerpt.

It was about Tim Goeglein. Might as well choose a vivid chapter. It got some giggles, especially from the teacher, who, like most teachers, has had her experiences with plagiarism. A snippet:

Like President Bush, I believe in forgiveness. But I also believe in shame, and we live in a shameless age. A man exposed as a thief of other’s thoughts and expression – for years – shouldn’t be publishing book after book. The online left has long spoken of “wingnut welfare,” the seemingly endless trough from which certain conservative “thinkers” can feed, in perpetuity. Scandals, whether it be taking laundered money from the Russians, sexual misbehavior or worse, don’t seem to dent people on the right, while Sen. Al Franken was pressured into resigning for making a naughty gesture in a photograph.

It was no doubt hard for Tim Goeglein to lose his White House job. But like so many of these preening God-botherers, he was shoved off the roof with a parachute on his back, and drifted gently down into another well-paid position.

What a bitch the lady who wrote that is.

Here’s something else I wrote, for the Free Press. It was paywalled when it went up, so here’s a non-paywalled link. It’s not what I’d usually do, but I assume you guys are mostly not in the Freep area, so oh well.

Tell me what you think. And have a swell weekend.

As expected, Kate’s health insurance, purchased on the ACA marketplace, is going to be more expensive next year. In fact, her plan won’t even be available, so she was booted to an allegedly comparable one for…quadruple her current premium. Which she absolutely can’t afford. And so the three of us must now put our heads together and try to figure out an alternative.

I’ve reached the point where I despise every Republican on the planet, and at least some of the Democrats, for allowing this to happen. I can’t even tell you how angry I am that a modestly paid gig worker like her has to risk going bareback because she can’t afford even the shitty health insurance the private marketplace offers.

But remember! The key to Democrats taking back Washington? Is MODERATION. What a joke. Medicare for all.

That rant out of the way, let me commence another: President Shit-for-brains has said he plans to pardon the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández. Yeah, this guy:

He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.

At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.

All this, while we’re still blowing up boats in the Caribbean, claiming without evidence that they’re drug-runners. And millions of Americans are just fine with all of this.

I must say, however, this is really a time for the NYT Pitchbot to shine:

In this Ohio town, it was tradition: Latin mass, biscuits and gravy at Bob Evans, and then down to the old marina to shoot a bunch of fishermen and claim they were running drugs. But now the woke mob wants to take all that away.

— NY Times Pitchbot (@nytpitchbot.bsky.social) November 30, 2025 at 4:47 PM

Friends, I have a lot of work to get out the door in the next two weeks, plus the usual holiday ramp-up. The good news: My shopping is all but done. The bad news: See above. Expect light posting, but I’ll be here, because blogging is a great way to procrastinate.

This will be quick because I have a long to-do list, as generally happens to women before a holiday. But they’re all happy errands, for the most part, so no biggie.

First, let’s go with the lighter stuff, if you consider waiting for a fool to drown “lighter,” but you know my sense of humor.

There’s a guy who’s been hanging around the local waterways for a while, navigating what’s charitably called a “homemade houseboat.” It looks like a shipping container sitting on a raft, the raft itself floating on 55-gallon plastic drums. It might not be a shipping container, but that’s about the size. Everything about it is what you’d call “makeshift,” and maybe “half-assed.” It made the papers when it required Coast Guard assistance to get through the considerable currents at Port Huron, where Lake Huron drains into the St. Clair River. Once past, though, the captain — of the houseboat — waved them off and said he was fine. He’s now docked in Lexington, Mich., and the story goes that he’s trying to do “the Great Loop,” or the circumnavigation of the eastern U.S. via the Atlantic Ocean, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. It’s unconfirmed, but if he is, I’d advise taking a few days off, or even a few months.

The gales of November are blowing as we speak, with a blizzard bearing down on the U.P. and just general misery everywhere else. If that ridiculous thing leaves the safety of its current mooring, it’s bound to be broken up before he reaches Saginaw Bay.

On a darker note, I don’t know how I missed this earlier in the week, but here’s a gift link to a great analysis of the Epstein emails by that guy whose name I always have to look up, Anand Giridharadas:

At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.

This is Giridharadas’ particular hobbyhorse; he writes a lot about the global elite, who care less for the rest of us than they do their own spouses. But it’s pretty perceptive, rich with detail and observations like this:

Many of the Epstein emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the more I read, took on greater meaning: the whereabouts update and inquiry. In the Epstein class, emails often begin and end with pings of echolocation. “Just got to New York — love to meet, brainstorm,” the banker Robert Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein. “i’m in wed, fri. edelman?” Mr. Epstein wrote to the billionaire Thomas Pritzker (it is unclear if he meant a person, corporation or convening). To Lawrence Krauss, a physicist in Arizona: “noam is going to tucson on the 7th. will you be around.” Mr. Chopra wrote to say he would be in New York, first speaking, then going “for silence.” Gino Yu, a game developer, announced travel plans involving Tulum, Davos and the D.L.D. (Digital Life Design) conference — an Epstein-class hat trick.

Landings and takeoffs, comings and goings, speaking engagements and silent retreats — members of this group relentlessly track one another’s passages through JFK, LHR, NRT and airports you’ve never even heard of. Whereabouts are the pheromones of this elite. They occasion the connection-making and information barter that are its lifeblood. If “Have you eaten?” was a traditional Chinese greeting, “Where are you today?” is the Epstein-class query.

A long read, but it kept my interest throughout.

And with that, it’s off to tackle the to-do list. At the end, I’ll have a homemade apple pie, a brined turkey, the makings of tomorrow’s green-bean dish and maybe time for a cleaned bathroom or drink with a friend. (I’m hoping for the latter.)

Have a great Thanksgiving, all. Back after.

I’ll say this for Detroit: People here know how to throw a good party.

Saturday, I went out to a double event at the Schvitz: First, a screening of “The Concert for Bangladesh” movie, followed by a one-hour set of all George Harrison music, by local musicians. And it was kind of a blast, being able to move around the whole building, which included a nice fire on the outdoor patio, have something to eat and even take the steam. (I didn’t.)

I walked in during the film’s extended Ravi Shankar performance, and told Paddy, “George Harrison’s great genius was in convincing people to listen to this for longer than two minutes.” I guess everyone needs an opener, but man — a little bit of sitar goes a long way for me.

Things to notice about the concert film: There was a period in the early ’70s when really big bands were, well, really big. Recall Joe Cocker touring with Mad Dogs and Englishmen, which was about two dozen people coming on and off the stage, singing, playing, partying. Harrison’s band for that night, billed “George Harrison & Friends,” was equally populated, although certain players were essential — Billy Preston, Leon Russell, Eric Clapton, a few others.

When the movie wrapped and the show started, they followed the same model, within the limits of the Schvitz stage. Four guitars, two drummers, four background vocalists, a keyboard…there may have been more. But they did a great job. It was nostalgic, but not, Just a nice reminder of one of the century’s great artists.

Plus that fire on the patio.

As for the rest of the weekend, I resolved to get work done, and I did. I’m ready for the holiday (kinda), and maybe even the holiday(s).

How about you guys?

Not much bloggage today, but I found this story about finding one’s second chapter, work-wise, to be amazingly sweet. Gift link.

Sometimes I feel bad about calling the First Lady a sex worker. (Or an old whore, depending on my mood.) First, because sex work is work, as we feminists say. Second, because I believe she’s retired from sex work, and maybe that should be acknowledged. And finally, because the current non-occupant of the now-demolished East Wing isn’t much of a First Lady this term, why quibble about what she did to get the job?

First, maybe we might address the question: Was she a sex worker at one time? (And I know we’ve talked about this before. I’m not obsessed. OK, maybe a little.) Not in the stand-on-a-corner-in-skimpy-clothing sense, no. But everything we know about her history as an immigrant, about what she did when she came to New York, the people she associated with, etc. suggests a form of…polite sex work, you might say. She was a “model,” a job description applied to many pretty girls whose photo will never appear in a magazine or catalog, or walk a runway. But she would make herself available for events requiring a certain number of hot women in attendance — parties, openings, nightclubs, etc. — and would be happy to catch the eye of the rich men in attendance. I suspect that is exactly why she came to the U.S., in fact: To find a wealthy man who might marry her and allow her to not only never see the rough side of Slovenia again, but to maybe get her parents out, too.

And that’s exactly what happened. Is that sex work? Probably millions of women consider potential life partners with eyes that cold. I think FLOTUS herself answered that best of all, when asked if she’d be married to her husband if he wasn’t rich: “Would he be married to me if I weren’t beautiful?” A transactional woman.

Her empty, loveless marriage suggests they both got what they wanted from it. After all, this is a woman who wouldn’t move into the White House until her prenup was recast to her satisfaction. At this point, she doesn’t need to have sex with anyone. She has a child and a wedding ring; she will never go quietly, unless it’s with suitcases stuffed with cash.

But I get salty when I hear the most repulsive of the MAGA crowd go on about the warm, elegant, refined Michelle Obama, calling her “Big Mike” because she used to be a MAN, doncha know? They photoshopped dicks onto her dresses and say her husband is gay, then complain that no one will put Melania on the cover of Vogue. “That old whore?” I reply.

This is counterproductive, I know. It won’t bring people together, join hands across the chasm of our differences, etc. But it seems the only response.

What else is going on today? There were some demonstrations in Dearborn yesterday. One was initially organized by a fringe candidate for governor — go ahead, guess which party!!! — protesting SHARIA LAW, etc. He called it off after claiming to have a change of heart about our Muslim neighbors. but the ball he started rolling didn’t stop. This guy appeared to be behind the wingnuts:

At about 6 p.m., there was a growing crowd confronting Jake Lang, a rightwing activist from Florida who organized one of three rallies Tuesday. Police then brought up several metal barriers around Lang and his supporters, keeping them separated from the crowd, who yelled back at Lang at times.

Here’s the gubernatorial candidate:

Another gathering was led by Anthony Hudson, a Republican candidate for governor who initially was planning an anti-sharia rally, but had a change of heart after spending four days last week in Dearborn and Dearborn Heights, visiting mosques and Muslim leaders. Hudson told the Free Press in an interview his rally was to promote unity, but also to tell Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud to be more respective of Christians and their concerns. Hammoud faced criticism earlier this year for berating a Christian minister, but later said the city welcomes all.

Note the misuse of “respective” by the reporter. The word he was trying for is “respectful,” but unfortunately, all the copy editors were purged in some previous round of cuts, apparently.

Listen to this douchebag, though:

Hudson said he visited the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Dearborn Community Center, the Islamic Institute of America in Dearborn Heights and the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights, where he met with Imam Mohammad Elahi, a prominent Islamic and interfaith leader in Michigan. He also visited Eternal Light, a nonprofit in Dearborn Heights, and a food bank.

“We’re proving the point that we didn’t see sharia law in Dearborn,” Hudson said. “We didn’t see women getting assaulted or disrespected. We saw women business owners that were yelling at men, telling them what to do. We saw young women walking at night to go to the bars and they weren’t being harassed. We saw the gentlemen’s clubs, which is against sharia law. We saw the liquor stores, which is against it. We just saw so many things that were against sharia law that I made the determination that during my trip, my four days, there was no sharia law.”

Afer living here all these years, I notice the wingnut panic over Dearborn runs in cycles. They all seem to take their cues from one another, because they have so few original ideas, and the wheel has turned again. The other day I looked up M*ll*ssa C*ron*, the fameball from the 2020 election cycle, and even she was posting “content” from Dearborn during the call to prayer, barking, “How would you like to listen to this five times a day?” And I considered that nearly all the people within earshot are Muslim themselves, and Melly herself lives in goddamn Macomb County, so what’s her damage? It’s just Dearborn’s turn, I guess.

God help us if they discover Hamtramck. OK, then. Time to find a grindstone and press my nose to it. Happy Wednesday, all.

Oh, no. I haven’t written anything today. Or yesterday. I am sorry. But I was cooking for, and wrapping for, the birthday twins’ celebration, which was yesterday. We had dinner, cake, gifts, the first half of the Lions game. I didn’t sleep well, and today I’ve been dragging ass, as they say. But it was a good party.

The individual gifts aren’t as important as my one brainstorm for a family gift that all three of us November babies can enjoy (along with three friends): A two-hour cruise on the J.W. Wescott, i.e., the mail boat that services freight vessels on the Detroit River. It advertises itself as the only floating zip code in the country (48222), based on when it would deliver mail to ships on the Great Lakes for weeks at a time. Now that letters from home aren’t so important, they do package and food deliveries — yes, you can order a pizza or a shwarma to be delivered to, say, the MV Paul R. Tregurtha as it passes through town — as well as pilot changes, which is what I’d really like to see. They pull up next to a ship under way, match their speed, and send the new pilot up a rope ladder, and take on the guy coming off duty.

I think that’s also how they’d deliver a pizza, only with a basket or some sort of conveyance, now that I think about it.

It all sounds exciting, different, fun and very Detroit. I can’t wait. Now to herd all our cats aboard.

The Wescott website talks about how they got their start, ferrying letters to ships in a bucket tied to a rope, and it reminded me of the Columbus Dispatch bucket, the fifth-floor bucket the staff would drop to photographers coming back from breaking news, on deadline. They’d deposit their exposed film in the bucket, and by the time they got parked and back into the building, the film was being processed. Was it ever used by a particular photographer to purchase weed from his dealer down on the sidewalk? I’ll never tell.

(Yes.)

So that’s why I’m so tired and not particularly productive today. But tomorrow is another one, and it won’t involve cake and two bottles of wine. So let’s see how it goes.

How many of you have young-adult children? And how many of them are at least as disgusted with the Democrats than the GOP? Are they even, perhaps, more disgusted, because at least the GOP says it’s the enemy of things that are important to them, while the Dems pretend to be on their side? And refuse to leave their elected positions until, like, oh, Eleanor Holmes Norton, they have to be forced or shamed out due to their physical and mental deterioration? (Note: This hasn’t happened yet, in Norton’s case. She plans to run again.)

How is the Surrender Caucus going over with those young people?

This combination photo of eight senators who are facing criticism from the Democratic party for their deal to end the government shutdown shows Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., top row from left, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and bottom row from left, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. (AP Photo)

Fucking Dick Durbin in particular:

Whoa — Sen. Durbin went to up Leader Thune during the vote last night to tell him that on the shutdown vote and ACA promise that "8 of us are sticking our neck out that you're going to keep your word. I hope you will. He said 'I assure you I will,'" Durbin says just now

— Burgess Everett (@burgessev.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 12:59 PM

We had one week — not even! — to savor our victory before the Neville Chamberlain Caucus ripped it away.

When people tell you that the GOP is unpopular, but the Democrats are even more so, this is why. The scoundrels.

So: With that mood established, I made the mistake of reading comments on a story about a local billionaire’s divorce. Thirty-year marriage, five children, which included one son who died young of an incurable disease (neurofibromatosis). They were together when they were young, and they split up when they were rich. See if you can guess what at least some of the online reaction was?

But of course. She’s a ho’.

Can you tell it’s been cold the last two days? Bitter wind, all of it? Yep. Let’s hope the back half of the week is more promising.

The plan for Saturday evening was fairly straightforward: To head to the Dakota Inn Rathskeller, another beloved Detroit business absorbed by my friend Paddy Lynch so that it may continue. (His previous purchases: The Schvitz and Dutch Girl Donuts.) But! It was also the 250th birthday celebration for the U.S. Marine Corps, and if you’re wondering how the Marines are older than the country itself, well, so was I, but I read up on it.

The birthday is actually celebrated Monday, November 10, but the 8th was a Saturday. It’s also observed with a cake-cutting and various associated rituals, and a German restaurant on a Saturday night with a resident piano player seemed like as good a place as any.

The bad news: The place was a madhouse, packed to the rafters with German-food enthusiasts, and a 1.5-hour wait for a table. We decided to go to the basement Rathskeller to wait for the cake and singing. Which came around 7:30, with a long windup about Tradition, but not so much that it killed the vibe. The cake is traditionally cut with a Maltese Mameluke sword, but we’ll use this knife, etc.

And the cake was cut, with the traditional order of serving: First slice to the guest of honor, who was the guy whose family owned the restaurant for two generations before selling it to Paddy. Second slice to the oldest Marine present, i.e., this guy, who fought at Guadalcanal:

Third slice to the youngest Marine, who was very strapping. And then we all sang the Marine Hymn, which contains my favorite passage in a military song, the dis at the very end:

If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven’s scenes;
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines.

And then the friend I went with started feeling ill, so I took her home and met our third for tapas at a quiet Spanish place.

Happy birthday, Marines, including our own Jeff Gill. Glad the pugil sticks didn’t leave you with brain damage.

The rest of the weekend? Shopping errands work workout until Sunday afternoon, when I swam 2,000 yards, came home and ate ravenously, then dozed and read the afternoon away. In other words, a pretty good one.

Hope yours was, too.

In other news at this hour, the GOP is still trash. This is a direct response to the SNAP crisis. I checked.