I’ve read a lot about Alice Waters, the doyenne of California cuisine. I’d never discount her accomplishments, which are considerable. If you cook with any sort of adventure in your soul, if you can tell a shiitake mushroom from a morel, if you consider seasonality and sustainability when choosing produce and meat and fish, you have Alice Waters to thank, for leading a food revolution, starting in the 1970s and still continuing.

However. I also concede she’s a bit of a nut on this subject. Her Marie Antoinette attitudes about how poor people should spend their food dollars are daft and condescending, and I’m sorry, but I’m not forgoing leafy greens through a long Michigan winter, as she has suggested we do. (“There are so many turnips and potatoes to enjoy!”) But I don’t want to get into that now. I’m thinking of the passage in a particular story, in which the writer playfully asked her how she’d feel if she knew her daughter, then a teenager, was sneaking McDonald’s. He described Waters as being genuinely saddened and distressed by the very idea of her child consuming a Big Mac. That’s how awful McDonald’s is, or was. (Psst, Alice: It’s worse now.)

I know Waters is a committed lefty, but I can’t help but wonder what she’s thinking about the Washington crew these days. She and Croaky and Casey Means, his nominee for surgeon general, seem to have a lot in common. I thought of this on a dog walk after reading this excellent essay by Talia Lavin, about Means and her ideas about eating and health:

Casey Means, the Trump administration’s new nominee for Surgeon General of the United States, has a prescription for America. You can find it in her 2024 book, “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.” In Means’ vision, “Good Energy” is a holistic approach to health, one predicated on the idea that “everything is connected.” The text strikes a tone that mirrors Means’ own career path, from training to be an ENT surgeon to life as a wellness influencer whose Instagram, @drcaseyskitchen, boasts nearly a million followers: there’s a sprinkling of grounded research that cites reputable medical journals, and a blizzard of plausible-sounding nonsense. (Means dropped out of her surgical residency and is not currently a licensed doctor.) Either way, what she offers is a kind of earthly paradise, one in which “you can enjoy balanced weight, a pain-free body, healthy skin, and a stable mood… the natural state of fertility that is your birthright.”

But like many other visions of paradise, to attain Means’ state of Good Energy, you have to obey the rules. And there are a lot of them.

According to her dubious statistics, only 6.8% of Americans are “optimizing energy production in their cells,” which is the prerequisite for the aforementioned earthly Eden of the body. For the other 93.2 percent, Means lays out a checklist of all that you must do to become one of the corporal elite. The section of her book on “Food” includes a daunting 23 items, starting with “I currently use a food journal or food tracker consistently to monitor what foods and beverages I’m consuming” and continues with eating three cups of leafy greens a day, plus avoiding foods with “refined seed oils,” all pastries, all sweetened drinks, all white flour, all artificial sweeteners, and—for a bonus—having the ability to not eat for longer than four hours without feeling “excess hunger or cravings.” There are further sections on “Toxins” (don’t store your food in plastic containers or eat high-mercury fish or use plastic water bottles or eat anything with artificial food dyes) and “Meal Timing and Habits.” Altogether, the material on food dwarfs the rest of the (very long) checklist, which includes sleep and the mind-body connection.

What it all amounts to is that Means’ “bold vision for health” in America involves an incredibly stressful, highly involved method of examining absolutely everything that goes into your body. It entails researching whatever you may consider eating, and avoiding oral contraceptives, antibiotics, and over-the-counter pain medications like ibuprofen, plus plastic water bottles and unfiltered water.

As I read on, I realized what Means’ affliction is, about a paragraph before Lavin revealed the same conclusion: Orthorexia nervosa. As the National Institutes of Health defines it (for now; I’m sure this web page is marked for death), orthorexia is an eating disorder “perhaps best summarized as an obsession with healthy eating with associated restrictive behaviors.”

I first read about it when I was clipping health news for Big Pharma, and it’s funny how so many MAGA people have some form of it, from Jordan Peterson and his crackbrain carnivore diet (beef, salt, water – and nothing else) to the various Paleo/caveman/low-carb regimes practiced in the manosphere to the organic vegan menus followed by women like Means.

Lavin, who grew up in a strictly kosher home, goes on to tie it to the dietary laws followed in her family:

I’m intimately familiar with systems of eating that involve a lot of label-gazing, head-scratching, and consideration of ingredients. The irony is that, even though I lived through two decades of religious dietary strictures of byzantine complexity, it never felt half as much like a story about sin as Casey Means’ book does. In Leviticus, God never promises a longer, healthier, pain-free life if you avoid breaking any of the dietary laws. He never promises anything, except avoiding becoming ritually unclean.

By contrast, the Instagram orthorexics explicitly declare that you’re broken unless you keep up with an ever-shifting codex of purity that, incidentally, involves quite a bit of discretionary spending. Sure, two sets of cutlery and kitchenware is a big outlay. But Means wants you to buy, at minimum, wearable activity trackers for your movement and sleep; a food journal; blue-light-blocking glasses; access to a sauna; charcoal and reverse-osmosis water filters; a glucometer; and a whole new set of pantry staples (she even specifies a seed-oil-free hummus brand.)

And of course, there’s cruelty involved. Fall away from the kosher path, and you’re a bad Jew. Eat Nacho Cheese Doritos? Then you richly deserve any illness that befalls you. All of this is backed up by ridiculous overstatement; note how Croaky talks about food dyes or processed foods or seed oils “poisoning” children. I will grant you, it’s probably not a great idea to drink a gallon of Red 40 every day, but most of us can survive our bad breakfast cereal or red licorice indulgences just fine. But if you consume these things after you’re told you shouldn’t? Then it’s so much easier to take away your Medicaid, you fat p.o.s. with no self-discipline.

In this, they are marching happily next to the more garden-variety cruelty practiced by the rest of the administration. And they feel fine about it, because they’re only trying to Make America Healthy Again. IS THAT SO WRONG?

I’m so mad at Croaky these days, I can’t even. And now they’ve cancelled the Moderna contract for a bird-flu vaccine.

There is joy in the land, however. Stephen Miller’s wife is leaving the White House to follow Elon Musk to wherever he’s going, and there’s a hot rumor the three of them were in a shall-we-say throuple type of relationship. Our breakfast conversation Thursday was not about eggs, coffee or what we each had planned for the day.

Me: “God, I can’t imagine being railed by both those guys. Literally a fate worse than death.”

Alan: “Nah, that’s not how it went. Elon railed her while Stephen watched, jerking off.”

It’s enough to make you want to splash Red 40 right in your eyes, isn’t it?

Have a great weekend, all.

Because misinformation is bad no matter who is spreading it, I note there’s a meme (as in a viral idea, not a picture with words on it) going around, that the reason Trump is going hard after Harvard is because his son Barron was somehow an unsuccessful applicant.

I’ve seen zero evidence this is true, and I doubt very much it is true. Everything I know about the family suggests Harvard is the last place Barron would apply. I’m sure his clingy mommy was thrilled he chose NYU, which is not a safety school for many people. Anyway, even if he had applied and been turned down, no one would know about it. I think the Harvard admissions office doesn’t comment on who gets in and who doesn’t, and I’d think even leaking that information would be a firing offense.

Facts matter.

Well, here we are, Wednesday. A short week, and already full of horrors. So let’s go bloggage-heavy today.

First, a decent Tom Friedman column about Israel, with a gift link:

I just spent a week in Israel and, while it may not look as if much has changed — the grinding Gaza war continues to grind — I felt something new there for the first time since Oct. 7, 2023. It is premature to call it a broad-based antiwar movement, which can happen only when all the Israeli hostages are returned. But I did see signals flashing that more Israelis, from the left to the center and to even parts of the right, are concluding that continuing this war is a disaster for Israel: morally, diplomatically or strategically.

You can say what you will about the Mustache of Justice, which I think was one of the names lefties bestowed upon Friedman during his world-is-flat era of interviewing Middle East cab drivers, but in general, I think he knows his shit about Israel, and if you’ve had your eyes averted in horror for a while, it’s a good catch-up.

Second, a truly fascinating story out of Hamtramck, the Detroit suburb. (I guess you’d call it that, although it’s completely surrounded by the city and is nowhere near an outer border.) Close observers of the news might remember that the mayor was nominated by Trump to be ambassador to Kuwait, as payment for being MAGA and likely tipping his city’s immigrant population in that direction. Hamtramck has gone from a Polish enclave to an immigrant melting pot-slash-hipster enclave to a culturally conservative, mostly Muslim melting pot, most of Yemeni and Bangladeshi descent. That aspect of the community is the subject of a long reporting project currently running in the Freep. Not to be a homer, but I found this story from The Detroit News far more interesting, and illustrative of the growing divide there, than a thousands-of-words chin-scratcher. It’s a report on last night’s city council meeting, in which the all-Muslim body voted to suspend the non-Muslim city manager, who himself had suspended the Muslim police chief, and hoo-boy these are some details:

During Tuesday’s regularly scheduled council meeting, (City Manager Max) Garbarino defended his decision to put the popular police chief — the city’s first of Yemeni descent — on suspension.

“When a police officer in any state, any county, any city across the whole nation is suspected of this, they are put on administrative leave. This is how this works,” he said.

Garbarino told The Detroit News he put the chief on paid suspension after receiving information from a Hamtramck police officer that Altaheri [the police chief] worked with an associate of President Donald Trump to bribe the president between $1 million to $5 million to pardon a federal prisoner who was convicted of financial crimes, among other allegations.

Oh really? The mayor and ambassador designate hasn’t taken the job yet, and presided over the meeting last night, huh. Also, my former editor watched the whole thing on YouTube and said the three-hour meeting was nuts, including several statements by residents in Arabic that were not translated.

Can I see the hands of those who believe Trump is incapable of bartering cash for pardons? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

An earlier Freep story on this mess, plus others, if you want a deeper dive.

As I said earlier, the week is already full of horrors. Croaky announced the government will no longer recommend Covid boosters for children, pregnant women or anyone other than we Elders. While I’m glad I can still get one, Kate, who works all winter in crowded clubs and bars, will have to either get a doctor’s note or pay out of pocket. This motherfucker. He’s another one I’ll ululate over when he checks out.

OK, time to get to work.

It really doesn’t feel like Memorial Day until someone reproves you for expressing happiness that you have a day off. There are MAGA scolds everywhere, especially since they jumped down Kamala’s neck for daring to tweet “enjoy the long weekend.” MAGA scolds spend the day in prayer and reflection, perhaps leaving church long enough to nibble on a hot dog and wave a little flag.

We’re having barbecued ribs here at the Nall-Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere home base. We are happy it’s a nice day. We are concerned these may be some of the last nice days the U.S. gets, as we have a lunatic president and a crew of enablers bound and determined to destroy it. Here’s his Memorial Day message:

Once again, I will say it: I can’t wait until this motherfucker is dead. I will celebrate. I will dance. I will open my windows and ululate.

This being MemDay weekend, it’s also Movement weekend, the big techno dancefest that seems to grow every year. For a while I collected drug stories around the festival, as stimulants and hallucinogens are pretty deeply embedded in the culture. (Not all techno fans, etc. etc. But when Kraftwerk plays an impromptu set at 4 a.m., a real thing that happened at an after hours a while back, that audience wasn’t staying alert on black coffee.) My fave was the tale, perhaps true perhaps not, of the dealer who set up shop outside one of the more popular nightspots in an RV, and served his wares out a side door, like a food truck. Detroit, and illegality, is a rich garden of economic innovation. However, my friends who do the festival regularly are now deep into their 30s, weed is fully legal, and I’m reliably informed that as the weekend wanes, you’re more likely to find restorative yoga brunches than a Xanax party.

We went to a Thursday-night jazz-cozying-up-to-techno set last week, and it was very nice. The trumpeter had an echo pedal on his mic, not something you see every day.

As I am an Elder, my main — my only — mind-alterer is a nice cocktail. Alan just served me one, in fact. Isn’t that a pretty mojito?

I appreciate the choice of the green straw. He’s always had an eye.

If I were a harder worker, I’d come up with a few paragraphs about the sacrifices of war. But today, I’m not. Enjoy the long weekend.

On Mondays I “sleep late,” which is to say, I don’t set the alarm and wake up whenever. On Monday I woke at 6, tried to read for a while and drifted back to sleep, and learned my subconscious still has some tricks up her sleeve, i.e., a brand-new anxiety dream:

I’d invited two people to come to dinner, and had shopped and prepped food for all of us. They arrived, and before I could even shut the door, more people were standing on the front step, and apparently I’d invited them, too. This went on and on, and the house filled up with people expecting a meal. I never got around to serving anything, because issues kept arising in the party crowd — someone needed this moved from the second floor to the first, etc. It seemed to never end until I finally woke up, feeling very befuddled.

If only I’d invited Jesus. I understand he has a hack for feeding a multitude.

I’m well-acquainted with anxiety dreams, and have been working on them for some time. They started with the classic Test Dream (I’m seated for the final, and realize I’ve never attended this class). After my formal schooling ended, it became the Deadline Dream (an editor is expecting something, and I’ve done no reporting). My Feet Are Mired in Mud, self-explanatory in the central imagery. And so on. Now it’s the Dinner Party Dream.

Sigh. Very Monday, that one.

Jason T. posted this piece from the Bulwark on his socials, and I think it’s worth a read. Excerpt:

Biden’s biggest failure was that his theory of America was wrong.

He could have governed as a radical intent on destroying the populist project. This would have meant aggressively pursuing criminal charges against Trump and his confederates. It would have meant forgoing normal legislation in order to pursue broad, systemic change. Such a course would have been risky and — probably — unpopular.

Instead, Biden governed like a normal president in a normal moment. He pursued mostly popular, mostly incremental reforms. He forged bipartisan majorities. He passed a lot of legislation, most of it focused on concrete items to improve the lives of American citizens even—especially—in red states.

Biden’s belief was that the Trump moment was an aberration and that America could return to its liberal equilibrium if he governed normally and gave the Republican party space to heal itself and turn away from its authoritarian project.

Biden’s theory of the case was shredded by events.

Like many of you, I’ve been marinating in takes about Biden since That Book dropped. (May I say here that I have never been so happy to be quit of cable news as I have been this week, as I understand CNN has been shameless in flogging their star anchor’s work product.) And I share the frustration many of you have, that the coverage of a dying man who is no longer president has not even been matched at all by coverage of a senile man who is president. But at the same time, I don’t think we can ignore that covering for the president’s infirmity has gotten us here, where Democrats who haven’t even filed to run for office, any office, will be asked to somehow defend the work of people they don’t know, in events they had no control over. And no one is saying the obvious: Even a frail, doddering president with a competent staff is preferable to the one we have now, although you can argue that the original sin was for Biden to run in the first place. (See quoted paragraph, above.)

But Jason added something else that needs to be said. The Bulwark is a Substack vertical run by never-Trumpers who have moved incrementally to the left, or not moved at all, and now find themselves with more Democratic friends than Republican. He commented:

The reason people don’t like The Bulwark, of course, is that many of the people who contribute to it also built the current media and political climate which now afflicts the U.S. — they were part of various far-right think-tanks and publications and TV networks. We didn’t get to this dark reality in a vacuum; people like Bill Kristol and Mona Charen dragged the U.S. into this dark reality.

Exactly. Those of us who remember Mona Charen when she was shaking her finger at women who had sex outside of marriage still remember those columns, and ditto Kristol. I mean, I’m glad they’re resisting the current catastrophe, but if it ever ends, I don’t see themselves on our side. And we need to work this all the way out.

Of course, we can’t not blame Fox News. A nice takedown of our U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, here:

“Think about it: Omar wears a hijab,” said Pirro in 2019, referring to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?” That remark drew condemnation from her own network.

After Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), for instance, expressed concerns that she might fall victim to a “political” prosecution after participating in a February “Know Your Rights” webinar for immigrants, Pirro attacked. “No, honey,” she said on the March 3 edition of “The Five.” “What it is, is it’s a prosecution based on — I think it’s 8 USC 119 — for obstruction of justice.” On the April 10 edition of “The Five,” she blamed Democrats for “keeping the illegals in the shadows and keeping the illegals illegal.” That was more charitable than the evaluation she articulated just over a week earlier, when she said of Democrats, “It’s a party that’s filled with hate.”

The punchline comes later, but it’s always satisfying to see Janine Winebox cut down to size.

But let’s end on a higher plane. Some of your Fort Wayne people might remember Zach Klein, who first crossed my radar when he won the Sterling Sentinel scholarship offered by my employer. He went to Wake Forest, and we later met up when he determined that he and I were the only two people in Fort Wayne with a blog. He later founded College Humor with his college roommates, sold it and has since gone on to more startups, including the one our own Deborah participated in, something about cabin-building.

Anyway. As I recall, Zach wrote about the subject of this very nice column, or at least the precipitating event, in his scholarship essay. It’s about the night his brother fell head-first out of a pickup that Zach was driving, as well as what came after:

When word got out that Noel was in a coma, our community showed up. There was a chapel in the hospital, and we held vigils for him. Mostly we sat silently with heads bowed, but occasionally someone would offer something up to the room. That’s when I heard the Serenity Prayer for the first time.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

I felt some relief, both an acknowledgment of my guilt and a merciful release from my community for whatever role I played. As a naive teenager who had little experience with the bigger world, it was an extraordinary glimpse into the human experience filled with error and pain, as well as a process—one that we have always needed and will always need—to forgive ourselves.

This prayer was different from the ones I had said over and over before. It was a tool, a reminder to help us frame burdens in a way that makes them easier to bear.

Noel’s brain swelling eventually reduced, and he emerged from his coma. He lived, but his life has never gotten easier. And I never returned to church or prayed again, either—yet I often think about the grace of the Serenity Prayer.

Anyway, I think you’ll like it, religious or not.

Time for me to get a move on.

Yard notes, for you gardeners: Our back yard, having been thoroughly ruined by some previous owner, has been a work in progress since we moved in, and I think we’ve brought it back about as far as we can, short of tearing down and rebuilding the garage where it should be, at the end of the driveway. (The owner moved it 90 degrees to gain a parking pad for their RV, we were told.) Along the way, Alan planted a climbing hydrangea along the back fence, where it dwelt in deep shade. Year after year, it would cover a smallish patch of the fence and do little more. A couple years back, Alan dug it up and replanted it against the side of the house, where it gets afternoon sun.

The motto for climbing hydrangea and other perennials, we’ve learned, is “first it sleeps, then it creeps, then it leaps.” The decade or so against the fence were its sleeping years. The first year on the house, creeping. But I’d say the Era of Leaping has fully arrived:

Not bad, little dude. Still to be revealed: The autumn-blooming clematis Alan put in this year to replace the honeysuckle that threw in the towel over the winter. Stay tuned.

How was everyone’s weekend? Mine? Can’t complain. Did some things, went out to a fancy dinner (32nd anniversary, Barda for you locals), stayed in with burgers the next night. A typical weekend, during which it was clear that Friday’s summery temperatures would give way to far springier ones, and they did. It was the benign touch of the storm system that devastated those to our south, and we’ll see what comes of that. The new FEMA director is being pretty open about the fact he doesn’t have a plan for hurricane season (which starts June 1) or anything else:

He also seemed to express surprise at the vast range of FEMA’s responsibilities, raising concerns among career officials about his ability to run the nation’s disaster-management agency. Richardson, who leads FEMA in an acting capacity, took over the complex agency last week.

“I feel a little bit like Bubba from ‘Forrest Gump,’ ” Richardson said, according to the video. “We’ve got hurricanes, we’ve got fires, we’ve got mudslides, we’ve got flash floods, we’ve got tornadoes, we’ve got droughts, we’ve got heat waves and now we’ve got volcanoes to worry about.”

Buck up, Dave. How hard can it be?

Then we had the Mexican yacht drifting into the Brooklyn Bridge. A car bomb at a fertility clinic. (He was opposed to “bringing people into the world against their will,” allegedly.) So many strange things happening, and it all feels very September 10, 2001 in the U.S. these days. Maybe it’s me. Happy week ahead, and the start of summer.

I was doing a practice lesson as part of this WSI class I don’t want to take but that’s a long story. The task was to teach the three kicks for treading water, and as I and my faux-students treaded away, I started telling a story that was so buried in my memory I don’t think I’d thought of it more than once since it happened. But unbidden, it surfaced and demanded to be told:

A bunch of us were at my friends’ cottage in the Upper Peninsula, and we were behaving like typical teenagers, which is to say, like idiots. We’d taken their boat out into the “big lake,” i.e., far from the channels of the Les Cheneaux Islands, well into Lake Huron, where the rollers are. We were doing something they called submarining, i.e. putting a bunch of people on the bow and gradually increasing the speed until the bow started going down, sending up an amusing spray and…I’m not sure how it was supposed to end, because we hit one of those rollers funny and a guy on the bow slipped off into the water.

This is northern Lake Huron, and as I recall it was June, late in the day, almost twilight. Lake Huron never really gets warm, and in June it is still quite cold. The kid was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and probably shoes of some sort. Did I mention we were all drinking? We were all drinking.

The guys who were leading this excursion, to their everlasting credit, did exactly what you should do in that situation. Neil immediately fixed on the guy in the water, pointing to his position. Paul scrambled for the swim ladder in the storage space. And Mark, at the wheel, put us in an immediate turn and roared back to the guy, expertly steering close without running him over, then decelerating, and we floated right up to him. Swim ladder was hooked on the side, and many arms reached down to help him climb back into the boat.

His first words, through his chattering teeth: “I’m sorry I dropped the schnapps.” Ha ha! Such a card! We’re having an adventure! We bundled him in what blankets were aboard, put him in the warmest spot (directly behind the front bench) and headed for home.

“And now we’ve been treading for about as long as that guy had to tread, in all his clothes, in very cold water,” I told my faux-students. “And that is why learning to tread water can save your life.” And honestly, it wasn’t until Wednesday evening, 50 years after the fact, that I realized how close we’d come to a fatal drowning incident, i.e., extremely. He could have easily gone straight to the bottom. I think your memory keeps that stuff buried for a good reason.

The three kicks for treading are scissors, breaststroke and rotary, i.e. eggbeater. Rotary is best. Also: Don’t do stupid boat tricks ever, but especially not there, especially not when the sun is going down. On the other hand, that kind of stupid fucking-around in boats often produces people who know how to drive boats. (Neil, Mark and Paul had done their share of stupid boat tricks before this.) My riding instructor grew up playing a game she and her siblings called Knock ‘Em Off, in which one person climbed on their horse, bareback and with no bridle, and the others tried to do anything short of touching the horse to get the mounted one to fall off. Flap a shirt in its face, run around yelling and waving arms, whatever. And that’s how my teacher learned to stick tight as a tick when a horse was misbehaving. I’m not sure that these stories have a point, but if they do, it’s that if you behave like this, don’t tell your mother.

You guys were discussing this piece in the comments, but if you don’t read the comments, Monica Hesse wrote an excellent column about the Diddy/Sean Combs trial, and here’s a gift link to read it.

Before I leave, three photos of our back yard.

March 26:

April 18:

This morning:

Happy weekend, all. Enjoy spring.

Like Alex, I need a new coping strategy for dealing with the news. I’m glad the weather has finally turned, because I need the next few months for a hard reset. More music, fewer headlines, maybe some time limiters for social media, with allowances for the work I need to do. At the same time, I freely admit to getting real pleasure from sneering at Secretary Croaky and the rest of the crew of idiots, but mostly as a way to mask my very real suspicion that all of us aren’t actually standing at a crossroads, but well beyond it, looking at a diminished America where an idiot buffoon like Donald Trump can become its leader. And all that lies ahead is more diminishment.

That’s not healthy. But it is reality.

Lately I’ve been allowing myself five minutes of our local talk station on my way to work at the pool, at an hour that coincides with Mitch Albom’s show. Yes, yes, still picking that scab, but it has shed some light on why his columns are so lame: He long ago ceased to be a newspaper guy and is now fully a talk-radio guy, where every extended bit of chitchat sounds like the worst elevator exchange you ever endured. The other day he and his sidekicks were talking about a matter of some local interest, the lawsuit filed by four former housekeepers for Smokey Robinson, alleging he was sexually abusive to all of them. What a terrible thing, the men agreed, that these women, who never called the police, could gang up on an 85-year-old music icon and ruin what should be the happy, last years of his life. Terrible, terrible. Why did they keep working for him, if he was so awful. Of course we can’t know the truth, no one does, but it’s a shame, just a shame. The man is 85 and has brought so much pleasure to so many. What a shame.

Here we have a talk-radio discussion in its purest form: Cliché, truism, assumption, stupidity, lack of curiosity, etc. And this is, increasingly, the way most public discourse is, and I need to step back. It’s like feeding at a trough of stale potato chips.

Things to consider: What will I write about here? What will we complain about here? Topics for further discussion.

So. What is today’s outrage? The Omaha mayor’s race was interesting, no? A moderate-ish Republican going for her fourth term in a bloody-red state loses…why?

As she campaigned for a fourth term, Ms. Stothert, who is the first woman to lead Omaha, emphasized her record on development and public safety. But she also waded into cultural issues by trying to make bathroom use and sports participation by transgender people a campaign issue. Mr. Ewing’s campaign has told local reporters that Ms. Stothert made baseless claims about his stance on transgender issues.

Ms. Stothert has told local reporters that she voted for Mr. Trump, though she has sometimes tried to distance herself from the president.

:::strokes chin::: Interesting.

Now let’s wait for the Democrats to fuck this up.

OK, I have work to do. Happy Wednesday.

Today I came downstairs dressed for my Mothers Day brunch date with Kate, and told Alan it was such a thrill to go someplace where I wasn’t wearing workout clothes or a swimsuit. I had on the excellent red lipstick she gave me for Christmas, a black jumpsuit and full eye makeup. Such a crazy getup in this dressed-down world.

It was an excellent brunch — mushroom flatbread for me, fish and chips for her — and a spicy margarita. And it would have been perfect, but just before I left, I learned that the motherfucking president of this stupid fucking country plans to accept the gift of a Qatari 747, and has greased the skids with his stupid motherfucking toadies who have all signed off on it, and I’m sorry, but it pissed me off. Excuse my language.

I will say it now: I cannot wait for this asshole to die. His casket will float to the surface of whatever golf course his wife decides to bury him in, the ground will be so soaked with urine. And then we can drag it into the street to be set on fire before shooting what’s left of him into deepest space with a warning note in all the languages of the world and some digital space language we can invent, that whoever finds it should do the same, and then whatever asteroid it lands on should be targeted by a nuke and blasted into so many shards that not one shred of his DNA should remain.

Not that I am terribly angry. If I were, I’d suggest we do the same to his entire issue, including FSWOUS, Melania.

How in the world is this OK. HOW? The limits on presidential gifts aren’t that high. I know others have ignored them in the past — Ronald Reagan alone collected enough expensive horses to hold his own rodeo — but they never belonged to him, and when he died, the survivors went to retirement arrangements, as far as I can tell. But even a blooded horse is not a half-billion-dollar jet, no doubt equipped with state-of-the-art listening devices, all for a man who’s spent the last week gibbering nonsense about dolls and pencils as he gilds the White House like a fucking casino and you can tell I’m upset because I’m writing run-on sentences.

Grr.

How about some pretty-pretty pictures. I almost did a Saturday Morning Market, but I was too busy juggling eggs and bedding plants.

Now get to work, plants. It’s almost mojito season, and I’m looking forward to some shishito peppers on the grill:

Have a good week. Don’t fly in or out of Newark, or maybe anywhere, huh?

Some years ago, I was kicked out of a local moms group on Facebook. It was at the very height of Facebook popularity among normies, and all sorts of drama was kicking off there. There was the woman whose marriage fell apart over the course of a morning after she sent up the alarm that her husband was missing, then revised it an hour later: No, he had apparently spent the night with a stripper, everybody stand down. That was a good one. My banishment doesn’t even compare, but it went like this:

The school district announced it would provide free FluMist flu vaccines for any child whose parents wanted it. Permission slips, etc., nothing out of the ordinary, but it set off a huge outcry on this particular mom group, who all seemed to post in all caps about VIRUS SHEDDING and BIG PHARMA PROFITEERING and WHY WEREN’T WE NOTIFIED and ISN’T THIS A VIOLATION OF MEDICAL ETHICS, and THESE COMPANIES WILL STOP AT NOTHING, etc. At the height of this back-and-forth a new voice parachuted in, a woman who said she had honey for sale from her own bees, and that this honey had “anti-viral and anti-fungal properties,” and that it could be a natural, organic, healthy way to protect your child from influenza. The clamor immediately shifted from BIG PHARMA to OMG DO YOU DELIVER and various forms of SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.

And then along came me, who wondered why it was evil for a pharmaceutical company to offer a vaccine, but OK for this lady to sell her honey. Well. The honey lady complained to the admins, and I was bounced from not only this group, but another that the same admin ran.

“And that,” my friend Dustin said at the time, “is when you got your teardrop tattoo, right?” Ha ha ha.

I could not have known at the time, in the innocent era of the Obama administration, that these women were proto MAHA moms. The anti-vax movement was making itself known, but they didn’t have a spokesman other than Jenny McCarthy and some Hollywood twits, certainly not an actual Kennedy. And that Kennedy, HHS Secretary Croaky, made all their dreams come true this week when he nominated Casey Means as the U.S. Surgeon General. Means is being identified as a doctor, and she did graduate from med school (Stanford! Impressive!) but never finished her residency, which my doctor friend tells me makes her not-quite-a-doctor. His text:

You don’t become a physician in medical school. Med school is a hazing ritual that earns you the right to become a physician over the ensuing years of residency (+ fellowship, etc.) if you survive.

Whatever. Apparently Means became disenchanted with otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat, for you people who don’t speak Medical) and dove headfirst into so-called functional medicine, which many consider pseudoscientific, and I know you will be astonished to learn that she is very suspicious of these “vaccines,” and is cut from the same cloth as Croaky, i.e. it’s the pollution and the seed oils and blah blah blah. And now she’s on deck to become the nation’s top doctor. Wikipedia:

(Means’) book’s central claim is that a single mechanism which the authors call “Bad Energy”, which they describe as a uniquely common form of mitochondrial dysfunction caused by improper lifestyles (contrasted with scientifically-established, genetics-based mitochondrial diseases), which causes disorders as diverse depression, anxiety, acne, infertility, insomnia, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, as well as “most other conditions”, because “it can show up in different cell types” and thus causes different symptoms.

As I believe we’ve discussed here about a million times, I have no problem with eating better, and I believe a healthy diet will improve one’s own health, but I don’t recall this being kept secret by the AMA. In fact, I think they’re the ones who are always handing us a copy of this or that diet on our way out of the exam room. And those of us who remember the Obama years also remember the conservative response when Michelle Obama dared to suggest school lunches could be healthier, and that exercise was a good thing.

(Cul-de-sac: A friend sent me a years-old story about a school lunch staple of our youth — Johnny Marzetti. This story goes into the rise and fall of Johnny Marzetti, best described as sort of a baked ziti, but more downmarket. Apparently it has nearly disappeared from school cafeterias, driven out in part by the nutritional reforms pushed by Mrs. Obama. I had NO idea.)

Conservatives bitched up a storm over those reforms, and now they’ll be obligated to support a quack who believes Bad Energy is what causes illness. Tell that to the sick folks in Kentucky and West Virginia, you cowards. Offer them a jar of honey instead. It’s delicious on toast.

Best social-media joke I heard this week: I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the orcas now have two F-18 Hornets.

The weekend awaits, doesn’t it? Think I’ll clean three bathrooms and go for a bike ride. You do what you like.

One thing you get from a pain-in-the-ass head cold is a good excuse to skip early-morning workouts. I laid in bed this morning, scanning the news and listening to the foghorns on the far-away lake; apparently some warm air is in our forecast, and it was already making things murky on the water. Then I picked up my iPad and learned Kari Lake, the new head of Voice of America, has found a “content provider” to fill the VOA airwaves now that she’s fired the whole staff.

One America News. It is to weep.

I’m old enough to remember when Radio Free Europe was something a different America was so proud of it created ads to tell other Americans about. Like this one. I found it while searching for a similar one I remember: A peasant family in a gray hovel, babushkas on the women, everyone huddled around the probably-forbidden radio, one ear cocked to its speaker and the other listening for storm troopers outside, as the voice on it speaks in a foreign language, and then: “ze Drifters…on Broadvay.” The music from the tinny speaker washes over the faces, and you’re there with them, imagining these beaten-down people hearing this song about faraway America, not understanding it, but somehow understanding anyway. It was…stirring, in the best way.

Now, they’ll get Matt Gaetz and Chanel Rion. Man, this country. Such a steep slide.

What else is going on? The conclave! :::makes cheering-crowd sounds::: Perhaps you’ve heard about Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, one of the conclave. His name alone has made him a great favorite in St. Peter’s Square, at least among the Americans, who find it amusing. What I don’t find amusing? This:

Jerusalem CNN — Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, cuts an unmistakable figure in the dark corridors of the ancient, stone patriarchate in this troubled corner of the world. He moves quickly, in long, deliberate strides, the seams of his black cassock billowing like a swimmer’s stroke ahead of his arrival.

Block that metaphor! Sounds like someone at CNN recently attended a How to Write Good seminar, and took the wrong lesson home.

OK, my biggest deadline of the last couple weeks is behind me, but more remain, so I gotta skedaddle. Happy hump day, all.