Last night I was all set to write something, but had what was, for me, a highly unusual set of physical symptoms, which boiled down to: Tummyache.

I never get nauseous. I never get heartburn. I wish, just once, I could have a “nervous stomach,” just to see if I could lose a few pounds. So I made dinner, served and ate it and went upstairs to read and avoid the presidential address. Alan watched it downstairs, at a volume high enough to only get a sense of it. I couldn’t hear the words, but that distinctive cadence, Trump-at-a-Teleprompter, was unmistakable: Blah-de-blah. De-blah. Blah-de-blah-de-blah. I could see him swinging between the three prompter screens like I was there. Sighed. Checked Twitter. Sighed a lot more.

You guys can talk about it today. I just heard a podcast on my way in (NYT’s “The Daily,” a good way to start your day), and need to allow my blood pressure to drop a little.

So just a few links, some of which were posted yesterday in comments.

Charles Pierce on why he doesn’t feel sorry for regretful Trump voters:

Holy mother of god, I’m tired of reading quotes from people who live in places where the local economy went to hell or Mexico in 1979, and who have spent the intervening years swallowing whatever Jesus Juice was offered up by theocratic bunco artists of the Christocentric Right, and gulping down great flagons of barely disguised hatemongering against the targets of the day, all the while voting against their own best interests, now claiming that empowering Donald Trump as the man who will “shake things up” on their behalf was the only choice they had left. You had plenty of choices left.

In Kansas, you could have declined to re-elect Sam Brownback, who’d already turned your state into a dismal Randian basket case. In Wisconsin, you had three chances to turn out Scott Walker, and several chances to get the state legislature out of his clammy hands. And, now that the teeth of this new administration are becoming plain to see, it’s a good time to remind all of you that you didn’t have to hand the entire federal government over to Republican vandalism, and the presidency over to an abject loon on whom Russia may well hold the paper.

Some hate criminals go to prison for lengthy stretches, after terrorizing a child’s birthday party. And cry like little bitches all the way there. A deeply satisfying read.

How Medicaid block grants will screw over rural America. See Pierce, above.

Finally, a beautifully told story of Tiger Woods, still a young man but old in athlete years, childlike in many ways, and deeply sad. But lots of new stuff here, too — did you know he at one time thought he could become a Navy SEAL? Like, recently?

Lots to read there. I need to do my day job. Enjoy.

So what would you have done if you were in their shoes? If you were Warren Beatty, looking into that envelope, knowing it was the wrong one? If you were the stagehand in the wings, suddenly realizing he was holding the wrong envelope?

Of course we all want to think we’d be heroes, that (if we were Beatty) we’d have looked into the wings, waved the envelope in some way that indicated someone needed to double check, then vamped for time with a few jokes. If we were the stagehand, we’d have bolted onstage for a moment of Oscar glory, waving the senior-citizen Bonnie and Clyde off like a plane about to land in a minefield.

But that didn’t happen. Sometimes actors who are brilliant at delivering lines are terrible at improv, and just default to the default: Read what’s on the card. Stagehands are trained to stay out of sight, and anyway, maybe s/he didn’t have the correct card. What then? “Something’s wrong, but we’re not sure what!” just wouldn’t have worked under the circumstances.

And so we at least got a memorable moment to talk about Monday. I actually read a few takes about the “injustice” done to the film made by black folks, which put me in mind of a bride who has a truly memorable mishap at her wedding, the kind that will make people talk about it for years afterward, and can only feel sorry that her special day wasn’t perfect. Right now, people are going to remember how “Moonlight” won a lot longer than they’ll remember “Moonlight.” Which isn’t exactly immortality, but it’s the next best thing.

Anyway, two people had one job, and screwed it up. (Not Beatty and Dunaway.)

So, a little bloggage:

Who knew? Really, who knew health care was so complicated?

Seriously, WHO KNEW?

Answer: Everybody.

Man, for the shortest month, February is sure taking its sweet time clearing out, isn’t it? I started Friday with good intentions to see at least one movie in a theater, do some food prep for the week ahead, the whole nine. Ended up watching the Sunday HBO lineup, which dropped early because of the Oscar conflict, and wishing I was anywhere but here, where the temperatures dropped, the wind picked up, and life became generally sorta gray and boring.

Made significant progress on “The Underground Railroad,” though. Which I am loving. “Lincoln in the Bardo” is next. “I Am Not Your Negro” and/or “Get Out” will have to wait for next weekend. When it’s cold and the wind is howling, it’s more of an otter eating lettuce sort of Saturday night.

Also, “Piper,” which you should watch, because not only is this short film too stinkin’ cute for words, it is kind of a documentary of me learning to surf.

Whatever happened to going out during the week? We used to do that, back when we both were reliably off work by 5 p.m., which simply doesn’t happen anymore. Plus: February. Chill winds. Et to the cetera.

Just one word before we get to the bloggage, after watching the third episode in the final season of “Girls,” I’m crossing my heart and making a promise that I will pay attention to Lena Dunham throughout her just-getting-started career, and you probably should, too. I thought “American Bitch,” the so-called “bottle episode” airing this week, was a real piece of work, smart and nuanced and funny and not-funny, and sort of amazing coming from the pen of a writer as young as Dunham.

Like lots of people, I have found Dunham hard to take at times, but the more I see of her acting but mostly her writing, the more impressed I am. “American Bitch” is about the gray areas where power imbalance, gender, age and consent all meet, a place lots of women have found themselves, both today and when we were all young. It’s not an easy topic to tackle in 30 minutes, but she managed it, with a great deal of help from Matthew Rhys as the famous dick novelist whose behavior is at issue.

We spend a lot of time here feeling sorry for ourselves because great old artists and entertainers are dying. I think the best cure for that is to find some young ones worth watching. Dunham is.

Plus, she drives conservatives insane, because she’s something of an exhibitionist with her nude body, which is pudgy and has cellulite and is generally the sort they think ought to never be seen unclothed. Fuck those guys, I say.

So. Bloggage? I guess there’s some: Thanks to Sherri for finding this piece on the “brilliant jerk,” a well-known type, especially in Silicon Valley:

This term, “the brilliant jerk,” has been around for a while in corporate lingo. I remember first reading about in a New York Times blog post (R.I.P. blogs) in 2012. (PLEASE DON’T ACTUALLY ME ABOUT REED HASTINGS, YOU JERKOFF, HE’S TWO GRAFS DOWN.) I guess there was a series about Being The Boss and the URL was boss.blogs.nytimes.com 🙁 What a world! Anyway it was a sort of advicey column about what to do about that one archetype, the Brilliant Jerk, in your workplace. It was fun to read when it came out because everyone got to speculate about who their brilliant jerk was.

But everyone already knows who the brilliant jerk at their workplace is because it’s the raging asshole!! It’s not hard to tell. And yet somehow as long as we’ve had a word for it, and probably even longer, we’ve wrung our hands over whether or not to cope with this fucktard over here because—wait for it—HE’S BRILLIANT!

Another Jewish-cemetery incident, this one in Philadelphia. The official word of 2017 is “emboldened.” Repeat after me.

My favorite Twitter chuckle of the weekend:

Donald Trump in 4 tweets 🔢 pic.twitter.com/LN6zbCljhr

— Danny (@recordsANDradio) February 25, 2017

And on to Monday. But first, some chicken.

Remember “10,” the charming romantic comedy from 1979 that made a zillion dollars, inspired way too many white girls to try cornrows and introduced the world to both Ravel’s “Bolero” and Bo Derek? Seriously, that’s her opening credit: “Introducing Bo Derek.” You don’t see that so often these days.

I just turned it on, to see if it holds up. I remember seeing it more than once in the theater, and loving it irrationally, although I never tried cornrows.

It opens with Dudley Moore being led into a dark house, which turns out to be a surprise birthday party for him. After the gaiety and the cake, he’s enjoying a quiet moment with his girlfriend (Julie Andrews) by the fire. He laments his advancing age, and the birthday party, which only reminds him he’s old, old, old.

He’s 42. Julie, we learn a beat later, is 38.

Suddenly, my perspective is radically shifted. I was 21 for most of 1979. Forty-two must have seemed ancient.

Don’t think I’ll watch it all the way through. As I certainly know by now, life is short, and I have books to read.

Oh, here’s a singing scene, with Julia. God, what a voice. And face. A true gamine, clear until…38. Just realized, when she made this movie, she was 44. I wasn’t really buying her as 38, but not because of her looks. She’s one of those women from an earlier generation who simply seemed more mature.

Speaking of more modern entertainments, pro tip: If you’re a podcast fan, go find “Missing Richard Simmons” and subscribe, pronto. It’s based on the mystery of where Simmons has been for the last three years; early in 2014, Simmons essentially “ghosted the world,” i.e. went into his house and hasn’t come out. All of which would be one thing, but Simmons had many close friends and associates, and none of them know where he is, either. Please don’t Google; I did this morning and suspect I know what happened, but I’m still listening, because it’s very well-done, not too long and, as you might expect, about a lot more than just Richard Simmons.

Sherri posted this in comments yesterday, but I don’t want anyone to miss it — it’s very good. Laurie Penny’s account of traveling on the Milo bus, and what she saw there.

Otherwise, this is a midweek slump, and anyway — I’m older than 42.

I mentioned, in what I hope was a certain woe-is-me tone yesterday, how I overcooked my New York strip night before last. It was still very good, because I did what I do from time to time and splurged on the really good USDA Prime that my meat market has on offer, most weeks. They display the Choice and Prime steaks right next to each other, and the difference is apparent to all but the fat-phobic yoga moms in their XS Lululemons — notable marbling in the Prime, little in the Choice. The flareups that overdid the steak would have reduced the Choice to leather.

The Choice steaks were $14.99 a pound, the Prime $19.99. Alan and I split one, for the standard deck-of-cards-size serving. I don’t feel guilty, because eating is something you have to do at least twice a day, and beef is something I might eat twice a week, so no biggie.

Sometimes I wish I’d gone into food journalism. Although by now I’d probably be a vegetarian. Feedlots are not nice places.

Can you see how hard I am trying not to talk about current events? I have to go back to reading novels instead of Twitter. “The Underground Railroad” is on the coffee table, “Lincoln in the Bardo” is on its way via Amazon (thanks, users of the Kickback Lounge!). I have to take more breaks from this insanity. Think about steak and cooking and the prose of George Sauders.

But we have to get to it sometime. I guess the story of the day is Milo. You only need to read two pieces, Roy’s —

Milo tried to do that with his pedo-tapes (in “a note for idiots” — ha, that Milo!) — but found that he was suddenly no longer the Right’s sassy gay friend. Not because he had sex with children himself — there’s no evidence he did; interestingly, it seems he was the one exploited as a child — but because, from the conservatives’ perspective, he did something worse: He embarrassed them. It was fine when he was whooping up those wanton cruelties and bigotries a normal American can get away with. But pedophilia is a Hard Limit, at least socially.

Conservatives could have done a love-the-sinner, hate-the-sin thing, but that would have required charity, and bitter experience has taught us all that in America this is not a Christian precept. They could have said that though Yiannopoulos had put himself beyond the pale, his principles were still sound, and they could put aside his failings the way intellectuals put aside the anti-Semitism of Mencken or the racism of Larkin, and cleave instead to his aesthetic legacy; but when his book deal and CPAC spot evaporated, it became obvious that there was nothing like a principle or an aesthetic legacy at all left to defend — just a savage clown show that no one wanted to see anymore. (Even Soave is edging away from him. Did I say “even”? Ha, I meant “of course.”)

…and this one, from Slate:

You can thank Steve Bannon, now a central figure in Donald Trump’s administration, for making the clownish hustler Milo Yiannopoulos a star. As the editor of Breitbart, Bannon recruited Yiannopoulos to the site, where he published columns like “No, J.C. Penney, Fat People Should Absolutely Hate Themselves” and “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.” If Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person, Yiannopoulos is a Trump voter’s fantasy of a decadent gay sophisticate. His shtick is to wrap various shades of reaction – anti-feminism, racism, anti-Semitism, hatred of Muslims – in camp, to sell bigotry as cheeky provocation. He and co-author Allum Bokhari put it this way, in a Breitbart ode to the alt-right: “Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish ‘Shlomo Shekelburg’ to ‘Remove Kebab,’ an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide.”

Yiannopoulos uses his gayness to grant absolution to his mostly straight right-wing audiences, telling them that by reveling in prejudice they are bravely flouting taboos. During the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, an at event billed as an America First Unity Rally, Yiannopoulos told a crowd full of bikers and Alex Jones acolytes: “I might be a dick-sucking faggot, but I fucking hate the left…the left in this country is a cancer that you need to eradicate.” As a gay man, he added, he aims to be “transgressive, to be naughty, to be mischievous. And today in America that means being right-wing.”

And that’s about all the Milo I can handle at the moment. Time to start “The Underground Railroad.” Good Wednesday, all.

I was scanning the stories from the past weekend about the president’s inability to spend a single weekend in Washington recently. Has anyone noticed his tweets about Mar-a-Lago? He started calling it the “Winter White House,” now it’s the “Southern White House.” It’s an arriviste’s idea of a Real Klassy Klub, but never mind that.

Of course, the president already has a perfectly fine weekend getaway at Camp David. Has he even been there yet? Sure, the weather isn’t what it is in Florida at this time of year, but there’s plenty of things to do, lots of places to put guests – it’s really ideal.

Ah, but then, it’s not …Mar-a-Lago, is it?

Mr. Trump appears to enjoy presenting the spectacle of his presidency to those at his privately held club, where members pay $200,000 to join.

So. President’s Day. Just yet another of those days when you realize that for the rest of our history, the composite photo of our presidents will contain a photo of 45. Also, there’s a certain exhaustion spoken of here:

(Russian dissident and journalist Masha) Gessen’s family immigrated to the United States when she was a teenager, and she later returned to Russia but then moved back to America three years ago to escape mounting anti-gay persecution by Vladimir Putin’s government. “In the last three years, since I got to this country, I realized what a mental price I had paid for living in a state of siege and a state of battle for a decade and a half,” she told me. At times, she said, being part of the righteous opposition was exhilarating, “but it’s intellectually deadening. When you are fighting, you stop learning. You stop reading theory. You stop reading about things that aren’t part of the immediate fight.”

The country will never be the same, will it? But I guess it’s never the same. Day by day, it’s not the same.

Although this is some scary shit.

And wonderful things are happening all over, really:

President Trump’s embrace of discredited theories linking vaccines to autism has energized the anti-vaccine movement. Once fringe, the movement is becoming more popular, raising doubts about basic childhood health care among politically and geographically diverse groups.

Public health experts warn that this growing movement is threatening one of the most successful medical innovations of modern times. Globally, vaccines prevent the deaths of about 2.5 million children every year, but deadly diseases such as measles and whooping cough still circulate in populations where enough people are unvaccinated.

It wasn’t a terrible day, really. Work at home, lunch out, steak for dinner. It was overdone by a too many flareups, but not tragically so. And Wendy got a piece of steak fat that fell on the floor. Everyone went home happy.

Considering that it was Presidents Day and all. Happy Tuesday, all. The week is underway.

OK, I think normalcy is returning. Still weak and dizzy from time to time, but I’m chalking that up to Girl Scout cookies.

I’m speaking, of course, of normalcy only in my own body. Outside, abnormalcy — I just invented that word, pay me the royalty — continues to reign. Do we even need to go over the events of the weekend? In the year since we dumped cable, I’ve missed it only a couple times, and this weekend wasn’t one of them – you get on Twitter, and you can experience pretty much any big national event in more or less real time. And truth be told, I have better things to do on a Saturday evening than watch the president start his 2020 campaign three years early, because he’s so insecure he needs to. So some guy came onstage to say he prays to a cardboard Trump cutout every night? Am I getting that right? If so: Wonderful. In the interest of looking on the bright side, let me just say that if we all survive this era, several things will not, one of them being the lectures we can depend on from our religious friends. They no longer have any moral high ground; in fact, they now occupy the religious low ground, if they’re OK with a guy actually praying to a cardboard idol.

Actual quote from a Freep story today about a far-right Catholic group in Detroit: “The personal proclivities, the personal sins or life of a particular leader is a separate discussion from how that man’s view of the world might influence his policies. And if that policy is favorable to the church, well then, very good.”

Like I said, that’ll be outta here soon enough.

How was everyone’s weekend? We had spectacular, early-May temperatures, and everyone was out riding bikes, running, what-have-you. I stayed indoors and mostly cleaned, experiencing the glory in short bits. There will be more beautiful days. But the house was ready for a hazmat team, and I now feel better in my dust-free home than I would if I’d run around all weekend. And the forecast says the week ahead won’t be terrible at all.

Oh, bloggage? OK, here’s a really stupid NYT piece about how liberals are “helping” Trump:

Mrs. O’Connell feels hopeless. She has deleted all her news feeds on Facebook and she tries to watch less TV. But politics keeps seeping in.

“I love Meryl Streep, but you know, she robbed me of that wonderful feeling when I go to the movies to be entertained,” she said. “I told my husband, I said, ‘Ed, we have to be a little more flexible, or we’re going to run out of movies!’ ”

Mrs. O’Connell, who claims to be a Democrat but voted for Trump, now finds Democrats “scarier than Islamic terrorists,” to which I’d say: Congratulations, Mrs. O’Connell, you’re actually a Republican now. Enjoy!

If you want a brighter view, try Neil Steinberg’s Saturday piece. Of the Mrs. O’Connells of the world:

They were tired of the old ways, the business-as-usual politics. It wasn’t that they didn’t have a valid complaint, they did. It’s just that their solution will make the problem, make all of our problems, so much worse. America is like a man who burns his house down to get rid of the mice. Like a person who has a genuine ailment—say cancer—and then hires a shaman to spray fragrant oils on the soles of his feet. You’re sorry they’re sick. You understand the fear in that. But they’re embracing a quack and don’t know it. I’d add “yet,” but that would be wistful. If we know one thing about error is that it tends to compound. The majority of people would much rather dwell in wrongness than admit being mistaken.

Finally: Borden! RIP, Junie Morrison. Damn. The world is a little less funky today.

Well, I think there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Woke up feeling much improved, enough so that I made my Bed of Suffering, i.e., the guest room/office, emptied the wastebasket full of sodden tissue and might even go for a walk later.

I got out to meet a new colleague last night. That helped, although it was touch and go just getting vertical yesterday.

That said, here’s a new thread for comments on…everything, I guess. One little head cold, and I feel like I’m already miles behind. Kind of like Congress.

Carry on.

Remember that cold I thought I had vanquished? Yeah, turns out that was an alternate-facts deal. Woke up Monday with a head full of snot and the usual miseries. Nothing all that bad, but enough I was happy to work from home yesterday. And today.

I threw a bunch of links into an empty post yesterday, so let’s get to them, as the rest of my update would consist only of “used enough tissue to reverse-engineer a tree” and “discovered why you shouldn’t take Sudafed at bedtime.”

The Washington Post does a travel piece on the ol’ hometown:

I have a terrible confession: I never saw Ohio’s capitol. A weekend in Columbus and not even a glimpse of the rotunda. But I have a very good excuse. I was lost in a 32-room bookstore. Well, that’s not entirely true. I was also preoccupied with selecting a writing utensil from a lifestyle store founded by a guy with a beard and an office-supply obsession. And drinking hand-poured coffee from a cafe named after a Belle and Sebastian song. And sizing up turquoise bulldog bookends from a shop in an emerging neighborhood. And watching a diner stuff a skyscraper-tall burger into his mouth. And drinking more coffee, this time made of Fair Trade-certified beans from Guatemala. And I’m not even a coffee person; I drink tea, except when I am in Columbus.

That doesn’t exactly make it sound like Paris, but it’s fair. The thing about Columbus, the thing that never bugged me until I left, is its utter lack of natural features. Its two rivers are muddy brown trenches, there are few if any hills, no lakes to speak of (besides Buckeye, which is manmade and so shallow that if your boat breaks down in the middle you can push it home, like in “The African Queen”). So I guess it’s all about that burger, then, described and pictured later in the piece — “two 12-ounce burger patties — among other delights,” which appear to include both bacon and ham. As Jim Harrison once said, only in the Midwest is overeating seen as something heroic.

We read a lot about Betsy DeVos and school choice recently, but here is how it’s lived out in Detroit, where charter schools open and close like doors in a French farce. Parents whose children are in failing schools slated for possible closure are sent helpful letters detailing which districts will let the kids transfer in – some of them an hour’s drive away. Market efficiency!

This story has already been partially overtaken by events with the firing of Michael Flynn, but I’m posting this passage about Reince Priebus because it may be one case where an exclamation point is actually called for in a new story:

Trump has already consulted friends about his next chief of staff. I’m told that to avoid admitting error, Trump plans a smooth transition from Priebus, perhaps by making him a Cabinet secretary!

#thebestpeople

Nothing this administration does should surprise me anymore, but this at least made me chuckle, coming as it did on the heels of the giant typo in the official inauguration poster.

I’ve got a few more, but I think I’ll save them for tomorrow, just in case I feel even worse then. Enjoy Tuesday.

I woke up one day last weekend with the beginnings of a cold sore, and the whole week felt like a struggle – slow in the pool, messing up appointment times because I didn’t read the email closely enough, that sort of thing. No disaster, just the sort of thing that happens when your immune system appears to be working overtime to hold something at bay. I thought it had finally arrived on Friday, and spent half of Saturday lolling in bed, but here it is Sunday, and I’m sorta feeling myself again.

The cold sore has left the building, too.

What goes on in our bodies during weeks like these? What does “feeling run-down” really mean, at the cellular level? It is to puzzle.

So that’s why no update on Friday, sorry. Just wasn’t feeling it, or anything like it.

One of the things I saw while I was being lazy Saturday was this remarkable clip from CNN, in which a local GOP county official tries to revive the death-panels thing, and the crowd lights him up like a Christmas tree. It almost felt like 2009 again when the WashPost looked into his social-media accounts and found the stuff we’ve been seeing from these folks for years. But this time, it feels like an antique. That crowd just wasn’t having it.

Not that we should count them out entirely, of course. But just today I read a column in the local paper about how mean “the left” is being to Ivanka Trump, whom they should be supporting, because she’s such an ally, you know. There was some random bloviage about liberal attacks, etc.:

Boycotts are the favorite weapon of the resistance movement. Anyone who suggests affinity for Donald Trump or cooperates with his administration or fails to speak out against him on command (see Tom Brady) faces being ostracized or having their livelihoods threatened and their names smeared.

The left’s demand for conformity in loathing Trump is creating a blacklist to rival that of Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Which I found amusing, as I had just read this piece, about what happens with the Breitbart constituency identifies you as an enemy:

New America, the think tank where I am a fellow, got a similar influx of nasty calls and messages. “You’re a fucking cunt! Piece of shit whore!” read a typical missive.

I’ve spent time on Ivanka Trump’s website, and see a “line” of basic sheath dresses, sweater dresses and other ho-hum designs. I’m no fashion plate myself, and in fact I generally appreciate a decent sheath dress, but I can find the same thing on 6pm.com and other discount sites for about a third the price. Be advised.

A bit more bloggage:

Dr. Mona, as one hero of the Flint water crisis is known around here, points to her own status as a first-generation Iraqi immigrant to ask the obvious question about the travel and immigration ban. I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but around here it’s almost impossible to get through a hospital visit without being seen by a doctor of Middle Eastern lineage. I hate to think what we’d do without them, particularly in non-garden spot cities like Flint.

Everybody’s talking about “Saturday Night Live” again, and posting the best bits on social media afterward. You can have the Sean Spicer cold open and the People’s Court satire from this week, but I’m going for Kate McKinnon as Alex Forrest/Kellyanne Conway in this genius piece.

We went to a party Saturday night, a fundraiser, and I bought some tickets for the raffle. And whaddaya know, I won a weekend at a lodge in northern Michigan. I’m taking it as evidence my luck has changed. Onward to Monday.