An old colleague had a story about a topic we’ve discussed here a time or two, i.e., the decline of local journalism:

CHEBOYGAN — They painted over the Cheboygan Daily Tribune sign last week, the letters loaded into the back of a pickup truck and the dark blue bricks disappearing under a coat of fuchsia. Inside the old Main Street building, where once reporters pecked away on stories about the city council, there’s now a shop selling medieval goods and swords.

…The local newspaper still exists online and residents can grab a thin printed copy at Family Fare Supermarket, but the stories within it often aren’t focused on Cheboygan.

The Daily Tribune employs one sports reporter, but no local news reporters to report on happenings in this Lake Huron community, 15 miles southeast of Mackinaw City, leaving residents to scour Facebook and a weekly shopper publication for information on elections and tax increases.

This is happening…everywhere, but especially in smaller cities and towns. Last week we talked about a would-be mass shooter in Fort Wayne, stopped only by his own incompetence, covered as little more than a routine police story. The great piece about the con artist from a local high school? Nothing. The mayor died a few weeks ago (covered), but the caucus to replace him? Not well covered. And so on, and not to single out Fort Wayne media. This is happening everywhere.

The result? Well, get this, a poll published in The Detroit News on the eve of the Mackinac Policy Conference, where Detroit’s big shots get together, drink and claim to be thisclose to reaching consensus on how the drive the state forward:

A new survey of Michigan voters suggests their trust is declining in the institution of democracy, the value of a college education and the stability of the economy, even among those who say they’re personally doing better than before the COVID pandemic.

The poll also asked about whether the use of force, threats or violence is justified under any circumstances in a democracy, and 35% of poll respondents said they believe it is.

Separately, 5% of Michigan voters said that violence is justified if their preferred candidate for president loses the 2024 election after all votes are counted “fairly.” Ninety percent said there would be no justification for violence in that case.

…”One thing we’re seeing not just in this survey, but in a multitude of surveys, is voters no longer can agree on some basic facts. We are in this era of misinformation,” said pollster Richard Czuba, founder of the Glengariff Group who conducted the survey. “And because we can’t agree on facts, they can’t analyze the basic fundamentals of what they’re seeing in front of them.”

This, more than anything else, is contributing to my Last Good Year mood. Because this, more than anything, shows the end result of not only the hollowing out of local news sources, but the rise of partisan sources as well.

Ignore the democracy questions; just take the college-education piece. There are a lot of things wrong with higher ed, starting with its cost but also including an explosion of what you might call “college,” i.e. for-profit outfits that charge like Harvard for worthless “degrees” that could be gained for a fraction of the cost at a local community college. But for students who attend a four-year school and graduate, the future is brighter than it would be for those with less education; even with all its problems, college grads out-earn those with no degree by hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a lifetime.

But college is another thing the right-wing media will tell you is wrong, because Woke, because a conservative speaker was booed offstage somewhere. (I always want to ask these people: How about your kids? Are you sending them to an HVAC certification program or, say, Dartmouth, just like mom and dad?)

I bring all this up because the Luckiest Man in Journalism, i.e. James Lileks, who’s been hanging on to a humor / local-whimsy / architecture column in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, has been informed he’ll no longer be a columnist come August, when the paper is relaunching, or something. (This according to his blog, where he tries and fails to not seem self-pitying.) I’m sure some people will miss him, and I’m equally sure a few of his right-wing friends will try a shame-the-Strib campaign, the way they did the last time he was threatened with having to cover an actual meeting or fatal accident or whatever. I can’t get too happy about this; I lost a column once upon a time, too, and it’s a blow to be sure. But we are now in battle-stations mode, and everybody drawing a paycheck needs to be covering news. It’s too important, even though I fear the battle is already mostly lost.

From Ron’s story about Cheboygan:

In those communities, residents sometimes struggle to keep up with local news that impacts their lives far more profoundly than news that’s easy to find on Fox or social media.

“The chronicling of a small town, that historic record-keeping, has faded,” said Jill Josef Greenberg, a former employee at the Cheboygan paper.

“I wonder who will tell the story of these resilient people?”

I don’t know, but we’re about to find out.

If this is the first weekend of summer, I’ll take it. ‘Twas a good one.

Friday, we went to see Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble at Orchestra Hall. It was a tight update on Was (Not Was), and a fine way to kick things off.

Saturday: Laundry and groceries, but also a lovely piece of salmon for dinner, with sautéed rapini and key lime pie for dessert.

Sunday: A sunrise rave, part of Movement weekend, i.e. the techno fest. I’ve come to enjoy techno, at least in connection with Movement. I associate it with spring, and the promise of summer. I met up with a friend there. We talked drugs and real estate and related matters. Went home, chilled and did a writing group later that day, then finished it out with a prime New York strip, grilled asparagus, morels and an excellent red.

Tomorrow? Ribs. Even though it’s raining buckets now. It’s not tomorrow yet.

A few notes before we let the weekend go, however:

For the last few years, we’ve bought a couple cases of wine for summer, roses and whites from a vineyard we visited in France when we were there. It comes through a wholesaler in Chicago. We could probably get the same thing here, but every time we open a bottle of summer wine from the vineyard, it reminds me of France, so who cares? It’s not that much money. And I get added to the mailing list, which means I regular receive emails that describe certain vintages thusly:

“Really perfumed nose, highly scented with purple flowers and dark ripe fruit – black currant, damson plum and black cherry. Deep aromatics with lots of tobacco and clove spice on the nose. It’s heady, strongly scented and alive. Cool and crisp on the palate, smooth, so silky, really effortless in the tannin presentation. Juicy and clean, so bright, but not sour or tart, just the right side, so it’s lifted but not overly austere. Once the acidity calms down in comes the salty, mineral base giving lots of liquorice, wet stone and graphite tones, putting you squarely on limestone.”

Or like this:

“Medium intensity ruby, this is a little reserved at first, in the best way, in that it has the hidden depths that are just so promising during En Primeur, real sense of sapidity, squid ink, violet reflections, extremely vibrant, really like this, blueberry, sage, slate, lift on the finish, delicious.”

I’m sorry, but this is hilarious. I ate squid ink not long ago, but can’t tell you what it tastes like, much less violet reflections. But I enjoy reading it.

Finally, there was a would-be mass shooter in Fort Wayne last week. A young man live-streamed his declaration of intent to murder, then carried his phone with him through a local Kroger until he fired off a volley at someone standing at the deli counter. He somehow, miraculously, hit no one, but not for lack of trying. I heard about this on Reddit, where I was able to watch his livestream. (It’s since been removed.) So I went in search of a legit news source story about the incident. All three — two from TV stations, one from the remaining newspaper — read the same, all having been written from police press releases. This is inconceivable to me; when I was there, we’d have flooded the zone with people, and dug up everything about the shooter within hours. Today? Why bother? We have no staff.

OK, then. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

I’ve told you about my friend Ryan’s Last Good Year theory, haven’t I? Can’t find it in search, but the idea is simple, and this: 2024 is the United States’ last good year. If Trump wins, it’s all over — this we know. If Trump doesn’t win, it’ll be all over, but in a different way: Likely violence, even more yammering about election fraud, even more screeching from the Halls of Congress, etc. Perhaps Marge Green will show up in a lucha libre mask next January. Maybe Lindsay Graham will get a Trump tattoo on his chest. (Probably he already has one, but on his butt.) Either way, 2025 will be worse than 2024.

So enjoy 2024. Might as well.

I came home from lifeguarding last night to learn that Justice Samuel Alito has been flying yet another problematic flag at his multiple houses, this one the Appeal to Heaven banner:

Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

Three photographs obtained by The New York Times, along with accounts from a half-dozen neighbors and passers-by, show that the Appeal to Heaven flag was aloft at the Alito home on Long Beach Island in July and September of 2023. A Google Street View image from late August also shows the flag.

The photographs, each taken independently, are from four different dates. It is not clear whether the flag was displayed continuously during those months or how long it was flown overall.

But oh my, Nina Totenberg was friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg! Oh my oh my oh my liberal bias in the media!

I should note that I disapprove of Totenberg having such a personal relationship with a person she covers. But Alito and his openly displayed political opinions are worse, by far.

So now we have two utterly, thoroughly corrupt justices, a probable third (Kavanaugh), and lord knows what fun Amy Barrett has in store for us.

Enjoy 2024! It’s the last good year!

It’s been hot this week, too hot for May, mid- to upper 80s all week. But it’s better here than it’s been in the South and central Plains, scoured by tornados this week. And at least rising sea levels aren’t flooding septic systems in Michigan. So for a Last Good Year, it won’t be a terrible one.

Meanwhile, I just opened the Axios Detroit newsletter to find they linked to my 2020 column on Mitch Albom for Deadline Detroit (it’s his birthday). STILL RELEVANT, MOFOS. As it turns out, I cannot get my phone to stay linked to my car’s sound system, so I’ve been listening to the radio far more than in the past. My 8-minute drive to lifeguarding coincides with NPR’s dreariest segment, and so I migrate over to WJR, and often catch a bit of Mitch’s talk show. It’s easy to see how his op-ed column became 800 words of blather; he’s just imitating the standard midrange talk-radio “discussion.” You say something anodyne and dull (“I’m no fan of Donald Trump, but Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen are bad people, too”), then say it again in different words, listen to your co-host/producer agreeing with you — because no one disagrees with Mitch — say it again, etc.

But he’ll be there until they dynamite him from his seat. Maybe it’ll happen in 2024, and then it’ll really be the last good year.

OK, then, Thursday awaits. Enjoy yours.

I have a friend who ignores the news. Seriously. Me, friends with a person who doesn’t know that a second bridge is being built across the Detroit river as we speak. She relies on me to keep her up to date, and I try. Sometimes I also try her coping strategy, like this weekend. I simply could not march into summer with That Shithead on my mind, so I didn’t, only to be bombarded with Barron’s graduation photos, along with the news he’s reconsidering his college choices. You ask me, NYU seemed like a good fit for him, but what do I know? Then, on Sunday night, the president and foreign minister of Iran die in a helicopter crash. Which is one of those things that could end up being very bad, but whatever it is, it’s back to the news mangle for me.

On the other hand, I still have no idea what the Kendrick Lamar / Drake beef is about, so I guess I’m doing something right.

How was your weekend? Mine was great — nice and warm, but the house hasn’t turned into a brick oven yet, so I could throw the windows open and still be comfortable. This morning I thought I’d clean the kitchen while I was rested and caffeinated, and put on some loud tunes to keep my energy up. My neighbor responded by firing up his gas blower. It reminded me that we never heard one of those machines, not once, the whole time we were in Italy. We did see this, in Rome:

Bad photo; I apologize. But you can see that’s a twig broom, like you might see in a Halloween display. At first I thought it was a one-off, something a single garbage-truck driver accepted from his old nonna and carries to please her, but there’s one on every garbage truck we saw, which either indicates a lot of nonnas or a belief that the old ways are the best ways. They’re at least a lot quieter.

So, since I’m an empty cup at the moment, some bloggage:

I feel like all I do here is recommend pieces from The New York Times, and this is not only very long, it’s vegetables, which is to say, there’s not much dessert here. But if you have the time to take a bite out of it over the next few days, you can learn a lot about how Israel found itself in the state it’s in now:

(Settler) violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.

And as a companion piece, another long — but not as long — story, about Miriam Adelson, Sheldon’s widow and very likely to be Trump’s biggest single donor (at least in the running):

October 7 had been Adelson’s nightmare — the event itself, of course, but also the world’s response to it. The attack confirmed the existential burden placed on every Jewish person of Adelson’s generation: No one could be counted on to care about the Jewish people; the duty to protect and safeguard Israel rested on them alone. On November 21, 2023, Adelson published an essay in Israel Hayom, a free Israeli newspaper she and Sheldon launched in 2007. In the piece, entitled “Dead to Us,” she discussed the “ghastly gatherings of radical Muslim and BLM activists, ultra-progressives, and career agitators” who, in the aftermath of 10/7, sprinted right past Israel’s grief and sympathized with Hamas. “These people are not our critics. They are our enemies. And, as such, they should be dead to us,” she wrote. “Indeed, we must disavow and shame them, deny them employment and public office, and defund their colleges and political parties. Doing all this will be easy, because the stakes in Israel’s war of survival have never been so clear … If you quibble about how many babies were beheaded, or how many women were violated, in the October 7 pogrom, you’re dead to us … We Israelis, we Jews love life. And we are done with meekly counting our dead.”

I should put my head back in the sand. Instead, I’m going to the gym.

While the rest of the world was paying attention to other details of Michael Cohen’s testimony in the Trump trial yesterday, I was struck by a smaller one: That among the payouts for this and that after Stormy Daniels was silenced, etc., there was a smaller, $50,000 payment for “tech services.”

The services?

At least in part, the services were Cohen getting a computer programmer to buy IP addresses in order to rig an online CNBC poll to make sure Trump ranked among the most influential business leaders alive.

Ladies and gentlemen, the former president of the United States, and maybe the next one.

This is why, despite everything I know about people and their foibles and complexity and all that, I simply cannot find it in my black heart to give Trump voters a break – on anything, ever, from now until the end of time.

And in a busy week, I feel like I just want to leave this here and let things go at that.

The first person to wish me a happy Mother’s Day was on Saturday. Total stranger, just “happy Mother’s Day” as I walked past, so I said, “Same to you, or to your wife or whatever.” Kinda weird.

More HMDs came at Eastern Market, and today, on actual Mother’s Day, I got several just pushing my cart at Kroger, again from strangers.

I did not post social-media photos of my mother, nor of Kate and me (“the one who made me a mother” is the usual verbiage, I believe), and in fact didn’t even see her, but she called from Berlin. She comes home tonight, and we’ll observe this holiday at some point, I guess.

“The Derringers don’t set a lot of store on the Hallmark holidays,” I told her when she called, which we say every year; it’s kind of a joke.

Who made Mother’s Day into such a huge thing? (Social media.) Mitch Albom wrote a drippy column about how much he misses his own mom, and all I could think was, “then celebrate some mother in your family, or even your own wife, dumbass.” But no one listens to my thoughts but me. We all miss our dead mothers, if they were good ones.

Hope yours was good. I washed all my bedding and changed the sheets, restocked all our provisions. Alan potted annuals and our usual herb array. The growing season is on.

And, because it’s an election year, this is happening, too:

Four words in the location tag, three of them misspelled. That’s MAGA for you.

We won’t be attending, but four years ago, we saw one in progress, going past our shoreline. I think we passed through the rump end, heading back to the marina. Here’s hoping for a dangerous thunderstorm, and at least two non-fatal sinkings.

There’s an interesting, alas paywalled, story in the News this morning, about a woman suing Detroit Animal Care and Control after her husband was fatally mauled by three free-roaming pit bulls or pit mixes or “American Staffordshire” mixes or whatever. Bully breeds or mixes, all. My friend Dustin and I call ourselves breedists where pits are concerned. One attacked and nearly killed his family’s Bichon, years ago; I just don’t like or trust them. I know they can be wonderful dogs, that it’s irresponsible owners who make them that way, all of that. It doesn’t change my opinion: Where pits are concerned, proceed with caution. Always. (Actually, that’s not bad advice with all dogs, but some kind of sweep that caution off the table when they jump on you and lick your face.)

Anyway. This woman is alleging that the department knew the couple who owned these dogs were irresponsible, etc., but the part that caught my eye is this:

The lawsuit also names a nonprofit called Friends of Detroit Animal Care and Control, which supports the city agency by supplementing its budget, applying for grants, holding fundraisers and forming relationships with donors and foundations. Some of those relationships have been with national organizations that have pushed for lower euthanasia rates in shelters.

The lawsuit contends the city allowed the nonprofit to “exert extensive influence” on animal control as to how and when the city’s dangerous animal code is enforced in exchange for the money the nonprofit gets from being affiliated with some of the national organizations.

“While animal lives were being spared, dangerous animals remained and unaddressed and ever-present threat to the safety and lives of people within the City of Detroit,” the lawsuit reads. It called the no-kill model “utterly ineffective, reckless and deadly as it concerns dog owners like the Goodmans, and dogs owned by them.”

I don’t know anything about this nonprofit, but that they are against euthanasia, etc., absolutely does not surprise me. If there’s one thing that has changed enormously over the course of my life, it’s been the way we treat dogs. Some of these changes have been good, although I think we’ve gone overboard on many of them. Dogs in affluent communities like mine live better than human children in Detroit. We no longer open the back door, let Fido out, and collect him at the end of the day. If you lost your dog back then, it was because “he ran away,” i.e. got hit by a car. I step in way less dog poop than I did as a child, when virtually no one picked it up. A new dog park opened in my community over the weekend, and I’ll be taking Wendy for some r’n’r when I get a chance. Of the whole fur-baby thing I will say little other than this: I dislike that term. It disrespects an animal’s essential nature. Anthropomorphism: bad.

At the same time, I’m flabbergasted by what people are willing to spend, and risk, in their efforts to keep frankly bad dogs alive. Years ago, The New Yorker published a lengthy essay by a woman whose efforts to “rehabilitate” a dangerous pit bull suggested she was the one who needed therapy, not the dog. My respect for Ira Glass, the “This American Life” host, plummeted after I heard the segment on the show about Piney, another psychotic (and sickly, and weird) dog he kept, even as it utterly took over his life, and that of his wife (from whom he’s now divorced; not sure if Piney was a factor). A segment from the transcript:

Piney’s a smallish, sweet-faced pit bull. Think Little Rascals, not Michael Vick. He’s a rescue, a very pretty dog, white with these big light-brown patches. He’s timid. He can get scared of puppies and other animals much weaker than he is. But when he gets anxious, he sometimes attacks people.

He has to wear a muzzle whenever he goes anywhere outside Ira’s apartment, including the office. Ira and his wife never have friends over, because Piney would go after them. Piney is fearful and anxiety prone. And he has to take Valium to keep from being even more aggressive.

Ira Glass: It’s almost like somebody who’s fearful who is also a pit bull. If you imagine–

Nancy Updike: It’s exactly that.

Ira Glass: It is exactly that, yeah.

Nancy Updike: It’s not even like it. That is what is it.

Ira Glass: That is what it is. He was a normal dog until a wedding that Anaheed took him to. Anaheed drove up ahead of me, and the dog was there with her and was a puppy. And all these people were hanging around.

And there was a moment where he bit the host’s daughter, Hope, who was 9 or 10 at the time. He just got up off the floor, saw her come into the room, walked over, and bit her. And then he bit a friend of ours, Vicky, her son.

Nancy Updike: At the wedding, he bit two children?

Ira Glass: He bit two children.

And that was only the beginning of Piney’s adventures. That show aired in 2012, and I expect Piney’s gone to dog heaven by now, and even though I know it can’t possibly be true, I’d hope it was before he reached the end of his natural life, because that dog was damaged, and needed to be put down. Humanely, of course; I’m not suggesting the Kristi Noem solution. But this mania to rehabilitate animals can go — and has gone — too far.

The people in Detroit who owned the dogs who killed the man whose wife is suing were bad owners, period. Those dogs had gotten loose and bitten people before. They should have been confiscated, and killed. Again, to let them live, or to try some sort of “rehabilitation,” misunderstands their nature. A dog can’t talk, can’t reason with you. It can’t tell you it understands why biting is bad and it needs to stop. A biting dog either needs to be super-duper securely confined, or euthanized.

OK, then. Time to get in a workout and try to make sense of the week ahead.

Back home again. It’s been a week of jet lag, held-mail sorting, and of course re-immersion in the toxic politics of the Land of the Free. Congratulations to all who voted for Nikki Haley in Indiana. Pulling 20 percent when you’re not even in the race bodes well for the Dems in November, but I’m not in the prediction business. The Politico piece on the primary that you guys have already chewed over underscores something that’s happening everywhere, i.e. the nationalization of every election, no matter how small.

I noticed one of the candidates for Indiana governor led with her proposal to eliminate all propertyincome taxes. Which is already laughable, as Hoosier property owners pay pocket change in property taxes. In the olden days, say 10 years ago, someone would have asked her how she planned to pay for such a drastic policy change, but given the diminishment of local and even statewide news coverage, that won’t happen. It doesn’t matter now, because she lost, but still. There’s a movement to eliminate property tax in Michigan, but they need to get a shitload of signatures to get that one on the ballot, and I doubt they’re having much luck, the movement being mainly comprised of MAGA goobers.

Speaking of diminished local media, here’s a great but unfortunately paywalled story about Gannett’s firing of a west-Michigan journalist, an editor, who led the way on coverage of Ottawa Impact, the right-wing group that took over Ottawa County’s commission, making national news in the process (free link). The oafs who roared into office have behaved like the Three Stooges, unable to conduct the simplest government business without poking one another in the eye, etc. They hired a losing congressional candidate to be county executive, and fired him a year later. The health director dug in her heels when they tried to defund the entire department, and they threw money at her to leave, but when the amount was made public ($4 million), the public objected, Larry stepped on Moe’s foot, etc., and they eventually retreated. (They wanted to replace her with a COVID nut, whose public-health qualifications consisted of being a health and safety officer for an HVAC company, with the online degrees to prove it.)

Anyway, this woman, Sarah Leach, covered it all. And get this:

Leach oversaw news operations at the Holland Sentinel and 25 other newspapers across four states — 15 in Michigan, eight in Wisconsin, two in South Dakota and one in Minnesota — the largest group within Gannett’s Center for Community Journalism division.

She handled budgeting, hiring, goal-setting and managed overtime. Short-staffed on local editors, she was also editing and managing reporters at three of the newspapers herself: the Daily Telegram in Adrian, the Hillsdale Daily News and the Monroe News.

This is Gannett these days. Many of these papers are entirely ghost ships, assembled remotely with wire copy and press releases. Leach had complained about Gannett’s empty promises to increase staffing to a writer for the Poynter Institute, a journalism nonprofit that tries to hold the industry to account. She wasn’t quoted by name, and she suspects the suits accessed her work emails to find out she was the whistleblower. She was fired over Zoom:

“I was asked, ‘Why did you do this?’ And I just stared at the screen for a long time because it was difficult to process what this moment was,” Leach recounted.

“I admitted that I had a phone call with this person, you know, because I am dying. I have been asking for resources, and I’m doing my best to try to serve these communities to the best of my ability, and I feel like I can’t. … Then I was informed that was my last day.”

I wonder about the person who swung the sword. Traditionally, publishers and executive editors start as reporters or other low-level employees. Anyone old enough to have that kind of job today probably has at least a dim memory of what it was like to work in a newsroom that wasn’t an echoing space. And today they’re the goon tasked with firing a good employee. One who did this:

Leach jumped in last January to help cover the crush of Ottawa Impact news when the Sentinel was down to just one full-time reporter. She soon became the face of the paper’s coverage, striving to explain to the community the unprecedented nature of the board’s sweeping new decisions and their potential effects.

A trio of retired journalists in the community elevated Leach’s work for the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting last fall, with the nomination citing the 130-plus stories she’d written. The nomination letter also noted the Sentinel’s subscriptions had surged 38% at that point in the year, making it the fastest-growing website in Gannett’s division for small newspapers.

One significant obstacle noted by the nominating committee is that Ottawa Impact commissioners generally refuse to answer questions or be interviewed by mainstream news reporters, though Leach tried to fairly represent their views anyway, according to the committee.

“More than any other journalist she has held our local elected officials accountable. We need her to preserve democracy in this town,” said Milt Nieuwsma, a retired journalist and author who was part of the nominating committee.

Well, too bad, Milt.

Which leads us to this:

The new iteration of “The Office” has been picked up to series at Peacock.

According to the official logline, the series will focus on “a dying historic Midwestern newspaper and the publisher trying to revive it with volunteer reporters.” https://t.co/HfMJ65oK73 pic.twitter.com/xRV0EHs30j

— Variety (@Variety) May 8, 2024

We laugh to keep from crying. Have a great weekend, all.

It’s our last full day here. We spent most of it on Murano, home of the famous Venetian glass factories. I was kinda-sorta in search of the closest thing I could find to the ashtray that Tom Ripley beats Freddie Miles to death with in the latest adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mister Ripley.” (That would be “Ripley,” now playing on Netflix.) A little Googling revealed the prop was real Murano glass (or more likely a dupe fashioned after it), owned by Steven Zaillan, who helmed the Netflix series. But if you’ve ever seen Murano glass, you know that piece is a rarity — heavy, colorless, clear and plain. Murano glass…how to put this delicately? It is one part of the stereotype that Italians have a taste for flashy and gaudy home decor. Most of it is vividly colorful, sparkly and silly, a little too-too much for my taste.

But we were almost back to the vaporetto stop when I saw a piece in a shop window that wasn’t an ashtray, but it was clear and simple. I knew it would be out of my price range, but once in the shop I spotted another piece, this one an ashtray, smaller, clear and with a simple design in a subdued shade of maroon. The owner said it was vintage from the ’80s, or maybe the ’50s. Her father’s design. And more reasonably priced. Small enough that I doubt you could kill anyone with it.

Reader, I whipped out my Amex. I’d show you a photo, but it’s entombed in bubble wrap at the moment. Maybe in a few days.

I like Venice more than I thought I would. The tourists are mostly contained in neighborhoods where we aren’t, and the one we’re in still feels pretty Italian. The kids play in the piazza, kicking soccer balls around. There’s a hardware store there. You hear more Italian than English spoken on the streets near us.

And of course, at night it’s magical:

The water has come up a couple nights we’ve been here, and I can hear passers-by splashing through the flooded sidewalk a few doors down. It’s great.

My feet hurt less than I thought they would, too. I invested in expensive sneakers before we left, but we haven’t had a sub-10K-step day the whole trip. There was recently a story in some newspaper, about Americans who go to Europe, eat like pigs and are shocked to find they didn’t gain any weight, and may have even lost a little. Could it be something different about European food?

Duh. It’s the walking, dummies. But then I remember this Google review, of a pizzeria we found in Florence, and think, you can’t fix this kind of delusion:

Tiny pizza place but excellent pizza. Back home we normally avoid cheese/dairy, wheat, and my husband always avoids nightshades/tomatoes but we’re being more flexible here trying things out as we understand they don’t use roundup or do to food what is done to our food back in the states so that it seems not to cause the digestive issues we’d experience if we ate like this back home. It is also a bit away from the super crazy crowds.

Speaking of Florence, when we were there we passed, several times, incredibly long lines to eat at a particular sandwich place. They had two locations nearly next door to one another, and both had hour-long waits, standing in line, to get a takeaway-only sandwich. It was so successful that other nearby places were copying their menu, and they had long lines, too. I considered trying it out, but life is too short to wait an hour in line for a sandwich. Then, on our last day, I was taking a photo of some 1930s typography on the wall of the train station, and whaddaya know?

THAT’S THE PLACE. All’Antico Vinato! With only four people in line! We figured now was our chance. And we split one — they’re huge:

It was an excellent sandwich, but the secret is obviously the bread, a type of focaccia split laterally, crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. Worth an hour in line? Nah. But for five minutes in line? Absolutely. I note the chain is expanding to the U.S. If you live in New York, Las Vegas or Los Angeles, you’re in luck.

Now we’re headed to our last dinner here. I’ve half a mind to try the black spaghetti they serve around here, colored with squid ink from the cuttlefish. It weirds me out, but I want to be adventurous, even as pomodoro and basilico is my favorite.

We’ll see. Safe travels to us, and back later this week.

EDIT: I ordered it, I ate it, and I liked it. Mission accomplished.

There’s a point that comes, on a vacation like this, where you say to yourself, yes, this is a masterpiece, but basta on the madonnas, per favore.

And that’s when you decamp for…

Yep, it’s the Venice Biennale, and a more bracing cure for religious-art overload doesn’t exist. It wasn’t a perfect day — we got shut out of the space because we ducked into a shelter to get out of the rain, not realizing we couldn’t get back in — but we saw plenty in the national pavilions we visited. Including Japan:

Electrodes inserted in the decaying fruit sense moisture changes, and translate that into electrical signals that trigger lights and drone sounds. So weird. Also, France:

Video with fabric sculptures, on a theme of drowning, and environmental degradation.

Korea was about smell. This figure snorted vapor out of its nostrils every few seconds. Unfortunately, the wind was howling through the open windows of the pavilion, and it was hard to get a sense of it.

Great Britain had a lot of video, along with light sculpture:

We saw a few more countries before we foolishly stepped outside the line, but those were the highlights. Tomorrow we’re looking for some of the free sites. Nigeria is supposed to be a good one. Yesterday we wandered through Ukraine’s freebie, which included a world map painted on a single dried chickpea (seriously) and this pile of dirt:

There were plants in it. I suppose the art will be whether the plants thrive over the six-month course of the show; we’ll see.

Ultimately, the most moving sight of the day was this man, who sat opposite us in the restaurant where we had dinner. He brought his dog with him. He ordered a steak, and when it was delivered, cut it up piece by piece and fed each one to the dog, who ate each morsel politely. It was such a sweet thing. It’s nice to see a dog and a person communicating on a deep level.

When I was here 40 years ago I recall cats everywhere, but haven’t seen one yet. The dogs are winning. Go, dogs.

OK, then. Back when events command it.

We were headed for St. Mark’s Square in Venice earlier today — knock that one off the must-see list, might as well — when the foot traffic seemed ridiculously thick. The back of a stage loomed ahead. Everyone was young, well-dressed, and many of the women were carrying nice bouquets of flowers or wearing laurel wreaths.

Then we stepped around the edge of the stage and saw what was happening: Graduation day. Giorno della laurea.

The Università Ca’ Foscari was sending its latest crop of graduates into the world. It looked like all graduation ceremonies: Fun and happy. We walked to the end of the square, to the waterfront of St. Mark’s, and marveled at what it must have been like to pull up to this particular quay when the Republic of Venice swung serious weight in the world, to see those twin pillars, the lion and St. Mark, the breathtaking cathedral, the ducal palace, all of it.

Then the graduates — ‘scusi, the laureates — broke up and dispersed to the hundreds of cafes and restaurants in the city to celebrate. Individual pods would periodically break into a filthy song; it went like this:

Dottore, dottore
Dottore del buco del cul
Vaffancul! Vaffancul!

As far as I can tell, it translates to:

Doctor, doctor
Doctor asshole
Fuck you! Fuck you!

But everyone laughed about it, and Alan postulated the real meaning is: Don’t get too full of yourself, now that you’re a fancy-pants college graduate. That sounds about right. The celebrations were fun to watch. We ate a late lunch/early dinner at the table next to Emily’s. Here’s Emily:

Isn’t she adorable in her laurel wreath? Note the bottle of rose taped to her hand. “They want me to drink,” she told me in perfect English, appropriate for a linguistics scholar. Obviously. The poster behind her is another tradition: It’s basically a memory collage of her college years; not sure if the crossword is standard or not. Her whole family was there, everybody sang the Doctor Asshole ditty, several times. The weather was perfect. A good omen for Emily.

And that’s where we are for our final week, in a quieter neighborhood. Right on a canal, not a heavily traveled one. On our morning wander, I took pictures of work boats.

The news this week is the new daily tourist tax being charged to visitors — 5 Euro per head per day. There was a big protest on day one, and I agree with the protesters that it won’t do much good, but lordy, this is a city about 1,500 years old, built on logs, and 20 million annual visitors takes a toll. Every one of them needs to be fed, housed, amused. Each one drinks, eats, poops and pees. (Yes, I’m including myself in that group.) So it was interesting to watch the morning deliveries along the canals — the food, the drinks, the inevitable Amazon boxes.

Honestly, I don’t see how they do it. But they do, somehow. I’m impressed.