For a few years, I would volunteer to work Christmas Day. For another few years, I was required to work Christmas Day. I never saw it as a big deal — when I was more connected to my birth family, we celebrated on the Eve, leaving the holiday itself as a yawning void, so might as well make some money and collect the chip to cash in later, for a holiday you really wanted off. The required-work years were all from home, so it was easy to keep my laptop open and check in every 15 minutes or so. Easy-peasy.

For a newspaper reporter, Christmas is either drudgery or tragedy. Go do a story on the B’nai B’rith volunteers who bring food to firehouses and hospitals — that’s drudgery, as is a bright on the slammed-for-hours Chinese restaurants, full of happy Jews enjoying their own Christmas tradition. Tragedy is the sort of thing that happens somewhere, every year: A fatal accident caused by bad weather or impaired driving. One year in Columbus a guy went to midnight Mass and while he was gone, his house caught fire and his entire family died. (Thanks, God!) Another year, an Alberta-clipper cold snap followed a snowstorm and broke water mains and other infrastructure all over the city. (You learn to carry a pencil at times like that, because pens freeze.) Yet another, a guy who’d robbed a bank and waited to be arrested, just to have a warm place to sleep, was bailed out by a softhearted man who didn’t think anyone should spend Christmas behind bars.

The underwear bomber — that was a Christmas story. As I recall, the editors of a certain Detroit paper couldn’t get a single reporter to answer the phone and roll to the airport to gather whatever fact-shards could be found there. (Damn caller ID!)

In…1979, I believe, unless it was 1978, J.C. and I went to a movie on Christmas Day, then headed to a local radio station, so he could record a review for a show he was contributing to. We got on the elevator with another station employee, who looked at us and said, “It’s a rule: The Jew works Christmas.”

Whatever your tradition, whatever your employment, I hope that if you have to work, someone brings you a nice warm plate of something good to eat, and it’s either as busy or as boring as you like. Maybe bring a book to read.

As for me, I’m reading about Matt Gaetz, who the incoming president of the United States thought qualified to be the top lawyer in the country. That person — incoming president, that is — also is going on again about buying Greenland.

The next four years are going to be long and miserable. But let’s enjoy the last good Christmas in the last good year. I’ll be back sometime after the holiday.

I’ve been doing this so long I can no longer remember if I’ve told a particular story before, but a quick search suggests maybe not*, so what the hell. Old women are allowed to repeat themselves.

I saw a Saturday Night Live sketch on office Christmas parties, which reminded me of the terrible ones we had in Fort Wayne, with one exception. You’d think a newsroom could throw a fun party, but we were cursed in some way. The job of organizing was usually given to the executive editor’s secretary, and her budget was limited. One year we had the worst chicken of my life — it seemed to have been boiled. The entertainment was a local elementary school choir, who didn’t sing Christmas songs but music that had been written for a non-denominational holiday play nobody knew, so the songs made no sense and weren’t very good, either.

She also invited a high-school girl who’d won a state speech championship to perform for us. She chose a dramatic dialogue where she played both parts, one an older, old-fashioned black woman and the other her younger, angrier daughter. The daughter was trying to convince the mother that white people never had her best interests at heart, but the mother was sweet and religious and believed it would all work out, praise Jesus. The climax, for me, came when the daughter exploded, “Mama, they call us n—–s behind our backs!” Ohhh-kay! That’s getting us in the holiday spirit!

The next year we, as in my colleague Adrianne and I, went to management in October and suggested we’d be willing to take over the job. We spent the paltry budget on deli platters and found a local bar with a private basement room. It was a little small for our purposes, but that only led to the convivial feeling. Open bar until the money ran out, then cash bar, mix tapes of bumpin’ holiday music, and we all had a great time. The night ended with a men’s room singalong of “The 12 Days of Christmas,” only with improvised lyrics. I remember “six urinals flushing!,” and a designer standing near one would do so. Some years later, we did something similar, with a karaoke machine. I recall an overnight sports guy, whom some privately called Boo Radley, wowing us with his interpretation of “Friends in Low Places.”

But the last one I endured there was pretty grim. It was held in the newsroom, over the lunch hour. Management kept finding new depths of cheapness, and I think they contributed a wan, unappetizing ham, not even Honeybaked. The rest was potluck, and the entertainment was a staffer with a keyboard and his own repertoire of Christian music.

All my employment after that was at small outfits, so the holidays could be observed in restaurants, at a couple pushed-together tables. They were fine. Lunch, a drink or two, and then home. At Deadline Detroit, we made it a dinner, at a Mexican restaurant with very good food that also allows guests to carry in their own booze, i.e. a perfect venue. The boss picked up the check. He probably spent more on six or seven of us than cheap-ass Knight Ridder, a major corporation, did on that stupid ham.

The parties in Columbus were much more in the traditional spirit of a holiday bacchanal — heavy-pouring bartenders and a quiet little library clerk throwing up in the hallway.

All this by way of saying we saw this movie, “Office Christmas Party,” on Christmas Day 2016, and it was very funny. Great cast.

* on a subsequent search, I see I did tell some of these stories, in 2005. Some details are different, but the gist is the same. Oh, well. It’s what old ladies do.

Tell us a Christmas/holiday office party story if you’ve got a good ‘un, eh?

I don’t want to fixate on the coming crisis, but honestly, it’s getting exasperating, always having to track down my eyeballs rolling around on the floor, because once again they’ve popped clean out of my head. We won’t go after RFK Jr. again, at least not immediately. It’s his confederates, his allies, that are driving me crazy lately.

I’m sure you’ve already heard about Bobby’s lawyer, Aaron Siri, asking the FDA to revoke its approval of…the polio vaccine. That story broke Friday. Today the WashPost looks at Dave Weldon, Trump’s nominee to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and his curious obsession with linking vaccines to autism:

Weldon’s past record of promoting the disproven link between vaccines and autism in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence attesting to the safety and efficacy of vaccines raises concerns among some public health experts about his ability to run the CDC. If confirmed, Weldon could undermine confidence in the lifesaving shots at a time when infectious-disease threats such as measles and whooping cough are on the rise, they say.

A Washington Post review of Weldon’s public comments, media appearances and congressional letters along with accounts of those who worked with him reveal a portrait of a politician and physician who emphasized the experiences of individuals while dismissing dozens of studies based on data from hundreds of thousands of patients that showed no link between vaccines and autism.

He has no interest in data, not when, what? Some mother wrote him a tear-stained letter about how her toddler was fine until the MMR shot, and he immediately started walking on his toes and never smiled again?

“He appeared to have a closed mind on the issue,” said Sharfstein, now a vice dean for public health practice at Johns Hopkins University and a former top official at the Food and Drug Administration. “He didn’t seem to understand that the core tool of population data analysis is one of the pivotal aspects of the work of CDC.”

We are going to a dark, dark place, aren’t we? And as Sherri points out, the people who will suffer the most won’t, in the main, deserve it. Babies too young to be vaccinated for pertussis, etc. How is this possible? How are we moving backward so swiftly?

As so often happens in our modern world, we can pin much of the blame on social media:

Here, an influencer named Kendra Needham, known to her 369,000 followers as the Holistic Mother, recommends a red-light-therapy gadget for pain and thyroid problems. There, Carly Shankman, who posts as CarlyLovesKale, evangelizes about the healing powers of hydrogen-rich water and a probiotic oral-care regimen. Courtney Swan, the host of a health-trends podcast called Realfoodology, links to a menstrual-cycle-tracking app and her own line of immunity boosters in minimalist-chic packaging.

This is a piece about the influencer moms, who grift openly, but no one seems to mind. Why is this country so goddamn stupid?

OK, enough. The weekend was nice enough for what it was, i.e. the last uncommitted one before the holiday. Saw friends, saw Kate, who got some good news — a big gig I probably shouldn’t reveal yet, but will in time. I’ve reached the point of making lists of stuff I have to do before D-Day, and they’re getting a bit long.

How about you?

Lotsa links today, but that’s the kind of week it’s shaping up to be.

I was listening to a podcast a few years back — I think it was Chapo Trap House — when one of the dudebros said something that stuck with me: Eventually, every con man will try to sell you supplements.

And whaddaya know, in a grifter-led administration, many of the incoming grifters are cut from the same cloth:

President-elect Donald Trump’s top political appointees want you to buy supplements.

Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, Trump’s pick for surgeon general, sells her own line of vitamins. Kash Patel, Trump’s choice to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, recommended pills on Truth Social in February that he said could “rid your body of the harms” from Covid-19 vaccines.

Mehmet Oz, the TV personality whom Trump named to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, promotes supplements sold by online retailer iHerb. He has advertised multivitamins, supplements for “brain power” and fish-oil pills that he said “probably slowed” the progression of his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Kash Patel has pimped even skeevier supplements.

I wonder if these people are expected to kick up to the boss as a result. Probably buying a Mar-a-lago membership at full retail will do.

A friend of mine wrote about the sketchy FDA oversight of various nutritional supplements a while back. The most horrifying was so-called black salve, offered as a treatment for skin cancer:

In late October 2018, a 50-year-old woman filed a complaint with the Food and Drug Administration, claiming that a topical salve she’d purchased to remove a spot on her nose had a horrifying, disfiguring side effect. The paste, called Indian Herb, wound up “eroding” her nose, she said, burning a hole through her skin.

FDA inspectors were dispatched two weeks later to visit the product’s manufacturer, McDaniel Life-Line. But if they were expecting to find a legitimate manufacturing operation when they arrived in tiny Felt, Okla. (pop. 149) that November, they may have been surprised to find that Indian Herb was being prepared in an ordinary kitchen, using a blender and other household utensils, by Bruce McDaniel and his wife, as the FDA wrote later in a letter to the company. The blender was stored in a trash bag kept in the garage when not in use, the letter noted.

And this is the sort of thing so-called “crunchy moms” will reach for instead of a phone to call a doctor. And the likely incoming head of Health and Human Services will think it’s just fine.

Speaking of which, one reason I’m not feeling quite as blue about the incoming administration is due to this story, which I read today, about how so many of the policies cheered on by Trump Country will come back to bite…Trump Country:

The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same.

To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out products that he says poison America, rendering its children obese and its citizens chronically ill.

To the workers here, those mills — the largest in the world — are their livelihoods.

Yep. If nothing else, it’ll be entertaining, watching the leopards eat all those faces. Although I suspect nothing will happen.

Good thing the information ecosystem is in such good shape! Oops, maybe not:

The Ashland Daily Tidings — established as a newspaper in 1876 — ceased operations in 2023, but if you were a local reader, you may not have known. Almost as soon as it closed, a website for the Tidings reemerged, boasting a team of eight reporters, Minihane included, who cranked out densely reported stories every few days.

…The reality was that none of the people allegedly working for the Ashland Daily Tidings existed, or at least were who they claimed to be. The bylines listed on Daily Tidings articles were put there by scammers using artificial intelligence, and in some cases stolen identities, to dupe local readers.

That’s a simultaneously horrifying and entertaining story, because one of the bylines that kept appearing in this so-called pink-slime publication was that of a real journalist. Sure, he lives in the U.K. and has only been to Oregon once in his life, but there’s his name on all those AI-written stories. I can hardly wait to see what someone could do with mine.

And that’s the midweek wrap-up. What a time to be alive.

Who else is wondering how embarrassing it will be when the Syrian rebels open Tulsi Gabbard’s file and start uploading it to the internet? Who else is hoping that when the United Healthcare CEO’s killer is arrested, he has a really good story to tell about why he did it? Yes, we don’t condone violence, but events like this are one reason I always enjoyed my career in journalism; you really never know what’s going to happen on a particular day, and things never unfold the way you expect them to, which is sometimes terrible and sometimes not, but almost always interesting.

Here’s the latest on the UHC CEO shooter, which suggests this guy planned this pretty well. Taking a bus in and out of the city was genius; interstate bus depots are packed with people, but no one looks very closely at anyone. It’s assumed you’re poor and inconsequential. A guy in a hooded jacket wearing a mask wouldn’t warrant a second glance from anyone.

I once had to pick up Kate and her roommate from an overseas trip at the Detroit Greyhound station. It was very early, before 6 a.m. as I recall, and I was parked outside in the pickup lane wishing I’d made coffee before I left. I watched a very old Jewish man — black hat, sidelocks, the works — walk in slowly, choose a seat in the waiting area, put on his tefillin and start davening. No one appeared to be giving him a second look. That’s a place you want to make your escape from after a premeditated murder.

But more will be revealed, because it always is.

I’ve noticed for a while that lots of new crime fiction is set in the past, because video technology makes it far harder to get away with murder these days; I guess this guy thought it through.

Enough, though — how was everyone’s weekend? I went to visit my old editor, who was recently laid up with a torn quadriceps tendon, an injury he suffered to the other leg just a few years ago. He’s at the sitting-in-a-recliner-in-a-leg-brace stage of recovery, so it was the right time to bring over some brownies and a flagon of green juice for healing purposes. The juice is my version of the First Watch kale tonic. Alan thinks it tastes like grass, but I find it quite the pick-me-up. The Vitamix is shaping up to be the best gift we gave ourselves this year, although I just made a carrot juice that turned out kinda meh. I’ll still drink it, but I won’t make it again. Yesterday we finally put the tree up and today it’s just been cleaning, chores and blogging. And finding clips of Trump’s Meet the Press interview online — jeez, what misery we’re in for.

Also, thinking of our next trip. Focus is closing in on Scotland and parts of the U.K.

Monday is on our doorstep. Let’s get through it.

Well holy shit, this is a twist, but in many ways an entirely expected one:

Alan just informed me there’s a third word, too — “depose.” Huh.

If it turns out this assailant is indeed an aggrieved client of United Healthcare, this could be a game-changer. We’ve accepted, for so long, the broken, immoral health-care system we have now, and for it to lead to this kind of violence? I’d like to think there’s still room in this country for some soul-searching. On the other hand, it’s not like Ted Kaczynski sparked a deeper interest in environmentalism.

Still, the cold-hearted reaction I’ve seen online — for every “this is terrible” there have been 20 Seinfeld-eating-popcorn “that’s a shame” GIFs. United Healthcare deleted a web page featuring the leadership ranks, with Brian Thompson at the top.

For those who’ve asked, it’s been 40 years since I lived in Ohio, and I likely never will again, although you never know.

At the very least, this is a hot national story that doesn’t involve you-know-who or Pete Hegseth’s mother, so I welcome something else to pay attention to.

Gotta run. Open thread.

Excuse the absence earlier. That silly column I wrote blotted out the sun for a couple days. On Monday I was toiling away at something else when my doorbell rang. On the front porch was a reporter from the local Fox affiliate, who wanted to interview me about it.

“Me? That column?” I asked, astounded.

“My news director says it’s a talker.”

I welcomed her in. I mean, I’m not going to turn a reporter away. But when she started asking questions, it became clear that she thought I’d dropped a policy brief on the mayor’s desk, complete with suggested GPS coordinates for sinking the Boblo boat, not a whimsical column chiding Detroit for its constant backward-looking gaze. I closed the door behind her thinking, I’m gonna look like an idiot, and I expect I did, although I haven’t watched the piece yet, and won’t. My takeaway is this: No one knows how to read anymore. For a while now, I’ve been wincing at how upset people get over headlines, knowing how many of them are likely written by interns or the web staff or whoever, some of whom may not even reside in the same city where the story was generated. But given how many people read no further, maybe it’s more important. Apparently there’s an entire Reddit thread of people who think I literally want to scuttle a precious childhood memory. I don’t! It’s a metaphor, folks. We covered that in seventh-grade English.

But lots of people liked it, so that’s cool.

Oh, and I haven’t told you the best part: I was invited to be on the Mitch Albom show. HAHAHAHAHAHA. I had to lifeguard during the time they wanted me, so I declined. I don’t think the producer is clued in to my online claim to fame.

But now it’s Wednesday, and as editors have been saying for millennia, what do you have coming for tomorrow? In these parts, a possible snowstorm. Nothing insane, but three inches will announce winter pretty emphatically, and it’d be wise to get the snowblower gassed up and in the front of the garage, where it will swap places with the lawn mower.

So I guess that’s what’s coming for tomorrow. Snow. And probably the erection of the Nall-Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere Christmas tree.

In bloggage, don’t have much, but news is breaking that the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot to death this morning in Manhattan. Police are calling it a targeted attack, so: very interesting. As always, more will be revealed. Refrain from jumping to conclusions. And I’ll see you later this week.

Thanks so much to everyone who shared Thanksgiving menus, greetings, memories and more. Ours was fine. We traveled to Alan’s sister’s in Defiance, bringing half the meal. I already posted this in the comments on the last post, but if you’re not a comments reader, here you go, my favorite disruptor to the earth-toned Thanksgiving table:

That’s a cranberry curd tart, a New York Times recipe (gift link), and it was the bomb. A bit of a hassle to assemble all the ingredients, but fortunately a local nut shop — a nuttery? — had blanched hazelnuts so the skin-shedding step was taken care of. And I didn’t sieve the cooked cranberries; I pulverized them in the blender. It turned out fab. Try it at the next holiday table. Pro tip: If you have a non-stick tart pan, use it.

We took Alan’s new (new to us, that is) car, which has satellite radio, still in its trial period. He gets a one- or two-month trial, then so many months at $5 per, and then it bumps to its regular charge of $20. We’ve already decided that’s more than we want to pay to have it in one car, but as soon as I mentioned it to a friend, he said we have to get Sirius on the horn, inform them we won’t be paying that much, and let them counter. He pays $10/month, and that seems more reasonable.

Overeating and consumerism — I guess this means we’re in the holidays for real. It beats talking about Kash Patel turning the FBI into Donald Trump’s personal revenge machine. And the very real chance he’ll get confirmed. If you haven’t read Sherri’s thoughtful comment toward the end of the last thread, I suggest you do so now. I spend a lot of time thinking about this, too: How we can dig ourselves out of the morass we’re in. Because of my work experience, I spend much of it concentrating on the news media. The same NYT that gave us that wonderful cranberry tart also served up this headline over the weekend: Trump Disavowed Project 2025 During the Campaign. Not Anymore.

What? Say wha-? You’re joking! Of course, many of us were screaming HE IS LYING ABOUT THIS throughout the campaign, but so glad to hear he’ll now be held accountable, lol.

I don’t have the stomach for this now. Let’s make fun of Mitch Albom.

I’ve been saying for a while how I’m marveling at the anachronistic nature of Albom’s work; it really doesn’t seem to have changed one bit since he started this job in the ’80s. He pulls the same mangy rabbits out of his hat:

The one-line paragraph.

The repeating phrase (in this case, “rub your eyes,” often delivered in a one-line paragraph). The noodling, the telling us what we already know, the HOW BOUT DEM WOLVERINES AMIRITE message delivered, and re-delivered, through several hundred words. And then there’s the tortured simile:

On a bracing cold afternoon when Ohio State, at 10-1 and ranked No. 2 in the nation, and Michigan, at 6-5 and ranked somewhere between “Why” and “Bother?”, the Wolverines marched into Columbus like the fiercest theater critic at the biggest box-office play.

That makes zero sense. Critics go to plays in their opening days, not after they’ve become boffo box office. But as Boon says to Otter, “Forget it, he’s rolling.”

Also note that there’s no dateline, and all the quotes came from Fox Sports, which means Mitch watched the game on TV and filed a column about it. You could do that job! I bet Sherri, for one, would do it better.

But at this point, who cares? It’s the last weeks of the last good year. Let’s enjoy it as they play out.

Back to the basement for me, where we are reassembling my home gym after months of idleness (for the equipment, not me). The week is ours for the taking, so let’s.

What did you have for Sunday dinner? We just had Kenji Lopez-Alt’s kung pao chicken, and y’know what? It’s pretty damn good. I made it a little on the hot side, but it didn’t disappoint. Used bok choy instead of zucchini, may have had a heavy hand with the ginger, garlic and peppers, but who cares, it was delish.

This will be a weird week, with the holiday bearing down on us. So much prep work, then the feast, then the leftovers. I predict a lot of meals taken standing up, eaten out of refrigerator dishes. And pie.

While I would like nothing better than to move on, I spent some time wondering what the resistance, if any, will look like in Trump II, and what’s more, who will surprise us in the process. I wonder, for instance, about the military. I can maybe see certain troops participating in the mass imprisonment of immigrants, but when protests begin, will they shoot or brutalize their own countrymen and women? I just don’t see it. Of course, I didn’t think Trump would win, either, so.

What do you think? What’s the worst that can happen?

Hate you leave you with just this, but I have some food prep to do.

I was in Chicago summer before last, and Jeff Borden and I went to the club where Shadow Show was playing. At some point in the evening, he handed me a shot of some amber liquor and told me to go ahead, drink it.

I don’t worry that Borden will slip me a Pete Hegseth mickey, and I wasn’t even tipsy from the beer I’d been nursing, so I did, downing it in one go. My eyes bugged out of my head, my throat screamed for mercy and my brain started flashing neon ABORT signs.

“What,” I gasped, “was that?”

“Malört,” he said. “Otherwise known as the Chicago hello.”

I’m not super-big on liquor history, but I’d never heard of this stuff. Borden said it was made with wormwood, a word I recall mostly from Shakespeare. What is wormwood, anyway? All I can tell you is, don’t drink it.

But now, Malört is catching on, or so says the New York Times:

Malört is, in one word, unforgiving. Made from neutral spirits, wormwood and sugar, it tastes a little like sucking dandelion juice through a straw made of car tires. It is also kind of good. Intensely bitter, it’s herbaceous and a touch citrusy, as if you were to bite a grapefruit like an apple.

It is also, in five words, the unofficial liquor of Chicago.

Carl Jeppson, a Swedish immigrant to the city, peddled Jeppson’s Malört as a digestif as early as the 1930s. “It was the only liquor to survive Prohibition because no one believed that a human being would drink that on purpose, and that it had to be medicinal,” said J.W. Basilo, the manager of the Promontory and a bartender in Chicago for more than 20 years.

Intensely local to the Windy City, Malört “became the designated initiation shot, something you downed to prove your Midwest mettle — a difficult drink for a difficult place to live,” the story goes on.

Hence the Chicago hello. I noticed that the next day on Shadow Show’s Instagram stories, they posted a photo of all of them taking their Malört punishment. Kate noted something to the effect that Chicagoans have some strange ideas about what’s drinkable.

Now, though — and this is the point of the NYT story — Malört is spreading beyond Chicago, probably because hipsters cannot stand not being in on a single city’s digestif secret. There’s even a Malört-centric bar now, in New Orleans. That city has its own signature cocktail, the Sazerac, but it also has to serve lots of thirsty tourists who want to be tipsy, but don’t necessarily want to be served the usual watered-down Hurricane in a go-cup. Novelty is the soul of capitalism.

I guess what I’m saying is, if someone offers you this particular digestif after the Thanksgiving turkey, think twice before you say sure, love to.

And now another tough week comes to an end. I can’t stop thinking about Pete Hegseth raping that woman (allegedly, yes), his dog tags swinging over her face before he ejaculated on her stomach. A rapist nominates a rapist, of course.

Next week is Thanksgiving. I’m going to have to dig for something to be thankful for, but not really. There’s always something, if you have food, shelter and family love. It’s just how long that could last, know what I mean?

See you then, at least for a little while.