I had a few moments to kill Tuesday, and instead of going to the Schvitz like I should have, I started playing around with an AI image generator. I started with a request kinda-sorta tied to one of my freelance clients, and tried to generate a copyright-free image similar to one that, due to an designer’s mistake, ended up costing the company a fair chunk of change.

I believe in copyright, and I got an education in it when I worked at Deadline Detroit, where a few blunders with photos ended up getting years of our picture library trashed outright, lest they slip back onto the site and cost more money. The most interesting thing I learned? That college professors of entomology, i.e. the study of bugs, can make bank policing the unauthorized use of their .edu archives. Entomologists take lots of pictures of bugs, and often upload them to their university websites as part of their work. Exterminators need pictures of bugs to sell their services, and in an earlier era of the web, their web developers would often just grab a random snapshot of a cockroach and slap it on their business website. Then Google Image Search came along, followed by lawyers using spiders (ha-ha) to search for duplicate photos, and the next thing you knew Professor Crawlybug would get an email with a lawyer’s pitch that somebody, somewhere, owes him money.

We were very careful about that stuff at Deadline. I wrote about a friend whose photo of Detroit was stolen, and is probably still being stolen, repeatedly.

But I figure AI is going to change that. Need a picture of a cockroach? Ask an image generator to make one for you. The bugs (ha-ha) probably still have to be worked out; based on the many six-fingered human beings who turn up in these things, they’d probably give you a cockroach with nine legs, but oh well.

Anyway, the scene I was trying to approximate was a generic car-crash photo, nothing gory, just the sort of thing a personal-injury attorney might use in their advertising. My prompt was first for an auto accident, with police on the scene, and their caution tape in the foreground. Google’s new AI image generator, Bard, flat-out refused; it can’t depict scenes of violence. I toned down the accident and asked that it be minor and out of focus, and got the same reply. So I tried another site, same request. Here’s the best of the four it offered:

Um, OK. It appears the police car was involved in the crash, maybe because the driver was distracted, thinking about why the person who painted the cars couldn’t spell “police.”

I asked again, and made it both more and less specific: Police lights out-of-focus in the background, foreground with yellow tape reading CAUTION POLICE. The great digital artist thought about it, and gave me this:

Photographers? Don’t quit your day jobs, at least not yet.

What else is happening today? New Shadow Show video/single, that’s what. Call the Moms For Liberty! Denounce them! They could use the publicity.

Otherwise, it’s just Wednesday. Have a good one.

Even allowing for the usual bitching and moaning, this has been an exceptionally gloomy winter. Warmer than usual, which means little or no snow, and clouds, heavy clouds, for days and days and days.

So yesterday was sunny, and we spent all day indoors. Alan rented a steamer to clean the kitchen-floor grout, and rental agreements don’t care about the weather.

Plus, it was cold. But the floor looks great, brand-new. Almost offsets the looming expense of the basement repairs, but what are you gonna do?

Lately I’ve been thinking about selling this house. Not selling-selling it, but having it in the kind of shape where if we had to sell it, it would be sellable. It reminds me of the two-day house hunt that led to us buying this one, a blur of a weekend where we walked through every house in Grosse Pointe in our price range, and saw so many tragedies. Hideous carpet that was brand-new, obviously thrown down to make the place sellable, and why the hell would anyone do that? Why try to guess at the prevailing carpet preferences of the market, when you could just stipulate that the seller will install new carpet of the buyer’s choosing, or adjust the price to allow for — which is almost certainly what the market of that time would have wanted — restoration or installation of hardwood?

There was an old-people house where everything old people tend to stack on a dining-room table had been thoughtfully relocated to the dining-room chairs, as though someone was holding a dinner party for dozens of old magazines. There was the cat-pee-smell house. There was the bedroom painted for a Red Wings fan, and I am talking the reddest red you ever saw, a four-coats-of-primer red. There was the bungalow where a woman with bipolar mental illness had lived, with every home-improvement project half-done — the floors half-refinished, the woodwork paint half-stripped. Her estate was selling after her suicide.

Then, this place, which was Acceptable. We’ve redone every room by now, and it’s finally pretty much the way we want it, which means it’s not for sale, but sellable.

Staging is the big thing now, of course. Some friends with a big, expensive place to unload went that route. The stager came through it like a good-taste tornado, took out half the furniture, put a bunch of big paintings on the walls, all that. She even put her own stemware in the glass-fronted cabinets. Fresh flowers everywhere. Our friends checked into a nice hotel in Birmingham (the Detroit suburb, not the Alabama city) for the weekend, and came home to an asking-price offer on the kitchen island. Contrast that to some neighbors who listed at what agents call an “aggressive” price point and couldn’t even slap a fresh coat of paint on the dusty-rose walls. It sold, but for far less than they started at.

Real estate is like a religion for some people in this country, but not me. However, I peek in at the churches from time to time.

I’d throw in some links at this point, but I saw a few of J.D. Vance on one of the Sunday shows yesterday, and it was disheartening enough to put me off politics for a day or two. For shame, Ohio, electing this husk of a man. For shaaaaame.

You guys, I am shocked this story hasn’t gotten more attention from the prestige media. It’s based on a government report, not “sources.” The revelations – that the White House has its own pharmacy, and under Trump, it handed out prescription meds like Smarties on Halloween – are startling. And yet, it seems to have bloomed and withered in one news cycle, and what stories were written concentrated on the cost, mainly of the use of name-brand drugs when generic equivalents were available.

That the White House has its own medical unit and pharmacy isn’t surprising at all – we’re talking about the commander-in-chief and support staff. But in the Trump administration, it sounds like it operated more like your skeezy cousin who knows someone who works night shift in a hospital pharmacy, and in some cases the guy at the end of the bar with a backpack who keeps going in and out, but not to smoke and the bartender keeps his stool open.

The pharmacy freely dispensed over-the-counter meds, no big deal, every office I’ve worked in has an unsecured cache of Tylenol and so forth. But they also liberally prescribed sleep aids like Ambien (defensible, but a somewhat bigger deal). And narcotic pain medications, including oxycodone, fentanyl, morphine and so on. (Bigger deal.) Also, Provigil, and now I’m paying attention. Provigil is described as an “anti-tiredness” drug, but generally speaking you need a diagnosis of narcolepsy to score it, although I’m sure the dealer at an Ivy League dorm can hook you up during finals week. Also. Also! Ketamine, a highly abused sedative. And Versed, a serious benzo, given to people about to go into surgery, for crying out loud.

I mean, I can understand why someone working in the Trump White House might want to be high all day, every day, but this is ridiculous. Provigil for jet lag at a G20 summit? I get it. But ketamine? Who the hell you planning to date-rape, Stephen Miller?

Roy Edroso, over on his excellent Substack, has been writing very funny short scenes featuring you-know-who ever since he noticed the constant sniffing during the first debate. He (Roy) has concocted a running gag about “the Formula,” the inhalable mix of crushed tablets that none of us would be surprised Trump consumes all day every day. It’s always fun when a Formula scene arrives in my morning inbox. And now we know: It probably wasn’t much of an exaggeration at all.

Now it’s snowing, way more than I expected when I checked the forecast this morning. A good day to stay inside and watch the fat fluffy flakes, maybe read a book or three. Think I will.

Needless to say, Detroit has Lions mania this weekend. Everyone’s wearing the merch. A guy was walking the Eastern Market yesterday with his beard dyed blue. There was a drone show Saturday night. Flags flying from every house. The stadium sold 20,000 tickets, even though they’re playing in San Francisco; the game will be displayed on the stadium’s TV screens, a move that a local sportswriter estimates will earn the team another million bucks.

Here at the Nall/Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere, we’ll likely make pulled-chicken barbecue sandwiches and eat ’em in front of the TV. However, I’m going to try to sincerely not care who wins, because my support is, for any team, the kiss of death. There are so many ways to get your heart broken, why ask for another? And so.

Pretty nice weekend, if you forget that we discovered a wet spot in our basement, which led to Alan ripping all the paneling in the rec room down, taking down the insulation, and discovering several large cracks in the foundation. They’re not super-serious, but it’s not the sort of thing that makes one jump up and down with glee. It’ll mean Basement Guys to fix the cracks, then replacing the stuff we ripped out, and at this point I’m just going to shrug and say oh well shit happens. At least we didn’t have a flood.

Then, today, I did a driving tour of Pontiac with a journalist friend. “Over there’s the liquor store where the closing door hit someone, so he shot the guy who didn’t hold the door. …That’s the cemetery where the caretaker saw a homeless guy walking through with a bag of groceries, and they found out he was living in a crypt from the Civil War. … Lotsa shootings around here. …Gang on this street. …Oh, let’s turn in here. It’s a great little neighborhood.” And so on. I purely love journalists’ tours. We see different things than most people.

With that, the kickoff and first score has already happened, so I’m-a watch. Let’s hope I don’t jinx ’em. Go Lions.

I neglected to mention one detail of my Miami trip: Passing along the causeway to Miami Beach, we had an excellent view of Royal Caribbean’s brand-new Icon of the Seas cruise ship, in the Port of Miami, just days away from her maiden voyage.

You don’t know what the Icon is? Well, check it OUT, friends. It’s only what appears to be the world’s largest cruise ship, “the largest waterpark at sea,” with a fact sheet that must be read to be believed:

20 TOTAL DECKS
18 GUEST DECKS

2,350 CREW
(INTERNATIONAL)

2,805 STATEROOMS

5,610 GUESTS
(DOUBLE OCCUPANCY)

7 POOLS AND
9 WHIRLPOOLS

6 RECORD-BREAKING
WATERSLIDES

1,198 FEET, 365 METRES LONG

BUILT AT
MEYER TURKU, TURKU, FINLAND

It’s all caps because I copy/pasted it off the fact sheet, sorry. Also: There are eight separate “neighborhoods” onboard, which I suspect is designed to make this enormous floating city seem smaller, somehow, although if small is what you’re after, why not book a smaller ship? Dumb question, I know. Cruising on this vessel is all about what you’ll tell the folks back home upon your arrival.

It’s as long as the longest Great Lakes freighters, and as tall as…can’t say. It looks weird and top-heavy, but that’s probably my uneducated eye. I can only say that, judging from the view from the causeway, I’d rather be towed behind in a dinghy than go aboard. I recall too many stories about norovirus, Covid, and what was the one that went dead in the water somewhere off the coast of Alabama a few years ago? CNN covered it like the Hiroshima bomb, and maybe that’s to be expected, as surely some of the passengers stranded aboard longed for the sweet fiery release of a nuclear explosion. I remember looking at the long-lens video shots of the ship shimmering in waves of heat coming off the Gulf of Mexico, and thinking: Fuck it, I’d go overboard and swim for it.

But people who cruise purely love cruising, and if that’s what they want, bless ’em. I wonder what the Finnish shipbuilders thought of this thing as they assembled it.

As I write this, the voters of New Hampshire are making their wishes known. This guy is surely one of them, and his story has been a minor social-media topic the last few days, and why not:

BEDFORD, N.H. — “This,” Ted Johnson told me, “is what I hope.” We were here the other day at a bar not far from his house, and we were talking about Donald Trump and the possibility he could be the president again by this time next year. “He breaks the system,” he said, “he exposes the deep state, and it’s going to be a miserable four years for everybody.”

“For everybody?” I said.

“Everybody.”

“For you?”

“I think his policies are going to be good,” he said, “but it’s going to be hard to watch this happen to our country. He’s going to pull it apart.”

As the story goes on, it’s plain this guy is lying. It’s not going to be hard for him to watch, whatever scenario this Northwoods idiot has in his head. He’s going to love it, plainly love it, because it’s going to punish everyone he dislikes, and that is a very long list.

It starts with his brother, from whom he is estranged, because what is family compared to Donald Trump, avenging angel?

Johnson started talking about “Russia-gate” and “Biden’s scandals” and Hunter Biden. What, I wondered, did Hunter Biden have to do with Nikki Haley? “She’s not going to hold anybody accountable for what they’ve done,” Johnson told me. “People need to be held accountable. That’s why you’ve got to break the system to fix the system,” he said. “Because it’s a zero-sum game right now. And to be honest with you, the Democrats are genius. They did anything they could do to win and gain power, even if they lie, cheat, steal. … What they’re doing is they’re destroying the country. Who could bring it back?” He answered his own question: “Trump’s the only one.”

Don’t want to over-paste here, but there is plenty-plenty more, and lest you think this guy is a trod-upon Deplorable, think again. He’s well-off, retired military with a great work-from-home job, a big house worth about three-quarters of a million, and more anger than you’d expect from a man living so well.

I used to think the people who said that MAGA was all about Trump giving people permission to hate others were a little bit dramatic. They weren’t. They flatly despise people they don’t understand, and it makes them feel good to do so.

And so they do.

OK. It has rained, drearily and near-freezingly, all the livelong day. School was cancelled last night, so no morning swim for me. So I’m feeling puffy and thinking I should maybe scrub a bathroom or something.

You guys, I meant to check in at least a couple times this past week. I took some work along, figured I’d squeeze a few notes in. But the warmth and torpor of South Beach took hold and I mostly spent my free time napping, chilling and wandering around looking at the ocean or the girls walking the street in bikinis or whatever.

We found a great dive bar, the kind of place where, when “War Pigs” comes on the jukebox, everybody sings along:

We found a lizard on the sidewalk:

We found the beach, complete with an offshore billboard, because American capitalism never sleeps:

And on Friday I made my way up to Palm Beach, to see the sucking vortex of tacky, Mar-a-Lago:

I met up with an old colleague there, also a journalist. We watched planes come in low over MaL on their approach to the airport in West Palm. She said one sign that Himself was in residence during his presidency was when they didn’t do that, on the orders of the Secret Service. She had lots of little factoids like that; Carolyn should be a tour guide. Don’t think you can sneak your drone in from the water side, either:

Being on the ground, though, I could see why a rich lawyer of my acquaintance sneered at Mar-a-Lago, which he called badly located, too close to the road that allows any old prole to look at your place. Of course, some people like the proles looking at their place. No one was ready for one to become president.

Later, we decamped to the Breakers, where they were playing, no kidding, croquet:

And then I got back on the Brightline higher-speed train and made it back to Miami in an hour and change.

A good trip. Now to climb back on the Dry January wagon for the next 10 days.

One thing I did in the early/late hours in my hotel room: Watched cable news, just to remind me that cutting cable was the best decision we’ve made in a while. The constant, never-ending blah-blah about the Iowa caucuses was too much for me. Especially when none of it captured details like his, from Politico:

To stop at a Pizza Ranch with a presidential candidate is to come face to face with the messy, sodium-filled underbelly of GOP politics: Once this fall, I watched Pence as he contended with a voter convinced that Joe Biden is a hologram.

Or this, from the WashPost:

Brian Laures, 52, said he had been star-struck meeting the former president at an event in Mason City earlier in the month. Laures was enlisted as a caucus captain by the Trump campaign to recruit pledges to show up to vote for Trump on Election Day. He had contacted more than 50 people, he said, and passed out dozens of yard signs.

“The aura that man carries around is tremendous. He has absolute confidence,” he said. “I loved what he did with our country. You know, closing up our border, getting Black people working, lowest unemployment, everybody was working.”

God, these fucking morons. And we focus the attention of a great nation on them, for weeks at a time.

At least it swatted Vivek Ramaswamy back to Columbus. Seems the voters of Iowa had different reasons for disliking him than mine, however:

Sigh.

Well, we picked a good week to be gone. It’ll be rain and melting for the week ahead at this latitude. I can handle that. Hope you can, too.

Finally: Go Lions.

MAGA types love to talk. That, and watch movies. They must have “Braveheart” and “The Patriot” running in loops in their houses, and over time, the dialogue seeps into their subconscious, and then out their mouths. My assessment is charitable in that I believe they’re mostly just shit-talkers, but even shit-talkers are responsible for what they say, which brings me to this:

Note the paywall, so no link. But here’s the gist:

There was a recount in a local election in December that “got heated.” Recounts are public events, so:

The event drew attendees who were investigating whether there was some sort of wrongdoing in the election, and it became tense.

And then:

At one point in the day, a person, who hasn’t yet been identified by law enforcement, was overheard saying (the county elections director) was going to be “hanged for treason,” (that same director) told The Detroit News in an interview Tuesday.

The recount turned out the way almost all of them do, in that it didn’t change the result and only shifted the totals by one vote:

But on Dec. 16, a day after (the recount), the Michigan Republican Party issued a press release, saying a “citizen-led investigation,” including a “canvassing mission” of homes in Royal Oak, found some voters who said they had cast ballots in the election but their votes were allegedly not reflected in city records.

“This is a time for Michigan Republicans to stand together, regardless of differing perspectives and fight to eliminate election corruption and ensure that no Michigan voters are disenfranchised due to derelict behavior of election officials,” Michigan Republican Party Chairwoman Kristina Karamo said in the mid-December press release. “We will not stand by and see our voices diminished or our presence deleted by dictatorial democrats.”

(The elections director) said some individuals at the recount wanted county officials to investigate the claims, but their allegations fell outside the scope of a recount, which is focused on tallying ballots.

This is so typical of these ignoramuses: Show up at a hearing where the activity is constrained by law to one thing, demand another thing, then yell “dictatorial democrats” when it fails, and then someone says “hanged for treason” to just put the cherry on top.

You watch: If this person is charged, they’ll howl about the Deep State uniparty, blah blah blah. “Hanged for treason” sounds real Mel Gibson-y, like something the patriots of old would do.

(I’m reminded of the first Indiana Jones movie, when he faces a foe swinging a scimitar around all fancy-like. Jones rolls his eyes, pulls out a revolver and shoots the guy. I mean, why is hanging always the preferred punishment of these idiots? The potential for spectators would be my guess, but you can make a show out of a firing squad and not have to build a scaffold.)

Anyway, these idiots are getting on my nerves. Fortunately, they’re destroying themselves. You’ve probably heard about the turmoil within the state GOP, and how the state committee tried to remove the above-mentioned Karamo at a meeting last weekend. But she is telling them she’s not going, and now there are lawsuits being teed up on both sides. It’s a People’s Front of Judea v. the Judean People’s Front all the way down the line, and Michigan Democrats are reacting exactly the way you’d want them to, which is to say: By not making a sound, a statement, or so much as a peep. When your enemies are destroying themselves, don’t interfere, etc.

So. Winter has arrived. We’re supposed to get snow today, and then next week, a deep cold snap. I, however, will not be here. A few weeks back, a friend called to pitch a girlfriends’ week away and I said OK, sure, I’m in. So where will I be while the temperatures settle into the single digits here? MIAMI. I am overcoming my distaste for all things Florida to sit poolside and sip tasty drinks. (Dry January is taking a time out, too, but I’m not going to rip the knob off or anything.) Maybe I can finally beat this respiratory crud.

But I’ll have my laptop, so no break planned here.

I was foolish enough to think I’d wake up Tuesday ready to resume my swimming routine, but at 2 a.m., once again, it was cough-cough-cough-cough for a couple hours. At 5 I gave up and thought maybe something bland and soft on my stomach might help me drop off, and began the day with Raisin Bran.

It didn’t really improve from there, but I went out in the driving rain to buy some OTC cold remedies. I’m going to nuke my body with Nyquil tonight and get seven hours come hell or high water.

And I actually feel fairly OK. Except for the lack of sleep.

But never mind. Confined to soft chairs as I was today, I read this thing in Politico, exploring why the MAGA right is so obsessed with sex trafficking.

Well before MAGA, I’d noticed how these lurid sex-trafficking (but never labor trafficking) stories flowered among the Karens and Kens of America, who may or may not be MAGA but were MAGA-adjacent, shall we say. The stories about girls being abducted from malls, and their mothers from mall parking lots. The “Taken” films. This idea that women, anywhere, and sometimes children, can be snatched off the street or some other public place, never to be seen again. When anyone who’s even noddingly familiar with the issue knows the trafficker is almost always someone known to the victim, and isn’t likely to end up on a sheikh’s (or Jeffrey Epstein’s) jet, bound for a Qatari nest of prostitution. But you all know this.

The Politico piece is a Q&A with Mike Rothschild, who wrote “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything” and (this is my fave title) “Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories.”

As is usually the case, the Clintons live rent-free in these dolts’ heads:

What is it about the Clintons that captivates far-right conspiracy theorists like this?

Part of it is that it’s already been three decades of this: The Clinton conspiracy industry started in the early 90s. It started with stuff like Whitewater, Travelgate, stuff that is ancient history now. But there was a really well-funded, very organized and popular effort to bring the Clintons down. And then of course, it resulted in the impeachment, it resulted in the dump truck full of conspiracies about Hillary Clinton when she ran for president. And even though they’re not really in the public eye much anymore, it’s so prolific that conspiracy theorists have stuck with them because they know what works. They’re just like a classic rock band playing the hits.

Which reminded me of a photo I took in a Detroit used bookstore a while back:

My brother had asked for a loathsome Clinton book for Christmas, and I was determined to look for a used copy before I paid the writer for one. Check out that chunk of reprinted Wall Street Journal reporting on Whitewater — remember that? And that was only one shelf. There were at least 20 different books on the Clintons, nearly all of them cut from the same cloth. As Rothschild says, the hits.

But it’s the salaciousness of the pedophilia accusations that always squicked me out, and I think Rothschild is right again here:

There’s always been a certain amount of salaciousness in these conspiracy theories, and there are theories going back about the awful sexual depravity of the Catholics or later on of the Jews. So you’re always going to find a certain amount of attention paid to any kind of conspiracy theory involving sexual proclivity of trafficking. And if it involves children, people immediately just lose their mind — even if these children don’t exist. There are no children who have been trafficked because of Pizzagate because Pizzgate isn’t real.

But if you just put out the suggestion there, it grabs ahold in a way that is difficult to dislodge. I think a lot of it has to do with antisemitism. I think a lot of it has to do with fear of the occult and Satanic panic. So you get all of these things that are mixed together: the anti-Jewish sentiment, the fear of Satanism. And, of course, now it extends to social media. So you have these powerful figures, in media, in politics, in culture, academia. It’s very easy to kind of put these people together as part of this vast conspiracy. And if there’s a conspiracy of them, well, they’re probably doing horrible things to children, too, because that’s what evil people do.

I hadn’t considered the ancient roots of antisemitism being the universal solvent here, but he’s right. One of the oldest hatreds, still a classic.

But this is the most important part, and why it’s pointless to try to change their minds:

Disinformation and conspiracy theories spread so quickly and so readily on social media, while the rest of us are doing our research and writing our articles and doing our interviews, trying to figure out what this actually means. The people who believe this stuff have already decided what it means. And they don’t want to be told differently.

Twitter and people like Alex Jones and people like Steve Bannon, they have an alternative media ecosystem. These are not fringe people anymore. This is not the guy standing outside the football stadium waving a sign about the end is coming. This is a massive industry. You’ve got billions of dollars being pumped into misinformation, into these products, into these podcasts, into these books. It’s a job for a lot of these people, and they’re very good at it. They spread this stuff very quickly. They know it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not, their audience doesn’t care.

So, good news: You can give up trying. And enjoy the midpoint of this miserably gloomy week.

I hope you all had a pleasant Insurrection Anniversary Weekend. The observances around here were minimal, mostly a lot of coughing, mostly on Alan’s part. Me, I think I may be over it, but as always, more will be revealed. Probably Monday. (On edit: It is now Monday. Still sick, but not terribly so.) We watched “Maestro” and were underwhelmed. Made salmon. Did the laundry.

Now I’m killing Sunday night scrolling through Golden Globes photos. Some astonishingly ugly turnouts, even considering it’s the starter event for awards season and often a little off-the-wall. Tom and Lorenzo liked this, but OMG no, Bella Ramsey, I don’t care if you’re nonbinary, this is not a goddamn bowling league banquet:

They also loved this, but I’m a hard no on peplums pretty much everywhere:

That’s Da’Vine Joy Randolph, from “The Holdovers.”

We’re in full agreement on Meryl Streep, however:

(We both loved it.)

Moving on to my new Monday hate-read: Paul W. Smith, who’s a local talk-radio host published by The Detroit News, where he files no more than six or seven paragraphs of prose so slight it barely qualifies as elevator small talk between the 10th and 25th floor. What’s more, they put it behind a paywall, because lord knows only the readers who pay for the paper should have the privilege of reading this:

Aside from many religious related exclamations of “miracles” over the years, one of the most famous such exclamations/questions of our lifetime had to be on Feb. 22, 1980, when extraordinary sportscaster Al Michaels blurted out, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” at the end of the United States’ 4-3 upset of the USSR in the 1980 Olympic hockey semifinals in Lake Placid, New York. The U.S. then went on to win the gold medal.

I have a new miracle. In fact, I am proclaiming it the first one of 2024.

The miracle at Japan’s Haneda Airport. Japan Airlines flight 516.

That long windup in the first graf makes me chuckle, it’s so full of cheese — “exclamations/questions,” the precise date, “extraordinary” Al Michaels, the full quote, the score, the date again, the city, the medal. Because lord knows this obscure moment from sporting history needs to be fully illuminated in the opening sentence. I’m surprised he didn’t mention the movie, too.

Then, the technique I’m calling the Albom Drop: But I have a new one. [new paragraph] The new thing.

More cut-and-paste from the wire services follows, detailing the crash in Japan, etc. etc. And he still manages to get the miraculous escape, in which all the passengers survived, wrong:

The well-trained crew of 12, along with a veteran pilot with 12,000 hours of flight experience, led to a relative absence of panic while passengers remained seated awaiting instructions.

See, I differ on this. I’m sure the crew did their jobs. But what saved the 379 people aboard wasn’t the crew. It was the fact they’re Japanese, raised in a culture where following instructions for the greater good of the collective is a bedrock value. If Japanese passengers in a clutch situation are told to get up, leave everything behind and swiftly exit via the inflated slides, they’re going to do it without an argument.

Anyone who’s flown on an American airline knows exactly how this would have ended at one of our airports. Fifty people might have made it off, and the rest would have been barbecued in jet fuel as passengers clawed at the overhead compartments, trying to rescue their laptops, wallets or favorite shoes, angrily pushing back at anyone who tried to hurry them toward the exits, screeching I HAVE A WORK PRESENTATION ON THAT COMPUTER AND MY BONUS DEPENDS ON IT.

Eight paragraphs, due to the Albom Drop. If it took him 10 minutes to write, he took a bathroom break in the middle.

More photos? Yes. Here’s one for my Columbus readers. I was telling Alan some Dispatch stories the other day, and recalled the Bonhams, a married couple who presided over the Sunday books page. We only saw them one day a week. Fridays were payday in the newsroom, and in those days before direct deposit, it meant everyone came in on Fridays — all the regional correspondents, the farm reporter (who wore bib overalls, and was hilarious), and the contributors like the Bonhams, who assembled and proofed their Sunday page. They were…well, “old-fashioned” would be the polite adjective. They took over from another weirdo, whose singular accomplishment of note was keeping books he considered “dirty” off the paper’s best-seller lists. I don’t remember how he did it — it was before my time — but Marge, our bridal reporter, said he was furious when “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” sat atop the lists for months at a time. I don’t know if he asterisk’d or simply ignored it, but if you had a book that did unexpectedly well in Columbus during the 1970s, that might be the reason.

Anyway, the Bonhams were cut from the same cloth. One of my colleagues described their ideal volume as “Twenty Years of Steam Trolleys,” and that’s pretty close. But they also hankered to be authors themselves, and when the Dispatch agreed to print a collection of their columns in book form, they came up with the perfect title:

I didn’t buy it, or even nick it out of the library, no. I told Alan this story, which he found hilarious. A few days later, UPS delivered it to our doorstep. The used bookseller was clearly so thrilled to get this dog out of her collection, she threw in another small-press volume, something called “Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction.”

I’ve been paging through the Bonhams’ prose for a few days. My fave so far is “Some Books That Press My Anger Buttons,” which I’ll summarize for you: Books that tell the reader how to succeed with no thought of others; books that run down America; books with “vulgar scenes and bad language”; and “books that exploit celebrities.” This column contains my favorite line so far: An author I know, who is a good writer and is working on a book, is being pushed by his publisher to put a homosexual scene in the manuscript. “Never!” says the author. “Even if it means my book will never be published.”

Seeing as how I’ve gone on at length beating up on three writers, let me finish with some praise: This biblioholic received Zadie Smith’s “The Fraud” for Christmas, and is enjoying it very much. Happy Monday, all, and send healing vibes this way.

All of a sudden, the young people I know are having babies. Not Kate’s crew, but the slightly older ones, the ones in their 30s. I went to a baby shower in the spring, a more casual one this fall, and now there’s one on the calendar for this month. I want to give all the parents what they ask for on their registries, but also my gift of knowledge, and uppermost in mind is this:

You won’t need most of this stuff.

Not that I am stingy, but it’s hard not to be awed by the sheer quantity of stuff new mothers are told they have to buy, a truth when I was pregnant, and one that persists today. And so much of it – so, so much – will be used little, or not at all. You need burp cloths, yes, but any old cloth will do; I found a six-pack of cheap cloth diapers did just fine. You need clothing for the little shaver, but shoes are entirely optional until they start walking. And while it pains me to say this, say it I must: Give up the dream of being an eco-warrior and using cloth diapers for anything other than spit-up cleanups: There’s a reason this is Pampers’ world and we’re all just living in it. If it scratches too hard at your conscience, find a brand that isn’t an environmental disaster and stick with it.

One modern trend I approve of: The one where guests are asked to bring a book and sign it to the baby. I can never disapprove of books. But after they’ve gone through all those infant board books, again I whisper: The public library is an excellent resource. Not all parents have the outstanding Allen County Public Library just down the road, but “move to Fort Wayne” isn’t an option for most of them.

Anyway, I know a lucky baby who’s getting a Poppleton book. Advanced for reading on their own, but fine for reading to them, once they can sit up and appreciate Poppleton’s world. It was between that and the McDuff books. And everything by Rosemary Wells. And so, so many others. No one embraces reading to a child as enthusiastically as an older mother.

OK, just added “Good Dog Carl” to my Amazon cart. You can’t get a good start in life without a copy of “Good Dog Carl.”

There’s much going on in the world, but today my interest is drawn to something I wrote a couple of years ago. I only recently learned that a Michigan U.S. representative traveled to Uganda — fucking UGANDA — to do this:

U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Tipton) traveled to the African nation in October for that country’s National Prayer Breakfast, during which he encouraged Uganda to “stand firm” in its Anti-Homosexuality Act, which was signed into law in May by President Yoweri Museveni, and includes the death penalty for those who are determined to be “serial offenders.”

Walberg began his remarks by applauding Ugandan Member Parliament Cecilia Ogwal, who he said came second only to God, after earlier in the prayer breakfast she compared support for LGBTQ+ individuals as an attack on God.

It so happens I know a gay Ugandan. He’ll be an American eventually, but the last I checked on him, he still had permanent asylum status, and was waiting out the year before he could apply for a green card. That’s when I wrote about him, after having known him casually/socially for a few years.

As I pointed out in my column, Alistair enjoyed many advantages people coming in on the southern border don’t have, mainly education, language skills and a certain amount of money. But even so, I was struck by just how hard it is to drive to an airport with the clothes on your back and whatever you could fit in a suitcase, but a one-way ticket and say goodbye to everything you’ve known. Make no mistake, he grew up with the sort of advantages an upper-middle-class child enjoys in modern Africa, but he still had to flee his home and country. Meanwhile, this Moody Bible Institute grad strokes the people who drove him out. Disgusting.

OK, I’m going to try to navigate a shower with my seasonal crud (not Covid, yay) and then take Wendy for a mani-pedi.