The older I get, the more of a grammar-and-usage pedant I become. The dumbass slang that every generation has can chap my ass, some days. The other day I saw the word obsessed to describe about 20 different things, from makeup to some nutritional supplement. I scrolled on, and learned that a particular influencer had declared this sweater made me reevaluate my entire life. That’s a powerful sweater, dear. You’ll be wearing that one a while.

Obsessed is up there with iconic in that it seems to be slung about most often by young women with vocal fry. OMG I am obsessed with this yoga mat. My new lip color has my husband shook. Kate introduced me to ate, which apparently means “to do well.” How were the shows in Canada? Oh, we ate.

Good to know.

I bring this up because… well, I’m not sure why. I saw a set of photos from Chicago this morning that were absolutely shocking, and in psychological self-defense, I needed to think about grammar and Uncrustables (amusing story, gift link) and respond to texts about the latest posting in the Wedding Attire Approval subreddit. Another old-person rant incoming: What the hell with these ridiculous wedding dress codes? When did people forget how to dress for a goddamn wedding? Going to a funeral? Wear black. Wedding? Something nice that’s not white. Job interview? Like the neatest, cleanest person who holds the job you want. Why complicate it, and where the hell do young people get off demanding black tie, especially at a time when virtually no one owns formal clothing anymore? The only wedding couples I’ve known who asked their guests to wear special clothing were getting married in non-traditional ceremonies and faiths, and even then they’re optional.

Maybe if we stopped shlepping through life in PJs and slippers, we wouldn’t have to do it this way.

That Uncrustables story is a wealth of information. As I recall, Uncrustables — basically a PB&J empanada busy moms keep in the freezer — were not favored by young Kate, so I only bought one once, at Cedar Point. But evidently they’re a cult favorite, and not just of children:

They’re not just a staple for kids (and the harried parents who have to feed them), they’re being wolfed down by the thousands in NFL locker rooms. Kansas City Chiefs star tight end Travis Kelce, a.k.a. the future Mr. Taylor Swift, revealed on his podcast that he scarfs down Uncrustables “probably more than I eat anything else in the world.” They’re often found at the finish lines of races, to refuel runners with carbs and the macronutrient of the moment, protein.

Who knew? Not I.

Those Chicago photos were really awful.

I was at a political fundraiser Friday. Never mind who– Oh, let’s not be coy. It was for Jocelyn Benson, who’s running for governor as a Democrat. I wasn’t there because I am a huge fan, although I think she’ll be the nominee and as usual, the people on the other side are ghastly. I was there because the event was being held at a friend’s former house, and she wanted to see it, three years later. I donated to justify having a glass of wine and some little phyllo-wrapped cheese things.

The wild card in the 2026 Michigan gubernatorial race is Mike Duggan, outgoing mayor of Detroit, who’s running as an independent. He’s not just any third-party flake, and has a chance to spoil either party’s chances, depending on the nominees. Given that Duggan has been a lifelong Democrat, it could easily be the Dems. Given that he has coddled the Detroit billionaire class (en route, to be fair, to transforming at least part of the city), it could also be the Republicans.

I mentioned this to someone during the chitchat portion of the evening, and she confidently asserted that Benson has little to fear from Duggan. And she knows this how? “AI says so.”

Which is the long way around to saying that in a very short time, a shocking number of people I know have integrated ChatGPT into their lives. They ask it the current value of a particular classic car, the chances of rain a week from Tuesday, to tell them a joke. Condense this document I don’t want to read. Give me some questions to ask this person when I talk to them. And so on.

I know I, too, use AI; I’m not naïve. I use Google, which now gives you an AI summary of your results whether you ask for one or not. If they sound fishy, I double-check them. I should always double-check them, because I’ve gotten straight-up hogwash more than once.

The other day, while lifeguarding, I couldn’t get the pace clocks — the natatorium wall clock that counts seconds in big digits, so swimmers can time their 50s and 100s — working correctly. So I turned them off with a shrug, figuring every minute spent fiddling over it is time I wouldn’t have eyes on the water, and that’s more important. Someone piped up, “Ask AI! It’ll tell you!”

The ones that really floor me are those who use AI to essentially do their jobs for them. The product is obvious — bland, anodyne, with the weird absence-of-humanity feel to it, which are then sold to clients. Sooner or later, the client will figure out what they’re being served and think, logically, what do I need this clown for? Way to put yourself out of business.

Do any of you do this? Is it worth it?

I finally figured out the pace clock via the time-honored tradition of asking someone who had the job before me. It turns out you have to set one to Lead and the other to Follow, and they sync themselves and work just fine.

It was a good weekend. Not much bloggage, but here’s a gift link: How a bad man got a good paramedic fired because he didn’t like what she said about Charlie Kirk.

Have a good week, all.

It’s color season.

Late but welcome, fall has arrived. I always note that there’s a week’s load of laundry a couple times a year that contains both shorts and at least one flannel shirt, and I guess it’s this week. It was 70 and muggy when I got up Tuesday morning, currently struggling to reach 50. Dinner last night was adjusted from chicken on the grill to BLTs. Can’t deny it: It feels great.

Check with me in another month, when the whining begins.

So. The week began at a gallop and has slowed to a forward canter. Coming back from my creative-writing class at Wayne State, on surface streets to avoid the freeway parking lot, I listened to “All Things Considered,” and wondered after a spell if it might be wiser for me to just quit paying attention to the news altogether. In an interview with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, he said (paraphrasing), “President Trump doesn’t read, and doesn’t know what ‘insurrection’ means.” The reporter, with her Bias Alert going WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP, said, “I think the president would disagree with you on that.” Gee, thanks, I feel so much better now. We wouldn’t want to let an American governor get away with speaking the truth, would we?

But I can’t stop, because that’s how I’m made. Before that, I heard the last few moments of an interview with Beth Macy, who has a book out this week. She was on “Fresh Air,” and had an op-ed in the NYT Sunday, and has this piece in the Atlantic today. Title: “What Happened to Ohio?” and yeah, it’s a gift link. It’s about Urbana, where Alan started his newspaper career and from which Macy hails. Turns out it’s not the place she grew up:

I was most shocked by what I gleaned from people I’d known the longest. My childhood friend Joy, a Black lay minister who had conducted my Mom’s celebration of life, revealed that she didn’t believe George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin. My niece’s husband, a type 1 diabetic, turned down not one but two life-saving transplants because the donors had taken COVID vaccines. When I spoke with my sister Cookie about my oldest son, Max, who was about to marry his husband, she used the Old Testament scripture from Leviticus to condemn homosexuality.

A friend asked recently what it felt like to spend time in a place I had once loved but no longer connected with, and I had to admit that my predominant emotion was pain. Often, I’d leave two or three days before my rental was up, eager to return home to my husband, my dog, and my largely privileged circle of friends who don’t espouse beliefs that repulse me.

Sigh. When does this shit end? Do we ever get out of it? I’m skeptical.

It’s been my experience that one of the best experiences one can have with art is to find a great piece of it before you know too much about it. There’s so much commentary, especially about movies — review shows, reviews, talk shows with clips, internet content, all of it. Don’t get me started on interviews with actors, etc., where SPOILER ALERT appears literally one word before the spoiler.

So, with all that said, I won’t spoil anything, or tell you too much, or anything at all. Just go see “One Battle After Another” and thank me later.

That was the highlight of the weekend, which was, as usual, filled with chores and, this weekend, yet another summer weekend — temps in the 80s. It won’t last past Monday, and I guess I should be sad, but I’m ready for fall.

And with that, I’ve kind of emptied my already shallow bin. Let’s try for better later this week.

When life grows a little overwhelming, as it’s been this week… Listen to me. “This week.” It’s Wednesday. And already we’ve had a whatever-that-was at Quantico yesterday, a government shutdown, deepfake racist AI coming from the Oval — it sometimes becomes too much. When I’m feeling outmatched by reality, I go to Reddit.

Reddit, the platform where no trivial topic is too small to create a community of fellow travelers to waste time discussing it all. My current fave subreddits: John and Carolyn and Wedding Attire Approval. In the first, lonely women rehash the lives and deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, endlessly. A typical post might be a closeup of Carolyn, and a question: Do you think she had very subtle rhinoplasty? Comments: 85. It’s really amazing. Wedding Attire Approval consists in large part of innocents wandering into a den of bitches, posting photos of perfectly fine dresses and asking if it’s appropriate for a guest at a wedding. The answer, frequently? NO. Forensic analysis of this dress reveals it was once carried through a room containing white thread! Therefore it cannot be worn to any wedding or wedding-related event!

I’ve known that women shouldn’t wear a white dress to a wedding — that’s for the bride — but I swear, these lunatics make up rules I never heard of. No white to a bachelorette party. No white to a rehearsal dinner. And the latest is when someone will post a photo of a light pink or pale blue dress, but it gets the veto because it might “photograph” white. Or a stunning floor-length dress with a white collar could be photographed from the wrong angle, suggest the guest might be the bride, and RUIN ALL THE PICTURES.

I know the great thing about the internet is, there’s a corner for everyone, and if the algorithm didn’t push it into my face all the time, I could forget it exists. But it does, and I can’t.

Meanwhile, here’s an analysis of the event at Quantico yesterday (gift link, natch):

It was a speech unlike any other and just like every other.

…Several hundred military commanders turned up at Quantico on Tuesday morning. Some had flown in for it from places as far away as Germany, Brussels, Japan and South Korea. They sat mostly in silence as Mr. Trump talked for 73 minutes about the same things he talks about almost every day, no matter where he is or to whom he is speaking.

He talked to the generals about Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the infamous autopen. He talked about the media. He talked about tariffs and the border. He talked about the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner. He talked about not being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.

He talked, in other words, exactly the same way he talks to rally crowds and the sycophants who gather around his table at Mar-a-lago. Only the military brass didn’t do what those crowds do — laugh and smile. They sat mostly stone-faced while President Wetbrain talked for…73 minutes. He told them he wanted American cities to serve as “training grounds” for soldiers; in other words, that he expected American troops to kill and wound Americans. What did he expect? Cheers? Clearly he did.

Lucian Truscott quotes from the same speech. It was chilling, not just because of the kill-your-countrymen thing, but the fact this man is obviously losing his marbles:

He began by attacking Biden, naturally, complaining that “We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day – every day, the guy’s falling down stairs – and I said, that’s not our president. We can’t have it. I’m very careful, you know, when I walk down stairs, I walk…very…slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just, try not to fall, ‘cause it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen, and it became a part of their legacy, you know. Walk nice and easy. You don’t have to set any records. Be cool! Be cool when you walk down, but don’t…don’t bop down the stairs. The one thing with Obama…I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen…da-da-da-da-teh-deh-bop-bop…I’ve never seen…he would go down those stairs, bop-bop, he wouldn’t hold on, he’d go down those stairs, I said, it’s great! I wouldn’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually, bad things are gonna happen, and it only takes one. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. This country was going to hell. We had nothing.”

And let’s not let that be overshadowed by this:

There were Black generals and admirals sitting amidst their white counterparts in that audience in Quantico today. Not one of them, white or Black, could have missed the rank racism when Trump imitated Barack Obama “bopping” down a set of stairs. Trump said he “never seen” anything like it, as if he were describing a tight end in a football game catching a difficult pass. None of them missed the racism when Trump mentioned, in speaking about “the nuclear” that there are two “N-words” you can’t say. Every person in that room knew what the other N-word is, and they got it that Trump was complaining that “political correct,” as he called it, had stopped its usage.

Ugh. Our president.

OK, I have an interview coming up that I must prep for. Carry on, enjoy your Wednesday, and we’ll see how it goes.

Jeez, what a week. What a weekEND. I take one hour off — one! — to have a wholesome swim, and emerge to learn that a man has driven through the wall of an LDS church, jumped out of his pickup firing, then set the whole church on fire. It is now a smoking ruin. Two people are dead, three if you count the shooter, picked off by the police, more in the hospital and likely still more under the collapsed roof of the church. Little is known beyond that, although if the photos from the scene in legit newspapers are to be believed, the pickup had bed-mounted American flags of considerable size, two of them.

Police say they’re searching for a motive, should one exist.

The church looks to be a total loss. You can see the shooter’s pickup at the bottom of the photo that is leading the story as I write this at roughly 5:30 p.m. Might change in a while, might not.

Now they’re saying there were IEDs in the truck. The killer’s said to be 40. Maybe an Iraq vet, who knows. It’s folly to try to speculate on these things. As always: More will be revealed.

Edit: The shooter was indeed an Iraq vet. Thomas Jacob Sanford of Burton, Mich. He looks exactly like about a zillion other guys his age running around the state. And yes, more will still be revealed.

So hey, that’s the weekend! Just another mass shooting that will be forgotten by Wednesday.

Hi, everyone. In the interest of posting three blogs a week, here’s a shortie. I wanted to share the wonderful photos Dorothy sent of the NN.c meetup in Arizona between her, Scout and Mike, aka Mr. Dorothy:

It looks like a wonderful time was had by all. Today, spider balls were on special at the market. I believe you civilians would call them osage oranges.

Enjoy your weekend, whatever it entails.

If you’ll allow me one more post about our Fort Wayne visit? Let me tell you what our walk-off gift was, courtesy of the Allen County Public Library’s world-class (and I do mean world-class) genealogy department:

The Homecoming organizers told us this was in the works, and said that if we wanted our personal family tree, to provide birth, death and cities for our parents and grandparents. I am one of those people mostly left cold by this stuff; at some point it started to strike me the way past-lives ninnies did, the ones who are always the reincarnation of Cleopatra or Henry VIII, never a guttersnipe in Victorian London or one of Cleopatra’s litter-carriers. But what the hell, why not, I thought, and coughed up the names and dates. And this is what I received in return:

Lordy. All that? Yes:

From the summation inside the front cover, this goes back five generations, to the great-greats. The last of the bunch was born in the 1830s, several in Germany or Switzerland. Some Civil War vets in there. One of my great-great grandfathers had charge of Abraham Lincoln’s bier as he lay in state in Indianapolis for 24 hours on his funerary trip back to Illinois. Another was, get this, a newspaperman.

I’m still working my way through this. Much of it is U.S. Census records, death certificates and the like, but for the first time, I’m starting to see the appeal of doing this research. I don’t carry but a few teaspoons of these old gents’ blood, but it’s fun to see what they did with the hands they were dealt, and how they were carried off. A few of cancer, stroke, some vague “illness” and the big cataclysm on my mother’s side, her father’s exit: “suicide by firearm.” I have a small medal that was his, awarded for bowling prowess:

He was a bank teller. I’m thinking I’ll have it made into a necklace.

If you want to dig up your roots, you won’t find a better place. The story was always that the only equal of Allen County’s collection was the Church of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, and the Library of Congress. I believe it.

So. Here’s a Sopranos joke, adapted for the times: An American walks into the Oval Office with a duck under his arm, and says, “This is the pig we elected.” The president says, “That’s not a pig, that’s a duck.” The American says, “I wasn’t talking to you.”

Doubt me? Don’t:

Over the summer, we learned (weirdly, via a social-media post by Jeanine Pirro) that Trump was planning to hang a row of paintings in the walkway adjacent to the Rose Garden, which connects the Executive Residence and the West Wing. …The portraits still haven’t been hung, but on September 21, White House photographers captured a new addition to the colonnade: a mock-up of a sign that reads “The Presidential Walk of Fame” in a large golden font.

Yep, that’s the pig we elected. Of the events of recent days, I have nothing to say that could be captured here. We elected a pig, and that’s that.

Happy Wednesday, eh.

We left Detroit for Fort Wayne sometime after 5 p.m. Tuesday, and after dealing with traffic and a gas stop, rolled into downtown around 8 p.m., well into full darkness. We were headed for the Bradley Hotel, new since we pulled up stakes in 2005. And even though it stands five floors and covers nearly a full block, Alan managed to miss the turn. (His navigator may have steered him wrong, but doesn’t remember.)

Around a couple of equally flummoxing blocks, we managed to find the valet lane and unload. “I don’t recognize the place,” Alan said. I pointed out Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island, cattycorner to the hotel. Didn’t help very much.

Which is to say that downtown has undergone a transformation, which this Homecoming event was intended to show off. The Fort Wayne Chamber invited about two dozen expats and partners, including our friends the Byrnes (former president of Parkview Hospital), Cosette Simon (first woman mayor, for 10 days, a long story), Zach Klein (co-founder of College Humor, Vimeo, Dwell, more), a former congresswoman, a sculptor, many others. And us. It was two days of showing off the city and hinting that investment in local startups would be welcome. Wining, dining, climbing on and off a bus and being encouraged to take a gift bag.

The short version of the itinerary: Touring the under-construction expansion of the Arts United Center, touring the Landing and Promenade Park, dinner at a fancy new restaurant, touring the fancy new restaurant owner’s even fancier new arts center, hearing his story (Sweetwater) followed by that of another local business success (Vera Bradley), meeting the mayor, touring the newly renovated G.E. plant (rechristened Electric Works in adaptive reuse), more business success stories, wrapping up with an evening at Parkview Field, the new(ish) downtown minor-league baseball stadium. The season’s over, but it’s enough of an event hub that we didn’t feel like we were in an empty space; there was a yoga class for roughly 100 taking place in left field.

The mood was friendly, which is to say, not really journalistic. I asked questions, but they were polite ones. Honestly, I wasn’t in a mood to challenge anyone over TIF funding. The results speak for themselves. When we left, downtown Fort Wayne was a wasteland. It isn’t anymore. There are hundreds of new apartments, people walking dogs everywhere, too many new restaurants to count. The out-migration has stopped, and young families are getting the message that it’s a place where housing is still cheap enough that you might be able to buy your own. The parks are beautiful. The rivers are finally getting the attention they deserve.

Does the city still have problems? Of course it does. But it also has an unmistakable shine. It doesn’t look like a place young people flee as soon as they collect their diploma.

Take Pearl Street. The whole time I lived there, it was known for a dirty bookstore, a strip club and gay cruising. A large industrial bakery covered several blocks. The fancy restaurant we ate at Tuesday night is on the ground floor of The Pearl, a new mixed-use building that faces it. Across the street is the Pearl Street Arts Center, both developed by the Sweetwater founder with some of the $1.5 billion he collected for selling a 75 percent stake in the company. He now owns the whole bakery building; the arts center is in part of it. They offer free or sliding-scale music lessons for every Fort Wayne Community Schools student who wants one. There are recording studios and performance spaces therein, all state-of-the-art.

We had coffee at the corner of Pearl and Harrison the first afternoon, and I flashed back to the last time I was in that particular doorway, sometime in the ’80s: There was a ferocious windstorm in progress, and the roof of a nearby building was coming apart in the gusts. A bunch of us had gone to lunch nearby, and the roofing material was flying through the air, some of it large enough to hurt a person. We crouched in that doorway, laughing, before running to a somewhat safer street to walk home on.

As I said, the city still has problems, and none are unique. Homelessness, racism, poverty the usual. But it’s a much nicer place to visit than it once was.

Of course, the graybeards at my old newspaper were opposed to all of this:

Should we give up on “downtown” as a concept whose time has come and gone, admit that trying to keep it on life support is a futile effort?

…As I write this, city officials are getting ready to celebrate the opening of a mixed-use facility they have engineered out of an abandoned General Electric facility downtown. I have been in and around that area for all my Fort Wayne time, and for the life of me I can’t see it succeeding. It’s a depressed area that will still look like a depressed area, so how often are people going to be thrilled about going there to shop or have a bite to eat?

The guy who wrote this was a near-agoraphobic, went to the same few restaurants year after year, and is dead now. Honestly, I don’t know how well Electric Works is really doing; it was beautiful, yes, but suspiciously depopulated when we visited. But I know what an abandoned factory looks like, living as I do in the world capital of them. And I salute the city for trying to turn this one around:

That same writer also disapproved of the new baseball stadium, because it replaced a “perfectly good one” out on charmless, ugly Coliseum Boulevard. The new one was built with TIF money, but it belongs to the city and is universally acknowledged to be the catalyst that started the turnaround.

Some people just don’t like change. I hope I’m never one of them.

Some more pix:

I ate breakfast every day at the place I used to take Kate after a library visit. Cindy’s Diner — the very best.

And now we’re back. What happened in our absence, other than the mad king’s ravings? FWIW, I don’t think the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk sent those texts. But that’s just me. And more will be revealed.