Georgia, and the country, dodged a bullet on Tuesday. I’m sure others here felt the way I did when I looked at the still-whisker-thin margin and thought: Lord, there were that many people willing to gamble on Herschel Walker? I can’t even look at photos of him for more than a few seconds; seldom has such a dim light shone from a man’s eyes. Of course, now the off-the-record rats are scrabbling to the nearest reporter:

Interviews with a dozen campaign staff members and Republican operatives working with the Walker campaign suggest that it wasn’t just the candidate who had flaws — the campaign itself was hampered by poor decision-making.

Some said that Walker and his wife, Julie Blanchard Walker, never fully empowered his team to make decisions, frequently questioning suggestions and plans by veteran campaign operatives. The pair insisted on spending what aides described as an “excessive” amount of time poring over proposals for every campaign stop, bottlenecking planning. That included wanting to spend significant time in heavily Democratic areas to woo Black voters, a problem that worsened in the runoff when staff wanted Walker to focus exclusively on mobilizing Republicans who had just voted for him in the general election.

Staffers said Blanchard Walker even suggested her husband should be winning as much as 50 percent of the Black vote in Georgia, regularly commenting that the campaign needed “to be getting him in front of his people, in front of his community,” as one person working on the campaign recalled.

A Republican victory in the Georgia Senate race — even with a Black nominee — was unlikely to involve the party winning over droves of Black voters. The overwhelmingly Democratic demographic propelled Warnock to office two years ago.

So farewell, Herschel. Go back to Texas and live out your life.

Meanwhile, in Germany:

The plan was to storm the German Capitol, arrest lawmakers and execute the chancellor. A prince descended from German nobility would take over as the new head of state, and a former far-right member of Parliament would be put in charge of a national purge.

To facilitate the coup, the electricity network would be sabotaged. Satellite phones to communicate off grid had already been bought.

That is what German prosecutors and intelligence officials say a nationwide far-right terrorist network was plotting before 3,000 police officers and Special Forces fanned out across the country on Wednesday to raid 150 homes and arrest 25 suspected co-conspirators. They included an active duty soldier, a former officer in the elite special forces, a police officer and at least two army reservists.

The prince looks like… about what you’d expect a member of German nobility to look like, which is to say, not exactly an übermensch, but rather a doughy Bavarian lout. And there’s this line, toward the end:

Germany’s intelligence services have for years said that the greatest threat to the country came from domestic, far-right extremist groups.

That’s what our intelligence services have been saying for a while, too, but not very loudly, because it might upset Jim Jordan.

Finally, this: BRITTNEY GRINER IS FREE. Hallelujah.

Haven’t done one of these in a while. Beautiful, beautiful mushrooms.

Because Twitter didn’t collapse in a heap five minutes after Elmo got the keys, there’s a fair amount of pushback from his weird fans. But I’ll tell you: I no longer get served ads for new movies, cars or from any other legit brand, even gambling. Rather, it’s all these super-fast-cut commercials for shit like miracle cleaning brushes, or a wrench that looks like a snowflake, or 25 Times Famous People Ate In Restaurants and You Won’t Believe What Happened.

So I think the longer view is that Twitter won’t collapse in a heap, but rather, be eaten away by glitches and bad user apples like Kanye. Musk will get bored if no one is paying attention to him, and he’ll sell it for pennies on the dollar.

Too bad. Twitter was fun while it lasted. Politics, jokes and cute animals:

Pretty sure to brighten up just about anyone's day!

One of our first videos we got back in 2019 when we started taking videos instead of photos on our trail cameras! pic.twitter.com/Z8iQpBq2iC

— Voyageurs Wolf Project (@VoyaWolfProject) December 1, 2022

Thanks for all the back-care advice. Today, Friday, is the first I’ve felt on the road to recovery. PT starts week after next. Until then, no heavy lifting.

In my convalescence, I’ve been reading the news, oh boy. Two big stories here: One, the battle to lead the Michigan Republican Party, which is revealing that the MAGA wing learned nothing from last month’s election. Either that, or they don’t want to go back to work at their boring old before-times jobs just yet. The losing AG candidate and the losing SOS candidate both have announced their party-chair bids, along with losing U.S. Senate (in 2012) candidate Pete Hoekstra. You junkies might recall him as the guy who ran the “Debbie Spend-it-Now” ad during that year’s Super Bowl, which was so racist the Asian actor cast as Rice Paddy Girl issued a public apology the next day. And he’s the “mainstream” candidate.

The other is about the reshuffling of the Democratic primary calendar for 2024, in which Michigan’s place in the order will move closer to the front of the line. We’re hearing everything from second (after New Hampshire, which for some reason HAS to be first) to fourth, but anything is better than what it’s been in recent years. In 2020, my primary ballot had something like 13 candidates, all of whom had dropped out by the time I voted. Screw Iowa; we can do better than this.

And I guess everyone here has heard what happened when someone put Kanye West in front of a live mic yesterday. A shitshow.

OK, my back is starting to bark again, so wrapping this up. More muscle relaxers! Have a great weekend, all.

What started as a little lower-back pain is turning into Backpocalypse. Third straight day in bed most of the time, with occasional movement to stay limber. I can cook a meal (although taking a cast-iron skillet out of the stove last night was a struggle) and walk the dog (as long as she doesn’t want a long one), but not sit for longer than a few minutes.

Saw my doctor yesterday. He prescribed prednisone (not helping so far), muscle relaxants (really not helping so far), and an x-ray. And physical therapy, which I have to set up. We’ll see. I’m hoping for recovery by the weekend. This shit sucks, although I’m doing a lot of reading and watching old Sopranos episodes on the laptop. It’s been interesting, seeing James Gandolfini assume the role of his life, the antihero who ushered in the golden age of TV. I recall showrunner David Chase despairing at how many of his own fans described Tony as “a good guy.” He’s not a good guy, and even the earliest seasons underline that.

Oh, well.

Bedbound as I am, I’ve been spending some time reading the news. This is the one-year anniversary of the Oxford High School shooting out in the exurbs. I haven’t read a single word of the coverage. Anniversary journalism was created for editors, so they can plan for a day sometime in the future. I don’t want to read about anyone’s grief, I don’t want to read how the survivors are coping, and I especially never, ever want to see another hashtag like #(Name of city)Strong. I hate the way these events are so common now, all we do is read from scripts afterward. For years, self-appointed media experts have begged reporters not to write so much about the killers, but instead concentrate on the victims. The message has sunk in, so today I’m scrolling past photo arrays of the four students killed, because we heard it all a year ago. It was tragic when they were killed, and it’s still tragic. I don’t see this as news.

Meanwhile, the cases against the kid who did the shooting, and his parents, who are being charged with negligent homicide, continue to drag on. The boy pled guilty a while back, but his parents are still fighting.

So I turn the virtual page, and it’s all about the impending rail strike, and I feel insane just reading about it. Are you telling me, NPR and New York Times and all the rest, that we’re looking at a national strike over four days of paid sick time, and what’s more, that today rail workers have ZERO DAYS OF PAID SICK TIME? How the hell did that happen? How does any industry get away with that? Is there something special about railroad work that it can’t accommodate workers having four measly sick days? Can someone explain this to a woman flat on her back waiting for the anti-inflammatories to kick in? Because I’m done with the crossword puzzle already and I’m temporarily sick of Tony Soprano.

If you grow up in Columbus, it doesn’t seem weird to have at least three friends whose parents have turned their rec room, or guest bathroom, or whatever, into a shrine to the Ohio State Buckeyes — the buckeye wallpaper, the block-O toilet seat lid, maybe a framed picture of the coach of the moment. When a baby girl is born to Mr. and Mrs. Gray, and they name her Scarlett Ann, netting them a cute story in the local media, it just seems…normal.

It’s a measure of how far I’ve come from Columbus that when the Free Press did a story last week about all the businesses along High Street had covered any Ms in their signage, I was able to finally say JFC these people. (Borden and I used to hang out at a High Street club called Crazy Mama’s, which I suppose would have to be called Crazy Xaxa’s. The basement place next door would be Xister Brown’s Descent. Down the Street? XcDonald’s.)

This is stirring up memories of working as a reporter in Columbus, and how it intersected with OSU. In Michigan it’s the couch blazes in East Lansing, but in Ohio, it can be anything. My favorite was the two city council members whose romance went sour: The spurned boyfriend drunkenly broke into her apartment in the middle of the night, and rousted his ex and her new lover out of bed. I believe he threatened them with a barbecue fork he found in the kitchen. He made them do Script Ohio stark naked, then stabbed their waterbed to death before fleeing the scene. This prompted a city editor, a legendary drunk himself but one blessed with a Shakespearean actor’s voice and diction, to crow to the newsroom at large, “Ah yes! Miss Coleman’s companion swung his baton while she enthusiastically dotted the I!” Newsrooms were fun places, back then.

I usually don’t take a side in sports contests, because it seems to be an E-ticket to misery. But man, I have to say: When Michigan put the smackdown on Ohio State on Saturday, it felt…wonderful. Underdogs, in hostile territory, all the sports yakkers calling them sacrificial lambs – and then they not only win, but win decisively? It was nice.

The chips and dip weren’t bad, either. I see why people get into this.

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving, and I apologize for being absent. There was work to do, my back is still KILLING me, and ever since I got this new laptop, your comments are no longer coming to my email. A few will slip through, but it isn’t a steady stream rolling across my desktop. I have to check the dashboard, or just dial up the site like anybody else. It’s no biggie, but I get behind from time to time.

Anyway, it was a good weekend for me — holiday, birthday, OSU-beatdown day.

How about a meme, then?

Ha ha.

OK, enough gloating. Occasionally, I surfaced to check out the news. And whaddaya know? Nothing changes:

Republican lawmakers have largely remained silent in the wake of former President Trump’s dinner with antisemitic rapper Ye and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, reviving a tactic they frequently relied on during his presidency.

Wonderful. Just wonderful. I should go back to bed.

Hope the week ahead is good for everyone. I’ll be here more frequently.

I’ll say one thing for this Twitter business: It sure makes me never, ever want to own a Tesla.

Seriously, the return of Trump last night only shows how ridiculous this whole affair has become. At least we have the pleasure of Trump declining to rejoin, ha ha, because his own worthless social network is doing so well. When Musk took over Twitter, a number of people jumped ship and a couple urged me to do the same. I’m thinking: Nah. This shit is too funny. If it fails, it fails, and I’ll read more books. That’s a good thing.

Sherri commented on the last thread: If Elon runs Tesla the way he’s running Twitter, Tesla vehicles are a clear and present danger on our roads, because the man is demonstrating that he knows nothing about software engineering. As the wife of the former Detroit News autos editor: Can confirm. How the NHTSA lets Tesla get away with so much of the shit they’ve pulled — there are many examples, but the biggest is calling their driver-assist technology “autopilot” — is simply mystifying. He’s the living embodiment of one of my favorite Peter Arno cartoons.

And we awakened Sunday to yet another mass shooting. I hope that whoever the Colorado Springs gay-bar patron was who disarmed and pistol-whipped the perp, stopping the massacre, that she was a drag queen.

So the week of thanks begins. Congratulations if you’re off. I, unemployed and quote-unquote retired, have two interviews scheduled — not heavy lifting, I grant you — and the usual complement of errands and tasks to complete before the Day. I’m mostly done, but I forgot Cool Whip, the secret ingredient for my trashy-but-delicious Waldorf salad, and I’m-a get a big block of cheddar to perhaps whip up something new for the before-bird snacking. And Friday’s my birthday. Sixty-damn-five. And you may ask yourself: Well, how did I get here? One year at a time, that’s how. Rewatching the video at that link, though, I gotta say I don’t wish I were younger. (Just a pain-free 65.) We had some great music to enjoy when it was fresh. We still have great music, but it’s much harder to find. It reminds me of after I moved to Fort Wayne, and would subscribe to the Village Voice, just for the music coverage, in search of something, anything to listen to that wasn’t classic rock. Now everyone outside of a few large cities has to do something like that. Because so many radio people are simply awful.

Maybe we’ve discussed this before, but long before newspapers ruined themselves by trying to be everything to everyone, radio did the same. I’ve probably told this story before, but when I briefly worked at WOWO, they had a consultant who gave them top-secret, proprietary, must-shred-upon-completion playlists. Or maybe he just looked over the ones they had and made suggestions. Whatever it was, he vetoed the Carpenters’ “Goodbye to Love” as too edgy for WOWO’s conservative, very middle-of-the-road listeners. Remember that song? A slow ballad, Karen’s voice warbling in self-pity over her broken heart. The Carpenters? you’re asking, as I did. The consultant explained that there’s a fuzz-guitar break in the middle and whoa, too-too much. The program director pushed back, and he said OK, you can play it, but not in the morning.

Blow that pathetic example out, add shock jocks like the two guys in your town who make dick jokes and the extremely loathsome Randy Michaels, and you see why I’m no particular fan. You public radio people are exempt from this judgment, you know that. But if you ever ran a rock station, and rejected the B-52s for more Led Zeppelin in the playlist, you know who you are.

The weekend was good. Saw Kate play at the Magic Stick with her second band. She joined us in a small area with seating for the Protomartyr set, and I saw something even more impressive: Her handling an old creep who wanted to chat her up. Toward the back side of middle-aged, wedding ring, standing too close to my 26-year-old daughter, who was wearing a short black dress and bright red lipstick. It was pretty much this situation exactly:

I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back, the guy was there but she was gone. “He had stank breath,” she said later. Of course I made a meme:

OK, time to go. Painters are here to do the final-final bit of Home Improvement, and I have one of those interviews in…23 minutes. Ciao!

Longtime readers know that my husband and daughter share a birthday, and it was yesterday. I usually make a meal and cake, but for two years now, we’ve met at a local restaurant and brought a bakery cake. And it’s been pretty great. We gave Kate a white-noise machine to help her sleep, and she gave Alan this:

That’s a bottle of artisanal mescal with a scorpion in it. A scorpion for a Scorpio. Ha ha.

She bought it around Halloween, in Mexico City, where she and the band had a gig. Someone was asking how they’re doing? Pretty good. They just finished their second album, it’s mixed and mastered, and they’re looking for a lawyer/manager/agent, all that crap. Kate continues to play in a second band, GiGi, and they’re opening for Protomartyr tomorrow night, and if you don’t know those names, well, you don’t live here and haunt the half-dozen or so venues where bands like them play.

And man, for some reason it’s been a bit of a week, probably because I went to Canada for two days at the beginning of it. When I got back, I realized I’d have a buttload of stuff to do, and it was all complicated by sudden-onset, near-crippling lower back pain. To all you armchair physicians: I doubt it’s a disc. I just woke up feeling like the Tin Man, so sore that if I’d dropped a $100 bill, I’d have let the wind take it rather than try to pick it up. Today I forced myself to swim 45 minutes, and everything seemed to loosen up a tad. Walked the dog, got another tad out of it. And now I feel 42 percent better.

Personally, I think it’s my body getting cheeky. Just a couple of weeks ago, I said to myself, “It’s funny. I never get headaches and I rarely get backaches. Two days later, a days-long headache and now this. I had to see my doctor on another matter and told him about my headache. He felt the back of my neck and said it was like kneading walnuts and suggested a massage. Perhaps I should spend retirement investigating alternative medicine treatments, getting a little more Woo about the old bod. Acupuncture, massage, infrared saunas.

But enough about me.

I’m not a subscriber to Business Insider and won’t become one, but you can get the gist of this story from the Twitter thread: Put simply, a tech-centric version of the evangelistic “quiverfull” movement is quietly trying to fill the earth with their self-determined genetically superior offspring.

(1/5) A few months ago I got a tip: A source told me that Elon Musk had "more children" than the public realized. So I did some reporting, and… it was true! He'd had twins with one of his employees. But I always felt like there was more to the story. https://t.co/vX9VmVBwfX

— Julia Black (@mjnblack) November 17, 2022

I’m so old — how old are you? — I’m so old that this reminds me of the Nobel laureate sperm bank that one of these literal wankers put together in the ’70s, correctly sensing that large number of women would grow weary of singles’ bars and would seek to become single mothers by buying a shot at a clinic somewhere. As I recall, this literal wanker managed to get three of them (Barack Obama had yet to win, dammmmmn guuurrrrl), but the place had gone limp (sorry) by 1999. New York magazine tells us:

In 2001, journalist David Plotz began an investigation for Slate into the donors of Graham’s clinic, and what had happened to their prized semen. (He riffs that he earned the nickname the Semen Detective, and later published a book on it, titled The Genius Factory). All in all, not a single baby ended up inheriting Nobel DNA, yet 217 kids in total were born from the sperm bank. Each donor was identified in sperm-bank catalogues by a color — fuschia no. 1, for example, or coral no. 36. After Plotz put out his call on Slate, he began publishing articles like “A Mother Searches for ‘Donor White,’” connecting with kids looking for their dads, as well as starting to reach the men who had donated to Graham’s sperm bank.

What he discovered was that just a few of the donors had produced a whole lot of offspring; for instance, one donor had produced as many as 30 kids, and that was just the ones Plotz knew about. He also found that the donors had been kind of a mixed bag. One man had falsely gotten into the bank by claiming to have an IQ of 160; another was the unremarkable son of a Nobel Prize winner; another was an Olympic gold medalist. As it turns out, after he failed to get the Nobel-winning sperm he sought, Graham began searching for donors on college campuses and recruiting young scientists, as well as hunting for “Renaissance men … donors who were younger, taller, and better looking than the laureates.” (In keeping with the sperm bank’s eugenicist legacy, all of the men were white). By the mid-1980s, Graham was accepting pretty much anyone who volunteered. “Forget about Nobel laureates; the Nobel sperm bank was taking men you wouldn’t wish on your ex-girlfriend,” Plotz writes. Ultimately, the sperm bank became kind of a scam, with women continuing to seek its services based on an illusory reputation that it couldn’t live up to.

If you’re still wondering whether you can get your hands on any of this mystery sperm, I’m afraid you’re out of luck; the bank closed in 1999, shortly after Graham’s death, and the frozen vials of sperm were incinerated.

Maybe humanity is getting dumber. After all, we dreamed up this silliness. And as anyone my age could tell you, sooner or later everything falls apart. And have you seen Elon Musk in a swimsuit? Eee-yikes.

OK, I think I’m going to call it a week. Happy weekend all, and let’s slide into the holiday weekend.

Now this is what I needed: A few days away. Hello from Canada:

This is the view from where I am, just outside Leamington, Ont. That’s Lake Erie. Typical November sunrise, nothing too special. I’m disappointed my phone couldn’t catch the colors — such as they were — no matter how I monkeyed with the exposure. I might be suffering iPhone 14 envy, having seen some of the amazing photos you lucky ducks are posting. But the ol’ 8 Plus is doing just fine otherwise, so I’ll endure.

Anyway, we’re on a getaway, me and a girlfriend. Just a couple days spent enjoying an off-season waterfront Airbnb, seeing the sights. You know what sights there are to see in Leamington? This:

A terrible picture, I know, but: Greenhouses. Thousands of acres of them, most built in the last decade or so. Leamington was already the Tomato Capital of Canada, and then they figured, hey, if we put glass over those fields, we can grow a lot more. And so they did, and this is why the produce terminal in Detroit is the first stateside stop for many of the vegetables consumed in my part of the U.S. (A fair amount of cannabis, fully legal in Canada, comes out of this area, too.) Last I checked, there were about 3,000 acres of greenhouses in this neighborhood, with more planned, although the light pollution is pretty serious, and the growers and environmentalists are trying to work things out. I can tell you that after the sun went down last night, there was still a band of light at the eastern horizon and as for the west, visible from my bedroom window, it was perma-sunset: That pink glow behind the trees, all night long.

The tomatoes they produce aren’t as good as homegrown, but they’re a lot better than the winter tomatoes I remember. I use them in salads in January; they’re fine. And I really enjoy the spinach and lettuce, peppers and cucumbers we get from here.

Today, I’m thinking Point Pelee for some bird-watching. Also, more sitting around in the hot tub, and also perhaps another couple episodes of “The Crown,” a show neither of our husbands is into. (I do recall Alan’s priceless line from when Charles and Diana were splitting up, mid-’90s. I explained it all to him, and he said, “No wonder he spends so much time fishing.”)

A bar cheeseburger may be in my future today, too. With a locally brewed lager. O, Canada.

I don’t have much bloggage, mainly because I’m still marinating in serotonin from the election. You have your own takes, but I think this is an interesting look at what might transpire in 2024. Beyond that, I think I’m going to turn my focus to Thanksgiving, and all I have to be thankful for.

Well, we got through it. I do not want to crow or even chuckle, but I did not see this coming. I was feeling good about Michigan, but the night before Election Day, after my shift observing absentee ballot pre-processing, I stopped for a fancy cocktail at the fancy cocktail bar across from Huntington Place. Got to talking to another Democratic challenger, and confessed I felt good about the gubernatorial and Secretary of State races here, but the attorney general might be touch-and-go.

For non-Michiganders, our AG is a spiky lesbian who was born with no fucks to give, at least about what people think of her. And so she’s had some public incidents (overserved at a tailgate party, making jokes about drag queens in schools) that would make any campaign coach facepalm. She’s also been a stand-up comic, and not everyone shares her sense of humor. And being female, of course some simply think she should sit down and shut up.

However. All my worry was for naught. Gretchen Whitmer won by 10+, Jocelyn Benson (SOS) by 14+, and Dana Nessel, the AG, by nearly 9. All of these qualify as landslides. And, to be sure, all were extremely fortunate in their opposition, which was uniformly awful, and that’s not just me saying so. Here’s the conservative editorial-page editor of the Detroit News:

Tudor Dixon, the gubernatorial hopeful, was the best of the bunch, and seemed to be making a solid run at Whitmer as the campaigning closed. A respected pollster put Dixon a fraction of a point ahead of the governor on the morning of Election Day. That turned out to be delusional.

Dixon started too late, and with too little oomph in her campaign. The challenger couldn’t raise enough money to truly compete with a Whitmer war chest that topped $36 million (Dixon raised $7 million).

The other two GOP hopefuls, Matt DePerno for attorney general and Kristina Karamo for secretary of state, were abysmal candidates who had no business on a respectable ballot. Many organizations traditionally aligned with the Republican Party refused to endorse them. They raised and spent even less money than Dixon. “Money talks” is still true when it comes to politics.

Karamo was a religious nut job, who came with a steamer trunk of oppo, much of it from her own podcast, where she opined that extramarital sex, yoga and various other benign forces led to demonic possession. She also spent a lot of time blabbering about abortion, which isn’t even part of the job she was running for. DePerno was more grounded in reality but also had a long string of regrettable incidents in his past, including padding his bills and assaulting his own clients. But both were, yep, personally endorsed by you-know-who. As was Dixon, who was just as crazy but a little more presentable. She also had many on-the-record interviews and media appearances when she was trying to be a minor-league Fox News commenter. But even this year, on the trail, when she was making hay from dirty books in school libraries, she used as an example the time one of her kids got a book out of her own school library that included a section on… anyone? Divorce. Yes, divorce.

So with these three leading the ticket, the down-ballot races were more or less doomed, and newly drawn legislative districts stripped the gerrymander advantage from Republicans. Long story short: Both chambers of the legislature flipped blue.

Election night at Huntington Place was anticlimactic, though. As the counting went on, the various GOP-linked challengers ran around scribbling madly on their clipboards, but nothing came of it. Everything ran very smoothly. The only downside was a throbbing headache that sent me home around 1 a.m. By then, the lay of the land was evident and the air was rapidly leaking out of the balloon. I didn’t feel I was letting anyone down by booking early.

I still have the headache, which has waxed and waned since Sunday. Seeing my doctor tomorrow.

And now it’s a lovely, lovely November day and I’m going to take a final-ish bike ride.

What else? Here’s a Twitter thread I did early on E-Day, on the unique joy of visiting Mr. C’s Car Wash here in Grosse Pointe. Let’s try embedding the first tweet and see if it doesn’t break the coding:

It's my birthday month, which means new stickers on my license plate, which reminds me I need a clean license plate, which reminds me I haven't had my car washed in forever. So off to Mr. C's full-service wash. First stop after leaving my car? The hallway of stuff! pic.twitter.com/uEscaQnBx7

— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) November 8, 2022

Otherwise, I’m gonna get on that bike. Hope your November day is equally lovely. See you next week.

You guys. I’m going to be scarce, or scattered, around here the next few days. For lo, election time is upon our nation and I volunteered to not only be a day-of challenger, but also a pre-processing observer, figuring, I’m retired, what else do I have to do? And not too much was a dumb answer, because chores and jobs are starting to pile up.

This weekend was the monkey wrench. I signed up for lifeguard training, and had to do the whole course again because I let my last certification lapse. It consumed the weekend like a ravenous beast, and isn’t even over. (The pool where we were supposed to do the deep-water stuff had mechanical problems, so that part is TBA.) But. I found time to attend two fun parties Saturday night, and had a couple drinks with a friend Sunday, so it wasn’t terrible. I’m just behind on everything else, relearning the lesson of my youth: Laundry will wait, but a fun party won’t.

I start ballot pre-processing observation this afternoon. And then it’ll be a sprint into Wednesday.

I’m feeling pretty confident about Michigan, a couple of nail-biter races notwithstanding. I’m not feeling good about the rest of the country, though. A doomy friend says these are the last good years in America. I’m increasingly thinking he’s right.

So to fill out the post, some pix from this weekend.

Learning infant CPR in lifeguarding class:

Me with a friend’s real baby and her grandmother at one of the fun parties. (He and his wife bought a convent and have filled it with massage therapists, facialists and artists. No one knew much about the elk, other than he was a native of Saskatchewan.) I’m dressed down because the earlier party was outdoors and extremely casual.

Finally, look what Alan found while vacuuming out a cold-air intake in our foyer. It’s in pretty good shape for having spent half a century in the bowels of our house:

If it’s worth anything, let me know. Otherwise I’m buying a lottery ticket.

Good week, all. I’ll speak up when I next surface.