One of my lifeguard colleagues and I were shooting the bull one evening, and discovered we have one bedrock belief in common: The best temperature is shorts-and-sweatshirts, i.e., when it’s warm enough to wear shorts, but cool enough for a sweatshirt. Somewhere in the range from 65 to 72, say.

I’m in shorts-and-sweatshirts latitudes now. Heavenly.

Where, you ask? We had to cross a big bridge to get here:

There was fresh whitefish for dinner the first night:

The first day the weather was perfect:

The second day it was cool and breezy. So we went even farther north to look at the engineering structure that makes Great Lakes shipping possible:

Had a very mediocre lunch nearby. Atmosphere: 10-plus. Food: 4. Service: Also 4.

Finally, I want to buy this boat. I would not change the name:

That’s all for now. New comment thread!

You guys? I am feeling peevish. It’s the usual stuff. Work hassles, other hassles, seeing pictures of the new Rose Garden, reading the Kennedy Center list of honorees, and then this:

In the World as Ruled by Nance, there would be no “K-9 officers,” which is copaganda so prevalent most people don’t even notice it anymore. A “K-9 officer” is a police dog, and that’s what they’d be called in my world. I don’t know what bugs me more: canine rendered as K-9, or a dog being called an officer. They’re not officers; I don’t care if they wear a little outfit and a badge. They’re tools used by human officers in the course of their duties, but calling them officers themselves is as dumb as declaring a police car to be an automotive officer.

What irritates me as much as anything is having to pause at this point and declare my love for dogs. Of course I love dogs. Most dogs are better than many humans, and disliking dogs is a red flag so glaring I think it should be disqualifying for holding high office in this stupid country, and yeah, you know who I’m talking about.

For a while now, I’ve tried to stop anthropomorphizing the animals in my life. I may talk to them like they’re human, but I know they’re not, and that’s what’s great about them. Truly appreciating animals is striving to understand them at their level, in their true nature, not the one we’ve imposed upon them.

Some years ago, a stupid superintendent in the local schools allowed the local police to do an unannounced contraband sweep of both high schools, using cops from their own and other departments and, of course, their dogs. It served as a training exercise for the police, and a terrorizing event for the students. A lawyer later told me it also yielded a case for him, when one of the dogs “alerted,” as they say, on a car in the parking lot driven by a girl whose father became his client. The father was an FBI agent, and his daughter was a multi-sport athlete, a straight-A student, and otherwise a shining example of teenage humanity, not likely to be even a casual drug user. Her car was thoroughly searched, and nothing was found, but the girl was isolated and aggressively questioned by the police, which left her in tears. They only reluctantly let her return to her class and drive her own car home after school. No apology. After all, the K-9 officer alerted! And dogs don’t lie!

They don’t lie, but being dogs, and being German shepherds in particular, they are bred and trained to please their handlers. The lawyer directed me to copious research on this subject, and how often these alerts turn up nothing, because the dog isn’t “looking for drugs,” which it can’t understand, it’s looking for a scent that will make the cop say “good boy, Rex.” Sometimes it’s contraband, but sometimes they just want the good boy.

That is today’s rant. There are a lot in the pipeline, which is the long way around to announcing I’ll be taking a few days of R&R, and while I’ll have wifi and my laptop in the cooler climes we’re headed to, I may or may not use them. More likely, I’ll just post a lot of pictures with brief commentary along the lines of wish-you-were-here. I want to let the world carry on without me, just for a few days. Please feel free to keep the conversation going, and thank every last one of you for reading.

I update this blog three times a week, most weeks, not every goddamn day, so Neil Steinberg beat me to the punch, but the punch deserves to be delivered twice, a one-two, if you will.

Croaky and his boss, President Shit-for-brains, have blood on their hands. Specifically, that of David Rose, the responding officer for the attempted mass shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday. He was killed by Patrick Joseph White, the shooter who toted five rifles to a CVS across the street from the building and opened fire. White was said to be increasingly obsessed with the idea the Covid vaccination had made him sick. Wherever could he have gotten that idea?

Our HHS secretary has called the Covid jab “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” citing reports to VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Intended to be a democratic way for anyone to report sore arms, fevers, etc., it was most certainly set up for a simpler time, when people would be honest brokers of this information. A friend of mine, then a reporter for a prestigious magazine, was asked to poke around in it, see if there was a story, maybe.

He poked, and came away after a couple days with his conclusion: No. Why? Recall that the Covid vaccine was first given to those most vulnerable to the disease — the elderly and immune-suppressed. And so VAERS is full of accounts that run like this: My father had stage IV lung cancer, and received the vaccine. Three weeks later, he died. Or: My mother, 97 and bedridden in her nursing home, received the shot, and died after 10 days. Neither of these people had Covid when they died, so: Very suspicious!!!

And because VAERS is open to anyone — seriously, anyone can make a report — it is of course subject to manipulation by bad actors. And I’m sure it is. Anyway, it’s not a reliable source of information. Which Croaky should know.

One caveat that I should note: Something that’s always interested me is how mental illness cleaves to the culture of its time. People used to believe incubi and succubi came into their rooms at night and had sex with them. Today, it’s aliens who abduct victims to their ships to stick probes into their anuses. (Always the anus. Huh.) The man who killed four people in New York City a couple weeks ago was convinced he had CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, from being hit in the head as a football player. (He was in the building housing the NFL.) He was 27 years old (well below the age when CTE typically presents), played only high school (potentially dangerous, but hardly NFL-level dangerous) and had not been diagnosed with anything.

So both these men, White and the NYC shooter, had fixated on current events to explain whatever was jangling around in their heads, and it’s possible that White would have fired on the CDC in the absence of a led-from-the-top damning of the work they do. But I’d say those chances are slim.

How did Croaky react? With the usual thoughts-and-prayers statement, made on Instagram. Fuck him.

Finally, I leave you with this, which is so ironic I can’t stand it:

As a record number of people in the U.S. are sickened with measles, researchers are resurrecting the search for something long-deemed redundant: treatments for the viral disease.

After the measles vaccine was introduced in the 1960s, cases of the disease plummeted. By 2000, federal officials had declared measles eliminated from the U.S. This success led to little interest in the development of treatments. But now, as vaccination rates fall and infections rise, scientists are racing to develop drugs they say could prevent or treat the disease in vulnerable and unvaccinated people.

“In America, we don’t like being told what to do, but we like to have options for our medicine chest,” said Marc Elia, chairman of the board of Invivyd, a Massachusetts-based drugmaker that started working on a monoclonal antibody for measles this spring.

Yes, that’s correct: A drugmaker is looking for a treatment for measles (because “we like to have options for our medicine chest”) because increasing number of dumbass Americans are refusing a safe, long-established vaccine for measles. I can’t stand it.

OK, then! On that cheery note, go start your weeks! I’m off on a bike ride before it gets to…checking…89 degrees. Ugh.

I really don’t want to be like this, but it’s hot again and I’m back to hate-reading the publications that cross my path, some of which I even pay for.

For instance, a lame-ass op-ed published by the Detroit News, written by none other than Ted Nugent. It’s about better management of wildlife, a table Ted and I could sit down at and maybe find at least a little common ground. Deer are popping up in my suburb all the time now; on one of the local Facebook pages, a woman said she came across a doe with three fawns on a nighttime walk this week. I always heard that deer will have twin fawns when the livin’ is easy, but I never heard of triplets before.

The Canada geese are so plentiful now that when a beach closes for e.coli, it’s as likely to be because of goose poop than human.

There are other issues, but the bottom line is: I don’t object to hunting and never have. It’s an important part of managing the ecosystem in the absence of natural predators, and I don’t think anyone wants to release a wolf pack in suburbia. For now, it’s Bambi vs. cars.

Unfortunately, from this promising beginning…

Wise use — it’s common sense to us attentive common citizens, and our hearts and instincts compel us to perform our clear and obvious responsibilities to participate in God’s miraculous creation as conscientious hands-on stewards in harmony with nature.

…things go downhill:

Wild game and wildlife are thriving across North America as a direct result of this proven conservation model, and out of touch, even corrupt bureaucrats, and the equally disconnected fantasy-driven uneducated nature haters that they mistakenly listen to are a very dangerous scourge that good, caring people must be ever vigilant of and willing to push back and stop at all costs.

Those real-world healing powers of nature is what I have dedicated my life to, and the embarrassment of mismanagement in my beloved birth-state of Michigan must no longer be tolerated.

This, I think, is going to be the hardest stain to scrub out of the country, if it can even be done, once Ted and company have gone to their reward: “Bureaucrats” must never be overmatched, or even incompetent. They must be corrupt, which suggests maybe they were bought off by Big Bambi, I dunno. Ted goes on for a bit about patriotism (he’s performing his “we, the people” responsibilities, he says); more corruption, this time “blatant”; and finally gets to the point: He wants to shoot not only deer, but bear, mourning doves and sandhill cranes, which birdwatchers know as lovely creatures and he calls the “ribeye in the sky.” They damage crops.

Mourning dove hunting comes up from time to time; they’re not a nuisance, but they do flush in a manner that trap and skeet shooters enjoy, once they get bored with clays. And bears can be a pain in the ass around unsecured garbage, for sure, but the answer seems to be: Secure the garbage. Also, limit or eliminate all food sources, including deer corn and bird feeders.

Ted disagrees, needless to say. The answer is: Whack ’em and stack ’em.

Mostly I wouldn’t object, but he ignores the obvious problem here. What do you do about those wildlife that have moved to suburbia? Make the deer season all year, hell I don’t care, but I would care about bullets, crossbow bolts or even arrows whizzing through the neighborhood, and this is where most of the so-called problem deer are. Canada geese, ditto — they can shit in the middle of the lake all they want, but they like placid places like parks and golf courses, another place it’s difficult to bump them off without risking hitting a kid, or a duffer. Extending the season on up-north deer isn’t going to do anything for down-here deer.

And anyone who could kill a sandhill crane because they gobbled up some farmer’s soybeans ought to move to Texas, or some other bloodstained shithole. That’s where Ted lives, anyway.

Let’s move on. Let’s treat Edward Coristine, aka “Big Balls,” the way his camp treated — treats — anyone in the other camp who suffers a misfortune. If you haven’t heard, BB, a protege of Elon Musk and a DOGE “worker,” was injured in what police are calling an attempted carjacking in Washington. From the WP:

Coristine was assaulted around 3 a.m. Sunday in the city’s Logan Circle neighborhood by a group of teenagers attempting to carjack him and a woman whom police identified as his significant other, according to authorities.

Three a.m. on a school night? Whatever could BB and his girlfriend be doing out in the District at that hour? Could they have been buying drugs? Googling can you buy ketamine on the street in Logan Circle n’hood right now.

OK, I must scoot. After nearly 10 days in the shop, my car is being liberated later today. Time to flex the Amex card and go for a drive. Have a great weekend.

Writers are infamously messy, and I suppose I am too. My Google Drive, desktop and other repositories hold various half-baked drafts of this and that. From time to time I try to clear them out, but I hang on to some of them. One in my blog drafts folder has a headline — The indifferent sea. — and is an unkind look at something one of my husband’s former colleagues, who was college friends with none other than Stockton Rush, wrote about his dead classmate. Alan asked me to maybe consider not publishing it, if for no other reason than it would make future collegial gatherings maybe a bit awkward. I agreed.

Rush is, of course, the man responsible for his own death, and four others’, when his jerry-built submarine imploded en route to the wreckage of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The U.S. Coast Guard has published its own report on the disaster, and it is…not kind:

At the time of the Titan’s final dive, Mr. Rush possessed a credential issued by the U.S. Coast Guard that permitted him to operate vessels of a certain volume on inland waters.

That credential was based on falsified information, the report said: In 2020, OceanGate exaggerated the volume of the Titan in a letter to the National Maritime Center so that it would appear as though Mr. Rush had the requisite time at sea needed to earn the credential.

…In an interview with the board, the OceanGate director of operations described a dive in which an earlier OceanGate submersible, the Cyclops 1, became stuck beneath the bow of the Andrea Doria shipwreck near Nantucket, Mass., with Mr. Rush at the controls. In response, Mr. Rush had a “meltdown,” the director of operations said, adding that when he asked Mr. Rush to relinquish the controls Mr. Rush threw the controller at him.

All of which made me dig up the original column, and hoo-boy, talk about aging like milk:

From test pilot Chuck Yeager to Mount Everest explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, risk-takers are a special breed. OceanGate CEO Tock was one of them. Unlike the astronauts and explorers who lived to reach the summit of mountains and outer space, however, Tock was fascinated by going to the bottom of the ocean.

…Ask anyone in my Princeton University Class of 1984 which one of us would be brave enough to dare such a mission, and Tock would be at the top of the list.

…When we were 19 years old, he became the world’s youngest commercial airline pilot, commanding Saudi Airlines planes during our college summers.

The part about Saudi Airlines was my first whoa moment. You’re telling me a commercial airline allows college students to fly its planes? Not quite. A little Googling reveals he worked as a first officer, i.e. co-pilot, on DC-8s operated by Overseas National Airways, which was under subcontract to Saudi Airlines to do charters, so kinda true, but not really.

But for the deepest and most unselfconscious look at ol’ Tock, you really have to go to the Princeton alumni publication:

Seemingly round-the-clock news coverage of the missing submersible has led to some unfavorable characterizations of Rush as a risk-taker whose adventures trended toward recklessness. Deep-sea explorers, oceanographers, and other industry leaders were reported to have expressed concerns about OceanGate’s safety precautions in recent years. For example, the Titan was built of both titanium and carbon fiber, which is used in the aerospace industry but considered experimental for deep-sea pressure.

“I mean if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything,” Rush told CBS Sunday Morning last year. “At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”

Rush’s friends said that quote has been used to misrepresent his “joie de vivre” outlook on life, and that the message of his quote was likely more along the lines of encouraging people to live their lives and not be afraid.

“History shows us that exploration and innovation are inherently risky and dangerous,” a group of alumni wrote in a statement to PAW, signing it “Proud and Grieving Friends of Tock.” “We’re disappointed, if not entirely surprised, at the outpouring of armchair quarterbacking about the science behind his work.”

Was Tock a rich kid? Of course he was:

He kept a private plane at the Princeton airport, and friends recounted adventures they took with Rush at the wheel.

…(A) friend who flew with Rush on his private plane during college remembered the feelings of trust and safety she felt on board. “He cared for people deeply and he wouldn’t want to put me in a position where I was unsafe.”

Bad things never happen to rich kids, as we all know. Ah, well. Now we know, but we always knew. Meanwhile, speaking of rich kids, Croaky has effectively pulled the plug on publicly funded mRNA vaccine research. If bird flu goes big, let me say it now, while I’m healthy: It was nice knowin’ ya:

Mr. Kennedy has been sharply critical of the technology. In a video posted on social media on Tuesday, he claimed incorrectly that mRNA vaccines do not protect against respiratory illnesses like Covid and the flu, that they drive viruses to evolve and that a single mutation in a virus renders the vaccine ineffective.

“As the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract,” he says in the video.

“By issuing this wildly incorrect statement, the secretary is demonstrating his commitment to his long-held goal of sowing doubts about all vaccines,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.

What else is new?

So that’s Wednesday’s stop on the Farewell to American Greatness tour. How’s your week going?

Been running hard the last few days, and it caught up with me Sunday. Didn’t get much done, other than a fair amount of reading. Finished Louis Bayard’s “The Pale Blue Eye” and started “Hotel Ukraine,” the final Renko novel by the recently departed Martin Cruz Smith. Soon I’ll go downstairs and make…something for dinner. Can’t decide between chicken-sesame noodles or a New York strip. What would you guys choose? My decision center appears to have gone on strike.

But I’m using the instruction I used to give Kate when she was potty-training: Listen to your body. And mine, right now, is saying Chill.

It also told me to stop reading the news after I made my appalled way through this almost unbelievable NYT piece (gift link), the top of which I’ll paste because FOR FUCK SAKE:

Hours after West Point pulled its offer to have her teach cadets, Jen Easterly posted a short essay in which she laid out what happened to her and what it meant for the country.

“This isn’t about me,” she wrote last week. “This is about something larger.”

Over three decades, Ms. Easterly, 57, had compiled an impeccable résumé as a West Point graduate, a Rhodes Scholar and an Afghanistan war veteran. She had served as a key aide on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council and led a critical cybersecurity agency under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Now she was blackballed — in her own words, “a casualty of casually manufactured outrage that drowned out the quiet labor of truth and the steady pulse of integrity.”

The source of the casual outrage arrayed against her was Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator and self-described “Islamophobe,” who has become a powerful and largely unaccountable enforcer in President Trump’s Washington.

This. This is why I can barely look the few known MAGAts in my life in the eye anymore, for fear I might start frothing at the mouth about BALLROOMS and HEGSETH and ROSE GARDEN WTF and JEANINE PIRRO and now booting a woman who has literally given her impressive life to the service of the United States, on the word of a lunatic who was, as one Bluesky user pointed out, banned for life from Uber and Lyft for harassing the Muslim drivers. If I am triggered, well then I am triggered. I’m tipping into despair. Mission accomplished.

At least we’re given some comic relief, in that the president so overweight and out of shape that he drives his fucking golf carts onto the greens of his many courses is the one who is resurrecting the President’s Physical Fitness Test. A million brains lit up the grid with the same thought: You first.

Look at the photo at that last link (it’s a free one). There’s President Tubby, doing the same mommy-lookit-my-pitcher-I-drew thing of holding up the signed executive order (because that’s the only way he knows how to get anything done), while his younger staff of toadies and ass-kissers chuckle in the background. No doubt every one is also thinking: You First. Also note that the one is “WWE Chief Creative Officer Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque,” no doubt fresh from paying condolences to Hulk Hogan’s family, after the Hulkster, allegedly a picture of strength and power, croaked at the relatively young age of 71. Heart attack, surely not at ALL related to the various drugs he gobbled like candy throughout his adult life.

Such fine role models. Loomer, who isn’t 35 yet, has had enough plastic surgery to resemble the Joker, and young men are gobbling dozens of dodgy supplements to achieve the Chad-like look they think will get women of a higher class than Loomer to fuck them. If that isn’t the Trump administration in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.

Oh, and let’s not forget Bobby Jr., another one almost certainly juicing. Well, may his shrunken testicles be a testament to his dedication.

Finally, really New York Times?! Here’s another paragraph in the Loomer/Easterly story:

And it raises big questions about the ways power and influence are currently wielded in Washington; what it means to be a patriot; and whether loyalty to Mr. Trump or any sitting president should be a prerequisite for government service.

RAISES QUESTIONS? JFC, no wonder I just want to read light crime fiction these days.

Here’s one lighter item, something new for the Nall/Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere Back 40. Did you know petunias can come up volunteer? I did not, but several little patches have popped up in the cutest places, like at the foot of our river birch:

It’s kind of like a Bambi forest. I like it.

Anyway, the new week is about to begin. Let’s hope lighting strikes someone who richly deserves it. Oh, and P.S. I’m making the steak. Turned out I didn’t have any peanut butter in the house.

I woke up super-groggy today, not uncommon when the alarm goes off at 5 a.m. I didn’t have enough time before my workout class to hit Starbucks for a cappuccino with an extra shot, but I did have time to hit the McDonald’s drive-through. Small black coffee, please. It was 5:45 a.m.

Pulled around to the window, where I was asked for 96 cents. “Really?” I said. “That seems low. I’m sure it’s more than that.”

“Well, with the senior discount, that’s what it is,” the window lady said, prompting me to ask how she knew I was a senior, goddamnit. (I didn’t say the goddamnit.) “Do you have cameras back there at the menu board?”

“This early, small black coffee? I just figured,” she said, handing me back a nickel. So really, 95 cents.

This is my life now, I guess. Little encounters with McDonald’s employees.

The class was good, but insanely hot and muggy. The weather is supposed to break tomorrow. And this is the rest of my life, I guess: McDonald’s and the weather.

This blog, too. A story hooked me the other day with its headline.

The Website at the End of the Internet: Reddit is one of the last thriving islands of the old web. Can it survive AI?

The question remains to be answered. Also:

The World Wide Web from which Reddit grew, and for which Huffman expresses so much reverence, has been going through something akin to ecological collapse after being poisoned, then abandoned, by advertisers that have little use for independent websites anymore. At the same time, the rise of generative AI suggests a lot of people are just as happy — if not happier — getting life advice, news, and conversation from a robot that has read a bunch of sub-Reddits as they are chatting with internet strangers themselves.

It gets way more into the weeds of Reddit and the internet than I’m interested in, but the bottom line is the same thing you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, because it’s an old story: Humans are a disappearing feature of the internet, steadily being replaced by bots and AI garbage yammering at one another. If you spend any time at all online, you’ve surely noticed it. If you’ve been online as long as some of us have, well, you really know. It’s easy to remember the early years of everyone being connected; oh, you like this obscure artist or singer/songwriter or movie or hobby TOO? Let’s be friends! Send me an email! I’ll write you back!

No more.

On the other hand, I have become oddly fixated with some Reddit groups — or subreddits, I guess. The amount of time people have to waste online talking about the stupidest shit imaginable is almost awe-inspiring.

Anyway, here you are: Human-powered blather since 2001. Fool that I am.

I would generally have a little more bloggage for you, but the news these days has been so depressing, I feel a little overmatched by it. You know, of course, that Ghislaine Maxwell is cruising toward a commutation or pardon, right? Emil Bove, lying thug, cruising toward a late-term Trump appointment to SCOTUS. Israel is run by thugs, and also liars. Even the coming of pleasant weather will be prefaced by a storm. Earthquake in Russia, tsunamis in the Pacific — it’s just not a good-news kinda week.

But there’s this: David Von Drehle is quitting the WashPost. Here’s his last column. It’s short, elegant and good.

That’s what I got.

Apparently “Sinners,” released around late spring, was one of the big summer movies, only prestigious, y’know. So I decided not to read anything about it, and try to have one of those rare experiences, wherein we can take in a work of art without knowing anything, or much, about it.

I knew it starred Michael B. Jordan, and there were vampires. That’s it.

So I averted my eyes from the headlines that speculated it might be an Oscar contender, although that made me want to watch it more. An Oscar-worthy vampire movie? Count me in. It finally came to HBO a couple weeks ago; Friday was the night to watch.

And, sadly, I was disappointed. It wasn’t that great. Points for locating the vampire plot in a new location (a ’30s juke joint in rural Mississippi). Points for some great music within. But the rest? Meh.

Jordan plays two characters, it turns out: Identical twins. There’s no story reason for making them twins, they could just as easily have been non-twin brothers with a second actor, but oh well. There’s a couple-three references to cunnilingus that suggests the brothers were masters of the art, but again, it didn’t really pertain to the story. I had high hopes the vampire clan, who started out all white, might thematically suggest what white people did to black music of the Mississippi Delta, but he didn’t really explore it. There’s a tacked-on KKK mini-plot that seemed to exist so the audience could get the thrill of watching a while klavern mowed down with a machine gun.

I’m not much for horror, but vampires are at least interesting monsters. These vampires…were not.

In a summer of brutal weather, starvation in Gaza and a full-on assault on American democracy, this doesn’t count as a tragedy. Just a disappointment. But it’s always good to see cunnilingus get a free public service announcement, I guess.

And the brutal weather continued. It’s about 90 as I write this, and will stay that way for two more days.

Also: A man randomly attacked 11 people with a knife in a Traverse City Walmart, which then exposed idiots who cannot use a map and understand that the northern Michigan resort city is not Dearborn, and a suspect by the name of Bradford James Gille is unlikely to be Muslim. In fact, he sounds like one of the many, many mentally ill souls in this country, having self-published a book about his revelation that he is, in fact, Jesus Christ. He hails from Afton, a dot on the map and still a bit of a drive to TC, about 90 miles to be exact.

Good thing the president just signed an E.O. requiring homeless people to be involuntarily committed to the scores of nearly empty mental hospitals that exist throughout this great land, just waiting to be filled. Mr. Gille will be right at home there.

Well, this is sad news: Martin Cruz Smith died last week. One of my favorite authors, most notably for his series set in the Soviet Union (and later Russia, and later still, Ukraine), featuring his soulful, chain-smoking antihero, Investigator Arkady Renko.

His (gift link) obit tells the story of his breakthrough with “Gorky Park,” first in the series, set in Cold War Moscow and published in 1981, to great acclaim. An elegant and stylish writer, he managed to catch a wave that tracked the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and recent history of what came after; the second in the series, “Polar Star,” took place on a Soviet factory ship in the Bering Sea during the Perestroika/joint venture era. Then came “Red Square” (post-collapse), “Wolves Eat Dogs” (Chernobyl), “Havana Bay” (Cuba), “Stalin’s Ghost” (the swing back to the right), “Three Stations” (oligarchs), and four more. I read them all, but something changed around “Stalin’s Ghost,” which is when Smith announced his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, and the change he’d had to make in his process: As I recall, he would sit in a chair, compose sentences in his head and recite them to his wife, Emily, who would write them down. And I don’t know what that says about writing, and rewriting, but the books were different, first subtly, then noticeably, then (to my mind) disastrously so.

Gone was the stylish prose; the later books feel like he was using a ghost, and who knows, maybe he was. He made a lot of money off the early books, but money runs out, and maybe he needed some. Or maybe he just had to do them — writing is like that. But it was sad to see Renko reduced to such a thin ghost of what he’d once been. The last book in the series, “Hotel Ukraine,” was published just last week. I guess I’ll read it, because I’m an Arkady completist, but it’s gonna hurt, I know.

No one ever said death was pleasant. But we remember the good people. All crime/detective fiction follows a formula of sorts, and the great ones find new ways to calculate the formula. Smith did that, no small feat.

In other news at this hour, Hulk Hogan croaked, too. No great loss.

Also, Chuck Mangione. There’s a very strange party going on the bardo right now.

And now we head into the weekend, when it promises to be cooler. I’ll try to stop complaining about the weather. None of us live in Gaza, after all.

Have a good one, all.

I don’t want to be Russian, shrugging off corruption with a what-can-you-do. I don’t want to be Hungarian, doing the same. And yet, being dumbfounded and outraged 24/7 is exhausting. I’m giving in to what my former religion teaches is a sin: Despair.

So when I read that the Kennedy Center Board of Ass-Kissers wants to rename the opera theater therein for Melania Trump, all I can do is scoff and say, “Not a bad come-up for an old whore.” And if anyone should blanch at that, I would remind you to grow up.

Meanwhile, Congress may be adjourned until after Labor Day, but I hope the Dems keep the water torture going. Like Sen. Wyden in Oregon:

“The Trump administration may be closing the books on Epstein’s sex trafficking, but I am not ready to give up. Far from it,” the Oregon senator said in a statement earlier this week.

Trump made campaign promises to release FBI files related to Epstein. But he then seemingly reversed course after taking office, saying they wouldn’t be releasing further Epstein documents. Many of the president’s supporters have been pushing him to release documents, including a list of Epstein’s clients.

Wyden said several banks waited until Epstein’s arrest to flag suspicious transactions that could be related to criminal activity. Now, the senator is pushing to make Epstein-related financial documents public. Wyden disclosed many of his revelations in a New York Times article that details what his staffers found digging through confidential bank records.

Hell yeah, Barry Levine:

Mr. Trump has acknowledged being friendly with Mr. Epstein for about 15 years, ending with a falling out over a real estate matter in 2004. Mr. Trump has not been accused by law enforcement of any wrongdoing related to Mr. Epstein, but his relationship with Mr. Epstein has come under scrutiny.

…On Wednesday, The Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Ms. Bondi told Mr. Trump this spring that his name appeared in the Epstein files. The context in which his name was raised remains unclear.

Hell yeah, Politico:

Trump and his closest allies thought they’d spend the summer taking a well-earned victory lap, having coaxed Congress into passing the megabill, bullied foreign governments into a slew of new trade arrangements, convinced NATO allies to spend billions more on collective defense and pressed world leaders to bow to various other demands from Doha to The Hague.

“POTUS is clearly furious,” said a person close to the White House, who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to discuss the mood inside the West Wing. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them sort of paralyzed.”

Good. Maybe he’ll have a medical event that will require him to use a cane or walker thereafter.

And yeah, if all this requires sacrificing Bill Clinton, that’s fine with me. It’s time, and no one cares anymore. He’s an old man.

By the way, it’s worth clicking on the Politico link to see the fucking mess Tubby has made of the Oval Office, which now looks like a higher-end New Orleans whorehouse. Fitting, I know! When he and the old whore are finally gone, there isn’t going to be enough sage and sandblasting to drive all that gilt crap out.

Sorry I’m late today. We had a perfect start of the week, and currently it’s 86 degrees, forecast to be 10 degrees hotter tomorrow, with humidity in the armpit-mold range until the middle of next week. It isn’t weather to spark creativity. But we press on.