Happy New Year to everyone, but especially you, my loyal readers, who have kept me maintaining this blog for, good lord, going on …24 years this month? It’s been that long? Amazing. We’ve lived through the Blog Craze, remained steadfast through social media, and who knows, maybe we’ll be popular again before cancer or random gunfire or a drunk/distracted driver takes me out. Not to be morbid, but I read the news yesterday oh boy, and I don’t see a lot to smile about.

That said, I’m still smiling. My 2024 one-word resolution, which I can’t remember, isn’t dong me much good, so I’m not making one this year. I have goals, of course, one being: Work less. Or rather, work less for others, more for me. The Biden stock market, decent luck and a lifetime of reasonably careful money management have left us reasonably comfortable, so I’d like to throttle back the freelance writing and write more for myself. Here, and elsewhere. So that’s the big one.

The others? The usual. Declutter. Death clean. Unfuck that which is fucked. Not to get too personal about our finances, but we’re investigating whether we can afford to bestow a chunk of cash on Kate to help her buy a house. Nothing fancy, but something that will allow her to start building equity on her own. As an all-1099 penniless artist (but a happy one!), she’ll never be able to do it on her own income, I fear, and it’s time for her to join the Sisterhood of Worrying About the Roof. As a boomer who benefited from an economic system that has since disintegrated, I have strong feelings about hoarding generational wealth. (I’m against it.) She’s our sole heir; might as well let her have some benefits now.

Entry level for a house in Metro Detroit that you don’t have to evict the raccoons from first: Roughly $200K. This is insane. But it’s the way we live today, so.

We’re taking the tree down today. I’m also pleased to report that yesterday’s ham-and-bean soup not only fulfilled the traditions of New Year’s dining, but it also used up the last of the Christmas ham, AND the accompanying Caesar salad did the same. As a Midwesterner, nothing makes me happier than using up leftovers. (Unless it’s buttoning up the house for winter.)

So, speaking of social media: A while back I joined a Facebook group about a concept called radical unschooling, just out of personal curiosity. I don’t radically unschool anyone, and am in fact a big believer in public education, but I’m also aware of how often it fails children who don’t fall into the mainstream, and while there are a fair number of utter crackpots in this group, there are many whose children struggle with structure. For the unaware, “radical unschooling” takes homeschool a step further, into basically trusting children will be led into learning by following their own instincts and interests. (Yeah, I know.) Kids stay home with a parent and, in the idealized version, go for a walk in a park and ask questions about plants and birds and wind and so forth, which the parent answers or, more often, directs the child to library books or YouTube videos or other resources that can answer them. But it’s pretty clear the idealized version doesn’t always pertain. One post asking for advice from the group was from a mother who went to a homeschooling fair and was scolded by a reading expert because her daughter was 8 years old and still illiterate.

“I thought she’d just naturally pick it up, and now I feel really bad, because this woman told me I’d missed a window!” she mourned. Whew.

A lot, and I mean a lot of the posts, suggest that someone’s child is neurodivergent, at least a little. And one topic comes up time and again: “Sensitivity issues.” One mother writes that her child won’t allow her to brush their curly hair, and now it’s matted. A child acts out in public, violently. Her kids have no self-control. The answer to many of these concerns seem to always be: The child has sensitivity issues. So my question for the group is: Who diagnoses sensitivity issues? I get the feeling lots of these parents aren’t into western medicine, so I doubt much of it is coming from doctors. Are sensitivity issues the new “oh I’m gluten-intolerant,” or is this just an extension of how we understand kids who are on the spectrum?

On to current events. :::opens newspaper page, slams it shut::: Ai-yi-yi, 2025. Let’s get through it in one piece.

The last two years of the Carter presidency coincided with the first two years of my career in newspapers, and one of my early tasks was to help edit the vast amounts of wire copy that went into the Sunday women’s section at the Columbus Dispatch. Fashion, advice, all that stuff, but today I’m thinking about Betty Beale, who covered Washington society. Her columns about parties at the French embassy seemed a little out of touch with central Ohio readers, but like I said, we had a lot of space to fill.

Beale, like most of permanent Washington, despised the Carters, considered them cornpone country white trash and never missed a chance to sneer at them. To be sure, the Carters were a very different first couple than we’d seen in previous administrations, and certainly did things differently than the Nixons, Fords, Kennedys and even the Johnsons. Rosalynn, you might remember, recycled the gown for the presidential inaugural that she wore to her husband’s gubernatorial inaugural celebration some years before. This was before stylists had coined the term “vintage” and “shopping your closet,” and Beale echoed the opinions that the First Lady has some responsibility to wear and promote American designers, and their current collections, not the old stuff. Jimmy preferred to carry his own bags, and she didn’t like that much, either. How trifling! How low-class! Doesn’t he know the American president should not humble himself to manual labor? When they elected to walk the inaugural parade route, rather than ride in a limo, why you could hear the tut-tutting all the way to Ohio.

It went on and on like this, and not just from Beale. The Carters, who voters elected in large part because they were so different from official Washington, were expected to just figure these things out. The country was in a weird, stressed-out place, having just survived Vietnam and Watergate, and I can’t really blame them for not going whole-hog for creature comforts, not when inflation was out of control and the OPEC oil crisis was still delivering shock waves to the economy. They were Democrats, after all.

Anyway, nothing Rosalynn could do would make bitches like Betty happy, and it seemed she knew that, and didn’t try very hard to please her. After Carter’s 1980 loss and the imperial Reagans’ arrival, Betty wallowed like a pig in slop. The Return of Glamour, etc. Nancy Reagan, an average-pretty former actress with no charisma to speak of, was hailed as the second coming of Jackie Kennedy. Her bedazzled dresses hung on her skinny shoulders, but they made the editors of fashion magazines fairly orgasmic with glee, simultaneously praising her “birdlike” size-2 figure and her choice of styles that would “showcase” it — whatever that means.

I also thought a lot in the last day about the extended Carter family, which was also looked down upon by official Washington. There was Billy Carter, the president’s brother, a classic good ol’ boy and drunk. There was Ruth Carter Stapleton, his sister and an evangelist, who converted pornographer Larry Flynt (it didn’t take). There were his children, four sons and a daughter, the latter, Amy, being a little girl when the family moved into the White House. She was criticized, too, because official Washington didn’t think children belonged at adult events. (These people fell silent when the Trumps would parade a 12-year-old Barron Trump, in black tie no less, into the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party. That was the last time I felt sorry for the little monster; imagine sitting with your parents, in a tuxedo, at a party where most of the guests are about 90 years old and all the women have strange, ruined, plastic-surgery faces. No wonder he never spoke a word aloud.)

And there was Miss Lillian, Jimmy’s mother, who had even hard-core city folk calling her “Miz Lill-yun” about 10 minutes after meeting her. Basically, the whole clan was the Waltons, at least for a while. Then they were Ma and Pa Kettle and their hillbilly fambly.

Soon we’ll say our official farewell. I really, really, really hope you-know-who doesn’t show up. I hope he has that much decency. (Ha ha! I know he doesn’t, the cunt.)

As longtime readers know, I go to the Eastern Market on Saturdays pretty much year-round. In season there’s the fresh local produce, and out of season there’s wholesale stuff from elsewhere, and in all seasons there are usually at least a few things I can’t get anywhere else, like…fresh eggs right off the farm. Local meats. Stuff like that.

My egg guy is a peach. He charges $6/dozen, but since I always buy two dozen and bring back my empty cartons, I give him $10 for two. This week, he said, “Man, can you believe what they’re asking down the way? Eight bucks!” I hadn’t noticed — I only have eyes for his eggs, with their vivid orange, pudding-like yolks — but I wasn’t surprised. Eggs have been all over the map, price-wise, in the last couple years, which I attribute to:

** Season. Hens lay less in winter, price goes up.
** Bird flu. When agriculture inspectors are taking out whole flocks to stop the spread, the price will go up.
** Cage-free mandates, a new one this year. As of January 1, all eggs sold in Michigan have to be from uncaged chickens. When I mentioned this, he said, “We’ve known that was coming for at least a year. Everyone’s already made the change, even the big outfits.”

However, this week the groceries have been stripping eggs from their shelves and hanging up apologetic signs about the new law, which has led to an uprising on right-wing Twitter — the only Twitter, these days — about CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS OUTRAGE and WHAT WILL THE DEMS INFLICT UPON US NEXT and so on. It fell to an unemployed young reporter to point out that the bill as introduced was sponsored by a Republican state senator, a farmer, way back in 2019, and passed by a GOP-controlled state legislature. Ha ha ha. However, the panic is real:

(This guy ⬆️ calls himself an “independent journalist” but does virtually no reporting I can see* other than tweeting, although he’s quite the aggregator of others’ work. *I don’t subscribe to his Substack; maybe it’s there.)

It seems to this egg-buyer that what’s being revealed here is the hollowness of the “we support local farmers” propaganda posters that hang in virtually every grocery I patronize. Granted, my part of Michigan isn’t that far from the Ohio border, and if all the eggs pulled from the shelves can’t be verified as being from cage-free hens, then that suggests they came from Ohio or someplace where poultry isn’t treated so well. I recall a widely loathed operation called Buckeye Egg from my time there.

Anyway, it’s fun to watch these wingnuts tearing one another up on Twitter. And no, I’m not telling anyone there about my egg guy at the market. He says he’ll keep the prices down until he can’t anymore, and I appreciate that as much as I do his brown eggs.

I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of this in the coming months — persistently high prices and fights on Twitter between MAGA factions. I, for one, am bringing the popcorn.

Sunday with another holiday ahead of us this week. Enjoy it. Yesterday we hit 58 degrees and we did a bike loop of Belle Isle. Today? Sheets of cold, driving rain. The lesson: Take your pleasant moments where you can in the dark season. They’re rare enough.

The only thing I had on my calendar Thursday was a 9 a.m. appointment to give blood. Why do I still donate, knowing that the Red Cross emphasizes the “donor” part and never, ever talks about how they sell this donation? Eh, because people still need blood, and because I’m an adult enough to know that fresh blood is a commodity, and it would be foolish not to handle it as such. And the donation is at my gym, and the owner likes a good showing by members. People-pleasing is my business. Also, I’m HIV-negative and healthy, so: Shrug.

On the way over I drove past a few of the big trend in mid-level holiday decorations this year: The enormous inflatable. Regular inflatables have been around for a while, of course, but the enormous inflatable — big enough to approach the roofline on a two-story house — are new, the Christmas equivalent of the 12-foot skeleton. They’re sort of festively terrifying. I wonder what it must be like for a kid to look out the window and see a Rudolph or Frosty the size of a dinosaur swaying in the yard. But they’re catching on.

The problem, with it and all inflatables, is what to do in the daytime, the downtime for holiday decorations. Most people seem to turn the blowers off when the sun’s up, which leaves yards covered by what looks like holiday-colored parachutes, or maybe just dead snowmen and reindeer.

I got to the gym, spotted the blood crew on the basketball court, and started the routine. There’s always a lot of warnings and concerns about fainting, but I’ve never seen it happen. “So does anybody really faint?” I asked the phlebotomist.

“High-school kids. They go down all the time. And once one falls, they all do,” she said.

“But they’re young and healthy,” I said.

“And they never eat breakfast. Then they lie to us about how they ate breakfast. I asked one girl, ‘I thought you said you had a big breakfast. What did you eat?’ and she said, ‘Fruit snacks.’ I told her to eat a big lunch, and she came back and said she still felt sick. ‘What did you have for lunch?’ I asked. ‘A bag of apple slices.'” Damn, kids these days. I finished my bloodletting, drank a bottle of water, chose Cheez-its for my snack and headed out.

OK, Cheez-its AND mini Oreos. I wanted both salt and sweet.

It was a good Christmas hereabouts. I got many gifts, both thoughtful and practical, and Alan gave us a bike rack for our cars, one that slips into the trailer hitch and carries them on the outside, bus rack-style. That’ll be nice for exploring some car-free trails in the warm weather, maybe heading up north. I had a dream once of spending a big chunk of winter in a warm climate, taking both bikes and dog along, but after checking out seasonal rental rates for the Florida Keys (the only part of Florida I think I could tolerate), eh, maybe not.

Another thing I did over the last few days was watch a documentary — on Hulu, I believe — called “The Disappearance of Shere Hite.” Having remembered how “The Hite Report” on female sexuality rocked the usual suspects, it seemed worth a trot down memory lane. Hard to imagine her most newsworthy finding — the most women need more than PIV to reach orgasm — landed as hard as it did. But it did. And I came away thinking that younger women seem to have benefited from this. Far fewer men have Soprano-level opinions about oral sex, and thanks to Hite and many other people willing to talk about sex frankly, in general I think younger women might have an easier time of it than their grandmother’s generation did.

Then the Matt Gaetz report dropped, and: Nah.

Gaetz is a sleazebag of the first order, but we already knew that. I came away from it feeling for the girls who partied with him and his terrible friends. There’s always a lot of loose talk when something like this happens, that so-and-so “raped a child.” We can quibble over whether a 17-year-old is a child, and whether having consensual sex with a 17-year-old is rape. Personally, I don’t think it is, but I do think it’s fucking gross, and I wonder why there are so many girls that age willing to put themselves on websites like Seeking Arrangement and accept $400 to have sex with people like Gaetz and his friends at parties. They’ve been desensitized by porn, yes, but it takes more than that to turn a junior in high school into a prostitute. I suspect it takes lots of mom’s boyfriends, virtually no life of the mind beyond wondering what the Kardashians will be up to next, an obsession with social media and a few other poisons in the cultural stew to do it. (Although I also acknowledge there have always been girls like this, and likely always will.) Soon enough she’ll show up in porn loops with her hair in pigtails, pretending to be 15 again. She won’t fool anyone.

Gaetz, for his part, should be tarred and feathered. Failsons like him never are.

Don’t mean to bring you down this near-holiday weekend! It’s a unique liminal space, the only one of the year. Enjoy it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How about you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kash Patel has pimped even skeevier supplements.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But more will be revealed, because it always is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gotta run. Open thread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The one-line paragraph.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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