Alarmed? Why would anyone be alarmed by this?

MADISON, Wis. — Hinting at his plans to overhaul how elections are run, the Republican running for governor of Wisconsin this week said his party would permanently control the state if he wins.

“Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor,” construction executive Tim Michels told supporters Monday at a campaign stop.

Michels is seeking to unseat Gov. Tony Evers (D), who over his four years vetoed a string of Republican-backed bills that would have changed voting rules in a battleground state that Donald Trump narrowly won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020.

To be sure, Michels’ mouthpiece says he was only speaking abstractly, that the GOP’s policies would be so gosh-darn popular they couldn’t help but hold their seats forever and ever, amen. Which is, I’m sorry, a crock of shit.

Man, am I tired of election season. Which I won’t be working this year, at least for money. Still waiting to hear what my shift will be at the absentee counting boards.

In sad news of the day, did y’all hear about Julie Powell? Dead at 49, of quote-cardiac arrest-unquote, which as a former colleague once pointed out, is what everyone dies of. Still, she’d recently had a long bout of Covid, followed by the flu, and then, hmm, just dies? I’m going back to my pre-booster mask behavior, i.e., wearing one indoors, with certain allowances for living life, which is to say, I’m not giving up on restaurants this winter. But with restaurant prices what they are, I’m not eating out so much anyway.

Short entry today, because I’m tired. Let’s hope for better later this week.

Note: I started to write this for Deadline Detroit, trashed it, rewrote it, trashed it again – it seemed too obvious. But now, in the last days before the election, gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon has unearthed dirty books as a campaign issue. So, with a sigh, I say the obvious.

Defending books from those who would ban them, burn them, keep them out of libraries – that’s porn for a progressive. It’s so easy to step up for Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, all of whom have written something to cheese off right-wingers. It’s almost literal virtue-signaling.

It’s harder to do it for the terrible writers – hacks, pornographers, crap-merchants – who also get swept up in the net wielded by people like state Sen. Lana Theis, who last summer choked back tears on the MIRS podcast when talking about the filthy, filthy books that Michigan children are exposed to in their school libraries. Stung by her tongue-lashing from her Senate colleague, Mallory McMorrow, she sought to get a little of her own back by also crying to the Detroit News’ Ingrid Jacques, champion of put-upon conservative women everywhere. Wrote Jacques, in her last column for the paper:

Theis points to specific books that she knows are in some Michigan school libraries or being taught in the classroom. Books such as “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender, and Sexual Health” depict in graphic detail masturbation, sexual positions and LGBTQ relationships. It’s targeted to children ages 10-13.

Other books such as “Push” describe a father raping his daughter, also in great detail.

“Do you believe preschoolers and elementary school children should be exposed to complex sexual and gender identity issues?” she asks. “Or do you believe children should be able to maintain their innocence at those young ages?”

Innocence. Huh. In my experience, 10-13 years is the age when puberty arrives, early for some (mortifying) and later for others (equally mortifying). Once that happens, one’s brain becomes a fetid stew of confusion, and innocence – at least, the innocence of early childhood – flies out the window. A book that explains how one’s body is changing, not just in medical terms but in a way that at least acknowledges all the weirdness one might feel as a result, sounds like a welcome addition to any school library. (Also, please: If 12-year-old boys, and some girls, aren’t masturbating, I’m Marilyn Monroe.)

I was about 12 when a different book was passed around my junior high school, like Soviets sharing samizdat. “The Godfather” was a best-seller, the ‘70s version of the Mafia tale. The paperback was everywhere, copies stained with pool water dripped by summer readers and ketchup from lunch readers, spines scored with multiple openings and closings. But we all knew what we wanted. Our copies fell open to page 21.

It’s the scene where Sonny Corleone screws Lucy, a bridesmaid at his sister’s wedding. Author Mario Puzo doesn’t spare a detail in describing Sonny’s huge penis, “an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle” that penetrates Lucy and causes “unbelievable pleasure” as she receives the “savage arrows of his lightning-like thrusts” which of course – of course! – end in a “shattering climax” for Lucy, the first of her life. Of course.

Junior high was different then. Most of us were still virgins. Our health classes talked about reproduction, sperm and eggs, but nothing about blood-gorged poles of muscle, needless to say. The passage was titillating, confusing and terrifying. We all had enough knowledge to understand, theoretically at least, that we’d be having sex one of these days, but we feared for the integrity of our tender interiors, should it be with a Sonny Corleone. But Lucy felt unbelievable pleasure; it said so right on the page. From savage arrows. What is going on here?

Here’s another book Theis named in her tour of aggrievement, “Push,” by an author known only as Sapphire. It opens with this devastating passage:

I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver. That was in 1983. I was out of school for a year. This gonna be my second baby. My daughter got Down Sinder. She’s retarded. I had got left back in the second grade too, when I was seven, ’cause I couldn’t read (and I still peed on myself). I should be in the eleventh grade, getting ready to go into the twelf’ grade so I can gone ‘n graduate. But I’m not. I’m in the ninfe grade.

Clarieece Precious Jones, the child telling her story, is not innocent, needless to say:

“Father,” (the nurse) say. “What’s your daddy’s name?”

“Carl Kenwood Jones, born in the Bronx.”

She say, “What’s the baby’s father’s name?”

I say, “Carl Kenwood Jones, born in the same Bronx.”

I can see where “Push” might not be Theis’ cup of tea. But imagine you’re a child who’s enduring this sort of abuse at home – it happens, even in Howell – and you pulled this book down from a library shelf. You might feel less alone in the world. And maybe you are a well-loved child from an intact family, and you did the same. Maybe you’d feel like the world was wider than you might have thought.

And that is the whole point of literature. To hold a mirror to the world, all of it. Children should be guided in their choice of reading material by adults, but not dictated to. (You should have heard what my school librarian had to say about Nancy Drew mysteries, my absolute favorite for a while.) In a just world, any child entering a school library in search of reading material should be treated with trumpets and salutes. If a plain old book can cut through the static of TikTok, homework, over-scheduling and the million other things competing for their attention, give that author the Nobel Prize. That’s an accomplishment.

Theis’ cause is not a lonely one. I recently stumbled across a spreadsheet, file name “inappropriate library books,” compiled by FEC United, a hard-right group that has established a beachhead in Grosse Pointe, where I live. It contains “Push,” needless to say. And there’s the 1619 Project and various books about racism. All three of the authors I mentioned in my first paragraph are there. And now, late in the race, the flailing Michigan gubernatorial campaign of Tudor Dixon has seized on dirty books, which she describes as “books describing how to have sex” as an issue. I can’t really top Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s riposte to that (“You really think books are more dangerous than guns?”), but I will add that in my experience, no one needs to be taught how to have sex; nature has endowed us with the instincts to figure it out on our own.

Anyway, like I said, we can all get a warm glow from sticking up for Toni Morrison. But I rise today to stick up for Mario Puzo, crap-merchant. His lousy novel was the foundation of two of the best movies ever made; that alone is the basis for a decent term paper. Lucy the bridesmaid gets her own subplot, a weird medical detour to explain her too-large vagina, and no I’m not kidding. It scarred me for years, worrying that one day I could only be satisfied by a donkey-endowed man like Sonny Corleone.

If only it had been kept from me!

Earlier this year, when the GOP gubernatorial field was taking shape here in Michigan, four or five of them met for an event at the Mackinac Policy Conference, the thing up north where the legislature and the big swingin’ dicks of the business and nonprofit world meet to drink and jaw and plan the future.

(I attended once. Those plans? They never work out.)

Anyway, one of them, Kevin Rinke, who inherited his family’s vast auto-dealership empire, responded to an abortion question by claiming that “some states” were considering bills that would “legalize abortion up to 28 days after birth. Twenty-eight days!”

Later in the summer-long campaign, Rinke would emerge as the “reasonable one” on abortion, advocating for rape and incest exceptions. No one else did. Shows you where we are right now.

Of course, that is bullshit. But I was interested in where a seemingly sane, functional adult might have gotten that idea. Google a little, and you find it was all around the crazier corners of the right-wing internet. The AP explains, if that’s the right word, the confusion:

“To everyone saying it’s fake because it was posted on 4/1 just do some research. 99% of y’all don’t stay in Cali. It’s called The infanticide bill,” claimed a Facebook post sharing a screenshot of the headline on April 1 with over 11,000 reshares.

But the posts misrepresent the purpose of the bill and its potential impact. The bill eliminates a requirement that a coroner must investigate deaths related to suspected self-induced or criminal abortion. Coroner statements on certificates for a fetal death could not be used to pursue a criminal case against the mother.

The aim of the bill, introduced Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, a Democrat representing the East Bay, is to protect women who end a pregnancy or have a miscarriage from being investigated, persecuted or incarcerated. Erin Ivie, a spokesperson for Wicks told The Associated Press in an email. “The bill is specific to pregnancy and pregnancy-related outcomes, and does not decriminalize the ‘murder of babies’ in the weeks after birth,” Ivie said.

So what that tells me is…well, there are several conclusions I can think of. One, that Rinke gets his news from the Gateway Pundit, et al. Two, that whoever prepped Rinke for the debate gets their news from those places. Or, far more likely, both the candidate and his aides know it’s bullshit, but figure hey, red meat for the base, who gives a shit.

Rinke didn’t get the nomination. This woman did:

The Republican gubernatorial nominee in Michigan invoked a conspiracy that the Covid-19 pandemic and protests in the summer of 2020 after the killing of George Floyd were part of a decades-long plan by the Democratic Party to “topple” the United States as retaliation for losing the US Civil War, adding that the party wanted to enslave people “again.”

Tudor Dixon, a former TV news anchor, made the remarks on the far-right streaming news network Real America’s Voice, which hosts former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s show, in late June 2020.

In a six-minute monologue at the beginning of the show, Dixon said that after the “attempted creation of the Black House Autonomous Zone outside of the White House,” referring to a cordoned off area near the White House erected by activists, that Democrats were using this moment to “topple” the US.

“The country today is divided, and this was the plan. It’s been in the works for years. The idea that you can topple the greatest country in the world. But to topple a country like the United States of America, you must be planning this for decades,” said Dixon. “Why wouldn’t that come from the party that lost the Civil War? The party that wanted to own people because they viewed them as less than human? Do you think that the Democrats are over losing to the north?”

Most polls have shown the incumbent governor with a Secretariat-size lead, but the race is tightening, as they usually do as the election draws closer. When the gap was 17 points, many Republicans grumbled that they missed their chance when they failed to nominate Rinke. He could have faced Gretchen Whitmer and backed her down, they say, because He Is A Business Success. (JFC, am I tired of that argument. The last business success we had as governor bean-counted an entire city into lead poisoning.) Dixon claims to be a business success too, if you count working for her daddy’s steel firm (which failed) and being a commentator on a right-wing network so obscure I have to look it up, every time. She was also an actor in some B vampire pictures and…I forget. Also, a mom. (She says it that way, in italics.) I call her Brunette Ivanka for a reason.

So that was our choice in 2022, or at least, Republicans’ choice. Don’t get me started on the AG and SOS candidates, who make Tudor Dixon look like Winston Churchill.

Ah, well. My vote is cast. Let’s change the subject. I was going to talk about Kanye West, but realized I don’t care. Seldom has a celebrity interested me less. So I’ll just recommend this interesting essay on “The Raft of the Medusa,” art and politics, in New York magazine.

Here’s a Van Gogh from the DIA show, from an angle, and enjoy the rest of the weekend.

Hello, Wednesday. Nothing on the schedule, nothing on tomorrow’s schedule beyond a vague plan to go to the art museum to see the Van Gogh show, one phone call for Friday. And it’s overcast and rainy.

If this is retirement, I don’t know how you keep yourself from going crazy. Bring on the part-time jobs and decent-paying gigs, I say.

I did cross one big item off my to-do list this year: Signed up for Medicare, which starts in five days. We both went with Original Recipe, plus a gap supplement, with a Plan D to be named later. Total outflow: Around $300/month for no-worries coverage. Considering I was paying more than double that for plenty-of-worries coverage, it seems cheap. I know many of you are Advantage partisans, but the more I read about them, the less comfortable I became. There’s something about the phrase “prior authorization” that makes my skin crawl.

And justlikethat, my email chimes with a decent freelance assignment. I know I’ve said I’m done with journalism, but this is right up my alley, with a generous deadline and a better-than-expected payday. OK then! Back in the saddle.

Still, though, life has slowed down considerably. When signing up for a hallmark of American old age is the highlight of your week, you know it’s time to develop some outside interests.

Did any of you watch the debate(s) last night? I’m hearing bad things from Pennsylvania, and the usual bullshit on Twitter about Michigan. My ballot was submitted days ago, and I hate-hate-hate what passes for “debates” these days, so I didn’t watch. As I saw someone say on Twitter, Fetterman’s condition is likely temporary, while Oz’s problem of being a lying dirtbag is permanent.

How’s everyone otherwise?

The death of a prominent figure on the world stage is like a train: The news itself is the engine, and certain predictable cars are dragged behind. Sometimes it’s the New York Times obituary where the byline is of a person who died years earlier. Sometimes it’s the previously unknown (to most, anyway) secret children. But always, always there’s the localization.

Localizing is how editors connect events happening far away to people, businesses or other actors close to home. Princess Diana worked briefly as a nanny, and we all got to meet the American family she nannied for, who remembered her as sweet and pretty and good with the children. The late Jim Barbieri, in little ol’ Bluffton, Ind., could localize a plane crash half a world away with no Americans onboard: “Bluffton-made Franklin Electric submersible motors” were used in the hunt for the black boxes.

So when Queen Elizabeth died, it was only a matter of time before they started turning up. Thanks to Mitch Harper in Fort Wayne for digging up some good ones:

On Mackinac Island, they’re remembering when Elizabeth and Phillip, aboard the royal yacht Britannia, passed under the Mackinac Bridge:

Two hundred thousand turned out to see her in Windsor, across the river from Detroit:

But the best of all might come from little Crown Point, Ind., where they’re thinking of…flowers:

Hey, it’s usually a reach, but people like to feel connected.

You’d be hard-pressed to get me to say a kind word about Ronald Reagan, but I have always liked this photo:

But that’s me: Always a sucker for a horse. We generally see Reagan in western wear, in a western saddle. But a good horseman can handle both, easily. It’s nice to see two people enjoying a shared enthusiasm.

So then, the week begins. We’re winding down to our departure for the next leg of our world travels, and the very last, or sorta-last chore in the refreshment of our house. The floors are finally refinished, and we should move back into our bedroom in a couple more days. Which should leave just enough time to remake the bed, pack the suitcases and run to the airport. Next stop: Barcelona.

But I’ll be back between then and now. So take care, and have a good week.

I observed the passing of Queen Elizabeth by pushing my bomb-ass battery-powered sweeper around, sucking up dog hair and thinking about the butterfly effect. What drove Wallis Simpson to set her cap for the Prince of Wales in 1930-something? (My guess is: Money and position, but honestly I don’t care because I have always found their love story boring in the extreme.) Anyway, when she made her play, she set in motion the events that would lead the prince’s niece to become sovereign, rule for 70 years and die as the beloved great-grandmother of a diminished empire, but at least not one that consorted with Nazis.

Funny, that.

Of course, the talk was always that Edward VIII was probably gay and probably sterile (mumps), and even if Wallis had been a blushing virgin and not a twice-divorced American well past heir-producing age, at some point a different line of succession might have had to be drawn up. Still. The crown did a hop, skip and jump, and went first to Elizabeth’s father, who became George VI, before landing on her 25-year-old head in 1952. And there it would stay until Thursday.

That was her on Tuesday after she greeted the new prime minister, and invited her to form a government in her name. You can complain about the waste and anachronistic nature of royalty all you want, but I’d wager most of the tourists who visit the U.K. at least make some time to drive past a palace or three, and as for doing the job, well, she worked overtime.

Imagine holding the same job – and a job it is – for 70 years. She had to hang on through so, so much: The latter half of the 20th century was no picnic for an institution like the monarchy, and then there was the country itself, losing its empire piece by piece. Her children, sensitive Charles and bold Anne, then the second thoughts, Andrew and Edward, had to go through their own wild youths and midlife crises and all the rest of it, all in a spotlight that only grew brighter and hotter with time. Give her this: She outlasted Diana.

Along with the spotlight comes all these, these …commoners, with their own ideas. “The crown should go directly to William,” opined one dipshit American on Facebook. “He’s much more of a leader than Charles.” And this is based on what, exactly? Because Charles cheated on his pretty wife with his homely old girlfriend, I expect would be the answer. Anyway, lady, this isn’t fucking Game of Thrones, anyway. The crown goes to the sovereign’s firstborn, it’s not up for a vote. Charles has been in the waiting room all his life.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Charles’ monarchy. His goofball interests and life experiences will give the world a different monarchy than his mother’s, and I want him to do the job he’s trained so long for. Long live King Charles III. I hope he has a grand coronation. If hereditary monarchy has to endure this long, at least it should be interesting.

P.S. Queen consort Camilla will be a trip, too – at least I hope so. I so want her to be the three-G&Ts fun grandma of Buckingham Palace.

Other than the excitement of current events and sweeping up dog hair, my only outing Thursday was to Costco, to pick up a prescription and note that not only is the Christmas merch out, but I heard “Joy to the World” on the sound system. I’m so old – how old are you? – I’m so old I remember when people complained that Halloween was too early to start thinking of the holidays.

Have a swell weekend, all.

I don’t know when it happened, if it was them or me, but I’ve kinda lost my taste for NPR.

It’s been so long since I was a regular listener to commercial radio I can’t even remember — 35 years? Forty? A long time. Obviously nothing should stay frozen in time, especially not a journalism outlet. I don’t miss Bob Edwards, but I miss the personal essays they used to run. I miss the offbeat stories from corners of the world I’ll probably never visit. They’ve been replaced by sometimes painful, flop-sweaty pieces to satisfy someone’s diversity agenda, and what’s worse, they’ve elbowed out actual news.

The other day Alan remarked that one of the January 6 hearings had gotten 30 seconds in the top-of-the-hour news roundup, while a stupid feature on a group called the Lesbian Avengers had gone about eight minutes. What are the Lesbian Avengers? “…An organization that focuses on lesbian issues and visibility through humorous and untraditional activism.” Thanks, Wikipedia. Alan only remembers that they sometimes pass out Hershey’s Kisses with notes attached: “Smile, you’ve been kissed by a lesbian.”

OK, then. Today the story was about Brendan Fraser’s six-minute standing O at the Venice Film Festival, where his latest film debuted. Called “The Whale,” it’s (quoting from the NPR story):

…about a reclusive English teacher (Fraser) who weighs 600 pounds, and as he struggles with his health, tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter. A combination of prosthetics and CGI help Fraser as he portrays this character.

The first half of the story was about how beloved Fraser is, by fans and colleagues alike, and how recent years have been rough on him, for a variety of reasons. He’s had some health challenges, and gained weight, although nowhere near 600 pounds. Maybe 40. He’s no longer Hollywood-slender and matinee idol-handsome. He looks like a Green Bay Packers fan. So what, though. In Darren Aronofsky, he’s probably found the ideal director for his comeback. (Remember what he did for Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler.”) So why does the headline for this story read Why Brendan Fraser’s Hollywood comeback story is both warming hearts and raising ire, hmm?

Because an advocate for fat Americans is miffed, that’s why:

Indeed, critics have turned to social media to say that the movie’s premise is inherently dehumanizing. There’s a question of whether it should have been made at all.

Aubrey Gordon, an author and co-host of the Maintenance Phase, a podcast focused on debunking health fads, took to Twitter to call out the movie’s aim.

“It’s so telling that so many only see fat people as ‘humanized’ in media that shows us doing exactly what they expect: living short, small lives; ‘eating ourselves to death’; feeling sad & regretful. All reminders of how tragic it is to be fat, and how superior it is to be thin,” she wrote.

This kind of media just “reinforces viewers’ anti-fat bias,” she wrote.

Gordon is smart, and I’m with her on the inherent societal bias against obesity. (She’s fat, if you haven’t guessed.) Fat acceptance, sign me up. Different-size models in advertising? Yes, please. Fat doesn’t necessarily mean unhealthy. But 600 pounds? Any way you slice it, that’s pretty damn unhealthy. One of the undone stories of my career, one I wanted to do for Bridge but left before I could put it together, was on super-obesity, those whose weight has passed the quarter-ton stage and suffer mightily as a result. I met a doctor who paid house calls on those patients, and told me what it leads to, i.e., a spiral. The bigger you are, the harder it is to move, the harder it is to move, the less you move. The less you move, the worse you feel. Which leads to more eating, weight gain, etc. Most of his patients that size were virtual shut-ins, afraid to get out much in the world, for all the reasons you can imagine. Needless to say, everything hurt, especially hips and knees.

Tommy Tomlinson is a gifted writer, a former columnist in Charlotte, married to a former colleague of mine in Fort Wayne. At his heaviest, he weighed 460 pounds, and his memoir, “The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America,” was full of excruciating detail about the million calculations one has to make when you’re that size: Will that chair hold me? Will any other furniture hold me? If I’m not sure, can I stand without social awkwardness? And so on. I read excerpts and felt not anti-fat bias, but deep empathy – we all have our addictions, our weaknesses, and the idea of seeing an actor as talented as Fraser bring this complicated emotional stew to life sounds pretty great to me.

I’m reminded of the backlash to “Fatal Attraction,” the way feminists hollered over the idea of a crazy spurned lover, that it dehumanized single women, etc. As a sane single woman at the time, I didn’t feel dehumanized.

So while I appreciate that NPR is stretching like Elastoman to include the fat person’s perspective, I think this is fairly ridiculous in this context, and if it weren’t for the musical weekends on WDET, I probably wouldn’t give them another dime. There’s a question of whether it should have been made at all! Mercy.

So, bloggage:

It was a pretty fun long weekend for us. We saw Kate play in both of her bands, at the Hamtramck Labor Day festival, and both performances were pretty great. The second band, the side project, is GiGi, which got a little ink ahead of the fest, and I had NO IDEA it had appeared, which shows where my head’s been of late.

A local theme park, Cedar Point, announced it was retiring one of its very edgy coasters, following the injury of a rider a couple years back. The park was not held responsible, for the record. I always thought there was a book in the development of a modern roller coaster. When I started taking Kate to Cedar Point, I was amazed at how high-tech and insanely scary they are, yet still (mostly) safe. They gave me heart palpitations just to look at them, honestly. But I’d read a book like that. Cedar Point, hire me! I’m a good explainer.

Finally, in the bottomless pit of indignities our former president has visited upon our land, here’s this: He tried to pay a lawyer – a Jones Day lawyer, no less! – with a horse.

That’s a good note to end on. Happy Wednesday.

You Ohioans probably know, or remember when, the Ohio State Fair was a big honkin’ deal. Former Gov. Jim Rhodes, a country boy from down Jackson County way, purely loved it, and used it as a platform for publicity, every single year.

He would personally attend the livestock auction in the fair’s last days, not actually doing the patter but cheerleading the bidding, which set new sale price records every year. The papers ran photos of all the winners and their bids, which were astronomical. I think I’ve told this story, but here it goes again: After Rhodes left office, there was some pushback on the higher-every-year thing. Rhodes always framed it as “you’re helping send a farm kid to college,” or at least helping him or her with a down payment on their own spread, but one year the seller of the grand champion beef steer took his mid-five-figure sum and spent it on a new pickup truck with all the shit on it. This displeased the buyer (usually Wendy’s). Some time after that, another high-dollar steer went to slaughter and, when the hide was stripped off the animal, globs of silicone gel fell out, touching off a cheating scandal in the formerly all-good-news arena of the country’s biggest state fair.

(Yeah, I know, Texas blah blah. I don’t believe it.)

Prices dropped sharply thereafter. :::touches earpiece::: Wait, I have a correction to make. Prices seem to have risen again. This year’s grand champion steer — always the highest-priced animal in the sale — was sold for $225,000 and HOLY SHITBALLS that’s a lot of money for some hamburgers. It sold to a Volvo dealer, too. Huh. Well, that doesn’t contradict everything above, although clearly prices didn’t stay low forever.

All of this is getting to the story I was leading up to, about the year a girl brought her lamb into the ring and started to cry. The lamb bleated and nuzzled her hand, and every time it did, she cried harder. She knew what fate awaited her pretty, prize-winning lamby, and the governor stopped the auction and made a speech. “This lamb was raised by this girl from the minute it hit the ground, and she loves it like a pet,” he said, along with something else to the effect that he expected whoever won the bid to respect that. The gavel fell, and the buyer announced he was immediately giving the lamb back to the girl. There was lots of cheering and hugging. This touched off a cascade of charity, and at the end, everyone had spent a lot of money and every kid was taking their animal or animals back home. (Where, I have to think, almost every single one was immediately sold again, to a slaughterhouse.)

At the time I thought this was a sweet story, and told it to a 4-H official in Indiana, after I moved there. His brow furrowed. That was absolutely, positively the wrong thing for the governor to do, as well as everyone else, he said. Farm kids know what animals are raised for, even sweet fluffy lambs, and that’s what the competition is all about — not the cutest lamb, but the meatiest, the best conformation, the highest potential return on investment, which is, after all, what keeps a farm paying its bills. Click the link and take a look at that quarter-million-dollar steer, and you’ll see that is no typical farm-field specimen.

And now, more than 500 words into it, we get to the story of Cedar the goat, as told by the New York Times.

Cedar also had a sentimental owner, a California girl under the age of 10, perhaps not cut out for a farming career:

She fed him twice a day and walked him everywhere, often on a leash, like a puppy, (Jessica) Long said in an interview on Thursday. The goat was afraid at first, having been taken from his herd, but he warmed up to the girl and ran up to greet her, Ms. Long said.

So as the June 25 auction approached, the idea that Cedar would be sold — not as a creature but as 82 pounds of meat — began to horrify the girl, who was enrolled in a local 4-H program.

They tried to withdraw it from the auction. Not allowed. They moved Cedar to a farm 200 miles away. The fair sent the law after Cedar; two cops made a 500-mile round trip to fetch him back. And now Long is suing:

“They went and took Cedar without a warrant from this property and brought him back that evening,” Ryan R. Gordon, a lawyer for Ms. Long, said in an interview on Thursday. “All the sheriff’s deputy told me was, we turned him over to who we deemed was the owner. And that’s the problem. The sheriff’s deputies are not the judge. They don’t get to deem who the owner is.”

So much drama! Over a goat! And what happened to Cedar? It wasn’t a happy ending, we know that much:

Mr. Gordon, who is co-director of the nonprofit law firm Advancing Law for Animals, said he believed Cedar might have ended up at a barbecue organized by another young farmers’ group, the National FFA Organization, the next day, but he did not know for sure.

There’s more to the story: The winning bidder was a state senator making a gubernatorial bid, who probably wishes he was a million miles away now. There’s also this priceless line:

“It is noteworthy that Cedar’s successful bidder was not entitled to, and did not purchase, Cedar,” the lawsuit stated. “Rather, the successful bidder was entitled only the cuts of meat that were Cedar.”

It sounds like the girl didn’t take this well, as you might expect. Poor Cedar. He looked like a very nice goat.

And now state fair season is over. Cedar is dead, summer is dying, and today it barely rose above 70 degrees. (It felt GREAT.) Happy labor day, all.

I didn’t watch Biden’s speech last night. I hardly ever watch presidential speeches, especially the State of the Union. If they’re brief and of the breaking-news variety, like Obama announcing the death of bin Laden, sure. But stuff like last night, I read the transcript. And I found little that was specifically objectionable in there, although I admit I was surprised, and not in a bad way, that he mentioned Trump by name.

High time, though.

Of course, the MAGAs are flipping out over this, but I have a feeling we’re well into the “find out” phase of their fucking around, so you can’t say it wasn’t coming.

I managed to be out most of today, and came home to discover sanding is well underway. The noise, oh the noise, so I’ll keep this short. Also, the weekend awaits, and we all want to get that underway.

Just one piece of bloggage, really:

This woman, endorsed by Trump, is the GOP nominee for secretary of state. Shudder.

Have a great weekend. Swim, picnic, have a blast.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The floor guys messaged us on Sunday afternoon and said oops, the last job turned out more complicated than we thought, so we’ll be a week later. Alan pointed out that we are leaving the goddamn country in a little over two weeks, so they agreed to come by and make the repairs that have to be done before the sanding/staining/sealing stuff starts on…Friday.

I know contractors work hard. I know shit happens. But just kill me now.

As it stands now, we’ll have about 5 days to get the house put back together before we leave, but oh well these are not problems. And then the spending will stop, or at least slow down, for a while.

Meanwhile, we might as well spend all our money now, because in a few more years this stupid country may well be sinking into the sea. I present to you the story of how a county election staff imploded over not Donald Trump, but…fluoridation:

Anti-fluoride groups have been active in the United States for decades, but have experienced a bump in popularity in recent years. By 2018, more than 70 cities in the United States had banned adding fluoride to their water systems, including some in Texas. Fredericksburg, the largest city in Gillespie County, held its own vote in 2019.

For years, Texas’s most vocal critic of fluoridated water has been Laura Pressley of Williamson County, a perennial candidate for office in central Texas who has yet to win a race. Local press often highlights her advocacy of disproven conspiracy theories. She has appeared on Alex Jones’ programming, and has said that “something was planted” in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. In recent years, she has become a self-styled poll watching expert and vocal opponent of electronic voting systems, training hundreds of people across the state in what election administrators say are disruptive practices that harm election integrity.

“Our elections are the representation of free will, and if we can’t trust that our free will is being represented legally and accurately, then God’s will is being thwarted,” she said at a meeting in Hood County in 2021. In recent years, she’s filed unsuccessful lawsuits against counties across the state over a variety of alleged voting problems.

And you know the rest of the story, how the constant harassment and threats and I’m-not-paid-enough-for-this led to the woman who ran elections in this Texas county to say exactly that. But it’s a good story.

I wrote about fluoridation once, too, about a dispute in northern Michigan. It was 2015, which felt like a million years ago, in terms of our current situation. The moral of my story is, don’t try to push a fluoride ban in the home of Michigan Community Dental Clinics corporate offices. Although who knows how it would go now.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. If you are one of those who observe, consider fretting about something else. Like whether or not my floors will ever get done.

Happy Wednesday, all.