I see Dexter mentioned the Michigan Ball-Kicking Incident in the last thread. I haven’t checked the comments to see if it’s caught anyone’s fancy, but it certainly caught mine, so here goes the summation from ground-level Michigan: 

The state GOP is fighting. They’ve been fighting for a while, but now the rebels are fighting amongst themselves, a real People’s Front of Judea vs. the Judean People’s Front type of situation, only stupider and not funny, unless you’re a Democrat. Earlier this year, the state party chairmanship was seized by the crazier of two crazy candidates, on the basis of this argument: Crazy person #1 ran for and lost the attorney general’s seat in 2022, and crazy person #2 ran for and lost the secretary of state’s race (by a bigger margin than the AG candidate), but! The AG wannabe, Matt DePerno, conceded his race on election night, and the SoS wannabe, Kristina Karamo, did not. Why should I concede I lost a race in a corrupt system? she asked the crowd at the state convention, and that did the trick. She won on the last ballot, as the cleaning crew was poised to kick everyone out because they ran way over their allotted time in the convention hall. That’s because they had to hand-count the ballots, because tabulators = EVIL. 

So even before this started, these were the folks in charge: The nuts. 

Then, the nuts began fighting amongst themselves. Karamo’s own vice-chair was splitting with her over financial issues. The party is flat-ass broke, the big donors have closed their checkbooks, and somehow the expected tsunami of small-dollar contributions isn’t filling the gap. There was some hiring and firing and this and that, and then this Saturday happened. The story’s paywalled, but here’s the gist:

As Michigan Republicans have been openly feuding over the party’s direction and the leadership approach of new Chairwoman Kristina Karamo, some were frustrated that the beginning of Saturday’s special meeting at the Doherty Hotel was limited to only members of the state committee.

In an interview, James Chapman, a Republican from Wayne County, said he traveled to Clare for the meeting but was forced to listen to it through a locked door.

Chapman said he and others said the Pledge of Allegiance together in the lobby outside the meeting and acknowledged he wiggled the knob of one door leading to the meeting room.

And then? And thennnnn?

Eventually, Mark DeYoung, chairman of the Clare County Republican Party, heard the wiggling and walked over to the door, where he saw someone flip him off through a small window.

DeYoung opened the door.

“He kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door,” DeYoung said.

Not only that, Chapman then bum-rushed DeYoung across the room and slammed him into a chair, or something. (Allegedly.) DeYoung ended up in the ER with a cracked rib and presumably an ice pack on his business, and Chapman was suspended from his local GOP committee. MLive dug up a detail I hadn’t known, that snapped a lot into place for me: He was the guy who showed up at a 2020 Lansing protest of the governor’s Covid restrictions carrying a fishing rod with a nude, brunette Barbie-type doll dangling from the end, clearly meant to be Gretchen Whitmer. (Photo at the link.) The kidnapping story hadn’t broken yet, but this was too much even for the MAGA crowd, and he was asked to stash it. He’s got a criminal record, too. A real model citizen.

Bottom line: The crazies are still in charge, the checkbooks are staying closed, and I doubt we’ll see a Republican win the open U.S. Senate seat next year. 

The other major news of the week? The best possible suspect for Chicago’s Tylenol murders of 1982, James Lewis, is dead, apparently of natural causes. He never served a day for the murders themselves, although he drew a 12-year federal-prison term for trying to extort $1 million from Johnson & Johnson, in exchange for “stopping the killings,” which he never admitted to. I remember those, as should everyone who was alive and paying attention then. For those of you who weren’t, they are the reason we now have to break through multiple levels of packaging to get at an over-the-counter medicine today. The Sun-Times is “free,” but it can be a pain in the ass to get to. If you have an account, this column by a retired editor who was a reporter then is worth your time. Tom McNamee interviewed Lewis in prison: 

I felt a physical chill when, in the tone of a man who thinks he’s clever, Lewis offered to explain to me how any mope — though certainly not himself — could have safely and efficiently filled Tylenol capsules with deadly cyanide.

It was simply a matter of drilling holes in a breadboard, Lewis explained, and inserting half a Tylenol capsule shell into each hole. Then, he said, the mope — certainly not him — would brush the powdered cyanide across the board with a table knife, letting it fall into the capsules.

But you didn’t do it, James?

“No,” he said. With a smile.

Neil Steinberg detailed how the killings went on his blog today, too, in an excerpt from his book. 

And that’s about all I have for the day, which is slipping by. Better get some real work done.

End of the week, and I’m bound an determined to get a third blog done before the weekend. Fortunately, I have a couple things to recommend, and recommend enthusiastically.

First is “Casa Susanna,” the latest PBS “American Experience” thing, which Alan watched late one night after I’d gone to bed, and liked so much he watched again, so I could, too. Here’s the link. It’s about a long-gone Catskills retreat for transgender women, and to make it clearer, specifically heterosexual men who had no other outlet to present as women. It’s absolutely fascinating, both for the level of detail, empathy and understanding it brings, without being sentimental or cringey or any of the rest of it.

It’s also an answer to those who talk about gender dysphoria as though it’s some weird, baroque mental illness. These men/women were highly functional, accomplished individuals whose main problem was that they were living in the wrong bodies. But you watch. You’ll like it.

I mention this other thing mainly because I find myself in the extremely rare situation of agreeing with David French, in the NYT. He’s writing about why the MAGA movement is so hard for people like me to fully understand. By George, I think he’s got it:

Why do none of your arguments against Trump penetrate this mind-set? The Trumpists have an easy answer: You’re horrible, and no one should listen to horrible people. Why were Trumpists so vulnerable to insane stolen-election theories? Because they know that you’re horrible and that horrible people are capable of anything, including stealing an election.

At the same time, their own joy and camaraderie insulate them against external critiques that focus on their anger and cruelty. Such charges ring hollow to Trump supporters, who can see firsthand the internal friendliness and good cheer that they experience when they get together with one another. They don’t feel angry — at least not most of the time. They are good, likable people who’ve just been provoked by a distant and alien “left” that many of them have never meaningfully encountered firsthand.

Indeed, while countless gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the MAGA movement’s rage, far too little has been spilled discussing its joy.

He talks about the boar boat parades, too.

Believe me, I was as surprised as you to find myself nodding along.

OK, it’s nearly the weekend. Enjoy yours.

Attachment parenting was getting a lot of attention when I was mother to a young child. This is the school of thought that includes carrying the kid at all times in a complicated sling, extended breast-feeding and the family bed.

It wasn’t my thing, but it did get me thinking, on walks and bench-sits on the playground, about the idea of attachment. A child grows inside you, is born, and you hold it close for a few weeks, then put it down (but still hold it a lot). Then they start walking, you hold their hands, etc., until one day you realize you’re a TOTAL EMBARRASSMENT and your child would appreciate it if you’d just get lost for the next five years or so, and then eventually they come back to you as adults.

It’s the adolescence that most challenges you, because it’s then that you most clearly realize that in the act of creating a new human life, you’ve done just that — create a new life, separate from your own. You and your partner each threw 23 pairs of chromosomes on the table and let them fight it out, and something entirely different emerged. Your child may look like your mini-me, but they have their own mind, and what’s more, they’re growing up in a different era from you, so even if they’re good kids who respect their parents and never put a foot wrong, they’re reflections of their own time and generational peers, at least to some degree.

And this is a good thing. The world needs to change, and it needs young people to change it. You may not like every change, but you’re not on the committee, no one’s going to ask your permission. Sorry about that.

Now someone, please tell this to the Moms for Liberty.

They’ve been getting a bit of PR lately, for their surprisingly successful attempts to gain spots on school boards. Our own was overtaken by a conservative majority last fall, and while they’ve mainly been concerned with budget matters, a number of them stressed “parental rights” in their campaigns, and the M4L has a chapter here. (Although not sure how active/influential they are. They seem to do better in the farther-out hinterlands.)

It’s a little frustrating for a person who knows how education works, or is supposed to work. Teaching is hard, hard work, and one thing you can grant your child’s teachers is the grace to let them do the work they were trained to do. They cannot consult with every parent on every book on the English reading list or in the library, or whether the Civil War should be taught this way or that way. You have to trust educators to educate. It’s part of the letting-go process for parents: Your kid will not learn exactly what you did, because they are not you. If you have a problem with that, prepare to homeschool.

Here’s another thing that struck me as the mother of an infant: You give birth to this tiny, perfect individual. Their skin is nearly transparent, their digestive system little more than a tube. And if you’re lucky, you breastfeed exclusively for however many months, and it’s all fine. Breast milk is the perfect food for junior. The diapers may be copious, but weirdly, they don’t smell bad.

Then you introduce solids, and hoo-boy, hold on to your hat for that diaper, because it’s going to burn your eyebrows off. It seemed like a metaphor. I told Alan at the time, “Now begins the world’s corruption of our perfect child.” Soon she’d be watching more television than I was comfortable with, eating foods with too much sugar, all that. I made many, many mistakes raising her, like everyone does. But she turned out all right. Almost everyone does, if their parents aren’t abusive and they don’t roll bad genetic dice.

You never stop worrying. You never stop thinking, what could I have done differently? But if you’re lucky, you should be able to start letting go at some point. You have to. If you’re religious, you say they belong to God, and it’s out of your hands. If you’re more like me, you might tell yourself you can’t control teenagers, not really. Weren’t you a teenager once? Didn’t you do all kinds of stupid shit? I had a curfew, and in later life I was very happy my parents set that boundary, because the kids who didn’t — hoo boy, you can’t believe what they got up to. Some of my friends had something called the GOOTH Club. GOOTH stood for Get Out Of The House, which they’d do once their parents fell asleep, sometimes by climbing out windows, after which someone would take a car from the garage and they’d spend all night — all night! — driving around. Once they drove to Cincinnati and back. Then they’d go to school the next day. They were not good students.

I’m rambling. But I was thinking about all this after reading this New York Times piece (gift link) on the new battleground of the, get ready, school play. Of course the recent production in Fort Wayne was mentioned, but also:

For decades student productions have faced scrutiny over whether they are age-appropriate, and more recently left-leaning students and parents have pushed back against many shows over how they portray women and people of color. The latest wave of objections is coming largely from right-leaning parents and school officials.

You don’t say.

Drama teachers around the country say they are facing growing scrutiny of their show selections, and that titles that were acceptable just a few years ago can no longer be staged in some districts. The Educational Theater Association released a survey of teachers last month that found that 67 percent say censorship concerns are influencing their selections for the upcoming school year.

In emails and phone calls over the last several weeks, teachers and parents cited a litany of examples. From the right there have been objections to homosexuality in the musical “The Prom” and the play “Almost, Maine” and other oft-staged shows; from the left there have been concerns about depictions of race in “South Pacific” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and gender in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Grease.” And at individual schools there have been any number of unexpected complaints, about the presence of bullying in “Mean Girls” and the absence of white characters in “Fences,” about the words “damn” (in “Oklahoma”) and “bastards” (in “Newsies”) and “God” (in “The Little Mermaid”).

Check out this story from Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, where the board rejected “The Addams Family,” literally the most-performed high school musical in the country, over its “dark themes,” which the school-board president described thusly: “The fundamental thematic theme, for me that I could see, was moving towards darkness, embracing death, embracing despair, embracing the pain.” Jesus Harold Christ, you idiot, IT’S A JOKE. Imagine growing up in that house. I bet their kids are charter members of the GOOTH Club.

I know some parents who might more closely align with my beliefs have raised hell over things like racial slurs in Mark Twain and the plays mentioned above, but man, I am done with that shit. (I never was one of them, anyway.) Read Huckleberry Finn. Yes, the text has the N-word. Talk about it. Discuss why Twain used it, why it’s OK to use it between black friends, but not if it comes from others. Talk about the era in which Twain wrote. Ask why it’s OK that art is disturbing. Move on. Find another book that makes another group uncomfortable. Dive in, get dirty, learn something. You can’t keep children cosseted forever, and it’s a sin, it’s wrong, to even try.

Oh, well. It’s still Independence Day, and it’s nice to have a midsummer holiday in which we are expected to do little other than enjoy the day, eat some hot dogs, light some sparklers. We went sailing. It was very nice.

Speaking of Jesus Harold Christ:

This guy. I mean.

Also, as Abraham Lincoln once said: Don’t trust everything you read on the internet. The story of a lefty provocateur who wasn’t even real.

Enjoy the fireworks! Happy Fourth!

A holiday week, you say? I remember holidays, from the BeforeTimes, i.e., before I got a job. However, the work week barely stops for something as silly as “Independence Day,” always for me (who’s working the holiday?) and maybe for you (yeah, it’s me).

Why did we let work do this to us? And with that question, I could direct you to Barack Obama’s Netflix update on “Working,” but why bother?

Alan and I are watching “Blazing Saddles,” just for the hell of it, and it reminds me of the last time I saw it, I was in the “parents’ tent” at the Warped tour in Cleveland. The tent was smack in the middle of three stages, and the ambient cacophony in the parents’ tent was really something. Of course the subtitles were on, but most people weren’t watching, but knitting, reading or hand-lettering “Live, Laugh, Love” signs, although I may have made up that last one. I read whatever “Game of Thrones” novel I was on at the time and surfaced periodically to appreciate the classic scenes — the horse getting punched, Lili Von Shtupp, etc.

God, this movie is funny. Another one you’d be crucified for making today.

A couple long reads for the holiday weekend. You ready?

A fantastic New Yorker takedown of the submersible. If you have clicks to burn, burn them here, because it’s great.

One you’ve already heard about today, no doubt: A long Sally Jenkins saga of the friendship of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. It’s just beautiful, a story of how some relationships, some friendships, are deeper and clearer than anything between spouses.

Something shorter: Neil Steinberg’s lovely piece on the business that found itself at the center of last year’s mass shooting in Highland Park, Ill.

Two out of three of those pieces will renew your faith in humanity. Which is what the Fourth of July should be about, right?

What a weekend, eh? It started with submersible clean-up and ended with a called-off coup. It’s amazing that I had time to go grocery shopping, but I did.

The more we learn about the OceanGate disaster, the more it becomes clear that Stockton Rush, born on third base with a long lead to home and a blind pitcher, was fortunate to the end, because the lawsuits his estate will be dealing with would leave him wishing he was dead. You could almost argue that anyone dumb enough to pay an arm and a leg to even go aboard is probably not smart enough to sue, but rich people have great lawyers. The detail that most struck me? The sub had limited propulsion, so landing in the right place to see the bow of the Titanic was pretty much a crapshoot. I learned this from a Detroit News story about a guy who took an earlier trip, which is paywalled, but I’ll quote the relevant parts:

On the day of the descent, the crew of five, including the OceanGate CEO serving as the pilot, were bolted into the submersible and sealed to avoid water leakage. A barge with the sub floated away from the ship, and the barge was sunk. The crew disconnected the sub to drop into the deep.

Weights sunk the sub for a more than two-hour journey to the ocean floor where the Titanic rests. Wortman could look out the single porthole, watching the “disco show” of red, green and blue sea life as the crew talked and listened to music. Wortman’s choice: Eminem.

Eventually, there was a complication. Wortman brought commemorative challenge coins to share and the passengers may have underreported their weight, and the sub fell faster than expected.

The faster descent meant the sub missed its destination. The hope was to land near the front of the ship. It landed roughly 300 yards off the back in a debris field of the Titanic. It was pitch black. With a light, Wortman could see ceramic tiles, wine bottles and one of the boilers. On the ascent, he saw the back end of the propellers, but the sub had to avoid getting caught in the metal remains of the vessel.

They spent about four hours on the ocean floor. A normal ascent required dropping the sub’s weights and floating to the surface, usually no more than three hours. But one of the weights didn’t drop during Wortman’s dive, consuming time to change the programming code to address the weight issue. It took 3 hours and 20 minutes to surface.

As a result, they didn’t see the bow of the ship, much of which remains intact. A later dive did see it. Hungry, tired and cold at 33-degree temperatures at the ocean floor, the passengers on Wortman’s dive agreed to return to the surface. Divers can’t recover the sub in the dark, and Wortman said he didn’t want to spend the night underwater.

Indeed. Man, remember when rich people felt they had a duty to leave a legacy behind? Carnegie libraries, major university endowments, scholarships? Also: Imagine being trapped in a minivan-size submersible listening to Eminem.

Well, Stockton Rush is plankton food now, so let’s surface and turn our eyes to Russia. Despite being something of a Russophile for much of my life, I have no idea what really happened here. A friend, who is not a cynic but sometimes leans that way, thinks the whole play was about money, that Putin had to put a nine-figure sum into Prigozhin’s Swiss bank account, and then and only then were the troops called back. Given that all involved are thugs and criminals, I wouldn’t be surprised. If this weakens Uncle Vlad, can’t complain. But as in all things Russian, beware what might be coming up behind him. As the U.S. has shown us, there are bottoms below the one we’re standing on now.

Speaking of which, Big Daddy is in southeast Michigan late this afternoon, if he isn’t here already. The Oakland County GOP is having a fundraiser with him as the big draw. They plan to give him a “Man of the Decade” award, which is something of a joke for people who can remember when he was here in 2016, and boasted from the podium that the last time he’d been in Michigan, it was to accept a Man of the Year award. Reporters, local burghers and others did their research and thinkin’, and no one could remember any such thing, or even any such award. But being bootlickers and ass-kissers of the first order, they’re going to do it for real this time, and add nine years.

The jokes, they write themselves.

OK, gotta make dinner for our little tribe of two before more world news breaks out.

In my observation, great families tend to fall apart after three generations. The old man makes the pile, the kids grow up in extreme privilege and try to do right by dad, but they don’t know what it’s like to make their own beds, much less their own fortune. (See “Succession” for more of this.) By the time the old man’s grandchildren are grown, it’s all divorce, drug addiction and dumbassery. The money may last a while, but the spark and verve is gone.

Which is how we end up with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. From a Wall Street Journal story about his presidential campaign today:

He has aired claims—debunked by public-health experts—linking childhood vaccinations to autism. He has cast doubt on the safety of Covid-19 vaccines. He has questioned whether prescription drugs have caused a rise in school shootings and whether Wi-Fi exposure leads to cancer. He has said that the Central Intelligence Agency assassinated his uncle and could have killed his father, Robert F. Kennedy, despite no concrete evidence. And he has said the U.S. is perpetuating the Ukraine war to fuel the defense industry.

…He said he is avoiding some types of campaign events including parades because his security team has determined that they aren’t safe given the risk of an assassination attempt by the CIA.

The hundreds of supporters who came to hear Kennedy’s foreign-policy speech—some who drove hours and came with copies of his books—spanned the ideological spectrum.

“All the things that he’s saying about bringing the country together, he really believes he really can do this, and he’s unlike anybody out there,” said independent voter Rebecca Giles, 54, a retired physician from Bedford, N.H., and a Kennedy campaign volunteer. Giles supported Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 New Hampshire primaries and general elections, but soured on him over his pandemic response, which she saw as heavy-handed.

He’s speaking to a Moms for Liberty convention next week in Philadelphia. Steve Bannon thinks he’s swell. I think I know all I need about this guy. (And may I just say? Having heard him speak, he has a serious case of spasmodic dysphonia. No crime there, of course, but in an age where any woman who raises her voice is dismissed as “shrill,” we’ll see whether the same standards apply to men.)

In other news at this hour, Marjorie Taylor Greene called Lauren Boebert a “little bitch” on the floor of the House yesterday and I, for one, am highly amused.

I was going to post a sensitively written story from the Columbus Dispatch about the descent of its former legendary zoo director, Jack Hanna, into Alzheimer’s, but now I’m not. I’ve read a bunch of these in my lifetime, and they all boil down to the same thing: Once this person was formidable, now they are not. It’s never not sad and it’s also barely news. We’re all gonna die someday, and the lucky ones will have all their faculties intact when they do.

With that, I beg you adieu and watch out for the CIA.

Until this weekend, I knew…thinking…one (1) person who had seen “Master and Commander,” one of my old KWF fellows in Ann Arbor. I said, “Jay, did you see any movies this weekend?” “Yeah, I checked out ‘Master and Commander.’ “How was it?” “I liked it.”

And with that, I forgot about “Master and Commander” for 20 years or so, when I learned the film, which is technically titled “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” is now a Thing, mainly and almost exclusively with young men, who apparently do things like this:

That’s the opening title of the film, directed by Peter Weir and starring his countryman Russell Crowe, based on – here’s another thing I simply didn’t know – what Roger Ebert calls the “beloved” novels of Patrick O’Brian, and there’s a whole series of them.

Clearly, on my own this weekend as Alan went fishing up north, it was time to check out “Master and Commander.” And like Jay, I liked it. Didn’t love it. I’m not a guy. But I liked it.

If you wanted to know what life at sea on a British man-o-war (the HMS Surprise) was like at the beginning of the 19th century (see tattoo above), this is your movie. Craftwise, it’s excellent; the battle scenes are amazing and give the viewer a real sense of what it must be like, to be far offshore on a wooden ship being hit by cannon fire. In between the framing battles that open and close the narrative, it’s kind of episodic. Here’s the scene where we see field medicine performed on deck by the ship’s surgeon. Here’s the scene where the surgeon operates on himself, using a mirror. Here’s the stop in the Galapagos Islands. And so on.

Essentially I’m in agreement with this GQ writer, a woman, who contends:

If you kidnapped a hundred of Hollywood’s top minds and forced them to work around the clock, they could not engineer a more exquisite Dad Movie. Though Master and Commander is ostensibly about the Surprise sailing to intercept a French enemy warship, the battle scenes, exhilarating as they may be, are few and far in between. The bulk of the film—and the heart of its charm—is instead a meticulous rendering of daily life at sea: the monotony of hard labor, the palpable threat of scurvy, the dirty-faced sailors who sleep in close quarters and grin through yellowed teeth. (You know it smells crazy in there.) Even better? All the screen time devoted to close conversations between Aubrey and Maturin, and their two-dude violin and cello jam sessions. You come away with a sense of satisfaction at their accomplishments and camaraderie, and just a bit of longing over a bygone way of life.

That’s just right. Check it out if you find yourself with a couple hours at your disposal and nothing on the teevee.

Otherwise, this weekend was a blur, running from one place to the next, although it was almost all fun. Met up with some friends at an out-of-the-way spot in the post-industrial stretches of Southwest Detroit. We sat on the patio while inside, a DJ mixed pop dance hits with mariachi. At one point I went inside to get another beer and noticed a satellite feed from some Spanish-speaking country, featuring, no shit, bare-knuckle boxing. I guess gloves are for “Master and Commander” fans. Saturday was a whirl of activity until I got home around 3:30 in the afternoon and said, Enough. Time for some Russell Crowe. Today I cleaned until Alan came home. We’ll celebrate Father’s Day tomorrow or later in the week; the Derringers don’t set much store on the Hallmark holidays.

Meanwhile, I read the news:

Sen. Joni Ernst says Iowans want someone who can “pull together” a divided country, and good luck with that, hon.

Yikes. The week lies ahead. Enjoy what’s left of your day, dads.

I feel like I spend half my time here apologizing, but OK then, that’s the way it is. I have an entry in my weekly planner that goes:

WORKOUTS:
MPS:
BLOGS:

As the week goes on, I add hashmarks. Workouts is self-explanatory; I aim for 5-6. MPs are morning pages, the daily stream-of-consciousness longhand thing I’ve been doing for a while, in hopes of waking up with a fully formed idea for a novel one of these days. As for BLOGS, I try for three. Often I only make it to two. This is the second of the week. I try, I fail, I’m human, and this is why I am resisting all calls to give this Substack thing a whirl.

But, as I usually say, I’ve been busy. I’m in training for a new part-time job this week, which I’ll reveal in due time. And the news has been so insanely…insane, I find myself just-can’t-evening a lot. Driving home yesterday, listening to a podcast on the arraignment the day before, and I heard Ron DeSantis pledging that if he is elected president, he will pardon Donald Trump, and calling upon all GOP candidates to do the same, and it kinda-sorta hit me: This could happen. Jesus Christ, just what I need: Another two years of doomscrolling and worrying and whatever-the-fucking.

I may need to really-really retire at some point. Just wait for Social Security to fill my bank account every month and relax. But not yet.

Meanwhile, however, this indictment is sucking all the goddamn oxygen out of my personal room. Every time I turn on the news, I’m reminded that we elected a criminal to lead the most powerful nation in the world, and could very well do it again. I’m just so…SICK OF THIS. When is this guy going to go away?

As I have, really, nothing today that you folks might say better, I’ll let this go. The weekend awaits. Let’s all enjoy it.

Today my pleasant little suburb had its “first annual” — the copy editor in me winced — “family fun bike ride.” It was clearly aimed at families with children, but they needed volunteers, so what the hell, I signed up. I’d hoped I’d get assigned to sweep, i.e., be the last in the peloton to make sure no one falls behind, but instead they assigned each volunteer to a corner, to make sure everyone stayed on course.

The course, I should add, was a rectangle. Down so many blocks, over one block, back the same number of blocks, over to the starting point. Total distance: 1.4 miles. Like I said, families with kids, and little ones. The lead and sweep positions were police, one on a bike and the sweep in a vehicle, lights blazing. We don’t take chances with child safety in the tender, fearful suburbs. I rode out to my post alone, and passed a yard where the owner gave me a cheery wave. I waved back, then noticed his side door had a Trump/Pence sign on the window. Given the events of last Friday, I wanted to circle back, stop and yell HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU PEOPLE ANYWAY? But I didn’t. Look at me, the adult.

Anyway, the bike ride was fun, even though it rained. (Finally, rain. The first in at least a month.) As the last of them passed my post, I got on my own bike and rode back to the park with them. It was a grandmother and her wee grandson, who still had training wheels, and was working mightily to keep pumping away. We encouraged him, and he found his second wind. The sweeping police vehicle celebrated our finish with a siren whoop. Forty-five minutes of waiting around after volunteer registration, 12 minutes of cycling, then home.

I spent the weekend running hither and yon, and so today, bike ride notwithstanding, was all about relaxation. (And doing pre-work for next week’s work.) So I had time to read the entire lengthy obituary for Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who died Saturday. (Gift link to the obit.) What…a life. On my way back from Columbus after the moving adventure, I listened to some podcasts, and heard one, a recent “Fresh Air” episode, on Clarence Thomas, tied to a POV episode about him and Ginni. I hadn’t realized how grim and painful Thomas’ early life had been; he is the ultimate example of the therapy phrase “hurt people hurt people.” His grandfather, who raised him, emotionally abused him. White people abused him. Black people abused him. So he grew up to be an asshole. So did Ted Kaczynski, although there’s a strong case to be made that he was simply born broken.

The obit has a hell of a kicker:

Online, young people with a variety of partisan allegiances, or none at all, have developed an intricate

vocabulary of half-ironic Unabomber support. They proclaim themselves “anti-civ” or #tedpilled; they refer to “Uncle Ted.” Videos on TikTok of Unabomber-related songs, voice-overs and dances have acquired millions of views, according to a 2021 article in The Baffler.

Mr. Kaczynski was no longer the mysterious killer who had belatedly projected an outlandish justification for violence; now he was the originator of one of many styles of transgression and all-knowing condemnation to adopt online. His crimes lay in a past young people had never known, and he was imprisoned, no longer an active threat to society.

His online support did not indicate how many eco-terrorists had been newly minted, but it did measure a prevalence of cynicism, boredom, dissatisfaction with modern life and gloom about its prospects for change.

During his imprisonment, Mr. Kaczynski copied his correspondence by hand and forwarded it to the University of Michigan’s Joseph A. Labadie Collection, an archive devoted to radical protest, which has amassed dozens of boxes of Kaczynskiana.

According to New York magazine, Mr. Kaczynski’s papers became one of the collection’s most popular offerings. In an interview with the magazine, Julie Herrada, the collection’s curator, declined to describe the people so intrigued by Mr. Kaczynski that they visit the library to look through his archive. She said just one thing: “Nobody seems crazy.”

No doubt. We’ll be passing this way again, I’m sure. Have a good week, all.

Taylor Swift is coming to town for two nights, Friday and Saturday, and it appears the town has caught Swiftie Fever.

Whatever that means.

I remember standing on a corner downtown, in the Beforetimes, and watching a giant semi rumble down Woodward Avenue headed for Ford Field emblazoned 1989 World Tour. This was a couple days before the show, and I figured they needed that long to set up the stage. But with this recent visit I realize it could merely have been the merch truck. The shows are Friday and Saturday night, but the merch store opened today, Thursday, and the line was wrapped around the block hours ahead of time:

The first “Swifties” arrived more than seven hours before sales opened from a truck parked outside Ford Field. By 8 a.m., more than 1,000 fans were lined up awaiting the 10 a.m. opening to buy T-shirts, sweatshirts and other items commemorating the pop superstar’s Eras Tour.

“The merch is special, but we made so many memories waiting in line and being here and going to the shows and posting on Instagram and just listening to her music and that just means so much more to me,” said Stella Kane of Brighton, who came with sister, Ireland, 14, and arrived at Ford Field about 2 a.m. with their cousin, Ainsley Kane, 18, of Novi. “I mean, the merch is important, but it’s the memories that come with it that make it so much better.”

It’s the white-girl version of Aretha’s funeral viewing a few years back, when they laid her out in the Wright Museum of African-American History for a couple days (changing her outfit every day), for fans to pay their respects. Lots of these Swifties today didn’t even have tickets, which are selling for four figures even in the nosebleed sections. And OK then:

Swift’s 52-night, 20-city tour is anticipated to earn the singer-songwriter around $500 million, according to Forbes.

Not bad for a few months’ work. I’m unfamiliar with her body of work, although I dialed her up on Spotify while I made dinner. Perfect pop music, and I can absolutely understand why young women love her.

Otherwise, we are not experiencing the degree of misery New York is due to the forest-fire smoke, although we’re definitely feeling it. Red-orb sunrises and sunsets, and air-quality warnings every day for a week or so. We have the windows closed and the furnace running the fan. I’m not as bugged as Alan, aka Allergy Guy, but my eyes are a little itchy.

Michigan hasn’t had rain in at least three weeks, maybe more, and the northern forests are tinder-dry, just as fireworks and peak camping seasons ramp up. There was a 3,000-acre burn near Grayling last weekend, and I expect more.

Just remember: Global warming is a Chinese myth, as reported by our former president.

Speaking of whom: Indicted. Again.

Finally, would someone stuff Salena Zito in a bag somewhere:

For the record, I’ve seen nothing but constant urging for kids to explore skilled trades for years now. The column is about Mike Rowe, who is allegedly a skilled tradesman but who spends most of his time hosting a TV show and otherwise being a media guy, but never mind that. I’d link it, but paywall. Apparently he spends a lot of time talking to Fox News-type audiences. What a surprise.

OK, into the weekend we go. Swiftly!