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

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

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

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

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

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

Hell yeah, Barry Levine:

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

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

Hell yeah, Politico:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday was indeed the perfect summer day the forecast promised, and so in late afternoon I told Alan we needed to truck the bikes to Belle Isle, do a half-loop, then head down the Riverwalk to Valade Park, where Bob’s Barge would be open. Bob’s Barge is a bar, on a floating platform right on the water, so you drink your beer looking out at the river and gently rising and falling with each passing vessel.

And so that’s what we did. It resembled what Jeff Borden once described as the ideal exercise, i.e. like sex: “You work a little, you get a reward, you go to sleep.”

But the real focus of the weekend was on Sunday, when this happened:

The girls played the Concert of Colors, an annual summer weekend of music that takes place downtown, mostly on the grounds of the DIA. The “colors” part refers to diversity, so as an all-female band, that counted. They had a serious delay getting onstage (tech issues) but sounded great once there, and had some new-music tricks up their sleeve, including some lovely harmonies.

There was this bomb-ass art car that looks like a roach parked out front. I believe the people who built it call it the Carcroach.

I was briefly left in charge of the merch. The view from the merch tent:

I shared the table with the merch guy for War. Obviously War, having had a several-decade head start, was doing more business than I was, but it was fun talking to him. He was like LA Mary’s son, only Hispanic and 20 years older (at least).

Now we’re home again, I’m tired, so here’s some bloggage:

Here’s some comic relief for you, where you don’t have to see his face or hear his voice.

At the Alligator Alcatraz press conference a reporter asked Trump what he planned to do to fulfill his next campaign promise. His full response was six minutes long. This is a verbatim reading of part of his answer. You won't have to listen to his voice or see his face.

[image or embed]

— Decoding Fox News (@decodingfoxnews.bsky.social) July 6, 2025 at 6:35 AM

But remember, it’s Biden who was demented.

FWIW, and we’ve covered this here before, all of our appliances are EnergyStar (RIP) rated as efficient, and I’ve noticed zero difference in their efficacy. They may even work better, at least as it relates to toilet-flushing, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

A long, but skimmable gift-link transcript of a NYT conversation with Julie Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who broke the Epstein story way back when. From time to time in recent years I’ll ask one of my Columbus friends, “So how are people talking about Les Wexner now that he’s been so roped to Epstein?” And the answer, inevitably, is a blank look.

But first: Do you think that some form of the intelligence world — and Epstein’s connections to it — played any role in why he got off so lightly the first time?

Brown: I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that’s, in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein, because I just don’t know. I know there’s a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, I try to stick to the facts, and so it’s just something we don’t know for sure.

Douthat: Yeah. I’m drawing on your view about your skepticism around the blackmail narrative. There’s two intelligent stories you could tell: One, Epstein is literally an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence.

So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a conduit of information. But it’s not that he’s being run as a kind of entrapment ring. If we don’t think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.

Hmm. Interesting. But I think it’s time for bed. Zzzzzz.

Well, the cool front arrived as advertised, thank goddess. It was windy during morning swim, and I lost an earplug. I made a few halfhearted underwater canvasses of the crime scene, then figured it was gone for good. Finished my swim, showered, dressed and thought I’d walk the perimeter of the pool one more time before ordering another pair. The wind had pushed it right to the gutter, only one lane down.

Obviously, today is my lucky day.

Go ahead, laugh, but if we still had a swimming-supplies retail storefront nearby, I wouldn’t have even bothered looking for it. But in a time when we have to buy so much online, it seemed worth the extra effort, just to avoid shipping and handling. While some online shopping is undoubtedly efficient, I’m starting to crave the experience of entering a store and being pleasantly surprised by what I find there. I have a friend who does Instacart for her groceries exclusively, something I cannot imagine. You let someone else pick out your apples? Girl, are you crazy? Trusting someone else to buy my groceries is like trusting them to do my laundry. No way.

And with that mishmash of nothing in particular, let’s get to the news, which has continued the week’s trajectory of being ever more horrifying: Emil Bove (a man whose soul is worn on his face, if there ever was one) on greased skids to be a federal judge. A Justice Department recommending a one-day sentence for a cop convicted of firing wildly into Breonna Taylor’s Louisville apartment. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, marked for death. It’s just one fucking thing after another.

Late in the afternoon, I read that President Pudding-for-Brains is diagnosed with something called chronic venous insufficiency, and I was disappointed it wasn’t congestive heart failure. I’m not in a healthy frame of mind these days.

So I leave you with one excellent obituary, for Connie Francis, who left the mortal plane this week at 87. I’ve known two Connie superfans in my life. One was my old buddy Paul, who loved to go around singing “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” and other Connie hits. The other is a friend here, who can extemporize for an hour about her business sense, particularly her recordings of her hits in other languages, which of course sold well in those countries. She learned the lyrics phonetically, and discovered that yeah, the world was waiting to hear “Vacation” in Japanese. You have to admire a girl like that.

Also, this phrase is waiting for you low in the obit:

Like Mr. Darin, with whom she was romantically involved until her father chased him off with a gun when she was in her late teens,

Well, they were Newark Italians.

God, I need some good news, and no, I don’t mean something about a plucky puppy or warmhearted mail carrier. I mean I want to see something that gives me hope for the future of my country. Let’s hope the weekend brings something around.

I used to read The New York Times exclusively on their website, but for some reason I downloaded the app, figuring it would work better on my phone, and then I allowed push notifications, and that’s how I learned on Monday afternoon…

In a major victory for the Trump administration, the Supreme Court on Monday allowed it to fire thousands of Education Department employees, functionally eliminating the agency.

What’s more…

The court’s decision, while technically temporary, lets workers who had been reinstated during the legal battle be fired again.

Well, ain’t that a kick in the head. Imagine that, another “major victory” for the most corrupt administration in my lifetime and probably American history, delivered by a corrupt Supreme Court. This is just exhausting to see, week after week. And here we thought summer would be relaxing. Instead, it’s just hot. And infuriating. A friend shared a witticism going around in his youngest daughter’s crowd: When this is over, woke is coming back to hard there are going to be tribunals for people with outdoor cats.

If it’s ever over, that is.

On that theme, I don’t know how I missed this on Sunday. Headline:

The Canadians Are Furious
Trump accomplished what was once considered impossible: Our northern neighbors have united against us.

In early May, Carney and Trump held a predictably surreal press conference in the Oval Office. Trump began genially, congratulating Carney on his election: “It was probably one of the greatest comebacks in the history of politics, maybe even greater than mine.” But when a reporter asked if he still envisioned Canada as the 51st state, Trump killed the goodwill.

“You know, I’m a real-estate developer at heart,” he said. The president waxed poetic about erasing “that artificially drawn line” on the map between the U.S. and Canada, saying that “when you look at that beautiful formation, when it’s together — I’m a very artistic person — but when I looked at that beauty, I said, ‘That’s the way it was meant to be.’” Carney interjected coolly, “Well, if I may, as you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale. We’re sitting in one right now.”

Isn’t that wonderful? The Trump administration is six months old. Or maybe we should think of it as 25 percent down the road to the midterms. Assuming we have them.

Not that I wish to hang the crepe. It’s just 88 degrees outside, and I am so fucking done with this. It might as well be nine below zero.

Meanwhile, in Ohio:

What sort of person looks at the guy on the right, this human mosquito, his whitened veneers gleaming in the light, and says, “That’s my guy.” The guy hasn’t had to figure out how the increase the budget of a small-city public-works department without increasing taxes, but he wants to run the state. I ask you.

Gift link to this excellent WashPost explainer on how the Texas floods happen. Even if you don’t read it, scroll through the graphics, which are outstanding, particularly the one showing the location of the Camp Mystic cabins vis-a-vis the riverbed. It’s…shocking. Maybe even criminal.

A good piece on another Stephen Miller manque, working at the state level. In Florida, of course.

Finally, Michelle Goldberg on MAGA and the Epstein story. Worth a read.

OK, then. A cooldown — a real one — is coming by week’s end, we’re told. We shall see. I leave you with a photo of Tuesday’s muggy, smoky sunrise. It’s pretty, though!

When I read that the owners of Camp Mystic tried to get certain structures removed from the Guadalupe River floodplain, it rang a bell that finally broke through: The news that, in 2017, a catastrophic flood in Houston was made worse because, wait for it, developers had built entire subdivisions inside a reservoir, but hadn’t told homeowners about it.

Because when they sold the houses, the level of the reservoir was low. Just as, when it’s not flash-flooding, the Guadalupe River is a pleasant stream you want to be close to, not up on a bluff looking down at it. Or as it was before Hurricane Harvey:

The vast basins are dry most of the time, dotted with wooded parks and sports fields, and are contained on their eastern boundaries by large, earthen dams. During rainstorms, floodwater accumulates behind those dams in areas known as “flood pools” and backs up to the west; how far it goes depends on how big the rainstorm is and where it hits.

That system worked well when the reservoirs were surrounded by prairie and rice fields. But in recent decades, development has encroached from all sides. Today, about 14,000 homes are located inside them. During Harvey, when more floodwater accumulated behind the dams than ever before, 5,138 of those homes flooded.

Some local government officials, like Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack, say they’ve warned residents for years during town halls and other public events about the risks of living in or around the reservoirs.

“It is very difficult to make people believe the unbelievable,” Radack said. “No one ever believed the reservoirs would fill.”

This is human nature. No one believed the reservoirs would fill, until they did. No one believed the river would carry away everything in its path, until it did. Living in a flooding city, as I did for 20 years, it’s easy to see this paradox. That river? That brown, stinky ditch? Coming this high? No way. And then it snows and snows, and then it rains and rains, and then the snow melts and combines with the rain, and the next thing you know you’re wearing rubber boots and throwing sandbags.

And that’s the best-case scenario. That’s a slow flood. We all saw the worst-case scenario July 4.

Fort Wayne has taken away a lot of the human factor by turning its floodplain into parkland. But honestly, I haven’t been keeping up. Have they had a major flood recently?

OK, then. A hot weekend. It’s been punishingly hot for a month now. During my Saturday boxing class, I was near a thermometer — it was attached to some fan. It was 83 when we started, and through the 45-minute class I watched it climb, degree by degree, until it topped out at 88. Thought I was going to die. Today was sailing — far more pleasant, but still hot.

How is it where you are?

It doesn’t qualify as a profound insight to notice that every child — hell, every person — alive today will have their photo taken a million times before they check out. Maybe more than that, if you throw in security cameras, which I’m not. I’m talking about how, as cameras have become omnipresent, we’re all more comfortable with having our picture taken.

If you grew up in the era where your parents might expose a single roll of film in six months, it’s a little unnerving. Yes, it’s great to have a bunch of pictures of your family. Yes, it’s also weird to point a camera at a child, and have them immediately step into a pose and flash a big insincere smile, the way mom and dad taught them. Where are the sullen teens of yore? Whatever.

Anyway, that’s all leading up to this: One of the things I did this weekend was go through some family pictures and artifacts my sister’s been keeping. I brought home my birth certificate, my high-school diploma, and a few snapshots.

My dad and his dad, whom I never met, c. 1943. My dad was meticulous in his appearance, and had his uniform tailored to his specifications. Looking at my grandfather, I can see it ran in the family.

I don’t know when that was taken, but St. Louis was a hot city. Imagine wearing a three-piece suit in that humidity.

Me and my brother, and me and my sister. This would be our house in Kansas City, most likely:

I had a bad problem with blinking when flashbulbs went off.

My very earliest memories were in that house; I think I must have been about…4? Maybe? After K.C., it was on to Columbus, where we settled and stayed.

Now these photos have been scanned and digitized, but I’ll keep the originals, where they’ll live in my family until Kate takes them, or throws them away, or they burn up in a fire.

I should toss my high-school diploma, though. Finishing high school is so bare-minimum, I wonder why anyone hangs on to theirs. But it seems wrong, somehow. Mine still has the sheet of onionskin paper that covers the precious diploma itself. It’s a thing of value! It cost the state of Ohio something to educate me. Better find a box to stash it in.

Also, this: I applied for a job a few years ago, not really wanting it, but curious what it might involve, and I was rejected for, get this, failing to attach a college transcript to my application, which was submitted online, of course. I think my college transcript must be in a moldy box in the basement of the registrar’s office, but never mind that, because it makes a pretty good segue to the bloggage, which today is a little dated. I’ve been throwing links into a blank doc for a few days now, so let’s lead with the evisceration of Indiana University, victim of a MAGA governor seeking to polish his national profile by gutting a fine institution. All in the name of “efficiency” and the needs of the job market, of course, which tracks with the right-wing insistence that college need be nothing more than a trade school for middle managers. (At least for your kids. The elite layer of the GOP will continue to send their offspring to the Ivies.) This Chicago Tribune editorial strikes the right note of are-you-kidding-me indignation, more so than any Indiana newspaper I’ve seen. But then, lots of IU journalism grads find jobs in Chicago, so no surprise there.

Here’s an amusing obit for a 105-year-old woman, a real GP OG, as I like to think of these dowagers:

Louise Booth, 105, passed away peacefully Thursday, July 3, 2025, at her home facing Lakeshore between Beacon Hill and Kerby in Grosse Pointe Farms. She was still of sound mind.

That’s a Booth of Booth Newspapers, back when owning newspapers was like owning a gold mine. They sold to Newhouse years and years ago, but they must have invested the pile wisely. Later paragraphs give the exact address of the house, in case any funeral burglars were confused. And while the obit isn’t amusing in the fashionable current trend of basically calling someone a lovable jerk — she seemed like a nice lady — I find any obit for someone who lasts that long into the postseason uplifting to read. Especially as she was still of sound mind.

The Sean Combs verdict happened so long ago it already feels like ancient history, but Monica Hesse at the WP has done a couple of good columns about it, which you can look up. This one, about so-called Alligator Alcatraz, is very good, too:

The point is that serious matters — the most serious matters, the matters of constitutionality, due process, citizenship and who gets to be an American — are, in this administration, being increasingly presented as cheap entertainment. You see it in the U.S. Border Patrol playing the power ballad “Closing Time” over footage of a scared looking young man being placed in handcuffs and shepherded onto a plane. You see it in the White House posting a video of detained migrants being processed for deportation, set to a hit from Bananarama.

Is it funny? Is it awful? Is it trolling or real life? The point is that we are not supposed to know. Alligator Alcatraz is a dehumanizing place, but when it is treated as spectacle, it’s not just the prisoners there who lose their humanity. We all do. The effect is to tell Americans not to take any of this too seriously. Families are being ripped apart, but it’s all for the lulz. We are dancing on the edges of constitutionality, but it’s making great television. We have become tonally incoherent, incapable of even determining tone. If Guantánamo Bay opened today, there would be a themed restaurant out back with happy hour specials taglined “Git mo’ at Gitmo.”

…I used to wonder about Roman gladiator battles. What kind of society would pack up a picnic lunch and go watch other humans, the enslaved or prisoners of war, forced to battle each other to the death? Another part of the gladiator legend is that these men were forced to fight large beasts, large carnivorous predators. But there was no physical evidence for that until just a few months ago in April, when archaeologists analyzed giant bite marks on the unearthed skeleton of a 1,800-year-old gladiator. Then it was confirmed: lions. In what society would this be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon?

Finally, a really interesting Atlantic story (gift link, as is the WP link above) about so-called customer-service sludge. Having recently spent 90 minutes on hold with the IRS without getting anyone on the line, I can identify. It’s maddening.

While we’re on the subject of MAGA, MAHA and Whole Foods, I want to make a couple points:

Jakash is right in the comments from earlier: The 365 house brand at Whole Foods is really very good, and when I do go there, I tend to stock up on that stuff. It is not a store with no part to play in the marketplace other than to suck money out of your pocket.

Here’s the other thing, and I’m asking this with a pure heart. In the discussion over so-called seed oils, the argument against them — which is the argument against a lot of things MAHA finds fault with — is that they cause, or lead to, or aggravate “inflammation.” But what, exactly, is being inflamed? That part is never precisely explained, and if it is, it’s with sort of a hand-waving oh-you-know, indicating a place where inflammation is hard to quantify. I mean, if you get an infected cut, that’s easy to see. But inflammation affecting “gut health,” a big one in the MAHA canon, is not. I can pretty much eat everything and not suffer for it, which is, I know, enormous good luck. (I sometimes wish my stomach were more sensitive, and would maybe reject salt, grease and sugar, instead of gleefully adding it to my thighs, in case we need it in the coming winter.) Anyway, gut problems, absent inflammation, can mean anything from nausea to gross stuff further down the line.

So what do I need to know about inflammation? How can I tell if anything on the inside is inflamed?

In other news at this hour, I made a small decorating change yesterday, picking up a secondhand table that I used to replace the one on my side of the bed. It’s one of those newfangled ones with an integrated power strip, so I can accommodate chargers and my illuminated clock and lamps and all the stuff we want plugged in at our bedside, which wasn’t the case when the house was wired, 80 years ago.

The one I was replacing was a square, lidded basket from Ikea, and I hadn’t opened it in a while. Apparently I’d been using it to store books, similar to the piles on top. Two I hadn’t read:

FWIW, I didn’t need the Northrup book when I hit the Big M, because it was by and large a seamless transition. Again: Lucky me. Later, Northrup would go insane during Covid. And I’m not sure how Ron Jeremy found his way into the house. I’m sure it was a freebie from somewhere, but I never cracked it. You know what? I’m gonna read it, or at least read in it. If anything can distract me from the current crisis, it’s the Hedgehog.

But I also found some good books that I’d just tucked in there for one reason or another. One of my quirks is, I use ephemera for bookmarks. It feels good to open a novel I’d enjoyed years later and find a receipt from a restaurant where I read it over lunch. I opened an old Martin Cruz Smith hardcover and found? The mixing solution for the hair color I got on my last appointment in Fort Wayne; my stylist told me to give these hieroglyphics to my new stylist and she could figure it out. I looked at it for a moment, and? Reader, I threw it away. This constitutes personal growth, for me.

Finally, check out this weirdness, which I found via Roy. As ghastly as the content is, the comments would seem to indicate dozens of credulous Christians believe it is real. (Wait. It just occurred to me that the comments are fake, too.) I told someone the other day that I understand that perhaps someday, artificial intelligence will spot a tumor on a scan of mine, something that was missed by the exhausted and overworked radiologist, and that we may have to suffer through some misery to get there. Remember when your computer would freeze and you’d lose all your work, and now we have autosave? Yeah, like that. But just consider, at a time when the Trump administration is doubling down on fossil fuels, these AI party tricks consume insane amounts of energy, and data centers are being built all over to suck it up. When a rolling blackout hits your neighborhood in a heat wave, just consider: It was for this.

And with that? HAVE A NICE DAY, SUCKERS. I’m going to my high-school reunion at week’s end, and will likely be too jammed up to write anything more. Happy Independence Day. Maybe we can enjoy independence for a while longer.

I was in Whole Foods over the weekend, picking up a few things. The founder of WF was a big libertarian, right? One of those guys who believed we could “heal ourselves” by choosing the correct organic foods, and anyone who didn’t — whether because of cost or attachment to Doritos — well, it sucks to be you. And that’s how I came to associate the chain with the MAHA movement, which believes much the same thing.

Then I stumbled into the supplements aisle, and hoo-boy, do these people swallow a lot of this crap. Food is all you need to heal you, along with ten thousand sketchily vetted, surprisingly expensive capsules that almost all come with zero evidence of their efficacy other than a vaguely worded article on some website, as well as the all-important recommendation by either an Instagram influencer or your personal trainer, or both.

The older I get, the less of this stuff I’m even tempted to take. For me it’s vitamin D because I live in a sunless pit six months of the year, vitamin B taken at the same time to remind me I remembered the D (because B turns your pee neon-yellow for a few hours), and that’s it. The truest words I’ve heard in some time came on Chapo Traphouse, when one of the guys said, “Sooner or later, every con man will try to sell you supplements.”

Of course, also, many of these supplements are sold via Amazon, a company I am trying my best to boycott, or at least deal with as little as possible. (I just ordered two books direct from the publisher, in case you doubt my commitment.) I am just one small, angry, bitchy person, but as I cannot launch a torpedo at the Bezos yacht on its next trip to carry the new Mrs. Bezos to her next adventure, perhaps collecting another environmental award, I can at least withdraw my business.

And yes, I know Amazon owns Whole Foods now. I only shop there once in a great while.

I imagine we all saw at least one or two pictures from the tackiest wedding of the century (so far). The guest-arrival photos were a nightmare of mermaid hair and squashed boobs. The bride, on her third marriage and the mother of three children, wore virginal white. The witnesses seem to have been chosen from a list of the randomly famous. Are they actually friends with this far-flung group? The Kardashians? The Kushners? Tom Brady? Oprah? Do you get the feeling Mr. or Mrs. Bezos have any friends they’ve known longer than a decade? A childhood or college friend they’ve kept on the Christmas-card list? I don’t get that feeling. If so, they might have married in a similarly lavish ceremony at this or that Bezos house, and not have to take over a European city for a week to get the right backdrop for the photos.

Tacky-tacky-tacky.

It’s hot again here, and I want to read the new Laura Lippman book. So here, have some amusing bloggage…

The Department of the Interior’s efforts to revise unfavorable stories about American history at National Park Service sites appears to be backfiring — instead of reporting incidents of “negative” history as directed by new signs, visitors have used the signs’ QR codes to submit hundreds of comments in support of the park service.

In a 65-page leaked document provided to SFGATE by the National Parks Conservation Association, the hundreds of comments that have poured in through June 16 show overwhelming support for better funding for national parks and increased protection of public lands.

“This felonious Administration is the very definition of un-American. The parks belong to us, the people. … Respectfully, GO **** YOURSELVES” reads one comment that has been reported through multiple parks and is directed to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

“Rangers, have a lovely day. You are appreciated,” the commenter added at the end.

“This park is perfect. Please tell Trump to go **** himself,” reads a similar comment posted through Keweenaw National Historical Park in Michigan.

…and have a pic of me and Dustin meeting Laura Lippman herself last week, at a book-signing in Toledo:

Does she look nervous or tired? We were at the very end of the line. Great dress, LL.

If you live to my east, be advised the heat wave is faltering. This one, anyway. The temperature’s in the low 80s, the sun is behind clouds, it’s raining a bit and I can give the A/C a break. By Friday we’ll be kissing 90 degrees again, but any break is nice. Yesterday a brief, fast-moving storm moved through and took out our power. I had to wrestle the generator out of the garage, get it started, string cords, all the stuff we end up doing at least once or twice a summer so we don’t lose the contents of our refrigerator. I was almost literally pouring sweat and couldn’t even lie under a fan to cool off. The humidity was brutal. How the hell do you people in the south stand it? I would purely die.

The good news: The juice came back on after four hours. Did the whole generator thing in reverse. Settled in for some TV and it winked out again, for three minutes. It’s like DTE was playing a little joke. Bastards.

We all awoke to learn the news from New York City. I don’t want to read too much into it, because optimism is useless at a time like this. And this is only a primary; more will be revealed. But I will allow myself at least some glee that sex pest Andrew Cuomo will have more time to spend with his family. Is that good enough?

I don’t know what to say about much of anything at the moment, other than: Fresh thread for discussion. Have at it.

There are two kinds of sellers at Eastern Market, most Saturdays: Growers and wholesalers. The first group grows their own produce, the second buys in bulk at the produce terminal, packages it separately and sells at a pretty good, better-than-grocery-store price. There’s no deception here, unless a customer is dumb enough to believe Michigan has a citrus crop.

Sometimes I stop at a particular wholesaler early, because he sells limes three for a dollar and we’re into lime cocktail season. This week I had to wait while the seller, clearly exasperated, searched his phone for CashApp, so a buyer could pay him $12. And call me boomer as much as you like, but this is ridiculous.

The guy I buy eggs from says this happens all the time and increases every year, because young people are abandoning cash. What’s more, older people like me seem to think it’s perfectly fine to pay for $7 worth of eggs with a $100 bill. Which is also ridiculous, unless you’re at a meat counter buying prime rib. I was reading a Facebook group for residents of my city, and there was an indignant business owner complaining that the city hadn’t enabled a parking app for its meters, and “no one carries change anymore, especially young people.” That may well be true; the manager of the waterpark I worked at two years ago noted it was taking longer every year to close out the registers in the snack bar, because younger people were simply bedeviled by quarters and dimes, and strained to count them.

I use an app to park in Detroit, because the kiosks that take cash are often inoperable, enforcement is robust, tickets are expensive and I’m nearly always staying at least an hour, which makes the transaction fee negligible. Plus, the cost to park is, for a major city, miniscule — a dollar an hour.

But in Grosse Pointe? To pop in and out of the dry cleaner? I keep an Altoids tin in my dashboard cubbyhole, filled with change. I put in a dime, get 12 minutes and leave with six still available for the next lucky parker. If I use the app, they’ll tack on a 40-cent transaction fee. The hell with that.

Add this to the list of Shit I Thought I’d Never See: That cash would become a problem.

So! The heat wave has arrived where I am. Two hours until noon, and it’s already 86. Yesterday it started cool enough that I could wear long pants, and by 1 p.m. it was oppressive. The next three days will be worse. But this is the climate we have chosen, so.

There is good bloggage, too:

Thanks to Nancy Friedman for posting, in the last thread, this Jon Carroll column, “13 Things You Should Know About My Mother,” published on M-Day 2005. (If you get a register-to-read pop-up, just reload a time or two.) Things I learned:

1 She was adopted into a wealthy family in Grosse Pointe, Mich. Her father was a politician.

2 She left Grosse Pointe to go to Vassar. When she graduated, she was supposed to return home and marry one of 200 eligible rich boys. Instead, she went to Hartford, Conn., and got a secretarial job in an insurance company.

…4 She met my father, who was poor, Irish and Roman Catholic. She married him. She was disinherited.

She never saw her father again. Well, that is a very Old Grosse Pointe thing to do to a daughter, if I do say so. Also:

8 When I was 8, she was waiting for a bus when an ash from a cigarette dropped on her pretty summer frock, and the frock erupted in flames. A passing motorist took her to the hospital. The scars on her legs took 25 years to heal.

This is the second woman I’ve heard of, suffering such a mishap. (The writer Eve Babitz was the other.) Jon’s mother’s would have happened in the 1950s, but Babitz’ was in 1997, when I like to think consumer-protection laws had largely shielded American skirt-wearers from clothing that could burst into flames. (I imagine the Trump administration is working hard to roll back these regulations, don’t you?) Maybe Babitz, famous hippie eccentric, was wearing a thrifted or imported-from-a-country-where-they-don’t-believe-in-that skirt. Whatever, a good summation on a mother’s life.

From national treasure Eli Saslow, a deep read on the spring 2025 measles outbreak in Texas. Saslow is able to get into anyone’s confidence, and portrays these…what’s the word? antivax idiots, yes. These antivax idiots come across sympathetically, but my heart was left as cold as stone. Here’s the local chiropractor, who does a lot of non-chiropractic health care in West Texas:

Most of what he remembered about measles came from an old “Brady Bunch” episode, where the children celebrated staying home from school and played board games. “If you have to get sick, sure can’t beat the measles,” one of the children said. …“I feel like I’ve been lied to,” Kiley told his wife as his fever rose to 104 degrees.

“Lied to” by a sitcom, check. More:

For more than a decade, Kiley and Carrollyn had debated whether to vaccinate their children. Each time, they decided against it. … In recent years, as many as 15 percent of families in West Texas school districts had applied for “conscientious exemptions” from the M.M.R. vaccine. What Carrollyn feared more than measles was the remote possibility that her children might experience an adverse reaction to the shots. Two of her younger siblings had been vaccinated and had then suffered from high fevers that led to febrile seizures — scary convulsions that lasted several minutes but didn’t cause permanent damage.

“My children won’t see this disease in their lifetimes,” she always concluded. “The vaccine would probably be fine, but why take an unnecessary risk?”

The takeaway from the story is, lots and lots and lots of people not only got measles, but not the Brady Bunch board-games variety. This was a severe outbreak, with high fevers, intestinal distress and more. All four of the chiropractor’s children had to be hospitalized. Bobby Kennedy should be horsewhipped.

Finally, if you have an HBO account, I highly recommend “Surviving Ohio State,” a documentary (a film, not a series, thank God) on the sexually abusive sports doctor there, Richard Strauss. It’s a familiar story, similar to the same narrative with Dr. Robert Anderson at U-M — rumors for years, student athletes complaining of fondling during exams, an actual penetrated-while-drugged rape, etc. — but no one did anything, not one thing, about it. No, wait, there was one coach who tried to get OSU to take action. A woman, of course, coach to both the men’s and women’s fencing teams. One of the villains of the piece is none other than U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. It’s good.

The Iraq Iran bombing I don’t have the capacity to discuss right now. But you all feel free.

OK, then. On to confront the heat and figure out a plan for the day. I’ll probably work, because why the hell not.