Strange to think my daughter will lose her rights and her affordable health care by the end of next year. And neighbors who watched her for years walking down our street, headed to school or the park, will celebrate. Hell, we could lose our health care, or see it whittled away to nothing, replaced by a “market-based” plan that will cost more than the pre-ACA plans did, and won’t cover anything anyway.

Rolling back fluoridation. The ignorance is breathtaking, isn’t it? To believe RFKJr’s lies about that, you’d have to believe the EVIL fertilizer industry had an EVIL problem, i.e., where to dispose of its EVIL waste, and some Snidely Whiplash in the C-suite said, “I know! Let’s add it to the nation’s drinking water!” and a plan was hatched to bamboozle the nation’s dentists, and it was successful, and all the EVILLLLL fertilizer guys cackled and rubbed their evil hands together in glee, and backed their dump trucks full of POISON to the nation’s reservoirs and poured it in, probably charging ratepayers for shipping and handling.

Because EVIL.

Well, I know what evil looks like, Pilot Joe. Sometimes it comes dressed in ignorance, but evil is as evil does, and a whole, whole lot of evil will be going on in the coming years. Because peanut butter is more expensive than it was a few years ago, and a suspiciously tall lady with a prominent Adam’s apple peed in the next stall at the coffeehouse, and oh my what could have happened.

I don’t have much to say today, except fuck it all.

Good morning, America, how are ya?

I think a lot these days about the damage done over the last 10 years or so. I’m focused on RFK Jr. at the moment, but I could be thinking of any one of dozens of people. Bobby’s patron speaks of children being “injected with this giant needle,” a ridiculous lie that’s hardly ever refuted by a journalist. RFK Jr talks about “72 vaccines,” another lie. The standard childhood vaccine array today is aimed at 15 diseases, some given over time in multiple doses. I counted the number of doses on the Cleveland Clinic vaccination schedule, and it totaled 37. My child got every one of them, including HPV, which conservatives, with typical Christian charity, call the slut shot. Needless to say, she’s healthy, unless you consider choosing a career in rock music an illness, ha ha.

And yet. A friend has a mother with some fragile health conditions, and when he told her recently that he didn’t want to visit until he’d had a Covid shot, she expressed concern that he’d had “too many” of those. He obligingly sent her the story about the German man who deliberately got a Covid vaccine about every four days for more than two years, for a total of 217. He is fine. But this is what I think of as the damage.

Clearly we’ll never reach Bobby and his cohort on this issue, but their continual amplification of this lie is seeping into the consciousness of otherwise reasonable people, who just vaguely worry that he’s probably wrong, but maybe he’s right, or a little bit right, and let that keep them from stopping in at their local pharmacy for whatever they’re due for.

Me, I’ve gotten eight Covid shots. I figure I’ll be getting two a year until I die. Still a Novid here. (Now let’s cue the troll who always pops up and jeers at us. Mr. Coffee, or something.) Might still get it. But I won’t get it because I let some propagandist talk me out of a safe vaccine. I got flu and shingles shots on Friday, and my fucking arm is still hot and sore from the latter, but that’s normal and I remember people with shingles telling me they have never, ever suffered such pain. Seems a good trade-off.

Today is the election. Over the last four years, despite saying ridiculous bullshit like “if I lose, that means it’s rigged,” millions of Americans have bought in to the idea our elections are not secure. They hold up this or that case of shenanigans as proof, whereas anyone who’s paid attention knows that yes, election fraud is easy to commit, on a very small scale. I could have voted in Indiana and Michigan — hands up don’t shoot — for a couple years, but I didn’t. And if I had, it would have made a difference in any race with a one-vote margin. I could have collected Kate’s absentee ballot and deposited it in the drop box with mine and Alan’s, which would technically be ballot harvesting because we don’t live in the same household anymore. Perusing the Heritage Foundation’s database of election fraud, you can read about individual cases. There are 19 listed for Michigan. Here’s one for Brandon Hall, a bottom-tier GOP activist:

Brandon Hall was convicted of ten counts of ballot petition fraud stemming from the 2012 election. Chris Houghtaling, who sought to become a candidate for the Ottawa County District Court, hired Hall to acquire the necessary signatures for his candidacy; Houghtaling reportedly did not care whether the signatures were collected legally or illegally, and even assisted in Hall’s crime by providing him old 2010 petitions to copy. Hall, realizing he did not collect enough signatures, used a phone book to complete the rest. Hall’s friend, Zachary Savage, assisted with the fraud, but prosecutors granted him immunity in exchange for his testimony. Hall appealed his conviction, which was affirmed. He is awaiting sentencing.

(Hall is the genius who briefly worked for James Craig, a former Detroit police chief who ran unsuccessfully for governor, and was part of this fiasco.)

Here’s another, Nancy Williams:

Nancy Williams was charged by the state in Wayne County with 3 felony counts of forging a signature on an absentee ballot, 2 felony counts of election law forgery, 5 misdemeanor counts of false statements on applications for absentee ballots, and 7 misdemeanor counts of receiving a payment to influence vote after participating in an absentee ballot trafficking scheme involving elderly voters at a nursing care facility. She submitted voter registration and absentee ballot applications for 26 legally incapacitated residents under her care without their consent. Williams had the absentee ballots mailed directly to her. She pleaded guilty to 7 counts of receiving a payment to influence vote in exchange for dismissal of the other charges, was sentenced to one year of probation, fined $3,500, and assessed $1,096 in fees. Similar charges against Williams in Oakland County are still pending.

You don’t win elections with 26 votes, at least not important ones. You win with thousands, hundreds of thousands. And that requires a conspiracy so vast it would collapse in hours.

But that’s where we are today. I hope we take a step back, but I expect bad things will happen between now and next January 20. We just don’t know what kind of bad things, and they’ll be different for everyone.

Be at peace, all. I’m working overnight tonight as a Dem challenger (observer) in Macomb County, where the city clerk has opted NOT to take advantage of eight days of pre-processing of absentee ballots, for unclear reasons. What that means is, I go to work at midnight and get off Whenever. So expect me Whenever, and play nice in the comments.

Sorry for not much to say today, but my brain is buzzing and I need to get some real work done. In the meantime, I remind you that this idiot is going around saying this, and I honestly can’t imagine anything worse for the country:

Anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. announces that Trump has “promised” him total “control” over America’s public health agencies if he wins pic.twitter.com/BRJceUzwVk

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 30, 2024

Please vote as though your life depends on it, because it does.

I was champing at the bit to vote early, and did, along with 145,000 other Michigan voters, which suggests a lot of bit-champing out there. My early-voting center said it had been steady all day, and it was. Didn’t take me long with the straight-ticket option, a choice I used to scorn, but well: Things are different now. Then there were the usual Wayne County judicial races, lots of them unopposed and/or under-opposed, which means the ballot says “vote for no more than 18,” and there are only 16 names in the race, so why bother.

But it’s done. And I got the good sticker:

Now let’s see if the number of emails and texts drop off. I’ve found responding “fuck off” to the ones that come from candidates you despise works as well as STOP. Just another week and change until I can either stop taking OTC sleep aids, or start taking double doses, plus CBD gummies.

I’m fresh home from leading the neighborhood Halloween slow roll, although I didn’t. Lead, that is. I got the tandem out, wiped the dust off, pumped up the tires, made a playlist, and met about five kids and three adults at the appointed place. When we set out, I led for about half a block before three kids dressed as Ironman, some other superhero and a dragon (but “a Mario dragon, not a regular dragon”) blew past me and set a rather brisk pace. Fortunately, one of the other adults had done group rides before, and could outpace them and block the intersections. I just tooled along on my Soviet limousine, playing The Cramps and Bow Wow Wow, and everyone arrived at the block party safely.

Update: Just received a text from someone telling me to call Sen. Stabenow and tell her “Michigan families can’t afford higher prices and to support the elimination of taxes on overtime and tips to help families survive.” Testing my Fuck Off strategy.

Count me among those who are not outraged by the Washington Post’s non-endorsement. I’ve always found endorsements fairly silly, a relic from when every newspaper had a specific constituency. (Fun fact: There were once six daily newspapers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, two of them in German.) I could excuse a union worker for wondering which judge the labor paper thinks he or she could vote for. But the self-importance that some editorial boards display around this time is ridiculous, for a practice that maybe, maybe influences 10,000 votes nationwide. That said, to decide to forego endorsements this year of all years is only proof that an authoritarian doesn’t have to crack down, they just have to make other people think they might, and people like Jeff Bezos fall right in line. So I didn’t cancel our subscription. I should cancel Amazon Prime, and still might.

Meanwhile, I found this infuriating multimedia presentation on how abortion is, and isn’t, being performed in the new era. Dr. Kristi Tomlin’s story is particularly crazy-making.

Finally, if you’re online as much as I am, you’ve probably noticed the degradation of content on websites and social-media platforms. I used to hate that word — content — but what’s out there now doesn’t really deserve to be called anything else. Turns out, the problem is “slop,” most of it AI-generated. Interesting explanation at the link. I guess it was fun while it lasted.

Monday awaits us all. Hang tight.

Someone I know wondered this weekend whether the story about Arnold Palmer that Trump told this weekend came from his good buddy Jack Nicklaus. Not that we’ll ever know. Another reason to despise the Golden Bear. You Buckeyes know that Nicklaus is probably the most famous native of Upper Arlington, the Columbus suburb where I grew up. (There’s also Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s, but he moved in later.) Jack is MAGA now, so I don’t feel bad about disliking him.

Or rather, Jack supports “the best candidate.” I expect he’ll consider the guy who talked about Arnie’s shlong the best. The guy who posted this last night:

Check out the package on that piece of fan art. MAGA is always going on about “stolen valor.” You’d think this would bother them. You’d think wrong.

Some of the early reports about the Arnold Palmer remarked didn’t say what Trump actually said. There were a few headlines like this, from the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (thanks, Jason):

I think even the NYT referred to “memories” about Palmer, but fortunately the rewrite desk sharpened it up:

Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday spewed crude and vulgar remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania that included an off-color remark about a famous golfer’s penis size and a coarse insult about Vice President Kamala Harris.

…His monologue culminated in lewd remarks about the size of Mr. Palmer’s penis. Moments later, Mr. Trump gave the crowd an opportunity to call out a profanity. He went on to use that four-letter word to describe Ms. Harris.

“Such a horrible four years,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Biden-Harris administration, as he surveyed the crowd of hundreds of people in front of him. “We had a horrible — think of the — everything they touch turns to —.”

Ugh. Oh well. Short shrift today, because my weekend was pretty full, but unexceptional. A Friday-night movie (“A Clockwork Orange” at a revival house), a Saturday bike outing, a Sunday bike outing, a welcome-home dinner for Kate, who’s been on the road this past week. Then I had this really weird dream just before I woke up, and it fogged my head for hours. Now I gotta get to work.

So I hope your week isn’t starting like mine.

I asked for sweata weatha, and I got it. Highs today in the low 50s, and because our Nest thermostat is always trying to save us a few pennies, I realized today that once again it had nudged the thermostat down to 66 and my nose was cold. And this reminded me of a nose warmer that some catalog we used to get carried; it looked like a stocking cap for your nose, and you would presumably give that as a gag gift to someone like me, but certainly never wear it where any other human being could see you.

I couldn’t think of the catalog’s name. And while it wasn’t Hammacher Schlemmer, that’s the only one that came to mind. Does it still exist? It does, as a website now.

And it’s still pretty weird:

And:

But this being the 21st century, guess what, they have vibrators. Behold, the “Award Winning Women’s Sexual Wellness Massager:”

“Come on, CVS carries those things now,” Alan told me. OK, but still. This is the place I first saw the “weather forecaster” that was a picture of a donkey with a tail made of yarn. “If the tail’s movin’, it’s windy. If it’s wet, it’s rainin’,” etc. It was something of a surprise.

But never fear, you can still buy a nose warmer, but not at Hammacher Schlemmer. This was from some other outfit:

They are surprisingly numerous on Etsy, as well. Go figure.

OK, then. I was going to stay away from you-know-who today, but the clips coming out of the Univision town hall last night were absolutely brutal; I suggest you dial some up. And I leave you with this banger of a deep dive out of Fort Wayne, about how Parkview Hospital grew and grew and got greedier and greedier. It’s detail-packed and riveting:

Revenue pressure was even brought down to the level of nurses – some of whom say they have been pushed to charge for the smallest of items from Kleenexes to batteries. One 2022 email, obtained by the Guardian, shows a supervisor at Parkview DeKalb telling nurses that she had reviewed their charts for the week and found they had “missed” $50,000 in charges as a team. The following year, managers told staff to be more stringent about how many linen towels they handed out to patients – an initiative they termed “linen stewardship”.

“It makes me feel disgusting. It makes me feel dirty,” said one current Parkview nurse, describing how staff have been made to charge for supplies and services down to the micro-level. “Why should I be trying to make sure that they’re getting the most money that they can?”

In some cases, these volume and coding protocols resulted in enormous bills and significant additional revenue for the system, according to medical and legal records reviewed by the Guardian.

In 2021, after a young girl went to the ER for an accidental razor cut, a doctor applied an “adhesive skin affix”, a special type of wound glue, on her finger for about 10 seconds, according to her mother. Afterwards, Parkview charged just over $85 for the glue capsule, about four to five times the price listed online. The hospital also tacked another $295 onto the bill for the labor, which it classified as an intermediate surgical procedure, according to paperwork reviewed by the Guardian.

Have a great weekend, all.

‘Twas a rough night last night. Bad insomnia, probably not helped by a late dinner of Alan’s chili, but never mind that. Slept horribly, which means today is a low-effort, low-achievement day, but oh well. And I missed my morning swim. But! I managed to unload the dishwasher, drank two large glasses of water and prepared a decent lunch, so here’s hoping tomorrow will be better.

In the meantime, new music from Shadow Show here.

And proud parental moment here, via WDET-FM here in Detroit:

Logrolling for my daughter out of the way, here’s one reason I slept badly: Trump’s dance party last night in Pennsylvania. It made me renew my vow, made periodically over the last few years, to not forgive any MAGAts in my extended circle, should they come groveling for mercy through the wreckage of the American republic. I know, that’s not Jesus’ way, but Jesus doesn’t have to live here, where I do, gnawing my nails to the cuticle that we might actually have four more years of this bullshit. Even if Trump loses, I expect weeks, maybe months, of civil unrest. It’s going to be ugly. My older friends remind me that the 1960s were in many ways worse, and they’re correct, but this is now. And every day, EVERY DAY, Trump is telling us who he is, and if that is who you are? Fuck off, all the way off, and don’t leave a forwarding address.

At the moment he’s being questioned by a braver soul at the Economic Club of Chicago, that is to say, braver than the limp noodle who questioned him in Detroit last week (see previous entry). If I were the “beautiful woman” he pointed to during this exchange, I’d get up, go home and take a Silkwood shower, followed by a dip in a mikvah, followed by a sage-smudging ceremony:

Trump points out a “beautiful woman” in the crowd and says to her of migrants, “they will look at you and kill you” pic.twitter.com/3r5vSEH6Vl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 15, 2024

So you can see, it’s just not a good Tuesday. Imagine if Biden — hell, if Harris — behaved the way Trump did last night. The New York Times would be sounding klaxon horns and calling battle stations. Instead, we have this:

Donald J. Trump was about 30 minutes into a town hall Monday night in suburban Philadelphia when a medical emergency in the crowd brought the questions and answers to a halt. Moments later, he tried to get back on track, when another medical incident seemed to derail things, this time for good.

And so Mr. Trump, a political candidate known for improvisational departures, made a detour. Rather than try to restart the political program, he seemed to decide in the moment that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned — and, it appeared, for himself — to just listen to music instead.

“Known for improvisational departures” — I ask you. Grandpa is sundowning.

Later:

Mr. Trump generally returns to his planned remarks after medical issues at other events. On Monday, he seemed more uncertain how to proceed. After offering what appeared to be a closing statement and having his campaign play a James Brown song, Mr. Trump suggested taking another question or two. As the crowd cheered in approval, he said, “let’s go,” but then said he’d play “Y.M.C.A.” and send the crowd home.

But after “Y.M.C.A.” ended, Mr. Trump seemed a little perplexed. “There’s nobody leaving,” he said. “What’s going on?” The audience cheered, and so the music kept going, as Ms. Noem stood awkwardly by, and many in the audience seemed unsure about whether the event was over.

I need to take a break from this stuff. Between this, the Israelis cooking refugees in tents and the Tigers losing, there’s no reason to open the paper (literally or figuratively) this week. But I’ll try to be back one more time before the end of it.

I was going to debrief you guys on Trump’s appearance — you can’t really call it a speech — before the Detroit Economic Club last week, but my week was back-loaded and I ran out of time. It was…well, it was fucking weird.

First, a little background: This was Trump’s second appearance before the DEC, which is a business group full of the city’s machers and machers-in-waiting. Another city equivalent might be the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco; I think New York has a similar group. They meet weekly or biweekly, and have speakers on serious subjects of interest to the business community, like tax or foreign policy, or topics of local interest, like the various sports teams, but almost always with a focus on the business impact of whatever the subject is.

One thing the club is very proud of is, they’ve been addressed by all U.S. presidents going back to…can’t remember. Decades. Usually these people come through when they’re still candidates, but they come through. They don’t pay honoraria; speakers come because it’s an honor to be invited to address the C-suiters of the auto companies and other industries based in southeast Michigan.

Trump first came through as a candidate, in 2016. It didn’t go well. A lot of people bought tickets with the intent to disrupt, and the first one — a woman who leapt to her feet and started screaming at him about something — came about 10 minutes in. I was there, and counted about 20 or so more, one of the yellers none other than not-yet-a-congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. Security guards frog-marched each one out of the hall.

But Trump gave a speech, a prepared speech with a prompter. You can read it here. It’s full of empty promises, but it’s coherent.

Eight years later, he was invited back, most likely because of the influence of John Rakolta, a top-tier macher who served as ambassador to the U.A.E. during Trump’s term. He’s nearly the same age, and built a huge construction company here, Walbridge. Rich as Croesus, as you can imagine. Pop-culture fans may recall his wife, Terry, who was nationally famous in the ’90s when she led a boycott of “Married…With Children.” Bill O’Reilly had her on his show a lot.

(I know all this because I was hired to write a book for some anniversary of its founding, a custom-publishing job. I remember seeing Terry at the launch party and wondering why she looked so familiar. She still wears her hair the same way. She also appears to have an Instagram that reveals a fuckton of plastic surgery, but she looks damn good for 80.)

Anyway, Trump showed up last week, and it was very different. He didn’t speak as Candidate Trump, but Caesar Trump, rally-style. He walked the short distance to the podium and just stood there, while his walk-on music, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” naturally, played to its first chorus. It looked like this:

If his bronzer gets any darker he’s going to have to deport himself.pic.twitter.com/NhTtX2JqX9

#TraitorTrump

— Scottacular (@Scottcrates) October 11, 2024

The Twitter account I found this on quipped: “If his bronzer gets any darker, he’s going to have to deport himself.”

There was no prepared speech, and no disruptions. (I imagine the security was about 10X tougher this time.) He just stood there and rambled, rally-style, for TWO HOURS, Fidel Castro-meets-late-life-Elvis. The headline was that he said if Kamala Harris is elected, the whole country will look like Detroit. I don’t know what the reaction was to this; I’m told it was “muted,” as we say in Journalese. Given how hard many in the room have worked to achieve the city’s recent triumphs — new buildings, the NFL Draft, etc. — I would certainly hope so. But in my opinion, the headline should have been: Mush-brain candidate for nation’s top office rambles for two goddamn hours, but no one asked me.

Incredibly, this display was followed by an onstage conversation with his buddy Rakolta, and that was even weirder. I wouldn’t expect the ex-ambassador to question him sharply, but the rapturous brown-nosing was something of a surprise. There were many serious-but-respectful questions he could have asked, like maybe about the proposal Trump floated, to make auto-loan insurance tax-deductible; what would that cost the national treasury? Or maybe the construction tycoon could ask how we can build housing after we’ve mass-deported a large chunk of the construction workforce. But he didn’t. The opener was something like, “You have so much energy. How do you do it?” followed by an even grosser one about the impressive, successful Trump children, and how did he manage this feat? I mean, Tiger Beat magazine was tougher on Justin Bieber.

Incredible — here’s the full footage of Trump getting a question about his parenting style at the Detroit Economic Club, then going on a nearly 8 minute rant that culminates in him calling for drug dealers to be put to death. His brain just flits around. pic.twitter.com/Ry3WjAtEfU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 10, 2024

Bah. Enough. The whole event sounded terrible. But Harris got an ad out of it:

Detroit is a city of resilience and hard work.

Donald Trump knows nothing about that.

Watch our new ad: pic.twitter.com/OGILiahTDe

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 11, 2024

The rest of the weekend was spent celebrating a friend’s birthday. The day was in August, but the gift was Friday. For a couple years now, we’ve been experimenting with the premise that the best yacht rock is found on any streaming channel’s Little River Band Radio setting. (For non-streamers, the “radio” allows the algorithm to put together a playlist that features that artist, plus similar ones.) So when I saw the LRB was coming through town, I bought her two tickets, and she graciously selected me as her plus-one. I booked a room downtown and we made a girls’ outing of it.

The show was everything I expected, which is to say, a reconstituted LRB that contains not even one original member, plus none of the replacements are even Australian, as the originals were. But we got a fairly tight set that didn’t go on too long (about an hour and 20), and because the crowd were boomers, hardly any standing. And boy, does the LRB have a dedicated fan base; when I bought the tickets last summer, there were few good ones left. But we did OK:

The guy in front of me was a superfan, and threw up those hook-em-horns hands the whole time:

On Saturday we ate at a spectacular little patisserie, and then wandered the neighborhood. This is in the parking lot of one of those new-style restaurants made for Instagram:

We did not eat there. Our friend who lives in the neighborhood said the dinner-hour valet line is “all Cybertrucks with young women contorting themselves on the hood to take selfies.” Sounds like a place I’d be allergic to, but just as an aside to Donald Trump, not so many years ago this was a grocery with a drug marketplace in the parking lot. So hey — if that’s the way the country is headed, what’s so terrible about that?

Have a great week, all.

We’ve been having an exceptionally warm autumn so far. I know many of you enjoy this, but I suspect we’re headed for another SLAM BANG OK IT’S WINTER NOW seasonal transition, having missed out on the pleasures of fall, i.e., the slowly cooling days, the slowly turning leaves, all of it. Right now it’s in the low 70s, forecast to top out at 77 in late afternoon, and all I can think is: Where is sweata weatha? Love sweata weatha.

“You miss January, Nance?” a friend asked me last night. I do not. But it’s a week into October, and I was hoping to put away my sandals by now.

It’s not that winter won’t come. Winter is never all that far away from Michigan. But we’ve had a few of those SLAM BANG seasonal changes of late, and I’m not crazy about them. You spend Easter in down jackets, then four days later it’s 85 degrees and stays that way.

Oh well. My house has not washed down a mountainside, so this is just mewling.

Let’s go to the news! Ho-ho, this is amusing:

According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.

Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition. (A study by Stat, a health care news outlet, produced similar findings.)

Mr. Trump frequently reaches to the past for his frame of reference, often to the 1980s and 1990s, when he was in his tabloid-fueled heyday. He cites fictional characters from that era like Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lip” (he meant “Silence of the Lambs”), asks “where’s Johnny Carson, bring back Johnny” (who died in 2005) and ruminates on how attractive Cary Grant was (“the most handsome man”). He asks supporters whether they remember the landing in New York of Charles Lindbergh, who actually landed in Paris and long before Mr. Trump was born.

Actually it’s not amusing, it’s terrifying, because the rest of the paper informs us this is still anybody’s race. I mean, I’m glad the newspaper that practically considered it a crusade to get Biden to drop out is finally turning its attention to Trump, but who is listening at this point? Nobody. The few allegedly undecided voters, aren’t. As soon as early voting opens, I’m going in, casting my ballot with grim purpose, then returning to scan real-estate listings in countries where the language isn’t too hard to learn, and has some sweata weatha.

How was everyone’s weekend? Mine was fine. We saw “Megalopolis,” two of roughly six people in the theater. I’d describe it as…an ambitious mess. Those critics who keep saying, “Remember, ‘Apocalypse Now’ was a laughingstock at first” either never watched “Apocalypse Now” or weren’t there when it opened. I think it had been in theaters one weekend, and people were practically stopping me on the street to talk about the first three minutes, with the Doors and the chopper landing strut going through the frame, and the napalm. Three days after seeing “Megalopolis,” what I mostly remember was…none of it, really. Lush visuals, silly story, not much else. The girder scene, maybe? Aubrey Plaza trying her hardest, checking my phone inside my purse because I couldn’t remember where I’d seen the actress who played Julia before (she was Missandei in “Game of Thrones,” and her name is Nathalie Emmanuel) and ticking off the members of the Coppola Family Players who had parts (Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Laurence Fishburne) along with Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight and others. I think the ultimate explanation was the closing title, after FFC’s, “To my beloved wife Eleanor.” Eleanor Coppola died in April; this has the feeling of her surviving husband writing last notes and closing books.

Speaking of which, you know how Francis Ford Coppola got his middle name? His dad, Carmine, was a flautist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra from 1936-41, the depths of the Great Depression, and his son was born here. The Ford Motor Company basically carried the orchestra through the Depression, sponsoring their performances and keeping roofs over musicians’ heads and food on their tables. Carmine gave his baby the middle name in gratitude.

On Saturday, I went with a friend to see Jonathan Richman at the Magic Bag. The show was great, but short — one hour start to finish. Today I saw someone describe him as “Lou Reed’s nicer cousin.” He opened with this number, which I loved.

And now I’m going to enjoy this lovely Sunday. I leave you with this:

What we know is that these two men have 17 children with 6 different women but it’s women’s bodies that need to be controlled! pic.twitter.com/1oadrzY55i

— nazir afzal (@nazirafzal) October 6, 2024

Have a great week.

The Department of Justice made public this week a letter written by Ryan Routh, the would-be Trump assassin. In it, he writes that he expects to fail, but that he hopes others will “finish the job” and offers $150,000 to whoever does. This incensed people across the political spectrum, but particularly on the right, and for once I agree. Although I imagine any sane person would understand that a man in federal custody, and likely to remain so for many years, is going to call backsies on the $150K promise, the sorts of people who might attempt it, aren’t. Sane, that is. It just seems there should be multiple ways to indicate probable cause to a judge without revealing that detail.

But I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll leave it to them. However, I am a writer, and I just want to pick a small peeve in these stories, i.e., the labeling of any statement by a person who’s committed an act of violence as a “manifesto.”

Granted, this is mostly done by dumbass news sources, like the New York Post or Rod Dreher, but it bugs me just the same. I suppose it started with the Unabomber, and whatever else you can say about Ted Kaczynski, he took his violence seriously. His manifesto was called “Industrial Society and Its Future,” and it ran 35,000 words. Publishing it got him arrested, but he had something to say, and said it. Supposedly he has a fan club now.

By contrast, the woman who shot up a school in Nashville, Audrey Hale, left behind a journal of sorts, marked with some coherent passages but also a great deal of angry scrawling. The Tennessee Star is the only publication that published selections from it. This photo, with the publication’s watermarks all over it, gives you an idea:

To their credit, they put “manifesto” in quotes in their reporting. I’ve said before that I don’t mind it (too much) when language changes, but every time I hear some racist ranting or anguished scrawling called the same thing that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels labored over, I cringe.

Ai-yi-yi, another bout of insomnia last night. I turned off the alarm and tried to stay in bed as late as possible, but I probably got four hours, total. Since I missed morning swim, I took a bike ride in the cool, cloudy conditions, something that usually makes me feel good, but I multitasked by listening to the “The Daily” podcast, and it just depressed me. It was about the shortage of housing, particularly affordable housing, and toward the end, the reporter pointed out, correctly, that we have faced extreme housing shortages in this country before, the period after World War II being the most obvious example. It was solved in part by enormous federal incentives to build middle-class housing, the obvious answer today, as well. But will this ever be accomplished? I doubt it.

Even assuming the best-case scenario, i.e., a Harris victory and a Democratic Senate, any effort to enact a large federal program to, you know, HELP PEOPLE would be attacked nonstop by the usual suspects, who will wail and throw sand in the gears and churn out memes and do whatever possible to stop the whole thing.

I also considered how we might leave our current house, maybe downsize to a condo in a different municipality and leave this three-bedroom Colonial to someone with children in the schools. We’d get a decent price for it, but then we’d have to buy in this overheated market, and our taxes would skyrocket. Why? Because Michigan adopted Proposal A 30 years ago, which pegged property taxes to the rate of inflation or 5 percent, whichever is less. When you buy a house, its taxes “pop up” to whatever value the market placed on it by your purchase, but then they’re pegged. During the great recession, when our house lost nearly half its market value, the taxes adjusted downward, a small relief at a very scary time. Now they’re pegged again, and as a consequence, we’re paying far less than newer residents who bought after the recovery, for the same services. If we bought a new place, we’d almost certainly be paying more. So we stay put, empty nesters in a community that desperately needs school-age children, because our taxes-and-insurance nut in our paid-off house is about $500/month.

When Proposal A was passed, real estate wasn’t the volatile market it is today. The population was different. Everything was different. It’s probably time to revisit Proposal A (which had other moving parts about school funding). But the Michigan legislature now has term limits, the worst idea ever, and is now populated by people who whirl in and out of their seats, never stay long enough to develop true legislative skills and pass truly meaningful policy. And like Washington, the camps are divided and dug in. Things only get done when one party has complete control in Lansing. People wonder why the Democrats put the pedal to the floor when they got bicameral/executive control in 2022, for the first time in 40 years. That’s why.

OK, enough of that.

I was reading this Atlantic piece about legal sports gambling this morning, too. It concentrates on the personal price paid by legal gambling — the precarious households made even more so, mostly — but I wonder: We can’t be more than a hair’s breadth away from a Black Sox-style scandal in college or professional sports, can we? And when it happens, what will we do? Stick a stake in the heart of a multi-billion-dollar industry and drive gambling back into the shadows? Don’t be silly.

OK, then. In cheerier news, I have had a pork shoulder simmering in the crock pot since morning, and it’s almost time to shred it into tasty pulled-pork bits. Enjoy early autumn, wherever you are.