Another Friday, another late post. Well, there’s always the weekend ahead.

Truth be told, we’re even more confined to the second floor of the house as this kitchen project lurches on, although I hope it’s better this weekend. Yesterday was the absolute worst, with the appliances being delivered (one of them, anyway) along with the cabinets, which together filled every inch of space in the living and dining room. The cabinets are being built and hung today, so some of the footprint is reduced, but I have a stove in my living room and pretty much everything is filthy now.

And so I am not a very happy person. I need order. I have chaos. They tell me relief will come next week. We shall see.

This is what my chaos looks like, in the meantime.

Another reason I’ve not been motivated to write: The news just keeps coming. The portrait unveilings, subject of the last post, feel like they happened in 2012, now that they’ve been eclipsed by the school shooting, the Playboy Trump mistress and the Russia indictments, all in 48 hours. I read the Playboy-mistress story at 5:30 this morning, and the Russian indictments dropped during the lunch hour. I feel dizzy.

That’s not even counting ancillary stories, like Scott Pruitt flying around the country in first class because someone was mean to him the last time he sat in coach, “mean” being “told him to stop ruining the environment.”

Does it seem like something in the air has finally changed, though? I’m wary of epistemic closure, and I try to pay attention to the other side, I really do, but it does seem we’re in a different place now, public opinion-wise, than we were a year ago. Every parent I know with a school-age child is incandescent with rage. But I don’t get out nearly enough to qualify as a public-opinion expert.

In the meantime, even though Jolene posted this already, I want to bring it to your attention again: Just because you agree with a particular organization doesn’t mean they’re playing by the rules. In this case, it’s Everytown for Gun Safety, and their oft-quoted statistic that there have been 18 school shootings this year. No there hasn’t:

Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counts as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.

Which makes it not a school shooting, in my mind. The organization I work for now has a hashtag: #FactsMatter. They really do. You can’t build good policy on a weak foundation. Keep that in mind the next time the news blows up, which will probably be in…about eight minutes.

Have a good weekend, all.

Not gonna lie — I’m amused by all the art critics in the world. Who knew, in a country with so few college degrees, that so many were qualified to pass judgment on a couple of portraits?

Of course, anyone can pass judgment on art, and you don’t need a college degree to do it. But a 100-level humanities class will probably cover the 1913 Armory Show, and the debate over traditional representational vs. nontraditional modern art. You could hear echoes of it in the many who said, “But that pitcher don’t look nothing like Michelle Obama.”

I am showing my cards here, not that they were ever in doubt. I loved Kehinde Wiley before he was announced as POTUS 44’s official portraitist, and I was willing to give Amy Sherald the benefit of the doubt on the FLOTUS portrait. I knew both paintings would be nontraditional, which would befit a nontraditional first couple. We all knew that once the drape was dropped, the usual suspects would find something, anything to hate about them, because that’s what they do. Their vinegary souls are fed in the dankest basements of the internet, and it sucks to be them because they are crabbed, broken people.

Long, elegant fingers.

I have my own disappointments. I wish Wiley had just walked out in his windowpane-check suit and said, “It’s yours now. Your meaning is your own,” instead of explaining the symbolism of the various flowers in the background. The world is full of sleuths who would have been comparing them to floral databases and have them named within the hour, and we would have at least have the pleasure of figuring it out for ourselves.

But the people whose opinions really chap my ass are the ones who say the paintings are somehow “lacking in dignity,” or some other bullshit. I was in the Michigan state capitol shooting photos a few weeks ago, and took a lap of the gubernatorial portraits. They had all the dignity these littlebrains want, the stuff they can explain to fourth-graders: “He’s looking out the window, which represents the future. And his hand is resting on a globe, because he was interested in foreign affairs. The stack of books on his desk shows his commitment to education…” And so on. Blech. All but one was utterly forgettable, a white man in a business suit and a tie. The one that wasn’t was remarkable only because it was of a white woman, and look, her hand is on a globe. Only this globe represents tax incentives. OK.

I notice some of the conservative “news” sites posted a composite of presidential portraits, including the newest one, asking “which one doesn’t belong?” Well, Obama’s, obvs, because it’s the one that actually qualifies as art instead of a wall-filler in some national museum.

At least in the opinion of this art critic.

There was a painter in Fort Wayne I wrote about once. Nice guy, very Catholic, extremely traditional. I forget what the angle was — he was trying to give an altarpiece to the Diocese, or something. He explained the panels to me: “Now this represents pro-life,” he said, pointing to a bunch of intertwined babies. Thanks for explaining that, because man that would have been impenetrable otherwise. I don’t know what he’s doing now. Maybe he morphed into this guy, who’ll surely be tapped to paint 45’s portrait.

There may be more to Michelle’s picture than you think, and it’s all in the dress.

What else? Louise Linton, Bond villainess of the current administration, explains herself. She lives at SoulCycle!

My best friend used to work at a magazine dedicated to the good ol’ days, almost all the content written and submitted by readers, who had one thing in common: Rose-colored glasses. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the good ol’ days really were swell, and in the course of her time there, the magazine published a book all about the Depression, which readers remembered quite fondly. I understand that one good thing about times that hard is that almost everyone is going through it together, and poverty isn’t so obvious and painful when your neighbors are in the same boat. But man, some of these old people were weird. They loved, loved their memories of public assistance, when you didn’t get food stamps or an EBT card or cash for clothing, but actually had to go to the local fairgrounds, stand in line and carry your allotment home in boxes. (You all remember government cheese, right? Like that, only all your groceries, not just cheese.) It was better this way, the old people all said. So I guess they’re going to love the new idea for a downmarket Blue Apron for the poor.

You know what was really weird about that Depression book? Some readers recalled that if you got “relief,” as it was called, you had to eventually pay it back, and oh that was just wonderful, when daddy made the last payment! Why don’t we do that now? And so on.

OK, have to walk Wendy and figure out what frozen dinner to make in the microwave. Man, I want this project to be capital-O Over.

So what’s your parallel-destiny Olympic sport? The one you’d be playing if your life had taken a couple of different sliding-doors turns? Mine is speed skating – original-recipe speed skating, not short-track. (In the summer games, modern pentathlon.) There’s something about that Hans Brinker pose, the smooth crossovers, the blades biting into the ice – it’s mesmerizing. And a good use for my stocky-leg genetics. The hunky Scandinavians taking all the medals don’t hurt, either. I’d figure out a way to train with them.

Either that, or biathlon. Talk about a combination of two practical sports.

Elsewhere in South Korea, our vice president proved there is little this administration is incapable of screwing up. Olympics diplomacy? That’s the easiest one in the book — you show up, you applaud, you shake hands. You don’t get snitty. And now the gay athletes are doing the same to him. Another triumph!

As you can imagine, nine inches of snow, plus more on Saturday, plus freezing rain on Sunday, really made for a good weekend to stay close to home. But with no kitchen, we had to venture out, if only for food. I’m glad for the floor protection the workers put down, because otherwise the snowmelt would be ruining them. This has been a character-builder of a last few days. Heaps of snow everywhere. And coming midweek? A thaw. So the slush will not end anytime soon.

But with lots of time to read, of course I read this amazing puff piece on a person who has turned up here far more than I’d have ever imagined – Mary Cunningham, or rather, Mary Cunningham Agee, widow. Whatever shred of doubt I might have had about whether this woman is truly the bullshit artist I thought she was, it blew away when I read this. She tries to latch on to the #metoo movement, which is the sort of ballsy move only a real grifter would try. The story confirms what was hidden in plain sight in her husband’s obituary – they were separated at the end, which is the root of the dispute between Agee’s first family and his second wife.

I don’t often say, “read the comments,” but read the comments on that story. They’re great. One:

Those of us who lived through the horror of working for what was then called Morrison Knudsen, under Bill Agee, will wonder at this strange article. The real story that should be covered in detail in Business Day and every MBA school is how one man could destroy a thriving company and bamboozle a corporate board. I wouldn’t have believed it could happen if I hadn’t been forced to watch. Watching from below, Bill and Mary seemed like goofy cartoon characters who knew nothing about the business they were destroying. There were so many amazing and fascinating aspects to this story. As a much younger engineering program manager, fairly recently arrived to MK, I got to spend 15 min with Mr. Agee in a locomotive cab. I went home and told my wife, “We’re in big trouble,” and warned her to be ready for the worst. My worst fears all came true.

Two:

Those of us who met Mary Cunningham realized quickly she was a greedy con artist. We hired her to speak after her book was published and she acted like a female Trump. Demanding, dishonest, bizarre, like a spoiled rock star. Her hotel bill included an unauthorized fancy dinner for twelve friends with expensive champagne. We were a charity. She was rude to us, downright nasty, and her presentation was mediocre. She created a success persona that the press magnified. Bill Agee got what he deserved. With all that money he ended up in an assisted living facility separated from his children. If he was paranoid he certainly would have had reason to be.

And there are more.

One more piece of bloggage: What happens when you make your house as smart as it can be? It gets dumber:

It took at least two hours to get all of our Christmas lights plugged into smart plugs from WeMo and Sonoff, and then to get those plugs online with their apps, and then to get those apps to talk to the Alexa app. The first night I said, “Alexa, turn on the Christmas lights,” they all turned on in sparkly synchronicity and it was magical. But one day, Alexa stopped recognizing “Christmas lights” as a group, and I could not figure out how to fix it, so I had to ask Alexa each night to turn off the lights one-by-one. (“Turn off kitchen Christmas lights.” “Turn off living room Christmas lights.” “Turn off bookcase lights.”) This was way more annoying than turning them off manually. The fantasy of the smart home is that it will save us time and effort, but the friction involved in getting various devices from different companies to work together meant that many things took longer to do.

So, we now have a floor and grout and about half a paint job. The next time we meet here, I’m hoping we have cabinets. Me, I’m on the hunt for some decent takeout.

Two questions I am tired of:

Why don’t women speak up about these things? Here’s why. And also here.

Where do I want to eat? The answer is the same: Somewhere with vegetables, because we don’t have a kitchen, but we do have a floor:

It’s gray. The countertops will be gray, too, and the walls, a very pale gray. I’m worried about too much gray, but we’ll have white cabinets and white doors/woodwork, so I’m hoping it won’t remind us of a cement factory. If I were describing it in a real estate listing, I would call it a cool, urban gray. Neutral gray. Gray-not-greige. I am losing my shit here. We’re in the midst of a projected 5- to 9-inch snowstorm, I’ve been working my (taupe) bedroom for a week and either Alan or I have blown snow all but one day this week, but I’ll probably have to do it twice more today, so.

At least the guys are back at work on the kitchen, having slogged through the weather like it ain’t no thing. Man, what they say about immigrant labor is true. It’s particularly noticeable as I met a woman the other night who is in her first year of retirement from teaching. At 46 years old. Alan was not pleased to hear this. “Well, teaching is a demanding job,” I said, weakly, and he replied “I HAVE A FUCKING DEMANDING JOB.” Can’t argue with that. She said she began accruing seniority years while still in college, when she worked as a lifeguard at a public-school pool. That’s the old Michigan there, when the cotton was high and the good times went on and on. Over now.

Back to Rob Porter for a minute, the nice Mormon White House staff secretary who likes to abuse women. What is Hope Hicks doing with this loser? And before this, she was with Corey Lewandowski? You’d think a beautiful young woman with the world at her feet might choose more wisely. But of course, then she wouldn’t have the world at her feet. And she may yet end up learning legal terms like allocution and time served. So there’s that.

Sorry for this thin gruel today, but I am stir-crazy and should maybe write something else. Have a good weekend, everyone.

One day you have a kitchen, an outdated and ugly one:

And the next day, you don’t:

Of course, the best thing about a kitchen renovation is kitchen archaeology. Wallpaper from days of yore:

Justlikethat, the process has begun. I worked at home Monday and Tuesday, while Wendy stayed close by my side, unnerved by the sounds of demolition downstairs. This crew works at a blistering pace. Monday: Demo. Tuesday: Subfloor. Today: Floor. Sas and his crew – Igor, Sergei and the other guy whose name I forget – are very nice. They speak Russian to one another all day but politely switch to English when I stick my head in. And of course it has snowed every night this week, and is snowing now, hard. I’ll go out and clear it once it stops. Three more inches coming Friday.

Thanks for all the advice. I’m trying to keep a semblance of normalcy, but it’s damn hard. I have the coffeemaker set up in the dining room, but am resigned to a lot of pizza and standup meals. It’s harder on Alan, but it’s like chair pose in yoga — it won’t last forever.

And now I have yet another day of work ahead. I was kind of looking forward to this project, if only because tile, cabinets and backsplashes probably stands the best chance of pushing you-know-what out of my head, but NOOOOOO. I am speaking, of course, of the military parade. Cadet Bone Spurs strikes again.

Have a good one, all.

Sorry no post on Friday. I wrote something, read it over and declined to hit Publish. More people should do that from time to time. Not everything that can be said, should be said. More to the point, I’m not sure I said what I meant to say. But by then it was late, and work had piled up.

It remains in the Drafts folder. It may yet live.

I always thought of that as the sign of a true writer: That you don’t know exactly what you think of something until you write about it, because writing and thinking are so inextricably linked that it’s hard to do one without the other.

What a weekend. On Saturday, we spent a fair amount of money on a stove and dishwasher. We didn’t buy a fridge, because the one we have is only a few years old. Besides, I took one look at this…

…and laughed out loud. I asked the salesman who pays the hefty premium for a fridge that will take a photo of its contents, keep track of your shopping list and otherwise make you dependent on yet another electronic device. “Younger people,” he replied. Of course. It reminded me of when I was shopping with my mom in…I guess it was 1984, because the Apple Macintosh had just been released. We were playing with one in the computer store near our home. I explained that you could use it to write, paint and draw.

“There’s also a program you can get, where you put in all the food you have in your fridge and pantry, and it tells you what you can make from it,” I said.

“I do that every day, only I use my head,” she said. I had to admit I do the same thing. The few times every year that I duplicate-buy something I forgot I already have don’t add up to the $3,500 or so one of these things cost.

And then it was home to start clearing out the kitchen, because demo starts tomorrow. (Allegedly.) My kitchen gets a thorough cleaning every couple months, with a clean-as-you-go policy the rest of the time, but man, nothing like pulling that microwave out from its space on the countertop to feel a wave of shame wash over you. There aren’t dead mice or anything back there, but especially in the pantry, let’s just say some people like to eat snacks while standing in the doorway assessing other snacks, and Wendy can’t get every morsel that drops. If I lived in Florida, where (I’m told) the rinse-and-hold setting on the dishwasher gets used after every meal, lest cockroaches be drawn to a dirty plate within, well – I wouldn’t live in Florida.

Photos to come.

As to bloggage, well, I’m throwing in the towel today. Hot takes on the memo are so thick on the ground you can barely move, and it already feels like we’re hunkering down for the next disaster. Perhaps it will come in the form of a pandemic we’re unprepared to face because funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been slashed to finance tax cuts. Maybe it’ll be next year’s flu — wasn’t the 1918 pandemic preceded by a mini-pandemic in 1917? One of my colleagues just returned to work after his flu adventure, and he’d gotten the shot. I told him that next year he’d be safe, while I would die.

And then, of course, there’s the Super Bowl. Ring in on the best ads. And go Iggles.

The Larry Nassar case wrapped an important phase yesterday, when the long, long sentencing hearing finally concluded and Nassar himself received the specifics of his punishment, which guarantee he will die in prison.

But I don’t want to talk about Nassar so much right now. I want to talk about sports.

With the winter Olympics bearing down on us, we’re about to be bombarded with stories of plucky young athletes who have sacrificed nearly everything youth has to offer for the chance to compete at a world level and maybe stand on the podium, have a medal hung around their neck and, rarest of all, have their national anthem played before the world. (At least if they’re in a sport worthy of attention. Hard to get big ratings for biathlon or my fave from the summer games, modern pentathlon. That’s riding, swimming, running, fencing and shooting, which was plainly my destiny in my parallel life.)

And I’ve been seeing headlines lately. Michael Phelps contemplated suicide after the 2012 games, which he left with four golds and two silvers. Tiger Woods, derailed after the death of his infamously domineering father, briefly trained with Navy SEALs, a foolish pursuit that may have given him a career-altering injury. Play in the NFL? Prepare to suffer head injuries that will likely shorten your life, or at least make its last years miserable in unanticipated ways. And then there’s Tonya Harding, human punching bag, the evil princess of American figure skating.

Anyone who pays attention to high-school and college sports hears stories, of parents willing to harass and even bribe coaches for playing time for their children. A average-size defensive lineman at my own high school came back from summer vacation looking like the Incredible Hulk. His father was a doctor, and the stories started circulating that dad had been helpful in finding a drug cocktail that would turn his son into a behemoth just in time for football season.

And these poor gymnasts in the Nassar case. Now that the main narrative has been concluded, look for the rest of the fallout to be coming down soon – about the coaches and trainers and others who, if they didn’t look the other way, certainly were accustomed to telling these tiny girls to just sit down and shut up about what this famous doctor did to them.

The stories are already starting to come out. This guy, booted from USA Gymnastics only this week, was one of Nassar’s enablers:

Geddert’s coaching style has largely been based on fear and intimidation, according to dozens of people who spoke with Outside the Lines over the past year, a group that includes current and former gymnasts, parents of gymnasts, coaches who have worked alongside Geddert and other gym employees. Many of those contacted said they were reluctant to speak publicly about Geddert because they either have children involved in gymnastics in the Lansing area or careers in the sport and they are mindful of the power he wields.

Man, it’s like you could hardly come up with a better atmosphere for a 14-year-old to not speak up about the doctor treating her back pain with a finger up her vagina, could you?

So, my question to the athletes in the room, or the athletes’ parents, or anyone who is athlete-adjacent: We hear a lot about kids who are “obsessed” with the game they play, who have to be told to put down the sticks and take off the skates/uniform/helmet. But how do you keep a child safe in a world like this, and why would you even want them to be part of it? How do you turn them over to a coach who trains little girls with fear and intimidation? I read an interview with Michael Phelps once where he apologized for not being more interesting, because “I swim, I eat and I sleep. That’s literally all I do.” Are even 20 gold medals worth it, when the result is a grown man who had to careen through alcohol, drugs, depression and suicidal ideation before, against all odds, finding himself? I mean, what about the ones who aren’t Michael Phelps, who train every bit as hard for just as long, but don’t make the cut?

I’ve long thought this was all about parents. Anyone seen “I, Tonya” yet? Allison Janney has a big scene, playing Tonya Harding’s mother, where she spits at her daughter, “I made you a champion, knowing you’d hate me for it. That’s the sacrifice a mother makes.” But how can you encourage a kid to keep trying, to not accept defeat easily, to give their best effort, in environments like this?

I read once that Wayne Gretzky’s father would take his hockey gear away from him and lock it in a closet once the season was over. Young Wayne could do whatever he wanted in the off-season except play hockey. It strikes me that the elder Mr. Gretzky knew something too many parents have forgotten.

In the meantime, this is the effort it took for someone to finally pay attention to what Nassar was doing:

Other girls had sounded the alarm about Nassar over the previous two decades — yet no one discovered his criminal behavior.

Rachael Denhollander arrived at MSU years after Nassar assaulted her. She was an attorney, ready for a battle with a thick folder of documents.

Among them: her medical records, journals, the names of four pelvic floor specialists, a USA Gymnastics-certified coach she had told about Nassar’s conduct, an index of medical journal articles on legitimate pelvic floor techniques, a character letter reference and a memo that outlined how her complaint met every element of Michigan law defining first-degree criminal sexual conduct.

“I knew it was going to be a fight,” Denhollander, a former Kalamazoo resident living in Louisville, told The Detroit News. “I had to present the absolutely strongest case possible because it was a medically and legally complex case because a doctor and alleged medical treatment was involved. My biggest fear was I would file a report, he would win and would know he was unstoppable.”

Insane.

So. Can we skip to some bloggage for the weekend?

A friend of mine works in an office where the Fox Business channel is on all day. “Think how bad Fox News is, then double it, and that’s Fox Business,” he says. After reading this piece on Lou Dobbs, I don’t doubt it.

And that’ll be it for me until after the weekend. I have a fundraiser to work on Saturday, and I appear to have blown out my knee (again), so I’m limping. Play nice and I’ll be back Sunday/Monday.

I spend probably too much time thinking about faces, but lately there have been so many weird ones out there, and so many have an indelible connection with you-know-who. A few weeks ago, Mrs. T No. 1 was on her book tour, and ay-yi-yi:

Over the weekend, as you probably know, some fans of Mrs. T No. 1’s first husband held a fundraiser/tribute for him at his Florida club. OF course someone snapped a picture:

I almost shrieked when I saw that. I believe many of these women are the Trumpettes, Mar-a-Lago ladies of a certain age. I have sympathy for women who grow up trading on their looks, although I was never able to do so myself. Sooner or later the thief of time comes for all of us, and the more you’re invested in your own beauty, the harder it is to let go. The biggest tragedy of “Bombshell,” the Hedy Lamarr documentary I saw a couple weeks ago, was how even this flawless beauty, as smart as she was, found herself bound to the ideal of her looks, and augured into the plastic-surgery merry-go-round. By the last years of her life she lived as a recluse, unable to face the world with her weirdly distorted face.

Do we wind up with the faces we deserve? You may have heard that Mean Girl Megyn Kelly had a little celebrity tiff with Jane Fonda a few days ago. Kelly pressed Fonda to talk about plastic surgery she’d had, under the guise of explaining why she “looks so great.” Fonda was pretty graceful about it at first, crediting a “good attitude, good posture and taking care of myself” before trying to pivot back to the movie she had been sent to promote, but Kelly wasn’t having it. All the while, Robert Redford, Fonda’s co-star, sat next to her. Have you seen Robert Redford in the last few years? He’s no stranger to the plastic-surgery clinic, let me tell you, but Kelly didn’t want to talk about his face work. And you could argue that Redford was, in his youth, more well-known as much for his rugged handsomeness than Fonda ever was. (Of course, women in Hollywood are just expected to be beautiful.)

If I reach Fonda’s current age (80), I of course will never look as good as this:

Here’s me on the red carpet of LA Museum of Modern Art gala

A post shared by Jane Fonda (@janefonda) on Nov 6, 2017 at 4:17pm PST

But I hope I’ll have her sense of humor:

Here’s me the next morning. I couldn’t get my dress unzipped so I slept in it.. never wanted a husband in my life until now

A post shared by Jane Fonda (@janefonda) on Nov 6, 2017 at 4:18pm PST

So, what a few days, eh? In Michigan, we’ve been gripped by the filibuster of misery unfolding in Ingham County, where disgraced Dr. Larry Nassar is awaiting sentencing for counts related to years of systematic sexual abuse of young women connected to the Michigan State and U.S. Olympic women’s gymnastics program. More than 120 women have stood to give victim-impact statements, and it’s simply devastating.

What’s even more dismaying is the reaction of the MSU administration, which appears to have learned nothing from the Penn State disaster a few years ago. Today — TODAY — one trustee went on a radio show and dismissed “this Nassar thing” as though it was a nuisance lawsuit brought by a crackpot and not an occasion of shame upon all who came close to it over the years it went on.

This is going to be very, very bad.

Oh, I am tiring quickly and must watch a little TV before making my way to my warm bed. Happy Wednesday, all.

Hey, just realized I forgot to blog for Friday. A quick one, because I’m Cinderella-fying myself for the big dance tonight, and brother, that’s a long-term process at my age.

For those keeping score at home: I have just removed unwanted leg and pit hair and moisturized heavily. Next step: Nails.

I’ve also been following internet worm holes on human trafficking hysteria. With the auto show in town, the usual suspects are claiming their share of the spotlight, spewing questionable data and offering such helpful tips as: Watch for situations that just don’t seem right.

See, this is predicated on the extremely shaky contention that any large group of people descending on a city for an event – Super Bowl, Final Four, auto show – will lead to a “spike” in human trafficking, specifically sex trafficking, but I bet you knew that. These press conferences aren’t to draw attention to domestic servants who are essentially held prisoner in their employers’ basement, but to give the local TV stations a chance to break out their whores-on-the-stroll video with the faces pixelated out. Anyway, I think the contention is shaky because so far, no one has ever produced any evidence other than this: Sex-service classifieds on sites like Backpage spike around that time.

This week, I tried to test it. To be sure, there are a lot of Backpage sex ads right now. But the ads drop off sharply after they’ve been up a day or two, and I’m not sure why. I also don’t have a control group from a non-auto show week. I tweeted a thread about this yesterday:

So I've been trying to fact-check the oft-repeated #humantrafficking claim that the sex trade goes into overdrive around large events. (Thread, I guess.)

— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) January 18, 2018

Any of you with experience in this area, feel free to private-message me via email or the channel of your choice. I’m genuinely curious.

Earlier this week, the police and some HT advocates held a presser that advised the public to BOLO (be on the lookout, in the cop lingo) for trafficked women at the show. They also said they made 22 arrests last year “tied to” the show, and apparently no one asked for more detail. So are girls, what? Working the floor? I find that hard to believe. Outside of Cobo? Ditto. Almost all prostitution is online now, anyway, so I don’t know how the public might see one of these women in the first place. Then there’s this:

Last year, police made 22 arrests for human trafficking that were tied to the auto show, Craig said. Some cases are still being investigated.

The chief anticipates there will be more reports at this year’s show, which runs through Jan. 28. Sex traffickers often go to major events that attract large crowds to find their victims, Craig said.

Craig emphasized that sex trafficking is much different from prostitution because trafficking means the person is held against their will.

Wait, what? Prostitution cases being investigated for a year? And what is he saying in the second paragraph there? That pimps are trolling the crowd for girls? Has anyone actually been to this show? The public week is hardly a magnet for young women traveling alone — it’s families, couples, and lots of guys. Is he pushing the “Taken” myth here? Oh, and trafficking vs. prostitution, he’s wrong there. He just is.

When I wrote about HT a couple years ago, one of my sources told me that, in terms of understanding the problem, we were about where we were with understanding domestic violence – in 1979.

It’s an interesting topic. I wish we had better data.

OK, on to the nails. I’ll have a photo roundup of the action tonight Sunday/Monday. Be good, all.

When I was a girl, rape was what happened when a man brandished a gun or knife, dragged you into a dark alley, and had sex with you. That was easy to understand.

Then, when I was a young adult, the concept of date rape was introduced – that it could be someone you knew, and there might be no weapon involved, just a stronger man holding you down. Also easy to understand. There was also a brief pass through the concept of marital rape, with John and Greta Rideout suddenly everywhere, testing the idea that a man didn’t have an absolute right to sex with his wife whenever he wanted, and that cause was strange, then righteous, then infuriating (with the Rideouts reconciled after his, guess what, acquittal).

Date-rape drugs were next. Remember roofies? Where do you get roofies? I am not deeply immersed in drug culture, but I know my way around a little, and I’ve never seen or been offered a roofie. A third, fourth, sixth or ninth cocktail? Now there’s a date-rape drug that doesn’t get its due.

Then, in the ’90s, Antioch College instituted its widely ridiculed sexual consent policy, and by widely ridiculed I mean it was an SNL sketch that very weekend. Antioch eventually went out of business, but that was a hardy seed it planted, because it flowered into how we now talk about sexual encounters: They must be consensual, and they must be consensual at every step of the escalation, and that consent can be revoked at any time. Already stuck it in? Sorry, guys, if she tells you to take it out, you have to. No one cares about your sexual frustration; that’s why your hands reach all the way down there.

This is where I began to step off the train. I like sex, but I don’t like sex that proceeds like a contract negotiation. Once the clothing starts to come off, I think it’s safe to make some assumptions. If I don’t like what you’re doing, I’ll speak up. I don’t want to answer “is this OK? Is this OK?” every few minutes. But at the same time, I see where that might be a useful framework, especially for college students who are still figuring this stuff out. Sex and navigating intimate relationships are skills you have to learn, and if these policies are essentially training wheels for the early years, no harm done.

Which brings us, as you knew it would, to Aziz Ansari, who is probably pacing his apartment rage-smoking, or maybe in a Xanax haze, or otherwise coping with the agony of being revealed to the world as a lousy hookup at best, and a near-rapist at worst. And here is where I step all the way off the train. Because the next stop is Pencetown, and I ain’t going there.

Either women are strong, independent individuals with the capacity to say what they do and don’t want in an intimate relationship, or they are delicate flowers who put out “cues” that men must decipher, and woe betide if they get their signals crossed.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, count yourself lucky. Or read up. A lot of us have been talking about being older lately; never have I thanked the fates for my arthritic knees and wrinkly ass more than this week, when the thought of having to navigate this dating moonscape made me quake with fear. Because evidently you can go back to a guy’s place, take off your clothes, perform oral sex on one another, change your mind because “things are going too fast” and also because he’s a lousy kisser, and still feel you were wronged somehow, because he also served you the wrong wine and he did that thing with his fingers and, and, and…

This young woman sounds, at the very least, deeply confused. It’s also possible she’ll grow into the sort of woman who gives her husband the silent treatment, and when called on it, says, “If I have to tell you what you did, then you’re even more wrong!” Maybe these two deserve one another, come to think of it.

I’m with Gene Weingarten. This was a terrible piece that should never have been published, and could do significant damage to an important cause. But I guess progress is rarely linear. We’re still figuring out how to get along with one another. I expect we always will.

So. Nearly the midweek. And the decline of facts continues apace:

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — When truck driver Chris Gromek wants to know what’s really going on in Washington, he scans the internet and satellite radio. He no longer flips TV channels because networks such as Fox News and MSNBC deliver conflicting accounts tainted by politics, he says.

“Where is the truth?” asks the 47-year-old North Carolina resident.

Don’t have much to say about that, just throwing it out there. There might be hope for journalism yet, but I’m not sure how.

Finally, this horrifying thing from an English-language Russian news site. It’s easy to say “nothing will come of this,” but that requires ignoring history, in which genocides and purges always start with this sort of propaganda, and rarely end well.

But now it’s Wednesday, or nearly so. Over the hump.