We’re going to war with North Korea (maybe) by threatening them with “fire and fury.” I guess POTUS is a “Game of Thrones” fan.

We’re going to war with addictive drugs by telling kids to just say no. I guess POTUS liked Nancy Reagan, too.

Meanwhile, here’s a delightful piece of journalism you should read before the fireball engulfs the west coast, or maybe Guam, or perhaps Japan:

They hitchhike across Europe, instantly recognizable in the wide-bottomed, corduroy trousers, white shirts and colored jackets that identify them as bricklayers, bakers, carpenters, stonemasons and roofers.

They are “Wandergesellen,” or journeymen — a vestige of the Middle Ages in modern Europe — young men, and these days women, too, who have finished their required training in any number of trades and are traveling to gather experience. Most are from German-speaking countries.

I knew nothing of this tradition, and had no idea why post-apprentice tradesmen and women are called journeymen. Now I do — because they journey, duh. It’s mainly a photo essay, so you can enjoy it without committing to a long read.

There was an election here yesterday. No surprises.

My friend Bill is recently retired, which means he’s in the go-go stage of post-work life. (The other two, of course, are slow-go and no-go.) He’s having a great summer, bombing around the state with “12th & Clairmount,” the documentary film our employer co-produced, and on his travels, he’s developing a new sport. The sport of the future! he says. He calls it ottering – it’s open water swimming in fins and a life jacket. He keeps saying we should go so I can try it out, and Sunday we worked out our schedules and did so.

We drove to St. Clair, Michigan, on the St. Clair river between Lake Huron and Lake St. Clair. There’s a park there, with a long boardwalk and seawall. We put on the gear and jumped off into 68-degree water and spent an hour ottering. It’s fun. The PFD holds you up and the fins allow you to master the current, which runs about 3 miles per hour draining the Great Lakes toward the sea. At least half a dozen ships passed us, and their wakes bobbed us up and down pleasantly as we drifted and floated.

Why is this the sport of the future? Because Bill has been swimming there most of his adult life, and in recent years has developed shoulder pain, enough that he fears one day injuring himself climbing back up the ladder on the seawall. Hence the PFD. The fins just make it easy to move around. So the pitch really should be, Ottering: The sport of the future in an aging America.

Now to monetize it. I told him to write the book and I’d contribute a chapter. He could do a merch run. It could be his gift to the world, a way to bring the joy back to swimming for people who don’t feel confident enough to do it in deep water anymore.

Then we had lunch and a couple of beers. Not a bad way to spend half a Sunday.

It was a pretty FUBAR weekend all around, with Alan suffering drug side effects from his oral surgery. He had hiccups all day Friday. Seriously, all day. Was awakened at 6 a.m. by hiccups, in fact. Turns out they’re a side effect of the steroid he’s on. Then you have the antibiotics and the painkillers and a UAW vote in Mississippi on a Friday night, and there goes half the weekend. I had to finish a story to boot, so there went half of mine. I was able to slip away for a while Friday night, for a house music lineup at a local bar.

House music sounds like this, at least this set did. That link is to a short video. (If it gives you problems or won’t play on your phone or whatever, I don’t want to hear about it.) I like it OK, and that was a nice early-evening groove, not too loud, so a pleasant way to pass a couple hours.

And suddenly, there goes the weekend. August is flying by. Next week is the OABI, the Once Around Belle Isle kayak race, which I’m on the fence about entering, and the weekend after that is Swim to the Moon, my first open-water swimming event (besides ottering). And then another kayak thing and into Labor Day. Stay a little longer, summer.

So, on to the bloggage? Sure.

This German dude is a future otter, commuting to work via swimming the Isar River, through Munich.

Man, the Chinese have this hoax nailed. Down.

Another take on “Detroit,” this one calling the film immoral.

Oh, and finally, perhaps appropriate because we spent all weekend working, we watched “Obit” on Saturday night, a documentary about the NYT obit desk. Very enjoyable, and I recommend. Let’s hope the weekend ahead is the same.

OK, so what’s happened in the last…12 hours, say? The WashPost released transcripts of head-of-state calls our own made with his counterparts in Mexico and Australia. And, as we’ve come to expect, it was deeply embarrassing to all of us.

I’m more interested in the backstory here.

Leaks don’t just happen. Reporters cultivate sources and sources return calls and texts. Someone on the inside despises this man enough to leak classified documents to the outside world, documents that show just how deep is this trouble we’re in, where the POTUS behaves as though the presidents of two other countries are somehow obligated to do what he wants. Bullying.

Mortifying. Just another Thursday.

Then, late afternoon, word of the grand jury leaks. (That’s a USA Today link, sorry. Upside: No registration needed. Downside: Autoplaying video, sidebar explaining “what is a grand jury.”

As we’ve said nine million times already: It’s hard to keep up these days. It’s hard to keep up in one day. I was supposed to be off, being driver/cook/nurse to Alan, who had some oral surgery today and came through it like a champ. Which was good, because I worked more or less all day, including when I was sitting in the waiting room.

But now the weekend awaits. A little more reading for you:

How ignorant of basic economics is our business-genius president? This ignorant.

Then there’s this guy, aka the Human Comment Section (but not at this site), running for Sherrod Brown’s Senate seat in Ohio. Don’t disappoint me, fellow Buckeyes.

And just to take you to the end of the week with something other than politics, here’s a great essay on the anti-affirmative action movement forming around college admissions. It’s from last year, but relevant because of… see Wednesday’s entry.

Finally, an interesting piece on how a pair of 1967 grizzly attacks changed the way we interact not only with wildlife, but the greater natural world. Totally worth your time.

I’m outta here.

Eighty-eight degrees out there at the moment. I just walked the dog and didn’t die. Sweating, but still ambulatory. I must be getting older, my decaying body craving heat like the dying husk it is, like an old man craves young women. Soon I’ll start setting my thermostat to 85 and wearing a cardigan sweater with an old tissue shoved up one sleeve.

Which is to say: It wasn’t the greatest Tuesday, but it wasn’t terrible, either. There’s a piece of salmon in the fridge and I’m thinking it’s going to be dinner. Which will help a lot.

But I have a case of the mid-weeks, which means I have a story due at the end of it, my notes are kind of a mess and I have to un-mess them and I’d rather make some of that salmon and open a bottle of white.

What are today’s outrages? What drinks can I put up on the bar to get today’s party started?

SAVE WHITEY! Jefferson Beauregard Sessions shows his worth at the Justice Department, sticking up for poor, poor, discriminated-against white kids. When I was a Fellow, one of U-M’s lawyers did a seminar for us, talking about the SCOTUS argument they made, that diversity was an essential part of the education a student should expect at a university. He convinced me, but Jefferson Beauregard Sessions was not in attendance that evening.

The secretary of defense and new chief of staff had an ad hoc adult daycare going there for a while.

I don’t know if this will be available to all, but a good WSJ story on the chaos of the Indian court system. You lawyers might appreciate this.

And a moment of grim levity from the WashPost: An oral history of last week:

At 4:58 p.m., Ryan Lizza publishes a story on NewYorker.com that recounts his curse-laden conversation with Scaramucci the previous night. By the 6 o’clock hour, chyrons on CNN were including Scaramucci quotations like “F—–G PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENIC,” in reference to Priebus, and “I’M NOT TRYING TO S**K MY OWN [EXPLETIVE],” a reference to Scaramucci’s putdown of Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

Tommy Vietor, former Obama spokesperson: [Former Obama speechwriter] Jon Favreau and I had recently finished recording our Thursday podcast when the story with Ryan Lizza and the Mooch popped up. . . . This was just the latest example of huge breaking news happening every time we finish a show.

I click through and am just flabbergasted. . . . We grabbed [fellow Obama alum Jon] Lovett and read him some choice lines. He couldn’t believe it was real. How can this be real?

And that’s only three paragraphs! There’s much, much more.

Finally, just to leave you with a midweek glance into the void, Jared Kushner on the Middle East, surreptitiously recorded by a White House intern:

Later in the clip, Kushner expresses frustration at others’ attempts to teach him about the delicate situation he’s been inserted into, saying, “Everyone finds an issue, that ‘You have to understand what they did then’ and ‘You have to understand that they did this.’ But how does that help us get peace? Let’s not focus on that. We don’t want a history lesson. We’ve read enough books. Let’s focus on, How do you come up with a conclusion to the situation?” He then goes on to lament the press’s treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a family friend who he’s known since childhood.

Kushner’s dismissal of the nuances of the conflict has already been an issue. Last month, when Kushner met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a Palestinian official told Haaretz that Kushner “sounded like Netanyahu’s advisers and not like fair arbiters” and that they were “greatly disappointed” after the meeting. Abbas himself was “reportedly furious.”

Finally, Kushner closed with the following statement of reassurance: “So, what do we offer that’s unique? I don’t know … I’m sure everyone that’s tried this has been unique in some ways, but again we’re trying to follow very logically. We’re thinking about what the right end state is, and we’re trying to work with the parties very quietly to see if there’s a solution. And there may be no solution, but it’s one of the problem sets that the president asked us to focus on. So we’re going to focus on it and try to come to the right conclusion in the near future.”

It’s moments like this that I feel us trembling, teetering on the edge of something terrible. Back on Friday, when the weekend will be in view. Let’s party then.

I’m giving up. The fire is now out of control. The firefighters can only pour water on the blaze because what else are they supposed to do. I’ve just run out of words to describe the conflagration.

For now, anyway.

Neil Steinberg: This White House can’t seem to pin the needle on crazy weird. It sits there, stuck at the extreme end of the scale, and these nutbags keep adding more red zone to sink into.

That’s about right. That seems to capture the essential weirdness. I’m glad he has some words, because I feel like I’m out.

These are good words, too:

for as curious as I was to see Sean Spicer on Dancing With the Stars I'm now even more interested to see Steve Bannon on Americas Got Talent

— Matt Oswalt (@MattOswaltVA) July 27, 2017

So, if you’re living on an outer planet and don’t know what I’m talking about, this is what I’m talking about:

On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director. He wasn’t happy. Earlier in the night, I’d tweeted, citing a “senior White House official,” that Scaramucci was having dinner at the White House with President Trump, the First Lady, Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine. It was an interesting group, and raised some questions. Was Trump getting strategic advice from Hannity? Was he considering hiring Shine? But Scaramucci had his own question—for me.

“Who leaked that to you?” he asked. I said I couldn’t give him that information. He responded by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. “What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,” he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source. He continued to press me and complain about the staff he’s inherited in his new job. “I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can’t help themselves,” he said. “You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.”

It goes on from there. You’ll want to read it. This is our America.

This is a better, or at least cheerier, story, about the promise and peril of recreational genomics. A new term, that. It’s about the family secrets that can be revealed through the use of home gene-testing kits like 23andMe, etc.

I will confess, however, that I find this level of dedication to one’s pedigree to be fairly far from my understanding. I simply don’t care enough about who begat who, once you go back far enough that I can’t remember them. The story is a very good yarn, though, with a nice twist at the end. You’ll like it.

We started with Neil Steinberg, and I guess we end with him, too. This just in: Blogs are dead.

Long live this one, anyway. I’m not going anywhere.

But I am planning to have a nice weekend. You do the same.

It was a perfect summer night for baseball, if not blogging, and the boss sprung for a suite:

I left at the bottom of the sixth, with the Tigers down 3-1 to the Royals. It didn’t bode well when the very first pitch of the game was a homer for K.C., but is it possible to have a bad time at the ballpark on a gorgeous July night, and in a suite, no less?

Meanwhile, some shit happened in Washington. And in Youngstown, I gather from Twitter. And let’s not even discuss the poor Boy Scouts. No, let’s.

Because it’s Wednesday, and this is all I have.

All the advice was to see “Dunkirk” in IMAX, so I googled around. Turned out there’s an IMAX screen at a multiplex in Royal Oak that I didn’t know about. Royal Oak is closer than the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, which is where I feared we’d have to go, so this was good news. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a regular theatrical-entertainment film in IMAX, only short science films like they show at museums. Bought tickets online, paid IMAX prices.

After the credit-card sale went through I looked at the tickets. “‘Dunkirk’ in EMAX,” they said. What’s EMAX? I thought, but figured it had to be some version of IMAX.

It wasn’t. It was just a wide screen. The theater is called Emagine, and sure enough, there’s no such thing as EMAX as a film format, it’s just the chain’s name for “PREMIUM LARGE FORMAT, bigger picture & maximum sound.” You can say that again; it was really, really loud. But the screen was nice and wide and oh well, at least for a movie like this you don’t generally have people talking throughout. And if they had, the soundtrack would have drowned them out pretty well.

And I can’t say I missed the IMAX, honestly. “Dunkirk” was an immersive experience in every sense of the word; it’s hard to see people wearing boots and heavy wool uniforms trying to swim in an unforgiving sea. A colleague saw it Thursday and panned its storytelling trick of multiple, non-synchronized timelines, but it worked for me. I imagine service in a war zone is a series of minutes-become-hours, hours-pass-like-seconds episodes, part of what makes it so disorienting.

You can read entire shelves of books about the Dunkirk evacuation, and thousands of words about this telling of the story, so I won’t add to it other than to say I liked the film very much and it made me want to sail our boat across the lake and rescue some Canadians. Or maybe the other way around. And I’ll also stand with David Edelstein, who took a pasting in the comments about his review in New York magazine, for writing that he assumed one chapter/timeline, titled “the Mole,” was about the anonymous soldier at its center, who has a prominent mole on his jaw. I did too! And I subsequently learned that “mole” is another term for a jetty, pier or breakwater, a structure that is very important in this story. I’ve read pretty widely and spent lots of time on or near water and boats, and I’ve never heard this before. Ever.

Before the movie, we visited a local brewhouse/restaurant. On the menu:

Proud to be an American.

I guess the next movie we’ll see in a theater is “Detroit,” about an incident in the ’67 riots, being commemorated this very week. Here’s a tick-tock by my former colleague Bill, roused from retirement to help the Freep staff. Lots of links within to other stuff, and sorry about the goddamn autoplaying videos, but that’s Gannett these days. And here’s the News’ editorial-page editor with the suburban take.

Over my years here, I’ve heard many personal recollections of that week, mostly bad ones. Some were grimly amusing; a guy on a local message board lived in St. Clair Shores, and remembers one of his mother’s friends knocking on the door late one night in a panic. She’d heard that gangs of black men were going house-to-house in Grosse Pointe, raping white women, and could she take shelter with them? He thought it was extra funny that he saw her a year later at a party his parents threw, and her escort was a black man. I always wonder, when I hear stuff like that, if there are people who deliberately start hateful rumors in the wake of chaos, for whatever reason. They were rife after 9/11, none backed by any shred of evidence.

This personal story isn’t funny at all, but it was written by a friend whose father was a Detroit firefighter in 1967, and it’s sad and worth your time.

As for the events from Washington, the Fall of Spicey and the rise of the next guy, Scaramucci, I leave it to the comedians.

Happy week ahead, all.

I just realized I promised you guys a MWF blog, and this week I neglected the F. And now it’s 10 minutes before I really should start working, so here goes with the speedblog.

Also, I’ve also realized that the way news moves at a breakneck pace these days, the links I haphazardly gather throughout my week are going to be stale by the time I post them. Last night, for instance, I was watching “Creed,” because I was exhausted, and all I wanted to do was eat pizza, drink a glass of wine and forget I live under the current regime for a couple hours. Adonis Creed was in the climactic fight when Alan groaned and announced the president may be planning to have a pardon party, with himself as the guest of honor. (Of course.)

I wanted to whimper. Can’t I watch a dumb boxing movie for two hours? I guess not.

So, then! The president’s pardon party! Discuss. Also, you’ve probably read by now about R. Kelly’s harem of zombie sex drones, but if you haven’t, do so. Jim DeRogatis, the Chicago pop-music writer, has done dogged, heroic work on this story. Please, let this be the one that makes a difference.

And a housekeeping note: MarkH, send me your email. I tried to forward something from basset and it bounced.

We’re going to see “Dunkirk” in IMAX this weekend if it’s the last bloody thing I do. Starting to go a little stir-crazy around here.

With the health-care overhaul bill dead — and yes, let’s stipulate that it is merely horror-movie dead, which is to say it might not be dead at all and we won’t know until the credits roll, the house lights come up and no one announces a sequel — I think we can all agree that this was a strange moment in a half-year full of them:

That was the Rose Garden ceremony to celebrate the passage of the House health-care bill. If you remember your Schoolhouse Rock, you know that in this case “passage” means “it was sent to the Senate.” Doesn’t that photo just…speak volumes? I think my right-wing friends in Indiana are still counting on President Pence one day bringing glory to that put-upon state, but if I were compiling an ad for his opponent, I’d put together a montage of these pictures — him standing at his master’s elbow, clapping and smiling, to an appropriate piece of music. I can’t think of one now, and searching “songs about toadies” isn’t helping, Google-wise. Maybe you don’t need music; maybe you could run the montage over his opening salvo at the first cabinet meeting, the “greatest honor of my life” stuff.

But now it’s more or less over, at least this part of it. A party that dominates the legislative and executive branch couldn’t repeal a law they’ve been howling about for seven years. They’re nihilists now:

I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, at least it’s an ethos.

Hot here. Gonna be hotter tomorrow. Gonna be hot for about a week. Then: Less hot. Still summer, though. I’m enjoying it. It’s not quite the silly season, but it’s the silly shoulder season, so let’s consider some fashion-y things in the bloggage.

Like Calista Gingrich’s hair:

The men — Nathan Sales, George Glass, Carl Risch — arrived in their dark suits and their crisp white shirts. Callista Gingrich, nominated to be ambassador to the Vatican, was dressed in a bright blue jacket with a modest portrait neckline. They all looked spit-shined for the occasion. But visually, nothing could compete with Gingrich’s hair, which over the course of time has become a kind of platinum synecdoche for the woman herself. The hair — a perfectly styled chin-length bob with a side swoosh — is Gingrich. The hair arrived, and it was perfectly composed. It did not wilt under the spotlight; it did not collapse when lawmakers raised questions about climate change and refugees. The hair was controlled and proper and smooth. The hair did well at the hearing.

I guess, as a well-known adulteress, she has to dress against type. But man, that hair freaks my cheese.

Cathy Cambridge has upped her style game, T-Lo note. Love the first dress, like the second one, but she absolutely did the right thing by taking six inches or so off her hair. The only thing about the first dress I don’t like is the stiffness of the fabric, to the point that the bust darts are giving her actual nipples.

I may read nothing but T-Lo for the rest of the summer. I’m in that kind of mood. Read fashion, and watch the Russian drips continue to fall. That would work for me.

Happy Wednesday, all. Carry on.

I don’t know what you were doing late on a Sunday afternoon, but after cooking two complicated, and error-filled, dinners on Friday and Saturday afternoon, I can tell you what I’m doing: Dreaming of a pizza made by someone else. And then watching “Game of Thrones.” Because Sunday funday.

Everyone is out enjoying some activity. Alan went sailing, Kate’s at Belle Isle with her buddies, and I’m listening for the dryer buzzer. Did a bit of a bike ride, but a persistent backache set in at mile six or so, and I turned around rather than gut it out. Once out of the evaporative breeze of movement, I commenced to once again re-secure my title as World’s Sweatiest Woman. But it’s nice and cool in the AC and under the ceiling fan; time to enjoy my solitude and get a little blogging done.

A quiet weekend, all told. I feel like we’re getting old — we’re not doing much this summer, but truth be told, I don’t mind. Happy to stay home and bake cherry pies and not get sweaty waiting in lines. And lines are simply the reality at some of these summer events we’re all beckoned to. You might as well bring a picnic basket. A couple weeks ago, I spent a lengthy lunch hour riding the new streetcar down to where the food trucks were parked, and ended up in a bar, unwilling to wait in line for 20-30 minutes to get a cardboard-bowl lunch. So sorry, missed the Concert of Colors last night, but we watched “Nocturnal Animals” on iTunes and it was very disturbing, but a pretty OK movie.

Can’t complain.

Can complain about this, though: No more celebrities running for office, for fuck’s sake. Their recent record is, how you say, uneven. Sorry, Caitlyn Jenner. Sorry, Kid Rock. (I won’t link, because I can’t even bear to Google.) Sorry, actual Rock. Now more than ever, we need competence. I don’t generally swoon over Frank Bruni the way some people do, but buried in his Sunday column was this brief passage:

Infrastructure that’s no longer competitive (or safe), a tax code crying out for revision, a work force without the right skills: When do we fix this? How far behind do we fall?

In-effing-deed. When? How? The world is at a very dangerous precipice. Career politicians, which is to say, people who know how the game is played and how to get results out of the system, may be our last hope.

Meanwhile, the picture of Jenner that accompanies that story is ghastly. Looks like she ordered the Madonna model cheek implant in XL.

Meanwhile, some comic relief: A little bit of the sunshine Ann Coulter spreads in the world came back to her over the weekend. We can all agree that when Ann has a bad day, the world gets a little bit nicer.

Finally, think you’re good at spotting fake news? Here’s a game that will let you show your skills. (Use the quick start option.) I found it pretty easy, considering you could view the source for individual stories.

For me, it’s back to “Game of Thrones” homework. See you mid-week.