I’ve been pretty productive this week, by my recent, diminished standards, so I’m going to leave you with one link, of a piece with the other stuff from this week. It’s about what happened to a town I drove through approximately a million times on my way to and from college — Lancaster, Ohio.

Private equity ruined its major employer, Anchor Hocking:

There were other glass companies in Lancaster, drawn there by cheap natural gas. But following a 1937 merger with the New York-based Anchor Cap and Closure, The Hockin’, now Anchor Hocking, grew into the world’s largest manufacturer of glass tableware and the second-largest maker of glass containers such as beer bottles and peanut-butter jars. It even played a role in the invention of late-night TV, in 1950, by sponsoring the pioneering NBC show Broadway Open House. Anchor Hocking became Lancaster’s largest employer by far, the rare Fortune 500 company based in a small town. At its peak, it employed roughly 5,000 people there, including executives in the headquarters, and many more in plants around the country.

But then came the 1980s. Since the start of the Reagan administration, Anchor Hocking has undergone a series of staggering transformations as a result of the financial manipulation that has come to define the American economy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Carl Icahn bought up shares and demanded a board seat and other changes, then agreed to leave the company alone after being allowed to sell back his ownership stake at a premium—a practice commonly referred to as “greenmailing.” Then, Anchor Hocking was purchased in a leveraged hostile takeover by Newell Corporation. After Newell’s own near-disastrous merger with Rubbermaid, Anchor Hocking was sold off in a debt-financed buyout to the huge private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The company promptly fell into bankruptcy, out of which it was sold in another debt-financed buyout to a much smaller private-equity firm called Monomoy Capital Partners. There was a forced marriage with the silverware company Oneida, then an initial public offering after which the stock soon tanked. In quick succession came a shutdown, a notice (in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) that the place might close for good, a second bankruptcy during which the former creditors became the equity owners, and countless leadership rotations. During the past 15 years, it’s had three different corporate owners. In January the company’s name was changed from EveryWare Global to The Oneida Group.

This is one reason I couldn’t get behind the Mitt-Romney-is-a-good-man line. Imagine making your living like this, buying and selling “assets” for profit, with actual human being shaking out with every deal. What do you tell yourself at 2 a.m. when you’re staring at the ceiling? They’ll retrain and land on their feet, or maybe their knees, from which they will rise, eventually. I remember Lancaster even earlier than my college years; a friend and I used to pester her mom to drive us down on Saturdays, to a horse livery in the hills. On the way home, we’d stop at the glassworks and pick through the scrap piles for interesting pieces to take home. It was a real place, in the Hocking Hills. There was a there there.

And, of course, there is collateral damage:

“Stability has been replaced by chaos,” Shannon Monnat, a sociologist and demographer at Penn State University who researches the interplay between economics and health, says of such situations. The longer the stress lasts, whether it involves family, community, or work, the more disheartened people become and the more faith they lose in the system, until, finally, they disconnect to survive.

Monnat has recently been studying “diseases of despair”—the plague of opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide afflicting places like Lancaster. She’s found that instability at work is strongly correlated with the prevalence of these problems as well as with social and family breakdown. Drug abuse is not solely due to the cheap availability of heroin or meth, nor some imagined weakness of the working class. Monnat believes it’s also caused by people’s loss of faith that they each occupy an important place in the American system.

I believe that, too, but no one asked me. And now we have someone in charge who thinks even less of these folks than the private-equity firms that batted the company around like a bored cat with a mouse.

I need to perk up. Maybe I should hit my new marijuana stash! (Same story I posted yesterday, but hit it up if you didn’t already.)

Or maybe I’ll just go to bed. G’night all.

So, if yesterday’s talker was from West Virginia, this one comes from Ohio. I see Sherri, who apparently reads the entire internet every morning before I’ve had my first cup of coffee, referenced it obliquely yesterday.

I can’t keep up with you, Sherri, but I have a one-degree-of-separation connection to this one. Here’s the top:

BLANCHESTER, Ohio — A life of farming taught Roger Winemiller plenty about harsh twists of fate: hailstorms and drought, ragweed infestations and jittery crop prices. He hadn’t bargained on heroin.

Then, in March 2016, Mr. Winemiller’s daughter, Heather Himes, 31, died of an opioid overdose at the family farmhouse, inside a first-floor bathroom overlooking fields of corn and soybeans. Mr. Winemiller was the one who unlocked the bathroom door and found her slumped over, a syringe by her side.

Nine months later, Mr. Winemiller’s older son, Eugene, 37, who once drove trucks and tractors on the family’s 3,400-acre farm, overdosed at his mother’s home. Family members and medics had been able to revive him after earlier overdoses. Not this one.

This native Buckeye had to look up Blanchester on a map. Turns out it’s not far from Mt. Orab, where my best friend Deb grew up. I sent her the story, but she’d already heard about it via her connections there, and of course, this is not a new story in Ohio; her sister’s best friend lost her youngest son to a fatal OD not long ago. The wrinkle on this particular story is that this farmer’s last surviving child is also a heroin addict and while he says he wants to stay clean and take over the family farm someday, he’s only been clean for a couple of months. His father now carries a naloxone dose with him at all times.

So that’s the angle: Heroin in the farm belt, and its implications for the next generation of farmers. I wish I were kidding.

I’ve seen urban poverty and rural poverty, and both are terrible, but there’s something about the rural variety, perhaps because we’ve all been coached to believe the country is where the bedrock virtues are nurtured most tenderly — hard work, faith, family. Of course, these farmers aren’t poor, but it won’t be long now if their kids are sticking needles in their arms.

You know there’s a punchline in all of this, right?

The elder Mr. Winemiller, who was among the 68 percent of voters in the county who supported Donald J. Trump for president, was rankled by scenes of political protest on the news. He saw only disorder and lawlessness.

“There are too many people who are too wrapped up in their lives. All they want to do is go out, bitch and complain,” he said. “My view on Donald Trump, he’s what this country needed years ago: someone that’s hard-core.”

He likes the toughness. After his son and daughter died, he began meeting with sheriffs and politicians at forums dedicated to the opioid crisis, urging harsher penalties, such as manslaughter charges for people who sell fatal hits of opioids.

Mr. Winemiller, with all due respect and sympathy for what you’ve been through, manslaughter charges aren’t going to help. What pulls people into drugs, from both the supply and demand ends, is no respecter of get-tough policies.

Deb’s family was by no means well-off, and staying put in southwest Ohio would have been the easiest thing in the world. Inertia always is. But she enrolled in a little Catholic two-year college, founded by the Ursulines and open to anyone with a high-school diploma or GED. From there, she was able to transfer to Ohio U. and finish with the most transformative credential available in this country — a bachelor’s degree. Her boyfriend went to Berea, a Christian college in Kentucky that charges no tuition and is founded and run strictly for low-income students.

Some people have to be farmers, because we need farmers. But I am tired of this Wendell Berry-worshiping, Rod Dreher claptrap about the saintly virtues of small-town life. Of course it’s nice to live on a street called Main or Elm or Oak, surrounded by people who are all nice and friendly and exactly like you, but there’s also a reason heroin is a growth industry in these places. “Get Out” would be a nice title for a movie about them.

Which brings me to the other story of the day, about a string of break-ins in the neighborhood where we used to have a lake cottage, in Branch County. One of the girls arrested used to play with Kate when we went up there on weekends. She was a bit of a pistol then, and the rumors about her pilfering from boats and other easily accessible places started not long after they spent a summer or two hanging in the summer sun, next to the sparkling lake. Still. I looked up both girls on Facebook, and they’re both pregnant, apparently by the two young men they were arrested with, both of whom have priors. It’s like they’re born under a bad sign, before they even get their neck tattoos.

This is one reason red and blue America keeps pulling apart. Where would you rather look for a job? Columbus or Blanchester? Grand Rapids or Coldwater? Where are the essential virtues more likely to be found? Where can a family have the modicum of stability that comes with a steady paycheck, the better life for one’s children that can only be gained through education?

Tell me again how getting tough is going to solve everything. These are, as they say, “diseases of despair.”

Sorry for being such a downer.

Just a reminder, too: The AHCA won’t cover drug treatment. Get tough!

Speaking of drugs! And not to end on a total bummer note, here’s what I’ve been working on lately — Nance gets her medical marijuana card, and goes looking for her medicine. In Bridge. Click and learn.

I guess the big talker in the WashPost today had to be this story, another deep dive into the murky pond of Trump’s America. The tl;dr: Seventy-four percent of McDowell County, W.Va. voted for Trump. About that same number needs the various benefits of the Affordable Care Act just to make it to their next birthday. What is the disconnect? Well, it’s pretty cavernous:

Another patient comes in: Carolyn Hodges, 68, who tells Keisha that she’s been feeling dizzy. Carolyn has Medicare, the public health insurance for the elderly. Medicare doesn’t cover all health-care costs, which is why Carolyn is as worried about the price of her medications as the fact that she’s been bumping into walls.

The last time she went to pick up her husband Roger’s insulin, Carolyn tells Keisha, the pharmacist said it would be more than $600, instead of the $100 or so they usually pay. That was when she learned Roger was in the Medicare prescription “donut hole,” which means that the cost of his medications had exceeded his limit for the year, and he would be forced to pay far more for prescriptions until the year ended and the tab started over. One initiative of the ACA has been to close that hole incrementally, but Carolyn, unaware of that, sees the bills piling up and thinks she knows who must be to blame.

“Thank you, Obama!” Carolyn says, throwing her arms in the air.

A week does not go by that I don’t read a story like this, or yet another tweetstorm from some poverty tourist with a laptop and a Medium page, telling the world how rough things are in Trump country, and how much they’re a-gonna suffer, etc. etc. And I’m getting tired of them. They knew precisely what they voted for, and now they’re getting it. How much sympathy are the rest of us required to have for someone like this?

Heartburn is just the latest problem for Clyde, a patient Keisha sees every three months. Like so many in this corner of Appalachia, he used to have a highly paid job at a coal mine. Company insurance covered all of his medical needs. Then he lost the job and ended up here, holding a cane and suffering not only from heartburn but diabetes, arthritis, diverticulitis, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Because of the ACA, Clyde’s visit is covered by Medicaid. Before the law, most West Virginians without children or disabilities could not qualify for Medicaid, no matter how poor they were. The ACA — better known here as Obamacare — expanded the program to cover more people, such as Clyde, who can depend on Keisha to fix his heartburn without having to worry about the cost.

As for the other problems in his life, he has put his hopes in Trump, who came to West Virginia saying he would bring back coal and put miners back to work. When Trump mentioned repealing Obamacare, Clyde wasn’t sure what that might mean for his Medicaid. But if he had a job that provided health insurance, he reasoned, he wouldn’t need Medicaid anyway, so he voted for Trump, along with 74 percent of McDowell County.

Love that word choice: “he reasoned.” He “reasoned” that a blowhard said he could command a river to reverse its course, and then his raft would no longer be drifting toward that waterfall. Good to know.

Clyde! Listen up! The reason you lost your job is, coal is over. Natural gas, produced in abundance through fracking, ran coal off the road. Lots of environmentalists worked hard against fracking, too, but I expect you thought of them as limp-wristed hippies and special snowflakes and all the rest of it.

I take a few deep breaths when I read stuff like this. I am empathetic, really I am. I understand what it means to be ignorant, and stuck in a shithole, and grasping for straws. I blame a lot of people for how things are turning out, including the cable-news executives who shoveled free airtime at Trump like Clyde shoveled coal down in the mine. But my patience is wearing thin.

I don’t think I’m alone, either. David Fahrenthold, a WashPost reporter, posted this story on his Twitter twice, asking people just to try to understand. The replies were pretty brutal. People do understand. They’re just not feeling nice about it.

How was y’all’s weekend? This was mine:

Yes, Patti Smith’s 40th-anniversary “Horses” tour. My young friend Dustin (who took the picture) got a plus-one for his review ticket. Not bad at all. I go back and forth on Patti; at her best she’s a truly interesting art-rock artist — sorry, I reject that she’s ever been “punk” — and at her worst, just a big bunch of pretension. But she’s aged into an interesting senior citizenship (she’s 70), and maybe I’ve mellowed. It was a very nice show, complete with that new wrinkle in rock shows, at least by the Olds: Bringing one’s kids out as part of the backing band.

After that we swung by the Old Miami to hear some friend of Dustin’s spin, as they say. Equally enjoyable, as she was working a fun mashup of ’90s hip-hop and newer stuff. Biggie’s “Hypnotize” never gets old, does it?

The last thing Patti did was slice the strings of her guitar, one by one, and throw them into the crowd. Don’t think Biggie ever did that, though.

I’ll leave you with a shot of Wendy in a pensive pose…

…as we start the week, pensively.

The American Health Care Act isn’t even seven days old. If they’d done their homework, it could be seven years old by now, more or less, but let’s not quibble. Not when it appears to be a dumpster fire, and the best Paul Ryan can say about it? Insurance can’t work if the young and healthy have to subsidize the old and sick.

I’ve actually heard others say the same thing. If you live long enough, you’ll hear people say all sorts of stupid things, but that one takes at least a big slice of the cake. Over the years, I’ve spent thousands in insurance premiums, protecting houses that never caught fire or flooded, cars that left my ownership with no more dents than they arrived with, etc. As Charles Pierce points out, that is the literal definition of insurance.

Oh, well. It’s nearly the weekend. How’s about some pictures?

Look who I saw in my back yard on Sunday:

He was back today, although I didn’t get a picture. This makes me think he might be roosting somewhere in the neighborhood, which makes me happy, even though my vet once told me not to be. They crow at first light, and not the cock-a-doodle-doo crowing of roosters, but sort of a harsh, hacking sound. So be it. Pheasants. They’re beautiful birds, and cool to have around. My own little wild chicken.

(Please, no cracks about the state of the yard. Alan doesn’t believe in the traditional, Grosse Pointe “fall cleanup,” in which every single leaf is bagged and toted away the first week of December. He thinks old leaves should lay on the flower beds. So far, the spring bloom hasn’t contradicted him. So it’s an ugly yard for us in the cold months.)

A gift from Basset, found in some old files:

Of course it was the Day Of, because the N-S was an afternoon paper, and in those days, there would have been plenty of time — and reason — to rip up Page One for such catastrophic news. I’m more struck that no other story above the fold was local. Back when your evening paper carried the news from everywhere, dammit.

Finally, a sign I see from time to time at the end of an exit ramp:

Not just any cans and pails, but metal ones. And plastic ones. Sold by the Canbys. In a bold, sans-serif font, too. None of this IniTech-type bullshit. I miss businesses like this. I should stop in and buy one of each.

This is it for me for the week. A good weekend to all.

Tuesdays are usually work-at-home days for me, and Monday night I had an exceptional sleep. (They usually follow terrible ones, which Sunday’s was.) Woke up, worked out, felt strong, came home, breakfasted, showered, dressed and worked all day in lipstick. Didn’t eat any junk food, either. To say rest and fuel have an effect on one’s mood is hardly deep-dive science, but man is it ever true.

The older I get, the less I drink. The less I drink, the better I feel. Goddamnit.

But now we’ve established a theme for the day: One’s good health. And with that…

This is an abstract for an academic paper, and I haven’t read beyond it, but I found it interesting, as I did some reporting on telemedicine a couple years ago (helped by our own Dexter, who was receiving weight loss and nutrition counseling via telemedicine at the time). Here’s the gist of the paper:

The use of direct-to-consumer telehealth, in which a patient has access to a physician via telephone or videoconferencing, is growing rapidly. A key attraction of this type of telehealth for health plans and employers is the potential savings involved in replacing physician office and emergency department visits with less expensive virtual visits. However, increased convenience may tap into unmet demand for health care, and new utilization may increase overall health care spending. …We estimated that 12 percent of direct-to-consumer telehealth visits replaced visits to other providers, and 88 percent represented new utilization. …Direct-to-consumer telehealth may increase access by making care more convenient for certain patients, but it may also increase utilization and health care spending.

This is disappointing. I like telemedicine for a number of reasons — it can allow people who live far from excellent doctors and hospitals to enjoy some of their benefits; it can facilitate one-on-one coaching like that enjoyed by Dexter; it makes sense as an efficiency measure at a time when, as we’re told more or less constantly, we all have to find ways to save. And yet, as this study shows, it doesn’t save. Because people need to see doctors, a lot. The more you see doctors, the more doctors you see.

And we’re going to fix this with health savings accounts! Also, tax credits!

Meanwhile, I’m sure this guy is headed for a bright future in politics:

A long-running battle to establish a database to monitor for prescription drug abuse in Missouri — the only state without one — is about to hit a boiling point.

On one side is Republican state Senator Rob Schaaf, who once said that when people die of overdoses that “just removes them from the gene pool.”

This was something else I did some reporting on this year — prescription drug monitoring programs, or PDMPs. They’re computer databases, with monitors in every doctor’s office and pharmacy, that allows staff to check the prescribing history of individuals seeking opiates. Makes sense, when doctor-shopping is a prime driver of the opiate crisis, don’t you think? Every single state, except for Missouri, has one. Most of the Missouri legislature wants to establish one. One guy doesn’t. So far he’s managed to block every attempt to enact one. His latest gambit is to set up a PDMP-like system, but one that wouldn’t talk to other states’. And why does he feel this way, despite the charming gene-pool comment?

“They don’t work. And it’s an infringement upon people’s privacy,” Schaaf said in an October 2016 interview with local television station KSHB. “Most people don’t want the government to have that information and have it on a database in which many people can get it.”

They don’t work, said the one guy in the one state that doesn’t have a PDMP. This reminds me of a story I did a few years ago, about a bill to allow health-care workers to opt out of private employers’ policies requiring vaccines. The sponsor wasn’t interested in considering what might happen when a nurse in a pediatrician’s office opts out of a flu shot; he was interested in the idea that a person could be required to do anything.

No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.

Maybe I should go yell at a TV for a while, and see who’s listening.

Happy hump day, all.

Had lunch with my boss on Friday, and marveled that for the first time in a while, I have no deadlines approaching and can actually have a weekend entirely free of work. He said, “Good.” I said, “Good.”

And that’s the way it pretty much worked out, although I did about 20 minutes’ worth this afternoon.

The rest of the time, I watched Twitter with the sense of dawning horror and WTF-ness that was the order of the weekend. It made me think of that “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” movie, and wondered if, when this whole ghastly period comes to an end, if we can’t all visit the Lacuna Corp. offices and have everything erased. I simply can’t imagine working in the White House; I recall, during the early honeymoon of the Obama administration, some journalist commenting that it was easy for the president to be a good father, because he essentially has a home office. And then Rahm Emanuel saying, “He’s the only one,” because the White House takes every hour of your day and then some. So far, this Chaos Good administration has big-footed every news cycle since the election. No wonder Kellyanne Conway looks like a zombie. No wonder Sean Spicer is so angry all the time. No wonder Steve Bannon resembles – oh, never mind. We know what he resembles, and why.

Maybe the leakers are the people who just want a fucking weekend off.

We’d all like a weekend off, don’t we? Alas, not yet.

A good weekend, all around. Work on Saturday, schvitz on Sunday. Waiting for a good week, with rain and warmer temperatures.

In the meantime, I’m glad I don’t live in Oklahoma.

Happy week ahead, all.

Another grueling week, lemme tell you. This Sunday is ladies schvitz, and I’m going to sweat until I’m just an desiccated husk. And tonight is a night to watch old boxing matches on HBO and cuddle up with the dog. It’s cold again, I drove a million miles and car repairs will cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars. So yeah: Boxing.

I thought Andre Ward was a goner after that second-round knockdown, but now I think he’s going to go the distance. This fight was last November in Vegas, but I must have let my subscription to Ring lapse, because I never saw it.

Sigh.

So, now we have an attorney general who met with the Russians and lied about it? Is the cognitive dissonance in the room a low hum for you, or more like a TV between channels, turned up to 11? (Hands go up.) So we now have leak after bombshell after stink bomb with this administration and their hanky-panky with the Russians, and the GOP continues to stick their hands in their pockets, look at the sky and whistle. I can’t stand it. I can’t even look at the blogs and the columns and the usual suspects anymore.

Except Roy, of course.

I don’t even have any bloggage, but I do have a headline:

She’s 42. And there were three football players. Because of course there were.

Folks, I’m beat. New thread for new outrages, and have a nice weekend.

Last night I was all set to write something, but had what was, for me, a highly unusual set of physical symptoms, which boiled down to: Tummyache.

I never get nauseous. I never get heartburn. I wish, just once, I could have a “nervous stomach,” just to see if I could lose a few pounds. So I made dinner, served and ate it and went upstairs to read and avoid the presidential address. Alan watched it downstairs, at a volume high enough to only get a sense of it. I couldn’t hear the words, but that distinctive cadence, Trump-at-a-Teleprompter, was unmistakable: Blah-de-blah. De-blah. Blah-de-blah-de-blah. I could see him swinging between the three prompter screens like I was there. Sighed. Checked Twitter. Sighed a lot more.

You guys can talk about it today. I just heard a podcast on my way in (NYT’s “The Daily,” a good way to start your day), and need to allow my blood pressure to drop a little.

So just a few links, some of which were posted yesterday in comments.

Charles Pierce on why he doesn’t feel sorry for regretful Trump voters:

Holy mother of god, I’m tired of reading quotes from people who live in places where the local economy went to hell or Mexico in 1979, and who have spent the intervening years swallowing whatever Jesus Juice was offered up by theocratic bunco artists of the Christocentric Right, and gulping down great flagons of barely disguised hatemongering against the targets of the day, all the while voting against their own best interests, now claiming that empowering Donald Trump as the man who will “shake things up” on their behalf was the only choice they had left. You had plenty of choices left.

In Kansas, you could have declined to re-elect Sam Brownback, who’d already turned your state into a dismal Randian basket case. In Wisconsin, you had three chances to turn out Scott Walker, and several chances to get the state legislature out of his clammy hands. And, now that the teeth of this new administration are becoming plain to see, it’s a good time to remind all of you that you didn’t have to hand the entire federal government over to Republican vandalism, and the presidency over to an abject loon on whom Russia may well hold the paper.

Some hate criminals go to prison for lengthy stretches, after terrorizing a child’s birthday party. And cry like little bitches all the way there. A deeply satisfying read.

How Medicaid block grants will screw over rural America. See Pierce, above.

Finally, a beautifully told story of Tiger Woods, still a young man but old in athlete years, childlike in many ways, and deeply sad. But lots of new stuff here, too — did you know he at one time thought he could become a Navy SEAL? Like, recently?

Lots to read there. I need to do my day job. Enjoy.

So what would you have done if you were in their shoes? If you were Warren Beatty, looking into that envelope, knowing it was the wrong one? If you were the stagehand in the wings, suddenly realizing he was holding the wrong envelope?

Of course we all want to think we’d be heroes, that (if we were Beatty) we’d have looked into the wings, waved the envelope in some way that indicated someone needed to double check, then vamped for time with a few jokes. If we were the stagehand, we’d have bolted onstage for a moment of Oscar glory, waving the senior-citizen Bonnie and Clyde off like a plane about to land in a minefield.

But that didn’t happen. Sometimes actors who are brilliant at delivering lines are terrible at improv, and just default to the default: Read what’s on the card. Stagehands are trained to stay out of sight, and anyway, maybe s/he didn’t have the correct card. What then? “Something’s wrong, but we’re not sure what!” just wouldn’t have worked under the circumstances.

And so we at least got a memorable moment to talk about Monday. I actually read a few takes about the “injustice” done to the film made by black folks, which put me in mind of a bride who has a truly memorable mishap at her wedding, the kind that will make people talk about it for years afterward, and can only feel sorry that her special day wasn’t perfect. Right now, people are going to remember how “Moonlight” won a lot longer than they’ll remember “Moonlight.” Which isn’t exactly immortality, but it’s the next best thing.

Anyway, two people had one job, and screwed it up. (Not Beatty and Dunaway.)

So, a little bloggage:

Who knew? Really, who knew health care was so complicated?

Seriously, WHO KNEW?

Answer: Everybody.

Man, for the shortest month, February is sure taking its sweet time clearing out, isn’t it? I started Friday with good intentions to see at least one movie in a theater, do some food prep for the week ahead, the whole nine. Ended up watching the Sunday HBO lineup, which dropped early because of the Oscar conflict, and wishing I was anywhere but here, where the temperatures dropped, the wind picked up, and life became generally sorta gray and boring.

Made significant progress on “The Underground Railroad,” though. Which I am loving. “Lincoln in the Bardo” is next. “I Am Not Your Negro” and/or “Get Out” will have to wait for next weekend. When it’s cold and the wind is howling, it’s more of an otter eating lettuce sort of Saturday night.

Also, “Piper,” which you should watch, because not only is this short film too stinkin’ cute for words, it is kind of a documentary of me learning to surf.

Whatever happened to going out during the week? We used to do that, back when we both were reliably off work by 5 p.m., which simply doesn’t happen anymore. Plus: February. Chill winds. Et to the cetera.

Just one word before we get to the bloggage, after watching the third episode in the final season of “Girls,” I’m crossing my heart and making a promise that I will pay attention to Lena Dunham throughout her just-getting-started career, and you probably should, too. I thought “American Bitch,” the so-called “bottle episode” airing this week, was a real piece of work, smart and nuanced and funny and not-funny, and sort of amazing coming from the pen of a writer as young as Dunham.

Like lots of people, I have found Dunham hard to take at times, but the more I see of her acting but mostly her writing, the more impressed I am. “American Bitch” is about the gray areas where power imbalance, gender, age and consent all meet, a place lots of women have found themselves, both today and when we were all young. It’s not an easy topic to tackle in 30 minutes, but she managed it, with a great deal of help from Matthew Rhys as the famous dick novelist whose behavior is at issue.

We spend a lot of time here feeling sorry for ourselves because great old artists and entertainers are dying. I think the best cure for that is to find some young ones worth watching. Dunham is.

Plus, she drives conservatives insane, because she’s something of an exhibitionist with her nude body, which is pudgy and has cellulite and is generally the sort they think ought to never be seen unclothed. Fuck those guys, I say.

So. Bloggage? I guess there’s some: Thanks to Sherri for finding this piece on the “brilliant jerk,” a well-known type, especially in Silicon Valley:

This term, “the brilliant jerk,” has been around for a while in corporate lingo. I remember first reading about in a New York Times blog post (R.I.P. blogs) in 2012. (PLEASE DON’T ACTUALLY ME ABOUT REED HASTINGS, YOU JERKOFF, HE’S TWO GRAFS DOWN.) I guess there was a series about Being The Boss and the URL was boss.blogs.nytimes.com 🙁 What a world! Anyway it was a sort of advicey column about what to do about that one archetype, the Brilliant Jerk, in your workplace. It was fun to read when it came out because everyone got to speculate about who their brilliant jerk was.

But everyone already knows who the brilliant jerk at their workplace is because it’s the raging asshole!! It’s not hard to tell. And yet somehow as long as we’ve had a word for it, and probably even longer, we’ve wrung our hands over whether or not to cope with this fucktard over here because—wait for it—HE’S BRILLIANT!

Another Jewish-cemetery incident, this one in Philadelphia. The official word of 2017 is “emboldened.” Repeat after me.

My favorite Twitter chuckle of the weekend:

Donald Trump in 4 tweets 🔢 pic.twitter.com/LN6zbCljhr

— Danny (@recordsANDradio) February 25, 2017

And on to Monday. But first, some chicken.