Let’s make this a quick one today. I’m tired and need some light lifting. But I don’t want to let another day pass without showing you who stopped by Jeff TMM’s back yard a few days back:

I count eight points on that bad boy, how about you? A trophy on any hunter’s wall. But I’m rooting for him to make it through another season.

The other day I showed up for my Monday boxing class, and was the only one there. No biggie, it just means a private session with the trainer, always a good thing. Traffic was light on the way to work, at a time slot where it’s never light. And even Alan came home early on Monday, reporting that news didn’t happen because the auto plants were closed and everyone was on light duty. Why? Gun season opened over the weekend.

It’s a big deal in Michigan. In West Virginia, it’s a school holiday, or so I’m told.

What is there to report?

Charlie Sheen has HIV, and has spent millions, he says, keeping it quiet over the last four years. I guess it was to preserve his reputation, because it’s so sterling.

Ben Carson is hung out to dry by an advisor, quoted by name, in the New York Times. And what an advisor to choose in the first place. Later, doc.

Paris isn’t over, and now it’s Germany. Ai-yi-yi.

With that, let’s drag ourselves through hump day together.

Monday was the birthday twins’ special day, so Kate came home over the weekend to eat cake with her father. We drove her back on Sunday and ate at a fairly awful Chinese restaurant in Ann Arbor before dropping her at her dorm. But! It was a worthwhile experience, because we sat next to a table of athlete/frat bros, and eavesdropped shamelessly on their conversation, which ended up being about women, of course.

What women are 10s? they discussed. The main point of contention seemed to be whether Victoria’s Secret models were 10s by default, having been admitted to the most exalted realm of female pulchritude, or whether there were gradations of heat within the Victoria’s Secret pantheon.

“They’re, like, the primo examples of humanity,” one protested. Another was pickier. Heidi Klum, well past her VS years, was a permanent 10, a hall-of-fame 10, but the rest of them? They would have to apply one by one.

The Derringers sat with ears cocked like cocker spaniels, listening to this. The best entertainment is our fellow human beings.

Which is why today’s bloggage kicks off with examples of humanity at its most confounding, including a man who paid $718,000 to a series of psychics, because he was lonely:

He knew none of it made sense: He was a successful and well-traveled professional, with close to seven figures in the bank, and plans for much more. And then he gave it all away, more than $718,000, in chunks at a time, to two Manhattan psychics.

They vowed to reunite him with the woman he loved. Even after it was discovered that she was dead. There was the 80-mile bridge made of gold, the reincarnation portal.

“I just got sucked in,” the man, Niall Rice, said in a telephone interview last week from Los Angeles. “That’s what people don’t understand. ‘How can you fall for it?’”

This, on the other hand, is a scary-as-hell story about how life and law enforcement works in the Deep Souf’, and how it led to the death of a little boy in the proverbial hail of gunfire.

And with a shift, we pivot to a topic near and dear to my heart: The meeeeedia. Which, it would seem, is getting tired of being a punching bag. In three pieces:

One:

There absolutely is room for debate about the proportionality of coverage of an incident like this compared to something like the Paris attacks that happened on Friday, but to say that the media don’t cover terrorism attacks outside of Europe is a lie.

They do.

But as anyone working in the news will tell you, if you look at your analytics, people don’t read them very much.

Two:

We live in a world now where no one wants to pay for news. Newspapers are struggling, and foreign bureaus have been shuttering for years. Many of the buzzy new media sites don’t have foreign bureaus or even much original reporting from overseas (with a handful of notable exceptions, and good on them). Publications are increasingly dependent on freelancers abroad, who do their work for low pay, with virtually no institutional resources behind them, often at significant personal risk. To suggest that “no one” is reporting on Beirut, on Garissa, on Baghdad is an affront and an insult to the great many professionals who put their lives in jeopardy to do just that.

We complain that we don’t see the reporting we want. But aside from an outraged Facebook status, many of us in the U.S. don’t actually seem to want the kind of reporting we claim to value — we’re overwhelmingly not paying to subscribe to the outlets that do good, in-depth reporting about places around the world. Aside from when tragedy strikes, we’re not sharing articles on Beirut or a city we’ve never heard of in Kenya nearly as often as many of us are sharing pieces about Paris, or even 10 Halloween Costumes for Feminist Cats.

And three:

Since college students are free to vent what they feel about the media, it’s only fair that the media return the favor.

So allow me, based, not on biases absorbed from my parents along with my Maypo, but on actual experience, teaching college courses, including one at Loyola.

College kids don’t know shit. The average college student couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a map. I once taught a journalism course for the State University of New York’s Maritime College. At the end of the final exam, I prefaced the extra credit questions with, “A journalist should have a rough idea of what is going on in the world.” One question was: “With the collapse of the Soviet Union, one Communist super power remains. What is it?” Some students guessed “Cuba.” Others, “Iraq.” Some didn’t even hazard an attempt.

That should give you enough to chew over for a Tuesday. Me, I’m back at work.

Like a lot of you, I have a love-hate relationship with social media — Instagram, Twitter, but mostly Facebook, which is the 900-pound gorilla of social media. Just when I think, hope, that Facebook has peaked and I can leave this party sooner rather than later, I see the referral traffic from Facebook for the publication I work for has only grown. For many people, Facebook is the main portal to the internet, how they get their news, how they communicate with friends far and near, an ever-changing TV channel tuned to You, starring Your Friends, reflecting Your Excellent Opinions. In my business, you can’t ignore that.

Things I love: Keeping up with all your vacations, meals, children, sunsets, etc. I genuinely enjoy these, because you people live lives far better and more fun than mine.

Things I hate: Seeing how the ever-running Facebook newscast of events like Friday’s go, because people? Y’all suck as editors. When bombs explode, when many people die, when we are shocked by breaking news, there seems to be a way these things unfold.

First, there’s the great Profile Pic Transformation. Once these were grassroots efforts, now they’re one-click deals offered by Facebook. Change your profile picture to the French tricolor. Change your profile pic to the gay-rights rainbow. Change your profile pic green (I think that was for the Arab spring). Or find an image of your own and change it to that. Why? To “support” the French, because apparently without this gesture, they might think the whole world is yawning over a rock club stacked deep with corpses. They might feel, y’know, unsupported.

Then the memes arrive, the quotes and jokes and zingers rendered in the display-size fonts, maybe with photos, suitable for sharing on your Facebook wall. Because my friend circle is lefty-heavy, I see these most often; they come from groups like Occupy Democrats and so forth, but I see them on the other side, too, from Tea Party Patriots, a group with an apparently limitless supply of eagle photos, always combined with their equally limitless supply of flag photos.

Then the inevitable grief-shaming starts. You can’t feel X about Y unless you also feel X about Z. It is accompanied by the bullshit, the clickbait stories that get hastily thrown up and turn out to be utterly wrong, but they’re satisfactory to read in some way: The refugee camp at Calais is burning, the Eiffel Tower has gone dark, etc., none of which happened. I used to make it a point to fact-check “news” stories people post that are total crapola, but stopped when most people either shrugged or otherwise said, “Eh, it’s still a good story.” And that is how Mitch Albom continues to thrive, year after year.

I believe facts matter, that emotions may be part of a story but should never be the whole part; there’s a reason the “how do you feel” question is the ultimate mocking reflection of (especially TV) clueless news gathering. But apparently I’m in a minority here.

But then, always, comes a story like this: A “mystery pianist” showed up at the site of the rock-club massacre to play John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Because isn’t that what the world needs now? To sit and imagine a world that not only will never come to pass, but probably shouldn’t, because what kind of world would it be without countries, religion, greed, hunger, the ideas of heaven and hell? I’ll tell you: Boring. Go get a lobotomy if that’s the world you really want, but I prefer the what’s-around-the-corner craziness of reality. But check out that pianist, or rather, who’s closest to him — photographers with expensive cameras, i.e, professionals. Behind them, the phones-held-high ranks of the hoi polloi, doubtless thinking, I can’t wait to post this on Facebook.

I don’t want to be cruel here. I know people do a lot of these things because they feel they have to do something, and sometimes this is all there is for an average person to do. For much of my career, when terrible news happens, I’ve been called to work. I’ve spent hours in newsrooms while terrible news clips played over and over on the TVs, and all around were editors and reporters, working the phones, tearing up pages, subbing in new photos and headlines. Action is a useful way to deal with the shock of shocking events, and getting a decent quote from some Mideast specialist to throw into a story about to leave the floor feels more useful than hitting a Share button.

But the term “slacktivism” exists for a reason, too. Hey, I support the French, too. (I better; I drink enough of their damn wine.) France, tell me what you need from me and I’ll do it if I can. I bet you need more than my face under the tricolor, but if that’s what you want, OK, sure. On the whole, though, I bet you’d rather I open another bottle of wine. Keep the economy going.

This, exactly.

Disclaimer: If you did the French-flag thing to your Facebook profile picture this weekend, of course I’m not talking about you. You are an angel.

I’d give you some bloggage, but there is so, so much to read at the moment, and many of you have been posting all weekend in the comments of the last post.

Don’t miss Charles Pierce, certainly.

When 9/11 happened, I said that it took some real balls to climb upon a pile of 3,000 corpses to flog your unrelated political opinions, but since then it’s a fairly regular occurrence, as Frank Bruni points out.

Not Paris-related, but something I meant to post last week but neglected to, in my fog of late-week fatigue: A look back at a 1988 Free Press profile of then-unknown Ben Carson. With links to the original piece. Enjoy.

And let’s hope for a less Facebook-worthy week, shall we?

Like many of you (I hope), I’ve been whipsawed by the events at the University of Missouri this week. Every time I feel somewhat heartened by a student body that has managed to look up from its phones and get exercised about something important, they do something to make me think they’re only the left’s version of the tea party, angry and intolerant and unrealistic and unbending.

Lately I’m thinking the latter. There’s the professor shutting down the photographers with a call for “muscle,” the Mao-esque list of demands, all of it. Today the campus virtually shut down because some cowardly dipshit was on Yik Yak calling down thunderbolts of violence. Stop acting like such fucking morons, you morons.

It’s depressing. But every movement has its embarrassments. This is just the left’s turn.

It’s a Wednesday (Thursday as you read this), and despite some storm clouds on my fair brow over Missouri, it’s been a pretty good week. I’m (so far) evading the cold that felled Alan earlier a few days ago. Getting stuff done. Thinking of the future, a rare treat in anyone’s work schedule — mine, anyway. I dare not say I am crushing it, because that would invite bad karma, but things are going well. How often do I say that?

Hardly ever.

A little bit of bloggage, then:

I have felt this way for many years: It’s wrong, and unhealthy for everyone, to pay too much attention to your children and not enough to your marriage — if you are married. See what you think.

Interesting take on Missouri-related issues by Jonathan Chait.

Do the One Million Moms even exist? Neil Steinberg considers their, er, influence.

Outta here. The downslope of the week, already.

The best thing about “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is that it doesn’t rhyme, which means you can plug any old lyrics in there and sing it loud in the shower: And we went to the drive-through, but they didn’t have Bud, so we took home two cases of Molson’s. If this takes a bit of the gravity out of what’s supposed to be a sad remembrance, well, I apologize. I’ve heard that damn song too many times to be moved by it anymore.

I believe Kayak Woman, who occasionally comments here, was listening to shipping radio traffic that night with her family, and remembers when the Fitz went silent. Maybe she’ll drop by and tell us.

But that’s all you’re getting from me on this anniversary, even if it is a nice round number.

Meanwhile, speaking of sadnesses, I suggest you set aside some time and read this long, but very fine, piece on Airbnb and the company’s simultaneously seductive and maddening DNA. Here’s the lead; it’s hard to stop from here:

The rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied to broke in half and fell on his head, immediately ending most of his brain activity.

I was in bed when my mom found him. Her screams brought me down to the yard where I saw the tree snapped in two and his body on the ground. I knelt down and pulled him up by the shoulders. Blood sprayed my blue sweatshirt and a few crumpled autumn leaves. We were face-to-face, but his head hung limply, his right eye dislodged, his mouth full of blood, his tongue swirling around with each raspy breath.

…“Tell me each time he takes a breath,” the 911 dispatcher said in my ear.

…“It’s only a matter of time until something terrible happens,” The New York Times’s Ron Lieber wrote in a 2012 piece examining Airbnb’s liability issues. My family’s story — a private matter until now — is that terrible something.

Just a quick swing through the links today, because I have a lot to do, work-wise.

How often do you get asked to donate to GoFundMe, Kickstarter and other online money-raisers? I think the etiquette is still not established, and, like Airbnb and its liability issues, we’re figuring it out as we go. This piece reflected a lot of my feelings at the moment.

Something Jolene posted yesterday, but worth a boost: Kentucky, which has benefited more from Obamacare than any other state, just elected a governor who has pledged to wreck it. How’s that going to work?

Finally, because I work in the nonprofit sector now, nonprofit pickup lines.

Later, taters.

Many years ago, during one of the anniversaries of Neil Armstrong’s trip to the moon, the newspaper I worked for invited readers to share their own memories of the historic occasion. We printed them all, even though they could not have been even remotely accurate.

That’s because many of the readers recalled incidents like this: “I was in kindergarten, and we were all taken to another classroom, where a TV was set up, and we watched it together. I still get chills, thinking about Armstrong taking that first historic step.” Couldn’t have happened, because the moon walk happened in July, when kindergarteners are almost entirely not attending school, and at close to 11 p.m. Indiana time (might have been 10 p.m., not sure what the time-zone situation was then), when they definitely wouldn’t have been. I was 11 going on 12, and I missed the first steps because I couldn’t stay awake. (I call my tale “The Lark’s Lament.”)

It was an early lesson in the fallibility of memory. So even though I consider Ben Carson not even remotely presidential timber, OK, I’ll give him a pass on somehow believing that Gen. William Westmoreland or someone close to his rank offered him a full ride to the U.S. Military Academy, as recounted in one of his books:

“That position allowed me the chance to meet four-star general William Westmoreland, who had commanded all American forces in Vietnam before being promoted to Army Chief of Staff at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.,” he wrote. “I also represented the Junior ROTC at a dinner for Congressional Medal of Honor winners, marched at the front of Detroit’s Memorial Day parade as head of an ROTC contingent, and was offered a full scholarship to West Point.”

As has been pointed out since Politico broke this story on Friday, there are some couldn’t-have-happened problems with this story. Westmoreland’s schedule says he was playing golf in suburban D.C. that day, although he did come to Detroit a few months earlier, and Carson could have been at that event. But the events of 1969 can seem distant indeed. He may well have heard “you’re a promising young man, Ben. Why, you’d probably be a shoo-in at the Point, and you know, everyone who attends gets a scholarship.” And heard it as, “We’re giving you a scholarship to West Point because you’re so special,” which is how it’s presented in the book. I don’t care what anyone says, in our culture “you’re/I’m getting a scholarship” is seen as a reward for achievement or potential, and saying so is drawing attention to it. Just getting into West Point is an accomplishment on a par with cracking an Ivy or other top school, and saying you’ve been admitted, or to any service academy, is enough; no one gets “a scholarship,” in this sense because everyone gets a scholarship.

Maybe you didn’t know that; that’s OK. Maybe he felt the need to say so because some people might not understand this. Hmm, OK, but say so — it only takes a phrase: “Like all West Pointers, I’d be attending on a full scholarship.” It’s even somewhat possible that Carson himself doesn’t understand how West Point works, but if that’s the case, what the hell is he doing running for president? That’s a basic-knowledge fact that someone who aspires to be commander in chief ought to know.

There’s this phrase you might have heard about, IOKIYAR — it’s OK if you’re a Republican. Imagine if a Democrat had said something like this, and imagine whether the defense would be as staunch. My God, John Kerry was mocked by some of these people for merely claiming service in Vietnam. Carson is being treated as a hero for not setting foot in the place.

So. How was your weekend? Mine was fine. Fall has settled into that late-season period where 95 percent of the leaves are down and nearly all the outside chores are done, and all there is to do now is untangle the Christmas lights and maybe squeeze a book or two in before the holiday whirl starts. We had our gutters cleaned by the guys who come around this time of year offering to do so. I didn’t know Alan had hired them until I was standing naked in the bathroom and saw one climb on a ladder past my window. Hey, guys! I have no idea whether he saw me or not.

So, bloggage:

Move on, nothing to see here, says Ben Carson. You understand, right?

So let’s get this week going, then.

When I was a lucky lass of roughly 25 or so, I had a friend from junior high who lived in Paris, and I went to see him for a couple weeks. We got along like we’d been besties since only yesterday, and had a marvelous visit. But bathrooms were a problem.

I don’t think I had an entirely comfortable elimination the whole time I was there. The bathroom in his apartment was tiny, the shower and toilet in the same enclosure — the toilet paper lived under a watertight plastic hood. But that was luxury compared to the repulsive facilities in the little cafes and so forth that we frequented. Some were literal holes in the floor over which you squatted. A crude seat was considered quite fancy.

When I returned home, everything looked gray and ugly and like a tire store, but at least the bathrooms were clean and roomy. So when you talk bathrooms, I always think of that time in Paris. Also, about how most of us use bathrooms.

Bathrooms were the undoing of the Houston equal rights ordinance, we’re told:

(What) was clear was that a monthslong effort by social conservatives to repeal the ordinance and reframe the issue had paid off, through tactics likely to be used again in similar battles around the country.

Through speeches, yard signs, T-shirts, banners and ads on TV, the radio and the Internet, they zeroed in on the measure’s gender-identity protections and focused the debate on a narrow issue whose very relevance was disputed by political rivals: bathrooms, and access to them.

This reframing cast the issue as a matter of public safety, with claims that the measure would allow men who were dressed as women or who identified as women to enter women’s bathrooms and attack or threaten girls and women inside. The measure’s critics called it the Bathroom Ordinance and simplified their message to five words: “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms.”

Women’s bathrooms aren’t like men’s — there are no urinals. We walk in, choose a stall, close the door and do our business. I suppose it’s possible to be assaulted in one, but a very unlikely place to inflame the lust of anyone, much less a man who’s living as a woman. Locker rooms? I’ll give you that one, but again, my experience with them was that hardly anyone used the showers, except maybe after swimming classes, and then we wore our suits. There’s a taboo against nudity in locker rooms among teenagers, and unless it’s changed, it’s quite strong. I’ve been naked in adult locker rooms about a million times, but in high school I was an expert at changing behind a tiny towel. I bet you were, too.

Why don’t any voters think of these things when they consider stuff like this? Transgender people have a way to go before they’re fully accepted, but when they walk into bathrooms, they’re the ones at risk, not the rest of us.

By all means, though, keep clutching your pearls, guys.

This week has seemed about a million days long, but it’s just about over. I hope you all have a great weekend.

I don’t want to keep coming back to Canada, but I get away so infrequently, and I notice things. Here’s something else I noticed on our trip: Strollers everywhere. (With babies in ’em! Sometimes when you see them around here, they contain small dogs.) Canadian birth rates are looking about the same as they are for other western democracies, but by contrast with Michigan, the anecdotal street-noticing difference is profound.

If you keep your ear to the ground of conservative media, you hear a frequent drumbeat of concern about declining birth rates. (Certainly it’s behind the concerns over the Muslim influx in Europe — and eventually here.) All over the world, the rule is the same: The wealthier a country gets, the more birth rates drop, until childbearing levels out at just below replacement levels. A lot of this is common sense; while some people like a house full of kids, how soon we forget that for most women, for most of human history, children were a stopgap against genetic extinction, and then they were just something that arrived every year or so, and frequently didn’t survive. I read something recently about attitudes toward abortion, which posited that the full-throated “pro-life” movement didn’t come along until children weren’t at least partly an affliction upon their parents, especially their mothers.

Birth rates, and marriage rates, fell during the great recession. Again, it’s common sense, unless your head is clouded by ideology: When times are tough, babies are less affordable. (Ideologues think a new baby always means a fatter welfare check, so poor people say bring ’em on.)

So what do we need to do to boost birth rates among the middle class? Economic security. Also helpful: Parental leave, decent child care options, especially excellent preschool. Preschool puts kids on a fast track to a good early-childhood school experience, so it’s win-win. And what do we have now? Ideologues who say preschool is anti-family, and that the only person who can successfully raise a child is that child’s mother. Never mind that throughout human history, babies have been handed off to non-parental, even non-family adults, and human history has not crashed and burned as a result. Never mind that no one is advocating Romanian orphanage-style child care. If you even whisper that the government, any government, might have a role, not the only role, just a role to play in making life easier for parents, then you are advocating “warehousing” of children in “government facilities.”

My point being, the next time a conservative complains that women aren’t having enough babies, fish out your pocket mirror and hold it in their faces.

Do I have any linkage for you today? Don’t think so — so post your own.

So, in the last few weeks I’ve been to a Patti Smith reading/signing; seen “Heart of a Dog,” the new Laurie Anderson movie; and heard Monday’s “Fresh Air” episode, with Illeana Douglas, the actress — she has a new memoir.

All are, or were, partnered with a man of equal or greater fame – Smith with Fred Smith, Detroit rock legend (OK, he probably took a back seat to his wife, fame-wise, but they were a power couple); Anderson with Lou Reed, and Douglas with film director Martin Scorsese, who was also her mentor.

I’ve been reading in the new Smith book, and I’m struck by how…ordinary it is. The story about the boat with a broken axle? Amusing, but ultimately, your life is just as interesting. I promise you. But people in the audience that night were rapt, absorbing the details of this pair’s domestic life, as though there was a secret about to be revealed — of coolness, or magic, or powerful creativity. There seems to be an inordinate interest in the personal lives of doubly famous couples, and maybe it’s a fact of being older, but the more I learn about people, the more I believe we have a lot more in common than not, and that the lives of the famous/brilliant and anonymous/ordinary contain a roughly equal number of farts, whining, dumb conversation and other things that make us wonder what life would be like if we’d only married someone famous and brilliant. (Note the children of these pairs, how often they are deeply unimpressed by mom and dad. Take your cue from them.) They probably go to better parties and have nicer clothes and travel schedules, but that’s about it.

Not that I’m not insanely jealous of Illeana Douglas, mind you; the other ladies can keep Sonic Smith and Lou Reed, but I’d pay money to share coffee with Scorsese in the morning.

The Anderson movie is very fine, but it’s about…well, it’s about a lot of things, but death is the biggie, as the whole thing is purportedly inspired by the death of Anderson’s rat terrier, Lolabelle. But someone else died in the last year in Anderson’s family, and Himself goes unmentioned, appearing in one brief shot and the very last one of the movie. There’s a certain oooh, it’s him frisson when his famous face flashes by.

No such enigmatic take for Douglas, who complained sharply about the interviewers who assume genius and influence only flows in one direction, always asking her how Scorsese affected her work, but never asked her paramour how she might have influenced his own. (If you think the casting of Don Rickles in “Casino” was genius, credit Douglas.)

Bottom line: Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, giving all your love to just one man.

Sorry no posting last night. I wrote much of the above in my last hour of consciousness, and this morning the punctuation was definitely showing it. But that allows me to absorb the election results, which weren’t particularly surprising. I guess the Houston equal-rights ordinance being overturned is the biggest news, but I’ve felt for a while now that transgender rights are not going to be as easy a sell as the LGB variety, so again, probably not surprising. As soon as you can convince the rubes that little girls won’t be safe in their own bathrooms, it’ll be game over for the other side. I don’t want to keep returning to Toronto, but I will say I noticed a trend in the restaurants we visited — the rise of the unisex toilet.

In this country we call them “family” facilities, and they’re useful for fathers out with little girls, and vice versa, and using them, you see men and women and toddlers, most often. But in Canada many places had three one-holers — M, W, U. I have no idea if this is a transgender accommodation or not, but I noticed.

Finally, I listen to less public radio in the evenings than in the mornings, and missed the “Marketplace” interview this piece in Fortune, about Ben Carson’s ignorance of economics, is based on. Simultaneously amazing and depressing.

So, let’s tackle Wednesday. Coffee’s calling.

Every time I go north of the border — or, as Detroiters inevitably point out, south, at least if you’re headed to Windsor — I’m impressed by something new. Like your plastic money:

“Why can’t we have plastic money?” I mused at one point. We decided the tea party wouldn’t allow it, because Obama. They’ve also done away with pennies. If you buy something that rings up at $1.82, you pay $1.80. Is this a great country, or what?

It was Halloween weekend, and we did Halloweeny things. Besides the “Frankenstein” play, we spent a few hours on Oct. 31 at a screening of “Nosferatu,” the 1921 version, with Radiohead’s “Kid A” as the soundtrack. You could watch it here if you like, but the guy who screened it in Toronto said it was his idea and he did it first. He was a real original. He shows movies in his living room. Six people were at this screening, and we were two of them.

But it’s a cool idea, and the music fit the action very well.

In between was a lot of walking and talking and shopping and eating and just looking around. Alan and I have our own way of doing cities. It works for us.

And now we have houseguests, unexpected ones — J.C and Sammy are passing through en route to Atlanta from the U.P. Of course, we took some pictures of the supermodel in the house:

That rug really pulls the room together.

There’s more to the weekend, but I’m so whipped now, and full of tapas and wine and impending sleep. Did you read this Mark Fisher piece on Trump over the weekend? You should:

For some supporters, especially those in the second half of life, Trump’s slogan is a tribute to a simpler time. “He could have said, ‘Make America what it was before’ and I would have voted for him,” said Jane Cimbal, 69, who lives in Winchester and signed up to collect signatures to get Trump on the Virginia ballot. “The last time we had good jobs and respect for the military and law enforcement was, oh, probably during Eisenhower.”

Cimbal doesn’t view Trump as an optimist of the Reagan stripe, but she’s okay with voting for a harsh critic. “He speaks his mind,” she said. “So many of the others are wishy-washy. Mr. Trump isn’t a provocateur to annoy people but to get them thinking.”

These people.

OK, toddling off to bed. Thinking about Canada, writing more later.