I read “Misery.” Saw the movie, too. I recall Stephen King talking in an interview about his inspiration for the novel, i.e. meeting his fans, and how quickly they can turn from “I love every word you’ve ever written, including the grocery lists” to “I will kill you, you motherfucker.” Usually this happens because you’ve turned down a fan’s perfectly reasonable request, perhaps that you come to their home, lay hands on their dying grandparent, and then stand as godparent to their child.

I have listened to “Stan,” the Eminem song that gave the world “stan,” lower-case, as a word for a certain kind of superfan. I’m aware of the Swifties, the Beyhive, and probably a dozen other self-named fan groups. There was an Amazon series a year or two back about a woman who was devoted to a fictional pop star similar to Beyonce, and I watched it, or enough of it. And Kate’s partner works at a local business founded by a local celebrity, and he talks about the superfans who come in, and solemnly hand the staff pictures they’ve drawn and other stuff, begging that they pass it along to that celebrity.

So I know that today’s fandom is nothing like yesterday’s, at least in my opinion. (Yes, I know about the suicides after Rudolph Valentino’s death, ditto Elvis, but the internet changed everything, and you’ll never convince me otherwise.)

This week I read the New York magazine piece on Neil Gaiman, the fantasy novelist. It starts out being a fairly familiar piece about Gaiman being, as we say now, “problematic,” but if you stick with it, it gets darker and darker, and while I have a long-standing policy of judging art, not artists, I finished it tempted to burn every Gaiman book in my possession. (One, as it turns out, with another on the Kindle app.) He stands revealed as not just a sexual abuser, but a sexual assailant, a particularly nasty variety of same, as well as a parent who should probably never see his child again. His ex-wife, Amanda Palmer, doesn’t come off much better.

There will no doubt be plenty of commentary on Gaiman, and the claims made by the women in the story, but I want to talk about fandom, as described in two short passages from a very long article:

Women would turn up to his signings dressed in the elaborate Victorian-goth attire of his characters and beg him to sign their breasts or slip him key cards to their hotel rooms. One writer recounts running into Gaiman at a World Fantasy Convention in 2011. His assistant wasn’t around, and he was late to a reading. “I can’t get to it if I walk by myself,” he told her. As they made their way through the convention side by side, “the whole floor full of people tilted and slid toward him,” she says. “They wanted to be entwined with him in ways I was not prepared to defend him against.” A woman fell to her knees and wept.

People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an “inherently vulnerable community,” one of Gaiman’s former friends, a fantasy writer, tells me. They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity,” she says. They want to share their souls with the creators of these works. “And if you have morality around it, you say ‘no.’”

It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Gaiman did not have morality around it, at least with some of them. But mercy! That quote about self-identity — that hits the nail on the head. I have my own fan enthusiasms, to be sure, but they begin and end with wearing a band’s T-shirt to their next show. I’ve met enough people I admire to know that “never meet your heroes” advice is sound. And yet, today’s fandoms seem to always take it too far.

It’s the larping and the cosplay — speaking of two words I had to look up, and not that long ago — and the WhateverCons and the fanfic (another one) and the cultivation of websites and Reddit groups, so you can find other people who share your enthusiasm and will talk-talk-talk about it with you forever. Until it seems perfectly reasonable to fall to your knees, weeping, when the object of your obsession passes close by. And those people become sitting ducks for the sort of abuse Gaiman dished out. (It should be noted that the worst of the abuse detailed in the article was inflicted upon babysitters, but there were ugly incidents with fans, too.)

Fans are important, of course, but if you ever wonder why your favorite actors, musicians, writers, et al have to live behind walls and fences, and rarely go out in public, and have to hold themselves aloof from the rest of humanity, well, this is one reason.

Various people have postulated over the years that the loss of religion on a wide scale led to…all sorts of stuff. Our obsession with our bodies, with food and diets, our naive belief that we are somehow perfectible. It suggests that worship — of God, of heroes — is something we need. Jesus is a pretty good role model, all around. Beats a novelist.

How’s your week going?

Because I once clicked on a Facebook post about Secretariat’s win in the 1973 Belmont Stakes, I now get lots of Secretariat content shoveled at me on that platform. The other day a pic came up, allegedly of Secretariat racing in the Belmont, except that the markings on the horse were wrong, the tack was wrong and the horse was going the wrong way on the track. Many of these garbage postings are from groups with names like “We love secretariat,” no capitalization, or from accounts attached to individuals allegedly named “An Du” or “Moo Iu,” or suchlike. In other words, they’re AI crap.

The explosion of AI crap is not confined to a crap platform like Facebook. So-called pink slime journalism is everywhere, too. The other day a local lunatic posted a story from one of those sites, and it’s obvious — stories based on data scrapes about school testing, all with the same picture. Weird hiccups like opinion columns from 2021, themselves aggregations of crap published elsewhere, popping up on the home page. The parent company publishes dozens of these things in Michigan alone; their domain registry is anonymous, of course.

People sometimes ask if I miss journalism. I do not.

Facebook, or Meta, made news yesterday when Mark Zuckerberg announced he was bending the knee and shitcanning the platform’s fact-checking, in favor of “community notes,” the same as Xitter does. My first reaction: Facebook does fact-checking? I haven’t seen a checked fact on that shit-tastic platform in ages. Even the AI Secretariat got past.

I have a decent monthly stipend doing social-media work for one client. If I didn’t, I’d be outta there justlikethat.

In other news at this hour, Los Angeles is on fire. Hope LA Mary and any readers we might have out that way are staying safe. Kate and I just texted, and she wondered if the unpaid interns who succeeded her at her 2019 gig are stuffing the boss’ valuables into their own cars and fleeing in those cars, while the boss evacuates in some more dignified conveyance, maybe a golden helicopter or a flying limo. Not that she is bitter, but those four months turned her into a hard-core lefty.

Funny how there are some people who go through a rough period as a bottom-of-the-ladder underling and think, “I can’t wait until I’m a boss and can shit on people, too!” and others think, “When I become a boss, I will never shit on people the way I was shit on.” Proud to have raised the latter type, but I can’t take credit for it. Like all human beings, she basically emerged from the womb fully herself. I just fed her.

OK, work calls.

The last two years of the Carter presidency coincided with the first two years of my career in newspapers, and one of my early tasks was to help edit the vast amounts of wire copy that went into the Sunday women’s section at the Columbus Dispatch. Fashion, advice, all that stuff, but today I’m thinking about Betty Beale, who covered Washington society. Her columns about parties at the French embassy seemed a little out of touch with central Ohio readers, but like I said, we had a lot of space to fill.

Beale, like most of permanent Washington, despised the Carters, considered them cornpone country white trash and never missed a chance to sneer at them. To be sure, the Carters were a very different first couple than we’d seen in previous administrations, and certainly did things differently than the Nixons, Fords, Kennedys and even the Johnsons. Rosalynn, you might remember, recycled the gown for the presidential inaugural that she wore to her husband’s gubernatorial inaugural celebration some years before. This was before stylists had coined the term “vintage” and “shopping your closet,” and Beale echoed the opinions that the First Lady has some responsibility to wear and promote American designers, and their current collections, not the old stuff. Jimmy preferred to carry his own bags, and she didn’t like that much, either. How trifling! How low-class! Doesn’t he know the American president should not humble himself to manual labor? When they elected to walk the inaugural parade route, rather than ride in a limo, why you could hear the tut-tutting all the way to Ohio.

It went on and on like this, and not just from Beale. The Carters, who voters elected in large part because they were so different from official Washington, were expected to just figure these things out. The country was in a weird, stressed-out place, having just survived Vietnam and Watergate, and I can’t really blame them for not going whole-hog for creature comforts, not when inflation was out of control and the OPEC oil crisis was still delivering shock waves to the economy. They were Democrats, after all.

Anyway, nothing Rosalynn could do would make bitches like Betty happy, and it seemed she knew that, and didn’t try very hard to please her. After Carter’s 1980 loss and the imperial Reagans’ arrival, Betty wallowed like a pig in slop. The Return of Glamour, etc. Nancy Reagan, an average-pretty former actress with no charisma to speak of, was hailed as the second coming of Jackie Kennedy. Her bedazzled dresses hung on her skinny shoulders, but they made the editors of fashion magazines fairly orgasmic with glee, simultaneously praising her “birdlike” size-2 figure and her choice of styles that would “showcase” it — whatever that means.

I also thought a lot in the last day about the extended Carter family, which was also looked down upon by official Washington. There was Billy Carter, the president’s brother, a classic good ol’ boy and drunk. There was Ruth Carter Stapleton, his sister and an evangelist, who converted pornographer Larry Flynt (it didn’t take). There were his children, four sons and a daughter, the latter, Amy, being a little girl when the family moved into the White House. She was criticized, too, because official Washington didn’t think children belonged at adult events. (These people fell silent when the Trumps would parade a 12-year-old Barron Trump, in black tie no less, into the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party. That was the last time I felt sorry for the little monster; imagine sitting with your parents, in a tuxedo, at a party where most of the guests are about 90 years old and all the women have strange, ruined, plastic-surgery faces. No wonder he never spoke a word aloud.)

And there was Miss Lillian, Jimmy’s mother, who had even hard-core city folk calling her “Miz Lill-yun” about 10 minutes after meeting her. Basically, the whole clan was the Waltons, at least for a while. Then they were Ma and Pa Kettle and their hillbilly fambly.

Soon we’ll say our official farewell. I really, really, really hope you-know-who doesn’t show up. I hope he has that much decency. (Ha ha! I know he doesn’t, the cunt.)

Lotsa links today, but that’s the kind of week it’s shaping up to be.

I was listening to a podcast a few years back — I think it was Chapo Trap House — when one of the dudebros said something that stuck with me: Eventually, every con man will try to sell you supplements.

And whaddaya know, in a grifter-led administration, many of the incoming grifters are cut from the same cloth:

President-elect Donald Trump’s top political appointees want you to buy supplements.

Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, Trump’s pick for surgeon general, sells her own line of vitamins. Kash Patel, Trump’s choice to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, recommended pills on Truth Social in February that he said could “rid your body of the harms” from Covid-19 vaccines.

Mehmet Oz, the TV personality whom Trump named to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, promotes supplements sold by online retailer iHerb. He has advertised multivitamins, supplements for “brain power” and fish-oil pills that he said “probably slowed” the progression of his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Kash Patel has pimped even skeevier supplements.

I wonder if these people are expected to kick up to the boss as a result. Probably buying a Mar-a-lago membership at full retail will do.

A friend of mine wrote about the sketchy FDA oversight of various nutritional supplements a while back. The most horrifying was so-called black salve, offered as a treatment for skin cancer:

In late October 2018, a 50-year-old woman filed a complaint with the Food and Drug Administration, claiming that a topical salve she’d purchased to remove a spot on her nose had a horrifying, disfiguring side effect. The paste, called Indian Herb, wound up “eroding” her nose, she said, burning a hole through her skin.

FDA inspectors were dispatched two weeks later to visit the product’s manufacturer, McDaniel Life-Line. But if they were expecting to find a legitimate manufacturing operation when they arrived in tiny Felt, Okla. (pop. 149) that November, they may have been surprised to find that Indian Herb was being prepared in an ordinary kitchen, using a blender and other household utensils, by Bruce McDaniel and his wife, as the FDA wrote later in a letter to the company. The blender was stored in a trash bag kept in the garage when not in use, the letter noted.

And this is the sort of thing so-called “crunchy moms” will reach for instead of a phone to call a doctor. And the likely incoming head of Health and Human Services will think it’s just fine.

Speaking of which, one reason I’m not feeling quite as blue about the incoming administration is due to this story, which I read today, about how so many of the policies cheered on by Trump Country will come back to bite…Trump Country:

The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same.

To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out products that he says poison America, rendering its children obese and its citizens chronically ill.

To the workers here, those mills — the largest in the world — are their livelihoods.

Yep. If nothing else, it’ll be entertaining, watching the leopards eat all those faces. Although I suspect nothing will happen.

Good thing the information ecosystem is in such good shape! Oops, maybe not:

The Ashland Daily Tidings — established as a newspaper in 1876 — ceased operations in 2023, but if you were a local reader, you may not have known. Almost as soon as it closed, a website for the Tidings reemerged, boasting a team of eight reporters, Minihane included, who cranked out densely reported stories every few days.

…The reality was that none of the people allegedly working for the Ashland Daily Tidings existed, or at least were who they claimed to be. The bylines listed on Daily Tidings articles were put there by scammers using artificial intelligence, and in some cases stolen identities, to dupe local readers.

That’s a simultaneously horrifying and entertaining story, because one of the bylines that kept appearing in this so-called pink-slime publication was that of a real journalist. Sure, he lives in the U.K. and has only been to Oregon once in his life, but there’s his name on all those AI-written stories. I can hardly wait to see what someone could do with mine.

And that’s the midweek wrap-up. What a time to be alive.

Excuse the absence earlier. That silly column I wrote blotted out the sun for a couple days. On Monday I was toiling away at something else when my doorbell rang. On the front porch was a reporter from the local Fox affiliate, who wanted to interview me about it.

“Me? That column?” I asked, astounded.

“My news director says it’s a talker.”

I welcomed her in. I mean, I’m not going to turn a reporter away. But when she started asking questions, it became clear that she thought I’d dropped a policy brief on the mayor’s desk, complete with suggested GPS coordinates for sinking the Boblo boat, not a whimsical column chiding Detroit for its constant backward-looking gaze. I closed the door behind her thinking, I’m gonna look like an idiot, and I expect I did, although I haven’t watched the piece yet, and won’t. My takeaway is this: No one knows how to read anymore. For a while now, I’ve been wincing at how upset people get over headlines, knowing how many of them are likely written by interns or the web staff or whoever, some of whom may not even reside in the same city where the story was generated. But given how many people read no further, maybe it’s more important. Apparently there’s an entire Reddit thread of people who think I literally want to scuttle a precious childhood memory. I don’t! It’s a metaphor, folks. We covered that in seventh-grade English.

But lots of people liked it, so that’s cool.

Oh, and I haven’t told you the best part: I was invited to be on the Mitch Albom show. HAHAHAHAHAHA. I had to lifeguard during the time they wanted me, so I declined. I don’t think the producer is clued in to my online claim to fame.

But now it’s Wednesday, and as editors have been saying for millennia, what do you have coming for tomorrow? In these parts, a possible snowstorm. Nothing insane, but three inches will announce winter pretty emphatically, and it’d be wise to get the snowblower gassed up and in the front of the garage, where it will swap places with the lawn mower.

So I guess that’s what’s coming for tomorrow. Snow. And probably the erection of the Nall-Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere Christmas tree.

In bloggage, don’t have much, but news is breaking that the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot to death this morning in Manhattan. Police are calling it a targeted attack, so: very interesting. As always, more will be revealed. Refrain from jumping to conclusions. And I’ll see you later this week.

Thanks so much to everyone who shared Thanksgiving menus, greetings, memories and more. Ours was fine. We traveled to Alan’s sister’s in Defiance, bringing half the meal. I already posted this in the comments on the last post, but if you’re not a comments reader, here you go, my favorite disruptor to the earth-toned Thanksgiving table:

That’s a cranberry curd tart, a New York Times recipe (gift link), and it was the bomb. A bit of a hassle to assemble all the ingredients, but fortunately a local nut shop — a nuttery? — had blanched hazelnuts so the skin-shedding step was taken care of. And I didn’t sieve the cooked cranberries; I pulverized them in the blender. It turned out fab. Try it at the next holiday table. Pro tip: If you have a non-stick tart pan, use it.

We took Alan’s new (new to us, that is) car, which has satellite radio, still in its trial period. He gets a one- or two-month trial, then so many months at $5 per, and then it bumps to its regular charge of $20. We’ve already decided that’s more than we want to pay to have it in one car, but as soon as I mentioned it to a friend, he said we have to get Sirius on the horn, inform them we won’t be paying that much, and let them counter. He pays $10/month, and that seems more reasonable.

Overeating and consumerism — I guess this means we’re in the holidays for real. It beats talking about Kash Patel turning the FBI into Donald Trump’s personal revenge machine. And the very real chance he’ll get confirmed. If you haven’t read Sherri’s thoughtful comment toward the end of the last thread, I suggest you do so now. I spend a lot of time thinking about this, too: How we can dig ourselves out of the morass we’re in. Because of my work experience, I spend much of it concentrating on the news media. The same NYT that gave us that wonderful cranberry tart also served up this headline over the weekend: Trump Disavowed Project 2025 During the Campaign. Not Anymore.

What? Say wha-? You’re joking! Of course, many of us were screaming HE IS LYING ABOUT THIS throughout the campaign, but so glad to hear he’ll now be held accountable, lol.

I don’t have the stomach for this now. Let’s make fun of Mitch Albom.

I’ve been saying for a while how I’m marveling at the anachronistic nature of Albom’s work; it really doesn’t seem to have changed one bit since he started this job in the ’80s. He pulls the same mangy rabbits out of his hat:

The one-line paragraph.

The repeating phrase (in this case, “rub your eyes,” often delivered in a one-line paragraph). The noodling, the telling us what we already know, the HOW BOUT DEM WOLVERINES AMIRITE message delivered, and re-delivered, through several hundred words. And then there’s the tortured simile:

On a bracing cold afternoon when Ohio State, at 10-1 and ranked No. 2 in the nation, and Michigan, at 6-5 and ranked somewhere between “Why” and “Bother?”, the Wolverines marched into Columbus like the fiercest theater critic at the biggest box-office play.

That makes zero sense. Critics go to plays in their opening days, not after they’ve become boffo box office. But as Boon says to Otter, “Forget it, he’s rolling.”

Also note that there’s no dateline, and all the quotes came from Fox Sports, which means Mitch watched the game on TV and filed a column about it. You could do that job! I bet Sherri, for one, would do it better.

But at this point, who cares? It’s the last weeks of the last good year. Let’s enjoy it as they play out.

Back to the basement for me, where we are reassembling my home gym after months of idleness (for the equipment, not me). The week is ours for the taking, so let’s.

I’m having an Unsubscribe party for myself this week. My inbox was a stew of misery, even with most posts going to their proper folders on Gmail. I figured it would end after the election, but it didn’t — I even got fundraising emails after the campaigns, with STAY INFORMED in the subject line, that sort of thing. I didn’t hesitate. Every candidate I sent money to this cycle lost, and I’m not inclined to stay informed about their activities. I’m replying STOP to end text contacts. I’m just done. Uncle.

The ones that gave me the best feeling were Axios, a.m. and p.m. I still get the Axios Detroit newsletter, but it’s about one eyeroll away from getting shitcanned, too. Fortunately it isn’t run by the same people who are now giving the president-elect the Strange New Respect treatment. Take a moment and tell us why you’re leaving, Axios begged. Because I’m sick of you polishing Trump’s knob, I wrote in the designated box. What could we do to keep you? Stop polishing Trump’s knob. And with that, I hit Unsubscribe with grim satisfaction.

Somehow I got on some right-wing mailing lists, on my other account. They all sold my address to their friends, too. I used to get some amusement out of seeing how they whip up the proles, but ultimately it wasn’t worth it. They all use the same Unsubscribe reply: Hate to see you go! Fuck off, assholes.

Needless to say, I dropped Amazon Prime.

I’ll be off Twitter soon enough. Find me on BlueSky at @nderringer. I have to stay on Facebook for my social-media work, but I’m trying to go dark there, too. (I may fail.)

Along with Unsubscribe, I’m also doing a limited number of paid subs, too. There’s Roy Edroso on Substack, although I think he comps me. He shouldn’t, because he brings me real pleasure and I’d gladly pay. I don’t pay for Eric Zorn, only because his paid content is all Chicago-oriented and would be wasted on me, but if you’re a Chicagoan, consider it. I like his Thursday newsletter because it’s amusing and topical. My friend Jimmy is on Substack, doing daily short fiction; I pay because he’s an artist and I sometimes attend his monthly writing workshop. I just subscribed to Caryn Rose, a freelancer who specializes in rock ‘n’ roll, because I’m so out of touch and should be in better touch. There are a couple of others.

You might see this as turning inward, and you might be right. I’m just trying to preserve my sanity in an insane time. How insane? Have you met our incoming secretary of defense?

Maybe I should start a paid service, called You Voted For This. A few bucks a year gets you an email sent to three addresses of your choice — friends, parents, colleagues, whatever. Once a week I will round up the horrors of the last seven days and mail them to the people you can no longer stand to speak to: Hi! Did you know the incoming secretary of defense just had his third child with an affair partner, is going through his second divorce and lies like a rug? Now you do! And he’s going to be in charge of the Pentagon!

Oh, well. Enough for now. Join me in the high point of the week: Figuring out why my vacuum lost its suction, via deductive reasoning. Answer: The head piece was clogged with schmutz. Later, gators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— nazir afzal (@nazirafzal) October 6, 2024

Have a great week.

I didn’t watch the debate. I came home from lifeguarding ravenous, inhaled a metric ton of pasta, did a little work and went to bed. I’m put off by the endless, ENDless pregaming for these events, the boners sprung by the entire Politico staff, all of it. I asked myself, will anything that happens tonight change my vote? It will not. I figured if Vance ripped open his shirt to show off his new swastika tattoo, I’d hear about it later. So I skipped. Sorry not sorry.

From what I’m reading this morning, I didn’t miss a thing. Republicans think Vance cleaned Walz’ clock, Democrats vice versa. Yawn.

I continue to worry about current events, don’t you fret about that. The Last Good Year is inching toward its finale, one ballistic-missile attack at a time. I read a thread yesterday about the longshoremen’s strike, and about the cozy relationship between the union president and Fat Orange Elvis, and it sounded like the girl in “Jaws” who’s trying to tell the panicking crowd on the beach the shark isn’t there, it’s over here. Last good year.

Speaking of Politico, et al, my friend Ryan — literally half my age, a former student, and author of the Last Good Year theory — said something the other day in our group chat that I’ve been mulling ever since. He said we were a better-informed nation under the old system of media-as-gatekeeper than we are today, which is in large part the utopia the earliest bloggers (99 percent of whom gave it up) dreamed of, back when we were invading Iraq and everything was democracy-whiskey-sexy. “The MSM is a lecture. The web is a conversation,” etc. I think James Lileks said that, and the whole warblog crew lifted him aloft and proclaimed him the pundit in whom they most trusted. (Note that he not only didn’t quit his six-figure MSM job — hard to find another humor columnist opening in our shrinking world — but now that his column has finally been taken from him, retaining his job, he has not ceased bitching about it.)

Anyway, don’t want to re-plow that ground. My point is, the old system wasn’t so terrible, even as flawed as it was. I’m a news junkie, and I only learned of the impending longshoreman’s strike…last weekend, I believe. And now it’s upon us, and it’s not even Wednesday. Once upon a time, an army of labor reporters would have kept us up to date for weeks, maybe months, ahead of the strike, and we’d at least have had time to process it, call our elected representatives, etc. Now there are hardly any labor reporters. One I follow is on Substack, essentially self-employed.

The old gatekeepers were overwhelmingly white and male, also older and well-to-do, if not rich. This undoubtedly left many stories uncovered. It also allowed a rich vein of alt-journalism to flourish, in the ethnic presses and the free weeklies in every city. One made their money on lower-cost advertising targeted directly at their readers, the other on racy personals and ads for escorts and strippers.

And what replaced this terrible system? Some marquee brands (NYT, WP) survive, a handful of nonprofit, serious news sites (MinnPost, Texas Tribune, the outfit I used to work for) and a whole lot of clickbait. Plus, a form of human clickbait — the influencer. The friend who likes all the things you like, will tell you about the things they like (use their product code for 10 percent off and free shipping) and lies happily to your face, but you like those lies, so it’s OK.

And don’t get me started on social media, the great bullshit amplifier of our age. I used to correct people who posted urban legends on Facebook as though they were facts, but I don’t anymore, because I was so often accused of being, essentially, a party pooper. Let people believe, etc. OK.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of these innovations have been welcome. We’re all busy. It’s nice to have some filters in our lives to productively direct our moments when we can be free to pay attention to the world outside our own bubble. And many podcasts are miles better than the hollowed-out husk of commercial radio. But for all the information we process from day to day — that I process, anyway — I still feel like there are yawning gaps in my knowledge.

And I know there are some in yours.

Anyway, that’s my rant for the day. Maybe some photos? OK. A yard sign a few blocks over:

Also, speaking of the MSM, I think this story is the very last place for a play-on-words headline, but no one asked me:

Fibs, not vicious lies, and “dog,” get it? HAHAHAHA.

Talk later.

I expect by now the outrageous tale of Judge Kenneth King of the 36th District Court here in Detroit has spread to your neck of the woods, but just in case it hasn’t…

Judge King is something of a showboat. No, he is a shameless showboat, no something about it. His courtroom actions are streamed on his YouTube channel, and you know what they say about courtroom cameras — sooner or later, someone’s going to play to them, and in this case, it’s the judge. He seems to consider himself an undiscovered court-TV personality, and has a fan group that he regularly interacts with on Facebook.

So the other day a local nonprofit brought a group of teens to his courtroom on a field trip, and one of them, Eva Goodman, fell asleep during the judge’s talk to the group. He didn’t take this well:

After speaking for about 45 minutes, King walked over to the young woman and screamed, “wake up!” Then he asked if he was boring her, before suggesting “there’s one in every group.”

Alas, Eva was very tired that day, and fell asleep again. Well. This was too much for King:

He ultimately decided she needed to “take a walk in the back to see where we keep our people who are disrespectful to the court.”

On Wednesday, King told the Free Press he felt disrespected mainly by her body language.

About two hours later, he had court staff bring her back into the room. At this point she’s wearing a green jumpsuit, the words “Wayne County jail” printed on the back. Her hands are cuffed in front of her body.

…Jumping from his seat, King repeatedly questions the young woman before offering his own comments.

“You sleep at home in your bed, not in court. And quite frankly, I don’t like your attitude,” King said.

Yes. He had this sleepy girl dressed in jail clothing, handcuffed and then? He held a mock trial, of sorts, and threatened her with juvenile detention. You really should read the story. It’s amazing.

But it gets worse. It turns out the reason the girl kept falling asleep? Her family is homeless. Not living-on-the-street homeless, but the more common variety of bouncing around from place to place with her mother and siblings, and the previous night had been a rough one. This came out later, when the circle of people who know about King’s courtroom had expanded well beyond his fan group.

The best thing written about it was this column by a Freep contributor, who pointed out, correctly, that this is one reason black teens run from police, etc.:

(H)is actions reinforced the pipeline to prison culture that community activists are continually fighting against. That culture includes everything from metal detectors and uniforms in public schools to forcing young people to cut their hair because it’s too long, or suggesting that wearing a hoodie or engaging in other normal teen activities are inherently suspicious and must be policed.

Precisely. It needs to be pointed out, again and again until people get it, that the reason Ferguson, Mo. exploded 10 years ago wasn’t the death of Michael Brown, but the years-long abuse of poor people by not only the police, but the entire judicial system, and you should read Radley Balko on this subject:

After the death of Michael Brown, we learned that black and poor residents of St. Louis County were essentially treated like walking ATMs. The mid-20th Century migration of white people to the suburbs, and then the exurbs — and their attempt to exclude black people each step of the way — resulted in an astonishing number of tiny “postage stamp” municipalities, most of which had their own police department and were funded by fines and fees imposed on their residents. The poorer the town, the more it needed fines and fees to operate.

Anyway, things aren’t going so well for King at the moment. His docket has been taken from him, he lost a teaching gig at Wayne State, and he’ll be lucky to keep his job, although he probably will, unless Fox News snatches him up and makes him a member of The Five or something.

But enough about him. Let’s turn instead to the turgid prose of Tim Goeglein, who apparently has found a sucker editor at the surviving daily in Fort Wayne, the Journal Gazette, willing to publish his columns:

He writes on Sunday of his misty water-colored memories of going to the Embassy Theater downtown to see old movies with Ma and Pa Goeglein:

The rain was pouring in monsoon-like waves in downtown Fort Wayne. The cars were splashing buckets-full of water hither and yon. People were skittering across the puddled streets like stones across ponds.

Everyone was being lashed by the fury of a Midwestern downpour, a soaker.

The windshield wipers clicking at record speed, my father pulled up our maroon Jim Kelley Buick LaSabre to the front doors of the Embassy Theatre on West Jefferson Boulevard.

All I remember seeing was a forest of umbrellas amid the bright, luminous, brilliant, beautiful lights of that singularly familiar Embassy marquee flashing its message: “Friday Nights at the Movies.”

Tim owns a thesaurus, but hasn’t absorbed the message that you don’t have to use all the synonyms when you look up an adjective.

It goes on — and on and on and on — until it reaches a sloppy climax with what else? The organ recital that preceded the movie:

We found seats midsection, and then, as if on cue, rising like a phoenix from the floor, as if out of nowhere, a kind of magic happened: the most glorious, riveting tones of a colossal organ as if from the highest plain of heaven.

Pipes of every tone and tempo kept us awash in the glory of pure sound, a kind of elixir for the ears.

It was the Grande Page Pipe Organ, rising before us as if from the MGM soundstage in Hollywood itself. Has there ever been a more amazing instrument in the history of our nation?

Well, yes, Tim. These theater organs were quite common in old movie houses. There was one in Columbus, which I heard when my mom took me to the old-movie screenings at the Ohio Theater there. There’s one in Detroit, at the Redford Theater. But I’m amazed at Tim’s amazement: Pipes “of every tone and tempo.” The “most glorious, riveting tones.” The MOST AMAZING INSTRUMENT IN THE HISTORY OF OUR NATION.” I’d think he was kidding if I didn’t know he wasn’t.

After one of his last columns, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Journal Gazette. Cruelly, they didn’t print it. So I will copy/paste it here:

I haven’t lived in Fort Wayne for nearly 20 years, but given the role I played in the loss of his White House job, I’ve since taken a particular interest in Timothy Goeglein’s writing, appearing occasionally in the JG’s opinion section. As a writer myself, and as one who wants everyone to be a better one, sometimes this is painful; I’ve rarely seen such floridly composed word salads, to use a phrase Tim might employ. I won’t call them “hate reads” — I’m trying to be a better person in my dotage — but my fingers often twitch toward an imaginary blue pencil to strip the lard, the filigree, and especially the adverbs out of his rhapsodical tributes to whatever misty water-colored memory is striking him today.

I’m also an editor, and know that self-editing is difficult. But can’t anyone at the Journal Gazette take a little hot air out of these balloons, perhaps by paring Tim’s “tall and willowy, thin as a rail” piano teacher down to just “willowy,” as that word literally means tall and thin? Or suggest that “a museum specializing in great art” redundantly states the definition of art museums, unless he knows of one that specializes in mediocre stuff.

To Tim, I offer my services as a writing coach. My email’s easy to find. Give me one paragraph, 100 words tops, on…something you dislike. Tight. No adverbs. We’ll start there. It may be a journey of a thousand miles, but it’s gotta start somewhere.

He won’t take me up on it. Sigh.

OK, Monday looms. Punch it in the face!