I was in Chicago summer before last, and Jeff Borden and I went to the club where Shadow Show was playing. At some point in the evening, he handed me a shot of some amber liquor and told me to go ahead, drink it.

I don’t worry that Borden will slip me a Pete Hegseth mickey, and I wasn’t even tipsy from the beer I’d been nursing, so I did, downing it in one go. My eyes bugged out of my head, my throat screamed for mercy and my brain started flashing neon ABORT signs.

“What,” I gasped, “was that?”

“Malört,” he said. “Otherwise known as the Chicago hello.”

I’m not super-big on liquor history, but I’d never heard of this stuff. Borden said it was made with wormwood, a word I recall mostly from Shakespeare. What is wormwood, anyway? All I can tell you is, don’t drink it.

But now, Malört is catching on, or so says the New York Times:

Malört is, in one word, unforgiving. Made from neutral spirits, wormwood and sugar, it tastes a little like sucking dandelion juice through a straw made of car tires. It is also kind of good. Intensely bitter, it’s herbaceous and a touch citrusy, as if you were to bite a grapefruit like an apple.

It is also, in five words, the unofficial liquor of Chicago.

Carl Jeppson, a Swedish immigrant to the city, peddled Jeppson’s Malört as a digestif as early as the 1930s. “It was the only liquor to survive Prohibition because no one believed that a human being would drink that on purpose, and that it had to be medicinal,” said J.W. Basilo, the manager of the Promontory and a bartender in Chicago for more than 20 years.

Intensely local to the Windy City, Malört “became the designated initiation shot, something you downed to prove your Midwest mettle — a difficult drink for a difficult place to live,” the story goes on.

Hence the Chicago hello. I noticed that the next day on Shadow Show’s Instagram stories, they posted a photo of all of them taking their Malört punishment. Kate noted something to the effect that Chicagoans have some strange ideas about what’s drinkable.

Now, though — and this is the point of the NYT story — Malört is spreading beyond Chicago, probably because hipsters cannot stand not being in on a single city’s digestif secret. There’s even a Malört-centric bar now, in New Orleans. That city has its own signature cocktail, the Sazerac, but it also has to serve lots of thirsty tourists who want to be tipsy, but don’t necessarily want to be served the usual watered-down Hurricane in a go-cup. Novelty is the soul of capitalism.

I guess what I’m saying is, if someone offers you this particular digestif after the Thanksgiving turkey, think twice before you say sure, love to.

And now another tough week comes to an end. I can’t stop thinking about Pete Hegseth raping that woman (allegedly, yes), his dog tags swinging over her face before he ejaculated on her stomach. A rapist nominates a rapist, of course.

Next week is Thanksgiving. I’m going to have to dig for something to be thankful for, but not really. There’s always something, if you have food, shelter and family love. It’s just how long that could last, know what I mean?

See you then, at least for a little while.

I was ranting about Mitch Albom on Facebook — I’m already bored by it, but if you are in my network, you can read it there — when I started thinking about tropes.

Tropes as in, the expected motifs, even clichés, that we find in certain genres of writing. I was comparing Albom’s Sunday column about Mike Tyson (phoned-in, sketchy, error-strewn — the floor of a boxing ring is canvas with one S, not two) to Pete Dexter’s far superior one from 1996. That column, which I can’t link to because I can’t find one, described watching Tyson in training as he demolished a sparring partner. It describes the gym he was training in, in upstate New York, “on the third story of an old building, over the firehouse and the city hall.” It talks about the trainer who discovered him, Cus D’Amato, and the one who took over after D’Amato died, Kevin Rooney.

It reminded me that boxing gyms are rarely if ever luxurious, and are always on the third floor of an old building, or perhaps in a converted garage in a bad part of town. Men who take up this dangerous sport are often from lower-status ethnic groups, which in the 20th century were Irish (Rooney), Italian (D’Amato) or people of color. It reminded me of the studio executive yelling at the title character in “Barton Fink” about why his star writer, a playwright of the common man, can’t get his arms around a script about one:

What do you think this is? HAMLET?
GONE WITH THE WIND? RUGGLES OF RED
GAP? It’s a goddamn B picture! Big
men in tights! You know the drill!

Judy Davis, as Audrey in that same film, explains it deftly:

Well, usually, they’re… simply
morality tales. There’s a good
wrestler, and a bad wrestler whom he
confronts at the end. In between,
the good wrestler has a love interest
or a child he has to protect. Bill
would usually make the good wrestler
a backwoods type, or a convict. And
sometimes, instead of a waif, he’d
have the wrestler protecting an idiot
manchild. The studio always hated
that. Oh, some of the scripts were
so… spirited!

And yet? It’s all in how you put it together. Dexter’s Tyson column is trope-filled, but still manages to break your heart a little:

The first time I ever saw (Holyfield) was in Atlantic City, where he was standing otherwise unnoticed in a crowded hallway outside one of the casino auditoriums, wearing a suit. He wasn’t on the card that night, he was just there to watch.

It’s hard for me to understand how that person came to beat the fighter I first saw 11 years ago.

I did see it, though, in what most people thought was a beautiful fight.

There was a moment, though, near the end, as Holyfield went hunting and a tired, half-conscious Tyson stumbled and nearly turned his back, that was not beautiful at all. A right hand exploded, sweat flew up into the lights, a halo, and Tyson pitched dangerously sideways, and then staggered away, toward the far rope, and before he gathered himself and turned back into the onslaught to meet what was waiting for him there, in that moment, I think, confusion and exhaustion took him home, to the place he comes from, where there is no protection, and there is no one who cares.

A story I’d like to see written? How boxing, a sport that’s pretty much dead now, is being kept alive by Arab kids in metro Detroit. I don’t think there’s a boxing culture back home, but in any Detroit gym, there are always a few Mohammeds and Husseins. Most of them are Yemeni, which is the lowest echelon of Arab-Americans in Detroit. Come to think of it, when we saw Claressa Shields fight in Detroit, the undercard featured a couple of bouts with Russian fighters from Chechnya, the Yemen of Russian republics. So the trope holds. How desperate do you have to be to risk your life in a boxing ring? When you see it as a chance to improve your lot in life.

Albom’s Sunday column was typically dumb — his grand conclusion was that the crowd backed Tyson because he was old, and we wanted Gen X to triumph over Gen Z. He barely talked about Jake Paul, who won the fight, beyond describing him as “a 27-year-old YouTube sensation turned professional boxer.” YouTube sensation? Hmm, OK. Paul and his brother Logan got famous the way young people with no particular talent get famous these days: By acting like assholes on YouTube. That seems to be the quickest way to fame and fortune online — be an asshole. The Paul brothers explored a Japanese forest where people go to kill themselves, found a hanging corpse, and made fun of the dead man. They also traveled to Italy and treated the canals of Venice like a water park, jumping from bridges while onlookers gaped. If you want to read about the perfect example of this type, google Johnny Somali. That’s why I was rooting for Tyson. I wanted him to murder this shithead. Full Duk-koo Kim. I wanted Paul to be a grease spot on the canvas. It had zero to do with age.

I didn’t watch the fight. I figured Tyson would lose, and didn’t want another disappointment.

One more interesting angle Detroit’s most famous best-selling author could have explored: Tyson distinguished himself for terrible behavior in the early part of his life, and has been rehabilitated into something cuddlier in his late middle age. He has a one-man show that he tours with. He’s a cannabis entrepreneur. Like Snoop Dogg, he’s one of those black men who used to be scary, and is now someone you wouldn’t mind sitting next to at dinner. That’s an idea it would have been interesting to pick apart. A task for a much better writer.

OK, it’s Sunday, my cold has relented somewhat, and this coming week has to be pedal to the metal. First, a birthday dinner for the birthday twins. (In a fancy restaurant. I have lost some cooking mojo in recent days.)

I’d imagine most of us remember those fabulous ’80s, right? That’s when “classic rock” emerged as a radio format, often credited to the utterly loathsome Randy Michaels. By effectively shutting the door on new music, the genre became moribund, only occasionally spawning retro-new acts like the Black Crowes. For me, it’s when radio really started to suck.

But when hip-hop rose to dominate pop music — and when lots of classic-rock dudes had teenage sons who scorned dad’s records for the rap that their elders hated and feared, and did so beneath the private headphones of a Walkman — it got nasty. I vividly recall many station IDs where some male voice would snarl TODAY’S BEST CLASSIC ROCK…AND NO RAP. There was an action movie whose TV ads featured a black gangster snarling at Bruce Willis, “I’m wanna make you scream in pain!” and Willis replies, “Play some rap music.” Ha ha. A rock DJ in Fort Wayne told me that when he played Run-DMC’s cover of “Walk This Way,” the phone lines lit up immediately, and not in praise, if you know what I mean.

Racist? You bet. Hip-hop may not be your cup of tea, but you can’t say it hasn’t stood the test of time. Public Enemy comes up from time to time in my boxing classes, and it still sounds contemporary, which is not something you can say about the synth-heavy pop of the ’80s, which is so dated it makes you smell AquaNet. Even the scary-ass rappers every white person was afraid of have matured into cuddly pop-culture heroes (looking at you, Snoop Dogg) or even people we should respect and listen to; if you didn’t see Barack Obama paying tribute to Eminem last week, I certainly did, and reflected on when one of my editors in Fort Wayne, a true music appreciator across genres, was appalled by his Slim Shady debut to the point of alarm.

But some people, mostly old white GenX or Boomers, still hate it.

I thought of this a few years back, when I was browsing for a hairbrush at CVS and overheard a black woman, younger than me but not by much, singing along to Billy Joel on the store’s music system. She was doing it kind of absently, looking for something on the shelves too, but I was struck by how much feeling she managed to infuse in a lyric I’d already heard 187,000 times. She had every right to find it as lame as I did, but she didn’t.

This week we have a crew hanging drywall in the basement. They’re all black, and like all drywall crews, they pass the time playing music on a Bluetooth speaker. I’d expect a playlist, or a radio station, that draws from the deep wells of blackness in pop music, but no. At the moment, it’s the Eagles. Before that, U2. Before that, Hall & Oates. The only black artist I can recall hearing this morning is Tina Turner, and “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” a fine track, but not exactly a deep one for that artist. I texted the family about this, and Alan noted, “The first day I thought they were curating their playlist so as not to frighten the white folks upstairs. But no. (The crew leader) knew the lyrics and was singing along to a Foreigner song.”

When it dropped, I know I linked to Wesley Morris’ contribution to the 1619 Project, a podcast episode called “The Birth of American Music,” and I still think it’s one of the best explanations of how we got here that you can get in half an hour. It starts with a funny intro about yacht rock, and here’s the pivot point:

This is the sound not just of black America, but the sound of America. It is deeply American, almost especially when it’s sung by British people like David Bowie and Annie Lennox and Amy Winehouse. And it fills me with pride. Like, I know that there is something irresistible and ultimately inevitable about black music being a part of American popular music. But it also reminds me that there’s a history to this, a very painful history. And in the most perversely ironic way, it’s this historical pain that is responsible for this music.

It goes on from there, but I don’t want to spoil it.

There’s a whole YouTube subgenre of black people listening to white music. This is only a mild taste of it. And all of this is, I hasten to add, FINE. It is great that we can all enjoy all the music that’s out there, even Foreigner. I just think it’s funny, how that woman in the CVS could take a Billy Joel song and make it pretty great. I’d buy her record! “In the Aisles: A CVS Shopper Covers Billy Joel,” maybe. That would drive the rock DJs nuts. But these boneheads who run rock radio can’t find it in their cinder-like hearts to enjoy a little Kendrick Lamar.

OK, then. Just a few more days until widespread civil unrest breaks out in American cities! Let’s listen to music and take our minds off it.

I don’t believe we have yet said goodbye to Mitzi Gaynor. She died last week, at 93. She was mourned in the usual modern fashion — some amusing clips of her energetic dancing posted online, some YAS QUEEN, a note added to the lengthening list for the In Memoriam reel at next year’s Oscars.

I will remember Mitzi mainly for her effect on Eddie Fisher.

Eddie was a sportswriter in Columbus, already past his prime by the time I arrived in 1979. I don’t know if he even had a beat, but he looked like the kind of guy who’d cover horse racing. A bachelor. He always had a wet cigar stub clamped in his jaw, smelled like a wet cigar stub and had a tendency to look at women like a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon. Eyes bugging out on springs, tongue rolling out like a carpet runner — you know the type.

He’s gone now, and his obit informs me that he spent a stretch as the paper’s entertainment editor. Even though he toiled in Sports, he hung on to one assignment from his earlier job, and that was writing advances for at least some of the Kenley Players summer-stock productions, and certainly the ones starring Mitzi Gaynor. I think he considered her a friend of sorts.

He loved, loved, loved Mitzi, and rarely missed the chance to drop her birth name into his slavering stories: Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber. I once walked past his desk when he was interviewing her. I think he was actually drooling.

Admittedly, Mitzi was quite something, an energetic hoofer with the legs to match. Her summer show wasn’t a play or musical, just “The Mitzi Gaynor Show,” with hoofing and jokes and false eyelashes and a crowd of backup dancers in tight pants and top hats. If you like that kind of thing, it was your kind of thing.

Mitzi had an active Instagram account, where she or her reps would post old clips of her dancing in some short number with a rhinestone-studded fringe hem. I guess that means she was young at heart. I could certainly watch her sing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” on repeat for about an hour.

In the midst of looking up stuff, I found a short piece about John Kenley, founder of the players, with this startling revelation:

Born to Slovakian saloon keepers in 1906, John was born in Denver Colorado, after the family had fled increasing prohibition laws on the East Coast. Born intersex, John (who occasionally went by “Joan” but utilized male pronouns when at work) entered show business when the family moved to Cleveland Ohio, where he worked as a female impersonator, acrobat, dancer, and audience plant at comedy show before he made the move to New York City.

I had no idea.

So farewell, Mitzi. You were a true entertainer.

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I asked for sweata weatha, and I got it. Highs today in the low 50s, and because our Nest thermostat is always trying to save us a few pennies, I realized today that once again it had nudged the thermostat down to 66 and my nose was cold. And this reminded me of a nose warmer that some catalog we used to get carried; it looked like a stocking cap for your nose, and you would presumably give that as a gag gift to someone like me, but certainly never wear it where any other human being could see you.

I couldn’t think of the catalog’s name. And while it wasn’t Hammacher Schlemmer, that’s the only one that came to mind. Does it still exist? It does, as a website now.

And it’s still pretty weird:

And:

But this being the 21st century, guess what, they have vibrators. Behold, the “Award Winning Women’s Sexual Wellness Massager:”

“Come on, CVS carries those things now,” Alan told me. OK, but still. This is the place I first saw the “weather forecaster” that was a picture of a donkey with a tail made of yarn. “If the tail’s movin’, it’s windy. If it’s wet, it’s rainin’,” etc. It was something of a surprise.

But never fear, you can still buy a nose warmer, but not at Hammacher Schlemmer. This was from some other outfit:

They are surprisingly numerous on Etsy, as well. Go figure.

OK, then. I was going to stay away from you-know-who today, but the clips coming out of the Univision town hall last night were absolutely brutal; I suggest you dial some up. And I leave you with this banger of a deep dive out of Fort Wayne, about how Parkview Hospital grew and grew and got greedier and greedier. It’s detail-packed and riveting:

Revenue pressure was even brought down to the level of nurses – some of whom say they have been pushed to charge for the smallest of items from Kleenexes to batteries. One 2022 email, obtained by the Guardian, shows a supervisor at Parkview DeKalb telling nurses that she had reviewed their charts for the week and found they had “missed” $50,000 in charges as a team. The following year, managers told staff to be more stringent about how many linen towels they handed out to patients – an initiative they termed “linen stewardship”.

“It makes me feel disgusting. It makes me feel dirty,” said one current Parkview nurse, describing how staff have been made to charge for supplies and services down to the micro-level. “Why should I be trying to make sure that they’re getting the most money that they can?”

In some cases, these volume and coding protocols resulted in enormous bills and significant additional revenue for the system, according to medical and legal records reviewed by the Guardian.

In 2021, after a young girl went to the ER for an accidental razor cut, a doctor applied an “adhesive skin affix”, a special type of wound glue, on her finger for about 10 seconds, according to her mother. Afterwards, Parkview charged just over $85 for the glue capsule, about four to five times the price listed online. The hospital also tacked another $295 onto the bill for the labor, which it classified as an intermediate surgical procedure, according to paperwork reviewed by the Guardian.

Have a great weekend, all.

I turned on the Oscars just in time to catch the screenplay awards, where they run the text at the bottom of the clip from the nominated film. And Bradley Cooper says, “I’m reining it in,” but the super says “reigning.” Sigh. As if the world wasn’t stupid enough.

I went to bed right before Emma Stone won for Best Actress, but I’m glad she did, despite the overwhelming push for Lily Gladstone. We watched “Poor Things” the night before — it’s on Hulu — and her performance was spectacular, with a much higher degree of difficulty than Gladstone’s. I know this was assumed to be a shoo-in for the Native American actress, as Hollywood loves to give at least one award a year to make it feel good about its social principles, or just to recognize a promising newcomer. But I don’t think Gladstone was robbed; she took home a lot of statues this award season, just not this one. And Stone deserved it.

That’s the thing about the Oscars — it’s just a vote, and we never know how the other finishers did. Stone may have edged her by a one, 100 or 1,000, but in the end it doesn’t matter.

Martin Scorsese, now — he knows about robbery. The greatest living director, and he has exactly one Oscar for it. (“The Departed,” 2006.)

In other frippery from the weekend, I’ve been studiously avoiding any of the Kate Middleton speculation and gossip, because why subject yourself to that when American democracy is swaying on its foundations and she’s probably fine anyway. Then the weekend photo business happened, and I must admit: I’m intrigued. It takes a lot for the world’s serious news agencies to put out a mandatory kill on something as silly as a courtesy photo from the British royal family. But in this case, the Zapruder-film examination of it makes me wonder what might be going on.

Most of the speculation has concentrated on some obvious — if you consider going over a picture with a magnifying glass obvious — editing of some of the clothing, but to me, it’s the black hole at her midsection that looks wonky to me. The most informed speculation about what might be ailing her, in my opinion, came from a doctor I follow on Twitter, who suggested she might have had some sort of temporary colostomy for the treatment of Crohn’s disease, and it would track that the rail-thin princess wouldn’t be photographed with any indication she might be wearing a bag. It would also explain the secrecy, because ew poop. Whatever. I do hope she’s going to be OK, because who wouldn’t.

Also, the British celebrate Mothers Day in March? Really?

And now it’s Monday again. Time to get it in gear.

How do you start your week? Even in my semi-retired state, I tend to spend a few moments on Sunday or Monday thinking about my obligations for the week ahead — pay this bill, meet this deadline, call that person, etc. All of it leads up to “The Week That Was,” the web show for Deadline Detroit that for some reason none of us can stop doing, and then, when it wraps at roughly 12:30 p.m. Friday, the weekend begins. I feel like Fred Flintstone sliding down the dinosaur’s tail.

We almost always go out, if only for a burger somewhere, on Friday. We only occasionally go out on Saturday. Go figure.

But this Friday the Derringers are going to…the opera. Allow me to explain.

The Michigan Opera Theater, now the Detroit opera, hired a new artistic director, Yuval Sharon, just before the pandemic, and boy is he artistic. This production put him on the damn map, at least if you consider attention from The New Yorker and New York Times to be something (and I do):

In the psychogeography of modern life, parking garages are sites of anxiety and subtle terror. The doctor’s appointment is minutes away, and yet you are still frantically circling. The space you find is so torturously narrow that it could have been designed only in consultation with auto-body shops. Afterward, desperation rises as you wander acres of concrete, listening for your faintly beeping vehicle. The lighting is sepulchral, the air dank. Few soothing scenes in movies are set in garages: shady deals are done, witnesses are offed, Deep Throat speaks.

It made sense, then, that Yuval Sharon, the new artistic director of Michigan Opera Theatre, chose a Detroit parking garage as the impromptu set for an abridged production of “Götterdämmerung.” The final installment of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle ostensibly addresses the twilight of the gods, but no gods appear onstage: according to the libretto, we glimpse them only in the far distance, at the climax, as fire consumes Valhalla. Instead, the opera is dominated by a compromised array of human beings, who move through a darkening, decaying world. In the prologue, we are told that Wotan, the chief of the gods, fatally wounded the World Ash Tree when he tore a branch from it to make his spear of power. The death of the tree stands in for the ruination of the earth by capitalism and industrialization. A multistory parking garage is as good a spot as any for the Wagnerian apocalypse.

This was during the Covid closures, and the parking garage “Gotterdammerung” worked like this: Your ticket got you admittance to the garage, in your car, needless to say. You drove slowly through the levels, stopping at scenes where a singer would perform a particular piece, with the music coming through your car’s sound system, tuned to a special frequency. When he or she completed the number, you drove on to the next one. Socially distanced and, for my money, the smartest, coolest way to put on a work of art in a time when most places just went dark. Was it the entire opera? Of course not; the whole experience, renamed “Twilight: Gods” took about an hour. But it was a triumph.

Of course we couldn’t get tickets. But now, with Sharon in the fourth year of a five-year contract, already a MacArthur Foundation genius, I figure we’d better get our butts in the seats if we wanted to check him out before he’s snatched up by a bigger city. So we’re going to this production, “Europeras: 3 & 4,” which promises to also be pretty weird:

Pioneering composer John Cage reassembles European opera as a collage in Europeras 3 & 4. These intimate, avant-garde operas exemplify his life-long fascinations that forever changed music history. Chance operations dictate everything in the production, from the staging to the costumes to the lighting design. In its joyful anarchy, Cage’s work invites audiences to embrace the unexpected.

I’m looking forward to this.

This week, I got 90 percent of my work done yesterday, so today I cashed in one of my birthday presents, a gift card for the Schvitz. Hallelujah, one of the massage therapists had an opening, so I snapped it up. I regret to say both the dry sauna and the steam were so hot I could barely stand them — both well over 200 degrees. The steam room temperature display read ERR, as in, the numbers didn’t go any higher. I came back after my massage, and it was down to 230, and I could handle it for maybe five minutes. However, this didn’t affect my enjoyment of my solitary afternoon one bit. The place was blessedly quiet, and I could discreetly take in the amazing tattoo variety without having to crane my neck. A good afternoon.

I think self-care is the only way I’m going to get through the next few months, frankly. It’s gonna be so ugly.

But now the week is under way, right? Let’s get through it.

A friend recommended “The Greatest Night in Pop,” a documentary now airing on Netflix, about the making of the “We Are the World” single in 1985. I took his recommendation, and found his summation fairly accurate: Suffer through the first 30 minutes of showbiz bullshit, and you’ll be rewarded with an hour of watching musical superstars feeling and acting very superstar-y, which is to say, often like spoiled brats and other bad-behaving archetypes.

I have to confess my prejudice up front: “We Are the World” and its predecessor, the “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” single out of the U.K., ushered in an era that got on my nerves, the time of ’80s/’90s feel-good “philanthropy” that required nothing of the philanthropist more taxing than a trip to a record store. Or affixing a particular color of ribbon to your clothing. Or joining hands in some sort of stunt to “raise awareness” of homelessness. And the song was terrible, too; at least the British song had a Christmas-carol sound to it, with all those bells. “We Are the World” was syrupy treacle, made for linking elbows, swaying back and forth and proclaiming not that others were in mortal peril, but that we, the singers, are the ones who… well, let’s just paste the chorus here:

We are the world
We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me

Beyond a few references to “people dying,” it’s entirely self-congratulatory. Which is to say, it’s got the smell of Michael Jackson all over it. He wrote the lyrics, Lionel Richie the music. And Richie is the one who leads the narrative lookback, although there are other talking heads, too, including Bruce Springsteen, Sheila E., Cyndi Lauper and the most surprisingly amusing of the bunch, Huey Lewis.

The hero of the whole project is Quincy Jones, who had to herd all these cats toward their common goal, and to do so in the course of one marathon overnight session. Part of the showbiz-bullshit portion of the film talks about simple steps toward that goal as though they’re brainstorms unique to the brilliance of Quincy — i.e., to have all the soloists record in a big circle, facing one another, rather than retreating to booths where they can complain quietly and nitpick their performance to death. I guess that was a brainstorm for a field that requires no small amount of diplomacy, but if there’s one thing we know about divas of all kinds, it’s that treating them like normal people will work, at least for a little while. (It’s such a new experience for them.)

There were some amusing moments, as when Stevie Wonder suggested they should sing at least a few lines in Swahili, presumably because Africa. This led to Waylon Jennings walking out, but honestly, I was in full agreement (with Waylon). Then someone pointed out that Ethiopians, the presumptive recipient of this charity project, don’t even speak Swahili anyway.

And there’s always the shock of seeing how many of these famous, or semi-famous faces have had serious work done since 1985. Smokey Robinson’s mug is tight as a drum, and Richie’s lower face looks so plumped with fillers it appears to have become a balcony extending from his forehead. All forgivable, because we all have our vanity.

But I was most surprised by my reaction to Jackson, who is painted, as per usual, as a genius, an icon, a magical sprite who was simply too special and talented for this dirty world. I have a long-standing policy of not confusing artists with their art, but Jackson tests it too much for me to look away, as I do about, say, Miles Davis’ history of abusing women. Jackson was a pedophile, period, which makes all his lyrical references to children deeply creepy. I find it hard to enjoy, or even listen to, most of his catalog today. Sorry.

Also, see above for my feelings about the song he co-wrote.

Worth your time? Sure, if you’re into pop music and remember the era. There’s a lot of sic transit gloria mundi on display — hey, Kim Carnes! — and a few good lines. My fave was Paul Simon’s: “If a bomb falls on this place, John Denver is back on top.”

Finally-finally, I’d really like to know more about where the millions this project raised were spent. Did it go directly to food aid? That’s key, because we tend to gloss over the fact that in the modern world, there is enough food for everyone, even with crop failures, drought and other natural causes. There is more than enough, but getting it to people who need it remains problematic, and the Ethiopian government bears at least some responsibility for what happened. That was another thing I disliked about the project, that it led the rest of the world to believe the solution was as simple as raise money > buy food > give food to starving people. When it absolutely wasn’t, and isn’t.

OK, the weekend is almost here! Back to listening to the SCOTUS hearing on you-know-who and hoping against hope.

I neglected to mention one detail of my Miami trip: Passing along the causeway to Miami Beach, we had an excellent view of Royal Caribbean’s brand-new Icon of the Seas cruise ship, in the Port of Miami, just days away from her maiden voyage.

You don’t know what the Icon is? Well, check it OUT, friends. It’s only what appears to be the world’s largest cruise ship, “the largest waterpark at sea,” with a fact sheet that must be read to be believed:

20 TOTAL DECKS
18 GUEST DECKS

2,350 CREW
(INTERNATIONAL)

2,805 STATEROOMS

5,610 GUESTS
(DOUBLE OCCUPANCY)

7 POOLS AND
9 WHIRLPOOLS

6 RECORD-BREAKING
WATERSLIDES

1,198 FEET, 365 METRES LONG

BUILT AT
MEYER TURKU, TURKU, FINLAND

It’s all caps because I copy/pasted it off the fact sheet, sorry. Also: There are eight separate “neighborhoods” onboard, which I suspect is designed to make this enormous floating city seem smaller, somehow, although if small is what you’re after, why not book a smaller ship? Dumb question, I know. Cruising on this vessel is all about what you’ll tell the folks back home upon your arrival.

It’s as long as the longest Great Lakes freighters, and as tall as…can’t say. It looks weird and top-heavy, but that’s probably my uneducated eye. I can only say that, judging from the view from the causeway, I’d rather be towed behind in a dinghy than go aboard. I recall too many stories about norovirus, Covid, and what was the one that went dead in the water somewhere off the coast of Alabama a few years ago? CNN covered it like the Hiroshima bomb, and maybe that’s to be expected, as surely some of the passengers stranded aboard longed for the sweet fiery release of a nuclear explosion. I remember looking at the long-lens video shots of the ship shimmering in waves of heat coming off the Gulf of Mexico, and thinking: Fuck it, I’d go overboard and swim for it.

But people who cruise purely love cruising, and if that’s what they want, bless ’em. I wonder what the Finnish shipbuilders thought of this thing as they assembled it.

As I write this, the voters of New Hampshire are making their wishes known. This guy is surely one of them, and his story has been a minor social-media topic the last few days, and why not:

BEDFORD, N.H. — “This,” Ted Johnson told me, “is what I hope.” We were here the other day at a bar not far from his house, and we were talking about Donald Trump and the possibility he could be the president again by this time next year. “He breaks the system,” he said, “he exposes the deep state, and it’s going to be a miserable four years for everybody.”

“For everybody?” I said.

“Everybody.”

“For you?”

“I think his policies are going to be good,” he said, “but it’s going to be hard to watch this happen to our country. He’s going to pull it apart.”

As the story goes on, it’s plain this guy is lying. It’s not going to be hard for him to watch, whatever scenario this Northwoods idiot has in his head. He’s going to love it, plainly love it, because it’s going to punish everyone he dislikes, and that is a very long list.

It starts with his brother, from whom he is estranged, because what is family compared to Donald Trump, avenging angel?

Johnson started talking about “Russia-gate” and “Biden’s scandals” and Hunter Biden. What, I wondered, did Hunter Biden have to do with Nikki Haley? “She’s not going to hold anybody accountable for what they’ve done,” Johnson told me. “People need to be held accountable. That’s why you’ve got to break the system to fix the system,” he said. “Because it’s a zero-sum game right now. And to be honest with you, the Democrats are genius. They did anything they could do to win and gain power, even if they lie, cheat, steal. … What they’re doing is they’re destroying the country. Who could bring it back?” He answered his own question: “Trump’s the only one.”

Don’t want to over-paste here, but there is plenty-plenty more, and lest you think this guy is a trod-upon Deplorable, think again. He’s well-off, retired military with a great work-from-home job, a big house worth about three-quarters of a million, and more anger than you’d expect from a man living so well.

I used to think the people who said that MAGA was all about Trump giving people permission to hate others were a little bit dramatic. They weren’t. They flatly despise people they don’t understand, and it makes them feel good to do so.

And so they do.

OK. It has rained, drearily and near-freezingly, all the livelong day. School was cancelled last night, so no morning swim for me. So I’m feeling puffy and thinking I should maybe scrub a bathroom or something.

I hope you all had a pleasant Insurrection Anniversary Weekend. The observances around here were minimal, mostly a lot of coughing, mostly on Alan’s part. Me, I think I may be over it, but as always, more will be revealed. Probably Monday. (On edit: It is now Monday. Still sick, but not terribly so.) We watched “Maestro” and were underwhelmed. Made salmon. Did the laundry.

Now I’m killing Sunday night scrolling through Golden Globes photos. Some astonishingly ugly turnouts, even considering it’s the starter event for awards season and often a little off-the-wall. Tom and Lorenzo liked this, but OMG no, Bella Ramsey, I don’t care if you’re nonbinary, this is not a goddamn bowling league banquet:

They also loved this, but I’m a hard no on peplums pretty much everywhere:

That’s Da’Vine Joy Randolph, from “The Holdovers.”

We’re in full agreement on Meryl Streep, however:

(We both loved it.)

Moving on to my new Monday hate-read: Paul W. Smith, who’s a local talk-radio host published by The Detroit News, where he files no more than six or seven paragraphs of prose so slight it barely qualifies as elevator small talk between the 10th and 25th floor. What’s more, they put it behind a paywall, because lord knows only the readers who pay for the paper should have the privilege of reading this:

Aside from many religious related exclamations of “miracles” over the years, one of the most famous such exclamations/questions of our lifetime had to be on Feb. 22, 1980, when extraordinary sportscaster Al Michaels blurted out, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” at the end of the United States’ 4-3 upset of the USSR in the 1980 Olympic hockey semifinals in Lake Placid, New York. The U.S. then went on to win the gold medal.

I have a new miracle. In fact, I am proclaiming it the first one of 2024.

The miracle at Japan’s Haneda Airport. Japan Airlines flight 516.

That long windup in the first graf makes me chuckle, it’s so full of cheese — “exclamations/questions,” the precise date, “extraordinary” Al Michaels, the full quote, the score, the date again, the city, the medal. Because lord knows this obscure moment from sporting history needs to be fully illuminated in the opening sentence. I’m surprised he didn’t mention the movie, too.

Then, the technique I’m calling the Albom Drop: But I have a new one. [new paragraph] The new thing.

More cut-and-paste from the wire services follows, detailing the crash in Japan, etc. etc. And he still manages to get the miraculous escape, in which all the passengers survived, wrong:

The well-trained crew of 12, along with a veteran pilot with 12,000 hours of flight experience, led to a relative absence of panic while passengers remained seated awaiting instructions.

See, I differ on this. I’m sure the crew did their jobs. But what saved the 379 people aboard wasn’t the crew. It was the fact they’re Japanese, raised in a culture where following instructions for the greater good of the collective is a bedrock value. If Japanese passengers in a clutch situation are told to get up, leave everything behind and swiftly exit via the inflated slides, they’re going to do it without an argument.

Anyone who’s flown on an American airline knows exactly how this would have ended at one of our airports. Fifty people might have made it off, and the rest would have been barbecued in jet fuel as passengers clawed at the overhead compartments, trying to rescue their laptops, wallets or favorite shoes, angrily pushing back at anyone who tried to hurry them toward the exits, screeching I HAVE A WORK PRESENTATION ON THAT COMPUTER AND MY BONUS DEPENDS ON IT.

Eight paragraphs, due to the Albom Drop. If it took him 10 minutes to write, he took a bathroom break in the middle.

More photos? Yes. Here’s one for my Columbus readers. I was telling Alan some Dispatch stories the other day, and recalled the Bonhams, a married couple who presided over the Sunday books page. We only saw them one day a week. Fridays were payday in the newsroom, and in those days before direct deposit, it meant everyone came in on Fridays — all the regional correspondents, the farm reporter (who wore bib overalls, and was hilarious), and the contributors like the Bonhams, who assembled and proofed their Sunday page. They were…well, “old-fashioned” would be the polite adjective. They took over from another weirdo, whose singular accomplishment of note was keeping books he considered “dirty” off the paper’s best-seller lists. I don’t remember how he did it — it was before my time — but Marge, our bridal reporter, said he was furious when “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” sat atop the lists for months at a time. I don’t know if he asterisk’d or simply ignored it, but if you had a book that did unexpectedly well in Columbus during the 1970s, that might be the reason.

Anyway, the Bonhams were cut from the same cloth. One of my colleagues described their ideal volume as “Twenty Years of Steam Trolleys,” and that’s pretty close. But they also hankered to be authors themselves, and when the Dispatch agreed to print a collection of their columns in book form, they came up with the perfect title:

I didn’t buy it, or even nick it out of the library, no. I told Alan this story, which he found hilarious. A few days later, UPS delivered it to our doorstep. The used bookseller was clearly so thrilled to get this dog out of her collection, she threw in another small-press volume, something called “Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction.”

I’ve been paging through the Bonhams’ prose for a few days. My fave so far is “Some Books That Press My Anger Buttons,” which I’ll summarize for you: Books that tell the reader how to succeed with no thought of others; books that run down America; books with “vulgar scenes and bad language”; and “books that exploit celebrities.” This column contains my favorite line so far: An author I know, who is a good writer and is working on a book, is being pushed by his publisher to put a homosexual scene in the manuscript. “Never!” says the author. “Even if it means my book will never be published.”

Seeing as how I’ve gone on at length beating up on three writers, let me finish with some praise: This biblioholic received Zadie Smith’s “The Fraud” for Christmas, and is enjoying it very much. Happy Monday, all, and send healing vibes this way.