My old neighbor in Fort Wayne — a saint, and Kate’s second mother — has a business cleaning offices and sometimes houses. Houses were more of a sideline, but once when we lived here she told me a terrible story about one. It was a nice house, in a good suburban subdivision, maybe set back a bit from its neighbors. On her way out, she complimented the owner on how nice it was.

“Yes,” the owner said. “I’m glad we were able to save it.”

The story unfolded like this: For three years or so, it had been occupied by two teenagers, who’d been abandoned by their parents. The mother left first, perhaps due to some sort of mental crisis, and then the father was offered a job in another state. The teens objected to being uprooted, so the father said, fine, you guys can stay here on your own. He said he’d send them money, and they were told to behave themselves.

In perhaps the least surprising news possible, they did not do this.

Soon the house became known as a teen party venue, and over the course of the next couple of years, the place was trashed. One detail I remember was about the night some kid brought over several gallon cans of paint, which were enthusiastically flung out the windows, lids off. Paint streamed down the sides of the house, and onto the roof and driveway. By the time the teens finished high school, the house was nearly unsalvageable.

I wondered at the time what it would be like to have both your parents abandon you, and at such a time of your life. I wondered what happened to those young people, how they grew up. I wonder where they are now. I wonder what the cops knew.

This week a far worse case of child abandonment was revealed here in Detroit. Three children — a boy, 15, and two girls, 12 and 13 — were found living on their own in a condo where garbage, mold and feces had piled up over the course of four years. This is in Pontiac. The neighbors were stunned. Everyone else was stunned, too, stunned and amazed that this could go on so long. The kids said food was left on the front porch, usually by delivery services. The mother lived nearby, with another child. That child’s father said he had no idea about the other three.

And how was this discovered? The landlord hadn’t been paid rent for a few months, and requested a welfare check.

There are a lot of unanswered questions. Today the county prosecutor filed first-degree child abuse charges. But it’s pretty clear that when we say sometimes children “fall through the cracks,” those aren’t cracks, they’re chasms.

More will be revealed.

How can anyone do this to children. I just don’t understand.

OK! Let’s move on. My friends whose house I’m staying in this week have the same coffeemaker we do. We have a different configuration — thermal carafe with no burner FTW — but we both have Moccamasters. These are pricey machines, but make excellent coffee. Alan has us on a strict maintenance schedule for ours. My friends do not. However, I am here and this is one of the week’s services I provide: Cleaning the Moccamaster. I just finished it, and I’ll explain the process to you, if you too have a teensy bit of OCD about getting stuff sparkling.

Here are the miracle solutions, purchased from Amazon. The gray box is for the innards, the blue for the pot itself:

They’re just powders, and speaking of OCD, I’d like to have a word with Urnex about why one box contains three packets of powder and the other four, because you use them together and that is annoying to always have to be ordering one or the other. But whatever. The gray descaler goes first. You dissolve it in water and let it run through. Here’s the Before picture:

Yuck, I know. I usually let the descaler run halfway through, turn the pot off and let it sit and do its work. Turn it back on after 10 minutes or so and run it all through. Then three water run-throughs, and you’re ready for the pot cleaner. This is where it gets sexy.

The pot cleaner is the same process — dissolve it in water and pour it through. You would not believe how much oil and gunk it takes off. This is the first pass through:

That looks like coffee, but it’s just gunk. Dump it out, and send three pots of plain water through, maybe tidy up with a paper towel here and there, and here is the After:

This may be one reason a skills assessment and interest inventory I took in high school said I should maybe run a commercial fishery. There’s just something about a project like this that is so much more satisfying than, say, writing.

The weekend is appearing on the horizon, and I’ll be going home to Wendy. You all have a good one, and if you like good coffee, enjoy a cup. I think I’ll have two.

I was looking back over the archives and realized that two years ago I was doing the same thing I’m doing now, i.e. dog- and house-sitting for some friends who live nearby. They’re in the Caribbean; we had about seven inches of snow in the last 24 hours. So they’re tanning, and I’m shoveling.

I am promised a very nice bottle of rum upon their return.

As often happens in an unfamiliar house, something comes up. So I text: Please tell me why I can’t run the kitchen faucet. It’s not cold enough to be frozen.

Reply: Ok. I have to order you some double A batteries bc they need to be replaced soon

“You can’t run the kitchen-sink faucet because the batteries are dead” is some real HAL 9000 shit, but this is why I’ve lived this long, I guess. Apparently the faucet has some sort of battery-supported touch mechanism that allows you to turn it on without the archaic 20th-century gesture of “reaching for the faucet,” I gather. I was wondering how I’d make coffee until I remembered I could use the pot-filler faucet over the stove. How well I remember our shared contractor, Sergei, saying mournfully as he installed it: “People want, but they do not use.” Well here I am, using it, Sergei! Take that!

Otherwise, I’m working, eating my way through an insanely large quantity of pasta e fagiole (pasta fazool to you non-Italians) and trying to keep the new dog from climbing onto my head at night. The diabetic schnauzer crossed the bridge a few weeks back, but now I’ve got Penny to deal with:

She likes to be close. It’s going to be very very cold in about 48 hours, so maybe I’ll need a dog on my head. I’ll certainly need a faucet that can drip all night to stave off freezing, so good thing I got those batteries.

In other news at this hour, too much has happened in the last 72 or so to even keep up. I see our new HHS secretary wants to get people off of SSRIs. Says they’re harder to kick than heroin. As someone who’s taken them a time or two, I disagree. Anyway, let’s say “you first” and make Croaky kick his fondness for anabolic steroids and other muscle-juicing drugs. Maybe Cheryl Hines can also swear off injecting botulism into her face, too.

Now I’m getting personal. Time to sign off and turn to the to-do list for the week ahead. Maybe make sure I have extra batteries.

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.

Happy New Year to everyone, but especially you, my loyal readers, who have kept me maintaining this blog for, good lord, going on …24 years this month? It’s been that long? Amazing. We’ve lived through the Blog Craze, remained steadfast through social media, and who knows, maybe we’ll be popular again before cancer or random gunfire or a drunk/distracted driver takes me out. Not to be morbid, but I read the news yesterday oh boy, and I don’t see a lot to smile about.

That said, I’m still smiling. My 2024 one-word resolution, which I can’t remember, isn’t dong me much good, so I’m not making one this year. I have goals, of course, one being: Work less. Or rather, work less for others, more for me. The Biden stock market, decent luck and a lifetime of reasonably careful money management have left us reasonably comfortable, so I’d like to throttle back the freelance writing and write more for myself. Here, and elsewhere. So that’s the big one.

The others? The usual. Declutter. Death clean. Unfuck that which is fucked. Not to get too personal about our finances, but we’re investigating whether we can afford to bestow a chunk of cash on Kate to help her buy a house. Nothing fancy, but something that will allow her to start building equity on her own. As an all-1099 penniless artist (but a happy one!), she’ll never be able to do it on her own income, I fear, and it’s time for her to join the Sisterhood of Worrying About the Roof. As a boomer who benefited from an economic system that has since disintegrated, I have strong feelings about hoarding generational wealth. (I’m against it.) She’s our sole heir; might as well let her have some benefits now.

Entry level for a house in Metro Detroit that you don’t have to evict the raccoons from first: Roughly $200K. This is insane. But it’s the way we live today, so.

We’re taking the tree down today. I’m also pleased to report that yesterday’s ham-and-bean soup not only fulfilled the traditions of New Year’s dining, but it also used up the last of the Christmas ham, AND the accompanying Caesar salad did the same. As a Midwesterner, nothing makes me happier than using up leftovers. (Unless it’s buttoning up the house for winter.)

So, speaking of social media: A while back I joined a Facebook group about a concept called radical unschooling, just out of personal curiosity. I don’t radically unschool anyone, and am in fact a big believer in public education, but I’m also aware of how often it fails children who don’t fall into the mainstream, and while there are a fair number of utter crackpots in this group, there are many whose children struggle with structure. For the unaware, “radical unschooling” takes homeschool a step further, into basically trusting children will be led into learning by following their own instincts and interests. (Yeah, I know.) Kids stay home with a parent and, in the idealized version, go for a walk in a park and ask questions about plants and birds and wind and so forth, which the parent answers or, more often, directs the child to library books or YouTube videos or other resources that can answer them. But it’s pretty clear the idealized version doesn’t always pertain. One post asking for advice from the group was from a mother who went to a homeschooling fair and was scolded by a reading expert because her daughter was 8 years old and still illiterate.

“I thought she’d just naturally pick it up, and now I feel really bad, because this woman told me I’d missed a window!” she mourned. Whew.

A lot, and I mean a lot of the posts, suggest that someone’s child is neurodivergent, at least a little. And one topic comes up time and again: “Sensitivity issues.” One mother writes that her child won’t allow her to brush their curly hair, and now it’s matted. A child acts out in public, violently. Her kids have no self-control. The answer to many of these concerns seem to always be: The child has sensitivity issues. So my question for the group is: Who diagnoses sensitivity issues? I get the feeling lots of these parents aren’t into western medicine, so I doubt much of it is coming from doctors. Are sensitivity issues the new “oh I’m gluten-intolerant,” or is this just an extension of how we understand kids who are on the spectrum?

On to current events. :::opens newspaper page, slams it shut::: Ai-yi-yi, 2025. Let’s get through it in one piece.

The only thing I had on my calendar Thursday was a 9 a.m. appointment to give blood. Why do I still donate, knowing that the Red Cross emphasizes the “donor” part and never, ever talks about how they sell this donation? Eh, because people still need blood, and because I’m an adult enough to know that fresh blood is a commodity, and it would be foolish not to handle it as such. And the donation is at my gym, and the owner likes a good showing by members. People-pleasing is my business. Also, I’m HIV-negative and healthy, so: Shrug.

On the way over I drove past a few of the big trend in mid-level holiday decorations this year: The enormous inflatable. Regular inflatables have been around for a while, of course, but the enormous inflatable — big enough to approach the roofline on a two-story house — are new, the Christmas equivalent of the 12-foot skeleton. They’re sort of festively terrifying. I wonder what it must be like for a kid to look out the window and see a Rudolph or Frosty the size of a dinosaur swaying in the yard. But they’re catching on.

The problem, with it and all inflatables, is what to do in the daytime, the downtime for holiday decorations. Most people seem to turn the blowers off when the sun’s up, which leaves yards covered by what looks like holiday-colored parachutes, or maybe just dead snowmen and reindeer.

I got to the gym, spotted the blood crew on the basketball court, and started the routine. There’s always a lot of warnings and concerns about fainting, but I’ve never seen it happen. “So does anybody really faint?” I asked the phlebotomist.

“High-school kids. They go down all the time. And once one falls, they all do,” she said.

“But they’re young and healthy,” I said.

“And they never eat breakfast. Then they lie to us about how they ate breakfast. I asked one girl, ‘I thought you said you had a big breakfast. What did you eat?’ and she said, ‘Fruit snacks.’ I told her to eat a big lunch, and she came back and said she still felt sick. ‘What did you have for lunch?’ I asked. ‘A bag of apple slices.'” Damn, kids these days. I finished my bloodletting, drank a bottle of water, chose Cheez-its for my snack and headed out.

OK, Cheez-its AND mini Oreos. I wanted both salt and sweet.

It was a good Christmas hereabouts. I got many gifts, both thoughtful and practical, and Alan gave us a bike rack for our cars, one that slips into the trailer hitch and carries them on the outside, bus rack-style. That’ll be nice for exploring some car-free trails in the warm weather, maybe heading up north. I had a dream once of spending a big chunk of winter in a warm climate, taking both bikes and dog along, but after checking out seasonal rental rates for the Florida Keys (the only part of Florida I think I could tolerate), eh, maybe not.

Another thing I did over the last few days was watch a documentary — on Hulu, I believe — called “The Disappearance of Shere Hite.” Having remembered how “The Hite Report” on female sexuality rocked the usual suspects, it seemed worth a trot down memory lane. Hard to imagine her most newsworthy finding — the most women need more than PIV to reach orgasm — landed as hard as it did. But it did. And I came away thinking that younger women seem to have benefited from this. Far fewer men have Soprano-level opinions about oral sex, and thanks to Hite and many other people willing to talk about sex frankly, in general I think younger women might have an easier time of it than their grandmother’s generation did.

Then the Matt Gaetz report dropped, and: Nah.

Gaetz is a sleazebag of the first order, but we already knew that. I came away from it feeling for the girls who partied with him and his terrible friends. There’s always a lot of loose talk when something like this happens, that so-and-so “raped a child.” We can quibble over whether a 17-year-old is a child, and whether having consensual sex with a 17-year-old is rape. Personally, I don’t think it is, but I do think it’s fucking gross, and I wonder why there are so many girls that age willing to put themselves on websites like Seeking Arrangement and accept $400 to have sex with people like Gaetz and his friends at parties. They’ve been desensitized by porn, yes, but it takes more than that to turn a junior in high school into a prostitute. I suspect it takes lots of mom’s boyfriends, virtually no life of the mind beyond wondering what the Kardashians will be up to next, an obsession with social media and a few other poisons in the cultural stew to do it. (Although I also acknowledge there have always been girls like this, and likely always will.) Soon enough she’ll show up in porn loops with her hair in pigtails, pretending to be 15 again. She won’t fool anyone.

Gaetz, for his part, should be tarred and feathered. Failsons like him never are.

Don’t mean to bring you down this near-holiday weekend! It’s a unique liminal space, the only one of the year. Enjoy it.

For a few years, I would volunteer to work Christmas Day. For another few years, I was required to work Christmas Day. I never saw it as a big deal — when I was more connected to my birth family, we celebrated on the Eve, leaving the holiday itself as a yawning void, so might as well make some money and collect the chip to cash in later, for a holiday you really wanted off. The required-work years were all from home, so it was easy to keep my laptop open and check in every 15 minutes or so. Easy-peasy.

For a newspaper reporter, Christmas is either drudgery or tragedy. Go do a story on the B’nai B’rith volunteers who bring food to firehouses and hospitals — that’s drudgery, as is a bright on the slammed-for-hours Chinese restaurants, full of happy Jews enjoying their own Christmas tradition. Tragedy is the sort of thing that happens somewhere, every year: A fatal accident caused by bad weather or impaired driving. One year in Columbus a guy went to midnight Mass and while he was gone, his house caught fire and his entire family died. (Thanks, God!) Another year, an Alberta-clipper cold snap followed a snowstorm and broke water mains and other infrastructure all over the city. (You learn to carry a pencil at times like that, because pens freeze.) Yet another, a guy who’d robbed a bank and waited to be arrested, just to have a warm place to sleep, was bailed out by a softhearted man who didn’t think anyone should spend Christmas behind bars.

The underwear bomber — that was a Christmas story. As I recall, the editors of a certain Detroit paper couldn’t get a single reporter to answer the phone and roll to the airport to gather whatever fact-shards could be found there. (Damn caller ID!)

In…1979, I believe, unless it was 1978, J.C. and I went to a movie on Christmas Day, then headed to a local radio station, so he could record a review for a show he was contributing to. We got on the elevator with another station employee, who looked at us and said, “It’s a rule: The Jew works Christmas.”

Whatever your tradition, whatever your employment, I hope that if you have to work, someone brings you a nice warm plate of something good to eat, and it’s either as busy or as boring as you like. Maybe bring a book to read.

As for me, I’m reading about Matt Gaetz, who the incoming president of the United States thought qualified to be the top lawyer in the country. That person — incoming president, that is — also is going on again about buying Greenland.

The next four years are going to be long and miserable. But let’s enjoy the last good Christmas in the last good year. I’ll be back sometime after the holiday.

I’ve been doing this so long I can no longer remember if I’ve told a particular story before, but a quick search suggests maybe not*, so what the hell. Old women are allowed to repeat themselves.

I saw a Saturday Night Live sketch on office Christmas parties, which reminded me of the terrible ones we had in Fort Wayne, with one exception. You’d think a newsroom could throw a fun party, but we were cursed in some way. The job of organizing was usually given to the executive editor’s secretary, and her budget was limited. One year we had the worst chicken of my life — it seemed to have been boiled. The entertainment was a local elementary school choir, who didn’t sing Christmas songs but music that had been written for a non-denominational holiday play nobody knew, so the songs made no sense and weren’t very good, either.

She also invited a high-school girl who’d won a state speech championship to perform for us. She chose a dramatic dialogue where she played both parts, one an older, old-fashioned black woman and the other her younger, angrier daughter. The daughter was trying to convince the mother that white people never had her best interests at heart, but the mother was sweet and religious and believed it would all work out, praise Jesus. The climax, for me, came when the daughter exploded, “Mama, they call us n—–s behind our backs!” Ohhh-kay! That’s getting us in the holiday spirit!

The next year we, as in my colleague Adrianne and I, went to management in October and suggested we’d be willing to take over the job. We spent the paltry budget on deli platters and found a local bar with a private basement room. It was a little small for our purposes, but that only led to the convivial feeling. Open bar until the money ran out, then cash bar, mix tapes of bumpin’ holiday music, and we all had a great time. The night ended with a men’s room singalong of “The 12 Days of Christmas,” only with improvised lyrics. I remember “six urinals flushing!,” and a designer standing near one would do so. Some years later, we did something similar, with a karaoke machine. I recall an overnight sports guy, whom some privately called Boo Radley, wowing us with his interpretation of “Friends in Low Places.”

But the last one I endured there was pretty grim. It was held in the newsroom, over the lunch hour. Management kept finding new depths of cheapness, and I think they contributed a wan, unappetizing ham, not even Honeybaked. The rest was potluck, and the entertainment was a staffer with a keyboard and his own repertoire of Christian music.

All my employment after that was at small outfits, so the holidays could be observed in restaurants, at a couple pushed-together tables. They were fine. Lunch, a drink or two, and then home. At Deadline Detroit, we made it a dinner, at a Mexican restaurant with very good food that also allows guests to carry in their own booze, i.e. a perfect venue. The boss picked up the check. He probably spent more on six or seven of us than cheap-ass Knight Ridder, a major corporation, did on that stupid ham.

The parties in Columbus were much more in the traditional spirit of a holiday bacchanal — heavy-pouring bartenders and a quiet little library clerk throwing up in the hallway.

All this by way of saying we saw this movie, “Office Christmas Party,” on Christmas Day 2016, and it was very funny. Great cast.

* on a subsequent search, I see I did tell some of these stories, in 2005. Some details are different, but the gist is the same. Oh, well. It’s what old ladies do.

Tell us a Christmas/holiday office party story if you’ve got a good ‘un, eh?

A few years ago, one of Michigan’s plentiful dumbass state legislators introduced a bill to do away with private-employer vaccine mandates, specifically the ones hospitals commonly have that requires their employees to get flu shots and the like. I wrote a story about it, and what stands out to me is what the co-sponsor said when I asked him what his intent was:

“I’m not a strong believer in mandatory things. If it’s against someone’s religious beliefs or something like that, there are people who just don’t believe in things like that.”

There you have the Tea Party mentality, c. 2012: You can’t make me.

What I also remember about that piece is what a doctor told me:

“Nowadays, we’re trying to convince people who are already locked into their opinions, and also don’t have historical perspective on history of these diseases,” said DeGraw, who is a paid consultant for two pharmaceutical companies. “A child born in 1912 had a 1-in-5 chance of dying by its fifth birthday. Even my parents’ generation knew someone who died of these diseases.

“Pertussis is a great example,” he said. “In the ’30s and ’40s, before the vaccine, 7,000 to 8,000 kids would die in the U.S.(from whooping cough). Now, in the last decade, you only get a couple dozen.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alleged incoming health czar in the Trump administration (although there are whispers he’ll be Chris Christie’d before January), says he’s not anti-vaccine. He just wants people to have choice, and for them to be fully informed about vaccine safety. I expect we could be heading toward a state of affairs similar to getting an abortion in a red state pre-Dobbs: Of course you can get your child vaccinated, but you have to sit through a video first, in which the “vaccine-injured” will tell sad tales about how their child was fine, fine, perfectly fine, and then he was vaccinated for measles/mumps/rubella and AUTISM. Still want that shot, mom? After all, most kids survive measles just fine.

I don’t want to keep harping on the medical damage we’re facing, because we’re facing so much other damage. Someone suggested that we could see a national school-voucher program in this administration, which will hollow out public schools. They’ll still exist in some fashion, for kids in Detroit or Chicago or wherever, and the Vance children and others of their wealth and class will attend elite private schools, but the vast middle class will be sucked into shitbag voucher academies. They’ll learn that God blessed America alone among nations, that slavery was really just an immigration program with a work requirement, and that higher ed is unnecessary — we need electricians, too! Girls can learn womanly skills like cooking, sewing and housekeeping, and boys will go to shop class.

Needless to say, teachers won’t be unionized, and they’ll be paid shit, while a few voucher-school tycoons grow very very rich. We’ll send money to homeschooling parents, too, and I’m sure that will work out just dandy.

I think I have to listen to some podcasts about movies or whatnot. This isn’t healthy for me or anyone else.

I went to Columbus this weekend, on family matters, and treated myself with the Crazy Mama’s 45th reunion party. Crazy Mama’s was a nightclub I used to go to, along with Jeff Borden and some others, back in the day, which is to say, the ’80s. It was spectacular; at a time when rock music had become bloated and boring — Kansas, anyone? — Crazy’s DJs played new wave, rockabilly, punk and other music that you never heard on the radio, and that just required you to get up and dance. And when I say “I used to go there,” I mean I was dedicated: For a while I was splitting my sleep in half. I’d stay until closing time, go home and sleep three or four hours, get up and go to work, then come home and crash for another three-hour nap before I left for another night of fun.

Pro tip: This is not a sustainable lifestyle, but I was very young.

I’d kinda-sorta planned to go with Borden and another friend, but Jeff had some family matters of his own and so that plan fell apart. I don’t mind going to stuff like that by myself, however, and the music was great — the Whiskey Daredevils, Willie Phoenix, Screaming Urge and the Fleshtones. I had a good time.

But now I’m back home, and it’s starting to look like family matters may bring me back to Columbus sooner rather than later. (I’m being oblique here for a reason.) They say life is a shit sandwich, and everybody’s got to take a bite. I just wish the whole country wasn’t being served a giant platter of them.

Oh, forgot to add: Here’s a podcast featuring Kate. You can listen on whatever platform you prefer. The podcast is called Outer Limited, and it’s produced by a music journalist here in Detroit and another bassist with a local band. The focus is Detroit music. She sounds good!

Someone I know wondered this weekend whether the story about Arnold Palmer that Trump told this weekend came from his good buddy Jack Nicklaus. Not that we’ll ever know. Another reason to despise the Golden Bear. You Buckeyes know that Nicklaus is probably the most famous native of Upper Arlington, the Columbus suburb where I grew up. (There’s also Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s, but he moved in later.) Jack is MAGA now, so I don’t feel bad about disliking him.

Or rather, Jack supports “the best candidate.” I expect he’ll consider the guy who talked about Arnie’s shlong the best. The guy who posted this last night:

Check out the package on that piece of fan art. MAGA is always going on about “stolen valor.” You’d think this would bother them. You’d think wrong.

Some of the early reports about the Arnold Palmer remarked didn’t say what Trump actually said. There were a few headlines like this, from the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (thanks, Jason):

I think even the NYT referred to “memories” about Palmer, but fortunately the rewrite desk sharpened it up:

Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday spewed crude and vulgar remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania that included an off-color remark about a famous golfer’s penis size and a coarse insult about Vice President Kamala Harris.

…His monologue culminated in lewd remarks about the size of Mr. Palmer’s penis. Moments later, Mr. Trump gave the crowd an opportunity to call out a profanity. He went on to use that four-letter word to describe Ms. Harris.

“Such a horrible four years,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Biden-Harris administration, as he surveyed the crowd of hundreds of people in front of him. “We had a horrible — think of the — everything they touch turns to —.”

Ugh. Oh well. Short shrift today, because my weekend was pretty full, but unexceptional. A Friday-night movie (“A Clockwork Orange” at a revival house), a Saturday bike outing, a Sunday bike outing, a welcome-home dinner for Kate, who’s been on the road this past week. Then I had this really weird dream just before I woke up, and it fogged my head for hours. Now I gotta get to work.

So I hope your week isn’t starting like mine.

‘Twas a rough night last night. Bad insomnia, probably not helped by a late dinner of Alan’s chili, but never mind that. Slept horribly, which means today is a low-effort, low-achievement day, but oh well. And I missed my morning swim. But! I managed to unload the dishwasher, drank two large glasses of water and prepared a decent lunch, so here’s hoping tomorrow will be better.

In the meantime, new music from Shadow Show here.

And proud parental moment here, via WDET-FM here in Detroit:

Logrolling for my daughter out of the way, here’s one reason I slept badly: Trump’s dance party last night in Pennsylvania. It made me renew my vow, made periodically over the last few years, to not forgive any MAGAts in my extended circle, should they come groveling for mercy through the wreckage of the American republic. I know, that’s not Jesus’ way, but Jesus doesn’t have to live here, where I do, gnawing my nails to the cuticle that we might actually have four more years of this bullshit. Even if Trump loses, I expect weeks, maybe months, of civil unrest. It’s going to be ugly. My older friends remind me that the 1960s were in many ways worse, and they’re correct, but this is now. And every day, EVERY DAY, Trump is telling us who he is, and if that is who you are? Fuck off, all the way off, and don’t leave a forwarding address.

At the moment he’s being questioned by a braver soul at the Economic Club of Chicago, that is to say, braver than the limp noodle who questioned him in Detroit last week (see previous entry). If I were the “beautiful woman” he pointed to during this exchange, I’d get up, go home and take a Silkwood shower, followed by a dip in a mikvah, followed by a sage-smudging ceremony:

Trump points out a “beautiful woman” in the crowd and says to her of migrants, “they will look at you and kill you” pic.twitter.com/3r5vSEH6Vl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 15, 2024

So you can see, it’s just not a good Tuesday. Imagine if Biden — hell, if Harris — behaved the way Trump did last night. The New York Times would be sounding klaxon horns and calling battle stations. Instead, we have this:

Donald J. Trump was about 30 minutes into a town hall Monday night in suburban Philadelphia when a medical emergency in the crowd brought the questions and answers to a halt. Moments later, he tried to get back on track, when another medical incident seemed to derail things, this time for good.

And so Mr. Trump, a political candidate known for improvisational departures, made a detour. Rather than try to restart the political program, he seemed to decide in the moment that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned — and, it appeared, for himself — to just listen to music instead.

“Known for improvisational departures” — I ask you. Grandpa is sundowning.

Later:

Mr. Trump generally returns to his planned remarks after medical issues at other events. On Monday, he seemed more uncertain how to proceed. After offering what appeared to be a closing statement and having his campaign play a James Brown song, Mr. Trump suggested taking another question or two. As the crowd cheered in approval, he said, “let’s go,” but then said he’d play “Y.M.C.A.” and send the crowd home.

But after “Y.M.C.A.” ended, Mr. Trump seemed a little perplexed. “There’s nobody leaving,” he said. “What’s going on?” The audience cheered, and so the music kept going, as Ms. Noem stood awkwardly by, and many in the audience seemed unsure about whether the event was over.

I need to take a break from this stuff. Between this, the Israelis cooking refugees in tents and the Tigers losing, there’s no reason to open the paper (literally or figuratively) this week. But I’ll try to be back one more time before the end of it.