Hey, everyone. Just catching up on the comments from the last post, which are infuriating. Or rather, infuriating and sobering, and I’m speaking about Little Bird’s Medicaid issues and Sherri’s husband’s cancer care. Strength and courage to both of you. It so happens I just saw a social-media post by a friend and former colleague who works for Easter Seals in Indiana. It details the loss of services and benefits for a young woman with Down syndrome, one who lives in a group home and can’t take care of herself outside it. Down syndrome. I ask you.

All so that the Bezoses and Musks of the world can get a tax cut. Also, so we can wage a stupid, world-destabilizing war and build a ballroom. Well-done, America.

Sherri, best to you and your husband on this — and here I will deploy a term I despise — cancer journey. Everything is a journey these days. Your weight-loss journey. Your menopause journey. Unless it’s a season, which is also popping on those indices that track language. I hear it a lot from terminally online people making excuses for why they’ve decided to turn a blind eye to Tubby’s atrocities: It’s just that I have other things on my mind in this season. Ah, I see.

But all the good luck to Sherri and her husband. Immunotherapy is truly amazing. It’s why Jimmy Carter lived well past his announcement that he was receiving hospice care. My sister has a friend who’s lived so long (and well) on the immunotherapy drug Keytruda that she’s known as a Keytruda long-hauler.

OK, then.

Yesterday we went shooting.

I shot just OK, which I blame on the weather. I prefer to hit the sporting-clay range on warm winter days — around 40 degrees — when the walk between stations doesn’t feel punishing, and the sun, should it arrive, ditto. In my defense, I slept badly both Thursday and Friday nights and the humidity hit me hard. I was sweating so much my glasses wouldn’t stay up on my nose, which made my aim rather haphazard. Alan, on the other hand, worked out the rust on the first few stops and was hitting most targets cleanly by the end. Every time we do this I fantasize about getting a Browning over/under like Alan’s and practicing enough to get good, or at least better, at it. Then I consider the associated expense, and the cleaning, and the number of times I’d actually get out to a range, and think, nah. But it’s fun once in a while.

Also, I’ve watched enough cop shows and Tarantino movies that I kinda fantasize about one of those pump-action Mossbergs, decidedly not a sporting-clays gun.

Today we’re headed to a pool party, so I should probably pack a bag. Let’s hope it doesn’t rain.

And let’s hope for a good week ahead, with lots more GOP missteps as the midterms approach.

Today’s to-do list:

Update blog
Pay two car insurance premiums
Think about the 9/11 anniversary on Friday.

So, to job no. 1, then: A couple weeks ago I wrote a check — a paper check, like the senior citizen I am — to Abdul el-Sayed’s campaign, and dropped it in the mail. The U.S. mail, also favored by we Olds. I did this specifically to avoid the fundraising platform Act Blue, through which I donated to Jocelyn Benson earlier in the year, and now spams me relentlessly, on every single channel of communication. Sorry, Dem Candidate Running in Arkansas, I wish you luck, but I don’t have the resources to help everybody. Every plea is a puppy looking up at you from the kill pen. Please please please our fundraising reporting deadline passed and we’re so far behind, etc.

Meanwhile, I’m getting the same pleas from El-Sayed, mostly on social media, and my check is still uncashed.

How often do you write checks? I just looked at my register, and it’s…eight so far in 2026. It would be near zero if my city would stop assessing a $10 service charge for online payments.

Just paid the car insurance, because I had to get up to pee and lost my train of thought here. Might as well get that out of the way.

So here we are at 9/11. As so often happens these days, I find myself arriving back at a state of disgust with my fellow American, at least the ones who voted for Trump. Like everyone else who is paying attention, I heard about Tubby’s remarks earlier this week on the subject. First, how envious he was of “the man in the red bandanna,” because that man, Welles Crowther, was briefly more famous than him, and Tubby doesn’t like that. Next, the statement that he went to lower Manhattan to help with the cleanup, and perhaps most outrageous, that he was rescued by two firefighters as one of the towers started to collapse.

Here, the Guardian has a roundup of a couple more 9/11 lies he’s told.

It’s just mind-boggling, how every stutter and hesitation and misremembering by Joe Biden was amplified and beaten like a bass drum, and the New York Times — the goddamn New York Times — called Trump’s lies part of an “evolving — and often disputed — account of his actions on Sept. 11 and in its aftermath.” Evolving! And often disputed! I mean, I know the NYT isn’t going to screech LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE, but to call this “disputed” is underselling it, I’d say.

I’m so disgusted. Two notes from the weekend:

1) Alan was watching the Take 6 performance, an a cappella group, wildly popular, at the jazz festival Sunday night. Between numbers, one of the vocalists remarked on the venue’s proximity to Canada, right across the river. “I love Canada,” he said, and the crowd roared its approval, at a near-ear-splitting level. Which you’d expect. Besides the proximity, some of the audience no doubt works in the auto sector, and the Detroit companies sell more than 600,000 vehicles in Canada, now tariffed at 50 percent.

2) I was sitting at breakfast Monday, alone at the bar in the hotel restaurant, chatting with a couple roughly my age, locals. We were talking about the temptation of moving to northern Michigan post-retirement, but then the husband said, “The only problem is, if you need a decent hospital, you have to come back downstate.” And I replied that the current administration had only worsened that issue, what with the rural hospital closings amid lower Medicaid reimbursements. The husband said, “Well, they voted for that.” No sympathy. And then he identified himself as a “real Republican.”

I know this doesn’t mean he’ll necessarily be voting for Abdul, but maybe he’ll stay home on Election Day, or leave that race untouched. One can hope.

OK, one bit of bloggage: While I know that when an allegation of child abuse is made, authorities must act quickly and not quibble over the trustworthiness of the accuser, hoo-boy the more that we learn about the accuser in the Pete Buttigieg accusation earlier this summer, the worse it gets:

While acknowledging that the evidence shows that her false hotline tip resulted in an “intrusive investigation of an innocent individual and his family,” the prosecutor determined the woman was not “capable of forming the requisite intent to support a criminal conviction.”

The caller has a long history of alcohol abuse and mental illness, E. Nelson Chipman Jr., a prosecutor in Indiana’s Marshall County, where investigators determined the call had originated, wrote to state police in a July 29 email outlining his decision [to not charge her with a crime]. Her history includes “hallucinations and delusional thinking which includes frequently responding to voices only she hears,” he added.

…The woman, who was not named in the email, is from Alabama but was visiting family in Indiana at the time of her call about Buttigieg. During her “relatively short stay” with relatives, she was involved in at least three separate police encounters, according to the prosecutor. The incidents included an arrest for domestic battery, during which her blood alcohol level was reportedly 0.32, four times the legal driving limit in most states.

Lordy. With that, I’m going to eat lunch and read a book on this rainy but otherwise very pleasant afternoon. Enjoy yours.

This weekend I learned that the German chocolate cake is not German in origin, but was in fact named for an American baker, Samuel German, who came up with the recipe as a way to use the semisweet dark chocolate he had…formulated would be the correct word, not “invented,” I guess. You can’t really invent chocolate.

I learned this while baking one, for an impromptu party thrown for an ex-editor. I also learned that “impromptu” and German chocolate cake don’t really go together. It’s a recipe that, if you’re devoted to scratch baking as I am, is pretty damn complicated. But it was the birthday boy’s favorite, and so I did my duty. Then I left my phone behind, so I’m enjoying a phone-free Sunday morning, and that’s a very good thing.

But it can’t last forever. I’m heading back over to his apartment in a bit to pick it up.

Work this week will be pretty wild, as we tick down the days to the Detroit Jazz Festival, the world’s largest free jazz festival, a phrase I probably wouldn’t have added before I started working on the social-media team, but that’s social media — marketing, not necessarily journalism. However, the job puts me face-to-face with great musicians and I get to hear some wonderful music in the bargain, so it only feels like work some of the time. It’s a good gig for the semi-retired.

Which is, as usual, my way of advance-apologizing for spotty blogging until we wrap on Labor Day.

That little factoid about German chocolate cake is the sort that sometimes gets me called something like “the walking encyclopedia” when I step out of journalism circles, where everyone is a walking encyclopedia. It goes with the job. “Did you know Dolly Parton had a disco album?” I remarked in a non-journalist text string last week after she died, and it happened again. I can’t help it, as I sit in a firehose of information all day. But today I found myself looking at the fresh New York Times and Free Press on my kitchen table and said, “I’m out.” You have to unplug from time to time, or your brain explodes. (Plus I already read much of it in the last few days, where the Sunday content is trickled out over the web. When our excellent newspaper carrier retires at the end of the year, I may cut back on one or more of our newspaper subs. Or I may not. Advertising in the print editions still supports many of them. I won’t be a party to killing a legit news source, even if they employ Mitch Albom.)

That said, I found a few stories to share today before I clock out:

We all remember the OMG SATANIC CHILD ABUSE IN DAYCARE CENTERS panic of the ’90s, right? Here’s an absolutely infuriating story about a woman who was swept up in it, served YEARS in prison for a crime she never committed, was finally released, and later received a formal exoneration, which would enable her to get compensation from the state of Ohio. However:

The exoneration cleared the way for Ms. Smith to seek compensation. She fantasized about being able to help her children — to pay off her eldest’s house and car and hire a lawyer to extricate her struggling youngest from legal trouble and child support debt. Maybe there would be enough, she hoped, to fulfill her lifelong dream of visiting the Vatican.

Ohio law is intended to make compensation for exonerees straightforward and quick, especially when the local prosecutor poses no objections. Under the law, Ms. Smith would receive at least $1 million. Mr. Tomlinson told the court he believed she had been wrongfully imprisoned and deserved recompense.

But then she ran into opposition from the state attorney general, Dave Yost, who stepped in and had Mr. Tomlinson’s statements stricken from the record.

[The original prosecutor] Mr. Rosenbaum, for his part, advanced a new argument: The exoneration should not have occurred, he said, because it had cleared the way for Ms. Smith to sue him and several others involved in her prosecution.

They were joined in their opposition by Tony Cillo, a Republican who had recently defeated [the prosecutor who supported the exoneration] Mr. Tomlinson, a Democrat, in his bid for re-election. Mr. Cillo called the exoneration “one of the most flagrant frauds upon the entire state of Ohio” and a conspiracy to “acquit and pay” Ms. Smith.

Mr. Yost’s office declined to comment on pending litigation, and Mr. Cillo did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Rosenbaum said, through his lawyer, that he had “prosecuted all his cases with the highest ethical standards, and the prosecution of Nancy Smith was no different.”

Yost, and all the rest of these terrible, terrible people, are slimy pieces of crap. A long read, but worth it.

Speaking of terrible people, Lucian Truscott’s Substack on Pete Hegseth is worth your time.

Finally, Dolly’s death got me thinking about Whitney Houston, for some reason. “I Will Always Love You,” a sweet song about leaving behind a lover (or maybe Porter Wagoner — accounts vary), is one thing in her voice, and quite another in Whitney’s, whose every recording carries the subtext of look what a belter I am. Not only that, she ushered in an age of belters that we’re still living through. Some years back, on a long drive, I cued up a Spotify playlist of various versions of “Lush Life,” a sad song about drinking yourself to death over a broken heart. The more recent the recording, the more likely it is to be belted by a singer who seems not to have actually read the lyrics. What do you think about this? Discuss.

I’ll be here this week, unless I’m not. Carry on.

The pedestrian/cycling lane on the new bridge has been open about two weeks. The Derringers took their first shot at it today. The weather report was favorable, the schedule was clear, and so we did it.

It’s a beautiful bridge, still clean and sparkling under the blue sky. The suspension cables give you some great details in the pictures. And there are many made-for-Instagram angles.

But ultimately, it’s the sky and the water and the other people on the bridge.

That’s Alan.

It’s a long climb up, and I regretted not checking my gears first, because I’m stuck on the big ring on the front. I mean, I made it, but I was glad for the downhill. On the other side, we blew through customs in a trice. “You have any weapons?” the Canadian border agent asked. “We’re bicyclists, not bikers,” I said. And that was that. Then it was two more miles into downtown Windsor for some Chinese food, and the whole thing in reverse coming back home. My sense was the Canadian climb was steeper, the American climb longer but shallower. So pick your poison. It’s a workout either way.

But overall, I think this bit of infrastructure is brilliant. There was solid bike travel both ways, and plenty of pedestrians, too. I’m not saying it’ll have a major impact on cross-border tourism, but any way you can get people crossing the border is a good thing. Now for an entrepreneur to park a food truck on either side, and you’ve got the start of an economy. In another couple of years, who knows what can happen. All because you made it easy for people who don’t travel in cars.

Just one bit of bloggage today, called to my attention by my Ohio people. An ad for Vivek Ramaswamy, running for governor there. It’s almost like the whole state hasn’t been in the grip of the GOP for years now. I hate this timeline.

But let’s have a good weekend anyway. Summer is fleeting. Let’s enjoy it, even if it rains.

Sometimes people ask if I miss being a working journalist. The answer: No. No, no, a thousand times no. I still have major respect, even awe, for people who continue to do it in this environment, but I have zero desire to join them. Every so often I’m inspired to write something for others to read, similar to what I do here but less messy. I have outlets for that. I don’t feel the urge to do it more than every so often.

Forgive me. I’m having a lost day. Slept very very badly last night, missed my workout, feel like shit. Spent much of the day working without much spark or pleasure, feeling gloomy about everything. Stuff like this, from my city’s email newsletter:

Built with AI, probably ChatGPT. It’s simply amazing how quickly this style has taken over the internet. I see it almost every day, and so much of it is ludicrously wrong — the tennis ball about to hit the woman’s head, the weird jewelry hanging from her neck, the fact that isn’t Lake Front Park, the flag with the weird stars (because without them, we might not know where we are, right?) — to name just a few. “Game, Set, Play.” The leaves on the court. The overall busyness of it. Graphic designers are going out of business because you can send ChatGPT a press release, and it will vomit up something like this.

I figure, if you’re going to oppose data centers, and I do, you have to not do the things that require data centers, like turn perfectly understandable words into AI slop flyers.

But creativity isn’t entirely dead. You may remember that back in May or June, I wrote about the revived, very stupid idea to turn Belle Isle, currently a state park, into a commonwealth or protectorate or something, where very wealthy people could live tax-free, in return for being job creators, or something. It was an idea first rolled out in 2013, when the developer who dreamed it up self-published a novella set some years in the future, after Belle Isle had become the Dubai of the Detroit River. It was a very strange book, with an undercurrent of homoeroticism that was immediately evident to any reader smart enough to know the meaning of the word. Also, a monorail. And F1 racing.

Anyway, a local journalist, Jeff Wattrick, wrote several scathing stories about it for Deadline Detroit, back when the site was new and fully staffed. He most memorably called the Commonwealth of Belle Isle something like “the HOA from hell, with police powers.” When the idea was rekindled late last year, pegged to a b.s. poll and Trump’s idea of “freedom cities” and a very compliant media willing to do anything for content, Wattrick was no longer in daily journalism, but still a writer. He started noodling around with a fictional sequel to the original story, and ended up with a 60,000-word novel. He’s started trickling it out on Substack, along with shorter interstitials about related this and that, like the b.s. poll and other stuff.

“Belle Isle 2: Belle Isler” is a slow starter, because he has to deal with the problem any sequel writer has: How much to assume your readers already know about the world you’re building. There are some very niche humorous moments: A discussion of setting up an emergency blood bank goes sideways, because the idea of donating something and not getting fair market value in return is anathema on Belle Isle. But once the action really starts, it’s showing a lot of promise. It’s a Hiaasen-esque first draft, but I’m enjoying it.

I hope I sleep better tonight.

And so we await the heat. I did a lot of complaining about the cold spring, but the last fortnight has been lovely, perfect June weather. Warm enough in the afternoon, but not too, which is to say perfectly comfortable without turning on the a/c. That won’t be the case starting tomorrow (high of 86) and continuing through the week, including a very unseasonal 99 on Wednesday. A legit heat dome. Things won’t start to moderate until a week from Tuesday.

Oh, joy.

We’ll make it through, of course. Providing the power doesn’t go down or some other emergency doesn’t strike. There are pools and fans and air-conditioning. Lucky us.

Me, I went through training Saturday to re-start my career as a precinct poll worker, a prospect that fills me with both anticipation and dread. The Michigan primary is in August, and no one expects any surprises. November is a different kettle of fish, of course. As I sat through two hours of stuff I mostly already knew, I tried to concentrate on the idealism of the people who signed up for this duty and not the nefariousness of the scoundrels already undermining the process by sowing doubt among the pigheaded idiots who still — still! — believe that the 2020 election was “rigged,” as the president says over and over. The people pulling their strings are going to keep up the propaganda until November and beyond, with repercussions yet unknown. In other words, it’s very likely going to be ugly.

I’ll just do my part. New wrinkles since the last time I did this job: As ballot-box inspector, the person who tends the tabulator, I have to stand 10 feet away when a voter is casting their ballot, i.e., feeding it into the machine, and only come closer if they’re having trouble and need my help. Also, we’re now doing curbside voting in Michigan, so that situation could come up. That’s about it.

It’s funny, working the polls. An efficiency expert could have a field day with how things run; you could easily get the job done with a third of the staff. But that would actually increase the chances of shenanigans. The beauty of this Soviet-style workforce is, no one has hands on a ballot for longer than a few seconds. When I worked the absentee counting boards, we had teams of six, and one person’s entire job was to smooth the ballots after they were taken from the envelope, so they’d feed into the tabulator without problems. Another person was charged with opening the envelope. It was ridiculous, but also genius.

And still, ignoramuses (ignorami?) claim it’s crooked. They wouldn’t last an hour at the job, having their preconceived notions smashed like china.

What else is going on this weekend? Oh, did you hear about this? A man, upset by the murder of Alex Pretti, wrote a letter to Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE. It read:

You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher.

The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.

You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.

Harsh moral condemnation? Absolutely. A threat? No. That didn’t stop federal agents from coming after the writer, a Rochester, NY man, at his home and then, later, at his hotel in NYC, where he was staying with his daughter. And all this came after they did the same to a woman who’d posted the name of the ICE agent who killed Renee Good, even though the name had been made public by the Minneapolis media. In the latter case, they pressured the woman to take the post down (she didn’t). In both, they informed the people involved that “they may be in violation of federal law.” (They aren’t.)

Guess what the woman who posted the ICE agent’s name was doing when they threatened her? Working the polls in last Tuesday’s primary in New York. In other words, being a good citizen.

Finally, although this is a long essay, it’s worth reading, if you have any interest in ’60s radicals. It’s a review of Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s memoir, as the son of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. But it goes far deeper, analyzing political violence in that era, and held my interest throughout:

In the past few years, the American Left has reformed once again, largely in protest of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza. Like the Vietnam War a generation ago, those protesters have been aided by a central, clarifying conflict—there has been, relative to the DSA of yesteryear, a bit less getting sidetracked into pointless internecine conflicts over the progressive stack—and unlike the Weather Underground, they have been free of any organized Action Faction, of any real effort to cross from building occupation and protest into violence. Of course, this has not spared them the same accusations of pointlessness, unreasonableness, and bigotry for failing to adequately appreciate the glorious incineration of children by US taxpayer-funded bombs. Merely protesting outside of sites dedicated to the auctioning of violently seized land is treated as a kind of violence itself, met with the same yowls and fainting that would meet actual efforts to resist the flattening of Gaza City, the illegal settlement of the West Bank, or at least the United States’ insistence on providing political and material cover for the ethnic cleansing of a captive population. They are still called childish for believing that the world does not have to be this way.

But if it is childish, if any of this—the outrage, the horror, the belief that something must be done—is childish, it is only because a child could see it. It is only adults who find comfort in the reassuring sobriety of pessimism. I keep reading that these protesters—like us, like the left wing of the Weather Underground—have been seduced by anti-American propaganda, by the nefarious infiltration of subversive “ideology” into feeds and articles and schools. If you believe that, you must imagine 9/11 with a twist: hours after the towers fell, as FDNY and NYPD officers swarmed the scene looking for survivors, a second wave of al-Qaeda hijackers brought another plane held in reserve, crashing it into the smoldering ground to kill the rescue workers they had lured there with the first attack. This is ordinary business in Gaza and Lebanon. What dastardly “ideology” is required to find this fact appalling? What far more common ideology is required to shrug, to accept that this is the way the world must be?

OK, that’s enough. News from Hot City later this week, I hope. IF I SURVIVE…..

I was up very very early Tuesday, for a lifeguarding shift. There were caddis flies hatching everywhere, and I didn’t think my camera would catch them, but it did:

They’re fine. Don’t bite. Hatch out of the lake, fly around and die. The fish go crazy for them.

Afterward I swam. The morning was cool, the water heated. It was…heavenly. At least four of the other swimmers had caught the Grosse Pointe stop on the Barbara McQuade book-a-palooza, and were impressed by how great it was, how smart she was. We wondered where we are as a country. Then we swam some more.

I can’t tell you how much I resent having this asshole in my brain for, what? A decade now. And I suspect that even if he bites the big one tomorrow, it’ll be another decade, or longer, flushing him out of the nation’s system.

But that’s no way to start a pleasant Tuesday, is it?

I keep watching the Saga of the Reflecting Pool. As of late afternoon Tuesday, it appeared workers were putting fencing? Around the pool? And cops were rousting anyone who even went near the actual water. Josh Marshall with a few thoughts:

We’ve discussed in the past Donald Trump’s penchant for creating spurious backstories to justify his various building projects. We were told last year that presidents and executive branch officials had been complaining for decades — or centuries! — about the need for a White House ballroom. “For more than 150 years, every President has dreamt about having a Ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties, State Visits, etc,” he claimed at one point. And it took him to finally create it.

Rinse and repeat: these absurd fairy tales are always part of the Trump sales job. With the Reflecting Pool it’s apparently been in crisis for the last century. Only Trump is going to be able to fix it for good.

Everyone wanted abortion returned to the states too, remember?

Man, these Ukrainians are some tough dudes:

For several months last year, a Ukrainian housewife, 35 and lonely in a marriage that had gone cold, traded WhatsApp messages with a Chechen commander, Achmad, stationed somewhere in Ukraine’s occupied south. They wrote about their days, their disappointments, what they hoped to do when the war ended. She asked about the front. He told her.

“Send me a picture,” she said. “I want to see your life.”

One afternoon, he obliged—a photograph taken inside the barracks, of himself and another soldier grinning for the camera. Behind them, pinned to the wall, was a map of the compound showing the unit’s position.

The housewife did not exist. “She” was a middle-aged officer named Serhiy working for Ukraine’s military-intelligence directorate, part of a concerted effort to draw secrets from the men sent to occupy his country.

“Serhiy was great at flirting,” his commander told me. “Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice.” Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone.

Well, when the United States abandons you, sometimes you gotta choose a new path.

Another night of rough sleep last night, so I’m going to hit the hay while the sun still shines. Not hard to do around the solstice. A good summer lies ahead, I hope, for everybody.

Alan is a pretty fair birdwatcher, not the tromp-the-woods-with-binocs type, but the keep-backyard-feeders-and-notice-who-comes by sort. A couple years ago, after not seeing any nearby, we started spotting the occasional oriole.

Orioles, with their bright plumage, are worth welcoming back. But it was only a glimpse; Alan rushed out to buy a oriole feeder, but subsequent sightings were rare. Our little microclimate has been invaded by red-winged blackbirds, which is like having a meth family move in, and we figured they were keeping the orioles away.

This year, huzzah, the orioles returned, so we got the feeder out of the garage, loaded it up — with oranges and grape jelly, if you’re unfamiliar — and soon they were stopping by on the regular, along with other species that apparently enjoy high fructose corn syrup and fruit that grows nowhere near their native habitat, primarily sparrows and robins. Along with another freeloader:

GODDAMN FUCKING SQUIRRELS is something I hear often these days. The ubiquitous critters are very good at finding free food, and figured out how to access the orioles’ chow in about 15 minutes. This necessitated, first, the purchase of a ridiculous squirt gun, sort of a large syringe, that can shoot a few dozen feet. The problem is the squirrels are faster than the gun, and the best Alan’s been able to do is dampen a few. I think for an animal that lives outdoors, a juicy orange quarter is worth a wet coat.

So now he’s experimenting with relocating the feeder. It’s sharing space with the hummingbird feeder now, another desirable species we want to keep happy. It’s an ongoing process. I’ll keep you posted.

Another pleasant weekend. The weather’s been in the 70s, with at least some sunshine every day, and this is, to me, the very best summer. So I’m getting out when I can, which is often. Nothing like a spritz in the back yard at the end of the day.

Of course I followed the saga of the Reflecting Pool over the weekend, too. Don’t worry, Judge Janine is on the case!

Also, farewell to Alan Greenspan and Clive Davis. Happy Monday to all the rest of you.

A few weeks ago, a story sped by in the sluice, something about a company with a substantial valuation that had a workforce of two — the founding partners. Everything else the company did was carried out by AI.

I don’t recall much more about it, AI being a topic that’s simultaneously rage-inducing and terrifying, so I probably read the first three paragraphs and noped out. But it came to mind in recent weeks, in connection with a gas-station credit card of Alan’s.

It’s a negligible card in our credit constellation, kept mainly for emergencies or those back-in-the-day days when you’re driving on fumes but payday is 24 hours away. I always paid it off, never carried a balance. It would give me an updated credit score every so often, which I appreciated: 820. Still excellent.

But earlier this year, we started receiving mail, both e- and snail, informing us that the oil company was closing its proprietary credit-card operation, and migrating it to a branded MasterCard, overseen by an entirely different company, Imprint. Quick! Migrate your account now! Your old card won’t work after May 18! As the payer of the household bills and a person who has most of her shit together, I obeyed these orders. First attempt: No account recognized under this name. Second attempt, a few days later: Same. Third, fourth and fifth attempts, days after that: Same.

Time to call Customer Support then, a call immediately answered by a clanker, er, virtual assistant. The clanker opened by encouraging me to do everything online, where it’s “easier.” Otherwise, tell me in a few words what the problem is. You all know how this goes, because we’ve all been there. The questions aren’t understood, and you end up bellowing REPRESENTATIVE!!! before being shunted to an alleged human being, where “wait times may be longer than normal due to high call volumes.” Reader, I hung on the line for 20 minutes, my personal limit for cycling through hold music.

This happened twice, before I found the company website and started rooting around in the About section, until I found the page for media inquiries. I filled it out with my information, left a terse but not obscenity-filled note about the problem, and went for a bike ride.

An hour later, a call from the company, which went to voicemail, as I was still out touching grass. I tried logging in again when I returned. Mirabile dictu, my account was recognized. Moments later, I was assured that my new MasterCard was on its way. Shipped!

That was May 19. The card has not yet arrived. It hasn’t been activated, whew, but it’s somewhere between there and here, and true to the warnings, the old card no longer works. I tried calling Imprint again. Clanker, clanker, clanker. REPRESENTATIVE!!!! Sorry, no one is here to take your call, try again later.

Sorry for the long windup here, but would someone please tell me how this miracle technology is going to improve our lives? Gov. Gretchen Whitmer lost 99 percent of my personal support last week, when she happily participated in a ceremonial groundbreaking for a gigantic data center in Saline, south of Ann Arbor. It’s safe to say that virtually no one in the area, save the construction tycoon who got the contract, wants this thing. OpenAI had to threaten to sue the pants off the city to get it done. And the governor shrugged and picked up the shiny shovel.

The editorial-page editor at the Freep had a succinct column about this today. Probably paywalled, so here’s the heart of it:

And there was Sam Altman on Monday, smiling alongside Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at the site of a hyperscale data center in Saline Township ― a massive project that will suck down enough electricity to power 1 million households ― bitterly opposed by a lot of residents and forced into the community via lawsuit:

“We know what the current attitude towards data centers in the world is … but I think we can make this a great example … This could turn into the site where hundreds of millions of students around the world learn and get private tutoring. This could turn into the site where millions of small businesses can run their business with AI in the cloud. … Hopefully someday we’ll all read about some incredible thing AI has done for society … and there’ll be a good chance that it happened as this site came online.”

This is a new, rosier Altman, who lately has seemed to discover that telling people you’re working to usher in a “Terminator”/”The Matrix”-esque version of the future where humans are meat batteries for our robot overlords evokes a little pushback. (But hasn’t seemed to hurt the prospects of OpenAI, which is steaming toward a $1 trillion IPO.)

So this is my question, one that it’s absolutely insane I even have to ask: If Altman believes that his work could result in the end of humanity as the planet’s dominant species, why on earth is Michigan doing business with him?

Good question. The governor’s spokesman had no comment.

Meanwhile, back in my little beef with Imprint, I thought it might be fun to punch their name into the Google and ask for reviews. Hoo-boy:

My REMOVED card, which I have had for 32 years in excellent standing has been moved to this company named Imprint Payments. This company is now sending me texts saying I have to agree to having their REMOVED. I already have a Mastercard, so I am not interested.I have been trying to do two things for the past nine days:- Pay any balance on the account – Close the account I have spent 67 hours on hold (literally 8 hours a day) trying to get a representative to assist. I have tried doing it online but the automated system does not recognize my name or birthday or anything else to identify REMOVED now receiving texts saying my account payment is due. I have used the website asking for assistance and am on hold again today as I REMOVED does not matter what option you choose, the system either says I’m not recognized and puts me on hold to speak to an agent. The past three days after being on hold for three hours it just hangs up on you, so I start the process all over. This is definitely feeling like a scam now as I have no way of paying any balance and/or closing the account. PLEASE HELP!!!

If I had this person’s contact information, I’d suggest they leave a note on the media-inquiries page. Not that it’s done me that much good. Poking around that page, I notice most of the content is press releases and one story from Forbes. Which is now a content farm.

Probably a clanker edits it now.

This should not have been a surprise, but as I am Old, it kinda was. At one point in the late-lunch colloquy over the table Sunday, someone mentioned a photo most of us had seen but a couple hadn’t — our friend Dustin as a little boy, sitting on Alice Cooper’s lap. In a golf cart — Alice was playing golf at a course managed by Dustin’s father. (Dustin often says he taught himself to read by examining the liner notes on his parents’ albums.)

Anyway, I wanted to show the pic to the uninitiated, but I couldn’t remember when it made its way into my camera roll. Google Photos is my automatic backup, so just for the hell of it I typed “man in golf cart” into the search engine. Immediately, there it was:

But there were other choices, too. A pic from an early-morning swim in the Shores, with a maintenance guy zipping across the sunrise.

A pedal pub downtown. Two, actually:

Weirdest of all, this detail from the Diego Rivera murals at the DIA:

I guess I’ve known you can do something like this — type “steps” or “waterfall” and be served the photos that match. I did not know it could be this specific. AI, which I try to avoid using whenever I can, is kind of scary sometimes.

I wish I had more to offer this morning, but I read about the president’s most recent, peak-blatant act of corruption — this, of course — and was nearly struck dumb with fury. You want to know why Democrats are so angry? Because I expect my elected representatives, all Democrats, to be SHUTTING DOWN THE GODDAMN COUNTRY right now. And it doesn’t appear to be happening. They’re worthless, every last one.

Also, I have to get a haircut. Let’s get though this week, eh?