If you grow up in Columbus, it doesn’t seem weird to have at least three friends whose parents have turned their rec room, or guest bathroom, or whatever, into a shrine to the Ohio State Buckeyes — the buckeye wallpaper, the block-O toilet seat lid, maybe a framed picture of the coach of the moment. When a baby girl is born to Mr. and Mrs. Gray, and they name her Scarlett Ann, netting them a cute story in the local media, it just seems…normal.

It’s a measure of how far I’ve come from Columbus that when the Free Press did a story last week about all the businesses along High Street had covered any Ms in their signage, I was able to finally say JFC these people. (Borden and I used to hang out at a High Street club called Crazy Mama’s, which I suppose would have to be called Crazy Xaxa’s. The basement place next door would be Xister Brown’s Descent. Down the Street? XcDonald’s.)

This is stirring up memories of working as a reporter in Columbus, and how it intersected with OSU. In Michigan it’s the couch blazes in East Lansing, but in Ohio, it can be anything. My favorite was the two city council members whose romance went sour: The spurned boyfriend drunkenly broke into her apartment in the middle of the night, and rousted his ex and her new lover out of bed. I believe he threatened them with a barbecue fork he found in the kitchen. He made them do Script Ohio stark naked, then stabbed their waterbed to death before fleeing the scene. This prompted a city editor, a legendary drunk himself but one blessed with a Shakespearean actor’s voice and diction, to crow to the newsroom at large, “Ah yes! Miss Coleman’s companion swung his baton while she enthusiastically dotted the I!” Newsrooms were fun places, back then.

I usually don’t take a side in sports contests, because it seems to be an E-ticket to misery. But man, I have to say: When Michigan put the smackdown on Ohio State on Saturday, it felt…wonderful. Underdogs, in hostile territory, all the sports yakkers calling them sacrificial lambs – and then they not only win, but win decisively? It was nice.

The chips and dip weren’t bad, either. I see why people get into this.

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving, and I apologize for being absent. There was work to do, my back is still KILLING me, and ever since I got this new laptop, your comments are no longer coming to my email. A few will slip through, but it isn’t a steady stream rolling across my desktop. I have to check the dashboard, or just dial up the site like anybody else. It’s no biggie, but I get behind from time to time.

Anyway, it was a good weekend for me — holiday, birthday, OSU-beatdown day.

How about a meme, then?

Ha ha.

OK, enough gloating. Occasionally, I surfaced to check out the news. And whaddaya know? Nothing changes:

Republican lawmakers have largely remained silent in the wake of former President Trump’s dinner with antisemitic rapper Ye and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, reviving a tactic they frequently relied on during his presidency.

Wonderful. Just wonderful. I should go back to bed.

Hope the week ahead is good for everyone. I’ll be here more frequently.

I’ll say one thing for this Twitter business: It sure makes me never, ever want to own a Tesla.

Seriously, the return of Trump last night only shows how ridiculous this whole affair has become. At least we have the pleasure of Trump declining to rejoin, ha ha, because his own worthless social network is doing so well. When Musk took over Twitter, a number of people jumped ship and a couple urged me to do the same. I’m thinking: Nah. This shit is too funny. If it fails, it fails, and I’ll read more books. That’s a good thing.

Sherri commented on the last thread: If Elon runs Tesla the way he’s running Twitter, Tesla vehicles are a clear and present danger on our roads, because the man is demonstrating that he knows nothing about software engineering. As the wife of the former Detroit News autos editor: Can confirm. How the NHTSA lets Tesla get away with so much of the shit they’ve pulled — there are many examples, but the biggest is calling their driver-assist technology “autopilot” — is simply mystifying. He’s the living embodiment of one of my favorite Peter Arno cartoons.

And we awakened Sunday to yet another mass shooting. I hope that whoever the Colorado Springs gay-bar patron was who disarmed and pistol-whipped the perp, stopping the massacre, that she was a drag queen.

So the week of thanks begins. Congratulations if you’re off. I, unemployed and quote-unquote retired, have two interviews scheduled — not heavy lifting, I grant you — and the usual complement of errands and tasks to complete before the Day. I’m mostly done, but I forgot Cool Whip, the secret ingredient for my trashy-but-delicious Waldorf salad, and I’m-a get a big block of cheddar to perhaps whip up something new for the before-bird snacking. And Friday’s my birthday. Sixty-damn-five. And you may ask yourself: Well, how did I get here? One year at a time, that’s how. Rewatching the video at that link, though, I gotta say I don’t wish I were younger. (Just a pain-free 65.) We had some great music to enjoy when it was fresh. We still have great music, but it’s much harder to find. It reminds me of after I moved to Fort Wayne, and would subscribe to the Village Voice, just for the music coverage, in search of something, anything to listen to that wasn’t classic rock. Now everyone outside of a few large cities has to do something like that. Because so many radio people are simply awful.

Maybe we’ve discussed this before, but long before newspapers ruined themselves by trying to be everything to everyone, radio did the same. I’ve probably told this story before, but when I briefly worked at WOWO, they had a consultant who gave them top-secret, proprietary, must-shred-upon-completion playlists. Or maybe he just looked over the ones they had and made suggestions. Whatever it was, he vetoed the Carpenters’ “Goodbye to Love” as too edgy for WOWO’s conservative, very middle-of-the-road listeners. Remember that song? A slow ballad, Karen’s voice warbling in self-pity over her broken heart. The Carpenters? you’re asking, as I did. The consultant explained that there’s a fuzz-guitar break in the middle and whoa, too-too much. The program director pushed back, and he said OK, you can play it, but not in the morning.

Blow that pathetic example out, add shock jocks like the two guys in your town who make dick jokes and the extremely loathsome Randy Michaels, and you see why I’m no particular fan. You public radio people are exempt from this judgment, you know that. But if you ever ran a rock station, and rejected the B-52s for more Led Zeppelin in the playlist, you know who you are.

The weekend was good. Saw Kate play at the Magic Stick with her second band. She joined us in a small area with seating for the Protomartyr set, and I saw something even more impressive: Her handling an old creep who wanted to chat her up. Toward the back side of middle-aged, wedding ring, standing too close to my 26-year-old daughter, who was wearing a short black dress and bright red lipstick. It was pretty much this situation exactly:

I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back, the guy was there but she was gone. “He had stank breath,” she said later. Of course I made a meme:

OK, time to go. Painters are here to do the final-final bit of Home Improvement, and I have one of those interviews in…23 minutes. Ciao!

Longtime readers know that my husband and daughter share a birthday, and it was yesterday. I usually make a meal and cake, but for two years now, we’ve met at a local restaurant and brought a bakery cake. And it’s been pretty great. We gave Kate a white-noise machine to help her sleep, and she gave Alan this:

That’s a bottle of artisanal mescal with a scorpion in it. A scorpion for a Scorpio. Ha ha.

She bought it around Halloween, in Mexico City, where she and the band had a gig. Someone was asking how they’re doing? Pretty good. They just finished their second album, it’s mixed and mastered, and they’re looking for a lawyer/manager/agent, all that crap. Kate continues to play in a second band, GiGi, and they’re opening for Protomartyr tomorrow night, and if you don’t know those names, well, you don’t live here and haunt the half-dozen or so venues where bands like them play.

And man, for some reason it’s been a bit of a week, probably because I went to Canada for two days at the beginning of it. When I got back, I realized I’d have a buttload of stuff to do, and it was all complicated by sudden-onset, near-crippling lower back pain. To all you armchair physicians: I doubt it’s a disc. I just woke up feeling like the Tin Man, so sore that if I’d dropped a $100 bill, I’d have let the wind take it rather than try to pick it up. Today I forced myself to swim 45 minutes, and everything seemed to loosen up a tad. Walked the dog, got another tad out of it. And now I feel 42 percent better.

Personally, I think it’s my body getting cheeky. Just a couple of weeks ago, I said to myself, “It’s funny. I never get headaches and I rarely get backaches. Two days later, a days-long headache and now this. I had to see my doctor on another matter and told him about my headache. He felt the back of my neck and said it was like kneading walnuts and suggested a massage. Perhaps I should spend retirement investigating alternative medicine treatments, getting a little more Woo about the old bod. Acupuncture, massage, infrared saunas.

But enough about me.

I’m not a subscriber to Business Insider and won’t become one, but you can get the gist of this story from the Twitter thread: Put simply, a tech-centric version of the evangelistic “quiverfull” movement is quietly trying to fill the earth with their self-determined genetically superior offspring.

(1/5) A few months ago I got a tip: A source told me that Elon Musk had "more children" than the public realized. So I did some reporting, and… it was true! He'd had twins with one of his employees. But I always felt like there was more to the story. https://t.co/vX9VmVBwfX

— Julia Black (@mjnblack) November 17, 2022

I’m so old — how old are you? — I’m so old that this reminds me of the Nobel laureate sperm bank that one of these literal wankers put together in the ’70s, correctly sensing that large number of women would grow weary of singles’ bars and would seek to become single mothers by buying a shot at a clinic somewhere. As I recall, this literal wanker managed to get three of them (Barack Obama had yet to win, dammmmmn guuurrrrl), but the place had gone limp (sorry) by 1999. New York magazine tells us:

In 2001, journalist David Plotz began an investigation for Slate into the donors of Graham’s clinic, and what had happened to their prized semen. (He riffs that he earned the nickname the Semen Detective, and later published a book on it, titled The Genius Factory). All in all, not a single baby ended up inheriting Nobel DNA, yet 217 kids in total were born from the sperm bank. Each donor was identified in sperm-bank catalogues by a color — fuschia no. 1, for example, or coral no. 36. After Plotz put out his call on Slate, he began publishing articles like “A Mother Searches for ‘Donor White,’” connecting with kids looking for their dads, as well as starting to reach the men who had donated to Graham’s sperm bank.

What he discovered was that just a few of the donors had produced a whole lot of offspring; for instance, one donor had produced as many as 30 kids, and that was just the ones Plotz knew about. He also found that the donors had been kind of a mixed bag. One man had falsely gotten into the bank by claiming to have an IQ of 160; another was the unremarkable son of a Nobel Prize winner; another was an Olympic gold medalist. As it turns out, after he failed to get the Nobel-winning sperm he sought, Graham began searching for donors on college campuses and recruiting young scientists, as well as hunting for “Renaissance men … donors who were younger, taller, and better looking than the laureates.” (In keeping with the sperm bank’s eugenicist legacy, all of the men were white). By the mid-1980s, Graham was accepting pretty much anyone who volunteered. “Forget about Nobel laureates; the Nobel sperm bank was taking men you wouldn’t wish on your ex-girlfriend,” Plotz writes. Ultimately, the sperm bank became kind of a scam, with women continuing to seek its services based on an illusory reputation that it couldn’t live up to.

If you’re still wondering whether you can get your hands on any of this mystery sperm, I’m afraid you’re out of luck; the bank closed in 1999, shortly after Graham’s death, and the frozen vials of sperm were incinerated.

Maybe humanity is getting dumber. After all, we dreamed up this silliness. And as anyone my age could tell you, sooner or later everything falls apart. And have you seen Elon Musk in a swimsuit? Eee-yikes.

OK, I think I’m going to call it a week. Happy weekend all, and let’s slide into the holiday weekend.

Now this is what I needed: A few days away. Hello from Canada:

This is the view from where I am, just outside Leamington, Ont. That’s Lake Erie. Typical November sunrise, nothing too special. I’m disappointed my phone couldn’t catch the colors — such as they were — no matter how I monkeyed with the exposure. I might be suffering iPhone 14 envy, having seen some of the amazing photos you lucky ducks are posting. But the ol’ 8 Plus is doing just fine otherwise, so I’ll endure.

Anyway, we’re on a getaway, me and a girlfriend. Just a couple days spent enjoying an off-season waterfront Airbnb, seeing the sights. You know what sights there are to see in Leamington? This:

A terrible picture, I know, but: Greenhouses. Thousands of acres of them, most built in the last decade or so. Leamington was already the Tomato Capital of Canada, and then they figured, hey, if we put glass over those fields, we can grow a lot more. And so they did, and this is why the produce terminal in Detroit is the first stateside stop for many of the vegetables consumed in my part of the U.S. (A fair amount of cannabis, fully legal in Canada, comes out of this area, too.) Last I checked, there were about 3,000 acres of greenhouses in this neighborhood, with more planned, although the light pollution is pretty serious, and the growers and environmentalists are trying to work things out. I can tell you that after the sun went down last night, there was still a band of light at the eastern horizon and as for the west, visible from my bedroom window, it was perma-sunset: That pink glow behind the trees, all night long.

The tomatoes they produce aren’t as good as homegrown, but they’re a lot better than the winter tomatoes I remember. I use them in salads in January; they’re fine. And I really enjoy the spinach and lettuce, peppers and cucumbers we get from here.

Today, I’m thinking Point Pelee for some bird-watching. Also, more sitting around in the hot tub, and also perhaps another couple episodes of “The Crown,” a show neither of our husbands is into. (I do recall Alan’s priceless line from when Charles and Diana were splitting up, mid-’90s. I explained it all to him, and he said, “No wonder he spends so much time fishing.”)

A bar cheeseburger may be in my future today, too. With a locally brewed lager. O, Canada.

I don’t have much bloggage, mainly because I’m still marinating in serotonin from the election. You have your own takes, but I think this is an interesting look at what might transpire in 2024. Beyond that, I think I’m going to turn my focus to Thanksgiving, and all I have to be thankful for.

You guys. I’m going to be scarce, or scattered, around here the next few days. For lo, election time is upon our nation and I volunteered to not only be a day-of challenger, but also a pre-processing observer, figuring, I’m retired, what else do I have to do? And not too much was a dumb answer, because chores and jobs are starting to pile up.

This weekend was the monkey wrench. I signed up for lifeguard training, and had to do the whole course again because I let my last certification lapse. It consumed the weekend like a ravenous beast, and isn’t even over. (The pool where we were supposed to do the deep-water stuff had mechanical problems, so that part is TBA.) But. I found time to attend two fun parties Saturday night, and had a couple drinks with a friend Sunday, so it wasn’t terrible. I’m just behind on everything else, relearning the lesson of my youth: Laundry will wait, but a fun party won’t.

I start ballot pre-processing observation this afternoon. And then it’ll be a sprint into Wednesday.

I’m feeling pretty confident about Michigan, a couple of nail-biter races notwithstanding. I’m not feeling good about the rest of the country, though. A doomy friend says these are the last good years in America. I’m increasingly thinking he’s right.

So to fill out the post, some pix from this weekend.

Learning infant CPR in lifeguarding class:

Me with a friend’s real baby and her grandmother at one of the fun parties. (He and his wife bought a convent and have filled it with massage therapists, facialists and artists. No one knew much about the elk, other than he was a native of Saskatchewan.) I’m dressed down because the earlier party was outdoors and extremely casual.

Finally, look what Alan found while vacuuming out a cold-air intake in our foyer. It’s in pretty good shape for having spent half a century in the bowels of our house:

If it’s worth anything, let me know. Otherwise I’m buying a lottery ticket.

Good week, all. I’ll speak up when I next surface.

(One last holiday-related post, sorry. But I think many of you can relate.)

I love Airbnb. Also, I hate Airbnb. It makes the sort of travel we’ve been doing in recent years not only affordable, but possible; there’s no way we could have stayed deep in the medinas of Morocco without it. Our last place, in Essaouira, was magical – it looked like the set of a French New Wave movie. The feral cats knocked on the door to the courtyard at 2 a.m., and were somehow charming rather than annoying. The host stopped by one day, and we got into a conversation about the difference between vegetarianism and veganism, both of which he found baffling. In other cities, Airbnb has given us space to spread out, to make simple meals, to take refuge in a place other than a hotel. On a couple of trips, traveling alone, I’ve done the single-room-in-a-house deal, and had not only comfortable lodging but made great connections.

However. When we met friends for dinner in Barcelona, I told her we were staying on a particular street in La Gracia. “Our Airbnb was on that street too,” she replied, and as we walked around the neighborhood, the signs were ummistakable: The doorbells/street mailboxes that all carried the same label, because a management company was renting them all. The “Tourists go home” graffiti everywhere. Airbnb had so infiltrated that charming neighborhood that locals were being priced out of it.

This isn’t a matter of opinion; short-term rentals are driving housing shortages in desirable cities everywhere. And problem rentals, like those in any hot American city where young people hold destination bachelor/bachelorette parties, are a headache for everyone. A friend here lives in Midtown Detroit, another area with skyrocketing rents, especially in Midtown. On a recent stroll down his own street, he said, he realized all the closest blocks were thick with Airbnb. In Detroit.

In west Michigan, a few communities have tried to enact local ordinances governing them, which prompted an influx of Airbnb lobbyists to the capital, who had little trouble convincing the GOP-controlled legislature that their allegedly foundational belief that small government knows best is wrong, at least in this case. Now there’s a law that says you can’t restrict short-term rentals in your own community.

And not all of our experiences have been great. We had to wrangle with our Madrid host, who took one flat and turned it into three, and stuck us in one that was decidedly not the one in the photos when we booked. He moved us after a couple days, which was fine, but the two unpictured flats were likely inescapable in a fire, something I think about a lot, especially in Europe. Our friends who met us there had an even worse experience, arriving to find their building wrapped in scaffolding, and workmen clambering around on it with very loud power tools, starting at 8 a.m. They bolted for a hotel after two days.

VRBO, I’m told, is better, but it’s much rarer, too. (We rent a VRBO cottage in northern Michigan, far from neighbors, and our cleanliness and care with the place inspired the owner to offer to deal with us directly, waiving the VRBO fee, etc. I treat rentals the same way I treat my own house.)

In the end, I feel like Airbnb is one of those supremely irritating move-fast-and-break-things products of Silicon Valley, where some guy says hey I got an idea, more guys shower him with money, and a few lucky people walk away multi-millionaires, while the rest of us get to sort out the inevitable consequences.

Nevertheless, we’ll probably use it again. Sigh.

How was everyone’s weekend? Ours was fine. We’re still working on the house, or rather, Alan is. (I provide domestic support in the form of laundry and meals.) Cooked some, shopped some, went out some. Shadow Show opened for another all-girl band at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, which was an excuse to get out and about. Talked a lot to a random kid sitting nearby, who told me all about his Birthright trip to Israel. I found a reference to a previously unknown biography of Warren Zevon, which prompted me, the Zevon superfan, to look it up on Amazon. Used the look-inside feature to get a sense of it. The epigraph alone put me off:

It didn’t improve. Here’s something I’m always telling writers I edit: Don’t use a quote to repeat something you just said, not in a quote. Do they listen? Maybe some do. This guy didn’t:

And now the same writer is doing a biography of Elmore Leonard. Guess I’ll be giving that one a pass, too.

So. The week ahead yawns with possibilities. So far I’ll be…meeting with a Medicare guru, schvitzing with a swimming friend, taking online training to be a poll challenger. I was going to work the absentee counting boards, but all the training — required by law — was held during our time away. My job is literally, LITERALLY, pulling the stubs off ballots, but I can’t, by law, work without being retrained in how to pull the stubs off ballots. Remember, Donald Trump told you Detroit was a lawless place, “so corrupt,” and that, my friends, is bullshit. So I’ll help out this way.

Good week ahead to all. Don’t use quotes to repeat something you just wrote! Use quotes to illuminate and add dimension to what you just wrote!

Here’s a random Spain pic for you, the high altar in the cathedral in Toledo. Notre Dame looks like a simple country church compared to this place:

You know I’m writing this stuff down not just to please you folks, but to get it down before I forget, right? The photos are mostly for your entertainment, though.

Anyway, some random notes as I wind up the week. I may think of another one-topic post over the weekend, but one thing I learned this trip: I am shit at keeping hand-written notes. I find it easier to dictate notes via talk-to-text, with all the screwups that involves. Those authors who write in longhand? My hat, it is doffed.

For now, though, some randomness:

Covid

We got our third booster a week before we left, and here’s my confession: I behaved like a guy at an orgy who left his condoms in the car, but doesn’t want to miss any of the fun. Which is to say, I was shamefully mask-less in many venues, although I wore one in others. In my defense, I offer only two weak arguments: First, that when it comes to me and masks, heat is kryptonite. If it’s hot outside, I find it very hard to tolerate even a light, surgical-style mask. And it was plenty warm in both cities while we were there. It wasn’t a problem for outdoor stuff, and most of what we did was outdoors, but in some venues I just said fuck it, I’m taking my chances. The biggest test was when we saw Brian Jonestown Massacre at Sala Apollo in Barcelona. It was a packed, SRO house, and we were right there in the thick of it. No way — for me, anyway — to wear a mask in the press of bodies.

Which leads me to the second reason: Spain seems to have decided Covid is over. We did the same thing we did pre-France, that is, uploaded all our vax records to a government health agency and got the QR code for our phones, but not one venue asked to see them. Hardly anyone was wearing masks, so we followed the crowd, combined with some common sense. Packed subway cars, yes. Museums and airy spaces, no. I saw a man reading a newspaper on a subway train, translated the front-page headline as “Covid cases down” and thought, the vaccination rate here is 85 percent, I’ve got a fresh one in my immune system, let’s see how they work. And they worked fine. We didn’t get Covid.

Although we both got colds. In Madrid. My first since 2020. It slowed me down toward the end of the trip, but my knees were starting to hurt from all the walking, so I’ll take it.

(And if you think the colds may have been post-vax Covid, we tested. Both of us, twice. Negative.)

Getting around

I can’t say enough about how wonderful it was to be in two cities with excellent public transit, one of the great shames of Detroit (and many other cities). We went everywhere via subway and bus, and rarely had to walk more than 500 meters or so from station to destination. And don’t get me started on the high-speed rail. The driving distance from Barcelona to Madrid is 383 miles; we covered it in a little over three hours. The day trips to Segovia and Toledo, both 55 miles from Madrid? Twenty-seven minutes via rail. There are days when it takes longer to get to downtown Detroit, and I’m inner-ring.

But the U.S. didn’t invest in high-speed rail, because Reasons. Meanwhile, a horror story unfolded in Michigan the same day we took one of those trains: What was supposed to be a 5.5-hour ride from Detroit to Chicago via Amtrak ended up taking 19 hours. The engine broke down, the power went out, the toilets wouldn’t flush and they had no lights. One guy got off at Gary and paid an Uber $200 to take him to his hotel. Others just jumped off and walked to a nearby highway to wait for rides. Unreal. If there were a fast-train link between those cities, it would have taken about 90 minutes.

And a note about shoes: I didn’t make the mistake I made in Paris, i.e., try to be “fashionable” like the locals, and get by with a pair of close-to-the-foot Italian sneakers. I packed Adidas and my Chacos, which, thanks to “Hacks,” I now know are coded lesbian sandals. Don’t care. They saved my aching feet.

Eating. And drinking, of course.

You leave Spain with your belly full, thinking: Tapas. Tapas are the way to eat. Sit down, order two or three, plus a liter of sangria, and just nibble. Still hungry? Order another. The whole small-plates thing has a fan in me.

As for drinking, did you know — I did not — that the gin & tonic is basically the national drink of Spain? They drop the “and,” however, so you just ask for a “gintonic.” I had a misadventure with gin decades ago, and have only slowly been making my way back to it in recent years; even the smell made me nauseous. The Negroni was my first step, and after watching Alan down a few Spanish gintonics, I took the plunge. The experience is very different there; the waiter arrives with a huge balloon glass with two big-ass cubes in it, along with the bottle. S/he pours the gin from the bottle in front of you, then leaves you with your own personal bottle of high-end tonic. The high-end is crucial — no Canada Dry crap, but British-made Schweppes or Fever Tree, made with real sugar and not corn syrup. And damn, but they are so, so good. Cheers:

Note the juniper berries. True connoisseurs find that shit silly.

We’re running long here, so let’s get to the pix then, shall we?

The aqueduct in Segovia. Two thousand years old, built with no mortar. It can still carry water, the guidebooks say. Damn, them Romans knew their shit (although it’s been restored twice):

One for you Buckeyes:

The Sagrada Familia in afternoon light, and some detail from outside. Those are the shepherds, worshiping the Christ child with a lamb and at least one pigeon:

Dogs ride the subway with everyone else:

And with that, I’ll draw the post to a close and wish you all a fine weekend. Back next week.

The best thing about slow travel is how random encounters can send you off in new, interesting directions. It so happened we were talking Me Too stuff at a waterside cafe in Barcelona, and I was explaining to Alan about Bill Cosby and his quaaludes when a British voice from the next table asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have a few of those tablets on you now, would you?” Ha ha. But long story short, this nice British couple said they were doing a Spanish Civil War walking tour the next day, I said that sounds interesting, and they dropped an easy-to-remember name: Nick Lloyd. Just google it with Spanish Civil War, he said, and he’d come up.

And so he did. I booked us for one a few days later. What a great recommendation.

Going in, I confess my Spanish Civil War knowledge was sketchy. Franco and his fascist nationalists on one side, Republicans on the other. Franco won, stayed in power for decades and became a Saturday Night Live one-liner. Guernica. That was about it. On my seventh-grade trip to Spain with my mom, I remember soldiers on every other corner, well-armed and scary-looking. This would have been in the early ’70s, before Franco died.

So much I didn’t know, so our three-hour walking tour with Nick and about a dozen others was a revelation and unsettling. Unsettling why? Let’s start with the roots of the conflict, when King Alphonso XIII abdicated in the global depression of the early ’30s. The second Spanish Republic formed and adopted a constitution with a lot of crazy progressive ideas, including: Spain should not have a state religion. Women should have the vote. And so on. The moving forces behind it were left-oriented — communists, anarchists, labor unions, republicans. A loose coalition of nationalists, monarchists, the Catholic Church (of course) and other right-wing groups decided this was too much, and a coup began in July 1936. Strip out the objections in Spain and replace them with the trans menace and critical race theory and about a dozen other hand-wringing topics Fox News likes to get on about, and, well, it starts to sound uncomfortably familiar. The Spanish war had no Mason-Dixon Line; it tore apart towns, neighbors, families. The scars remain today, and sometimes it seems they’ve barely closed. Sound familiar?

I won’t run through the whole tour, but it was fascinating. Yes, Atrocities Were Committed on Both Sides, but I’m still giving the edge to the fascists who allied with none other than Adolf Hitler. Here are children playing in a square in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. See the pitted walls at the far end? Those are scars from a bomb attack carried out by none other than the Luftwaffe, supporting the fascists. The death toll in this strike was something like 169, all civilians:

(God, Spanish children are so cute. You see them out and about, and they’re playing like you expect kids to play, with soccer balls and jump ropes. They must get phones at some point, but I didn’t see any carried by younger kids.)

And then there was Guernica. Hitler: “Hey Frankie, I got a new idea for carpet-bombing a civilian population. Mind if I practice in your neck of the woods? Maybe on a market day, for maximum casualties?” Franco: “Sure, be my guest. There’s this pain-in-the-ass Basque town I’m thinking of.”

We saw the painting in Madrid. When was the last time a work of art got people talking like Picasso’s “Guernica?” Maybe “Piss Christ,” or Robert Mapplethorpe with a bullwhip up his ass.

Nick had a lot of ephemera from the period. This was an ID case or dues record or something from the workers’ union, which included a fair number of anarchists.

They never did get their shit entirely together, but they produced some nice graphic design.

Military footwear. Imagine marching miles in these:

Anyway, without deep-diving into George Orwell, etc., here’s one story that’s in most of the guidebooks to Toledo, which we visited during our Madrid stay: A nationalist commander, Col. Moscardo, was under siege at the Alcazar of Toledo in the earliest days of the war. The Alcazar was a fortification at the highest point in town; it started as a castle, then bumped through the centuries as this and that, and in 1936 was a military base, and the Republicans wanted the munitions it held. Col. Moscardo was holding them off when a Republican commander telephoned Moscardo’s office and told him they were holding his son, Luis. If he didn’t surrender in 10 minutes, Luis would be shot. Moscardo asked to speak to his son, and is said to have told him, “Commend your soul to God and die like a hero.” Luis handed the phone to whoever was holding him, and Moscardo said, “I don’t need 10 minutes. I will never surrender the Alcazar.”

It was a long siege, but Moscardo was as good as his word. (Luis was not shot immediately, contrary to newspaper accounts at the time, but was disposed of a month later with some other hostages.) For some reason, this struck me as the most Spanish Civil War story ever. Half a million people died. Moscardo’s office is preserved as a museum exhibit now. Here’s where it happened:

Anyway, while we’re on the subject, a pivot to some bloggage, Fiona Hill interviewed in Politico about the Ukrainian situation. Elon Musk is the Henry Ford of the 21st century, very smart in some areas, criminally dumb in others:

Reynolds: We’ve recently had Elon Musk step into this conflict trying to promote discussion of peace settlements. What do you make of the role that he’s playing?

Hill: It’s very clear that Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin. There was a conference in Aspen in late September when Musk offered a version of what was in his tweet — including the recognition of Crimea as Russian because it’s been mostly Russian since the 1780s — and the suggestion that the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia should be up for negotiation, because there should be guaranteed water supplies to Crimea. He made this suggestion before Putin’s annexation of those two territories on September 30. It was a very specific reference. Kherson and Zaporizhzhia essentially control all the water supplies to Crimea. Crimea is a dry peninsula. It has aquifers, but it doesn’t have rivers. It’s dependent on water from the Dnipro River that flows through a canal from Kherson. It’s unlikely Elon Musk knows about this himself. The reference to water is so specific that this clearly is a message from Putin.

Now, there are several reasons why Musk’s intervention is interesting and significant. First of all, Putin does this frequently. He uses prominent people as intermediaries to feel out the general political environment, to basically test how people are going to react to ideas. Henry Kissinger, for example, has had interactions with Putin directly and relayed messages. Putin often uses various trusted intermediaries including all kinds of businesspeople. I had intermediaries sent to discuss things with me while I was in government.

This is a classic Putin play. It’s just fascinating, of course, that it’s Elon Musk in this instance, because obviously Elon Musk has a huge Twitter following. He’s got a longstanding reputation in Russia through Tesla, the SpaceX space programs and also through Starlink. He’s one of the most popular men in opinion polls in Russia. At the same time, he’s played a very important part in supporting Ukraine by providing Starlink internet systems to Ukraine, and kept telecommunications going in Ukraine, paid for in part by the U.S. government. Elon Musk has enormous leverage as well as incredible prominence. Putin plays the egos of big men, gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they’re just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin.

My friend Lynn texted before we went to the bullfight one night in Madrid. “If you see a worthy bull, bet a few Euros on him for me.” I thought what I’d already told her more than once: You don’t understand. The bull never wins.

Bullfighting is, to put it plainly, animal torture for human entertainment. There’s really no way around it. A bull is turned loose in a ring and harassed, mentally and physically, for 20 minutes, at the end of which he is killed, more or less humanely, if you discount the previous 19 minutes and change.

However. I’ve never seen a real* bullfight, and neither had Alan. I was curious. Not going wouldn’t have saved the six bulls who died that night, and I’m not going to take PETA’s word for anything. Also, Culture. So we went to Las Ventas — the arena that is, to bullfighting, what Michigan Stadium/Ohio Stadium/the Rose Bowl is to college football. We were going at the tail end of the season, and the program indicated novillados. Novices, facing off with younger bulls, i.e. the minors. But that meant lower prices and thinner crowds. Fine with me.

The subway there was packed, mostly with older men, many carrying bags with seat cushions inside. Everybody got off at the Ventas stop, and we made our way to the ticket window. Rick Steves said choose section 8 or 9 for shade and the best view; the toreros tend to push the action to that side of the arena, to reward the premium seats. So we did, and found a stadium scene familiar to anyone who’s been to one, anywhere, but maybe more stripped down. The refreshments were beer and blanched almonds, sold by vendors in the stands (the fighting runs roughly 6-8 p.m., and no one eats dinner that early in Spain). We found we could rent seat cushions for 1.50 Euros, and good thing we did, because the seating was cold and hard:

Note: No railings. If you fall, you fall. People come here to see blood, and it might as well be yours.

There was some sort of hall of fame in the hallway leading to the seats. Don’t ask me whether these guys were notable sires, or just put up a hell of a fight; I’m a stranger here myself:

This was the crowd close to starting time. Not huge, but better than the Detroit Tigers did, many nights this season:

The show started at the stroke of 6 with the traditional parade of toreros, picadors, support staff and even the mules who will drag away the carcasses:

They make one lap of the arena, take their places, and the first bull is released. He’s already pissed off — I believe they stick him in his hump first to get him in a bad mood. The toreros work as a team, with half a dozen or so hassling him with bigger capes, to rile him up. These guys are matadors in training, so at this level, minor-minor. They show a little style, but they know their place, even though they’re all dressed the same:

The torture really starts when the picador comes out. This guy’s job is to draw the bull to attack his horse, and the first time this happened I gasped, but all the horses seemed prepared, and unharmed by it. Once the bull makes contact, the picador stabs him right in the hump. This wound gets the bull to lower his head for the rest of the fight, which is safer for the humans; makes a goring less likely. I’m adding a video; I hope it works for most of you, and if it doesn’t, I’m sorry. Enlarge it to fullscreen:

After the picadors come the banderilleros. Their job is to further inflame the animal, by placing twin picks in his hump (stylishly!). They face the animal, it charges, and they place the banderillas with a leap. This happens three times. If you see a classic bullfighting print, the sticks you see hanging from the bull’s shoulder? Banderillas.

Then the final act begins, at about the 10-minute mark. The matador comes out with a smaller, red cape — the muleta — and starts the tercio de muerte. The muleta is braced with a sword, but it’s just a prop. The matador’s job at this point is to tire the bull out, but do it fancy-like, showing his bravery. (We called our favorite, of the three guys who performed that night, Mick Jagger. He struck all the traditional poses, inching forward, leading with his pelvis, that stuff that gets the girls hot.) And then he exchanges his toy sword for a real one, comes back, sights down it dramatically, and charges in for the kill. In this stage, he needs to jump into the air, so the sword can come down between the shoulders, ideally to the hilt and severing the aorta or piercing the heart itself. Mick Jagger accomplished it on his first bull, but the second was kind of a disaster; he needed three tries, which was probably expected from a novillado.

At that point, the bull goes to his knees, theoretically, and a final guy comes in with a dagger and gives him a stab just behind his head, severing his spinal cord. The animal pitches over onto his side, dead. The end. Cue the mule team.

It’s pretty brutal, yes. But we watched the whole thing. Afterward, it was time to wave farewell to Las Ventas and have some dinner. Alice, let’s eat! Who wants a hamburger?

I’m glad we went. I eat meat, so I can’t claim any purity around killing bulls for human ends. I’m not sure an American slaughterhouse is a much less distressing way to go. In one of Jim Harrison’s many memorable turns of phrase, he described cattle as giant machines to turn grass into shit. But they feed us well in the end, so.

If you want to know more about all of the above, I suggest this post on Spanish Traveller, where I got a lot of the terminology, at least the Spanish phrases.

On and as for that *asterisk, above: This was actually my second trip to Spain. My mother took me to Malaga and the Costa del Sol for spring break when I was in…seventh grade, I think. It was March, but there was a “bullfight” put on for the tourists down there somewhere. It wasn’t even the season. Some steps were skipped — no picadors. I don’t know who the matadors were, maybe some waiters picking up extra coin. But the bulls were killed and, get this, ears were awarded. Even I could tell this was (sorry) bullshit staged for people who read James Michener’s “Iberia” and took it to heart. Getting an ear — cut from the dead bull and given to the matador for a superior performance, by order of the judge and seconded by the crowd, is an infrequent occurrence. Getting two ears is very rare. The highest honor — two ears and a tail — is even rarer. Here’s a funny note on the semiotics of this gesture. Needless to say, no ears were awarded the night we were there, not even to Mick Jagger.

The lazy person’s credo: If you wait long enough to do a job, often someone else will do it. And lo, it has happened.

OK, not really. But it turns out none other than Neil Steinberg was in Spain at the same time I was — in Madrid, even — and while we didn’t meet for coffee, we did come away with many of the same impressions of the place, including this conclusion:

Spain is a majority-Catholic country where abortion has been legal nationwide for a dozen years. As for trans issues, a court there found that barring transgender minors from gender changes is unconstitutional. Sure, they have their own troubles — police in Madrid feel obligated to cluster around the entrance of their downtown headquarters, brandishing shotguns and assault rifles. We’re not quite there, yet.

So I don’t want to be one of those Americans who goes abroad and starts running down home. America is still a great place to live, despite all the efforts to turn it into a zombie cult. But we are more of a backward-looking nation in the grip of religious fanatics than Spain. Which strikes me as news, and not good news.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The trip was wonderful. I’d only have changed a few things about it. Stayed in more cities, maybe. But we landed on this land-here-move-minimally travel strategy for a few reasons, including:

** Every time you move cities, you lose a day. That was the lesson of Morocco, with its slow trains. Just too much time spent on them, not enough time strolling medinas.

** The point of these trips isn’t to bolt from one tourist draw to the next, but to settle in and try to get a real sense of a place. To live like a local, to the extent that’s possible — to cook on induction hobs, make coffee in their comical low-tech gadgets, to view a rainy day not as a catastrophic disruption to a set schedule, but a good opportunity to read for a few hours, maybe with the terrace door open to street sounds. To try, if only for a few weeks, to be less American. Also, to eat gelato.

It works, mostly. I don’t like induction cooking, but I understand it. Moka pots are pain in the ass, and don’t get me started on the washing machines, which would give even Barbie a headache (“How are you supposed to wash more than one outfit at a time? And why does it take three hours?”). That said, if we go to Italy next year (please recover, retirement nest egg), we’ll do at least three cities, maybe four. And eat lots of gelato.

But the trip had many, many pleasures. We were able to meet up with American friends, twice. We became, if not experts, at least confident users of two urban mass-transit systems. We heard music, went to a rock show (Brian Jonestown Massacre, Barcelona), viewed masterpieces, saw bullfights, walked Barcelona’s civil-war sites on a spectacular history tour, saw lotsa Gaudi, Rubens, Goya, Picasso. Sweated profusely (it’s still summery there, despite the locals shivering in puffer coats), ate one million olives. Broke my gin curse*, which an evil witch put me under when I was in my early 20s and overindulged on the stuff. Oh, and we were burned — lightly, but I have holes in my clothing to prove it — in a native festival, in Sitges:

It was some saint’s festival; there are a lot of those in Catholic Spain. We met some people at a local bar, dressed identically, carrying drums, obviously pregaming. Was something going on, we asked? Why yes, there was a parade starting in a couple hours. There’d be “giants”…

…followed by marchers he struggled to describe in his limited English, but turned out to be what every Detroiter recognizes and calls Big Heads (they’re in our Thanksgiving parade)…

…and then there’d be diablos. Even I know what a diablo is. We stuck around; trains run back to Barcelona every 20 minutes or so until almost midnight, so why not. And after the giants, and the Big Heads, came the diablos, led by groups of drummers like our new friends. They were dressed in burlap with devil-horn heads, and carried sticks with several whirling, spark-spitting, loud-banging fireworks, which showered the onlookers in whoo-ouch-that-smarts stinging tastes of hell:

Others carried figures — a dragon, a lizard — outfitted with their own fireworks. When a shell was spent, they’d reload.

Barcelona has a similar festival around the same time called La Mercé, but getting this close to it would have required the dedication of a Macy’s Thanksgiving hard-core fan. In Sitges, we were able to be right in the thick of it, crouched in a doorway, yelling at each other DO YOU SMELL BURNING HAIR? IS IT MINE? So much fun.

That was the first week. It was a good month.

My takeaway, similar to Neil’s, came during our Spanish Civil War tour, and it’s pretty simple, as befits a simpleton like me: We’re on the same path. But I’ll discuss that later this week.

One final note: I’m writing this on a brand-new laptop. I shut down the old one before we left, and left it on the charger. I’ve been leaving it on the charger all the time, because its second battery is now failing. Got home, booted it up, started to wade through some email and wondered why the track pad didn’t seem to be clicking right. I was about to text Kate and ask if it had been knocked off the desk or something while we were gone, when I noticed the keyboard was bulging up. Googled, and learned that by continuing to use it, I was risking, yes, explosion, an actual exploding battery. Or a fire. Shut it down, unplugged, went to the Apple store.

It was time. The old one gave me eight, EIGHT years of service. (The bulge is pronounced enough that by the time I pulled the plug, it no longer closed correctly.) Now to find a USB B-to-C converter so I can transfer my music and photos. (Also, a toxic waste recycler for the battery.) But there is a takeaway, and this is it: Back up to clouds whenever you can. I was able to start the new machine and, thanks go my iCloud and Google accounts, get to work almost immediately. Our world, it is a marvel.

Now for some coffee and breakfast. Coffee made in a MoccaMaster, as God intended.