Another …day. Another day, but it started with a pretty good swim, and so there’s that. This is why I work out with the dawn patrol; if the day goes well, it goes well. And if it doesn’t, at least you got a workout.

I’m working on learning the butterfly. I’m terrible at it. Wikipedia explains why:

The breaststroke, backstroke, and front crawl can all be swum easily even if the swimmer’s technique is flawed. The butterfly, however, is unforgiving of mistakes in style; it is very difficult to overcome a poor butterfly technique with brute strength. Many swimmers and coaches consider it the most difficult swimming style.

But like I said a while ago: Just keep swimming.

Water is sort of a theme around these parts. Today this story broke:

The state provided its workers in Flint with bottled water in January 2015, 10 months before officials would tell residents the water was not safe to drink, according to state emails released Thursday by liberal advocacy group Progress Michigan.

The decision was unrelated to elevated lead levels that were later found in Flint’s drinking water, said Caleb Buhs, a spokesman for the state Department of Technology, Management and Budget.

Instead, the management and budget department decided to provide water coolers in a Flint state office building after the city sent out a notice saying it had been found in violation of the state’s Safe Drinking Water Act because of high levels of disinfection byproducts.

It just keeps getting worse. This is going to be such a mud bath.

I had the world’s most boring task today (transcription), and a lot of busy work, so my brain feels steamrolled this evening. But hey! So some pix today.

My colleague Chastity did a story on breed-specific legislation, i.e., banning pit bulls, and it’s attracting the expected slapfest in the comments, but I only want to call your attention to this puppy:

That pup is the offspring of, wait for it, a Chihuahua and a pit bull. They lived under the same roof, and the owners never had them neutered because they figured, what are the odds? So now there’s this litter of chia pets (or chit bulls). For some reason, it reminded me of the puppies we meet in the final scenes of “Babe: Pig in the City,” one of my favorite kid movies, and maybe movies, period:

Supposed to be 40 degrees this weekend. Woo. Have a good one.

Another cray day past and ahead, but since y’all are sharing adult-coloring stories in the comments of the last post, here’s one: Kate was tickled to learn that the U-M library brought in puppies for students to pet for stress relief during finals week. At least, that’s what she was told at orientation. It turned out to be therapy dogs, not puppies, and so many students showed up to greet them that she couldn’t get near the beasts. But there was an alternative! Both coloring AND Legos, at which point, hearing this, my fingers tightened around the steering wheel. They tightened, and whitened. Because it was really hard not to say ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

Hank Stuever and I have a shared belief that Kids Today could stand to grow up a little more, and a little sooner. For all the worry, so often expressed in mass and social media, that children are “sexualized” at ever-earlier ages, there’s a corollary that’s equally evident — some are staying young, or maybe babyish, for way too long.

In “Tinsel,” Hank’s book about Christmas in modern suburbia, he talks about older students who claim to still believe in Santa Claus, and around here, in a very similar community, the Cult of Keeping Them Believing is vast and strong. There was a whole Facebook thread about it among local moms, which I read in slack-jawed amazement. “This will NOT be the year they stop believing!” mother after mother vowed. There was talk of a coordinated effort to make sure older children didn’t spill the beans to the younger ones. One mom complained in a recent exercise class about paying a pretty penny to attend a Santa Claus event, and the Santa underachieved, with a crappy costume and a strap-on beard that didn’t fool her kindergartener. This was seen as a tragedy.

Are we raising a generation of fornicating, social media-dependent wimps who need puppies to endure a college finals week (we made do with beer), or is this just me? I ask you.

One or two links today: A great Bridge story on a local (Detroit-local, that is) Chaldean kid who was born in Iraq, traveled at great peril with his family to Michigan to start a new life after Gulf War I, and has since returned. He now lives in northern Iraq, in ISIS country, and flies the flag of Motor City hip-hop in his job of running a radio station called Babylon FM. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, don’t miss this gem within, a sound clip of the young man interviewing a Kurdish rapper going by the name of Frank Flo. Listen to the rapper and tell me hip-hop hasn’t conquered the world. Dear Donald Trump: AMERICA IS ALREADY GREAT, YOU MORON.

Back later. Thanks for just being you.

Maybe some of you with nothing better to do are wondering whether I embarked on the Whole30, and if so, how it’s going. I did, and OK so far. I probably wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t have two friends who are doing it as well. We got together for dinner on New Year’s Eve, the night before the launch. The first course would be entirely Whole30 “compliant,” as they say:

That’s barbecued prawns with portobello mushroom caps. Mmmm.

And the main course was certainly compliant:

Mmm, beef tenderloin.

But you don’t go on a 30-day sugar/grain/legume/dairy/booze purge without one last fling. Which was dessert:

For the last few days, we now text one another pictures of our meals. To be supportive, you know.

Breakfast:

Lunch:

And dinner:

I have but this to say: I miss bread. I don’t miss booze. I don’t miss sugar (too much — the fruit helps). But man, that lunch would have been better as a sandwich.

One day at a time. And if I give it up, no biggie. It’s all about learning.

Is there anything as boring as another person’s chow? No. But that was a lovely, delicious chocolate-Chambord mousse. February isn’t so far away.

So, the tree is now at the curb, the ornaments are back in their boxes, Kate is back at school and I’m back at work. Threw some stuff out, sent a million emails, did a bit of spadework for the next eight weeks of assignments. Ate that grim lunch at my desk and tried to explain the Oregon situation to Kate on the drive to Ann Arbor. Honestly, I think the Onion nailed it:

What are the protesters’ demands?

$5 million in cash and safe passage to 1874.

Deconstructing the semiotics of Bill Cosby’s grandpa sweater.

I also slept terribly last night, so I think I’m going to turn in early. Have a great Tuesday, all.

Well, happy new year to y’all, too. I hope you had a pleasant pair of long weekends, or in my case, TWO SOLID WEEKS of not having to think about work (too much). I had a particularly fine time reading the comments on the last entry, about how so many of you made it here, and why you stick around.

To clear up some points made there, which I might as well do now, because I’m not sure when, precisely, this blog began, although J.C. probably does:

NN.c was born out of boredom, restlessness and a sense that things were changing in my business, and some skills in the new era might be useful. J.C. had already launched his own site — and that’s what we called them, just websites or “personal websites” — which was updated then more often than it is now. I always looked forward to reading it, and in his always-encouraging way, he urged me to try it myself. At least secure your name.com, he said, so I did, at Network Solutions, for something like $25. I only got the .com, because $75 to secure the .net and .org seemed like a lot of money to spend on something I might not ever even do.

On one of J.C.’s swings through town, he showed me how to work Adobe GoLive in sort of an all-thumbs, basic way, and in about 10 minutes, mocked up the first NN.c. Dominant color: Blue. He showed me how to make new pages, how to upload to the server. I understood what a server was. And so I tapped out a tentative first entry, introducing myself and telling the world that I now had a personal website. There were pages devoted to my scary-clown news clippings, and my postcard collection, links to sites I regularly visited, and that was about it. All this was in January 2001.

I sent emails to everyone I know, saying hey, I now have a website. And I told my editors, just in case there was a conflict. They decided there wouldn’t be, as long as I didn’t try to sell anything that might be construed as competing with the paper. Everyone looked at Day One, patted me on the head and said, “Isn’t that nice” and went back to putting out the paper.

I believe I got 104 visits that day. Clicks, anyway. Google analytics didn’t exist yet.

As Day One drew to a close, I called up my page and looked at it. The question “now what?” seemed to announce itself. Guess I should write something new, I thought, starting the first weekly archive page, pasting the first day’s content to that and starting anew in the now-blank box on the home page.

On that second day, I considered a few things when at the keyboard. First, that one of my great regrets in life is that I haven’t kept a regular journal, and large swaths of my life are only committed to my increasingly faulty memory. Another is that I couldn’t keep a real journal on a site that was called by my real name, because it’s the internet and I don’t want everyone reading the intimate details of our household, or that my boss was a jerk that day, or whatever. So I fell into a style that had become familiar to me over the years, in my long-running correspondence with my best friend, who now lives in Milwaukee: A letter to a friend. Sort of easy and breezy and a report on the day’s events, trivial and less-so. A journal with some intimacy, but not total access. And that’s really how it went, for quite a while.

But then a couple things happened: 9/11, which was followed by an explosion of these things called weblogs, or blogs for short (a horrible word, in my opinion). Most of them were atrocious and rightly died a swift death, but they led to a shift in the conversation about websites that weren’t established and maintained by an institution, but by an individual. New tools — Blogger, Typepad, et al. — made it easy to get your own version of NN.c up and running in a matter of minutes. Suddenly it wasn’t just me and J.C. and a few others. It was everyone.

The other thing that happened was the Humiliation and Firing of Mr. Bob Greene, which happened over a weekend. I saw the news via Jim Romenesko, probably, and dashed off a column-length piece about it. I announced what every young woman who’d ever passed within 10 yards of the guy knew — that he was a horndog, a fact so widely known in media circles that it hardly even counted as gossip. I also said he was a hack, and had been for some time, another observation that barely rises above Duh. And I mentioned his stupid toupees, because are they not a metaphor for his hackitude and desperate need to paw women? They are. I uploaded it and went to bed.

The next morning, I looked at my email. “Great rant,” said someone with an address from thenewyorker.com — a staff writer. More continued to arrive through the next few days, one from none other than Lucianne Goldberg. It turned out I’d been linked by Romenesko, and then by Slate, and then by many other blogs and publications and whatnot. Newsweek magazine quoted me. A Japanese magazine writer conducted a phone interview, in halting English, through a bad phone connection. For the first time, I was Internet Famous.

I told the executive editor, expecting an explosion of whatthefuck, but got little more than the that’s-nice head-pat he’d given me on day one. And that, more than anything, exposed a few things in sharp relief. First, that the newspaper business had no idea what was coming for it, and second, that if I wanted to be known outside Fort Wayne, Indiana, I should stop trying to get carried by the Knight-Ridder wire service (which had turned me down more than once) and start writing more stuff like 700 dashed-off words about Bob Greene. If it’s true that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, it’s equally true that no one knows you’re a nobody toiling for a fading daily in the Hoosier state.

I’ve said it many times, in many places: Every good thing that’s happened in my writing life has happened because of this site. I was routinely ignored by hiring K-R editors who passed through the Fort, but here? Here’s where I met Laura Lippman, and her husband Mr. Lippman. Here’s where Ben Yagoda found me, and put me in a textbook about finding your writing voice. (Take that, stupid hiring editors!) This here place is what I wrote about in the essay that got me a Knight Wallace Fellowship. Here’s where the career of Tim Goeglein, White House aide, went up in flames. (And Tim? I am pissed I didn’t get mentioned in your book. Not once.)

And here’s where I met all of you guys. Because after 15 years, frankly, there are days when I sit in front of my blinking cursor and can barely think of one thing to say. Now that I’m a working reporter again, I have to be more circumspect in what I write here, and that chafes sometimes, believe me. But I know that if I put up just a little something, someone here will take it and run with it, or will introduce something else and go in another direction.

Something else I’ve said many times: This place, and its commentariat, is the world’s greatest and friendliest bar. Some people teetotal, some cry into their beer, some fall off their stools (a moment of silence for Prospero here). If “Cheers” had a bigger set and cast, it would be like this site. Which is really one of the things the internet did for everyone, right? If you were a lonely gay boy in Nowhere, Nebraska, you could find other gay boys out there. If you collected paintings of chickens and only chickens, somewhere out there someone is keeping a blog for you. Not all of these communities have been good and healthy ones, but this one? It’s pretty good. After all, it has Coozledad, who not only amuses us here, but also at his own site. (Read that one — it’s pretty good. I so wish he’d write a book.)

And just now, looking at my word count, I’m struck by the horrible feeling I’ve written this thing before, probably many times.

Anyway, today isn’t the anniversary of the blog. That was either the 14th or 21st, maybe? Those dates stick in my head. But I’ll take today to say, once again, how happy I am to have you guys in my life, even on days when I feel like pulling the plug. Because a writer without readers is just shouting into the void, and a writer with readers who can talk back and contribute is lucky indeed.

On to the links:

What the hell is going on in Oregon? Discuss.

If Boston Globe reporters and editors were going to moonlight as carriers, they should have just done it and kept it to themselves. This just comes off as self-aggrandizement, to me.

One of the trainers at my gym just announced she’s planning to attend one of these learn-to-surf camps this summer, to commemorate her 50th birthday, and invited others to come with her. I cannot. Get it OUT. Of my mind. Someone talk me out of spending a September week in San Onofre, Calif. making a fool of myself. But I cannot deny, being able to get even one ride on a surfboard would be a total bucket-list item for me.

Here’s to 2016, all. It can be a pretty great one, if we make it so.

I made split-pea soup yesterday, to use up the Christmas ham and some yellow split peas I found deep in the pantry. While googling the difference between yellow and green splits, just in case cooking times needed to be adjusted, I found this gem — DifferenceBetween.com, a site that does guess-what.

Ranging from the trivial — the difference between pumps and platform (shoes) — to the far less so — the difference between photoelectric effect and photovoltaic effect — it promises hours of time-wasting. Which everyone needs more of, right?

There is no appreciable difference between yellow and green split peas, by the way. The soup was delicious. Gonna eat up my legumes while I can. (Still undecided on Whole30.)

Another bit of bloggage for the day is this pretty direct analysis of how Donald Trump destroyed the modern GOP.

I cleaned the biggest, most overstuffed-and-overdue closet yesterday, and friends? The feeling of accomplishment was astounding. I should have pursued a more task-oriented career, something with a blue collar, maybe. Set the job down before you, do it, send it on down the line. Shoveling snow, maybe. It’s that satisfying.

So, on to the next one. Happy Tuesday.

Another Christmas in the books. When Kate was younger, I used to think of the Three Hurdles of Autumn — Halloween, birthdays and the holidays. By this point, with Christmas behind us and only the new year and tree-dismantling ahead, I’d feel like a racehorse halfway down the stretch.

It’s not as grueling anymore, so I’m enjoying these last few days. It helps that I don’t have to work, that the past year was a good one, that 2015 brought only the normal wear and tear to me and mine. Still, I have this pipe dream of organizing the house before 1/1/16. We’ll see if I can at least get a couple of rooms done.

Meanwhile, I hope you all got the presents you wanted, and a few you didn’t know you wanted. We all did just fine here.

With the 30 Days of Abstention ahead, I’m wondering if I should go whole-hog and try a Whole 30 in January, too. A friend of mine posted about it on Facebook, saying it got his pre diabetic blood-sugar numbers down in a shockingly short period of time, but I dunno — a whole month without bread, pasta, rice, sugar, dairy AND alcohol? Talk about a shock to the system. On the other hand, if I’m already going to be booze-free… What’s the harm of trying?

Never mind the self-improvement for now. How about the weekend’s pleasures?

Alan got stuck working Christmas Day, so Kate and I took ourselves to “The Big Short,” which I can’t recommend highly enough. Hide all the weaponry in the house, however, lest you be tempted to go out and knife random investment bankers afterward. It’s very entertaining and does a tremendous job explaining some frankly impenetrable financial instruments, although there were moments when I was at sea. It didn’t matter — the narrative carries you through the rough parts, and the fourth-wall breaking is a stroke of genius. Go. You won’t regret it.

Then we came home and watched “Inside Out” on iTunes, and that was equally fine, although in an entirely different kind of way.

This is pretty much all I want to do on this break — lie on the couch, let entertainment wash over me and clean closets.

A little bloggage to start the week, whether you’re working or not:

The worst and stupidest health claims of the year, kicking off with none other than Gwinnie Paltrow:

Gwyneth Paltrow told women to steam clean their vaginas. Don’t do this.

OK, I won’t!

For you Michiganians, a particularly harsh take on the legislature’s year.

And in the Freep, a lovely farewell from one columnist to another, who happens to be his wife. (And isn’t leaving anything other than her job.)

More laziness in the week ahead. Enjoy yours, eh?

You know, even if you have the holidays handled, even if you completed your shopping and so forth well ahead of the deadline, even if you have money in your pocket and a smile on your face, the last days before Christmas are always a grind. Is that toilet scrubbed? No. Scrub it, then. Did you remember to tip the newspaper carriers? Oops, go get some crisp bills at the bank. Is there gas in the car? You never know when there will be a catastrophe and you’ll have to flee the metro area, so you better have at least half a tank, preferably more.

All of these things involve long lines. Except the toilet-scrubbing. You’re always the only one volunteering for that job.

At times like this, to keep the blog from collapsing into a spiral of capital-B Boring, I cast around for material. Here’s the last photo I took with my phone:

Those are Kate’s hands. She’s performing her final-exam project for her digital-music class, a piece she composed and performed for the class. It’s untitled. That glowing board is a controller for a program called Ableton Push; if you’re into techno or EDM, you probably know about it, or at least have heard music created with it. She borrowed the controller from a guy in Windsor, as the single one owned by the University was signed out at the beginning of the semester and kept, well, all semester. But she got an A+, so booyah; it must have had good mojo, as it was last used by some big-deal techno guy for his latest album. Final factoid: The piece contained a sample from “Finding Nemo,” Dory saying, “Just keep swimming.”

That’s good advice in many things, I’ve found, particularly swimming; oftentimes those first few laps just don’t feel great. Keep swimming, and you loosen up. What do we do, we swim.

We also scrub toilets. Can you tell what job I’m putting off right now?

So, a little bit of bloggage:

As this is the season when lots of people who don’t think about religion get themselves into a church for at least a little while, a thoughtful piece about President Obama’s faith. It won’t change anything; the people who think he’s a Muslim will continue to think so, and believe this is another snow job by the liberal media, and those who think highly of him will think, perhaps, a little more highly. But it’s still a good piece, encapsulated in these nut grafs:

Obama did not grow up in a religious household and became a practicing Christian as an adult. He has written more extensively about his spiritual awakening than almost any other modern president, addressing it in two books before he was elected to the White House and in more than a dozen speeches since.

His faith had been central to his identity as a new kind of Democrat who would bring civility to the country’s political debates by appealing to Republicans through the shared language of their Judeo-Christian values.

With just one year left in his second term, Obama now holds a different distinction: No modern president has had his faith more routinely questioned and disparaged. Recent polls show that 29 percent of Americans and nearly 45 percent of Republicans say he is a Muslim.

Everybody’s seen this by now, but it’s so perfect, let’s all watch it again: Meet your second wife! Tina Fey, can we be best friends?

Finally, while this screenshot says much…

…including the update on the Bridge story about the homeless EMU student — you can see his financial situation is much improved — I think what we really want to know about is that stabbing, right?

Well, here ya go. The girl was not seriously injured.

Tidings of comfort and joy! Off to buy tamales tomorrow, my last-promise-last errand of the holiday. Now to scrub the damn toilet.

I was at Wallace House today, the Ann Arbor clubhouse of my old fellowship. Of course I took a lap of the first floor, and noticed that a couple of Mike Wallace’s Emmys had been added to the shelf in the library. Is it possible to pass a major award and not pick it up and make a little acceptance speech?

And take a selfie, of course. This one’s blurry, but you can see Mike peeking over my shoulder:

Since I was in town, I took Kate to lunch to celebrate the near-end of her first semester. She has one final to go, some sort of live performance of an original digital-music composition, so, y’know, no pressure. We went to a noodle bar, of which there are now ten thousand in Ann Arbor. I had the bibimbap I’ve been craving for weeks; Kate had pho. And that was lunch. Because she doesn’t read this blog, I can reveal that I stopped at the MDen and bought her a sweatshirt with her school name on it, for Christmas. I bought it because she showed up for lunch wearing a UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs T-shirt. A friend goes there, and gave it to her at Thanksgiving break.

“Would you wear branded merchandise from your own school?” I asked.

“I guess, but not here.”

“Why?”

“Because everybody knows where you go to school here.”

This girl needs to walk through the Harvard Coop. I bet half their merch goes to non-students.

So. I guess you guys will have something to say about the debate, but I can’t add anything — one of the advantages of cutting the cord is, you don’t have to feel guilty about not watching CNN.

So what happened?

I don’t know why, but it seemed this year’s Thanksgiving break was just about perfect, kicking off with my birthday on Wednesday and winding up with family not-thanksgiving today; my sister-in-law came up and we had lasagna, which is traditional, right? Anyway, I’ve been away from the grindstone just long enough, and it’s back to work today.

A few things we did:

** Had a Friendsgiving this year. There were some scheduling changes this year, and so we were freed to have the big banquet in the evening, not at 1 p.m., our usual time. You ask me, I think the candles sparkle brighter on the table after the sun goes down, but I bend to the will of the crowd — I’m just there to cook. But because of the later hour, we had more friends at our table, and it was lovely. The wine was spectacular, I made a stuffed boneless turkey breast and I just ate the last of it in a sandwich. Makes a nice bookend on the weekend.

** Saw “Spotlight,” the film about the Boston Globe’s priest pedophilia investigation. To paraphrase David Simon, for a journalist, it’s like watching porn. Just a really well-done film, admirably underplayed, that doesn’t traffic in shadowy parking-garage meetings or other low-rent cloak-and-dagger stuff. Journalism in stories like this mostly takes place in ugly offices and fluorescent-lit courthouses and other unglamorous places, where everybody dresses badly, in shades of beige, black, navy and oxford-shirt blue. Underdoing it like this gives the brief scenes where someone speaks a raw truth — “And then one day he asks you to jerk him off or give him a blowjob, and now you have another secret” — a great deal of power. The cranks, like the founder of the victims group SNAP, are not de-cranked for narrative purposes, and the strange, twitchy victims, you can immediately see, were chosen by their abusers because they were strange, twitchy kids.

I can’t think of any part of the story that was goosed for dramatic purposes, with the possible exception of one montage scene, where a children’s choir sings and a character comes to terms with the inexorable evil he and his colleagues are confronting. And that was hardly unforgivable, given some of the nonsense I’ve seen in journalism movies over the years.

** Went to the Eastern Market on Saturday. Beheld this:

No comment.

** Started a new book, “Slade House,” which Kate gave me for my birthday. I put aside Margaret Atwood for now, which I now see is worth the very low price I paid for it in Toronto.

** Finally, we cut the cord. The cable cord, that is. Those of you who have dealt with Comcast know what it’s like to deal with Comcast, so I won’t bore you with the details. But we got rid of the digital-cable box, picked up HBO Now and Showtime-via-stream, and Alan picked up a weird-looking antenna, with which we can receive all the local channels, in widescreen HD, and I think that’s going to do us just fine. Net savings: $110 a month. I’ll take it.

And now the holidays start in earnest. I have a jump on my shopping and for once am facing the next month un-frazzled and almost, dare I admit? A little festive. Let’s get into it. And let’s start this week.

Whatever happened to that playlist service where you could embed a sound file in a blog post like this? I feel like we need some 50 Cent all up in here, “In Da Club,” cuz shawty, it’s my birfday, we gonna party, cuz it’s my birfday.

Actually, probably the partying will be kept to a minimum, although the year 58 must be celebrated somehow, and it is the biggest bar night of the year. Some friends and I discovered one not too far from here that has the best jukebox I’ve seen in ages. (Detroiters: Better than Honest John’s, oh yes it is.) So that’ll be da club for tonight. But tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I’m cooking, so I have to get up ready to rumble in the kitchen.

That’s middle age for you.

I accept and thank you for all your tributes in advance. We’re all buddies in here.

A few links to get out of the way, some of which you folks have already posted in comments:

Gin & Tacos on security vs. freedom, bringing the Obviously sauce to the picnic:

By giving Americans the freedom to move about as they please and buy whatever they can afford (including some things that could be used to do harm) we are choosing (reasonably) to live with some risk. We’re never completely safe. As I tell the students, the only way to guarantee that you won’t be stabbed on the way to your next class is to create a society in which either cutlery or the right to walk around outside are forbidden. It’s certainly not likely to happen, and that’s why we choose to live with the minuscule risk that it will.

This is all incredibly simple, yet here I am explaining it because half of adult Americans do not appear to understand it. At one moment we appear to believe that we can protect ourselves from a nebulous and ephemeral threat and at the next moment we are willing to increase vastly the risks to ourselves and to society. The same people, for example, who oppose admitting Syrian refugees because doing so might pose the slightest increase in risk of danger from terrorism are most vocally in favor of letting everyone carry any kind of gun anywhere and at all times. We’re so concerned about our security that we are willing to let Syrian refugees die (literally) to protect ourselves, yet we don’t see a problem with handing out powerful, high-capacity firearms to any possibly unstable, possibly deranged white guy who can pass a laughable background check (or use one of the many loopholes in gun sales to circumvent even that) and hand over the purchase price. Our national principles can be jettisoned when we’re confronted with scary brown refugees but when we deal with the desire some of us have to avoid being murdered at work or school our freedoms are sacrosanct.

Neil Steinberg, touching on the same themes:

The right side of our political spectrum is devoted to marrying Islam to terror, Which makes them on the same team as ISIS, because that’s precisely why they commit these acts. Western culture is a big, warm, inclusive blob that absorbs and alters everything. Joan of Arc rides in, clad in armor, her eyes aglitter with passion for the Lord, and 500 years later, Miley Cyrus swings out, straddling a wrecking ball in her underwear. ISIS wants to separate Islam from the West, so men like them can be in charge forever and women never get to drive or sing. Thus they strike at the West in nihilistic acts of terror, counting on the Bruce Rauners of our nation to leap up and shout, “Golly, do we really want all these Syrians here?”

Yes, yes we do. Because the way to manufacture patriotic Americans is by letting their grandparents into the country after their homelands go to hell. My grandfather, Irwin Bramson, didn’t end up in a trench in Poland because a relative, Ira Saks, plucked him at age 15 out of the jaws of doom. So my mother, June, got to be born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1936, and not in Bialystok, Poland, where she’d end up another 5-year-old butchered by her neighbors.

I liked that image of Miley Cyrus swinging out of western civ. Made me chuckle. Of course, others see this as evidence of decadence; Rod Dreher — look up his stupid blog if you want to read it, I’m not linking here — has had his panties so bunchy lately, between terrorism and the hoo-ha on college campuses, that I’ve come up with a new rule: If it upsets Rod, I’m for it. Personally, I can’t wait until he makes good on this Benedict Option crap he’s always threatening and fucks off for good. Unfortunately, I’m sure he’ll be fucking off to someplace with wifi and a sinecure.

Which brings us to a final link, to Foreign Policy magazine, on terrorism in general, arranged in a helpful list:

Occasional terrorist attacks in the West are virtually inevitable, and odds are, we’ll see more attacks in the coming decades, not fewer. If we want to reduce the long-term risk of terrorism — and reduce its ability to twist Western societies into unrecognizable caricatures of themselves — we need to stop viewing terrorism as shocking and aberrational, and instead recognize it as an ongoing problem to be managed, rather than “defeated.”

The Israelis have been living with terrorism for generations. I don’t know that they’re the model we want to follow in our response, but they don’t hide under their beds, either.

So with that, I leave to go pick at a light breakfast before a 9:30 workout. The link between terrorism and birthdays isn’t an obvious one, but some years, maybe so. Not this one, not yet anyway.

Happy Thanksgiving, too. Look for photo posts through the weekend.