If you haven’t read the link MichaelG posted in comments yesterday, from Talking Points Memo and about Trump, you should read it, if not for the analysis then for this excellent metaphor about projects and doing things the right way vs. the wrong way. (I’ve done it both ways, so I feel like I know this from experience.)

When I read the Times article (about the GOP’s failing effort to stop Trump), observe recent weeks as they’ve fluttered by and think about how things got to this point, I come back again and again to conversations I have with our chief tech, Matt Wozniak. Matt uses the metaphor of debt to describe the inevitable trade off we face building and maintaining the software that runs TPM.

If we do a project in a rough and ready way, which is often what we can manage under the time and budget constraints we face, we will build up a “debt” we’ll eventually have to pay back. Basically, if we do it fast, we’ll later have to go back and rework or even replace the code to make it robust enough for the long haul, interoperate with other code that runs our site or simply be truly functional as opposed just barely doing what we need it to. There’s no right or wrong answer; it’s simply a management challenge to know when to lean one way or the other. But if you build up too much of this debt the problem can start to grow not in a linear but an exponential fashion, until the system begins to cave in on itself with internal decay, breakdowns of interoperability and emergent failures which grow from both.

So here we are, on yet another pivotal Tuesday, and who knows? In 36 hours we may know with near certainty it’s a Trump-Clinton ticket, come fall. And then the fun really begins. As this is a politics day, and I’m getting a late start on this, a few linky hors d’oeuvres for y’all:

Nothing about this analysis, about why Ted Cruz will not drop out to save his party, surprises me. Especially this part:

It’s very possible that, if he becomes the Republican nominee, Trump would get shellacked in November, setting off a period of anguished introspection for the party. Conservatives would vow never again to nominate a non-conservative for the highest office. “This is Ted Cruz’s ace card,” says Steele. “Going back to 1996, conservatives in the party have always felt that we’ve lost these presidential contests because we’ve not been true to the cause by nominating someone who will fight for the cause.”

For a large segment of the party, the savior would be obvious. And Cruz, having never wavered, would find himself right where he wanted to be, once he realized, in March 2016, that he wouldn’t be the 2016 Republican nominee: at the front of the pack to challenge Hillary Clinton in 2020.

I hear this over and over from Republicans — don’t move to the center, move further right! And as bad as a Trump-Clinton race would be, I can’t imagine how awful a Cruz-Clinton race might play out. I may have to emigrate for 2020.

Says Slate, “To save itself, the Republican Party must finally put the working class ahead of the donor class.” Like that’s gonna happen.

Finally, here’s a Storify of David Frum tweets on the collapse of the GOP — you know, the Canadian-born RINO from the Bush administration? I think he nails it, though.

Off to work.

Last week, three young men, all African immigrants, all purportedly Muslim, were found shot to death in a house on the southeast side of Fort Wayne. There’s not a lot to know right now, except that the house they were in was known as a party/hangout pad, the owners having relocated to Indianapolis and left the house open to…someone.

I don’t know anything more about it than what I’m reading in the local paper, but to me, having lived in that city for 20 years and observed dozens of homicides there, both big and spectacular and small and sad, nothing about this one sounds like a hate crime. Young men hanging in an unsupervised house, with people coming and going at all hours? Yeah, that doesn’t really sound like the setting for a latter-day lynching to me. A triple-H with three people shot in the dome suggests an assailant or assailants with accomplices, which sounds like a gang. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

Of course, I’m only speculating here. But I think I’m speculating fairly close to known reality. I wish I could say that for the various lefty aggregators, who are starting to pick at the story in ways that make my head hurt. ThinkProgress yelled at the governor for not saying anything about it yet. Vox scratched together some links (from TV stations — hasn’t anyone heard of newspapers? do any of these aggregators know the average age of a TV reporter in a past-100 media market? I’ll tell you: It’s about 10.) and all but pronounced it a hate crime, because Muslims were shot execution-style, so what other explanation could there be? It’s an excuse to run the few sketchy facts we know, pad it out with clips about other Islamophobic incidents, and surround it with rhetorical questions. This passage about made me hurl:

It is important to caution against assuming that whatever happened this week in Fort Wayne, whatever chain of events led to the mysterious “execution-style” murders of three young men, must necessarily be part of the rising wave of Islamophobic violence in America. Police are presumably cautioning against that conclusion for a reason, and it may well turn out that their deaths are entirely unrelated.

Still, it is difficult to ignore that three apparently Muslim young men have been murdered, for no immediately obvious reason, just as indiscriminate violence against Muslim Americans is growing out of control.

It is thus concerning that these murders have received so little attention, if only for the possibility, however remote, that they could be part of this trend of religious violence against American citizens.

Count the qualifiers and weasel words in just three paragraphs. They can’t even say for sure that the victims were Muslim. But hey — let’s scrounge a few clicks out of it.

This is what I was talking about a while back, about the importance of drilling down for original, local sources, and not relying on aggregators, particularly ideological aggregators, too much. The ThinkProgress piece quoted Vox, for Christ’s sake. So now you have aggregators of aggregation.

Think for yourselves, media consumers. In the lefty blogosphere, there’s an inside joke around the phrase, “Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.” That bit of self-congratulatory bullshit was written by none other than Peggy Noonan, wondering if the raid that returned Elian Gonzalez to his Cuban father in 2000 was ordered by President Clinton, because he was being blackmailed about his sex life by Fidel Castro. This is the same thing.

And I’ve got $20 on this homicide being drug-related, if anyone wants to take the other side.

Another beautiful weekend, which will be followed by another horrible week — two fresh inches of snow expected on Tuesday. Sigh. I just paid my mortgage for March. Sometime in March, spring will arrive. There was Easter candy in the grocery today. The blueberries I bought were Chilean, but they were blueberries just the same. It’s coming.

Jolene Sherri, one of our most diligent link-hounds, found this one over the weekend, and you should read it: Jon Favreau, the POTUS’ former speechwriter, on Hillary.

And I’ve been struggling to write a piece the last few days, about political tribalism. Maybe that’s why I was so impressed and moved by Sherri’s comment late Sunday, about trying to get to the bottom of the feelings in a local planning-commission dispute. Just try talking, people! It works! Read it, though. It’s good.

And let’s all get through the week ahead, whether it’s snowing where you are or not.

It appears I’m headed into another vortex of work for a few days, and maybe weeks, although it won’t be unrelenting. I’ve accepted an outside job doing proofreading on some marketing materials, the proceeds of which I’m throwing into our Iceland account. Did I mention we’re going to Iceland in June? WE ARE GOING TO ICELAND. I’ve always wanted to see the midnight sun and sit in steaming cauldrons of natural hot springs. The last time I did that was in Yellowstone, in a place deep in the backcountry, where a hot spring joined with a cold stream to make a perfect, and I do mean perfect, hot tub. You adjusted the temperature by moving around in the stream. ‘Twas wonderful. But this trip, like the last one, will require money, so I’m in selling/earning/saving mode.

A big pile of work has been promised for my blogging time tonight, so this may be a little dashed-off. Fortunately, I have some good links. Here’s Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone on Il Douche, but more important, the conditions that have allowed his remarkable run to take place:

What these tweedy Buckleyites at places like the (National) Review don’t get is that most people don’t give a damn about “conservative principles.” Yes, millions of people responded to that rhetoric for years. But that wasn’t because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems.

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame. For a generation, conservative intellectuals have successfully pointed the finger at big-government-loving, whale-hugging liberals as the culprits behind American decline.

But the fact that lots of voters hated the Clintons, Sean Penn, the Dixie Chicks and whomever else, did not, ever, mean that they believed in the principle of Detroit carmakers being able to costlessly move American jobs overseas by the thousands.

It’s a really good piece. Long, but entertaining and absolutely worth your time.

As is this one, again by Jeb Lund, again in Rolling Stone. It’s about the other Jeb, the exclamation-point one. It’s not a slashing piece; Lund is a Floridian, and gives Jeb! credit for his competent handling of that state’s hurricanes, plural. (You’ll recall it only took one to send his brother into a tailspin.) But then he gets to the Terri Schiavo case, and, well, it’s hard for a thinking person to forgive the governor that.

Oddly enough, I’ve seen Jeb come in for abuse on that issue from the other side, some of whom honestly believed that he should have sent the Florida National Guard into her hospice, to protect her from her husband. Whom they would have loved to see arrested. There’s a noxious priest who was openly saying that Michael Schiavo abused his wife into a coma and, fearful she might wake up after 16 years and be able to point a trembling finger at him from a witness stand, just wanted to, y’know, finish the job. And in fact, Bush did ask the prosecutor to look over the original police and medical reports, for just that sort of evidence.

So let’s wrap up with something a little lighter — Hank, on the “Full House” reboot, “Fuller House.” It has a nice late-in-the-piece pivot point:

I could stop here and go home, having dutifully shot the fish in “Fuller House’s” barrel. But we haven’t done the part where you accuse me of telling the kids to get off my lawn. I feel we must.

“Full House” wasn’t my thing, so “Fuller House” certainly won’t be. But you younger folks, you enjoy.

Well, the snowstorm was a big nothing burger for my part of Michigan — all-day slush-rain, as the temperature hovered at 32.8, and yes, I checked. We still might get something overnight, but right now? I’m thinking I’m going to have to swim in the morning.

Good day, all.

I found myself nodding off at 9 p.m. last night, so alas. However, part of me wanted to see the Trumpian margin of victory in Nevada. And it’s impressive — he got 46 percent. If this guy isn’t Mr. Inevitable at this point, I don’t know who is. Like Neil Steinberg, who pointed out the candidate’s astonishing (and underreported) use of the Gen. Pershing/pig’s blood libel, I am no longer even darkly amused. But this is our country, isn’t it?

So just in case you’re a GOP voter, and you’re looking at the second option on the menu, here’s a rather brutal profile of the guy running that show:

“Jeff Roe does not know the difference between fact and fiction,” said Joe Brazil, a county councilman in Missouri who unsuccessfully sued Mr. Roe for defamation after a 2006 blog post days before Mr. Brazil’s primary in a State Senate race.

The item focused on a sad event from Mr. Brazil’s youth, when, at 17, he killed a classmate in a dump-truck accident. Mr. Roe’s post suggested Mr. Brazil had consumed “quite a few beers.” But Mr. Brazil had not been drinking, the police said, and was not charged.

After watching coverage of the Iowa caucuses from his home in Augusta, Mo., Mr. Brazil said, he tried to reach the Carson campaign, hoping to offer a history lesson. “How could they be surprised?” he asked.

Don’t miss this detail, either:

Mr. Roe, who declined to be interviewed, was quick to establish a distinctive culture at Mr. Cruz’s headquarters in Houston. Top aides were required to move there. (Mr. Roe brought along his wife, Missy, the 2010 winner of the Mrs. Missouri United States pageant; their baby, Remington, named in part for the gun maker; and Mrs. Roe’s parents.)

I imagine Missy will be found soon, clutching the wheel of her car alongside a racing freeway, muttering to herself. Or maybe not. Maybe he chose the perfect better half. In which case Houston is totally her kind of town.

How bad it is: This guy is the “decent” one in the race. Was.

Jeb Lund is one of my favorite columnists working today, and I think he nails it here.

OK, time to put nose to grindstone. Freezing rain is pouring from the sky, and I’m out of bread, too. Wednesday! WOO.

Jeb Bush’s campaign is over, and while we all know it was a big waste of money — the exclamation point alone was probably about $4 million — the actual semi-itemized list is sort of interesting.

Eighty-four million on advertising (and they still couldn’t figure out Donald Trump). Parking cost $15,800, $88,387 on “branding,” which will always sound to me like something you do to cattle. Pizza consumed $4,837, or rather, $4,837 was consumed in the form of pizza.

I love pizza, just like everybody else. Ate some today, in fact, but where is it written pizza is the only food for political campaigns? I’d like to start a third party, dedicated to eating Chinese food instead of pizza. Or maybe takeout fried chicken.

A tiring Monday with a long staff meeting, which always takes it out of me — all that sitting. Then pizza, then more meeting, then the drive home. Sitting, sitting, sitting. At the end of the month we’re moving to a co-working space, which has many standing-desk options, and I intend to take advantage of them. The booty will be the summer project.

And while we’re both a) tired; and b) below the belt, some good news from the health beat — the HPV vaccine is a smashing success:

A vaccine introduced a decade ago to combat the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer has already reduced the virus’s prevalence in teenage girls by almost two-thirds, federal researchers said Monday.

Even for women in their early 20s, a group with lower vaccination rates, the most dangerous strains of human papillomavirus, or HPV, have still been reduced by more than a third.

“We’re seeing the impact of the vaccine as it marches down the line for age groups, and that’s incredibly exciting,” said Dr. Amy B. Middleman, the chief of adolescent medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, who was not involved in the study. “A minority of females in this country have been immunized, but we’re seeing a public health impact that is quite expansive.”

Of course it’s still a hard sell to parents who never want to admit their children, boys and girls, might have sex lives some day. Science won’t change their minds, but it’s still a welcome improvement.

So, then, let’s close with a giggle: The Onion, nailing it yet again:

Warning that the flora in the immediate vicinity withers and turns black at an alarming rate, scientists from Cornell University alerted the public Monday that all plant life within a 30-yard radius of each of presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s campaign signs is rapidly dying off.

Blight. OK, then. Happy Tuesday.

After Friday’s excoriation of the poor shlub who wrote the Daniel Holtzclaw piece, I feel the need for some balance. Check out the first couple grafs of this Jeffrey Toobin piece on Antonin Scalia:

Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward.

His revulsion toward homosexuality, a touchstone of his world view, appeared straight out of his sheltered, nineteen-forties boyhood. When, in 2003, the Court ruled that gay people could no longer be thrown in prison for having consensual sex, Scalia dissented, and wrote, “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.” He went on, “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a life style that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”

You know what I like about that? There’s not a whiff of equivocation in any part of it, just simple declarative sentences, dropping like truth bombs, ending with a long passage written by the deceased himself, and not that long ago, underlining just how retrograde his opinions were. Were. He’s dead. Let’s move forward. So many writers are afraid, of blowback, of Twitter, of whatever, that they can’t even express a clear opinion anymore. It’s not that I think this, but that I really think this — you can find that sentence in a dozen columns published today. If you’re good, no one would get confused in the first place.

The essay doesn’t lose steam — and isn’t that long, I should add — but if I may quote one more paragraph, or portion of it:

Not long ago, Scalia told an interviewer that he had cancelled his subscription to the Washington Post and received his news from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times (owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church), and conservative talk radio. In this, as in his jurisprudence, he showed that he lived within the sealed bubble of contemporary conservative thought.

And this man, I remind you, is considered a towering intellectual. He got his news from Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, et al. Good luck with that level of intellectualism, guys.

Whew, that felt good to read.

So, we had ourselves a lovely weekend at my latitude, two days back-to-back with temperatures in the 60s. I ran errands on my bike, smelled the breeze, did some recreational reading, attended a dinner party and otherwise, we enjoyed ourselves. Of course, because I am a homeowner, I looked at the considerably colder forecast for the coming week and thought, “Good thing I got most of the dog poop picked up, because the snow’s going to cover it all back up again.” Lord Grantham never had this problem.

I hope I can be one of those people who looks forward as I get older. Endless nostalgia is a truly destructive attitude to carry into life. As anyone who reads Bob Greene could tell you.

The rest of the weekend was not so great in Michigan, as current events will demonstrate. My friend and former student Ryan had to roll out for K’zoo Sunday morning. As he was leaving, his girlfriend informed him he would be missing her breakfast tacos, “which only makes me hate this fucking loser even more,” he said.

But he filed a good story. Best detail:

Michael Arney, a local radio reporter, said he attended Comstock high school in Kalamazoo with Dalton, who was now, he said, the third murder suspect from his 1989 graduating class.

The delamination of the less-well-educated white American male? Or coincidence? You tell me.

Have a good weekend, all.

The cruel term for the sports desk within newspapers is, or used to be, the Toy Department. A cruel moniker and undeserved — a well-curated sports desk should have some of the best writers at the paper, because, when you think of it, they really have the sow’s ear/silk purse job at the paper, even more than the guy who covers the zoning board. After all, most people who are looking for zoning-board news don’t already know what the vote was. How long has it been since you opened a newspaper to find out who won a game or was the No. 1 draft pick?

But it wasn’t until I spent my much-whined-about time as a sports copy editor that I realized just how stinky those sows’ ears are. In Fort Wayne, there’s only pro hockey and one branch campus of two large universities, with a sports program most known for its great…volleyball program. The readers were mostly interested in high school programs, including that world-famous Hoosier Hysteria basketball thing. I’d read the Prep Sports copy and feel an unfamiliar emotion about the polo-shirted shlubs back in sports – empathy. And not a little pity. After all, they had to drag quotes out of 15-year-olds and try to make rivalries between high schools sound interesting.

But all that said, I had one thought when I finally staggered to the end this week’s journalism of infamy, i.e., “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw,” a 12,000-word piece about a mediocre college football player later convicted of raping eight different women in the course of his work as a police officer in Oklahoma. The story was published, then abruptly un-published by SB Nation, Vox’s sports site. And that thought was this: Toy department.

Of course the story is still out there, and if you have 12,000 words’ worth of tolerance for cliché, subordinate clauses and misplaced sympathy, you can read it here. It’s such a mess, it’s hard to imagine it was edited at all, much less the way a long-form narrative should be.

The immediate complaint was that it takes Holtzclaw’s side, and that it does – to read it, you’d think he was the victim of a terrible injustice, and not a man convicted by a jury of his peers. Deadspin’s summation is pretty on-point:

It starts off with expressions of full sympathy for Holtzclaw, hinting that perhaps there are two sides to this story. It tells only one. The side based in reality—that Holtzclaw violated and brutalized at least eight poor, black women and is in jail for the rest of his life—is never given more than cursory attention.

It presents an endless litany of character witnesses for Holtzclaw—his lawyer, his family, former teammates—all expressing their disbelief that Holtzclaw could be guilty, which is among other things a monotonously boring thing to hang a story of this length upon. Basically, this is the local news interviewing the shocked neighbors—“He always seemed like such a nice kid”—over and over again for 12,000 words.

And so on. And boy, does it waste a lot of words to get there. Take this sentence, just as one example. It’s by way of explaining Hoytzclaw’s enrollment at Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti:

Unlike the University of Michigan, the perennial college football powerhouse seven miles up Washtenaw Avenue in the more affluent and more picturesque college town of Ann Arbor, Eastern Michigan, despite a student population of about 25,000, is a member of the Mid-American Conference, more “mid-major” than big-time.

And that’s a fairly lean one. There are many more far worse.

This Slate piece gives you “the worst parts,” by their reckoning. My favorite:

Holtzclaw chose to go to Eastern Michigan as a means to not only play football and pursue his dream of playing in the NFL, but to keep his parents from having to foot the bill for his college education. To act so unselfishly, say those who know him best, was just who Holtzclaw was.

Messes are something of a theme today.

How is it possible to hold these competing thoughts in one’s mind — that police are tough enough to protect us and yet so, so sensitive, too? Ask Beyoncé:

At first, Sheriff Robert Arnold said he had no explanation for why shots were fired outside his home in Rutherford County, Tenn., on Monday night — except perhaps for an undercurrent of anti-police sentiment in America.

“You do make people mad when you do your job; so that’s the only thing I could think of,” Arnold said at a news conference Tuesday, according to edited video of his comments posted by the Daily News Journal.

But then another possibility came to mind, and Arnold blamed Beyoncé.

“With everything that happened since the Super Bowl… that’s what I’m thinking: Here’s another target on law enforcement,” he said.

He went on: “You have Beyoncé’s video and that’s kind of bled over into other things, it seems.”

Yes, that’s the most likely explanation, don’t you think? I mean, I felt incited to dance; why shouldn’t another be driven to anti-police violence?

Which brings us into the weekend. When it will be warm! Above 40, anyway. Enjoy yours.

So it turns out the good Justice Scalia was the featured entertainment at a rich-guy’s retreat in Texas. I wish I could be surprised. I’m also not surprised by this:

He pointed to perhaps the most famous case involving a justice and recusal, which involved Scalia himself. Scalia joined then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney on a hunting trip while Cheney was the subject of a lawsuit over his energy task force, and in response to calls that he sit out the case, Scalia issued a highly unusual 21-page argument explaining why he refused to do so.

This is one area where there is no false equivalency. This is Washington. But this is also the Supreme Court. No wonder Trump and Sanders are doing so well.

Sorry, I’m still in a sort of all-links/clear-the-desk phase. Ridiculous week at work, empty tank creatively. So here you go:

While we’re on the subject, a little remembrance of the deceased Nino. Not a particularly flattering one.

I love Roy’s blog, but never more than when he points with the sword of truth on wing nut whining about culture. As he does here.

Great New York story here:

One Lower East Side man received what some have called “the most New York note imaginable” after losing his wallet at a concert.

Reilly Flaherty found out after a Wilco concert at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn earlier this month that his personal effects were missing, and later got a letter that was a metropolitan mixture of brash, surprising, honest and mean.

“I found your wallet and your drivers license and your address so here’s your credit cards and other important stuff,” read a note, later posted on Instagram, that arrived in a plain white envelope.

“I kept the cash because I needed weed, the metrocard because well the fare’s $2.75 now, and the wallet cause it’s kinda cool. enjoy the rest of your day. Toodles, Anonymous.”

Now into Thursday. Ugh.

A few stray notes and scraps I’ve been saving. Sorry, but we all have to empty drawers from time to time.

** Every time I think about the Supreme Court, I get irritated, thinking about one of the most preposterously obnoxious trolls of recent years — the time the National Review bitched about Sonia Sotomayor daring to pronounce her name the way she feels like pronouncing it. Why can’t she be more ‘murrican? A few of the viler blogs referred to her thereafter as Sodameyer.

I know it was just baiting, but keep that in mind when some winger whines about whoever the president ends up nominating.

** Kate had a friend over when she was home a few weekends ago, and they made a nest on the couch to watch “Six Feet Under.” Kate got up to make popcorn, and her friend popped up behind her. “In a popcorn popper? I have to see this!” she said. Nineteen years, and she’d never seen popcorn prepared in a home popper. And so another generation got to see this in action:

My siblings are in their 60s now. This was a gift from our Aunt Charlene when they were preschoolers.

** Jeb! has a monogrammed gun. I am not in the least surprised.

** Tonight may be the first night since we cut the cable cord that I regret it, because it’s… the Westminster Dog Show! Someone tell me how it went.

Everyone else, get through your Wednesday however you can.

I ate a ton of vegetables today. Spinach and mushrooms for breakfast, cauliflower soup for lunch, broccoli and a li’l salad at dinner. Of course, now what I really want is a bologna sandwich and a mess of potato chips on the side.

Bologna, mayo and a bunch of crunchy iceberg lettuce on white bread — this is a secret shame of mine that I indulge maybe once a year. I haven’t done it for a while; maybe this weekend. I ask you, though — if vegetables are so uniformly great for us, why don’t we crave them more? Why is it a chore to eat them consistently? Why aren’t our bodies more adapted to a plant-based diet?

Why do we want to put cheese on everything? Why is sugar so great? Why is whipped cream (with lots of sugar) something you want to dive into, but broccoli, meh?

I’m thinking some dessert is in order, but I made Alan take the dark-chocolate sea-salt caramels I bought at Costco for Valentine’s weekend to his office, so I wouldn’t eat them all. Sigh. February. It just never gets better.

But there’s less of it to live through than we already have. March starts spring and spring-like activities. And by this weekend it’ll be in the 40s.

So how was your Presidents Day? I worked on one thing that became the only thing, and tomorrow it’ll be a big thing. That seems to sum it up. My hard-working boss is on vacation this week, which means a shifting of duties, and, today, three emails from him. The last one was replied to by one of my colleagues to the effect that we didn’t want any more emails from him. They weren’t bad emails, just the can’t-help-yourself sort. Beaches aren’t all that great, at least when you have iPhones.

Which seems like a good transition — beaches, reading, food stress — into the bloggage, an essay about Oprah and forgiving oneself for not having a perfect body:

My epiphany was this: Oprah is one of the most accomplished, admired, able people in the world. She has an Oscar to keep all her Emmy Awards company. She creates magic for other people and herself on the regular. So if Oprah can’t do permanent lifelong weight loss, maybe it can’t be done. Oprah is also crazy rich. If Oprah can’t buy permanent lifelong weight loss, maybe it can’t be bought. And that sucks.

Sure does. But maybe it’s OK, too. There’s a size 16 woman on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Relax. Eat the bologna.

What else? Vanity is dead. Now there was a lovely young woman, if at little untalented at being a pop star. And she died of an inflammation of her small intestine, begging for money on GoFundMe. Life’s not all it’s cracked up to be for anyone.

Think I’ll turn in early. Happy Tuesday, all.