An interesting topic came up in a group chat this weekend. Here was the precipitating statement:

Are old-fashioned manners outlawed these days? As a childless uncle and aunt, we’ve always been very generous to our nephews and niece. Now that they’re adults — my niece is studying law but the boys are working — we send them sizable checks. As of today, still no thanks. Hell, we’d settle for a text. All three are good people, yet they seem unaware of basic common courtesies.

It so happens this is something I’ve noticed myself. Wedding gifts in particular don’t seem to be acknowledged. (Not by Deb’s boys, I hasten to reassure her. They wrote lovely thank-you notes.) I bought one a few years back, working from the online registry, and as soon as I hit Purchase a robo-email landed in my inbox: Bob and Sue thank you for your generosity! The hell they do. They checked a box, maybe, on their registry, to enable the robo-reply.

I know I didn’t get a proper thank-you afterward.

And having had a wedding of my own, and knowing how insane they tend to get, I don’t think this is always a hanging offense. Couples get overwhelmed, cards fall off of boxes, shit happens. But with wedding gifts in particular, so often they’re sent directly to the bride’s or couple’s house before the wedding. You want to know they arrived, at least. Porch piracy is a real thing. But it seems weird to ask, although Alan did, once. He got a mumbled yeah I think so and only learned later the marriage didn’t survive very long, and maybe that’s why the thank-you was never sent.

I blame parents for not teaching their children better manners, although given the way Gen Z reacts when asked to do anything involving setting a pen to paper, maybe they did and they were just ignored. As my friend says, just send a text. It’ll probably be enough.

So, the great interregnum of the year is upon us. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas; I know we did. Gifts and food and more food and cocktails at 3 p.m., all of it. I got some wonderful gifts, large and small. I’m currently waiting for what is supposed to be more apocalyptic weather on Sunday, torrents of rain followed by plunging temperatures that may or may not lead to snow, but will surely freeze the puddles left behind. Good thing this is my vacation from my early lifeguarding shifts.

And I’m doing Dry January, again. In fact, I’m looking forward to it, after all the rich food and 3 p.m. cocktails of the past few days. I want to eat vegetables and drink sparkling water, or just plain old water. Settle in for the long haul until spring not feeling like the Goodyear blimp.

Couple quick things: For four days now, I have been unable to load this site — my own site! — on my phone, but it works fine everywhere else. Anyone else having the same problem? I get this error:

J.C. says he blames “the DNS services your phone’s provider is serving your phone with.” I have no idea.

Another housekeeping note: I reloaded the WordPress app on my phone, thinking it would be easier to post more often, with photos and such. Alas, these posts (like yesterday’s) seem to default to closed comments, even though I thought I changed that setting. I’ll keep tinkering, but be advised I’m aware of the problem.

Finally, let’s all take note of the example of Chuck Redd, the jazz musician who cancelled his Christmas Eve jam at the Kennedy Center after the toadies running it added you-know-who’s name to the building. Harvard is buckling. Big Law buckled. Big Media buckled. But this guy didn’t. Let a million Davids bloom. Keep your slingshot handy. We are on our own, we all know that now.

I was at the Eastern Market on Saturday when a Waymo taxi passed me. Someone was behind the wheel, which I take to mean it’s still undergoing testing, but we’ll likely have the driverless vehicles in Detroit before long. I texted a friend that I look forward to setting one on fire during the bloody riots of summer ’26. I was joking, but only kinda. We all know the year ahead will be grim, as the midterms approach and the Trumpers get more desperate. Be like Chuck Redd. Maybe we’ll get through this.

An unlucky pig and parts of many more, as the pork-eating holiday approaches.

I know many of my readers here are older men, and older men are famous for their love of military history, so I’m asking one of you to explain it to me like I’m five: Why would we be investing in a new class of naval battleships, when naval battleships haven’t been relevant to modern warfare since the Second World War? And how many times have we been told the next war will be fought with drones and software? How do battleships play into that?

Seriously, I want to know. This makes no sense to me.

I know I’ve been scarce around here of late, and I will likely be scarce going forward. I’m writing this while watching my kitchen floor dry, and I still have a few things to do before I’m ready for the holiday. So let this be the last one for a while, unless some photos present themselves. I wish every last one of you Merry Christmas or whatever holiday you observe, including Festivus. I do not have a lot of problems with your people, because in fact, you’re the best.

Back later.

Although the snow we’ve had almost all melted in the last couple of days, it’s still winter (almost), and hence, bird-feeding season. Alan has set up the suet feeder for the woodpeckers, the thistle seed feeder for the goldfinches, and the gen-pop feeder for the rest.

And now, the war with the squirrels begins.

Sometimes I’ll be upstairs and Alan down, and I’ll hear GODDAMNIT accompanied by a sharp rap on the window, and I know that, once again, some crafty squirrel has figured out how to leap from the fence onto the finch feeder, and use its sharp little teeth to rip big holes in the screen. Alan added another piece to the pole, raising the height, which would (he thought), not be reachable, but that didn’t last. Turns out squirrels are good jumpers. Now he’s talking about adding a length of wire to the takeoff zone, to foil a clean leap.

He’s been making noises about electrifying it, but I’m pretty sure he’s kidding.

As for the rest of the week, let’s just forget it, shall we? Between the Reiner murders, and President Shit-for-braiins’ reaction to it, to the renaming of the Kennedy Center (which will forever be the Kennedy Center, sorry), to yet another utter disgrace at the White House, I just want this week to be over. Soon it will be.

Watch out, squirrels.

So, is Susie Wiles about to be spending more time with her family?

My guess: No. For all of his fondness for bellowing YOU’RE FIRED, he won’t fire any of the hand-picked lackeys who fluff him all day. But my guess is, it will make the underlings regard one another with even fiercer and more vicious thoughts blazing from their eyes.

You know who I think about sometimes? Bobby Kennedy. Here’s a guy who has been catered to, looked up to and otherwise fluffed himself, all his life. But for these cabinet meetings, he has to bow and scrape and ass-kiss like the rest of those yo-yos. It must chap his ass like nothing else, sucking up to that pig. All of that swallowed bile has to go somewhere. I’m thinking the fallout, when all of this explodes, is going to be epic.

And that was just this morning.

I don’t know if Roy’s excellent Substack today is unlocked, but here are a few good parts (and you should subscribe):

In his first term Trump pantomimed some policy interests, but these were impossible to take seriously. You may recall, for example, his stupid “Trumpcare” alternative to the ACA that was so poorly conceived his factota in Congress dragged their feet on it, terrified at how voters would react if it were actually put into practice, until John McCain did them the favor of killing it in the Senate. And with COVID he mainly handed off the work to the health bureaucracy while yammering so nonsensically about it on TV that it killed his 2020 campaign.

In this second term you can see what Trump, relieved of any obligation to make it look good for political reasons, is really about, and it ain’t steering the ship of state.

Since Congress ended the subsidies that were keeping ACA premiums down, his approach to the chaos that ensued isn’t some new version of Trumpcare 2.0 — it’s just letting everyone know he doesn’t give a shit what happens (“Don’t make it sound so bad”). He is observably content to see millions of Americans lose their insurance as revenge for having signed up for something called “Obamacare” in the first place.

Revenge is a big part of what fills in for policy in Trump governance. His reaction to the rebuke he received from the electorate for his pandemic malfeasance, too, has been a pathological act of vengeance against the health care establishment — indeed, against the very idea of health care, with the appointment of an actual dangerous lunatic to run it.

Yessiree.

Not much more to report today. Got two-thirds of the work shoveled off my desk, and am tentatively looking forward to a pleasant holiday interlude, if you ignore all the bad news in the world.

I saw the news about the Brown University mass shooting Saturday evening, and woke up to the Bondi Beach mass shooting Sunday morning. I have no thoughts about this other than: :::deep sigh.:::

No, just this: Mass shootings are a true American export, aren’t they? As always, more will be revealed about both incidents, but that’s my knee-jerk reaction.

So let’s wait a bit before we talk too much about it.

And it was such a pleasant weekend, too. Erected the tree, squired the out-of-towners around a bit, hit a Christmas bazaar, set up a wrapping station in the basement, spotted a Cooper’s hawk sitting on our back-yard fence. My plan to get the decks cleared by today isn’t going perfectly, but it’s close enough.

If you follow sports at all, you’ve probably heard about the travails of the just-fired University of Michigan head football coach, Sherrone Moore. It’s a tale as old as time: Sexually profligate man allows his sexual profligacy to get the best of him. We don’t know all the details yet, but it seems pretty obvious that his main side piece was his executive assistant, herself the daughter of an NFL scout and an Erika Kirk doppelgänger, minus the Tammy Faye Bakker level of eye makeup. Moore is said to have “grabbed butter knives” from her kitchen drawers in a confrontation, and threatened to kill himself with them and make her watch. I don’t know how she responded to this threat, but needless to say, it came up at his arraignment and, well. Like I said: A tale as old as time.

At least he was fired for cause, which means the university won’t have to pay out his bloated contract, as Michigan State University is doing with its own fired coach. For once, I find myself in complete agreement with Nolan Finley, the conservative ed-page editor at The Detroit News. I’m sure his column today is paywalled, but these two grafs are hammer-meet-nail dead-on:

Schools hire coaches who promise to take them to the mountaintop, sign them to lengthy, multimillion-dollar contracts, and when no championship banners arrive in two or three years, cut them loose and go looking for their next savior. Most end up stuck paying the salaries of both the old coach and the new one at the expense of students.

Look up the road to East Lansing, where Michigan State University will be paying $32.5 million over the next five years to fired coach John Smith, and $30 million over that same period to new coach Pat Fitzgerald. So the head coaching position will cost MSU roughly $12 million a year. And if Mel Tucker wins his $125 million wrongful discharge lawsuit, that figure will skyrocket.

I used to say the best job in America is to be the first ex-wife of a billionaire: Marry him, birth and raise the kids, then bail out with an eight- or nine-figure settlement when a spiritual sister of Lauren Sanchez enters the chat. Now I think it’s being a losing football coach with a multi-year contract.

One last note, a story that dropped online a few days ago, but I’m just getting to today, about how the loathsome Tate Brothers were sprung from custody in Romania thanks to the Trump administration, and yes, that’s a gift link. It’s as upsetting as you’d imagine, and my takeaway is this: No more hands off Barron Trump, that poor innocent kid, who appears to have blossomed into the apple that doesn’t fall far from the tree, or a grosser metaphor about assholes and shit:

Barron, now 19, admired Andrew (Tate), and spoke with him over Zoom last year, according to Justin Waller, a mutual friend who was on the call. During the call, they discussed their shared belief that the Romanian criminal case was an effort to silence the Tates, he said.

Maybe he never had a chance, being the son of a criminal and a whore, but he’s made his own choices.

Off to enjoy a very cold Sunday, if “doing some work” can be called enjoyment.

I watched “Jay Kelly,” the new George Clooney movie, this week. I found it to be entirely enjoyable, yet also, as the kids say today, mid. Which is to say it may be like the book I talked about earlier this week: It wasn’t terrible to watch, but I’ll forget every frame of it in 10 days. My main takeaway was this: George is old now.

For me, it might be the most unsettling part of aging — seeing the movie stars I grew up with turning into senior citizens. Some of the most striking women of my youth, beauties like Sharon Stone, Michelle Pfeiffer, all old now. The men, those lust objects like Clooney: Old. Robert Redford had a cameo on the last season of “Dark Skies,” and looked as lined as one of those dried-apple dolls, and he’s dead now, anyway.

It’s unsettling, of course, because it means I’m old now too, which I objectively am, but apart from the pain in my knees, honestly, I don’t feel old. I feel…mature. Capable of holding my tongue in situations where I once would have let loose, to no good end. I can take the long view more often. I have no interest in chasing trends, or even knowing anything about them. You say baggy jeans are back? That’s nice. I think I have a pair in my drawer. From the ’90s. And as someone who could never, ever coast on her looks, I even think I look better than I did at, say, 30. I’m a better-looking old person than I was a young person. That has to count for something.

“Jay Kelly” is about an aging actor, and — this is not a spoiler — culminates with a career-tribute highlight reel, many of the shots recognizable from Clooney’s earlier work. He watches it with a slow tear sliding down his cheek, tinged with all the joy and regret over roads taken and not taken, and I guess that’s what life is like at our age. George and I are about the same age but he took the rich-Hollywood-movie-star-male-division life path of marrying a much younger woman, so he could have children. I wouldn’t want to be mothering twins at 56, or even 39, the age of his wife when she gave birth, but I can’t afford round-the-clock nannies, either, so it all works out.

We’ve spoken here often about growing old, and I know I’m still in early old age, that everything can go south tomorrow, but so far so good. Look me up in five years, see how I feel.

I’ve almost grown out of one of my bad habits of aging, which is to say, comparing my physical decrepitude with that of other women my age: Look at that crepey cleavage. At least I don’t have that, and so on. Sooner or later the crepe is all we have. Live until you die, I guess.

Getting older means I’m more likely to be a victim of a scam, something I’m reminded of almost daily, as I read about some miscreant persuading one of my cohort into depositing cash into a Bitcoin ATM to avoid prosecution for child porn, or something. I worry that one day I’ll get a call from someone close to me, begging for bail money, and I’ll fall for it, but it’ll turn out to be an AI sample of their voice. I think we should discuss a family code phrase to use. I think I should let Kate have veto power over big withdrawals from the nest-egg funds, so it doesn’t all go to Chinese or Russian thieves. Then I think, nah. Not time to panic yet.

Alan used to chide me for peeling off a couple singles for every panhandler we pass, arguing that it was just going to go for booze or drugs. That’s a type of scam, I guess. No one asks for money on the street for a pint of Mad Dog. On the other hand, everyone should have a small pleasure. So I keep giving.

Why so philosophical today, Nance? Can’t say. I had an enjoyable morning, meeting two friends of the blog in town for a couple days. Then a quiet afternoon. Indiana rejected further gerrymandering the state, indicating the cracks in Tubby’s coalition are widening.

I hope I live long enough to see him die, though, preferably of natural causes, in public and painfully. It’ll be awesome. How’s that for maturity?

Have a good weekend, all!

The other day I was down at Wayne State, turning in my textbooks, browsing the campus Barnes & Noble. On a whim, I bought Emily St. John Mandel’s “Sea of Tranquility,” because I loved “Station Eleven” so, so much.

This week I’ve been reading it, and I was 50 pages in when I realized: I’ve already read this. And not that long ago, either. And it took me 50 pages to realize it.

Obviously, this is an affirmative diagnosis of dementia. Also, I’m out $18.

It’s still a good book. Mandel has a real gift.

How’s everyone, midweek? Man, has it EVER been winter all up in this place. It got cold early, snowed early, and now we’re getting another 1-2 inches overnight, followed by a single-digit cold snap this weekend. Our Atlanta guests are heading south as we speak, and I don’t blame them. (Also, I don’t mind the snow, either. I am large, I contain multitudes. With dementia.) Woke up this morning to two more inches of slush, with school called off, which means early-morning lifeguarding is cancelled, too, but the call came late and I was already at the pool and the pre-dawn patrol was pulling in, so? We swam. Or rather, they swam. I sat in the chair and watched.

Bloggage? Oh yeah:

President Shit-for-brains goes off-script:

MOUNT POCONO, Pa. — He had charts that he read from, touting economic data. The stage around him was filled with signs reading, “Lower Prices Bigger Paychecks.” He introduced Pennsylvanians who he said had more take-home pay because of his policies.

But if he was supposed to launch a speaking tour to connect with Americans struggling with higher prices and stagnant wages, President Donald Trump didn’t hesitate to veer off course.

He mocked the word “affordability,” touted how high the stock market had risen and said Americans didn’t need so many pencils. He launched into a number of digressions to disparage the country of Somalia, the concept of climate change and the news media in the back of the room.

Yeah, he’s back on the you-have-too-many-pencils-and-dolls thing. But remember! It’s Biden who was senile!

Miami elected its first Democratic mayor in 30 years. More bad news for you-know-who.

Can a typeface be woke? Mario Rubio sure thinks so, the dolt.

Among the many funny things Jeff Borden said during our time as across-the-hall neighbors was his offhand observation about exercise: “I could get into it if I could find one like…oh, like sex. You work a little while, you get a big reward, and then you go to sleep.” Ha ha.

I swam on Sunday for the second time in 72 hours, and reflected that it is the most paradoxical of the three or four workouts I most often do. It’s the one I have to work hardest to show up for, but once it’s over, I feel much better than after boxing, cycling or doing weight work. I don’t know if it’s the shower, or what. I certainly don’t get an orgasm out of the deal. But I always leave feeling not just exercised, but energized.

Then I go home, eat my weight in carbs, and fall into a food coma.

Swam 2,075 yards in 58 minutes, average heart rate 121. Nothing special, but it started the week off right.

Most of the weekend, I worked. I had to file 1,600 words on pickleball, and I now invite you to ask me anything about pickleball, a game I’ve never played. My favorite research was on the war between pickleball players and those who do almost anything else on a court. Pity poor tennis, now eclipsed by what appears to be a goofier form of ping-pong. In Santa Rosa, Calif. in 2021, pickleball courts were vandalized by a deliberate motor-oil spill:

The players also found a profanity-laced note printed on a piece of white paper lying on one of the courts. Its writer threatened to key the cars of any pickleball players who came to the courts, and called tennis players who didn’t do anything to stop the pickleball players “chickens.”

Don’t cross Big Tennis! They don’t mess around!

Then there’s this guy, who squats on handball courts in New York to keep picklers away:

His name is Paul Owens (or maybe Paul Rubenfarb or Paul Rosenberg); he claims to be 97, and his cryptic business card reads “Let’s go dancing,” while listing a variety of genres like “doo-wop” and “1950s red-light mambo.”

All they know for sure is that his life seems to revolve around arriving at the North Meadow Recreation Center as early as 7 a.m., well before Parks Department employees clock in for the day, and just as the earliest pickleball players begin trickling in. That is when he stakes his claim in the middle of the courts and, in a sense, holds the pickleballers hostage. He contends they are taking away space originally devoted to the proletarian sport of handball, historically favored by teenagers of color. (He himself is an ex-handball player, but like many old-timers, he has switched to paddleball, which is more forgiving on the knees.)

To anyone who asks why he insists on ruining the fun, he hands out a flyer in the style of a ransom note that slams “pickleball’s well-off aggressive elite.”

My dad played handball. He often called racquetball “a ladies’ game.” I wonder what he’d think of pickleball. My guess: Not much.

Otherwise, it was a pleasant weekend. J.C. and Sammy are swinging through tomorrow for a brief visit, and I’m very much looking forward to that. Thanks for your comments on my Belle Isle piece, also. I don’t have a lot to add, except that the man with this big idea went on something called the Charter Cities podcast to discuss it. I gather the concept of charter cities is the same as charter schools, i.e., a boondoggle that allows chartered individuals to step outside the law with the promise of innovating their problems away. I expect it will end the way the charter-school movement has, i.e. with wealthy people getting wealthier, the problems remaining and the rest of us, screwed.

Bloggage? A good WashPost dive into the state of the Kennedy Center (gift link):

So what is the Kennedy Center now?

For one thing, it’s getting a Trumpian revamp. He ordered new marble and the repainting of the exterior columns in austere white. Portraits of the first and second couples now hang in the center’s Hall of Nations, and the building exterior is occasionally lit up in red, white and blue (a move that, many staffers joke, makes the building look like the flag of France, not America).

…(Kennedy Center President Richard) Grenell, who directed his staff refer to him as “Ambassador,” quickly began overhauling the center’s leadership. Hires included Roma Daravi, a White House communications aide from the first Trump administration and a former ballerina, as head of the public relations team; and Lisa Dale, a former senior campaign adviser to Trump ally Kari Lake, as the senior vice president of development. He installed the former national chairman of the Young Republicans, Rick Loughery, and his longtime adviser Nick Meade in top roles. None of the three had any previous arts expertise. (Staffers quickly dubbed the trio “The Icks.”) Grenell spends a significant amount of time in California, where he primarily resides, and is rarely seen in the building, staffers say.

Ai-yi-yi. Can’t wait to see the new medals.

OK, time to make some dinner. Have a good week, everyone.

This has been a week. You might recall I’m taking a creative writing class this semester? Today was the last class. We were asked to read a selection from our final project, which encompassed short fiction, poetry and memoir. I read my memoir excerpt.

It was about Tim Goeglein. Might as well choose a vivid chapter. It got some giggles, especially from the teacher, who, like most teachers, has had her experiences with plagiarism. A snippet:

Like President Bush, I believe in forgiveness. But I also believe in shame, and we live in a shameless age. A man exposed as a thief of other’s thoughts and expression – for years – shouldn’t be publishing book after book. The online left has long spoken of “wingnut welfare,” the seemingly endless trough from which certain conservative “thinkers” can feed, in perpetuity. Scandals, whether it be taking laundered money from the Russians, sexual misbehavior or worse, don’t seem to dent people on the right, while Sen. Al Franken was pressured into resigning for making a naughty gesture in a photograph.

It was no doubt hard for Tim Goeglein to lose his White House job. But like so many of these preening God-botherers, he was shoved off the roof with a parachute on his back, and drifted gently down into another well-paid position.

What a bitch the lady who wrote that is.

Here’s something else I wrote, for the Free Press. It was paywalled when it went up, so here’s a non-paywalled link. It’s not what I’d usually do, but I assume you guys are mostly not in the Freep area, so oh well.

Tell me what you think. And have a swell weekend.