I refuse to sniff the Hopium, as they call it on the internet, but I’m allowing myself, at some moments, when the light is just right, when I’ve had a single drink, when I’ve slipped out of my bubble and into another, to feel some optimism about the upcoming elections.

This week, in the Michigan House, this is what happened (link probably paywalled):

LANSING — The Michigan House voted on Sept. 23 in favor of proposals to condemn socialism and to require an American flag be displayed in a prominent location in each classroom across the state.

…Michigan law already generally requires American flags to be placed in classrooms, under legislation that Republican then-Gov. Rick Snyder signed in 2012. But the new bill from state Rep. Matt Maddock, R-Milford, aims to add a size requirement — two feet by three feet — and a standard that the display be prominent.

I feel so much better now, knowing the party that wants the government out of our lives will now enforce a particular flag size and placement. Comic relief, also likely paywalled:

Freedom Fest, a MAGA-themed Kentucky event planned for Sept. 26 that was to be headlined by Kid Rock and was slated to feature an appearance from Dog the Bounty Hunter, has been canceled by organizers after selling less than 10 VIP tickets, The Cincinnati Enquirer reports.

Organizer Eric Deters announced the cancelation on social media on Sept. 21.

He said he had counted on VIP ticket sales funding the festival, which was previously held in 2022 and 2024. Past events featured guests such as Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Candace Owens.

“When I put together Patriots Day Freedom Fest, I put it together with the game plan and the idea that I could pay for it with VIP sales of $1,000 from these 100 people that I interact with on a regular basis,” Deters said on Facebook in a since-deleted message, according to the Enquirer.

Instead, only six people had purchased VIP tickets to the event, he said. The number of non-VIP tickets sold for the event was not disclosed.

“Rank-and-file Americans are the backbone of this country, (from) both political parties,” Deters said. “I want to tell you something: rich people, as a whole, suck.

“I am never ever, ever, ever, ever doing this event again. Ever,” he said.

The air may be hissing out of the balloon. We’ll see. I’ve had my hopes dashed too many times to get comfortable believing it, but all the indications are good.

And if Tubby pulls a fast one and cancels the election, the country will burn down and then? Problem solved.

Sorry I’ve been scarce this week. It’s been one of those weeks. Not busy, just uneventful. I made a list and handled some things. I went to a friend’s house and made some misshapen turnovers. The filling was great — pear, fig and gorgonzola — but the pastry was a mess. We decided there is NO SHAME in going for Pepperidge Farm puff pastry next time, and we will. I went to the library, in another attempt to distract myself from the current crisis. I was amazed to find an unread Thomas Harris book, and dismayed to learn, 80 or so pages in, that it’s terrible.

And other than that? It’s just been kinda dull, now that the thrill of traveling to the Hoosier state has worn off. I need another adventure.

It was a dry summer. We were watering our driveway garden every other day, and it would still droop on hot days, which were plentiful. So when I woke up yesterday to a cool, drippy world and again today, I was pleased.

Never more than a visitor to a farm, but once a Midwesterner, always a Midwesterner.

I checked out the brief discussion about third-grade reading in the comments of the last post. I understand that Mark was pointing out the grammatical mess of the original statement, and also Julie’s point that third-grade reading skills are important. They were talking past one another, but no biggie.

It so happens Michigan’s schoolchildren are doing abysmally, and have slipped precipitously in recent years. The GOP, in seeking to make this a campaign issue, are bringing up the so-called Mississippi miracle, in which that beleaguered state made tremendous gains in elementary reading accomplishment through the time-honored strategy of Getting Tough and Demanding Excellence, etc. I’ve been reading about this for a while, and it kept ringing a bell, because it sounded so similar to a plan that was briefly in place in Michigan, in which any kid who wasn’t at grade level in reading by the end of third, would be held back a year.

It didn’t last long. Schools hated it, teachers hated it, parents hated it, and when the Dems took a trifecta in the state legislature, it was promptly repealed.

I’m oversimplifying it to some extent. It wasn’t simply read or flunk; there were strategies for remedial support, etc. But the bottom line was the flunking part. Flunking isn’t just a disaster for children. It throws a monkey wrench into school administration, teaching plans and even student households. One or two failures in a year is one thing, but when a large cohort of children are facing retention, it has all sorts of ripple effects that were likely not considered when the law was passed, as “pass or flunk” reads better in a campaign speech than “reading comprehension is complicated and can be negatively affected by various factors, including…”

Here’s a blog by a Michigan teacher from 2019 that gets into the weeds, if you’re interested.

A friend who covers education pointed out that the Mississippi miracle shows its flaws within a few years. Sure, hold a kid back, cram them with remedial instruction, finesse the test scores and squeak them into the next grade level, a year older than their classmates. Then wait for the collapse, because within a few more years, certainly by middle school, those hard-fought gains are gone.

In fact, with the details changed, it’s exactly the argument conservatives make for doing away with Head Start — the gains achieved at preschool disappear by third grade, etc.

It’s almost as though teaching reading — teaching anything — is harder than it seems to a state legislature. It involves pretty much every factor in how education is structured in this country, including but not limited to home environments, household income, summer slide and everything else. I’m not a teacher, and I can’t even begin to know how to teach a kid to read. Kate basically taught herself, because she had an older, exhausted mother who was always happier to read to her rather than chase a soccer ball around the yard. Her teachers handled the rest of it, and today she has a library card. Happy ending.

I once visited a grade school in Grand Rapids. With “challenges,” as we say, including a large number of children of migrant agricultural workers, who might only be enrolled a few weeks before their parents decamp for another crop to harvest. The principal was heroic in his work to get these kids reading and supported for it. He stood at the door at dismissal on Fridays to make sure every kid was carrying a book to read over the weekend. There were regular staff meetings where students at risk of failing were discussed, with teachers huddling on what might work to get them making progress. It was a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month push, and they had the improving scores to document it. But it was never easy, or simple.

OK, then. What was the infuriating news of the weekend? It all blurs together after a while. But here’s a good piece on the destruction of the Kennedy Center, a gift link. (Note: Unless otherwise noted, everything I post is a gift link, or already free to read.) Lede:

A storm brought down a five-foot piece of ceiling plaster at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts this month and its leadership sprang into action. One thing they did not do was repair the damage.

Instead staff members left the mess on the carpet for nearly two weeks, posting photos on social media with commentary like “the place is falling apart and @realDonaldTrump wants to fix it.” They measured plaster shards and mapped the “debris field” like investigators after a plane crash, for a 55-page briefing for the center’s board about the building’s decay. No one was injured but Mr. Trump claimed online that a security guard had narrowly avoided “certain death.” Less than two hours later, his allies on the board voted to close the center, citing safety concerns.

I hate this era so, so much. Not a good way to go into the week, but here we are. Gird your loins; the midterms are still coming.

The trip to Fort Wayne was great. We saw old friends, met new ones, marveled at the evolving city, and saw a soccer — er, football — game, in the new stadium:

Yes, it’s nearly empty. But the season is almost over, and the stadium’s only been open since May. Parts of it are still under construction. But the tickets are reasonable, the design is thoughtful (there are picnic areas, children’s play places, and more) and I’m sure it’ll be an asset, going forward. Seating capacity of 9,000, and they expect to have concerts there eventually, so that capacity will grow with field seating.

We met with the mayor, who talked up the new park and this and that. Everyone is bullish on the Fort.

Now to the swag bag:

The Indiana tote bag I’ll use at the farmer’s market, the chocolate bar will be eaten, the zippered pouch will come in handy for something, the lip balm will live in the bottom of a bag. Which leaves the FW flag pin and the soccer scarf. Any FWFC fans out there who can use it? Or the pin? Brand-new, happy to share, free shipping.

Now I’m trying to catch up with stuff. A long car ride in the passenger seat leaves you with lots of links to share. So let’s hop to it.

A remarkable essay by Erick Erickson, a garden-variety wingnut, on the far-right lunatics who frighten even him:

Charles Haywood made his fortune selling shampoo. He sold his Indianapolis hair care company in 2020, and he has spent the years since writing out, at length and under his own name, what he would like to do with your country. Rod Dreher, who is no man of the left, read Haywood’s online ramblings and described Haywood as pouring out vile from “deep in his Midwestern Führerbunker”.

In a document he calls the Foundationalist Manifesto, Haywood explained that his preferred government “will not be democratic.” The state “will have unlimited means,” because “properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.” Women “will not be permitted to choose career over family.” Men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.” The state will seize the assets of “any citizen who views himself as a global citizen.”

Hoo-boy. Yes, a strong streak of leopards-eating-faces, etc., but worth a read.

The Indiana connection made me wonder whether Haywood was throwing a few shekels at the Indiana Policy Review, a one-man sinecure for a former colleague of mine, but no. I did find a typically stupid column by that colleague, praising the Amish, and contrasting them, in a single paragraph, with Muslims:

An Amish recently explained his community’s success to the Guardian newspaper: “I can see the big changes they have come to society, which my children will never see. There is more independence on the individual level, but people have become more selfish – everything is for themselves. We value the idea of working for the betterment of everyone. Our goal is to show people that it works if we are honest in our dealings, respect people and go the extra mile.”

In the simplest terms, the Amish ask the question: Just because a Ford GT can go 215 m.p.h., do you need to jump in and put the pedal to the floor? More exactly, they back up a bit and ask the question of whether you really need a Ford GT — or any car, for that matter. The thought occurs that this general approach might be useful in considering our own community’s questions about birth control, artificial intelligence, data centers and such. And education? Give me a minute to think of something I learned important in school after eighth grade . . .

…You don’t have to be an expert on either the Amish or the Muslims to make a comparison based on their actions and words. The Muslims are living a mistake of the 7th-century where they conflate religion and conquest, the outcome being predictable and disastrous. The Amish, God bless their hearts, have chosen not to make that mistake.

Huh? I wonder what it feels like to be a man in his 80s, living off the largesse of two wealthy families, with the sole task of producing garbage like this.

RFK Jr., off the leash again:

The speaker before Mr. Kennedy was Mark Gorton, the president of the MAHA Institute, who called the success of the polio vaccine a “fraud,” priming the audience for the remarks of their former leader, who railed against vaccines for two decades. The speaker after him was Andrew Wakefield, a discredited British doctor whose retracted paper linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine with autism. Decades of research have proved that finding to be wrong.

…He promised the crowd that he would “be in this fight” to the end, and said the work he was doing was methodical. He added that his team was launching studies after which, he said, “we will take appropriate action.”

He also generated applause when he announced that he would be looking at the health effects of electromagnetic radiation and so-called chemtrails, the trails left by airplanes that the Environmental Protection Agency has said are actually condensation, not chemicals.

Chemtrails. Andrew Wakefield. Trashing the polio vaccine. Every week, it’s worse.

But that’s it for me today. Happy weekend! I blogged three times this week! Now off to bike the bridge again.

This has been the summer of the e-bike. Or rather, the summer of assholes and idiots on e-bikes. I get the feeling it’s the same elsewhere, too.

My community is generally described as “affluent,” and the first thing you learn when you move here is, if you’re looking for someone to blame for teenage bad behavior, it’s usually the parents. When I was compiling police reports, I lost track of how many alcohol-soaked teen parties were saved from a law enforcement breakup by a lawyer dad stepping onto the front porch and denying entry. There was a horrific fatal car crash a couple years ago, where the teen driver was known to routinely travel at insane speeds — thanks, tracking apps — and was still allowed by his mother to drive. (The crash was on a residential street with a 25 mph speed limit. The kid was going 105 when he lost control. The passenger died, not him.) And this summer, it’s 13-year-olds on Class 2 or 3 e-bikes, bombing down sidewalks without a care in the world.

I hate to play in-my-day, but in my day, I got around on a 10-speed bicycle and felt like I had pure freedom under me. I can’t think of the last time I saw a kid on a regular old bike; they all have at least pedal assist or more frequently, throttles. These bikes are capable of 20 or 30 mph, and they are menaces. It would be one thing if they were ridden in the street, where they belong, but no. Their riders prefer the sidewalk, and they don’t practice even the simplest courtesies, like making noise when overcoming a pedestrian. That no one has been injured is a miracle. I have yet to see a kid wearing a helmet on one. EDIT: I should have said here that there hasn’t been a serious injury here. In Birmingham, two 13-year-olds on an e-moto, on the sidewalk, hit a turning truck, and both are in the ICU, a couple weeks later.

Last month, it was an actual chase on e-motos, which are a step above even the Class 3 e-bikes. They’ll go 50 mph, and three Grosse Pointe brats were, once again, blasting down a sidewalk on them when they caught the attention of the police, who chased and arrested them.

Other communities report similar incidents. And once again, I blame the parents. In my time on the planet, I’ve noticed a phenomenon among the better-off — as soon as they complain about what something their kid does costs, you can check your watch, and within 30 seconds they will tell you exactly what it costs. To wit: “My kid’s hockey is costing me so much, I can’t even tell you.” Three, two, one: “Twelve grand a year, can you believe it?” Or 20 grand, or 25. They have to tell you. They’re compelled to let you in on just how much income they’re willing to commit to their kid’s recreation.

And e-bikes, and e-motos, are not cheap. You’d have to be a very dedicated teenage lawn mower to save up the money for one. They are very dangerous, though, especially on sidewalks. One went past me so close a couple weeks ago I felt my arm hair stir. And downtown, leaving the jazz festival on my own 50-year-old regular bike, riding in the street, two young men on e-motos not only rode on a very narrow sidewalk, scattering pedestrians, they looked at me like I’m the chump, hey check out grandma pedaling her antique.

Damn kids these days. They’ll learn.

In other news at this hour, are you noticing a spate of car washes being built near you? We have; they’re popping up like mushrooms, sometimes within a block or two of an existing car wash. Guess who’s responsible? You won’t believe it:

This legislation permanently reinstated 100 percent bonus depreciation for qualified property placed in service after January 19th of [2025]. This change represents a game-changer for investors looking to reduce their tax burden while earning passive income through commercial real estate.

…Bonus depreciation allows investors to accelerate their tax deductions by expensing the entire cost of eligible assets in the first year. In the context of car wash investing, this can provide an enormous benefit.

Consider the following example:

** You invest two hundred fifty thousand dollars in a car wash syndication
** You receive a $400,000 depreciation allocation in the first year
** That amount may offset your taxable income from the investment and potentially from other passive income sources
** Your effective after-tax yield increases as your tax liability decreases
** In practical terms, investors can reduce or eliminate taxes on their distributions from the investment. For many, this creates a win-win situation: the combination of cash flow and significant tax deferral or reduction.

And why car washes? They require a big capital outlay up front, but begin cash flow quickly upon completion, so “this means the depreciation can potentially be matched to real distributions.” How nice. I can’t wait until we reach total market saturation, and these ugly monstrosities are abandoned to sit vacant and become crack houses. Data centers, but flashier.

OK, enough. We’re off to the Fort later this week, for a quick drop-in visit. Hoping for good weather, hoping for friendly faces. Hoping for fewer e-bikes.

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

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

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

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

OK, then.

Yesterday we went shooting.

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

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

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

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

Today’s to-do list:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As everything has to come to an end, so to has the 47th annual Detroit Jazz Festival, and my burden is significantly lightened. Posting to social media is a strange thing, not journalism but with elements of it, not quite marketing but with elements of that, too. Truth be told, far more marketing than journalism, but sometimes you can say that about The New York Times. But it was four long days with lots of running around, buttonholing artists for stop-and-chats, being on the lookout for interesting things on and around the various stages.

Truth be told, I cannot top the City of Detroit genius who came to the festival and gave us the Unc Cam:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by City of Detroit (@cityofdetroit)

This was my breaking news:

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A post shared by Detroit Jazz Festival Fdn (@detroitjazzfest)

A very fragile and interesting moment I feel fortunate to have captured (not well, but at least I captured it).

The hotel where we all stayed, the Marriott at the RenCen, is enormous, and was also accommodating the Islamic Society of North America and a large Indian wedding. So when any random elevator door opened, you might be sharing it with men in shalwar kameez or a thobe, women in abayas or long dresses with a hijab in contrasting print trailing behind, raven-haired beauties in saris with hennaed hands, or some dude all in black carrying a saxophone case. Today it was a teenager in a T-shirt advertising “a better way to wudu.” I asked him what the better way was; he said it involved a special sock. (Wudu, for those who don’t know, is the ritual bathing before Islamic prayer, and the problematic part is the feet. The University of Michigan at Dearborn, after repairing too many bathroom sinks accidentally torn from the wall by clumsy wudu, installed footbaths.)

Anyway, it was a good weekend of exhausting work and excellent music. Plus uncs. And this lady, the one on the right…

…who is famous. I asked her where she got her sunglasses. She said Reykjavik. I saw her every day, always looking amazing.

Now, friends, I am bone-tired and intend to sleep until my body has had enough. I want you to know that I haven’t forgotten this blog, nor you readers. I now intend to enjoy Adult Summer — the six weeks of good-enough weather that follows Labor Day — to the fullest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even as a native Buckeye, I don’t think I came across the rural Ohio hamlet of East Palestine once before that train derailed there a while back, and here it pops up again on Monday:

San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York pleaded no contest Monday to two misdemeanor charges after his arrest in East Palestine, Ohio, over the weekend.

Columbiana County court records show that York was ordered to serve one day in jail for each charge, to be served concurrently, and was given one day of credit for time served. He also paid two fines totaling $1,150.

Also according to those court records, York’s initial charge was “engaging in prostitution,” which was reduced to disorderly conduct and possessing criminal tools, and that “$160 seized shall be forfeited to MVHTFF (Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force).” When reached by USA TODAY Sports, the MVHTFF did not immediately have additional information.

What, one might ask, is the owner of the San Francisco NFL franchise doing in East Palestine, allegedly sporting with hookers? I asked my Ohio sports-news authority, who replied:

His mom is the sister of previous team owner Eddie DeBartolo, another Youngstown mafioso who was busted on a similar charge some years back. They just like that dirty trailer trash.

Ah, well. That makes sense. Robert Kraft, the Patriots owner, was busted for patronizing one of those massage parlors employing…what was the name of the place? Orchids of Asia Day Spa. It must have something to do with constant exposure to the heart-stopping beauties who populate the ranks of NFL cheerleading squads. One seeks something different, the way a man who can eat all the lobster and caviar his heart desires sometimes might enjoy a hot dog, just as a change of pace.

Anyway, thinking of East Palestine reminded me of one of Charlie LeDuff’s more ridiculous columns, when he was still employed by The Detroit News:

The poor folks of East Palestine, Ohio.

There they stood last week, staring into the sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of Air Force One, which at that very moment was supposed to be flying overhead — 150 miles from the White House as the crow flies — making its way from Washington D.C. to Detroit.

Yeah, I totally believe that happened.

Now it’s Tuesday, and I still haven’t got this done. My freelance work ramps up this week and next, culminating with Labor Day weekend, and after that I’ll have about a month of summer to enjoy. In the meantime, two items from the You Can’t Make This Shit Up file:

The racist racists in the Trump administration, including the director of the Art in Embassies program, describes this painting as “aesthetically terrifying” and “very woke.”

The racist who described it as such is Erin Scavino. Remember that name.

And then, today, this:

President Donald Trump said he is considering changing the name of Lake Ontario, the easternmost of the Great Lakes spanning the U.S.-Canada border, to Lake America, as the U.S.-Canada trade fight escalates.

“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer,” he wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday morning.

I hate the president. And all his racist toadies. That is all. Better get this up before something else derails me.

EDIT: And now Dolly Parton! Arrrgghhh.

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

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

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

That’s Alan.

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

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

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

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