Apologies for no post coming into Monday. Honestly, I was kinda empty, and in cases like this, it’s best to respect the dry well and let it refill.

Then, today, John Sinclair died. :::cracks knuckles::: Ok, then.

If you don’t know who he was, no worries. He was strictly a local celebrity who briefly went national, if you’re the sort of obsessive music fan who reads the liner notes. He’s most often described as the manager of the MC5, a local activist in the hot heart of the ’60s, an unapologetic stoner who co-founded the White Panther Party and lured John and Yoko to Ann Arbor for a benefit after he was sent to prison for giving two joints to an undercover cop. You might remember the White Panthers from one point in their multi-point manifesto: Total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock ’n’ roll, dope and fucking in the streets.

I can’t recommend my friend Bill McGraw’s obit in the Freep highly enough; he really captured the guy, including his rock-solid, lifelong sense of humor and absurdity. The White Panthers weren’t Maoist scolds, or even 100 percent serious, and damn, I’d have liked to party with those guys.

I only met Sinclair once, although you could often spot him at this or that event around town. He’d been in declining health for some time, getting around with a walker or in a wheelchair, but his mouth was always in good shape. After marijuana was fully legalized in Michigan, a local attorney held a news conference in his conference room, and Sinclair was a guest. There wasn’t much news coming out of the event, something about a lawsuit, but at one point Sinclair went off on a recent story in one of the papers, that had showcased police concern for what might happen to their drug-sniffing dogs in this new era. “They’re boo-hooing about their dogs!” Sinclair raged. “Their fucking dogs!” The TV reporters despaired of a spicy clip they couldn’t use, but I laughed. And I quoted him accurately in my story.

He wasn’t all about weed, as this passage from Bill’s obit notes:

In 1972, after having been freed from prison for his marijuana conviction, Sinclair found himself in more serious difficulty. A federal grand jury indicted him and two other White Panthers, Plamondon and Jack Forrest, for conspiring to dynamite a clandestine CIA recruiting office on Main Street in Ann Arbor in 1968. The FBI maintained Plamondon planted the bomb.

After U.S. District Judge Damon Keith in Detroit ruled against the government for tapping Plamondon’s phone without a warrant, the three hippies squared off against the Nixon Justice Department in a landmark wiretapping case before the high court in Washington. Sinclair and friends won, in a unanimous decision that scuttled Nixon’s national legal strategy against numerous other radicals. It was a major defeat for the self-proclaimed law-and-order president.

“When that case came down, every pending Black Panther, Weatherman, antiwar conspiracy case in the country had to be dismissed,” said Hugh (Buck) Davis, a Detroit lawyer who worked on the Sinclair appeals as a recent law school graduate, with nationally known legal heavyweights William Kuntsler and Leonard Weinglass, fresh from defending the Chicago 7. “They were all based on illegal wiretaps.”

Good for him.

John Sinclair got high every day, and moved to Amsterdam for a while to make it easier, but he came back. Detroit is a pretty lawless town, and getting marijuana isn’t exactly difficult, even when it was a crime. Or, as he put it:

Detroit, Sinclair said, “was the place where you could hear jazz all night long and cop weed or pills whenever you wanted to.”

So farewell, John. As a final note, here’s a piece of research Bill passed along to me when he was composing his pre-written obit. Note the police description of a jam session: “…a party at which the participants entertain themselves with bongo music and marijuana.”

Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” is getting a fair amount of attention, as Big Books by Big Authors tend to do in the days following their publication. In a nutshell, Haidt argues that smartphones — not Covid, not climate change, not mass shootings — are at the root of Gen Z’s well-covered tendency to be more depressed and less optimistic than older Americans. He talks mostly about the corrosive effects of social media, but it’s another part of the grinding-down aspect of smartphone life that interests me: Surveillance.

Haidt is friends with Lenore Skenazy, who made a big splash a few years back when she wrote about letting her 9-year-old find his way home from Bloomingdale’s (they live in New York City) alone. The kid had a $20 bill for emergencies, but no phone. He had been riding on public transit for years and knew the system. And he was fine. The piece splashed so big that Skenazy spun it into an organization, Free Range Kids, that advocates for loosening the tethers that worried parents place on their children, to give them age-appropriate freedom and independence. Let go, let God. It’s good for them. Etcetera.

I think this is a good idea, which is easy for me to say, as my own child is 27 now, but looking back, I reflect that life got easier when I did the same thing. We live in a safe community, but in conversation with Kate’s peers’ parents, I got the impression that few others think so. At least with regard to their own offspring.

Which I get. Your child is the most precious thing in the world, and you’d do anything to protect it. But around here, parents go to insane lengths to do so, and increasingly, the smartphone is key to everything. For instance, it’s commonplace for people around here to leave their phone’s location-sharing on all the time, and share with their family. So not only do parents know where their kids are, kids know where their parents are. Spouses track one another in real time.

This is always explained, and justified, as a matter of safety, trust and love. It’s a way of showing up for each other, to say “if you need me, this is where you can find me,” or “I worry about you, so it helps to know you’re safe.” Bad things happen to people. A couple years ago, a freshman went missing at Michigan State after a night of heavy drinking. Common sense would tell searchers where to look (the Red Cedar River, running through the middle of campus), but it took weeks to find him, and that’s exactly where his body was. The discussion afterward centered on improving security with more cameras (the one nearest where he fell in was out of service), not discouraging the blackout drinking that leads to these incidents.

Kate had a friend when she was young, who lived a block away. She liked to spend time over there — they had video games and better snacks — and by the time I’d call her home in wintertime, it would be dark outside. They never failed to drive her one block home, and when I suggested that was excessive, the reply was always, “If anything happened to her, I’d never forgive myself.” That nothing had happened to any child walking home in our community, that anyone could remember, meant nothing. There’s always a first time.

I think about the kids we see in Europe; we usually go during the school year and have seen uniformed children on the streets and squares of Paris and Barcelona and Morocco and Madrid. No adults are in evidence, and if they are, they keep their distance. These kids get on and off buses and trains and play freely with one another — a soccer ball seems to be all they need to have a good time. I don’t recall seeing any phones in a child’s hand in these street encounters. While I’m sure they have video games and their own anxieties, they don’t seem to be the American kind.

The night of Kate’s high-school graduation, her band played a gig in Hamtramck. They all surrounded me and begged to borrow my car, a Volvo station wagon at the time, for their upcoming tour. It would be two or three weeks on the road, all of them 18 years old. I thought about it for a while, considered that they had been playing unsupervised gigs all over one of the country’s most dangerous cities (according to the stats, anyway) for a couple years now, and finally said yes. And while I’m certain there was drinking and weed-smoking and other stupidity taking place over that fortnight, they came home safe. They were ready.

OK, getting to week’s end, have to finish a piece, so here’s some bloggage:

Neil Steinberg speaks for me when he suggests Ronna McDaniel’s betrayal of her own country shouldn’t be excused easily:

The former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee thought she could shed her Trump-coddling, election-denying, democracy-shredding raiment and simply rejoin polite society. And, sadly, the out-of-touch NBC brass hoped she could too, briefly. Imagined McDaniel might provide some of that good old fashioned Red State perspective, make the case for lies and delusion, maybe snag a few viewers drifting away from Fox News.

But legitimate NBC journalists rebelled, on air. Thank God. That’s how it should be. Some things cannot be forgiven. Maybe casting a ballot for Trump two or three times, in the privacy of the voting booth, can be reframed as a secret shame. But at some point, as you rise up the ladder in the pyramid of cowards, quisling and craven opportunists, you lose the chance to walk away from your treachery. At some point you end up in the dock in a plexiglas booth.

Yep. Also, Joe Lieberman is dead, and someone will mourn him, but it won’t be me:

Lieberman’s last term in the Senate was not one in which he shined. He played an absolutely critical role in making sure that the Affordable Care Act had no public option. He told Harry Reid he would filibuster any effort to create a public option. And while he wasn’t the only Democrat to torpedo a far better bill than what got passed, Lieberman has more than his share in the blame to make that happen. A lot of people were disgusted by his behavior in the 2006 election and he was only polling at a 31 percent approval rating in 2010, so he decided to retire at the end of his term. Chris Murphy replaced him and finally Connecticut Democrats had a real senator representing their interests.

…Lieberman may have theoretically supported Clinton in 2016, but he was happy to work with Trump. In fact, who did Betsy DeVos have introduce her to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee for her confirmation hearings as Secretary of Education but Holy Joe himself. Great that he was willing to vouch for such a lovely person. Lieberman always had a soft spot for Trump. Speculating that the latter could run for president in 2000, Lieberman said in 1999, “The Donald is quite a ladies’ man. He’s going to have, if elected, an all-female cabinet … Secretary of Energy Carmen Electra, Secretary of Defense Xena the Warrior Princess.” That’s some hot comedy from our favorite senator there! Trump nearly named him FBI director to replace James Comey, which would have been a total shitshow. I wonder if Lieberman would have toadied up to Trump in the required manner or whether his “look out for me and me alone” mentality would have let to a total blowup. I almost wish it happened just so we could have yet another reason to hate the man.

A good weekend to all. At the end of it, it’ll be April.

The world continues to fall apart. The collapse of the Key bridge in Baltimore was — is — shocking. I had to get off Twitter once the For You stream sent me a series of posts suggesting this WASN’T AN ACCIDENT and was likely caused by TERRORISTS or JEWS or it was a CYBER ATTACK ON THE SHIP or some other rage-farming bullshit. Why is it so hard to hear those hoofbeats and think horses, not zebras. Or they know it’s horses, and they’re just exploiting the once-useful social network ruined by Elon Musk.

Worse was the local resident who carped to a reporter that now the harbor and port would be closed, and traffic would be terrible, and you can forget about same-day deliveries from Amazon, yes you can. I know Baltimore is a tough town, but please: A moment for fishing the bodies out of the harbor before we move on to petty annoyances.

I recall reading a story, years ago, in the Washington Post. The subject was maybe Fear or Phobias or something, but it included a short piece about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, also in Maryland. The bridge employs drivers for so-called “Timmies,” i.e. people with phobias about driving over such a long bridge, but nevertheless required to do so, usually for a job commute. The Timmies (for “timid,” duh) pull over in a designated area and the driver gets in. They can handle the drive however they want — calmly in the passenger seat, crouched under a blanket in the back, whatever. At the other end, the driver gets out and goes to the waiting area for a ride going the other way.

At the time it seemed amusing. But the last time I drove the Mackinac Bridge I did deep breathing all the way across and found myself oddly unsettled. I used to love it; I’d change lanes back and forth between the paved outside lane and the grated inside lanes (for icy conditions) just to hear the hum of the grating passing under my tires. But now I stick to the pavement and try not to think how far down the water is. Not a Timmie, but maybe Timmie-adjacent.

Anyway, look for a lot more Timmies crossing bridges in the coming days.

Collapse elsewhere: I try not to think too much about the British royal family, either, but man, Friday’s news about Princess Kate was a shocker. It certainly silenced the Too Online Encyclopedia Browns for a hot second, after which they roared back to life, blaming her cancer on the Covid vaccine, because rage-farming waits for no one. I was left mainly thinking, when do the bad guys get a hit like this? She’s a young mother with three young children; when does Tubby McBronzer get his fatal stroke? When does Roger Stone get hit by a truck? Where is karma when you need it, goddamnit.

Legal collapse: The Supreme Court heard arguments in the abortion-pill case today; here’s a heartfelt defense of IVF that lays out the stakes, i.e. babies for people desperate to have one vs. crazy people who believe eight cells in a Petri dish has full constitutional rights. Not crazy, bad people. Bad, bad people.

OK, then. Let’s let the investigations unfold and hope for the best. Later.

Proof that this is a stupid, stupid country comes with an emerging theme of the Trump campaign: Asking if you’re better off than you were four years ago.

I can answer that one instantly and unequivocally: Yes. Hell yes. Take all the yes under the sun, pile it high, double it and double it again. Yes.

The Washington Post, being cognizant of its liberal media presence, added a qualifier to its headline: Trump asked if U.S. was better off in his last year. In many ways, the answer is no. The “in many ways” is perhaps justified by the subhead: A look at the third week of March 2020 reveals a nation that was plunging into a pandemic, and a leader exhibiting the erratic characteristics that his supporters love and his detractors revile

Hmm. Well, OK, maybe some people found those daily Covid briefings entertaining. But the story (gift link) lays out what we all remember:

Four years ago this week, the stock market was collapsing — hitting its worst week since the Great Recession of 2008 — as the country spiraled into a years-long pandemic that claimed more than 1 million American lives, cratered the economy, upended daily life and, arguably, helped cost Trump a second term in the White House.

…Reported covid cases exploded that week, growing from 588 to 3,659, and covid deaths more than tripled, from 16 on Sunday the 15th to 52 the following Saturday. Over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump regularly indulged in his most combative and erratic impulses, alienating large swaths of the public along the way.

During that seven-day stretch, Trump promised the country had “tremendous control” over the virus and that “we’re winning it.” In fact, the opposite was true.

Yep. That’s how it went. When I read stuff like this, I sometimes go back to my photos from that period. I don’t take as many pix as I probably should, but I take a few. Many of these images will be familiar to you, and they suggest that no goddamn WAY was the country better off in March 2020.

It was a bad time to run out of toilet paper, or “bath tissue,” as the sign suggests.

It was a good time to be making sanitizers of all sorts. This was for a story I did for Deadline Detroit. I think this guy was getting something like $50 a tub for these alcohol wipes.

My boxing workout briefly moved outdoors, socially distanced by the yard markers.

I look about as excited to be at this Zoom cocktail hour as anybody would be. “You are the only one here.” Solo drinkers should look more hangdog, if you ask me:

A closed bar in Grosse Pointe. Cardboard Conor McGregor was probably left over from St. Patrick’s Day, a couple weeks previous.

I got a tip that certain bars were opening on the DL, reviving the city’s grand tradition of speakeasies. I was using a jukebox app to try to find them, but never connected with one. I did capture this image of the neon installation on the modern art museum in Detroit, with Woodward Avenue empty of everything but my Subaru:

A friend did have a small speakeasy group with three friends, one of whom owned a bar. They’d go there, sit several stools apart, and drink together. Was it fun, I asked. “Not at all. Kinda depressing, actually.”

A socially distanced teen hang in an empty middle-school parking lot. Note all the late-model cars. Rich kids, but at least they were being responsible:

Then the Unlock Michigan movement got moving, whipped along by social media. They insisted the shutdowns and restrictions were all either a hoax or overblown or not worth the economic damage. Many of the ringleaders looked like this:

I just looked up Kevin Skinner. It appears he’s now pushing the ballot initiative to do away with property tax in Michigan. Of course.

I have to say, though, that there were moments of calm, happiness and beauty. Kate and I went down to the lakefront to try to catch a flyover of the Blue Angels, who were saluting health-care workers all over the country. It was a lovely day.

I had two cameras that day, my phone and my Nikon SLR, loaded with Tri-X pushed to 1600. A friend saw this and remarked, “Man, even Wendy looks hard.”

We were looking out at the water, thinking that’s where the planes would be. But suddenly we heard them, and saw them only a few seconds later, behind us. I swung around, raised my camera and took a hail-mary, and whadday know, it turned out great. High-contrast, but I like it.

So. Better off? You better believe it, even if the Blue Angels aren’t flying around. My 401K recovered, I now see friends face-to-face and when I want to wipe my bum, I have the t.p. to get the job done.

Happy Sunday/Monday. A busy week ahead, but afterward, all downhill.

The other day I saw this amusing item in my Axios newsletter. I’d normally link to the story, but can’t find it with a casual Google, so accept this screenshot:

God, Barry, we all miss you so much. The other day someone posted the video of Aretha Franklin singing “Natural Woman” to Carole King at the Kennedy Center Honors. The cutaway to Obama wiping away a tear almost made me cry, too, but not because the music was beautiful. It’s because I didn’t get up every day of the Obama presidency and thank God for him. I had no idea that his successor would be a pig who can barely string a sentence together, with a sex-worker third wife and a nightmare family, all of whom would end up supported by American taxpayers, one way or another. I didn’t — none of us didn’t — know how bad it would get.

Sigh. How about some levity?

Ha ha ha ha ha. The proper answer to that question is: I would choose to live somewhere else. Because, if you read the story, you find that their budget is, no shit…

…around $850,000, but even with $450,000 saved, high mortgage rates meant that most single-family homes were out of reach. So they began to seriously consider a manufactured-home park about seven miles west of the city. “There were no good options,” Mr. Zero said. “Except for this place.”

I gotta say, though, those are some pretty sweet looking trailers. They look like double-wides, and once you get into double-wide territory, they don’t feel so much like trailers. Santa Barbara doesn’t get hurricanes or tornadoes to speak of; I could probably live there. But not for most of a million dollars.

God, the real estate market is a ticking time bomb. How is any normal person supposed to afford these prices? It’s insane.

What else happened today? I had an insane one, that’s what. I missed my morning swim because I overslept, then got buried in an avalanche of work. I didn’t brush my teeth until 11 a.m., but yes, I still found time to post on Twitter, because that’s how life today is.

One more funny screen cap? OK. Here’s Kim Guilfoyle, raising money on the hustings:

If you want, you can tuck a check for $2,500 into her cleavage.

OK, then! Happy Friday, happy weekend, happy life.

One of my most treasured former colleagues is Bill McGraw, who spent his career — virtually all of it — at the Detroit Free Press, and now, in retirement, contributes weekly flashback stories for readers who either never knew, or forgot them. This week’s was a corker:

He was an outgoing guy. He introduced himself as Tony Jones.

But Detroit police found him suspicious, with his fancy cameras, British accent and habit of jumping out of a rented orange car to shoot close-up photos of cops arresting suspected criminals. He had no current ID.

It was January 1974. Crime was a big problem in Detroit. Cops were jumpy. So they hauled him off to the old 1st (Central) Precinct, and there they discovered the truth.

His full name was Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, the Right Honourable 1st Earl of Snowdon. He was a global celebrity, the husband of Princess Margaret, the younger sister and only sibling of Queen Elizabeth.

Yes, the very same. Tony Jones wasn’t really arrested, more like detained. He was in Detroit taking pictures for a Times of London assignment on the American “urban crisis.” We know Lord Snowdon as a portraitist, especially of the royal family. He did a set of Princess Diana late in her life that was really smashing, and I can’t find it now; I seem to recall her hair was wet and slicked back, and she looked amazing, but oh well. But he was also a good photojournalist, with the right instincts to get in close and be fearless.

He tried to stay Tony Jones, but the secret got out, and it got a little silly:

The Free Press saw an opportunity. It assigned a young female reporter, Detroiter Toni Jones, to take Londoner Tony Jones out for a night on the town. Toni Jones brought a friend, and Aris came along, too. Jones, err, Snowdon, was a good sport. Toni Jones described him in her story as modest, easygoing and witty.

They hit several long-gone night spots. At Lafayette Orleans in Lafayette Park, Snowdon met Kenneth Cockrel, the famous attorney, and appeared not to notice when a patron began heckling the band. At Watts Club Mozambique on Fenkell, Snowdon was introduced to Pistons forward Don Adams.

It’s Watts Club Mozambique that kills me. The long-gone, but spectacularly named spot burned to the ground a few years back, after appearing in an Elmore Leonard novel (“Unknown Man #89”) and playing a major role in black Detroit’s street culture. I’d love to know who came up with the name, and how they settled on it, and let’s ask the internet, and whaddaya know:

The Watts Club Mozambique was established in 1969 by Detroiter Cornelius Watts. Since the early 1960s, the African country of Mozambique had been fighting for independence, Mr. Watt fell in love with the exotic sounding name. By the late 60s, African consciousness had swept to the forefront of American culture and Mr. Watt named his latest venture Watt’s Club Mozambique. He carried the theme on and decorated the interior with bamboo wallpaper and had banana leaves draped around the ceiling. It was a hit from day one.

Never mind whether the guy’s name was Watt or Watts. I think we can all agree that “Mozambique” is a very cool-sounding name, and entirely appropriate for Detroit; the country had an AK-47 on its actual flag for a time, since removed.

The club started with jazz, but it couldn’t turn a profit, so it eventually switched to sort of a black Chippendale’s, with hot-dude dancing for women. There was a legendary dancer named Hawk, who was very popular but decided he could make a lot more money in Vegas, and bought a one-way ticket.

So many crazy stories in this crazy town. This is only one of them.

It was a good Tuesday. The centerpiece was being the guest speaker at my ex-colleague Julia’s class on feature/biographica/memoir writing at Notre Dame. I did not go to South Bend, alas — it was all via Zoom. And although I was dreading spending an hour looking into my webcam, the time flew by and it was a great class. For me, anyway.

And now I’m looking at the results of the Ohio primary, and? Ugh. We’re doomed. Ohio is, anyway.

This was an interesting story in Politico the other day, about how raw milk became politicized. Raw milk is unpasteurized milk, of course, popular with certain foodies, but mostly with you-cain’t-make-me anti-government types.

Truth be told, I only had it a couple times. I’ve probably told this story before, but: In college, my boyfriend Bruce rented a house a couple miles outside of town, and it abutted a small dairy operation. The farmer would sell Bruce gallons of raw milk for something like $2. Being a New York City boy, he thought this was the coolest thing ever, and to be sure, the milk was something, with an inch of cream on the top of the jar and the milk below nearly as thick. It was nothing like supermarket milk, but I don’t remember it being an orgasmic experience or anything.

When I mentioned it to my mother, she turned as white as the milk. “Don’t you dare drink that!” she said, and explained that she’d had a classmate who contracted brucellosis from raw milk. She was sick for weeks, and returned to school looking close to death. I came back to Athens and conveyed this news to Bruce, who said, absurdly, “The cows look fine.” But I stopped drinking it when I was there, and that was the end of it.

You all know me. Generally speaking, I favor western medicine, progress and scientific advances. I get vaccines, swallow Big Pharma’s product line when it’s called for, trust doctors when they give me advice. I see pasteurization as a great leap forward in public health. And while I appreciate that milk-borne disease is less common today, and people who sell raw milk claim to be diligent about having their herds tested, etc., ultimately I don’t trust them enough to take a chance, especially for something like milk. Supermarket milk is just fine for something I don’t drink a lot of anyway.

But because everything these days has to be politicized, now it’s raw milk’s turn. From another Politico story:

Loosening regulations on raw – or unpasteurized — milk, which the Food and Drug Administration believes poses too many health risks, has been gaining steam on the state level in recent times, with at least half of states now allowing the sale of raw milk directly to consumers and several more seeing raw milk-related bills being introduced in the previous two sessions.

Now, with the introduction of two new bills in Congress by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), proponents of legalizing raw milk are making strides on the national front, too. Massie’s first bill, the “Milk Freedom Act of 2014,” would overturn the interstate ban on raw milk, and his other bill, the “Interstate Milk Freedom Act of 2014,” would allow interstate shipment of raw milk only between two states where raw milk sales are already legal.

The Milk Freedom Act. Jesus wept.

The swing in momentum can, in part, be attributed to a transformation of the argument that advocates are using. The debate used to be centered on the health and nutritional benefits of raw milk versus the safety of pasteurized milk, but the likes of Ron Paul — who mentioned the issue in several speeches during his 2012 presidential run and introduced similar bills when he was in Congress — have turned it into one about freedom of choice.

Of course. Because lord knows we must all be given freedom to make ourselves sick unto death.

EDIT: I just realized I linked to, and quoted from, the wrong story. I fixed the link, but the quoted portions above are from a 2014 Politico story on the same topic. Here’s something from this year:

Long a fringe health food for new-age hippies and fad-chasing liberal foodies, raw milk has won over the hearts and minds of GOP legislators and regulators in the last few years. (The Iowa vote broke almost perfectly along party lines with nearly all Republicans in favor and only a handful of Democrats defecting to their side.) And it’s not just in Iowa. Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia and Wyoming all have passed laws (or changed regulations) since 2020 legalizing the sale of raw milk on farms or in stores.

To be clear, raw milk is still a niche product. According to an FDA study relying on 2016 and 2019 data, 4.4 percent of Americans report consuming raw milk in the past year, although the number has almost certainly grown since then. Though raw milk’s appeal remains small, its increasing popularity among Republicans nevertheless demonstrates a scrambling of the political poles in which the American left-of-center, long associated with anti-establishment sentiment, has become more deferential to institutions as the right-of-center, long associated with the establishment, has seized the iconoclastic fervor inherent in America’s DNA.

I hope your weekend was a good one. It got cold again here, but we had a date night of sorts on Friday. Had dinner, then dropped by Greektown to visit the casino. Didn’t spend a dime, but the people-watching was great. It was disappointing to see how joyless gambling seems to be these days. With the exception of the craps tables, no one was smiling or laughing or doing anything other than pushing a button on a screen. So many games have been converted to computers. There’s video poker, video blackjack, even video roulette, although that one has a real wheel under a plastic dome. I’d think people who make the effort to go out to the casino might want to interact with other humans, but I guess not. We did a walkthrough of the floor, had a nightcap in the puzzlingly named Urban Cocktail lounge, and went home.

It’s Monday, then. And I have a load of work to shovel. Best get to it.

This week is Covid Anniversary Week, depending on how you figure it. This was the week, four years ago, that we finally started to realize how deep the shit we were in really was. It’s when Tom Hanks revealed he and his wife were sick, when the travel bans, restaurant closings and other shutdowns began to happen. The cruise ships full of sick people were anchored offshore. You were there, you remember.

Not long ago a Detroit media personality said, “Why did we have to shut everything down, when we were just trying to protect old people?” How soon we forget that we were trying to protect everyone. Certainly, older people were the bulk of the deaths, but lots of people under 65 died, too. In Detroit, there was a 7-year-old girl who died. A state legislator, 44 years old. Lots of people, over 44,000 Michiganians, over 1 million Americans. Seven million worldwide. Dead.

I wrote a one-year anniversary story for Deadline Detroit, and I’ve reread it around this time of year for the last couple, not because it’s great journalism but because I don’t want to forget the details. The way Woodward Avenue looked in the middle of a weekday (empty). The doctor who had food delivered for ER workers, because there wasn’t time to go out for any, and PPE was in such short supply that they couldn’t afford to do a complete change. The funeral director who had to spend time he didn’t have sourcing gloves, because without gloves, he’d be out of business, and then how would he pay for the refrigerated truck outside keeping the overflow from decomposing? The mom trying to coordinate schooling for all her children, plus care for her ailing father, back in New York. All of it.

The funeral director said this, and it stays with me:

The real trouble started when government offices closed. We couldn’t get death certificates. You have to have an official cause and manner of death to bury, and especially for cremation. I rented a refrigerated truck. My holding room was overflowing. Hospital morgues were overflowing. It was late May to June before I could finally catch up.

Without death certificates, families can’t collect insurance. And because people were dying so young, nobody had a will or plan. Some people had their living wills, medical power of attorney, all those things in order, but that wasn’t the majority. Then you had households with multiple Covid cases, like a husband and wife in the ICU at the same time. If one died and the other was on a vent, no one could speak for them. So someone had to get emergency guardianship. It complicated all the situations.

We barely heard about cases like these, but they happened everywhere. And I want to remember it all, because time erodes memory, and bad actors are still lying about so much of it, especially vaccines, but other stuff, too. “Don’t say ‘died of Covid,’ say ‘died with Covid’ because that’s more accurate,” for instance. I still see “pureblood” in online bios.

When we talk about long-term changes to American society, we’ll need books to examine it all. The loss of respect for institutions. The cost of having an idiot president in charge, who casually suggests hospital workers are selling PPE “out the back door,” and wondering how we might get “a light inside the body.” The still-being-sorted effects of white-collar work-at-home. The way the governors of Ohio (male) and Michigan (female) ordered virtually identical business restrictions, and the Michigan governor endured great blowback for it, but the blowback in Ohio was directed at the state health director, and I bet you can guess what gender that person is.

Now, of course, many of us have had Covid, some multiple times, and this is offered as “proof” that the whole business was overblown, that it was self-inflicted punishment, never mind that viral outbreaks become less deadly as the virus mutates, that each wave that followed the initial one was less deadly. That’s in part because doctors knew what they were dealing with, but mostly because of vaccines. Which few people are keeping up with, many because they “feel they’re ‘done’ with Covid.” Huh. I’ve had six shots so far, and may yet get the spring version, because we’ll be traveling in a few weeks and why risk a spoiled vacation. P.S. Still a No-vid here, as is Alan.

So.

Like many of you, we’ve had a spectacular run of pleasant, warm weather. It perhaps portends a truly hellish summer, but that’s just more reason to get out and enjoy it. I hope you are. I intend to. Happy midweek.

I turned on the Oscars just in time to catch the screenplay awards, where they run the text at the bottom of the clip from the nominated film. And Bradley Cooper says, “I’m reining it in,” but the super says “reigning.” Sigh. As if the world wasn’t stupid enough.

I went to bed right before Emma Stone won for Best Actress, but I’m glad she did, despite the overwhelming push for Lily Gladstone. We watched “Poor Things” the night before — it’s on Hulu — and her performance was spectacular, with a much higher degree of difficulty than Gladstone’s. I know this was assumed to be a shoo-in for the Native American actress, as Hollywood loves to give at least one award a year to make it feel good about its social principles, or just to recognize a promising newcomer. But I don’t think Gladstone was robbed; she took home a lot of statues this award season, just not this one. And Stone deserved it.

That’s the thing about the Oscars — it’s just a vote, and we never know how the other finishers did. Stone may have edged her by a one, 100 or 1,000, but in the end it doesn’t matter.

Martin Scorsese, now — he knows about robbery. The greatest living director, and he has exactly one Oscar for it. (“The Departed,” 2006.)

In other frippery from the weekend, I’ve been studiously avoiding any of the Kate Middleton speculation and gossip, because why subject yourself to that when American democracy is swaying on its foundations and she’s probably fine anyway. Then the weekend photo business happened, and I must admit: I’m intrigued. It takes a lot for the world’s serious news agencies to put out a mandatory kill on something as silly as a courtesy photo from the British royal family. But in this case, the Zapruder-film examination of it makes me wonder what might be going on.

Most of the speculation has concentrated on some obvious — if you consider going over a picture with a magnifying glass obvious — editing of some of the clothing, but to me, it’s the black hole at her midsection that looks wonky to me. The most informed speculation about what might be ailing her, in my opinion, came from a doctor I follow on Twitter, who suggested she might have had some sort of temporary colostomy for the treatment of Crohn’s disease, and it would track that the rail-thin princess wouldn’t be photographed with any indication she might be wearing a bag. It would also explain the secrecy, because ew poop. Whatever. I do hope she’s going to be OK, because who wouldn’t.

Also, the British celebrate Mothers Day in March? Really?

And now it’s Monday again. Time to get it in gear.

Notta lotta time this morning. I’m debriefing myself on the State of the Union, which I did not watch, because I never watch. I read the text the following day, absorb several different stories about it from reputable news outlets, and consider myself informed. I gather the laugh lines landed, and the GOP response was even worse than Marco “gimme a sip of water” Rubio’s, way back when.

I just watched a couple clips from Katie Britt’s community-theater-audition response. It’s worse than I thought.

Instead, come with me down my latest media rabbit hole, i.e. photos of people taken at Mar-a-Lago. Why does everyone there look like they are residents of the Capital in the Hunger Games movies?

This one ⬇️ is so weird I wonder if it’s real, but apparently it is. And to think these people have a problem with drag queens.

Kim Guilfoyle, looking practically normal in this gang:

The one on the right here is the same as the one on the left in the first photo. Not sure about the other one.

These two could be a mother/daughter pair. “People are always getting us mixed up, it’s so weird!”

It must be a condition of membership that every woman wear the same hairstyle. This one is giving me “Russian mistress,” how about you?

This must have been the No Strapless Bras luncheon. Second from left is the older one of the mother-daughter pair above. Not sure about the others.

And there you have it, just a glimpse into the membership of America’s trashiest country club. Feel free to make merry, but I have to get ready for the day.