So, Bob Knight is dead. I guess I have to say something about that. And I have rarely felt less qualified to say anything about anybody.

When I first moved to Indiana, I found the discussion and static around Knight to be oddly familiar. “Same coach, different sport,” I told people in Columbus, noting the resemblance between Knight and the somewhat-recently departed Woody Hayes. Both of them old-school guys, the sort who talked with his fists as much as his voice, popular with the knuckleheads in the fan base, less popular with the people who valued their degrees and paid attention to changing times. Woody famously hated the forward pass, as the forward pass was becoming a much bigger part of the game. Knight disliked showtime ball, preferred boring ol’ teamwork. And both were coming to the end of their respective lines when things changed and they couldn’t change with them.

And that’s about all I know about the sports part of their careers. It’s not much, I know. I wasn’t a columnist in Ohio, but I was in Indiana, and Knight had a way of blocking out the sun, to where even if you were a basketball-ignorant derp like me, you had to say something about him, at least sometimes. When he threw the chair. When he yelled at a bunch of professors watching a practice, although that’s when I learned that some people laugh when someone else says, “PhD? That just stands for ‘piled higher and deeper.'” There was a story about how he got along with some woman who was writing a book, and that book was flattering. Mostly, what bugged me about him was, I.U. basketball inevitably disrupted the Thursday-night prime-time lineup, when I didn’t give a fat rat’s ass about I.U. basketball.

He also personified a certain kind of Hoosier, the ones who teared up over the insurance-company ad that portrayed a young Larry Bird shooting baskets because he had nothing else to do in French Lick, the ones who would stand in the checkout line at Meijer and leaf through whatever book about Knight was on the nearby rack, and sometimes buy it. In Michigan, they call the U-M fans who didn’t go to school there “Walmart Wolverines,” which is bitchy and classist and all that. In Indiana, I’d guess it was the majority of the fan base, people who didn’t care about the music or the business school or anything else, just the basketball team. I’d imagine it’s the same for most big schools. Knight was the I.U. representative for those fans – pushy, profane, a winner.

Much of the time, anyway.

But he couldn’t change, because why should he? And so the new university president came to town and indicated Knight’s standard behavior would no longer be tolerated. What happened? The inevitable: Some kid made a mildly disrespectful comment to him, he flipped out, and that was game over.

Who blows their life up like that? People like Bob Knight. Who is now dead, the winningest coach in college basketball for a while. He looked a lot like Mike Pence; let’s give him that.

What’s your Bobby Knight memory?

On my drive back and forth from Columbus last weekend, I passed several signs for an attraction called “Haunted Hoorah,” which was a little puzzling. Zombie cheerleaders?

No. It’s a reference to the Marine…cheer? Don’t know what you’d call “hoorah” as it applies to U.S. Marines, and I bet Jeff Gill will set us straight presently. But the website offers more clarity:

Haunted Hoorah is a 15,000 square foot, ten acre facility located in Marion, Ohio. You become part of the story, in this unique, interactive, Military/Sci-fi themed haunted attraction!

Attacking your senses and fears with every twist and turn. The Haunted Hoorah’s fright begins on a military transport as recruits travel to the first haunted destination – Joint Research Base Hoorah. Each recruit comes face to face with the doctor as he determines whether or not you have the substance necessary to be used in his super soldier creation program. Do you have what it takes? Come to the Haunted Hoorah for an experience that you will never forget.

Um, no thanks! But thanks for clearing that up. A few days later, I caught a Marketplace segment on the business of “scream parks,” which is what haunted houses — and they’re much more than houses — are called.

Haunted houses are so 20 years ago. If a building can be commandeered for a month, almost anything can be haunted. When I was in college in Athens, the haunting was at a vacant hospital. (“Wait until you see the maternity ward,” one of the builders confided.) Here in Detroit, they’re cashing in on the decades of scary stories connected to the Eloise Psychiatric Hospital, closed 40 years ago but still OMG CREEPY. One of my great regrets was never visiting the — I love this name — Haunted Scary Building in Detroit, on Mack Avenue in Detroit. I couldn’t find anyone to go with me. They had a barbecue barrel set up across the street doing a brisk business. The following year, the Haunted Scary Building had been sold and demolished. Damn. There’s also a haunted car wash somewhere nearby. The Haunted Garage, at the end of my street, does a land-office business. On November 1, they strike the set and put up an over-the-top Christmas display, of course.

The various hauntings put on by evangelical Christian concerns were almost all terrible, inviting laughs, not screams. Oh look, a girl is having an abortion. Someone else is facing the fires of hell. Inevitably, you’ll hear someone in the crowd say they’re just not stoned enough for this bullshit.

Even worse was a haunted…something. Maybe it was a vacant Sears store? It was put on by the Fort Wayne police, and it was just terrible. A friend and I did a tour of several of these places for a column, and in that one, even the police couldn’t get into it. “Here’s a guy who made some bad choices,” one said, turning on a light that illuminated a skeleton lying in a coffin, still wearing his gang colors. So lame. I think the worse choice was trusting the FWPD to do justice to his story.

Back to the Haunted Hoorah, it’s a wonder they had to blend “sci-fi” into their military attraction. From what I’ve heard about Parris Island, it sounds scary enough just by itself. Battle a ghoul with pugil sticks! March for 25 miles before you’ve had coffee! Watch the rest of the platoon laugh at your girlfriend’s nudes!

Oh well, happy Halloween to all who celebrate.

Not much bloggage today, but here’s a gift link to an insanely long and even crazier story about the relationship between Kanye West and Adidas from today’s NYT. It is NUTS:

Just weeks before the 2013 swastika incident, The Times found, Mr. West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment, ostensibly to spark creativity. In February 2015, preparing to show the first Yeezy collection at New York Fashion Week, staff members complained that he had upset them with angry, sexually crude comments.

He later advised a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a picture of Hitler every day, and he told a member of the company’s executive board that he had paid a seven-figure settlement to one of his own senior employees who accused him of repeatedly praising the architect of the Holocaust.

This is what it’s like to work for an unmedicated manic-depressive, evidently. Amazing.

Have a great week, all.

One thing my trip to Columbus did was stir up a bunch of those early-career memories. I recalled, but didn’t mention, the example Gary Kiefer used to teach me the difference between further and farther: “I can drive your car farther down the road, but I drive you further toward the brink of insanity.” I not only remember it, I use it when I have to teach it to someone else.

Then, today, in Axios, came this, about the return of the pandas to China:

I can still see the paper I extracted from my mailbox the day Kirk Arnott schooled me on this distinction after I turned in copy with the phrase “panda bear”: A cartoon panda with a dialogue balloon, saying, “I am not a bear!” Never forgot it.

Someone tell Axios.

Speaking of teaching, I went to see one of my former students play in his band last night, at a dive spot in Hamtramck, the kind of place where I, a 65-year-old grandma-ass looking woman, had to show ID AND open her purse for weapon/smuggled liquor inspection. As soon as their set ended, he came off the stage to see how the Ford-UAW settlement story his bureau was working on ended up. It’s a job that never ends. And that reminded me of the geezers who used to lead newsroom tours in Fort Wayne, who never failed to point out that some reporters might be reading the paper, and “that doesn’t mean they’re goofing off,” but that we were checking to see “how their stories look in print.” Ai-yi-yi.

Wait! :::touches earpiece::: We have this breaking update:

Well, I got that cartoon well before 1985.

Once again, I’m avoiding the news because it never seems to improve. I’m just reading about the mass shooter in Maine, and came across this uh-oh detail:

Lt. Cmdr. Ryan Koroknay of the U.S. Coast Guard said a 29-foot response boat was searching the Kennebec River for Robert Card, the suspect in the Lewiston shooting. A car linked to Card was found at a boat ramp in Lisbon, Maine.

And a boat linked to him is unaccounted for. We all know by now that Maine has virtually zero gun control, which we’re told over and over is the real solution to gun violence. Clearly the answer is, we have to harden our targets. So metal detectors, bag searches and maybe cavity searches in every bowling alley.

Which reminds me, this is something I think about a LOT:

Corporate media seems to lack the vocabulary to accurately describe the modern Republican Party.

Duh.

But consider how poorly the words they choose describe the reality of the Republican Party and its current leadership.

In their lead stories, Johnson’s political views were summed up with words like “staunch conservative,” (AP) “conservative hardliner” and “religious conservative” (New York Times), and “lesser-known conservative” (Washington Post).

But there is nothing “conservative” about insurrection. That’s radical extremism.

Yep. What’s more:

Johnson, like the party he now represents, is an extremist and a reactionary. By calling him a conservative – a “staunch” one at that – the mainstream media coverage normalizes him. It even glamorizes him.

Exactly. When this country marches itself right off the cliff — the brink of insanity, if you will — it’ll be with the best-intentioned people leading the way.

I should wrap this up. The weekend awaits! Enjoy yours.

I try to front-load my week, i.e., getting as much done on Monday and Tuesday as possible, as we’re in the season now where I’m less likely to get pop-up tasks, and that makes for a very festive four- or five-day “weekend,” but you know how all weekends end.

With Monday. And more work.

Monday I slept badly, which means the work dragged into Wednesday, but now I’m …kinda free. And isn’t all this just FASCINATING?

So let’s move on. The United States House of Representatives is leaderless no more! What do we know about this Rep. Mike Johnson (whose name I find unsettling, because I worked for a man of that name for some time)?

Mr. Johnson, a lawyer and former chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, played a pivotal role in congressional efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

An evangelical Christian, he has voted for a national abortion ban and co-sponsored a 20-week abortion ban, earning him an A-plus rating from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. On the day the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, he celebrated, calling it “an extraordinary day in American history that took us almost a half-century to get to.” He hosts a religious podcast with his wife and considers Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the founders of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, a mentor.

Last year, Mr. Johnson introduced a bill that prohibited the use of federal funds for providing sex education to children under 10 that included any L.G.B.T.Q. topics — a proposal that critics called a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Mr. Johnson called the legislation “common sense.”

Wonderful. Just wonderful. A retrograde coonass religious hysteric from one of the most backward states in the union? Sounds like smooth sailing ahead. Meanwhile, the man they all look up to:

Donald Trump surprised his own national security adviser and a group of Republican congressmen and women when he interrupted an Oval Office briefing to ask why he should “give a fuck” about the fate of Kurds in Syria.

“Nothing we said worked,” Adam Kinzinger, until this year a Republican representative from Illinois, writes in a new book.

I’m left with the desire to look out the window at the pretty-pretty fall color and wonder how many more autumns I might get to see it. Crazy to think that only three years ago we thought out long national nightmare was over. And it was only the end of the prologue.

And my god, it gets worse:

“Once we got to the Oval Office,” he writes, “I could see that Trump was impatient, and Bolton was desperate for someone to get through to him.

“A plain-spoken intellectual, Bolton strained to remain polite even as Trump seemed uninterested. The Kurds had fought and died for us in Iraq, said Bolton. They were continuing to provide great insight into politics in the region. Nothing we said worked.”

Trump eventually ordered the US withdrawal. Justifying his abandonment of the Kurds, he said they “didn’t help us in the second world war, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example – they mention the names of different battles, they weren’t there”.

I’m feeling a little short-tempered today, which I think means I need to go for a long walk every afternoon after lunch, settle the ol’ nerves and try to withdraw from a media community where a fair portion of the highest-profile voices act like it’s no biggie to call a woman a cunt. Presumably because they’re cunts, too. Whatever.

I need to get something posted. So let’s move on.

In iPhone photos of the day, I was leaving my boxing class at 6:50-ish this morning and said, “Wow, look at the sunrise coming up. Seems early!” The other women I was with said no, that’s the east-side glow. So I altered my route home to check it out, and sure enough, they were right:

The photo is a little misleading. It was full dark at the time, with sunrise not for another hour. What looks like twinkle lights on that tree is the reflection of my four-way flashers, as I had to stop in the roadway to get the photo. But that is, indeed, the glow of the hundreds of thousands of square feet of greenhouses on the other side of the water, in Leamington. People around here like to call them “the pot farms,” but I drove through this district last fall, and they’re mostly tomato and vegetable operations. The price we pay for fresh produce. The actual sunrise comes several degrees to the north, this time of year.

OK, then. Hit Publish!

My visit to Columbus was everything I wanted it to be. Warm, fun, a million laughs.

That’s me with Jeff Borden and Dave Jones, two very funny people. We met early before the whole group arrived:

Extras included Jim, Karen, Kirk and Gary, all former Dispatch people. The bar in German Village was one of our old haunts, and looks like it hasn’t changed a thing in 40 years. So it was perfect, really. I didn’t want the night to end (especially since I went home in a driving rain). But I got back to Westerville in one piece, and the following day went out with Julia Keller, another ex-Dispatcher who now writes and teaches. It struck me, going home, that going to see old friends is the best kind of travel. After Western Europe, of course. But way less walking.

So it was a restorative kind of weekend, except I had one glass of wine too many Saturday night with the fam, slept badly and now feel like crap. I’ll be better tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we had a minor media story break over the weekend in Detroit, in which Charlie LeDuff, a downward-spiraling journalist who fancies himself a Jon Stewart/Hunter Thompson mashup and desperate to “go national” tweeted something about the Michigan attorney general:

You see the problem? “See you next Tuesday.” As long as I’ve been a grown-up, I’ve understood that phrase to be another way to say “cunt.” Like “you go to h-e-hockey sticks, you scoundrel!” Even Charlotte York understands what it means.

He was called out by a number of female journalists, then some male ones, and by Saturday night he’d lost his contributing-columnist gig at The Detroit News. His fans, who are disproportionately right wingers because that’s the niche he’s going for in his quest to get his career back on track (Fox News, maybe CNN), keep insisting he never called Dana Nessel a cunt, and Charlie himself actually tried to claim he was only referring to when his next column would post. I call bullshit. Funny how it’s women who understand when they’re being insulted, isn’t it? And how often men try to gaslight us?

Finally, I could build up a big head of steam over this rather startling survey from the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, but I’d rather let you guys take a look at it and tell me what you think. Briefly, it reflects a jarring disconnect between what parents say they want for their children’s independence and what they’re willing to do to further it:

Among parents of a child 9-11 years, 84% agree that children benefit from having free time without adult supervision. Fewer parents report their child does things without an adult present, including staying home for 30-60 minutes (58%), finding an item at the store while the parent is in another aisle (50%), staying in the car while the parent runs a quick errand (44%), walking/biking to a friend’s house (33%) or playing at the park with a friend (29%), or trick-or-treating with friends (15%). The top reason parents cite as preventing them from letting their child 9-11 years have time without adult supervision is worry that someone might scare or follow their child (54%); however, only 17% say their neighborhood is not safe for children to be alone. Some parents think their child isn’t ready (32%) or doesn’t want (28%) to do these things. Some parents believe state or local laws don’t allow children that age to be alone (17%), that someone might call the police (14%), or that others will think they are a bad parent (11%) if their child is not in direct adult supervision.

Note well: Only 15 percent would let their child trick-or-treat with friends, but almost the same percentage thinks their neighborhood isn’t safe to trick-or-treat in. We’re paralyzed by fear.

OK, let’s start the week.

A nondescript building was torn down on our commercial strip here in Grosse Pointe Woods, to expand parking for an adjacent business I’m told. Look what was revealed:

Looks like it was painted yesterday. Without going to a library and doing serious research, I’d estimate its provenance as: Likely late ’50s/early ’60s, maybe? Our house was built in 1947. The “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot” slogan goes back as far as the ’20s, but it lasted years. Dossin’s was a local bottler, and a prosperous one — they commissioned the Miss Pepsi hydroplane. And there’s the phone number, with the old TUxedo exchange for this area. The Oxford Beer Store is still around, although it’s moved one door west and is now Oxford Beverage; it’s where Kate would ride her bike for frozen Cokes when that was her pleasure. This building is now a dry cleaner.

I mention this for two reasons: One, because one thing I noticed when we moved here was the abundance of wall-painted signage, just way more than you saw in Fort Wayne or Columbus, and lots of them are pretty great. So let’s celebrate the good ones. And the other? I’m sure some dipshit property owner or city father will order it covered with white paint before too much longer. So let’s at least say it was here for a while, and we all got to enjoy it.

We recently had a case here that may have gotten some national attention, a suburban man who put out a social-media call for others to go “hunting Palestinians.” He was arrested in fairly short order, by the police in Dearborn. I googled his name, and whaddaya know, he’s a troublemaker of long standing:

Carl David Mintz, 41, was charged Monday in connection with the alleged threat posted last week to social media in a case that heightened fears of fallout from the Israel-Hamas war in a region with a sizable Arab American population.

Mintz is a former school board candidate who ran on “ending critical race theory,” and was previously reported to have posted Islamophobic YouTube videos. He’s a also a licensed Realtor whose firm tells the Free Press it “released” him Monday after he was charged.

…In a 2010 road rage incident that grabbed headlines, Mintz shot 20-year-old Faith Said in the arm in Oakland County.

After an initial trial that tested the limits of self defense and ended in a mistrial, Mintz ultimately pleaded guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon, according to Free Press archives.

Another story said Mintz repeatedly tapped his brakes until Said got out of his car and approached, after which Mintz shot…him, I presume. Although the name is given in two places as “Faith,” I’d be willing to bet it’s really Fatih, which goes better with the surname.

Anyway, Mintz is your garden variety Islamophobe shithead, and we’ve all heard of the Palestinian mother and son wounded/killed by another Mintz in Chicago, so let’s worry about what some college students said about Israel.

OK, this will be it for the week for me. Heading to Columbus tomorrow for a long weekend, mostly reconnecting with old friends and family. So it’ll be great, I know it will.

You all have a great weekend.

Yeesh, what a day. When fair September debuted, I told Alan, “one of these days it’ll be cold and rainy, and on that day I intend to give the kitchen a deep, deep cleaning. It’ll take the better part of a day.” Then this happened and that happened, and it became October, but finally, the cold and rainy day dawned and to be sure, it took the better part of Sunday.

But goddamn, that room is clean. I could have served dinner off the floor if I felt like cleaning it again, but plates will do. We cooked eye-talion sausages on the grill, and the stove still looks like it just came out of the showroom.

Our trip up north was lovely. Alan got to go fishing, I got to do some reading and Wendy fully became a woods dog. It’s funny: When we go for walks around here, she won’t even walk through a puddle and get her paws wet, but put her in the drippy, rainy woods and she’s bolting through the ferns and sniffing the ground like a bloodhound. She loved the woodpile outside the cabin, because periodically there’d be a squeak coming from it, and she’d shove her nose in every crevice and wag her tail enthusiastically. Never caught anything, but she certainly got in touch with her inner terrier.

And now we’re home. But it’s lovely up there:

I know some people look at that and see gray skies and bare pine boughs and a lot of mess on the ground, but to me, it’s paradise. Except during bug season.

Now, the usual nonfunctional government and Middle East turmoil and all the rest of it. As I said a couple hundred words back: Yeesh. Let’s all have a week.

Well, I was going to include a photo of the view out my current window, but the internet up here in North Woods, Michigan, doesn’t appear to be up to the task of uploading a 2 MB photo. EDIT: Success!

So take my word for it: It’s lovely. That’s the Au Sable River flowing by.

Watching bluejays dart about right now. There were half a dozen deer in the yard last evening. And it’s so dark, and so quiet, here at night that truth be told, I’m a little nervous. In the woods, no one can hear you scream.

But we’re away for a few days. I wanted to start a fresh thread to discuss the various ongoing global calamities. Which are…calamitous.

Think I’ll take Wendy for an off-leash walk. That’s what we’re paying for, after all.

For most of my life I’ve had a hard and fast rule: No television during the day. Obviously we made accommodations for Kate’s childhood, but once she was off to school, I went back to my old habits. No talk shows, no cooking shows, no Oprah. Needless to say, no soaps, either. But I usually spend at least an hour, hour-and-a-half watching nighttime TV, and man this is the long way around to admitting that yesterday I found myself watching the first 20 minutes or so of “The Golden Bachelor,” and boy oh boy do I regret it.

“The Golden Bachelor” represents network television basically giving up. No one under 50 watches it anymore, so they might as well lean into who’s left before they all die off. The show is an elderly twist on the successful franchise, and what I watched was…horrifying. I’ve only watched snippets of the original Bachelor, but you’d have to be dead not to know the gimmick: One man (or woman) is allegedly looking for love, and a dozen or so potential candidates for loving are presented to him or her, reality TV-style, with one eliminated every week in a cornball “rose ceremony” until only two or three are left, and they scratch each other’s eyes out until s/he chooses one.

The so-called golden bachelor is a Hoosier dork named Gerry, previously an Iowan who, in the intro, tearfully tells how the love of his life, Toni, his wife of many years, died after a sudden illness five years ago, and now he’s ready to love again. He’s 72, looks very good for his age, and if the dizzying array of elderly women presented to him are any indication, he’s not going to find it on this show.

Not that they were all horrible. Some seemed more or less normal, but a fair number were the usual reality-TV narcissists. One arrived disguised as Estelle Getty hunched over a walker, then flung it and her dowdy housecoat aside to reveal her gym-toned body in a short lace dress. Others made quips about “being able to take six inches” and how much they wanted to find someone to have sexytime with. And there were more than a few that I could tell were absolutely not going to enjoy life in LaGrange County.

Yep, this Hoosier is a northeast Indiana Hoosier. After he and Toni retired to their dream house on Big Long Lake and she died, he was left to rattle around in it alone. Maybe he’ll want to sell, depending on who he chooses. But he should choose wisely, because the sunbelt bachelorettes in particular are going to throw in the towel after one wonderful summer (the Amish! so quaint!) and one enchanting fall (the colors! the sweaters!) bleeds into the gray, overcast, unending Hoosier winter. A few long weekends in Chicago (similarly gray/overcast/unending, but with theater and restaurants) aren’t going to do it.

You know, if I were inclined to watch this show, I’d like to see evidence of a few lives well-lived. If you’re going to marry in your life’s final chapter(s), you’re going to bring enough baggage with you to fill a 747 cargo bay. Best find out early if your suitcases and garment bags match. But truth be told, I’m not going to watch it to find out. That Estelle Getty act scarred my brain.

Meet the bachelorettes, and shudder.

Every day I’m reminded of how old I am. I get up after half an hour in a chair, and it’s not uncommon to stagger a step or two, as my legs relearn how to move in bipedal motion. I scan Twitter for five minutes and stumble across Americans so stupid I can’t believe they are able to themselves move in bipedal motion, let alone make it to a Trump rally and speak into a microphone. Or I’m sitting in a bar in St. Louis, and ask the bartender, no spring chicken herself, if the Schlafly craft brews on the beer menu are in any way related to Phyllis, or rather Phyllis’ family.

“Who?”

“Phyllis. Phyllis Schlafly.”

“Who’s that?” she asked. She looked at a younger guy sitting a few stools away, evidently a regular. “Do you know?” He shrugged.

Well, that says everything about our brief time on this blue marble, doesn’t it? One day you’re a nationally known helmet-haired antifeminist, founder of the Eagle Forum, the next you’re forgotten in your more-or-less hometown (Phyllis hailed from Alton, Ill., across the river, but part of the metropolitan area).

For the record, Schlafly brewing is related to Phyllis’ family-by-marriage, but she had nothing to do with it, as this story from 2014 details:

Phyllis Schlafly is opposing a federal trademark for the name “Schlafly” for beer made by a St. Louis craft brewery co-founded by her nephew, Tom Schlafly.

The Schlafly beer maker applied for the trademark on the use of the brand name in 2011; Phyllis Schlafly filed a notice of opposition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in September 2012. Settlement talks have failed to produce a resolution, and neither side appears ready to back down.

… Tom Schlafly is a nephew to Phyllis Schlafly by marriage — she married his uncle, the late John Fred Schlafly — but she has no connection to the brewery and never has. The question of whether Phyllis Schlafly has ties to the brewery comes up, however, especially in new markets outside of St. Louis.

Phyllis argued in her case that the name means one thing, and one thing only: Phyllis. And hence:

…“In connection with its usage as a surname, it has the connotation of conservative values, which to millions of Americans (such as Baptists and Mormons) means abstinence from alcohol,” her filing with the trademark office states. “An average consumer in St. Louis and elsewhere would think ‘Schlafly’ is a surname associated with me, and thus the registration of this name as a trademark by applicant should be denied.”

I guess she lost that one, because the name is all over St. Louis, and appears to be more connected to beer, and the branch of the public library near our hotel in the Central West End, than ol’ Phyllis, who croaked in 2016, at age 92. I think there’s a lesson here.

As for our weekend, it was pretty great. We had plenty of time to ourselves, plenty of time with friends, didn’t drink too-too much and all in all was well worth the time and travel investment. Beyond that, here’s some pix. Day one we strolled down to the Cathedral Basilica to see its famous mosaics. Which are…amazing. It’s an overused word, but it’s the only one that really applies. This church is the equal of any we saw in Europe over the last few years.

But that’s not all there is to see in the CWE. There’s also the World Chess Hall of Fame, and its attendant, the World’s Largest Chess Piece, as designated by the Guinness folks:

We didn’t go in – neither of us play – but I visited the gift shop. The HOF exerts a certain cultural influence over the crossroads where it’s located; the Kingside Diner’s children’s menu is designated “for little pawns.”

We found bike rentals nearby and toured Forest Park. It was blazingly hot. Saint Louis’ horse would have fainted, but fortunately he’s bronze:

Friday night, the welcome party, at a beer garden, of course:

The wedding couple are both genetic researchers, a theme reflected in the desserts:

The wedding day was even hotter, so we tried to go from one air-conditioned space to another until it was time to go to the venue, a secular space for a Jewish wedding. The yarmulkes matched the groom’s footwear:

Here I am with my godson, Patrick, as the killer sun retreated for the evening and the outdoors grew pleasantly habitable again:

Blue dresses go well with red shoes:

Of course there was a hora. The groom looks like he’s considering what could happen to all that science in his brain if he happens to be dropped on it.

But no one was hurt, the night went swimmingly and everyone danced to Motown tunes, proof that Detroit’s contributions to the world do not begin and end with cars.

I hope I didn’t slow anyone’s download with all the pix, but right now I’d much rather take a bike ride than sit at a keyboard. Catch you later, all.