A few years back we watched a small, amusing movie called “Adventureland.” Starred Jesse Eisenberg, Kristin Stewart and…I forget. It was about a recent college graduate who can’t find a job in his major (Renaissance studies) and ends up at a second-rate amusement park, in a “seasonal job” with a lot of co-workers who are more or less the same age. It was scratching in my brain for the first part of the summer until I remembered why every day reminded me of it, at least a little bit. Not that our waterpark was entirely Adventureland, but there were distinct elements, mainly because for the first time in my life since I was a teenager, I was working with teenagers. It was kind of a shock, but also lots of fun.

The endless energy, oh my god. One day I was sitting on a post next to a crowd-control barrier that was about, I’d estimate, 40 inches off the ground. One of my fellow guards walked up to it and effortlessly leaped over it, box jump-style. Like a deer. At the end of the day, when I’d be dragging my ass to whatever dinner Alan had prepared for us, they’d be on to the second shift. They could walk in hungover and refresh themselves with a short dip in the pool. It was something to see.

On the other hand, I had skills they didn’t, for instance: Telling time. I learned early on that if someone asks, “What time is it” and you answer “ten ’til,” they will stare blankly until you say “two-fifty.” On the other hand, they could communicate volumes thumb-typing their thoughts on their phones, using a million abbreviations that made their texts as hard to understand as hieroglyphics. But it was lovely, lovely, being in their midst after 40-some years of working with so-called adults. Their amusing slang, their incredible knowledge gaps (“man, Hawaii is really out there, isn’t it?”), the way they … well, let’s put it this way: No one knows shit about anyone else’s life. It made me think of the newspaper business, when we’d try to figure out what readers wanted, without talking about whether they were even readers in the first place. We all live in bubbles. It’s good to get out of your own, even if you have to go around for a few weeks as the old-ass white lady in the lifeguard crew.

In a few hours, I have to get up for an early workout. In the meantime, here’s some bloggage:

The bloodbath of the Michigan GOP, thanks to fealty to Donald Trump:

The Michigan Republican Party is starving for cash. A group of prominent activists — including a former statewide candidate — was hit this month with felony charges connected to a bizarre plot to hijack election machines. And in the face of these troubles, suspicion and infighting have been running high. A recent state committee meeting led to a fistfight, a spinal injury and a pair of shattered dentures.

This turmoil is one measure of the way Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have rippled through his party. While Mr. Trump has just begun to wrestle with the consequences of his fictions — including two indictments related to his attempt to overturn the 2020 results — the vast machine of activists, donors and volunteers that power his party has been reckoning with the fallout for years.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of crazy people, if you ask me.

I hope you’re in Adventureland yourselves right now. See you soon.

I should warn you, this will go on for a while. Not today, but I’ll be processing the experience of my summer employment for a while.

I don’t know about you guys, but this last winter about broke me in two. I decided I wanted to spend the warm months a) outside as much as possible; and b) around young people. After reading a few stories about the shortage of lifeguards and the role of geezers in filling the gap, I thought, what the hell, go for it.

It so happened a waterpark in Detroit offered the best deal: A whole $15/hour, which stood in contrast to my own suburb, which was offering, I shit you not, $11.10. Most of the other clubs, parks and municipal pools were in that neighborhood. I think it was the dime added to that eleven bucks that bugged me the most. You could make more, a lot more, at any fast-food joint in town, but then, it’s lifeguarding, the cool summer job. Right?

Wrong. While there are some kids who still want to sit in the sun twirling a whistle and getting a tan, a lot are polishing their college application essays with fulfilling social work, volunteering, etc. It so happened I met another lifeguard at the top of the water slides a couple weeks ago, when a trio of well-built, supremely confident and otherwise cocky teen boys – which is to say, I pegged them for Grosse Pointers at a glance – came through for a few runs while I was posted as topside traffic cop. One was wearing board shorts with GUARD on one leg.

“You working?” I asked him, and he nodded yes, at the Detroit Yacht Club. “What are you making there?” Twelve bucks an hour to start. I told him he’d earn $15 here, but he’d earn every penny. “How many saves have you had this summer?” I asked. “For the whole club? Maybe four?” he answered.

“One of our guards had five in one day,” I told him, and pushed his tube into the flume. Down he went into the three-foot catch pool, where it was pretty common to have to fish frightened children and adults of shaky physical confidence out, or at least boost them to their feet so they could make their way to the steps.

I forgot to mention another reason I took the training and looked for this job: I’m interested in swimming as a social-equity issue. The data is plain: Children of color are far more likely to lack water skills, and drown disproportionately. The NYT had an excellent essay a couple weeks ago that explored the reasons, which are mostly understandable to anyone who’s lived a few summers: Lack of pool water, lack of a swimming tradition, lack of a swimming culture, lack of swimming role models, and a long history of discrimination at the gate to the inviting blue water beyond. Something I learned in my reading this summer: Faced with court orders to desegregate pools in the ’60s and ’70s, many cities just shut them down, permanently. White kids moved to private clubs and backyard pools. Black kids did without. And it shows in drowning statistics.

They told us in training that most guests can’t swim. We did everything to keep them safe; free life jackets for anyone who asked, little kids kept behind the three-foot line, but still, a day with no rescues was pretty uncommon. These weren’t dramatic Baywatch saves, but just jumping in and pulling someone into shallower water, where they could stand up. Even then, some people would, and did, panic and have to work to calm down. My first save, I jumped into the water after a girl who had slipped off her inner tube when the waves started up in the wave pool, and by the time I got to her, someone had already pulled her to safety. My last, a kid got that look — chin in the air, panic on his face — and I tossed him my rescue tube without going in myself. He grabbed it, pulled himself to the wall, said thanks and worked his way down into a safer depth. Very little high drama.

It made me think, a lot, about how I learned to swim, at the Devon Road pool in Upper Arlington, Ohio. The main pool, a rectangle, sloped from baby-pool depth to nine feet, and there were two ropes dividing it. To earn the right to pass the first rope, you had to pass Turtle B in the Red Cross swimming lessons everyone took (easy), but to make it past the second and into the deep end, you had to pass Turtle C, which required you swim back and forth across the width of the pool with only a touch at the wall in between, no resting. I had a hard time my first couple of tries, while my friends who passed were given the golden ticket to not only the deep end, but the real prize — the diving pool. It was a truly memorable moment when I finally made it, and collected the vinyl badge my mom would sew onto my swimsuit. I have been comfortable in water ever since, and the older I get, the more precious pool time is to me; it’s a profound pleasure of not only summer, but the whole year. Why swim for exercise? The older you get, the more it becomes the one thing you can do that doesn’t hurt.

But here’s something that occurred to me as the summer wore on: One reason swimming skills are still too rare? Waterparks themselves. The Devon Road pool had no slides, no splash pads, no wave machines. The deepest water at the park where I worked was six feet, and most people never went that far. But the rest of the park was shallow and inviting to people who couldn’t swim a stroke, and as I twirled my whistle and watched over it, I thought of the waterparks I’d been in, and had been built in the decades since I passed Turtle C. Kate and I would visit Soak City at Cedar Point when she tired of riding roller coasters, where she’d go down slide after slide and I’d float on the various lazy-river attractions. Affluent suburbs are less likely to build traditional swimming pools and more likely – at least around here, with months of cold weather to endure – to install indoor facilities with few lap-swimming lanes but lots of play opportunities for kids with February cabin fever. They’re fun, absolutely they are, but they don’t have much of a barrier to entry beyond buying a ticket.

Our park was on the east side, in Detroit. Suburban families would come sometimes, usually early in the day, and I learned to spot the Grosse Pointe kids pretty early. They all swam like Michael Phelps. You had to be four feet tall to ride the slides, but I waved through more than a few borderline kids who’d proved they could get from splashdown to the exit steps with three or four perfect strokes of freestyle. “You swim really well,” I’d tell them. “Yeah, I swim on my team,” they’d reply, the dead giveaway. One mother told me the Grosse Pointe pools started lessons for kids around 3, and there were plenty enrolled. (Well, it is a boating community, and it’s a life skill.)

One day, my shift ended with a break, and I thought I’d get a jump on closing duties by doing a few of the little chores we were expected to do — picking up trash, collecting abandoned life jackets, etc. I was in a remote area of the deck when came up on two women who were clearly getting high, although they were trying to hide it.

“Can you swim?” one asked.

“Well, I’m a lifeguard, so I’d better,” I replied.

“I should learn,” she said. “I never did. I should do that one of these days.”

“Yeah, you should,” I told her. “You never know when you’ll fall out of a boat.”

She looked a little startled. But it’s true. It’s a life skill. Life-saving, actually, every time you get in the water.

More later. It was a fun summer.

We went sailing yesterday, and it was perfect for it — clear and sunny and a steady-but-not-overpowering breeze out of the southwest. Motoring into the marina, we passed a smallish Boston Whaler flying a largeish — like, queen-size bedsheet size — American flag from one side of the Bimini top. Behind it, I could see another flag flying, and call me a cynic, but I had a strong feeling what it would be, and sure enough, the breeze lifted it so we could see: LET’S GO BRANDON.

Reader, I flipped him the bird. Don’t think he saw it, but I’m not letting that stuff go anymore.

This will be a bit of a mishmash. As usual, I start with an apology for my scarce presence around here. I’ve been working a second job this summer. Here’s a clue: I have the best tan I’ve had since high school.

Which is to say: I’m a lifeguard at a local waterpark. It has been a crazy summer, and I will tell you more about it when the season officially ends for me after this week. I got into it because I kept reading about the lifeguard shortage keeping pools from opening, or keeping them on shorter hours, but it’s turned out to be so much more than that. The biggest surprise is how physically exhausting it’s been. It’s not the physical activity (which isn’t all that much), but the sitting in the sun all day, even with shade umbrellas and sunscreen and frequent breaks and chugging water, just saps my strength. I can’t believe I actually thought I’d ride my bike to and from the park every day (four miles one way). I often end the day scowling at my car because it’s one space away from the closest possible spot in the parking lot. And there’s a mental exhaustion that comes from keeping focused attention on the water, especially when most of the people in it can’t swim.

Fortunately, Alan has stepped up and usually has a delicious meal waiting for me when I come through the door at 7 p.m. But I go from dinner to a couple hours of TV to a half hour of reading in bed to zzzzzzz.

My thoughts are with our California readers, especially L.A. Mary, as they deal with the hurricane/tropical storm. It looks like the worst of it is over, but SoCal simply isn’t set up to deal with rainfall of this magnitude. (Of course, many areas where it’s common aren’t anymore, either. :::raises hand:::) But I just read the the L.A. River peaked well below flood stage, and is falling now. So that’s good.

Here’s a funny story about Ron DeSantis’ awkwardness, which may have already been discussed in comments because it’s a few days old, but honestly I haven’t even glanced at ye olde comments in that time. Still, it’s a gift link and this made me laugh:

As he sought to connect with voters and donors, critics said DeSantis had resembled — to quote a couple of posts — “a robot put together from scrapped spare parts from Disney’s The Hall of Presidents” or “an extraterrestrial in a skin-suit trying to learn to be human.”

Been there, felt that.

Finally, Neil Steinberg expresses for the millionth time the jeez-would-you-GO-AWAY-already feeling so many of us have, but it still seems worth saying:

It’s the whining that most exasperates me. Don’t they ever tire of it? Yes, Donald Trump is famous for the lies that firehose out of his mouth, as easily as he draws breath and almost as often.

But it’s the constant complaining that drives me mad, if I didn’t tune it out — I can’t imagine watching Trump’s interview this Thursday with Tucker Carlson, his half-clever way of drawing whatever scant interest there might be away from the first Republican presidential debate, a gathering of gnats, all of whom, with the exception of born-again Chris Christie, can’t even muster the internal fortitude to string together a few critical words against the liar and bully, fraud and traitor whom they would defeat.

Yep.

OK, I have to do a few chores around this dump, drink some water, maybe clean my bathroom. I had some photos to share, but for some reason the server isn’t accepting them. I’ll try again later. Thanks for tolerating everything.

There are a lot of special events – attractions – that happen through the year. I’m not into most of them, but that’s fine, not everything is for everyone. Air shows are a particular who-gives-a-crap thing; I mean, stand around craning your neck all day to watch planes fly overhead? For others, maybe, but not for me.

Then, Sunday, this happened not far down the road:

A MiG-23 fighter jet crashed today at the Willow Run Airport of Thunder air show in Michigan. The two pilots reportedly ejected and are both unharmed

pic.twitter.com/0h9LBZ3f1R

— Flight Emergency (@FlightEmergency) August 13, 2023

That’s a Russian MiG-23, part of the Thunder Over Michigan air show near Ypsi, and it did a big ol’ oopsie into an apartment complex parking lot. The pilots ejected safely, and the plane, amazingly, hit only parked cars when it came down.

It’s the ejections that always amaze me. I recall, from “The Right Stuff,” that ejection is incredibly dangerous. Pilots are basically igniting an explosive under their seats, and all kinds of bad things can happen on the way out. Isn’t this how Goose died in “Top Gun,” in fact? Hit his head on the canopy as he was launched into the wild blue yonder? But if the choice is between Maybe Dying and Definitely Dying, of course anyone would choose door no. 1. Still. Freaky.

Anyway, one more piece of Russian hardware gone for good. Sorry, Vlad. Maybe your tech just isn’t what it could be. Or pilot error, who knows.

So much news these past few days. Maui on fire. Trump on fire (in the pants region, anyway). Rodriguez dead. Ohio’s Issue 1, buh-bye. And this bullshit in Kansas. I haven’t been able to keep up, at least not here, but I trust you all have been able to.

This will return to normal soon. For now, watch the plane crash.

You remember a few days back, when I said my planner has three lines at the bottom of the weekly page? Logging workouts, morning pages and blogs? I just looked at it and realized, oops.

But life has been crazy-busy this week, and this weekend in particular. It ended with us seeing “Oppenheimer,” thus completing the Barbenheimer cinematic diptych of the summer, so: Checked that box, but missed my blogging window.

I didn’t like “Oppenheimer” nearly as much as “Barbie,” but then again, the fact they’re both films is about all they have in common. It certainly has its place in the world, but my viewing suffered from not being a science nerd well-acquainted with every brilliant PhD who worked on the Manhattan Project. I knew about Oppenheimer, knew about Teller, but beyond that? Not much. So a great deal of the sub- and backstory was lost on me. And sorry, but why anyone would think they need to see this in IMAX is baffling — most of the action consists of people talking to one another in medium shots. In fact, my biggest disappointment was that the detonation of the first bomb, the Trinity test, was not really the film’s climax; it goes on for an hour afterward.

Maybe the draw is seeing Florence Pugh’s breasts in IMAX, I dunno.

We settled for a regular old wide-screen movie theater, and it was just fine (breasts and bomb). The explosion was very well-done, and I’m glad Oppy’s famous reaction line from the Bhagavad Gita was underplayed; I get the feeling someone like Spielberg would have dolled it up more. But the performances were very good, the story important, and it left me with lots to think about, including how a person with a brain like Oppenheimer’s interacts with the rest of the world. I certainly don’t understand quantum physics or mechanics, but the fact this achievement was followed by the 20th century equivalent of the MAGA era must have been almost physically painful for people that smart. It certainly made me wince that we only recently had a president who spoke of nuking hurricanes and countries and so on, as though these were special effects to be deployed, not weapons of mass destruction. Speaking of dumb.

Do I have bloggage? Why yes I do:

Neil Steinberg parts with one matchbook he’s been holding on to for 40 years, and has an epiphany: I could get used to this:

I’m at an age when I’m surrounded by great masses of detritus, aka, crap. Files and furniture, notes and boxes, mugs, souvenirs, relics. I hate to include books, which are holy, but hundreds of books, most of which I’ll never read. After I wrote the above, I went to walk the dog, and can’t tell you how good I felt. The mixture of performing a small kindness plus the liberation of divestment was a real boost. Only a little thing, true: an old, used matchbook. But it’s a start of the great give-away that will end with me being put, possessionless, into the ground.

Death-cleaning. It becomes more important the closer you get to, um, death, and damn, but it feels great.

Alan and I used to watch “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” when we first got together, so it has some special significance to me. Losing Paul Reubens last week was tough, but we’re all going to the undiscovered country eventually, so I wasn’t upset. This Hank Stuever appreciation of Pee Wee (gift link) was very good and exactly right, I thought:

There were a lot of ways to both fall in love with Reubens’s character and to also find him annoying, but there was no denying that he, along with other retro acts (the B-52’s come to mind) had harnessed a longing for and a lampooning of a B-movie, mid-century vibe: In the high time of Pee-wee Herman, every fun city had at least one gift store that sold inflatable Godzillas and cat’s-eye sunglasses and chile-pepper Christmas lights along with sardonic, non-Hallmark greeting cards.

And, more important:

Now, in a culture derailed by childish taunts and vicious politics (“I know you are, but what am I — infinity”), fixated on all the wrong kinds of nostalgia, where drag queens and other groovy outliers are publicly pilloried and accused of trying to corrupt children, it is becoming quite clear that things are increasingly less safe for anyone who deigns to be different. Just when the world could use Pee-wee’s keen and welcoming sense of humor, we lost him.

Yep.

OK then, deeper into August we go.

While the rest of the country waited on the Georgia indictment, we had a state-level one today: The pro-Trump losing attorney general candidate and a state legislator were both indicted by a grand jury today. The charge: That sometime after the 2020 election, they and others convinced a number of township clerks in rural Michigan to turn over their voting equipment, which they then took to various locations, disassembled and tried to reverse-engineer the “vote-switching” they claim stole the election from their guy.

If they were any stupider, they’d have difficulty brushing their teeth.

From the NYT story (gift link):

The charges against Mr. DePerno, which include undue possession of a voting machine and a conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer or computer system, come after a nearly yearlong investigation in one of the battleground states that cemented the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.

Former State Representative Daire Rendon was also charged with two crimes, including a conspiracy to illegally obtain a voting machine and false pretenses.

Four felonies for the big guy. All this was known before the nominating convention last year, but the party still made him their nominee for AG, widely considered the most vulnerable of the three executive offices up for re-election. (Incumbent Dana Nessel has made some mistakes. She also got a little overserved at the UM-MSU game.) They nominated him anyway. All three – the governor and Secretary of State being the other two – were very fortunate in their enemies, and won by wide, comfortable margins.

Some might ask, why did the clerks turn over the equipment? One of the individuals who accompanied DePerno had some sort of bullshit title and organization that sounded official, and wore a sidearm. Nothing like cop energy to intimidate a government official. Some wouldn’t go along with it, though, and bless ’em.

And now, as I write this, I see that the Trump indictment has been unsealed. Let us all discuss that, then, in this storm of falling shoes.

Oh, but before I go, I need to ask you southwesterners: Are these worth buying? I know the Hatch legend, but they always seem a little soft and ready to spoil, probably because Michiganders don’t know what to do with them. Do they travel well?

I try not to march in lockstep with any movement, and I split with mainstream feminism over Barbie. The complaint about how her “impossible body proportions” made little girls feel bad about their own just struck me as silly. I guess you could find one or two women out there who could trace their body dysmorphia to a foot-tall plastic doll they played with as children, but it’s my experience that pretty much every woman alive has something about her body that she doesn’t like, whether they played with Barbies or not. So there.

I had a Barbie. And I had a Francie, who I always thought was Barbie’s friend but Barbie fan sites tell me I’m mistaken: She was Barbie’s “modern cousin” and wore “mod-style clothing.” Whatever. I liked her because she had long blonde hair I could brush, whereas my Barbie was the one with the brunette bubble cut, i.e. the one that terrified Sally Draper in “Mad Men.”

Anyway, I can’t say exactly when they arrived in my toy collection, but my guess is, I was around 8 or 9. I wasn’t thinking about body proportions then. My mother was a talented seamstress, and made her several outfits in addition to the striped swimsuit she came dressed in. Francie’s proportions were the same, so they shared the same clothes. And that is pretty much that, recollection-wise. The massive Barbie brand build-out seemed to trail my interest in the doll, which is to say, by the time the Dream House came onto the market, I had moved on. I had a carrying case that held the two dolls, with space in between for the clothes. The outfits were the splurge.

By the time Kate was born, the thing about Barbie that had changed most was the age period — she came into the house when Kate was very young, maybe 4? Also, the thing wasn’t to get one Barbie and a lot of outfits, but to get a ton of Barbies, period. They were cheap, and there were so many of them, you can see how the collecting mania began. (My neighbor’s in-laws were both deaf, and they all used ASL when they got together. Her mother-in-law gave her granddaughter ASL Barbie, which she was thrilled to have, but immediately told her — in ASL, presumably — that she could never take it out of the box, because it would ruin its value. My neighbor went out the next day and bought another one that the girl could actually play with. In-laws. What are you gonna do?)

Kate’s most memorable was Olympic Swimming Barbie, who came dressed in a swimsuit with a medal around her neck. You wound up a knob on her back and her arms windmilled wildly; she was a bathtub toy. She didn’t age well, and retired from swimming in a film of soap scum. There were others.

Olympic Swimming Barbie wasn’t in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” which the three of us saw the other night. I…loved it. It was zany and funny and heartfelt and spot-on and just felt totally original. I read somewhere that Mattel has something like 18 more movies in the pipeline, based on their best-selling toys. I think they should shut it down now, because it’s all downhill from here. I feel especially bad for Lena Dunham, who’s said to be developing the Polly Pocket movie, which I wouldn’t see at gunpoint. Who cares about Polly Pocket? No one.

But Barbie could become “Barbie” because of all the cultural weight resting on her slender plastic shoulders, and Gerwig and her writing/life partner, Noah Brumbaugh Baumbach, put it all together like Tetris. When I saw Kate McKinnon’s name in the credits, I couldn’t imagine where they’d squeeze her in, but they figured out a way. (She’s Weird Barbie. She smells like basement.) By the time Barbie rolls out of Barbieland in her pink Corvette, singing the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” I was utterly under the spell. My only quibble might be Dan Savage’s, who wanted a scene acknowledging all the gay boys who secretly played with Barbie, and didn’t get one. A trans woman plays Doctor Barbie, and that seemed to be the only queer shoutout in the film, unless you count Michael Cera as Allan, Ken’s friend in that stupid striped beach coat. I didn’t.

Yes, there were moments late in the second act that dragged a bit, but who cares? It was a perfect, bubblegum-pink summer movie, and that’s all I want at this point. We were all charmed.

Francie wasn’t in it, though. Midge and Skipper were. I have no memory of breast-growing Skipper at all. Does anyone else?

Anyway, I had to wait a whole week to see this movie, scrolling quickly past think pieces, etc. Why does the “spoiler alert” window close after, what, 36 hours? Not everyone can see something on opening weekend. Which is my way of saying I won’t say any more. Just enjoy it.

And have a good week.

I was at a friend’s house Saturday, and as we paddled around in her backyard pool — been doing a lot of swimming this summer — she confessed that she’d mostly given up social media. She’s already someone who pays only glancing attention to the news, and said Instagram was eating her alive, so she just…gave it up. (Mostly.)

I’m starting to see the utility of that. The more Elon Musk screws up Twitter, which could be infuriating but was still mostly entertaining, the easier it seems. I’m not ready to go all the way yet, but hell, maybe I’ll do a few tests fasts or diets or something. See if I can find the good in my fellow man again.

Who am I kidding. There is no good in these dipshits.

That’s the WashPost (gift link), on its millionth Cletus safari of the modern era, circulates through the crowds at an Iowa county fair and learns — YET AGAIN — that nope, they’re still down with the clown:

During a hot, sunny weekend at the Boone County Fair — where hundreds of Iowans came together to eat funnel cakes and corn dogs and to watch their children and grandchildren show off animals from their family farms — the range of Republican voters’ views on Trump, the undisputed front-runner in state and national polls, was on full display. Interviews with GOP voters in the rural county, which Trump carried by double-digit percentage points in 2016 and 2020, show that Trump continues to have a tight grip on the party, even among those who have grown weary of his rhetoric and legal troubles.

…(Vickie) Farmer has been a Trump supporter from the start, but in the years since Biden came into office, her support for the former president has only grown. She said she’s most worried about the economy, because she sees her adult children living paycheck to paycheck and at times struggling to juggle food and gas costs.

“I was very happy with the way things were going. I don’t think he is guilty of nearly all of the things they’re accusing him of,” she said, sitting next to a table she set up with her husband to sell scented wax melts and other home goods. “I think there’s a smear campaign to try to keep him from getting into office.”

Oh, fuck off, Vickie. If you’re dumb enough to believe that returning a psychopathic felon to office will free your children from wage slavery, you’re really too dumb to vote at all.

The point of this story is that in this vast crowd of Iowans, there were a few who confessed to being “sick of the drama,” but will probably vote for him if he’s the nominee, and to these good Germans I say fuck off as well.

In other oh-eff-off news today, there’s this:

Joy Alonzo, a respected opioid expert, was in a panic.

The Texas A&M University professor had just returned home from giving a routine lecture on the opioid crisis at the University of Texas Medical Branch in March when she learned a student had accused her of disparaging Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick during the talk.

In the few hours it took to drive from Galveston, the complaint had made its way to her supervisors, and Alonzo’s job was suddenly at risk.

Don’t you just hate left-wing political correctness? Oh, wait, this isn’t it?

And the thing is, no one can even say what it is she said that was “disparaging” of the lieutenant governor. Other students can’t remember anything. But one little informant in the crowd disapproved and called her mommy.

For free speech advocates, health experts and students, Texas A&M’s investigation of Alonzo was a shocking demonstration of how quickly university leaders allow politicians to interfere in classroom discussions on topics in which they are not experts — and another example of increasing political involvement from state leaders in how Texas universities are managed.

You don’t say. And this overheated hellhole is where Americans are flocking? No thanks.

Other than that? It hasn’t been a terrible week so far. Nice swim this morning, not too punishingly hot in the afternoon. But I’m crawling to that hump, and will be very happy to see the weekend, when Kate and I will see “Barbie.”

How about you?

I just looked at the weather forecast for the week ahead, and it is…grim. Starting to climb tomorrow, then topping 90 at midweek. It’s our turn in the barrel, which I realize may fall on unsympathetic ears for you guys in the southwest, but trust me, it’s pretty miserable. Although it’s also…summer weather, so you can’t complain too much. That said, I will. Complain, that is. It’s my right as an American, and as a senior citizen.

But a good weekend, all things considered. Made some time for friend relationships, and got in an otter swim with Bill. A freighter went by as we were getting dressed to leave.

The St. Clair River was bracing (70 degrees), but left me feeling a little…filmed, if you know what I mean. A shower took care of it, but you gotta wonder what the hell was doing that. There have been some gully washers lately, and those tend to scour the grosser parts of an urban infrastructure. Whatever. I showered, and that was that.

Speaking of showers, I felt like I needed one after reading this thread, by a young reporter who left the biz earlier this year.

Ok here goes it: During my time as a Capitol reporter in Lansing, I faced burnout, anxiety, and depression, as well as relentless harassment. Despite this, I kept it all to myself, feeling like it would make me seem self-centered or incapable. I finally broke down in Jan. (1/x) https://t.co/ts2IveJJVe

— Allison R. Donahue (@donahual) July 23, 2023

The precipitating incident she obliquely refers to is this, when a state senator made a crude remark to a 22-year-old reporter. She wrote about it, and the usual happened: Other women, including his colleagues, had similar stories. As it turned out, it was a nothingburger, consequence-wise — he lost his committee assignments, but he was term-limited, so he played out his string and ran for Macomb County prosecutor. Which he won.

The 22-year-old, however, didn’t do so well. The usual happened to her, too: Rape threats, FaceTime calls where the caller was masturbating, and — this is particularly galling — “a woman on a livestream making a call out to get people to send me porn,” and there’s a special place in hell for that one, eh? That’s a lot for a 22-year-old to handle. God, what a hideous movement.

And with that, I’m commencing a busy week. I hope yours is cooler and less so.

Alan spent several hours today replacing the battery in my iPad mini, and right now he’s making sure the adhesive adheres. It occurs to me you could get a pretty good sense of us from this random selection of heavy books from a nearby shelf:

Dunno if Italy will happen this fall. We have a wedding in St. Louis on September 30, and we lost our dog sitter when Kate announced she’s going on tour during October and into November, not as a musician, but as the sound tech for a Canadian band. They’ll tour western Canada and the same part of the U.S. So maybe it’ll be spring before we get there, but we’ll get there. I kinda wish I was hitting western Canada with her, frankly. I’ve never been to Vancouver.

Anyway, that leaves us in Michigan for one of the prettiest months of the year, so I can’t complain. We’ll do some weekends here and there. It’ll be fun. I hope.

Meanwhile, news is breaking here. The state attorney general just announced charges against the 16 fake Trump electors from 2020, a group that includes the former vice-chair of the state GOP, and a national GOP state committeewoman. I remember watching live video of them marching to the Capitol on December 14, when the real electors were meeting inside. A state police officer refused to let them in. Later stories would emerge that they’d discussed secretly sleeping in a sympathetic legislator’s office overnight, so they could say they met “in” the Capitol, as the law requires.

One final note: The youngest fake elector is 55, the oldest, 82. There’s your MAGA demographic, right there.

News is breaking elsewhere, too. This story, from the Israeli paper Haaretz, may be paywalled, although I was able to read it this morning, when I nearly woke Alan chuckling over it. The gist: In 2019, the Israeli government loaned some rare antiquities to the White House, lamps made from clay, as part of a Hanukkah celebration. The loan was intended to be short-term, but then the pandemic started, everything shut down, but no fear for the artifacts. After all, they were in the most secure building in the world.

Well, guess where they are now? You get one guess, and it’s located in Palm Beach.

This guy. I mean, this fucking guy.

Here’s another guy, a local billionaire building his dream house. The details are galling, but what did you expect, a log cabin?

I didn’t expect a log cabin. But I probably didn’t expect a trampoline park.

OK, outta here. Into the midweek we go.