Well, that was a nice trip, except for the ending — a five-hour flight delay out of Newark, with the five hours (closer to six-seven because I’m an early arriver) spent at the Newark airport. Now the real slog of the long winter begins. I’ll be spending it mostly in more-or-less isolation, as I feel I’ve been taking too many Covid chances and need to atone.

If I escape getting it from this trip, it’ll say something about the efficacy of vaccines, because I took chances. Masked on the flight, but not in the airport, unless it was crowded. Masked on subway trains, but not in subway stations; my rule was, if I can feel air moving across my face, it’s OK to take it off. Outdoors, not at all, indoors, depended on the venue. This, I recognize, is a little like sometimes wearing a condom, but oh well. Something’s gonna get all of us, and you gotta live your life.

But it was still a very nice trip. Ate good food, saw lots of great entertainment, actually got to a Broadway show (“Between Riverside and Crazy,” which was Just Meh). Took some pictures:

That’s the Bleecker Street subway station, built at a time when a little beauty in a public place wasn’t considered a waste of taxpayer money.

Chinatown fish market:

Beautiful ceramic of a gruesome scene, at an upper east side commercial art show.

At the same show, a depiction of my state, late-ish 18th century:

Brooklyn:

(I think the proper reading of that is, “I fucking love New York.”)

Jazz at the Blue Note:

Now I’m ready to economize and get back to dry January. Nothing like spending $18 for a mediocre glass of wine to make you ready to clip coupons and switch to Diet Coke.

You guys are all having a nice conversation in the comments and I hate to interrupt it, but just popping up to say we’re having a great time in NYC, despite some terrible weather. Yesterday was nice, though:

Today was just cold, rainy-all-day and dreary. I did capture Alan near a tag that he’s never, ever seen before, just down the street from the Whitney, where we bought two senior-discounted tickets and beheld the Edward Hopper show there:

We saw this cabaret show last night. (Seriously, it’s a video of the entire show. Watch along with us! It was very funny.) Tonight, a shocking twist: There’s a Broadway play, a Pulitzer-winner, we were able to get $40 tickets for — “Between Riverside and Crazy.” After that, who knows? I just want it to stop raining.

OK, carry on.

(Before I start talking about “Tar,” the film starring Cate Blanchett as a Leonard Bernstein-level celebrity conductor who gets #MeToo’d, I just want to note that yes, I know the a in her name should have a diacritical mark, but I’ve been dancing with the keyboard option menu for a while now and haven’t figured it out yet, so just be advised: Blanchett’s character is named Lydia Tar, with an acute accent mark over the A, but pfft.)

Anyway. We watched “Tar” Saturday night. Loved, loved, loved it. It was smart and talky and everything I love in a wintertime movie. As someone who finds Marvel movies boring, it’s exactly what I was looking for. But there’s a weird thing that happens about 2/3 of the way through, as the toppling of Tar (this is not a spoiler) really picks up speed, and if you have seen it — only if you’ve seen it — you might want to read this piece in Slate and tell me what you think.

But if you haven’t seen it, it’s absolutely worth your time, if only for the Juilliard master-class scene, in which Tar disposes of a conducting student who blithely dismisses Bach — Bach! — as a “misogynist” that he, as a “BIPOC pansexual” doesn’t have to pay attention to. He pronounces it “buy-pock,” like it’s an identity he picked out of an array on a shelf at some very chic boutique that he can’t give you the address for, and they wouldn’t let you in, anyway.

Those of us old enough to remember Bernstein probably know he was a sexual exploiter without peer, too. A friend of mine was at Indiana University when he did a residency in the music school there, and said Lenny ran through college boys like breath mints. They weren’t boys, of course, but young adults capable to consenting to sex, but as we all know by now, the power dynamic makes any sexual encounter between the two problematic, to say the least. It’s equally true that imbalanced-power-dynamic sexual relationships don’t always end in tears and misery. That needs to be said.

“Tar” is set in the tiny, rarified world of classical music, and the highest levels of even that world. So you get the experience of glimpsing an environment of super-luxe life that doesn’t involve Wall Street assholes, so: Win.

This, I thought, was the review that best reflects my reaction.

The highlight of my otherwise ordinary January weekend. We’re going out of town for a few days, leaving Wednesday, so I hope to have more to report by the end of the week. We’re headed to New York for…just to get away. I can’t afford Broadway anymore, so we’re going to a cabaret show by Salty Brine. We saw him in 2019 at Joe’s Pub, and it was one of the most inventive, imaginative, funny nights of theater I’ve experienced in ages. Other than that, my aim is to find a chopped cheese sandwich. Small goals.

Talk later.

It’s the end of the week, and time for? Items in search of a blog!

Like every other writer on the planet except for me, Gene Weingarten has a Substack, and dropped one of his language pet peeves: “reach out to” instead of “ask.” This peeve is journalism-focused, so he quoted some story where X reached out to Y for an explanation, etc. I am in full agreement with Gene, and would like to add one that came up in my reading yesterday:

“Change out.” X was recommending Y change out their air filter, although sometimes it’s “swap out,” which might have a tiny bit of nuance, but probably doesn’t. Don’t get me started on “change up,” which is just ridiculous. Change your air filter, swap it, I don’t care. Just stop adding “up.” OK? Settled.

Next week: We’ll circle back to “circle back.”

I don’t believe I have it in me to fight another culture war, so I’m just saying it now: I’m a non-combatant in the Gas Stove wars to come. Also, I will give up my gas stove when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. That’s how much I love it, and don’t tell me how great induction is. It may heat up quickly, but it’s the cooling down that takes a while, and that’s what I love about gas. You turn off the flame and…the heat goes away! We cooked on induction in Europe, and that “H” stays lit quite a while after you turn the burners off. Don’t talk to me about air quality, either. I have no respiratory illnesses, neither does Alan, and if gas fumes were going to kill me, they’d have done so by now.

The rest of you who want to preen about your moral superiority in cooking with induction, go right ahead. I’m sitting this one out.

(Also, I know this issue is overblown, and based on sloppy reporting. Still.)

Nolan Finley, the conservative op-ed page editor at the Detroit News, gets a fair amount of undeserved credit for mundane observations; I will never forget or forgive the chorus of what-a-keen-eye-this-gent-has when he noted the near-absence of black people in a trendy new restaurant. But generally, gennnnerrrallly, I can respect that he seems to be a conservative with eyes to see and a tongue to speak, which is another way of saying he’s smart enough to see Trump for what he is. In discussing the current state of the Michigan GOP (paywalled, sorry), he writes:

How sorry are the affairs of the state party?

It still is figuring out how to pay for its state convention in Lansing Feb. 17-18, where roughly 2,000 delegates are set to gather to select a new chairman from an 11-candidate list. That slate, in its mediocrity and lack of both political experience and appeal, is distressingly reminiscent of the field of hopefuls who initially filed for the GOP gubernatorial primary in 2022.

The party is proposing for the first time charging delegates a fee for attending the convention, as many other states do. The suggested amount right now is $50 each.

Failed attorney general candidate Matt DePerno is pitching a proposal to charge the 11 candidates running for party chair, including himself, $20,000 each to pay for the convention and other operations.

Maybe the GOP should just hold a bake sale.

And you know what? DePerno, a thug fired from one of his former firms for putting hands on a client, is likely to win the chairmanship. The two closest competitors are equally crazy and unqualified, and it’s going to be glorious to watch them try to rebuild with a 2020 election denier (no matter who of the top-polling candidates wins, it’ll be a stop-the-stealer) at the helm.

With that, the weekend awaits us all. Let’s enjoy it.

In today’s delightful news, I drop this nugget in front of you, tail a-wag, and wait for a chorus of GOD I WISH I LIVED THERE.

Now that I check, it’s a paywalled story, so here’s the headline, which is really all you need:

Hamtramck council approves allowing animal sacrifices for religious purposes

And here’s the non-paywalled condensation: The all-Muslim city council was asked to consider whether to outlaw the ritual killing of animals in the name of religion, and decided to weigh in on the side of state and federal law, which allows it, surprisingly. The consideration here isn’t about Santeria, but Islam:

Animal sacrifice is practiced in some religions, specifically around some holidays. In Islam, during Eid al-Adha, or the “Festival of Sacrifice,” some families may sacrifice a sheep, goat, camel or cow.

“There’s a religious and spiritual import to these sacrifices,” Walid said. “It relates to our faith being Abrahamic. The symbolism of the sacrifice in particular around the Eid al-Adha season relates to Abraham giving the permission of sacrificing a ram instead of sacrificing his son based upon a dream he had.”

Walid added: “We would normally sacrifice a sheep or goat. From that meat which is slaughtered religiously, one third is traditionally kept for one family, another third is given to the poor and then another third would be given away to others who are perhaps not indigent but would enjoy the meat. There are a lot of lessons involved in that, being charitable to the poor.”

There are a lot of strings attached to the city ordinance regarding safety, sanitation and clean-up. It’s safe to say no one’s going to be swinging a scimitar at a goat in their front yard. But if it’s done humanely, it’s hard to see a difference from regular commercial slaughter. I also like the idea of giving away two-thirds of the cuts. Not that I am particularly interested in eating goat or sheep, never mind camel.

Weirdly enough, the News didn’t open comments on this one. Gee, wonder why.

The other news of the week: Lynette Hardaway, the Diamond of Diamond & Silk and no don’t ask me which one that is, the talker or the non-talker, because I don’t know, don’t care, and…does this sentence have a landing set up? Whatever. Anyway, Diamond? Is dead. Almost certainly Covid, if you ask me, mainly because they won’t answer questions about it.

And that’s all my midweek news, and inspiration. You should see the sky here — just the most relentless gray blanket imaginable, and no snow.

Sunday I signed up for a sound-bath meditation. You people into Woo know what that means: An hour lying on a mat in a yoga studio, while a woman plays singing bowls at the front of the room, trying desperately to get my buzzing brain to stop buzzing for…not even an hour. Can I get 15 minutes? Fifteen minutes in a theta state? Is that so much to ask?

The leader talked about how her various bowls were tuned to our chakras, and gave us all a heart-shaped piece of rose quartz. She said January was for self-care, and we should all be good to ourselves, and were free to place the quartz heart wherever we felt it could do the most good. Maybe at the end of the mat? Maybe on our third eye? Or just on our heart? (I tucked mine into my bra, where it still is. It’s very warm.) Then she commenced to play her half-dozen bowls, and it was very resonant, and I put on a black eye mask and concentrated on my breathing. I listened to the bowls, and I may have gotten 10 or 12 minutes of true theta state, because I was startled by the closing sound, if one can be startled with a pulse rate of 58.

Then I came home and learned they’re having a January 6 in Brazil. Why bother seeking inner peace. I should have donated that $30 to a charity that helps asylum-seekers. American exceptionalism:

1/6/21 1/8/23 pic.twitter.com/jou8vxmChb

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) January 8, 2023

Oh well. Hope you had a great weekend. I didn’t stay up to watch the fun in the House of Representatives, having better things to do. (Sleep.)

Monday awaits.

Things aren’t going well for Kevin McCarthy, or the congressional GOP, this week. But I want to draw your attention to west Michigan, where a hard-right takeover of a county commission (Ottawa, in this case) has been going great, if you’re a particular sort of wingnut.

I’ll try to summarize, for you out-of-towners: Ottawa County sits on the Lake Michigan shoreline due west of Grand Rapids, and encompasses several communities within easy commuting distance from G.R., as well as rural areas blending into typical lakefront affluence. It’s a conservative area. That’s just a fact. But as has been happening all over the country, the generally saner conservatives have been falling out with the crazies, and it all reached a crescendo this week.

Last summer, in a story that went national, one of the county’s townships defunded its own library over guess-what. Private donations have kept it open, but it will be officially closing in September 2024. The group that led the defunding, accomplished by defeating a tax millage, got high on its own supply, drunk on its power, and successfully ran candidates to take over the county commission last fall. The new members took their seats and had their first meeting earlier this week, during which they fired the county administrator and killed the office of diversity, equity and inclusion, firing its entire staff. They hired John Gibbs, who lost a congressional race to a moderate Democrat last year, to replace the administrator. They also hired an unqualified “industrial hygienist” to replace the health director, who was also fired. Finally, they changed the county’s motto, from “You belong here” to “Where freedom rings.”

All in one meeting! Whew.

Gibbs is notable for a couple reasons: He defeated the far more honorable and qualified Peter Meijer in the primary, and was one of the GOP candidates whose primary campaign was supported by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in the (correct) view he’d be easier to defeat in November. He’s also a real piece of work; he was a bitter-ender in the Trump administration, working for Ben Carson in the HUD office. An election, denier, of course – in his campaign interviews, he’d say it was a “mathematic impossibility” for Trump to lose Michigan, because he got more votes than in 2016. He was also exposed for his college-conservative lunacy, when he wrote for his own “think tank,” called the Society for the Critique of Feminism, that women’s suffrage was a mistake. LOLOL, just boys being boys!

Anyway, he needed a job, and now I guess he has one.

The health director is a more problematic hire, because it has to be approved in Lansing, and so far, the new guy, “a 39-year-old self-proclaimed industrial hygienist with master’s degrees in health from an online college,” is, um, cut from the same cloth as Gibbs:

In November 2021, during the height of the pandemic, (Nathaniel) Kelly dressed in a parody video as (Gov. Gretchen) Whitmer’s sign language interpreter during a press conference earlier in the pandemic, when she told sports fans stadiums would be shut down. In the video, he could be seen with makeup on, miming gunshots to his head and suggesting those who took vaccine shots could fall ill or die.

There’s video of him presenting at the “America’s Frontline Industrial Hygienists & Multidisciplinary Support Summit,” in which he states that if he were health director of a county, his guidance would be to:

…”send each household a kit with “prophylactic medications and tools,” including “Zinc, vitamin D with K2, vitamin C, ivermectin and NAC.”

“A neti pot with instructions for nasal lavage would also be included,” he claimed.

He also suggested companies upgrade their HVAC systems for better ventilation. The punchline: He works for an HVAC company.

You can’t make this shit up, but here we are. You get a neti pot! And you get a neti pot! Everybody gets a neti pot!

My guess is, Kelly’s ascension will be blocked by saner heads in Lansing, but you never know. Maybe his online alma mater, Columbia Southern University, will go to bat for him.

Ay-yi-yi.

In other crazy-Republican news at this hour, Michelle Goldberg’s column on the speaker deadlock is good, but likely paywalled for non-subscribers. Best part:

McCarthy evidently believed that by courting Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, an avatar of hyper-performative politics, he could co-opt her wing of the party. He was set to offer her valuable committee assignments, and, according to Draper, had even offered to create a new leadership position for her. But her elevation would be valuable to other Trumpists only if there were concrete things they hoped to accomplish together. Putting Greene on the Oversight Committee does nothing to help those who aspire to her notoriety. They don’t want policy; they want airtime.

One of the most amazing aspects of the House Republican crackup has been watching Greene’s angry exasperation as her shot at real power is imperiled by attention-seeking hard-liners. “They’re proving to the country that they’re just destructionists,” she said on Sunday. It was the embodiment of the Twitter meme: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”

By bowing first to Trump and then to Greene, all McCarthy has done is show other Republicans how much there is to gain from pushing him around. His downfall isn’t surprising: Almost no one who has sold his or her soul to Trump has come out ahead. (The jury is still out on the Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik.) The reason these deals with the devil always go bad, I suspect, isn’t metaphysical. It’s simply that Trump sycophants are ultimately undermined by their weak and flabby character.

Yep, exactly.

OK, then, happy Thursday/Friday to all you celebrate. See you next week.

I mentioned my one-word New Year’s resolution? Balance. I was thinking more of my failure to execute tree pose competently, but today offered a new way to approach it.

One of my Christmas gifts from Kate was a class at the Lexus Velodrome here in Detroit. We took it together. It was really fun, but kinda humbling, too.

The 101 class had four participants: The two of us, plus a father-daughter team, the father a skilled indoor cyclist, the daughter less so, but then, she looked about 11 or 12 years old. In an hour, we had to learn how to control a fixed-gear bike with no brakes, then ride with enough speed and competence to go “on the track,” which is to say, to go from the relatively flat apron onto the banked part. I handled the straightaways fine, but the turns were freeee-keeee, and I bailed. But by the end of the hour, I felt comfortable enough to say I’d sign up for another lesson.

I was also, if not the oldest, certainly one of the oldest ones there. I’m well aware of my physical limitations and the brittleness of my bones. But I’m-a try again.

It was a good day, for the most part. I alternated between writing my latest freelance story and switching over to Kevin McCarthy’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day of utter humiliation.

Friends? It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

But I have to get up extra-early tomorrow, finish the story, send an invoice, and do more chores. Also, buy bagels. Stay in your lane today, and if you have to go out of it, keep your speed. It’s crucial.

Happy new year to all of us. Around here, it dawned — ha ha — so gray and overcast I had to turn on a lamp to read the paper. It’s one of my idiosyncrasies that I really dislike using electric light once the sun is up, probably a leftover from my dad, who was always adjusting the thermostat and turning off lights in empty rooms to save a few pennies on the utility bill. Anyway, when it’s that dark I am at least reminded to take my Vitamin D, and I shrug and think: Michigan. January. Whaddaya gonna do?

One-word resolution for 2023: Balance. So maybe tomorrow will be sunny.

I hope you all had a pleasant NYE. We followed our script: Cooked a better-than-usual meal, watched a movie (“White Noise,” meh), listened to the gunfire at midnight, went to bed. Today I’m scrolling through pix and videos of the Mar-a-Lago NYE party, trying to think what would be worse: Listening to a bad cover band plow through “Footloose” at M-a-L, or standing outside in Detroit, waiting for one round to come down and pierce the soft tissue at the base of my neck.

Outside in Detroit, most definitely. It’s a better, more honorable way to die.

I was thinking again — woolgathering, nothing focused — about 2022 and realized that until I saw one of those Year in Pictures roundups, I had totally spaced that it was an Olympic year. Beijing, the problematic sporting event to open the year, closed of course by the World Cup in Qatar. I recall watching the skiing thinking it would be more pleasant to travel downhill on concrete; not a flake on any of the competition slopes actually fell from a cloud, but was manufactured, and looked and felt like it. The meltdown in the ladies’ figure skating was memorable, but apparently not for more than a few weeks.

Before we put the year entirely to bed, this was an interesting story in the NYT. For those of you who can’t read it, the tl;dr: Politically skewed polls that predicted a red wave in November and the resulting panic may have deprived some candidates of funding that could put them over the finish line.

Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points.

So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in October, two more Republican-leaning polls put Ms. Murray barely ahead, and a third said the race was a dead heat.

As the red and blue trend lines of the closely watched RealClearPolitics average for the contest drew closer together, news organizations reported that Ms. Murray was suddenly in a fight for her political survival. Warning lights flashed in Democratic war rooms. If Ms. Murray was in trouble, no Democrat was safe.

Murray ended up winning by nearly 15 points, which other pollsters had already predicted. But she ended up spending her war chest on her own campaign, rather than spreading it to other, less fortunate candidates. A similar phenomenon happened here, where two-time U.S. Senate loser / empty suit / Trump apologist John James finally will go to Washington — as a congressman — but had a much harder time winning than all the polling indicated. How might he have been thwarted if the DCCC hadn’t written off the race as unwinnable, because Inevitable Red Wave. A little more cash for his opponent might have made the difference. I mean, he only won by half a percentage point.

Polling — good polling — runs the risk of being made irrelevant by bad actors. Trafalgar was the same firm that had GOP challenger Tudor Dixon nipping at Gretchen Whitmer’s heels just before the election, which Dixon lost by more than 10 points. It’s almost like they’re doing this…on purpose.

OK, time to move on to 2023 and greet it properly. Dry January awaits.

Christmas came and went with only a delay, no serious mishaps. The wind blew and blew and the temperature fell and fell, and we got…maybe, maaaybe, two inches. A pathetic total, but with the wind howling, it did push everything back by a day. But that was OK, because Kate was waiting out a close Covid exposure, so it all worked out. It always works out. It’s Christmas. You set the table and pour a Bloody Mary and wait for it to work out.

For weather news this week, you really couldn’t beat Buffalo (apocalypse) and Seattle (comedy).

Santa brought me a hi-tech Japanese rice cooker and all the possible condiments that could go with Kenji Lopez-Alt’s wok cookbook, so we’ll be eatin’ Asian this winter. Alan got a new Ward Cleaver robe and four Spanish-size gintonic glasses, with a giant ice-cube mold to match. Kate gave me, get this, a cycling class at the Lexus Velodrome in Midtown, which I can’t wait to do with her. I’ve never ridden a velodrome, and I hope it’s fabulous. We all got what we wanted, including another humiliating self-own by a dickhead Republican. So all in all, a wonderful Christmas.

Now I turn my thoughts to the new year. I have one freelance story to finish, and then I think I’m going to take a month to just think about what sort of writing I want to do in 2023. But before that, I’m scrolling through my 2022 pictures. Scroll with me!

January 1, a solitary walk on a very, very muddy Belle Isle, with a stop at the eastern end for the view:

I didn’t clean the mud out of my hiking boots until summer. It was like cement.

February was the Dirty Show, always fun in the midst of winter:

I took a little trip later that month, because I was going stir-crazy. Covered that here already, but I saw: Friends, horses, the Obamas:

I remember listening to 24-hour news about the invasion of Ukraine while enormous trucks tailgated me at 75 mph on America’s freeways. A lot of driving.

In March, vertigo:

Four dizzy spells that month, none since. Go figure.

In April we tried to adopt Kevin. It didn’t work out, but we got him neutered and placed with a fantastic new home.

Also in April, the girls left for their glamorous European tour. Later, Kate said, her friends would ask, “Did you see the (something) in (some European city)?” No, she said, they mainly saw the inside of bars and the road between them. But they had a blast, just the same:

In May, we celebrated our 29th anniversary with a one-night stay at the St. Clair Inn, just upstream of my ottering spot. The inn’s bar is called The Dive, after the staff’s traditional end-of-season celebration:

Then you turn around and it’s June. Beautiful, beautiful June:

Let’s end it here. Maybe do the back half of the year later this week, maybe not — don’t want to bore you to death. If you’re working in this last month of the year, don’t work too hard. If you’re fortunate enough to be off, enjoy every minute. Unless you’re in Buffalo.