Now this is what I needed: A few days away. Hello from Canada:

This is the view from where I am, just outside Leamington, Ont. That’s Lake Erie. Typical November sunrise, nothing too special. I’m disappointed my phone couldn’t catch the colors — such as they were — no matter how I monkeyed with the exposure. I might be suffering iPhone 14 envy, having seen some of the amazing photos you lucky ducks are posting. But the ol’ 8 Plus is doing just fine otherwise, so I’ll endure.

Anyway, we’re on a getaway, me and a girlfriend. Just a couple days spent enjoying an off-season waterfront Airbnb, seeing the sights. You know what sights there are to see in Leamington? This:

A terrible picture, I know, but: Greenhouses. Thousands of acres of them, most built in the last decade or so. Leamington was already the Tomato Capital of Canada, and then they figured, hey, if we put glass over those fields, we can grow a lot more. And so they did, and this is why the produce terminal in Detroit is the first stateside stop for many of the vegetables consumed in my part of the U.S. (A fair amount of cannabis, fully legal in Canada, comes out of this area, too.) Last I checked, there were about 3,000 acres of greenhouses in this neighborhood, with more planned, although the light pollution is pretty serious, and the growers and environmentalists are trying to work things out. I can tell you that after the sun went down last night, there was still a band of light at the eastern horizon and as for the west, visible from my bedroom window, it was perma-sunset: That pink glow behind the trees, all night long.

The tomatoes they produce aren’t as good as homegrown, but they’re a lot better than the winter tomatoes I remember. I use them in salads in January; they’re fine. And I really enjoy the spinach and lettuce, peppers and cucumbers we get from here.

Today, I’m thinking Point Pelee for some bird-watching. Also, more sitting around in the hot tub, and also perhaps another couple episodes of “The Crown,” a show neither of our husbands is into. (I do recall Alan’s priceless line from when Charles and Diana were splitting up, mid-’90s. I explained it all to him, and he said, “No wonder he spends so much time fishing.”)

A bar cheeseburger may be in my future today, too. With a locally brewed lager. O, Canada.

I don’t have much bloggage, mainly because I’m still marinating in serotonin from the election. You have your own takes, but I think this is an interesting look at what might transpire in 2024. Beyond that, I think I’m going to turn my focus to Thanksgiving, and all I have to be thankful for.

Well, we got through it. I do not want to crow or even chuckle, but I did not see this coming. I was feeling good about Michigan, but the night before Election Day, after my shift observing absentee ballot pre-processing, I stopped for a fancy cocktail at the fancy cocktail bar across from Huntington Place. Got to talking to another Democratic challenger, and confessed I felt good about the gubernatorial and Secretary of State races here, but the attorney general might be touch-and-go.

For non-Michiganders, our AG is a spiky lesbian who was born with no fucks to give, at least about what people think of her. And so she’s had some public incidents (overserved at a tailgate party, making jokes about drag queens in schools) that would make any campaign coach facepalm. She’s also been a stand-up comic, and not everyone shares her sense of humor. And being female, of course some simply think she should sit down and shut up.

However. All my worry was for naught. Gretchen Whitmer won by 10+, Jocelyn Benson (SOS) by 14+, and Dana Nessel, the AG, by nearly 9. All of these qualify as landslides. And, to be sure, all were extremely fortunate in their opposition, which was uniformly awful, and that’s not just me saying so. Here’s the conservative editorial-page editor of the Detroit News:

Tudor Dixon, the gubernatorial hopeful, was the best of the bunch, and seemed to be making a solid run at Whitmer as the campaigning closed. A respected pollster put Dixon a fraction of a point ahead of the governor on the morning of Election Day. That turned out to be delusional.

Dixon started too late, and with too little oomph in her campaign. The challenger couldn’t raise enough money to truly compete with a Whitmer war chest that topped $36 million (Dixon raised $7 million).

The other two GOP hopefuls, Matt DePerno for attorney general and Kristina Karamo for secretary of state, were abysmal candidates who had no business on a respectable ballot. Many organizations traditionally aligned with the Republican Party refused to endorse them. They raised and spent even less money than Dixon. “Money talks” is still true when it comes to politics.

Karamo was a religious nut job, who came with a steamer trunk of oppo, much of it from her own podcast, where she opined that extramarital sex, yoga and various other benign forces led to demonic possession. She also spent a lot of time blabbering about abortion, which isn’t even part of the job she was running for. DePerno was more grounded in reality but also had a long string of regrettable incidents in his past, including padding his bills and assaulting his own clients. But both were, yep, personally endorsed by you-know-who. As was Dixon, who was just as crazy but a little more presentable. She also had many on-the-record interviews and media appearances when she was trying to be a minor-league Fox News commenter. But even this year, on the trail, when she was making hay from dirty books in school libraries, she used as an example the time one of her kids got a book out of her own school library that included a section on… anyone? Divorce. Yes, divorce.

So with these three leading the ticket, the down-ballot races were more or less doomed, and newly drawn legislative districts stripped the gerrymander advantage from Republicans. Long story short: Both chambers of the legislature flipped blue.

Election night at Huntington Place was anticlimactic, though. As the counting went on, the various GOP-linked challengers ran around scribbling madly on their clipboards, but nothing came of it. Everything ran very smoothly. The only downside was a throbbing headache that sent me home around 1 a.m. By then, the lay of the land was evident and the air was rapidly leaking out of the balloon. I didn’t feel I was letting anyone down by booking early.

I still have the headache, which has waxed and waned since Sunday. Seeing my doctor tomorrow.

And now it’s a lovely, lovely November day and I’m going to take a final-ish bike ride.

What else? Here’s a Twitter thread I did early on E-Day, on the unique joy of visiting Mr. C’s Car Wash here in Grosse Pointe. Let’s try embedding the first tweet and see if it doesn’t break the coding:

It's my birthday month, which means new stickers on my license plate, which reminds me I need a clean license plate, which reminds me I haven't had my car washed in forever. So off to Mr. C's full-service wash. First stop after leaving my car? The hallway of stuff! pic.twitter.com/uEscaQnBx7

— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) November 8, 2022

Otherwise, I’m gonna get on that bike. Hope your November day is equally lovely. See you next week.

You guys. I’m going to be scarce, or scattered, around here the next few days. For lo, election time is upon our nation and I volunteered to not only be a day-of challenger, but also a pre-processing observer, figuring, I’m retired, what else do I have to do? And not too much was a dumb answer, because chores and jobs are starting to pile up.

This weekend was the monkey wrench. I signed up for lifeguard training, and had to do the whole course again because I let my last certification lapse. It consumed the weekend like a ravenous beast, and isn’t even over. (The pool where we were supposed to do the deep-water stuff had mechanical problems, so that part is TBA.) But. I found time to attend two fun parties Saturday night, and had a couple drinks with a friend Sunday, so it wasn’t terrible. I’m just behind on everything else, relearning the lesson of my youth: Laundry will wait, but a fun party won’t.

I start ballot pre-processing observation this afternoon. And then it’ll be a sprint into Wednesday.

I’m feeling pretty confident about Michigan, a couple of nail-biter races notwithstanding. I’m not feeling good about the rest of the country, though. A doomy friend says these are the last good years in America. I’m increasingly thinking he’s right.

So to fill out the post, some pix from this weekend.

Learning infant CPR in lifeguarding class:

Me with a friend’s real baby and her grandmother at one of the fun parties. (He and his wife bought a convent and have filled it with massage therapists, facialists and artists. No one knew much about the elk, other than he was a native of Saskatchewan.) I’m dressed down because the earlier party was outdoors and extremely casual.

Finally, look what Alan found while vacuuming out a cold-air intake in our foyer. It’s in pretty good shape for having spent half a century in the bowels of our house:

If it’s worth anything, let me know. Otherwise I’m buying a lottery ticket.

Good week, all. I’ll speak up when I next surface.

Alarmed? Why would anyone be alarmed by this?

MADISON, Wis. — Hinting at his plans to overhaul how elections are run, the Republican running for governor of Wisconsin this week said his party would permanently control the state if he wins.

“Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor,” construction executive Tim Michels told supporters Monday at a campaign stop.

Michels is seeking to unseat Gov. Tony Evers (D), who over his four years vetoed a string of Republican-backed bills that would have changed voting rules in a battleground state that Donald Trump narrowly won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020.

To be sure, Michels’ mouthpiece says he was only speaking abstractly, that the GOP’s policies would be so gosh-darn popular they couldn’t help but hold their seats forever and ever, amen. Which is, I’m sorry, a crock of shit.

Man, am I tired of election season. Which I won’t be working this year, at least for money. Still waiting to hear what my shift will be at the absentee counting boards.

In sad news of the day, did y’all hear about Julie Powell? Dead at 49, of quote-cardiac arrest-unquote, which as a former colleague once pointed out, is what everyone dies of. Still, she’d recently had a long bout of Covid, followed by the flu, and then, hmm, just dies? I’m going back to my pre-booster mask behavior, i.e., wearing one indoors, with certain allowances for living life, which is to say, I’m not giving up on restaurants this winter. But with restaurant prices what they are, I’m not eating out so much anyway.

Short entry today, because I’m tired. Let’s hope for better later this week.

Note: I started to write this for Deadline Detroit, trashed it, rewrote it, trashed it again – it seemed too obvious. But now, in the last days before the election, gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon has unearthed dirty books as a campaign issue. So, with a sigh, I say the obvious.

Defending books from those who would ban them, burn them, keep them out of libraries – that’s porn for a progressive. It’s so easy to step up for Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, all of whom have written something to cheese off right-wingers. It’s almost literal virtue-signaling.

It’s harder to do it for the terrible writers – hacks, pornographers, crap-merchants – who also get swept up in the net wielded by people like state Sen. Lana Theis, who last summer choked back tears on the MIRS podcast when talking about the filthy, filthy books that Michigan children are exposed to in their school libraries. Stung by her tongue-lashing from her Senate colleague, Mallory McMorrow, she sought to get a little of her own back by also crying to the Detroit News’ Ingrid Jacques, champion of put-upon conservative women everywhere. Wrote Jacques, in her last column for the paper:

Theis points to specific books that she knows are in some Michigan school libraries or being taught in the classroom. Books such as “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender, and Sexual Health” depict in graphic detail masturbation, sexual positions and LGBTQ relationships. It’s targeted to children ages 10-13.

Other books such as “Push” describe a father raping his daughter, also in great detail.

“Do you believe preschoolers and elementary school children should be exposed to complex sexual and gender identity issues?” she asks. “Or do you believe children should be able to maintain their innocence at those young ages?”

Innocence. Huh. In my experience, 10-13 years is the age when puberty arrives, early for some (mortifying) and later for others (equally mortifying). Once that happens, one’s brain becomes a fetid stew of confusion, and innocence – at least, the innocence of early childhood – flies out the window. A book that explains how one’s body is changing, not just in medical terms but in a way that at least acknowledges all the weirdness one might feel as a result, sounds like a welcome addition to any school library. (Also, please: If 12-year-old boys, and some girls, aren’t masturbating, I’m Marilyn Monroe.)

I was about 12 when a different book was passed around my junior high school, like Soviets sharing samizdat. “The Godfather” was a best-seller, the ‘70s version of the Mafia tale. The paperback was everywhere, copies stained with pool water dripped by summer readers and ketchup from lunch readers, spines scored with multiple openings and closings. But we all knew what we wanted. Our copies fell open to page 21.

It’s the scene where Sonny Corleone screws Lucy, a bridesmaid at his sister’s wedding. Author Mario Puzo doesn’t spare a detail in describing Sonny’s huge penis, “an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle” that penetrates Lucy and causes “unbelievable pleasure” as she receives the “savage arrows of his lightning-like thrusts” which of course – of course! – end in a “shattering climax” for Lucy, the first of her life. Of course.

Junior high was different then. Most of us were still virgins. Our health classes talked about reproduction, sperm and eggs, but nothing about blood-gorged poles of muscle, needless to say. The passage was titillating, confusing and terrifying. We all had enough knowledge to understand, theoretically at least, that we’d be having sex one of these days, but we feared for the integrity of our tender interiors, should it be with a Sonny Corleone. But Lucy felt unbelievable pleasure; it said so right on the page. From savage arrows. What is going on here?

Here’s another book Theis named in her tour of aggrievement, “Push,” by an author known only as Sapphire. It opens with this devastating passage:

I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver. That was in 1983. I was out of school for a year. This gonna be my second baby. My daughter got Down Sinder. She’s retarded. I had got left back in the second grade too, when I was seven, ’cause I couldn’t read (and I still peed on myself). I should be in the eleventh grade, getting ready to go into the twelf’ grade so I can gone ‘n graduate. But I’m not. I’m in the ninfe grade.

Clarieece Precious Jones, the child telling her story, is not innocent, needless to say:

“Father,” (the nurse) say. “What’s your daddy’s name?”

“Carl Kenwood Jones, born in the Bronx.”

She say, “What’s the baby’s father’s name?”

I say, “Carl Kenwood Jones, born in the same Bronx.”

I can see where “Push” might not be Theis’ cup of tea. But imagine you’re a child who’s enduring this sort of abuse at home – it happens, even in Howell – and you pulled this book down from a library shelf. You might feel less alone in the world. And maybe you are a well-loved child from an intact family, and you did the same. Maybe you’d feel like the world was wider than you might have thought.

And that is the whole point of literature. To hold a mirror to the world, all of it. Children should be guided in their choice of reading material by adults, but not dictated to. (You should have heard what my school librarian had to say about Nancy Drew mysteries, my absolute favorite for a while.) In a just world, any child entering a school library in search of reading material should be treated with trumpets and salutes. If a plain old book can cut through the static of TikTok, homework, over-scheduling and the million other things competing for their attention, give that author the Nobel Prize. That’s an accomplishment.

Theis’ cause is not a lonely one. I recently stumbled across a spreadsheet, file name “inappropriate library books,” compiled by FEC United, a hard-right group that has established a beachhead in Grosse Pointe, where I live. It contains “Push,” needless to say. And there’s the 1619 Project and various books about racism. All three of the authors I mentioned in my first paragraph are there. And now, late in the race, the flailing Michigan gubernatorial campaign of Tudor Dixon has seized on dirty books, which she describes as “books describing how to have sex” as an issue. I can’t really top Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s riposte to that (“You really think books are more dangerous than guns?”), but I will add that in my experience, no one needs to be taught how to have sex; nature has endowed us with the instincts to figure it out on our own.

Anyway, like I said, we can all get a warm glow from sticking up for Toni Morrison. But I rise today to stick up for Mario Puzo, crap-merchant. His lousy novel was the foundation of two of the best movies ever made; that alone is the basis for a decent term paper. Lucy the bridesmaid gets her own subplot, a weird medical detour to explain her too-large vagina, and no I’m not kidding. It scarred me for years, worrying that one day I could only be satisfied by a donkey-endowed man like Sonny Corleone.

If only it had been kept from me!

Earlier this year, when the GOP gubernatorial field was taking shape here in Michigan, four or five of them met for an event at the Mackinac Policy Conference, the thing up north where the legislature and the big swingin’ dicks of the business and nonprofit world meet to drink and jaw and plan the future.

(I attended once. Those plans? They never work out.)

Anyway, one of them, Kevin Rinke, who inherited his family’s vast auto-dealership empire, responded to an abortion question by claiming that “some states” were considering bills that would “legalize abortion up to 28 days after birth. Twenty-eight days!”

Later in the summer-long campaign, Rinke would emerge as the “reasonable one” on abortion, advocating for rape and incest exceptions. No one else did. Shows you where we are right now.

Of course, that is bullshit. But I was interested in where a seemingly sane, functional adult might have gotten that idea. Google a little, and you find it was all around the crazier corners of the right-wing internet. The AP explains, if that’s the right word, the confusion:

“To everyone saying it’s fake because it was posted on 4/1 just do some research. 99% of y’all don’t stay in Cali. It’s called The infanticide bill,” claimed a Facebook post sharing a screenshot of the headline on April 1 with over 11,000 reshares.

But the posts misrepresent the purpose of the bill and its potential impact. The bill eliminates a requirement that a coroner must investigate deaths related to suspected self-induced or criminal abortion. Coroner statements on certificates for a fetal death could not be used to pursue a criminal case against the mother.

The aim of the bill, introduced Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, a Democrat representing the East Bay, is to protect women who end a pregnancy or have a miscarriage from being investigated, persecuted or incarcerated. Erin Ivie, a spokesperson for Wicks told The Associated Press in an email. “The bill is specific to pregnancy and pregnancy-related outcomes, and does not decriminalize the ‘murder of babies’ in the weeks after birth,” Ivie said.

So what that tells me is…well, there are several conclusions I can think of. One, that Rinke gets his news from the Gateway Pundit, et al. Two, that whoever prepped Rinke for the debate gets their news from those places. Or, far more likely, both the candidate and his aides know it’s bullshit, but figure hey, red meat for the base, who gives a shit.

Rinke didn’t get the nomination. This woman did:

The Republican gubernatorial nominee in Michigan invoked a conspiracy that the Covid-19 pandemic and protests in the summer of 2020 after the killing of George Floyd were part of a decades-long plan by the Democratic Party to “topple” the United States as retaliation for losing the US Civil War, adding that the party wanted to enslave people “again.”

Tudor Dixon, a former TV news anchor, made the remarks on the far-right streaming news network Real America’s Voice, which hosts former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s show, in late June 2020.

In a six-minute monologue at the beginning of the show, Dixon said that after the “attempted creation of the Black House Autonomous Zone outside of the White House,” referring to a cordoned off area near the White House erected by activists, that Democrats were using this moment to “topple” the US.

“The country today is divided, and this was the plan. It’s been in the works for years. The idea that you can topple the greatest country in the world. But to topple a country like the United States of America, you must be planning this for decades,” said Dixon. “Why wouldn’t that come from the party that lost the Civil War? The party that wanted to own people because they viewed them as less than human? Do you think that the Democrats are over losing to the north?”

Most polls have shown the incumbent governor with a Secretariat-size lead, but the race is tightening, as they usually do as the election draws closer. When the gap was 17 points, many Republicans grumbled that they missed their chance when they failed to nominate Rinke. He could have faced Gretchen Whitmer and backed her down, they say, because He Is A Business Success. (JFC, am I tired of that argument. The last business success we had as governor bean-counted an entire city into lead poisoning.) Dixon claims to be a business success too, if you count working for her daddy’s steel firm (which failed) and being a commentator on a right-wing network so obscure I have to look it up, every time. She was also an actor in some B vampire pictures and…I forget. Also, a mom. (She says it that way, in italics.) I call her Brunette Ivanka for a reason.

So that was our choice in 2022, or at least, Republicans’ choice. Don’t get me started on the AG and SOS candidates, who make Tudor Dixon look like Winston Churchill.

Ah, well. My vote is cast. Let’s change the subject. I was going to talk about Kanye West, but realized I don’t care. Seldom has a celebrity interested me less. So I’ll just recommend this interesting essay on “The Raft of the Medusa,” art and politics, in New York magazine.

Here’s a Van Gogh from the DIA show, from an angle, and enjoy the rest of the weekend.

Hello, Wednesday. Nothing on the schedule, nothing on tomorrow’s schedule beyond a vague plan to go to the art museum to see the Van Gogh show, one phone call for Friday. And it’s overcast and rainy.

If this is retirement, I don’t know how you keep yourself from going crazy. Bring on the part-time jobs and decent-paying gigs, I say.

I did cross one big item off my to-do list this year: Signed up for Medicare, which starts in five days. We both went with Original Recipe, plus a gap supplement, with a Plan D to be named later. Total outflow: Around $300/month for no-worries coverage. Considering I was paying more than double that for plenty-of-worries coverage, it seems cheap. I know many of you are Advantage partisans, but the more I read about them, the less comfortable I became. There’s something about the phrase “prior authorization” that makes my skin crawl.

And justlikethat, my email chimes with a decent freelance assignment. I know I’ve said I’m done with journalism, but this is right up my alley, with a generous deadline and a better-than-expected payday. OK then! Back in the saddle.

Still, though, life has slowed down considerably. When signing up for a hallmark of American old age is the highlight of your week, you know it’s time to develop some outside interests.

Did any of you watch the debate(s) last night? I’m hearing bad things from Pennsylvania, and the usual bullshit on Twitter about Michigan. My ballot was submitted days ago, and I hate-hate-hate what passes for “debates” these days, so I didn’t watch. As I saw someone say on Twitter, Fetterman’s condition is likely temporary, while Oz’s problem of being a lying dirtbag is permanent.

How’s everyone otherwise?

(One last holiday-related post, sorry. But I think many of you can relate.)

I love Airbnb. Also, I hate Airbnb. It makes the sort of travel we’ve been doing in recent years not only affordable, but possible; there’s no way we could have stayed deep in the medinas of Morocco without it. Our last place, in Essaouira, was magical – it looked like the set of a French New Wave movie. The feral cats knocked on the door to the courtyard at 2 a.m., and were somehow charming rather than annoying. The host stopped by one day, and we got into a conversation about the difference between vegetarianism and veganism, both of which he found baffling. In other cities, Airbnb has given us space to spread out, to make simple meals, to take refuge in a place other than a hotel. On a couple of trips, traveling alone, I’ve done the single-room-in-a-house deal, and had not only comfortable lodging but made great connections.

However. When we met friends for dinner in Barcelona, I told her we were staying on a particular street in La Gracia. “Our Airbnb was on that street too,” she replied, and as we walked around the neighborhood, the signs were ummistakable: The doorbells/street mailboxes that all carried the same label, because a management company was renting them all. The “Tourists go home” graffiti everywhere. Airbnb had so infiltrated that charming neighborhood that locals were being priced out of it.

This isn’t a matter of opinion; short-term rentals are driving housing shortages in desirable cities everywhere. And problem rentals, like those in any hot American city where young people hold destination bachelor/bachelorette parties, are a headache for everyone. A friend here lives in Midtown Detroit, another area with skyrocketing rents, especially in Midtown. On a recent stroll down his own street, he said, he realized all the closest blocks were thick with Airbnb. In Detroit.

In west Michigan, a few communities have tried to enact local ordinances governing them, which prompted an influx of Airbnb lobbyists to the capital, who had little trouble convincing the GOP-controlled legislature that their allegedly foundational belief that small government knows best is wrong, at least in this case. Now there’s a law that says you can’t restrict short-term rentals in your own community.

And not all of our experiences have been great. We had to wrangle with our Madrid host, who took one flat and turned it into three, and stuck us in one that was decidedly not the one in the photos when we booked. He moved us after a couple days, which was fine, but the two unpictured flats were likely inescapable in a fire, something I think about a lot, especially in Europe. Our friends who met us there had an even worse experience, arriving to find their building wrapped in scaffolding, and workmen clambering around on it with very loud power tools, starting at 8 a.m. They bolted for a hotel after two days.

VRBO, I’m told, is better, but it’s much rarer, too. (We rent a VRBO cottage in northern Michigan, far from neighbors, and our cleanliness and care with the place inspired the owner to offer to deal with us directly, waiving the VRBO fee, etc. I treat rentals the same way I treat my own house.)

In the end, I feel like Airbnb is one of those supremely irritating move-fast-and-break-things products of Silicon Valley, where some guy says hey I got an idea, more guys shower him with money, and a few lucky people walk away multi-millionaires, while the rest of us get to sort out the inevitable consequences.

Nevertheless, we’ll probably use it again. Sigh.

How was everyone’s weekend? Ours was fine. We’re still working on the house, or rather, Alan is. (I provide domestic support in the form of laundry and meals.) Cooked some, shopped some, went out some. Shadow Show opened for another all-girl band at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, which was an excuse to get out and about. Talked a lot to a random kid sitting nearby, who told me all about his Birthright trip to Israel. I found a reference to a previously unknown biography of Warren Zevon, which prompted me, the Zevon superfan, to look it up on Amazon. Used the look-inside feature to get a sense of it. The epigraph alone put me off:

It didn’t improve. Here’s something I’m always telling writers I edit: Don’t use a quote to repeat something you just said, not in a quote. Do they listen? Maybe some do. This guy didn’t:

And now the same writer is doing a biography of Elmore Leonard. Guess I’ll be giving that one a pass, too.

So. The week ahead yawns with possibilities. So far I’ll be…meeting with a Medicare guru, schvitzing with a swimming friend, taking online training to be a poll challenger. I was going to work the absentee counting boards, but all the training — required by law — was held during our time away. My job is literally, LITERALLY, pulling the stubs off ballots, but I can’t, by law, work without being retrained in how to pull the stubs off ballots. Remember, Donald Trump told you Detroit was a lawless place, “so corrupt,” and that, my friends, is bullshit. So I’ll help out this way.

Good week ahead to all. Don’t use quotes to repeat something you just wrote! Use quotes to illuminate and add dimension to what you just wrote!

Here’s a random Spain pic for you, the high altar in the cathedral in Toledo. Notre Dame looks like a simple country church compared to this place:

You know I’m writing this stuff down not just to please you folks, but to get it down before I forget, right? The photos are mostly for your entertainment, though.

Anyway, some random notes as I wind up the week. I may think of another one-topic post over the weekend, but one thing I learned this trip: I am shit at keeping hand-written notes. I find it easier to dictate notes via talk-to-text, with all the screwups that involves. Those authors who write in longhand? My hat, it is doffed.

For now, though, some randomness:

Covid

We got our third booster a week before we left, and here’s my confession: I behaved like a guy at an orgy who left his condoms in the car, but doesn’t want to miss any of the fun. Which is to say, I was shamefully mask-less in many venues, although I wore one in others. In my defense, I offer only two weak arguments: First, that when it comes to me and masks, heat is kryptonite. If it’s hot outside, I find it very hard to tolerate even a light, surgical-style mask. And it was plenty warm in both cities while we were there. It wasn’t a problem for outdoor stuff, and most of what we did was outdoors, but in some venues I just said fuck it, I’m taking my chances. The biggest test was when we saw Brian Jonestown Massacre at Sala Apollo in Barcelona. It was a packed, SRO house, and we were right there in the thick of it. No way — for me, anyway — to wear a mask in the press of bodies.

Which leads me to the second reason: Spain seems to have decided Covid is over. We did the same thing we did pre-France, that is, uploaded all our vax records to a government health agency and got the QR code for our phones, but not one venue asked to see them. Hardly anyone was wearing masks, so we followed the crowd, combined with some common sense. Packed subway cars, yes. Museums and airy spaces, no. I saw a man reading a newspaper on a subway train, translated the front-page headline as “Covid cases down” and thought, the vaccination rate here is 85 percent, I’ve got a fresh one in my immune system, let’s see how they work. And they worked fine. We didn’t get Covid.

Although we both got colds. In Madrid. My first since 2020. It slowed me down toward the end of the trip, but my knees were starting to hurt from all the walking, so I’ll take it.

(And if you think the colds may have been post-vax Covid, we tested. Both of us, twice. Negative.)

Getting around

I can’t say enough about how wonderful it was to be in two cities with excellent public transit, one of the great shames of Detroit (and many other cities). We went everywhere via subway and bus, and rarely had to walk more than 500 meters or so from station to destination. And don’t get me started on the high-speed rail. The driving distance from Barcelona to Madrid is 383 miles; we covered it in a little over three hours. The day trips to Segovia and Toledo, both 55 miles from Madrid? Twenty-seven minutes via rail. There are days when it takes longer to get to downtown Detroit, and I’m inner-ring.

But the U.S. didn’t invest in high-speed rail, because Reasons. Meanwhile, a horror story unfolded in Michigan the same day we took one of those trains: What was supposed to be a 5.5-hour ride from Detroit to Chicago via Amtrak ended up taking 19 hours. The engine broke down, the power went out, the toilets wouldn’t flush and they had no lights. One guy got off at Gary and paid an Uber $200 to take him to his hotel. Others just jumped off and walked to a nearby highway to wait for rides. Unreal. If there were a fast-train link between those cities, it would have taken about 90 minutes.

And a note about shoes: I didn’t make the mistake I made in Paris, i.e., try to be “fashionable” like the locals, and get by with a pair of close-to-the-foot Italian sneakers. I packed Adidas and my Chacos, which, thanks to “Hacks,” I now know are coded lesbian sandals. Don’t care. They saved my aching feet.

Eating. And drinking, of course.

You leave Spain with your belly full, thinking: Tapas. Tapas are the way to eat. Sit down, order two or three, plus a liter of sangria, and just nibble. Still hungry? Order another. The whole small-plates thing has a fan in me.

As for drinking, did you know — I did not — that the gin & tonic is basically the national drink of Spain? They drop the “and,” however, so you just ask for a “gintonic.” I had a misadventure with gin decades ago, and have only slowly been making my way back to it in recent years; even the smell made me nauseous. The Negroni was my first step, and after watching Alan down a few Spanish gintonics, I took the plunge. The experience is very different there; the waiter arrives with a huge balloon glass with two big-ass cubes in it, along with the bottle. S/he pours the gin from the bottle in front of you, then leaves you with your own personal bottle of high-end tonic. The high-end is crucial — no Canada Dry crap, but British-made Schweppes or Fever Tree, made with real sugar and not corn syrup. And damn, but they are so, so good. Cheers:

Note the juniper berries. True connoisseurs find that shit silly.

We’re running long here, so let’s get to the pix then, shall we?

The aqueduct in Segovia. Two thousand years old, built with no mortar. It can still carry water, the guidebooks say. Damn, them Romans knew their shit (although it’s been restored twice):

One for you Buckeyes:

The Sagrada Familia in afternoon light, and some detail from outside. Those are the shepherds, worshiping the Christ child with a lamb and at least one pigeon:

Dogs ride the subway with everyone else:

And with that, I’ll draw the post to a close and wish you all a fine weekend. Back next week.

The best thing about slow travel is how random encounters can send you off in new, interesting directions. It so happened we were talking Me Too stuff at a waterside cafe in Barcelona, and I was explaining to Alan about Bill Cosby and his quaaludes when a British voice from the next table asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have a few of those tablets on you now, would you?” Ha ha. But long story short, this nice British couple said they were doing a Spanish Civil War walking tour the next day, I said that sounds interesting, and they dropped an easy-to-remember name: Nick Lloyd. Just google it with Spanish Civil War, he said, and he’d come up.

And so he did. I booked us for one a few days later. What a great recommendation.

Going in, I confess my Spanish Civil War knowledge was sketchy. Franco and his fascist nationalists on one side, Republicans on the other. Franco won, stayed in power for decades and became a Saturday Night Live one-liner. Guernica. That was about it. On my seventh-grade trip to Spain with my mom, I remember soldiers on every other corner, well-armed and scary-looking. This would have been in the early ’70s, before Franco died.

So much I didn’t know, so our three-hour walking tour with Nick and about a dozen others was a revelation and unsettling. Unsettling why? Let’s start with the roots of the conflict, when King Alphonso XIII abdicated in the global depression of the early ’30s. The second Spanish Republic formed and adopted a constitution with a lot of crazy progressive ideas, including: Spain should not have a state religion. Women should have the vote. And so on. The moving forces behind it were left-oriented — communists, anarchists, labor unions, republicans. A loose coalition of nationalists, monarchists, the Catholic Church (of course) and other right-wing groups decided this was too much, and a coup began in July 1936. Strip out the objections in Spain and replace them with the trans menace and critical race theory and about a dozen other hand-wringing topics Fox News likes to get on about, and, well, it starts to sound uncomfortably familiar. The Spanish war had no Mason-Dixon Line; it tore apart towns, neighbors, families. The scars remain today, and sometimes it seems they’ve barely closed. Sound familiar?

I won’t run through the whole tour, but it was fascinating. Yes, Atrocities Were Committed on Both Sides, but I’m still giving the edge to the fascists who allied with none other than Adolf Hitler. Here are children playing in a square in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. See the pitted walls at the far end? Those are scars from a bomb attack carried out by none other than the Luftwaffe, supporting the fascists. The death toll in this strike was something like 169, all civilians:

(God, Spanish children are so cute. You see them out and about, and they’re playing like you expect kids to play, with soccer balls and jump ropes. They must get phones at some point, but I didn’t see any carried by younger kids.)

And then there was Guernica. Hitler: “Hey Frankie, I got a new idea for carpet-bombing a civilian population. Mind if I practice in your neck of the woods? Maybe on a market day, for maximum casualties?” Franco: “Sure, be my guest. There’s this pain-in-the-ass Basque town I’m thinking of.”

We saw the painting in Madrid. When was the last time a work of art got people talking like Picasso’s “Guernica?” Maybe “Piss Christ,” or Robert Mapplethorpe with a bullwhip up his ass.

Nick had a lot of ephemera from the period. This was an ID case or dues record or something from the workers’ union, which included a fair number of anarchists.

They never did get their shit entirely together, but they produced some nice graphic design.

Military footwear. Imagine marching miles in these:

Anyway, without deep-diving into George Orwell, etc., here’s one story that’s in most of the guidebooks to Toledo, which we visited during our Madrid stay: A nationalist commander, Col. Moscardo, was under siege at the Alcazar of Toledo in the earliest days of the war. The Alcazar was a fortification at the highest point in town; it started as a castle, then bumped through the centuries as this and that, and in 1936 was a military base, and the Republicans wanted the munitions it held. Col. Moscardo was holding them off when a Republican commander telephoned Moscardo’s office and told him they were holding his son, Luis. If he didn’t surrender in 10 minutes, Luis would be shot. Moscardo asked to speak to his son, and is said to have told him, “Commend your soul to God and die like a hero.” Luis handed the phone to whoever was holding him, and Moscardo said, “I don’t need 10 minutes. I will never surrender the Alcazar.”

It was a long siege, but Moscardo was as good as his word. (Luis was not shot immediately, contrary to newspaper accounts at the time, but was disposed of a month later with some other hostages.) For some reason, this struck me as the most Spanish Civil War story ever. Half a million people died. Moscardo’s office is preserved as a museum exhibit now. Here’s where it happened:

Anyway, while we’re on the subject, a pivot to some bloggage, Fiona Hill interviewed in Politico about the Ukrainian situation. Elon Musk is the Henry Ford of the 21st century, very smart in some areas, criminally dumb in others:

Reynolds: We’ve recently had Elon Musk step into this conflict trying to promote discussion of peace settlements. What do you make of the role that he’s playing?

Hill: It’s very clear that Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin. There was a conference in Aspen in late September when Musk offered a version of what was in his tweet — including the recognition of Crimea as Russian because it’s been mostly Russian since the 1780s — and the suggestion that the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia should be up for negotiation, because there should be guaranteed water supplies to Crimea. He made this suggestion before Putin’s annexation of those two territories on September 30. It was a very specific reference. Kherson and Zaporizhzhia essentially control all the water supplies to Crimea. Crimea is a dry peninsula. It has aquifers, but it doesn’t have rivers. It’s dependent on water from the Dnipro River that flows through a canal from Kherson. It’s unlikely Elon Musk knows about this himself. The reference to water is so specific that this clearly is a message from Putin.

Now, there are several reasons why Musk’s intervention is interesting and significant. First of all, Putin does this frequently. He uses prominent people as intermediaries to feel out the general political environment, to basically test how people are going to react to ideas. Henry Kissinger, for example, has had interactions with Putin directly and relayed messages. Putin often uses various trusted intermediaries including all kinds of businesspeople. I had intermediaries sent to discuss things with me while I was in government.

This is a classic Putin play. It’s just fascinating, of course, that it’s Elon Musk in this instance, because obviously Elon Musk has a huge Twitter following. He’s got a longstanding reputation in Russia through Tesla, the SpaceX space programs and also through Starlink. He’s one of the most popular men in opinion polls in Russia. At the same time, he’s played a very important part in supporting Ukraine by providing Starlink internet systems to Ukraine, and kept telecommunications going in Ukraine, paid for in part by the U.S. government. Elon Musk has enormous leverage as well as incredible prominence. Putin plays the egos of big men, gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they’re just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin.