I didn’t watch Biden’s speech last night. I hardly ever watch presidential speeches, especially the State of the Union. If they’re brief and of the breaking-news variety, like Obama announcing the death of bin Laden, sure. But stuff like last night, I read the transcript. And I found little that was specifically objectionable in there, although I admit I was surprised, and not in a bad way, that he mentioned Trump by name.

High time, though.

Of course, the MAGAs are flipping out over this, but I have a feeling we’re well into the “find out” phase of their fucking around, so you can’t say it wasn’t coming.

I managed to be out most of today, and came home to discover sanding is well underway. The noise, oh the noise, so I’ll keep this short. Also, the weekend awaits, and we all want to get that underway.

Just one piece of bloggage, really:

This woman, endorsed by Trump, is the GOP nominee for secretary of state. Shudder.

Have a great weekend. Swim, picnic, have a blast.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The floor guys messaged us on Sunday afternoon and said oops, the last job turned out more complicated than we thought, so we’ll be a week later. Alan pointed out that we are leaving the goddamn country in a little over two weeks, so they agreed to come by and make the repairs that have to be done before the sanding/staining/sealing stuff starts on…Friday.

I know contractors work hard. I know shit happens. But just kill me now.

As it stands now, we’ll have about 5 days to get the house put back together before we leave, but oh well these are not problems. And then the spending will stop, or at least slow down, for a while.

Meanwhile, we might as well spend all our money now, because in a few more years this stupid country may well be sinking into the sea. I present to you the story of how a county election staff imploded over not Donald Trump, but…fluoridation:

Anti-fluoride groups have been active in the United States for decades, but have experienced a bump in popularity in recent years. By 2018, more than 70 cities in the United States had banned adding fluoride to their water systems, including some in Texas. Fredericksburg, the largest city in Gillespie County, held its own vote in 2019.

For years, Texas’s most vocal critic of fluoridated water has been Laura Pressley of Williamson County, a perennial candidate for office in central Texas who has yet to win a race. Local press often highlights her advocacy of disproven conspiracy theories. She has appeared on Alex Jones’ programming, and has said that “something was planted” in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. In recent years, she has become a self-styled poll watching expert and vocal opponent of electronic voting systems, training hundreds of people across the state in what election administrators say are disruptive practices that harm election integrity.

“Our elections are the representation of free will, and if we can’t trust that our free will is being represented legally and accurately, then God’s will is being thwarted,” she said at a meeting in Hood County in 2021. In recent years, she’s filed unsuccessful lawsuits against counties across the state over a variety of alleged voting problems.

And you know the rest of the story, how the constant harassment and threats and I’m-not-paid-enough-for-this led to the woman who ran elections in this Texas county to say exactly that. But it’s a good story.

I wrote about fluoridation once, too, about a dispute in northern Michigan. It was 2015, which felt like a million years ago, in terms of our current situation. The moral of my story is, don’t try to push a fluoride ban in the home of Michigan Community Dental Clinics corporate offices. Although who knows how it would go now.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. If you are one of those who observe, consider fretting about something else. Like whether or not my floors will ever get done.

Happy Wednesday, all.

It doesn’t seem possible, but my world – which is to say, our house – has contracted even further. Not only is all the stuff from the master bedroom, including our closet, shoved into the two other bedrooms, we realized last week the hall linen closet will have to be emptied, too, and that took up both laundry baskets. All to accommodate the floor-refinishing crew AND the furnace/AC-replacing crew, both of whom are arriving tomorrow morning.

The floor guys said they’d be here “sometime in August.” We’ve been living like this for a month now, waiting. Of course, tomorrow is still technically August.

Fair warning, this week may be a mess, blogwise. We’ll do what we can. I have a little carve-out in the spare bedroom/office that works for now, but we’ll see what happens when the dust tents go up.

For now, though, things are calm. So on to the main thing I want to talk about today, this piece, which is sports-focused, looking back on a famous (for those concerned) confrontation between sportswriting titan/Jabba the Hutt Buzz Bissinger and the at-that-time Deadspin editor/founder Will Leitch on HBO’s “Costas Now.” But it’s really about the clash between old media and new, and why it happened. It’s long, but smart and worth your while.

Perhaps you’re too young or you were too offline when it went down, but this was an industry-defining moment, and it illustrated a generational standoff.

Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, plus other books and big-time magazine articles, unleashed tirades directed at the younger generation of sports writers. He assailed the blogs of that era as ushering in something cruel and glib. The great bulk of the media response to the incident, which skewed BlogBoy, was highly dismissive of Buzz, perhaps responding in kind to his highhanded dismissal. Look, the old man doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand that some blogs are great. He isn’t aware of how the industry is being disrupted for its own good, towards some greater ideal.

Now 14 years later, it looks like old Buzz had a point or two. There was no halcyon era on the horizon, no media utopia after Deadspin, Fire Joe Morgan, SportsbyBrooks, Kissing Suzy Kolber, With Leather and Mr. Irrelevant. Indeed, quite the opposite.

On that fateful night of April 30th, 2008, Costas’ HBO show featured a panel discussion on sports blogs, with Deadspin founder Will Leitch present. NFL wide receiver Braylon Edwards was also there, but served more as bystander to the car wreck than as an active participant in the proceedings. This show was the most public Leitch would ever be as Deadspin representative, and it would accelerate his exit from that mantle. Will has, subsequently, been edited out of Internet history just a bit, though perhaps it’s more accurate to say that he deleted himself. Leitch still works as a successful writer at New York magazine, but he left Deadspin behind in 2009, and hasn’t exactly worn that background on his chest since leaving. When people, well, media people, talk Deadspin, you hear Gawker, Nick Denton, and A.J. Daulerio. Seldom discussed is the man who invented this website that changed Internet culture.

As we were discussing blogs here a few days ago, you might find this interesting, even if you don’t care about either Deadspin or Buzz Bissinger. But two passages stood out to me. This one:

Bissinger’s performance was mostly ridiculed by critics. He was rude to Leitch and, unfashionably, read from printed out Deadspin pages like a triumphant prosecutor. The easy take back then was “what a boomer.” My take, however, is more admiring: What a boomer! Look, I can’t defend many aspects of Buzz’s assault on Will. Overall, I like both guys and was certainly more partial to Leitch’s perspective when I watched in 2008. But there’s a redeeming aspect to Bissinger’s presentation, something you just don’t get from the younger generations. It’s authentic, it’s passionate, and it’s confident. Buzz, who likes to explore nontraditional aspects of gender expression, is classically masculine in this moment. He isn’t, as the younger generations so often do, mystifying his meaning with stylized irony. His tenor isn’t undermined with upspeak. This man is just gloriously unreconstructed. He hasn’t been conditioned, as my generation has, to worry about how public acts will be received on the Internet.

So true. I feel bad, I really do, for kids in Kate’s cohort, who grew up having their pictures taken 25 times a day and grew to fear where those photos – and their words, and their opinions – might end up. They’re now almost literally afraid to answer their phones. Many of them seem nearly crippled by self-consciousness.

This was the other part, which comes at the end, after a section higher up about what it was like to be a younger sportswriter trying to break into the business at a time when people like Bissinger and Mitch Albom and Mike Lupica were squatting at the top, holding onto their sinecures while the industry dissolved around them:

What the boomers missed, however, was how they created this generation. They promoted an aesthetic of rebellious gatecrashing, then pulled up the ladder once safely ensconced. Moreover, they demeaned their privileged perch out of a moralized pique, all while ceding no purchase. This food is terrible, and such small portions, but none for you. No tradition was upheld because no tradition was offered.

So the younger generation responded in kind, not with tradition, but with an all-out assault on it. They beat the establishment, then beat themselves, and in the end, almost nothing endured.

You could blow out this part to describe many other beats besides sports. I wish Albom would at least occasionally reveal that he understands this position. But I won’t hold my breath.

Anyway, big media is nearly over now, beyond a few titans like Fox News and the New York Times, etc. Deadline Detroit threw ourselves a party Saturday, although we’ll stay afloat a few more days – I even have a story in the pipeline – and the site will stay up for a while. In the end, it wasn’t a bad place to end a career. We had fun, all four of us:

And now, to get some recreation in before the sanders arrive and the check-writing begins.

Someone suggested I think about starting a Substack newsletter in my, ahem, retirement. I have thought about it, and I’m troubled by a few things:

1) Many days, I have very little to say, and would feel terrible charging anyone for it.

2) Even if I did the free thing, what if Substack goes toes-up? Another migration of content I don’t need.

3) It’s my goal to have the last surviving blog in the world.

Seriously, though, while I have no doubt at least some of you suckers lovely people might be generous enough to give me $20, $30 or $40 a year to read what I have to say, I don’t know that I could accept it, even though I firmly believe writing is work that is worth paying for. I have subscriptions to several paid Substacks (fave: Roy Edroso Breaks It Down), and several more to unpaid Substacks – a common setup is one freebie a week, and one or more bonus editions for the paying guests – and already it’s starting to annoy me; as a sales tactic, either the platform or the individual writers will send out teaser editions, with five grafs of writing, then a “want more? you gotta subscribe” pitch. There’s no easy way to know if the email you’re about to open is the complete freebie or the incomplete teaser.

I think, at least for now, this will remain a free-to-all space. I feel no pressure to produce if I’m feeling down or empty (although I usually do, unfortunately). I have a friend who uses Substack to write short fiction, with the gimmick that he does it every single day. A short story a day, going on more than two years now. Every so often he pitches for more subscribers, and he sounds almost angry that more people aren’t signing up. Writing fiction is hard work for sure, but it should also have something to say, or be entertaining, or be something other than a gimmick, which it inevitably becomes when you’ve pledged to produce it every single day.

I don’t want or need another job like that. There’s an argument to be made for taking it easy. I will write as long as I’m able, but having just finished 40 years of deadlines, I won’t take on any more right now. Now that we’re in our (gasp) third decade here, I’ll stick with dumb ol’ WordPress a little longer.

I was an early adopter of blogging, and now I’m a dead-ender of blogging. Me and Neil Steinberg, hangin’ in there. In a Laura Lippman line I’ve certainly quoted here before: She never met a rut she couldn’t love.

If a crisis hits and I have to beg for money, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I’ll tell you this: One of my goals for post-work is to raise my game here. Won’t be so busy, will have more time to think things through. Fingers crossed.

Bloggage: I don’t think this story is paywalled. It is instructive, however, about some of the candidates invited to a “Call to Action” conference hosted by Church Militant, which is a far-far-far-right Catholic outfit here. Here’s our Republican candidate for Michigan Secretary of State:

“We see the authoritarians that have taken over the Democratic Party, the traitors that exist in our own party. We understand that we the people have got to rise up, get involved,” Karamo said, sharing a couch with Arizona Republican secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem.

The two are part of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, a group of election deniers vying to serve as their states’ top election administrators that includes those campaigning on a blend of stolen election claims and evangelism. Their campaigns appear to be part of a larger Christian nationalist movement marked by radical religious and political views, according to experts.

…”Part of my passion is to get more Christians involved in government,” she said during the panel. “We’re not trying to establish a theocracy,” she emphasized later. The “justice and the truth that we are fighting for” is for everyone, not just Christians, she said. “We just hope at the end of the day, they come to Christ.”

Ai-yi-yi. She doesn’t have much of a chance, but still.

Meanwhile, the two mopes who plotted to kidnap the governor were convicted today. Good news for midweek. See you all later. Tip your waitress, but not me.

I back up my phone to Google Photos, and it’s starting to freak me out. The first thing it does when you upload your library is, it starts to look for matching faces, then asks you if you want to ID that face and make an album. I did this for my family members and close friends; it makes searching for pictures much easier.

It was a little unnerving that it could tell 4-year-old Kate was the same as 24-year-old Kate (although it couldn’t tell Wendy from Kevin, and they share only modest similarities). But then today, it flagged this photo, a throwaway from Kate’s high-school graduation in 2015. Who’s this guy, it asked:

That’s Kate’s friend Will. I ID’d him as such, and pretty soon it put this pic, from March 2020, in that album:

Man, I’d be hard-pressed to say that was the same kid; his appearance is pretty different there. Like Kate, Will is a musician. His band is the Stools (and they’re great). And Google stuffed these pics, from last summer’s Labor Day festival in Hamtramck, in there:

At least in that one, he looks close to his high-school self. And as for this, I can only assume it figured that since we know he’s White T-Shirt Guy in the pictures taken close to one another at the same location, that’s probably the back of White T-Shirt Guy’s head, too:

I realize this is just an AI thing, but it’s a bit unsettling. Will’s a good kid, but I hate to think we’re all out there somewhere, and Google Knows All.

But that horse has left the barn.

Meanwhile, here’s a picture of Kate from Friday night, when her other band, GiGi, played at a local punk/garage fest at a bar nearby. Someone was setting off fireworks nearby, and it made for some nice shots:

Well, it happened: I no sooner announce my exit from journalism than my swim coach pitched me on being a lifeguard at the Grosse Pointe Shores (or any other GP pool) next summer. Not sure if I want to do it, but it could be fun. My career, it takes a turn!

In bloggage, I have only this, which many of you have already seen, but on the tiny chance someone hasn’t, it’s so, so worth a click: A withering takedown of Jared Kushner’s White House memoir:

Every political cliché gets a fresh shampooing. “Even in a starkly divided country, there are always opportunities to build bridges,” Kushner writes. And, quoting the former White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell: “Every day here is sand through an hourglass, and we have to make it count.” So true, for these are the days of our lives.

Kushner, poignantly, repeatedly beats his own drum. He recalls every drop of praise he’s ever received; he brings these home and he leaves them on the doorstep. You turn the pages and find, almost at random, colleagues, some of them famous, trying to be kind, uttering things like:

It’s really not fair how the press is beating you up. You made a very positive contribution.

I don’t know how you do this every day on so many topics. That was really hard! You deserve an award for all you’ve done.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say again. This agreement would not have happened if it wasn’t for Jared.

Jared did an amazing job working with Bob Lighthizer on the incredible USMCA trade deal we signed yesterday.

Jared’s a genius. People complain about nepotism — I’m the one who got the steal here.

I’ve been in Washington a long time, and I must say, Jared is one of the best lobbyists I’ve ever seen.

A therapist might call these cries for help.

And then there’s the eye-goo line. But you’ve already seen that in a million places.

OK, time to take on my second-to-last week in journalism. Short-timer! What a feeling.

The first social network I joined was LinkedIn. J.C. advised me to, I think, or maybe he just told me about it. I joined, and spent years deleting emails about people who wanted to connect with me, or endorse me, or whatever. It was utterly useless; no one in journalism used LinkedIn, but my network grew, like a determined but unattended houseplant. Finally, sick of the emails, I took a deep breath and deleted my account. My first breaking of social-media shackles! Yay me.

A few months later I found myself laid off and looking for work. The first thing I learned in the applying-for-jobs thing? You’d better be on LinkedIn. So I had to open a new account, upload a resumé – don’t get me started on that nightmare, i.e. writing a resumé that will be read by an AI bot looking for keywords – and try to answer the essential questions: Does putting my date of college graduation on there brand me as an Old? Does anyone care that I graduated cum laude? How do you write a description of something that boils down to “I write?”

God, I am looking so, so forward to deleting that fucking account. If I get another job, I’m going to submit a resumé that says: I write. Or else I’ll get a very low-skilled thing that just involves filling out an application. That’ll be different. I can fill out a form in about 90 seconds flat, no matter the complexity.

So. I’m reading a story today in the Freep, with one of their dumb clickbait headlines, something about “these eight parts of Michigan” are of special concern for a potential polio outbreak. The areas – Detroit and seven low-income counties up north – are slipping below 60 percent full vaccination. FOR POLIO. The reason isn’t deliberate vaccine refusal, as we’ve seen in New York, but Covid-related slipping in parents bringing kids in for the standard juvenile array. With the New York flare-up, there’s concern it will spread, and honestly I am going insane here. Being a parent of a young child isn’t easy, god knows, but some things are simply no-brainers. Vaccination, for one. FOR POLIO. The childhood-disease shots are free virtually everywhere; all you have to do is come in. I’m sure in rural counties, they’ll come to you. So your child won’t get POLIO.

We live in the stupidest timeline. Just appalling.

Thank you for all your encouragement after learning of my fate. The more time that passes, the more I know this is the way it should be, at least for me. I think your emotions and body tell the truth, and it’s telling me: Time to move on. This is a good thing.

Or maybe I’m just lazy. I guess we’ll see.

Crazy week. We’ll see how things are next. Good weekend, all.

I was going to post something last night, but saw my editor had this column ready to go, so I held off. To save you a click, Deadline Detroit is closing up shop on Labor Day, which means the Summer of Nance will end with a bang: Retirement, more or less.

I say “more or less” because I expect I’ll work again, somewhere. One thing about losing your job: It opens a lot of doors you might not have considered walking through. Maybe I’ll re-activate my lifeguard certification and become one of those old bags with a whistle. This sounds appealing – working part-time for an airline to cop the free-flights benefit. I always thought it might be fun to work in one of Michigan’s weed dispensaries; there has to be a book in it. There’s a labor shortage in this country. I won’t starve.

But before any of that happens, we’ll be doing more traveling – Spain, this time, mid-September to mid-October – and I’ll spend that time thinking about what I want to do next. Something election-related might be cool in the short term, because democracy ain’t gonna save itself.

Don’t worry about me. We saved our money, our house is almost paid off, I’ll be on Medicare November 1 and I still have my health, as they say. I told Allan (boss Allan, not husband Alan) that I’d stick it out until Deadline ran out of money, and I thought it would happen well before this. Truth be told, I have a spring in my step. It’s…interesting to not know what you’ll be doing January 1.

Mostly, I’m grateful that, in the last years of my career, I was able to have fun at work again, something that’s been missing since roughly the turn of the century. The News-Sentinel was like being aboard a sinking ship. Bridge was fine but Stress City. The Research Council was fine but so quiet and cloistered it could have been an insurance office. I didn’t make a lot of money at Deadline, but the stress was low and we had some good times. So I’m at peace with that.

I’ll hear your suggestions for how I should play out my string.

Speaking of democracy not saving itself, I have one piece of bloggage, and I beg you to read it: Jane Mayer’s deep dive on how state legislatures are, in the headline’s word, torching it. It concentrates on Ohio, but the same thing could be said about Michigan (although it’s looking up here), Florida and many other states. I read it and was chilled to the bone. Please do so yourself.

Now I’m going to finish one of my last DD newsletters and maybe make some calls for one more story. Later, guys.

It’s been quite a crazy few days, eh? Salman Rushdie nearly killed, a nutjob trying to get into an FBI field office, and what am I watching on TV right now? The Princess Diana thing on HBO. There are advantages to not having cable, I guess.

The most impressive part of the Di movie? A short clip of Queen Elizabeth riding sidesaddle at one of her trooping-the-color events. Never tried it, but it looks hard. I’d never do it without a bombproof horse under me, but I guess she has plenty of those in her stables.

That is, of course, the entire theme of “The Crown,” the only reason to subscribe to Netflix these days (one of these days they’ll drop another season, I guess) – that it’s the queen holding the whole works together.

This year is the 25th anniversary of Diana’s death. A tragedy, of course, but the whole thing was: This unprepared girl, recruited as a broodmare, utterly unprepared for what she was getting herself into. She could have been just another member of the British upper class, smoking cigarettes and soaking up gin-and-tonics starting at lunch. She chose not to be. Alas.

Twenty-five years later, here we are, with a former president who sinks lower and lower, and an insane public – some of them, anyway – that still loves him, defends him, would kill FBI agents for him. God, it’s repulsive, isn’t it? I rather wish I lived in an England having a hysterical breakdown.

Thank all of you for your comments about the nature of document security at the federal level in the previous post. I learn so much from you.

Meanwhile, I introduced Alan to the wonderful world of the Petfinder Names Twitter account:

Let’s not forget this one:

And my personal favorite, for a three-legged Chihuahua:

Meanwhile, this strikes me as the real outrage of the weekend:

The Norwegian authorities killed a 1,300-pound walrus named Freya on Sunday who had spent the past weeks off the coast of Oslo climbing onto boats and lounging on piers, saying that moving her was “too high risk.”

“In the end, we couldn’t see any other options,” said Olav Lekver, a spokesman for the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries. “She was in an area that wasn’t natural for her.”

The hell you say.

Happy Monday. I’m opting for Something over Something Better tonight. Sorry.

I said I was going to let the universe decide whether I’d be taking the Badger home, and the universe said: No. The ship was sold out for cars, although I could have hopped aboard as a plain old human being. Unwilling to tow my Subaru across Lake Michigan in a dinghy, however, I had to drive home, but that is fine. It meant two hours or so of WXRT on the radio, and I defied Google’s suggestion that I take I-294 through the west suburbs, opting instead for I-94 through the city. It meant some delays, but nothing head-hurting. The Chicago skyline is my very favorite, and definitely worth a few minutes sitting in sludge.

Then a stop at Redamak’s in New Buffalo for a greasy-burger lunch, and another in west Michigan for fruit, and it was a very tolerable 6.5 hours behind the wheel.

It was great to see old friends; we’ve been separated too long. I only wish it hadn’t been so dang humid.

And now I’m back home, living in chaos, as we wait for the floor-refinishers to get here. In the interim Alan has been doing work in the room, so it’s not like we’re sitting here like lumps. But Alan hates the guest-room bed and I hate the fact that some of my clothes are here and some are there and some are god-knows-where. The dressers are crammed into my office room, and everything behind them is unreachable. I have two pairs of earrings to wear — a tragedy, I know — but one of the consolations of being, um, older is that you know where all your shit is, and you generally have it together. Not now.

OK, so while I consider how I want to spend the rest of the day, have some bloggage:

Say what you will about Beto, but he knows how to seize the moment.

I imagine the Trump inner circle these days being something like the last third of “The Departed,” where Leo DiCaprio is essentially shitting himself from stress over being a rat.

I read little nonfiction in book form, because I spend all day in a firehose of nonfiction in my work life, but this book sounds like it might be worth a visit to the library, whenever it arrives:

“Thank You for Your Servitude” concentrates less on the MAGA true believers — the likes of Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene — than on the twisted and tormented souls in the Republican establishment who could have prevented Trump’s hostile takeover of the party but didn’t. Such Republicans, in Leibovich’s assessment, “made Trump possible” and they “refused to stop him even after the U.S. Capitol fell under the control of some madman in a Viking hat. It was always rationalization followed by capitulation and then full surrender. The routine was always numbingly the same, and so was the sad truth at the heart of it: They all knew better.”

So why did they go along? The usual Washington factors of greed, ambition and opportunism, for starters. Kevin McCarthy, who unwisely spoke to Leibovich at length and with considerable candor, made clear he would endure any humiliation at Trump’s hands and sacrifice any principle in pursuit of becoming House speaker. “Once McCarthy wins,” in Leibovich’s view, “nothing else matters: He will have made it.” Senator Lindsey Graham turned from Trump critic to lapdog out of a desire “to try to be relevant,” he told Leibovich, as well as a pragmatic understanding that his re-election depended upon Trump’s blessing and his base. Others submitted out of both fear and fascination; Leibovich notes the mystique that Trump, as “a pure and feral rascal,” held for rule-bound, easily shamed politicians.

Oy, these people.

OK, half of Thursday, Friday and the weekend await. Enjoy yours, and I’ll be back Sunday-ish.

Hello from Milwaukee. Sorry for the long absence. I’ve been taking a little me-time, another mini-driving tour to see long-missed friends. First stop, after recovering from working until 4 a.m. election night, Chicago.

Oh, and the tl;dr on election night: Long but surprisingly un-hectic. It was a primary, after all. Only one GOP challenger was ejected, and lo, he made a fuss about it, but ultimately, very quiet. But it ran until 4:30 a.m., so Wednesday was a walking-into-walls kinda day. Thursday, though, it was off to Chicago, to see the Borden/Connor Co-Prosperity Sphere. We had a good time. Went to the Nick Cave show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, saw Kate play at the Empty Bottle, wilted in the heat.

Had cocktails here:

It’s a retro cocktail lounge that is truly retro — that is, unchanged over decades, not reconstructed based on someone’s snarky memories.

Saturday it was off to Milwaukee, to crash with Deb and Mike for a couple days. Fewer pictures here, but it’s been very relaxing, hiding from killer humidity in the a/c. We did venture out to the farmers market. A very fun gang was selling…spring rolls, I believe, with this offer:

I could totally do a one-minute plank, but didn’t want to show off. Also, we didn’t need spring rolls, and it was so, so hot.

I’m keeping this short because my laptop battery is dying, and there’s fresh hummus on the counter. Tomorrow, I’m going to let the universe decide whether to take the S.S. Badger home to Michigan. If tickets are available in the morning, it’s a go. Otherwise, just another very long drive.

Back midweek. Hope your summer is going as well as the Summer of Nance.