Who were you people who didn’t like “The Power of the Dog?” We checked it out over the weekend, and I thought it was pretty great. Such fabulous acting; Jane Campion must run her actors through Subtle Facial Expressions U. before she shoots a single frame. I loved the way the power shifts over the course of the story, I loved the scenery, I loved the way it put me in 1925-era Montana and basically posited: This is what it was like, here.

Otherwise, a weekend. Fuck Joe Manchin and I hope his stupid houseboat sinks. Actually, it wasn’t a shit weekend. We went to a Friday-night party — all vaccinated — but I will still get tested on Wednesday because Covid is running wild here, helped on by irresponsible behavior (like mine, maybe). Saturday was the Eastern Market and its associated pleasures, and Sunday I did a gift exchange with a friend. He has holiday travel plans and is being super cautious, so we tried to find a heated tent, but ended up in the back yard of a Cass Corridor bar. They wouldn’t turn the patio heater on because we were just two people, so we sat there and shivered for one round. It wasn’t all that cold, so it wasn’t terrible, and it wasn’t cold enough to drive us inside. Kate gave us notice yesterday that everyone she knows has Covid now, including someone she worked next to (masked) a few days back, so she’s testing daily and may not make it to Columbus at the end of the week.

It’s beginning to look a lot like a Covid Christmas, in other words. Everywhere I go.

I forgot to mention: While we were sitting on the cold patio? A sizable rat ran from under one section of deck to another. Happy Christmas in Detroit!

It hasn’t been a terrible holiday season, although I have yet to make gingerbread. Maybe tomorrow. But this cloud of doom hovering over all? That I can do without. It’s gonna be another long winter.

Wouldn’t it be nice to get some genuinely nice, happy news one of these days? A certain former president collapsing in a serious health crisis, maybe? Justice running down like water? That would be a present we could all open.

Speaking of presents, the GIF in this tweet makes me so happy:

Here's a great attraction at a great landmark. pic.twitter.com/u9C3CfxB3w

— Marco Schaefer (@mhschaef) December 19, 2021

For those who don’t get it, it’s the last move in the Ohio State marching band’s signature formation, Script Ohio. The i is dotted by a sousaphone player, and it’s considered a great honor to be the i-dotter. It’s really the only thing I’d watch the OSU band to see, but they don’t do it for every game. I feel like I have to start using this GIF in every text message now. Just to, y’know, emphasize things.

And now we’re in the countdown week, i.e. the second-dullest week of the year, unless Trump just lost an election. I realize these offerings have been a little thin of late. It’s not that I’m tired or not into it or whatever. The well simply feels a little dry at the moment. It’ll refill. I just can’t say when. Maybe time for another France picture.

Explanation: The market plaza in Nice had an installation of these poster-size photos, dedicated to local livestock breeds. The explanation placard stated that market forces were flooding meat and dairy markets worldwide with products from a relative handful of bloodlines, which anyone who drives in the Midwest country can see with their own eyes. Dairy cows are almost exclusively Holstein now, the breed which produces the most milk, and selective breeding of championship bloodlines has further increased the amount an average cow can produce. Semen collection, and sales of sperm and frozen embryos, have made some bulls and cows super-parents, with a few having hundreds of thousands of offspring. The dangers of this concentration into a few bloodlines are obvious, but it sure dollars up on the hoof, as they say in the auction ring. Yay, capitalism. This exhibit of less-popular, but beloved, breeds was one of my favorite things to look at as I was gathering provisions for the apartment. Not a great pic (by me), but this bull is so cool:

Another week in the books, and I can’t quite understand how it happened. You ever get that way? Monday dawns, and it’s another grind ahead, and then you look up and it’s Friday, and you’re another week older.

Not that I wish to depress you. It’s just something that happens.

Today I found Barack Obama’s year-end list of his reading and viewing, and once again, regretted… well, you know what we regret:

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That’s a two-page list, by the way. I’ve read two books on there, total — “Harlem Shuffle” and “Leave the World Behind.” I’m clearly not smart enough to touch the hem of Barack Obama’s garment, but I think we could share a laugh at a cocktail party. I read “Harlem Shuffle” in Paris, where I learned that every current best-seller on the U.S. list is available in Europe in a fancy paperback, which is maybe not important to you until you have to schlep this stuff through one, two or more airports.

I did better on the movie list:

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Saw three of these – “Pig,” “Summer of Soul” and “Judas and the Black Messiah,” all excellent. I want to see the rest, but after the “House of Gucci” experience, I can wait until they play in the living-room cinema.

As you can no doubt tell, the holidays are sapping my energy, as is the January 6 subcommittee and all the rest of it. One of these days I’ll find something to say about it, but for now, probably just as well to look at other people’s reading lists.

Back after the weekend.

I was making a new recipe for chicken curry and threw the seeds and trimmings of a jalapeño pepper down the disposal, then made the mistake of turning it on and not immediately running to the other side of the kitchen. Been coughing ever since. Instant pepper spray! How many times have I learned this lesson? Too many times to count. Sometimes I feel like the world’s stupidest home cook.

The curry was…C+, I guess. Splendid Table recipe, used yogurt. I think I prefer coconut milk, but it was good enough for dinner and it’ll be fine for next-day lunch.

The carnage in Kentucky was awful, as was some of the social-media snark about Rand Paul strutting on the floor of the Senate in 2012, talking about how “other people’s money” was going for relief from Hurricane Sandy. The response to a 180 in a dim-bulb libertarian may well be jeering, but maybe we can point this out another time, eh? The response to a disaster in the United States is to relieve the suffering. Yes, Rand Paul is an hypocrite. Yes, the people of Kentucky elected him (and Mitch McConnell, oy). No, the response is not to tell them “sucks to be you” when tornados kill them and destroy their homes, businesses and towns.

However, we’re in a sucks-to-be-you moment right now. I read a little over the weekend about Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania. Lia swam for the men’s team for two years of her college career. She transitioned during the Covid-cancelled season, and is now swimming as a woman, and winning. “Breaking records,” in fact, but here is one place where I have to part with Sherri, to name one person in our readership, who has said that any advantage to being a biological male in sports disappears after a year of hormone treatment. I simply don’t believe that, at least in this case.

Thomas isn’t just breaking records, she’s obliterating them. Winning by 7 seconds in the 200 free, and 38 in the 1650-meter free, to name but two. These aren’t normal new-record margins. Swimming is a sport where records fall by fractions of seconds, not seven of them. (Unless she is Katie Ledecky. Lia Thomas is not Katie Ledecky.) There is an advantage here that comes from being taller, stronger, more broad-shouldered and from having trained and competed all your life as a man. The photos of her are crazy. She’s a hulk.

As you would expect, the right-wing media has picked up this story and is shaking it like a dog. I had to scroll down in the search results to find a source I thought could be fair — Swimming World magazine, which I am confident knows more about the sport than, say, the New York Post or Fox News.

And this piece is pretty evenhanded, explaining that while Thomas is swimming slower on female hormones than when she was a male, she suddenly catapulted from an Ivy League finalist to an Olympic-level contender, threatening records set by the greatest women in the sport, including Ledecky and Missy Franklin. Swimming World also had the decency to ask for decency, after getting the expected onslaught of reader abuse following their reporting. And they’ve also done sensitive reporting on F-to-M trans swimmers like Schuyler Bailar, so I feel like I can trust their editorial judgement.

But even SW editorialized against allowing Thomas to compete in the NCAA championships in March:

Athletes transitioning from male to female possess the inherent advantage of years of testosterone production and muscle-building. There is also the advantage (in many cases) of larger body frames, hands and feet. All of these traits are beneficial in the sport of swimming. In the case of Thomas, she had nearly 20 years of this testosterone-building advantage, something cisgender women could not attain. Although she took part in the testosterone-suppression process, a look at her performances clearly reflects that she is benefitting from the genetics of her birth sex.

“There’s absolutely no question in my mind that trans women will maintain strength advantages over cis women, even after hormone therapy,” said sports physicist Joanna Harper in an interview with WEBMD Health News. “That’s based on my clinical experience, rather than published data, but I would say there’s zero doubt in my mind.”

…Now, Thomas is stalking Ledecky’s 500 freestyle record, a chase that reveals the unfairness in her racing against cisgender women. A look at the all-time rankings in the 500 free shows that Leah Smith is the second-fastest female performer in the event. Yet, she is almost five seconds back of Ledecky. The fact that Thomas could break the record of such a once-in-a-generation athlete confirms the biological advantages she possesses, and their power.

The stories of Thomas’ meet performances are agonizing: She finishes first by a wide margin, and the crowd sits on their hands. When the cisgender female touches the wall second, they erupt in cheers. This may be a cruel reaction, but it is also honest. These are not fair competitions. The question is, what do we do about them?

The floor is open. I’m honestly interested in what some of you have to say.

The fallout from the school shooting continues to be felt. Everywhere. The county prosecutor has her hands full with a shit-ton of copycat threats to other schools in the area. I have no doubt they’re all bullshit, but it certainly suggests kids kinda…hate their schools? Yes, that seems to be it.

Of course, lots of kids “hate” school, but they miss it terribly when they’re not there. It’s the center of their social lives, but even kids like me — stable home, lots of support, did well in what was indisputably a first-class public school district — had days when, if the building had burned to the ground, I would have stood outside, roasting marshmallows.

Lots of the threats are at the middle-school level, which tracks. I mean: Middle school, amirite? Others are more serious, leading to evacuations, dismissals for the day, and the expected messages to panicked parents: Don’t panic!

Well, we’re all on edge. I think it’s not just because this shooting happened close to home. Rather, because we look at those mugshots of the Crumbleys and realize: I know 25 people exactly like this. How many of them leave guns lying around for their disturbed teenagers to pick up? Probably more than a few, because really, what good is a “properly secured” weapon worth in a tense situation? Home invaders don’t send advance notice; you wake up in the night and think you heard something. Or you walk into the kitchen on a warm summer day and realize someone’s there who shouldn’t be. Do you say, “Hold that thought while I unlock my properly secured weapon?” Or maybe you don’t have children, so you leave the gun in the nightstand, or on the nightstand — badass! — or somewhere else. And then someone breaks in while you’re gone, and steals it.

Someone called in a threat to my high school, maybe a year before I arrived there. Only there really was a bomb, a homemade thing made of fireworks, as I recall. It blew up a toilet, and a kid was injured by flying porcelain. The perpetrator was expelled, the only permanent expulsion I’m aware of during my time there. He wasn’t a terrible kid, just one lost in the dark tunnel of adolescence. I just looked him up on Facebook, and he appears to be fine. Has an interest in general aviation. Who knows what Ethan Crumbley might have become, with different parents? A question for the ages, I guess.

I once saw a cop show that featured a middle-of-the-night home invasion, of Regina King’s house. She played a cop. Leapt from her bed to the closet, quickly keyed in a four-digit combination on her gun safe, and took out a Mossberg pump-action shotgun, which which she dispatched the bad guys. Now there’s a well-secured firearm. I’ve heard police say a shotgun is actually the safest home-protection weapon you can have, because the rounds won’t fly through your walls or windows into the neighbor’s nursery, and you can keep it loaded with rock salt rounds (do those even exist outside of southern gothic fiction) just in case you accidentally shoot your daughter’s boyfriend, sneaking in for some middle-of-the-night shenanigans.

OK then! Must run — the Deadline Detroit holiday party is tonight, and I have to throw together my contribution to the buffet. And get a Covid test first, which is scheduled in about 30 minutes. Probably be crowded, too, what with our heedlessness and surging case load. Best get moving. Happy weekend to all.

Kate and Alan had a father-daughter date Friday night, which left me on my own. So I ran an errand, had a solitary dinner at the bar of a spot I’ve never tried before, and went to a record release show in Hamtramck. Leaving around 11:30, I was rolling east on Mt. Elliott when a bunch of flashing blue lights were suddenly coming up fast behind. I pulled over, and three DPD units went by so at such a speed that I could barely catch that they were, indeed, DPD.

I got home, checked Twitter, and realized where they must have been headed: To the Crumbley manhunt, because news here doesn’t just happen, it warps and metastasizes and becomes SuperNews, a school shooting where the perp’s parents are accused of involuntary manslaughter and try to lam it, despite what their lawyers say. (The lawyers say they always intended to turn themselves in. They were simply “getting their affairs in order” and spending the night in an artist’s studio 40 miles from their home, nbd.)

Yes, it was a week where the news just didn’t quit. The Crumbleys iced the rancid cupcake. I’m sure you’ve all seen the pressers by now, the prosecutor explaining that the Parents of the Year not only bought their 15-year-old a semiautomatic handgun for an early Christmas present, they blew off school reports that young Ethan was exhibiting disturbing behavior and, on the day of the shooting, came to school for a conference and refused to take their boy home. And the school, for its part, didn’t exactly cover itself with glory by allowing him to go back to class without searching this backpack or locker.

This case is going to be with us for quite some time. I also have a feeling the gun people are simply biding their time and waiting until some of the spotlight has dimmed before they Well-Actually into a defense of the Crumbleys. It’s gonna be ugly.

Time will reveal more, but I’ll say, just to wake up on Saturday and see the entire family arrayed in mugshots, all occupants of the same county jail, was surreal.

Then I ran my Saturday-grind errands, had dinner with a friend and watched U-M win the Big 10 championship. So it was a good weekend after all.

Now it’s the week, and I have no energy. Half the people I know have Covid now, so I’m hoping it’s not a prelude to that. Pfingers crossed and pfaith in Pfizer, anyway. I’ve been careful, but not 2020-careful.

Fresh thread for now, and we’ll hope for something more stimulating in a day or two.

Jeez, what a fucking week. The local news is still filled with the Oxford school shooting, as you might imagine. I wish I could be impressed by the journalism, but it’s just depressing. A local PR maven took to his blog to proclaim that breaking national news here always causes local reporters to rise to the occasion and “punch above their weight.” Gotta say, I don’t see it so far. Chasing breaking news is 101-level stuff: Go to the press conferences, knock doors, that sort of thing. I’m not seeing incompetence, but brilliance hasn’t arrived yet.

Maybe on Sunday, you never know.

But the news out of the shooting has been all, ALL bad. The four dead students. The ones still fighting for their lives, with chest wounds and similar trauma. And the shooter, oy. Kind of a moonfaced kid with glasses, young-looking for his age, an only child as far as anyone can tell. He lawyered up immediately, and so did the parents, and for good reason – the gun was bought only four days previous. Yes, on Black Friday.

(“Do gun stores do Black Friday sales?” I asked Alan. “Are you kidding? Of course,” he replied, and followed up with links.)

Not only that, it was apparently not secured in any way in the household; the Crumbleys (that’s their name) were leave-the-guns-lying-around sorts of people. With a disturbed adolescent in the house, because that was another detail: the school had spoken to young Ethan, the shooter, about some “concerning behavior” on Monday, and on Tuesday both parents came in for a conference that morning. Ethan had the Sig Sauer 9mm semiautomatic in his backpack, and put it to use later that day.

So far, it’s just one depressing fact after another dropping, but as always, our state legislature goes the extra mile in dipshittery:

LANSING, Mich. — Michigan Rep. Steve Carra (R-Three Rivers) announced Wednesday a plan to allow teachers and school staff to arm themselves.

…“School and state authorities must be fully prepared if, God forbid, another violent attacker targets students at school,” said Carra. “Teachers and staff care for their students’ safety, and some of these professionals are willing to use their gun or taser if a tragic need for school defense arises. I am putting together a plan to enable educators to protect their students with lawful weapons, stored securely for an emergency we pray never comes again.”

Thanks, asshole.

I feel bad because I don’t feel sad. Instead, I am simmering with anger. How many years have we been doing this? My first mass shooting was…I guess Charles Whitman, but I was a kid then. The first one I remember as an adult was the McDonald’s massacre in 1984. Then the Luby’s shooting, in 1991. Then Columbine, Virginia Tech, and oh wait, can’t forget the post office shootings, which originated right here in Metro Detroit** (like carjacking!) and gave us the term going postal to describe titanic anger followed by violence.

Today I found a two-day-old Washington Post piece about the Oxford shooting that had more detail than I’ve seen so far. A girl in her AP Statistics class had bullets coming through the classroom door, so she handed out the closest weapon-like object at hand – calculators. Another girl crouched next to a toilet in the bathroom, holding hands with two others. And this was the reaction of our state Senate majority leader:

WATCH | @9and10News @SenMikeShirkey asked about what action people can expect after the #OxfordHigh shooting, outside of 'thoughts and prayers.'

"If we get obsessed with eliminating all risks, we will then develop and evolve into a country we won't recognize."

SOUND⤵️ pic.twitter.com/QLTdhTGFYF

— Eric Lloyd (@EricLloyd) December 1, 2021

I hate to say it, but this country is so fucked. Personally, I’d welcome living a country I don’t recognize, maybe one where people don’t throw shit fits over wearing a piece of cloth in the name of public health in a grocery store, or where children don’t have to consider whether a Texas Instruments calculator is what stands between them and death. But that will never happen. Nothing ever changes. Time to move to Barcelona.

I hate to leave you with a bummer tonight. I’m headed to some craft shows this weekend, just to see pretty things and breathe a little. In the meantime, another France photo, the load-out of a classic car show near the Louvre.

Later, all.

** Hank, in comments, is correct. The first one Wikipedia notes was 1970, but it was targeted, in that the shooter went looking for one individual and shot him. What we later came to consider the mass, untargeted shooting with many victims started in Oklahoma, with 14 dead.

I forgot to tell you guys about our Friday evening over the weekend. The three of us went to see “House of Gucci,” and for Alan and me, it was our first trip to see a movie in a theater since the pandemic. The movie was just OK — more on that in a minute — but the experience of watching it in the theater was? Awful.

No wonder everyone is trying to short AMC stock. The whole experience was interminable and expensive.

If you’re going to a movie these days, especially a first-run movie the first weekend it’s open, you should expect to pay the top price, but holy shit — $14 per ticket, and that’s the beginning. Popcorn — two small popcorns, mind you — were $16. They were salty, so we got three beers to carry in. $35, plus tip. We’re now t $100 for three people to see a movie.

Showtime: 6 p.m. The previews start, and keep going. And going, and going. They ran for 25 minutes, followed by five minutes of turn-off-your-phone spots and a long one featuring Nicole Kidman, extolling the experience of seeing a movie in a theater. The movie finally started at 6:30. It was nearly two and a half hours, which meant we were there for three.

And it wasn’t very good. The short version: Everybody speaks in a mamma-mia-that’s-a-spicy-meatball accent, which somewhat obscures the clunky dialogue but doesn’t obscure that the movie is too long, verges on camp, veers wildly in tone and, most appallingly, is a movie about a fashion house that contains hardly any fashion.
Although Lady Gaga looks great and that’s about all I can say about it.

See it yourself if you want; maybe you’ll love it.

But enough about my petty complaints. Today we had a school shooting in exurban suburbia. Three dead so far, eight injured, including a teacher. It’s going to be a brutal few days, and I’m not looking forward to it. Who would?

Random France photo, on a government building. As national mottos go, it’s a good one:

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…the liberal media:

Want more? OK, here ya go:

All of the above is a lie. The people Trump is endorsing in Michigan aren’t making “election administration and investigating last year’s vote central to their platforms,” they’re Stop the Steal lunatics who have stated, baldly, that Trump Won, and that if they’re elected, they’re going to do their best to make sure he never loses again.

The election has been litigated, recounted, audited and investigated, and none of their claims have been found to have any basis in fact.

But this is NBC News here, and to write that Trump “narrowly” lost Michigan is also fiction. He lost Michigan by 154,000 votes. That is not a narrow victory. And these people are not interested in improving elections. This is the “liberal,” mainstream media promoting this fucking garbage. I can’t stand it.

But OK, it’s the long weekend. I got most of my shopping done (online), picked up a couple stocking stuffers from local businesses, and even scored a white shirt I’ve been looking for forEVER from a local business, and a black-owned one at that. So I’m counting this as a win, Chuck Todd or not.

My birthday was very nice, even if I spent much of it cooking, at least it was pretty easy. Thanksgiving is basically a matter of chopping and timing; with enough advance work, you really don’t have to spend all day in the kitchen. We had the usual for our small tribe of four, and it was very fine, topped with two desserts, for Team Cake and Team Pie. The last of the turkey went into tonight’s tetrazzini, and that puts the holiday to bed. With the worst of the chores handled, I intend to spend the rest of December doing January organizing and maybe making some gingerbread. The hell with the holidays; maybe we can enjoy the season for once. See the lights, go to some parties, all of it.

And it was very nice to watch Michigan beat the shit out of Ohio State, the first in a decade:

Those leaving Ann Arbor, please drive and celebrate safely. If you happen to be heading to the state down south, you can really take your time, your season is over. #DriveMichiganSafely pic.twitter.com/qGM03Kt9jv

— MSP Metro Detroit (@mspmetrodet) November 27, 2021

So the week begins. Enjoy it.

I get a lot of spam. Everybody does, I guess. On my Gmail account, which is rapidly becoming the one I use most, it’s generally sales pitches and the like, which at least fall into convenient folders. One or two clicks, and it all goes away. My Mac Mail account, the one associated with this site, is more of a pain. But sometimes, it’s fun to look deeper.

Most of it is pitches from crap outfits pointing out that something on this blog from, say, 2006 has a dead link, and would I like a replacement? They have a suggestion! (No.) I ignore these, of course. They generally come in threes — first pitch, second pitch (Hi, Nancy, just checking to see if you had any response to my offer last week…), third pitch (I know you’re busy, but I thought I’d circle back and…). Then they go away. Usually.

I also get an occasional threat from someone who claims to have hacked my entire computer and recorded me “wanking to YouPorn.” If I don’t pay up in a specific amount of Bitcoin, it will be sent to everyone on my contacts list. I keep thinking I should respond by asking to see some frame grabs from these recordings, just to be sure it’s me.

Then there are the poorly spelled and punctuated warnings from various entities offering me a $20 credit at CVS if I just click the big button. One had a return address that was something like kiVHeish@yahoo, etc. As the kids say: Seems legit.

Bottom line: 90 percent of my inbox is garbage. It strikes me that sooner or later, American capitalism + freedom ruins everything. When was the last time you answered an unknown number on your cell phone and the person on the other end was someone you actually wanted to talk to? We have this wonderful technology that allows us to make phone calls from a slender rectangle we carry in our pockets, but it’s mostly useless for communicating with anyone other than people we already know. All because we wouldn’t regulate.

I don’t have a transition from spam to turkey, but I guess I don’t need one. Thanks for the birthday greetings. The actual day is on Thanksgiving this year, so I’ll be observing my birthday by making a big meal with two desserts – pumpkin pie and birthday cake. I’ll be 64, which moves me into the Medicare Penumbra, during which your phone rings with odd numbers every day and the spam — oy, the spam. (I know this because for some reason Alan’s name was associated with my number, and I’ve spent the last year declining his calls.) Got my first call just the other day. It’s gonna be so much fun. Only 365 more days of this.

Happy birthday to me, happy Thanksgiving to all of us and happy weekend, likewise. Random France photo of the day, an unusual civic sculpture outside Nice city hall. Nice thumb, I guess:

I decided to try something new for me — learning from past mistakes, in this case — and do my Thanksgiving shopping early. I swam Friday morning, came home, dried my hair, tanked up on coffee and hit Kroger at about 9:30 a.m.

What a fabulous idea. The store was fairly quiet, but fully stocked on everything I needed, and while there were only two checkout lanes open, I was in and out in 40 minutes. The turkey I bought at Eastern Market the previous day. Such a strange feeling, knocking that out ahead of time; it seems the madhouse crowds the weekend before any big holiday always comes as a fresh surprise. But when I did my usual Saturday shopping last weekend, and the rush had already begun — bloated endcaps on every aisle, mid-aisle stacks of flour and sugar and canned pumpkin — I knew I had to have a plan.

My shopping experience would be improved immensely if my fellow grocery-getters would do two things: 1) Be aware of the space they’re occupying, which is my way of saying that if you want to have a long reading experience with peanut-butter labels, park your cart to one side of the aisle and don’t leave it sitting in the middle where no one can get around; and 2) I can’t remember the second thing, because the first thing is so much more important.

And if you’re still reading, be advised that groceries are very important at this time of year, and yes, that’s why I felt like bragging a little.

Unfortunately, Michigan is now number one in the country in per-capita Covid cases. With a bullet! Or maybe just a hissing ventilator, whatever. The caseload is exploding, and with the holidays bearing down. However, I read some interesting things over the weekend, which explained that vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans are birds of a feather. Which is to say that if you’re vaxed, chances are you hang with others who are, too, and probably have more protection than the unvaxed, who have similar patterns in their associations. That said, Kate’s second band, GiGi, has a Thanksgiving-eve show and I will probably go, but wear a mask the whole damn time.

How was the weekend? I made a fancy dinner Friday and ordered a pizza Saturday, but most of all, I cleaned for the coming holiday. We also watched “King Richard,” the movie about Venus and Serena Williams’ dad, and it was a bit overlong, but not terrible at all. By the end, I wanted to slug King Richard, but he had the courage of his convictions — you gotta give him that.

In other words, a pretty bleh weekend, but a holiday awaits. So there’s that.

Random France photo today is from Pere Lachaise cemetery, where you think everyone there died in the 19th century, but it turns out not: This young woman perished in the 2015 terror attack in Paris.