Joe Rogan is in the news these days. This is a development that leaves me feeling so utterly out of it, I feel like taking up knitting, mainly because I only recently learned who Joe Rogan is. I didn’t watch the show he hosted (“Fear Factor”), because it sounded boring and ridiculous, and I don’t pay attention to mixed martial arts, his other big claim to fame, and so when you tell me this guy has millions of listeners to his podcast, I think: Huh. OK.

While I don’t doubt the people who claim he’s racist and sexist, podcasts can be cherrypicked and words taken out of context, so I thought I might check him out and see for myself. (I retain my Spotify subscription. For now.)

I should tell you my prejudices about podcasts up front: I think most of them are too long. It kills me that so many pods are produced by people who have undeniable assets but no radio experience, and make shows where the opening small talk between hosts takes 15 minutes. I’m glad people get along, there’s nothing wrong with showing your on-air chemistry, but holy shitballs start the damn show already. And learn how to edit, to take out the irrelevant guest tangent. And most of all, stop assuming people have nothing else to do but listen to you.

Granted, everyone listens differently. And maybe I’m too old to understand the appeal of this or that host chatting with his/her co-host like you are the third person at the table, or maybe the small talk isn’t for me, but I still firmly believe Podcast Bloat is a thing, and I far prefer pods that can get in and out of my ears in either 30 or no more than 60 minutes.

All this by way of noting that two hours is a short Joe Rogan podcast. Two and a half seems to be standard, and some go far, far longer. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian weirdo, talks to Rogan for FOUR! HOURS! (And 13 minutes.) People used to say, “You can’t judge Rush Limbaugh by some single thing he said. You have to listen for a month, then decide if he’s an asshole bigot.” Sorry, pals, I ain’t got time to dedicate a month of the only life I have to divining the essence of Rush Limbaugh, and ditto Rogan. But I did cue up half a dozen of his pods this week, just to see how or if they grabbed me.

Readers? They did not.

Rogan is, as his fans say, undeniably curious on a wide variety of issues (concentrating on bro-y stuff like fitness, stand-up comedy, showbiz and the like), so I’ll give him that. Unfortunately, he employs the Larry King Tabula Rasa strategy of interviewing, which is to say, he doesn’t seem to really prepare for anything. People say stupid shit and it’s not challenged. Rogan says stupid shit and it’s even less challenged; one trainer advocated a particular move that goes directly against every rule about how to treat your knees, and while Rogan noted the contradiction, he didn’t ask the why question.

In other words, while Rogan has the foundation of being a decent journalist (curiosity), he lacks the discipline to know how to craft it in service of others. Not that he won’t chime in when he feels like it. When one guest mentioned omicron, he said, “Oh, yeah, the cold.” And in the exchange that followed, he insisted omicron was no more serious than that, and the only people dying of it were basically fucked to begin with anyway, so. The “no big loss” was left unspoken, but hung in the air.

I guess it’s easy to talk to someone for two hours, especially if you’re on drugs – Rogan is said to be a big fan of those – but far harder to do it responsibly. There’s a clip of Rogan talking to a Holocaust denier that will curl your hair. He just sits there and nods.

So. Other big news of the moment: The Canadian Truckers 4 Freedumb have landed close to home. The privately owned Ambassador Bridge has been closed most of the day, with most of the action on the Canadian side. I was down there today for lunch and didn’t see much – a few trucks pulled over on the freeway with a state police officer talking to one, that sort of thing. But it’s big news, I guess. I’ll keep you posted if a shooting war breaks out.

Saturday mornings I’ve been going to my boxing trainer’s “gym,” i.e. his garage. He gave up the old place at the beginning of the pandemic and we’ve been doing Zoom classes for two years now. Most people have hung bags in their basements or garages, but I’m on a strict NO MORE SHIT IN THIS HOUSE pledge, so I shadowbox, and one day a week I get down there to be in the Zoom studio audience, i.e. on Saturdays, in his garage. Two Saturdays running this month I’ve taken the class is single-digit temperatures (the garage has a heater, but still: 4 degrees + a garage = call on your Midwestern fortitude, hon. Still, it’s often the best hour of the week, just banging the shit out of a heavy bag.

What does that say about life these days? You tell me.

But things are looking up. Cases are way down. The temperature, notwithstanding Saturday morning, is edging up. Snow is starting to melt. Spring is more than a rumor, more like the Chinese Democracy of seasons. It’ll be here eventually, but it’s a long way off.

If I sound like a profoundly dull person of late, well I am. This has been a hard winter. I feel fat, boring and peevish.

But now we have the Winter Olymp– Excuse me, the Games of the Roman Numerals Olympiad, to make me feel like there’s nothing more fun than sitting on one’s couch and watching a moguls skier, whose course makes my knees hurt just looking at it. Those and the skaters. And of course the biathlon, one of my faves, along with speed skating, where a parallel-universe Nance is competing in a full speed suit, one hand behind her back, the other swinging in time =. The color commentators, how can we forget them: “She is skiing for gold. I know because I asked her.” Tell me when someone says, “Who, me? I’m here for the bronze, no better.”

And because we’re watching it on Plain Old Network TV, we get to see back-to-back-to-back ads for sports betting and online casinos, NOW WITH LIVE DEALERS, all of whom are beautiful and rocking seven inches of cleavage.

Ah, it’s winter.

And a fresh thread for whatever terrors and delights the day ahead has.

I’m not Catholic anymore, but that’s how I was raised, and even though I’ve :::hand to forehead::: fallen away, there are parts of the One True that just stay with you. Which is the long way around to saying that when a Jesuit speaks about morality, I tend to listen with an open mind.

And hey, one did, Fr. James Martin, S.J., asking the question in the headline: How Do You Respond When an Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid?

Great question! I struggle with this one. There have been a few high-profile Covid deaths around here, and a few more on the national stage. I’m absolutely out of fucks, as the kids say, but I can’t go so far as touchdown dancing all over the internet, either. Death is the undiscovered country, and the dead know something we don’t. So give them that.

Martin has a few things to say on this topic:

At this point I could run through a list of philosophers, theologians and wise voices from religions and traditions around the world to prove my point. Instead I will reclaim a word that has been largely lost from our discourse: mean. Crowing over someone’s suffering or demise is as far from a moral act as one can imagine. It’s cruel.

Indulged in regularly, schadenfreude ends up warping the soul. It robs us of empathy for those with whom we disagree. It lessens our compassion. To use some language from both the Old and New Testaments, it “hardens” our hearts. No matter how much I disagree with anti-vaxxers, I know that schadenfreude over their deaths is a dead end.

“Come on!” some might say. “It’s a natural emotion.” That’s true — and emotions are usually beyond our control. If someone coughs intentionally (or thoughtlessly) in your face on the subway, it’s natural to get angry. At least for a few seconds.

But what you do with those emotions — give in to them, prolong them or intensify them — is a moral decision. After your fellow subway rider coughs in your face, you don’t need to express your anger by punching him. Simply letting your emotions take you wherever they please is what a baby does, not an adult.

I think that’s right. Higher in the column, he talks about Laura Ingraham, “a commentator who often expresses her belief in ‘Christian values,’ applauded the news that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had tested positive for the coronavirus despite being vaccinated and boosted.” I want nothing to do with Laura Ingraham. So I’ll try it Fr. Martin’s way.

Speaking of morality, one of the zillion Republicans vying for the gubernatorial nomination here in Michigan stepped in it this week, making the case for women pregnant as a result of rape to be “heroic” and choose to carry their fetuses to term.

I’ve long found this position repugnant, but at least morally consistent; after all, if you believe all zygotes, embryos and fetuses to be fully formed humans with civil and constitutional rights, then you might as well go all the way. The people who say sorry, gotta have that kid are fully living their beliefs. The ones who make rape/incest exceptions are saying those embryos are expendable, but not the ones that came because you were a slutty slut. That’s directly punitive of women for their sexual choices, and even worse.

He’s not going to be the nominee, although I don’t know who will be, either. I do know that in just the last few days — and it’s only Tuesday! — one candidate has advocated for election interference and another for forced childbearing.

So now we’re all hunkered down, waiting for the big storm. Eight inches, no 12 inches, no FIFTEEN INCHES of snow, headed our way. We’ll be stuck indoors for two days, at least. So now, I’m going out to snag a cheeseburger made by someone else while I still can. Stay safe if you’re in the path.

Since I started the last entry with an embedded tweet, let’s do it again, hey what?

Candidate for MI governor Ryan D. Kelley tells prospective poll workers to unplug tabulation machines if they suspect fraud in the 2022 election. State senate candidate Mike Detmer takes it a step further: “We need to be prepared to lock & load,” he says. “Show up armed.” pic.twitter.com/rLsmUcUR0q

— Left of Center MI (@leftofcentermi) January 30, 2022

When I trained to be a poll worker, we were instructed in all the most likely scenarios we’d see in the course of an election day: Average voter, voter without ID, voter whose absentee ballot was requested and didn’t arrive, voter whose absentee ballot arrived but not returned in time, all that stuff. Of course, one of the bottomest of the bottom feeders took the training, secretly recorded it, selectively edited it and tried to make it sound like we were being instructed in how to cheat.

Now here’s an actual video, not manipulated beyond taking two clips from a longer piece — which you can watch in its entirety (follow the thread for the link) — that directly instructs people to break the law and bring weapons to polling places/boards of elections.

Whoever said everything is projection with these people sure got that one right.

So. Another cold weekend. I kept busy. We did stuff. Watched the Criterion Channel (“The Killing,” “The Vanishing”). Made soup. Made some progress in a couple of books. Narrowly escaped dying of boredom, as you are probably suspecting. January, this year, has 295 days, 294 of them cold. (Still to come this week: A major snowstorm, followed by another cold snap: -1 on Saturday morning. The joy, oh the joy!)

And there was actually more why-aren’t-we-screaming-in-the-streets news this weekend. Trump says that if he’s reelected, he’ll consider pardoning the January 6 defendants.

When it happens, we’ll wonder why we didn’t see it coming. Maybe because we were playing Wordle. (I was, anyway.)

And so the week begins!

If I’d stayed in Indiana, this dipshit would be my representative:

Have we ever seen a President attack and malign the free press like Joe Biden has??

— Jim Banks (@RepJimBanks) January 24, 2022

Nice ratio, dude.

Sorry I missed Wednesday; we went to a show Tuesday night. Courtney Barnett, a lanky Australian singer-songwriter. I got strong Lucinda Williams vibes from her, minus most of the country feel. They checked vaccine cards and everyone wore a mask, so I figure: Shrug. I badly need some time out of the house, not just Tuesday but some more days, too. Maybe the cold snap will break soon, although the one thing about an extended subfreezing stretch: When it finally gets above 20 degrees it feels almost balmy. Wendy and I went for a walk and it was nearly enjoyable.

So. I think I mentioned the sex scandal that broke a couple weeks ago, about the former Michigan Speaker of the House. He’s a big evangelical Christian? Turned out he was banging his sister-in-law? And it started when she was 15? And now there are big money questions? Yeah, that guy. Another shoe dropped today: His dad’s a p.o.s., too:

Rusty Chatfield, the father of former state House speaker Lee Chatfield and superintendent of the Northern Michigan Christian Academy, did not report allegations of unwanted sexual touching last year between two 11-year-old students, according to a police report from the Tuscarora Township Police Department obtained by City Pulse.

Instead of calling local law enforcement or the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services’ child abuse reporting line, Chatfield brought the accused 11-year-old student to his office, the report showed. The boy admitted to the sexual touching — which included “the inner thigh, the penis and the buttocks” over the clothing, according to the police report.

Chatfield made the boy apologize to the victim, the police report said.

Then, Chatfield ordered the two 11-year-old boys to be separated at all times in the school and advised the alleged victim to physically “beat up” the accused if he touched him again, according to an interview documented in the police report between authorities and Chatfield.

And that, friends, is why as far as we’ve come with gay acceptance, guys like this will never let us get all the way.

Yeesh, what a week, and next week looks no better. Time to turn in early and just read a book for a while.

It’s Monday, which is allegedly a day off for me. It rarely works out that way — I always end up doing something work-related — but I have no deadline bearing down, I spent yesterday dusting and vacuuming, there’s food in the pantry and we’re supposed to get two to four inches of snow today, so I’m clearing the decks and declaring this a Real Day Off. I’m going to read my old friend David Heath’s new book about the development of the Covid vaccine and maybe even take a nap.

But first, a few words for you lovely people.

I read Neil Steinberg’s year-old blog about John Kass this morning, and it reminded me of a truth about newspapers, or what’s left of them: Not everything in it is for you. Or for me. A newspaper is what used to be known as a generalist publication, meaning there had to be something in it for everyone in the whole family. Horoscopes, puzzles, comics, sports scores, stock prices, etc. When we arrived in town, the News and Free Press would even include a few paragraphs of shipping news, i.e., which vessels would be passing up and down Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River, in case you were curious about what the Arthur M. Anderson was carrying, and where she was heading.

If I had read Neil’s blog before I read yesterday’s Page One weeper in the Freep, I might have found the strength to avert my eyes before they started rolling back in my head. It’s paywalled, so I’ll summarize: A registered nurse, a father of seven young children, is recently widowed. The headline: While ER nurse was saving wounded Oxford kids, his wife was dying from COVID-19. He was working the ER, his usual post, when the school shooting happened last November. The story is pitched as a tribute to #OxfordStrong, as the inevitable hashtag goes, because even though he has lost his wife and has all these kids and a demanding job, his church and neighbors are rising to the challenge, etc.

This is not the sort of story I generally find compelling. I’ve read too many of them through the years, and that people are capable of great good and generous grace is not news to me. I’m glad the guy is getting by with a lot of help from his friends. I’m ready to leave the rest of it unread when, record scratch:

As Holt prepared for Elizabeth’s funeral, he Googled her name, trying to find her obituary for some details, and he came across a website that mocked Elizabeth’s illness and death. John and Elizabeth Fowler held strong anti-vaccination views and were attacked on social media.

“I stumbled upon that website,” Holt said. “You know what? I’m OK if you want to be anti-vax or pro-vax. But I’m not OK when you’re anti-people. The problem with politics and vaccinations and religion, and all of that, is that people get caught up in the concept, or they get caught up in the construct of it, rather than the people.”

This wasn’t a debate about an issue. This was an attack, almost a gleeful celebration that she had died.

I bet I know which website he might have found — there’s one whose URL I can’t remember, which lists the deaths of outspoken antivaxxers, and then there’s the Reddit sub called Herman Cain Awards. Probably one of those two. I’ve seen them, but don’t participate; I haven’t the emotional bandwidth, and the older I get, I figure, why bother, it won’t do any good.

That said, this nurse is full of shit. His late wife was a nurse, too, I should mention that. So these two nurses, health-care professionals, he with a master’s degree with “an emphasis on public health,” are/were not only anti-Covid vaccine, they appear to be anti-all vaccines, if this passage is any indication:

“I don’t trust the vaccine companies,” he says. “Because there’s no control. They can make a product that the FDA or whoever CDC says it’s safe. But then if your kid is affected, you cannot do anything to them about it. They’re completely protected by the government.”

He says that McLaren Oakland allows medical and religions exemptions to a vaccine mandate.

“I have a master’s in nursing with an emphasis on public health,” he said. “So I’m not uneducated, right. It’s just, I, I’ve told my kids I said, ‘hey, when you get older, and if you want to pursue college, I’m perfectly OK with you when your immune systems are stronger. If you do a slow course of the different vaccines you need to forward your education, I’m OK with that.’ I just didn’t want to do it when they’re young.”

“Do you regret that you and your wife were not vaccinated?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

Just once, just once!!! I want to hear one of these people say, “Y’know, we were wrong about that. Elizabeth should have gotten the vaccine. All of our now-motherless children should be vaccinated against the vaccine-preventable childhood diseases. And of course I, a nurse who works in an emergency room during a pandemic, will be getting my Covid vaccine a.s.a.p.”

I mean, he’s a NURSE. He works in a HOSPITAL. He has a MASTER’S DEGREE. He studied PUBLIC HEALTH. And somehow he got that degree without learning about vaccines. Or the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, for that matter. I wouldn’t set foot in that fucking hospital.

I shouldn’t have read that story. It wasn’t for me.

OK, then. The snow is coming down, but in flakes so fine you have to look for it out the window. Time to crack that book. Happy Monday, if that’s possible.

Although it came up by surprise, I’ve been thinking about the blogversary lately. When I started this in January 2001, I never, ever, ever thought it would go on this long. I feel like I started skiing down a very long hill and haven’t reached the bottom yet. Blogs hadn’t even gotten hot yet, then. I was an early adopter. Then 9/11 happened, and everybody had a blog – remember? The “warblogs,” every other one written by an asshole? Then the warbloggers beamed up to what was then called the MSM, or moved on to their own companies like, what was that? Pajamas Media? Yeesh.

Then blogs pretty much went away entirely, and it was all about social media. Now it’s Substacks and newsletters, which are just blogs in different form.

And on and on, NN.C grinds. As Laura Lippman once wrote, I never met a rut I couldn’t love.

Not that it’s been a rut. Now that there are, whoa, 21 years of archives over there on the left rail, I have an imperfect record of them. It’s not a journal; I can’t live entirely online. But it’s interesting to see how things change, what was upsetting me in…2007 or so. I admit that from time to time I think about chucking it all, maybe writing a book. But if I did write a book, I’d need a place to promote it, so…on I plug.

Glad you all who are here still show up to check it out. Admittedly, I haven’t checked my analytics in more than a decade. This might be a very thinly attended cocktail party, after all.

I should have more to say, but I’m out of gas. It’s been a long week, and now it’s cold again. For 10 days it’ll be like this, we’re promised. Ugh.

Something to read: Me, on the No. 1 asshole car in Metro Detroit — and many other cities.

Have a great weekend.

The January Uncluttering is complicated this year. We’re ripping up carpet, preparing to redo hardwood floors, and of course, still waiting on the Ukrainians to come redo two bathrooms. But it’ll get done. Pandemic time passes slowly, but it still runs one minute at a time. We’ve offloaded one large piece of furniture, with a second going later this week, fingers crossed. And last week I schlepped three boxes and one bag of books to the used bookstore in downtown Detroit, and left with $60 in store credit that I will probably give away because I have a teensy little problem with accumulating books.

The goal for 2022: Reduce. Become more nimble. Accomplish 10 percent of my Death Cleaning, but don’t actually die in the process.

For Christmas, I asked for very little, but I did receive two new books. Ha ha.

It was a newsy weekend hereabouts. Nothing like sitting down to eat on Saturday and learning the University of Michigan has fired — fired! — its president. It’s the usual reason: Improper relationship with an underling. From the looks of the emails released by the Board of Regents to justify the decision, looks like someone fairly close to the office, an assistant or scheduler or something. Once again, I am amazed at how a man smart enough to have a million degrees, a medical scientist earning more than $900K a year running a major university, is too dumb to conduct a fling anywhere other than his work email. I mean, there are literal apps for this. There’s Gmail, for crying out loud. The mind boggles.

Then there was the volcanic explosion in the Pacific, which was just…daaaammmmnn. The time-lapse satellite views made it look like a bomb, which of course it was, albeit a natural one. Nature always wins, a lesson we’ll learn yet again, one day. One of the books I got for Christmas was “Under the Wave at Waimea,” Paul Theroux’s surfing novel, where several chapters take place in weird, impoverished Pacific island nations like Tonga. This won’t help the local economy, but maybe the influx of researchers will.

I woke up this morning, and read about a fight at a local steakhouse, and not a cheap one. An unruly patron pulled a knife and stabbed a security guard, and the security guard pulled a gun and shot him to death. And so you see where we the phrase “don’t bring a knife to a gun fight” comes from.

Detroit. Never a dull moment.

And finally, there was this:

Trump says white people are being discriminated against on covid treatment: “If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics .. In NY state, if you’re white, you go to the back of the line if you want help.” pic.twitter.com/QLgkC3VESk

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 16, 2022

I have no more words. No, I have these: Boy, he really sounds like an old man, doesn’t he?

Entertainment notes: If you have Apple TV, “The Tragedy of Macbeth” is absolutely worth your time, a taut, expertly staged and acted production. Sets, score, costumes, photography, etc., all first-rate, and accomplished in under two hours, hallelujah. If you struggle with Elizabethan dialogue, try turning on closed captions, which did the trick for us.

Is that all? I think so. Supposed to be warmer this week, but gray. So what, I’ll take it.

Yesterday I learned of the death, this week, of a certain local woman. I didn’t know her, but knew of her. Whenever I had reason to watch the local school-board meetings on livestream, she was often among the public-comment speakers. She always prefaced her remarks with a long Bible verse, and often warned members of who they’d have to answer to if they continued on the road to perdition, which they always were.

She spoke for God, in other words, and she had the usual right-wing positions. Her latest issue was masking in schools (she was opposed), and on her website, there’s a hodgepodge of paranoia over vaccines and why the God-approved treatments of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, Vitamin D, etc. are being kept from The People.

You’ll never guess what killed her.

Which would be merely a tragedy to her family and friends, except for this, a note left by her sister on the dead woman’s Facebook page. The sister appears to still have a rational brain:

Seven weeks. SEVEN WEEKS, much of that in intensive care. Seven goddamn weeks, refusing treatment. If anyone wonders why doctors and nurses are shattering like dropped china, here’s one big clue, this woman who refused to save herself, taking up the most expensive real estate in an American hospital for nearly two months.

Hate to be a bummer, but maybe the bright side is this: I’m still capable of being astounded by this stuff. Yay me.

And thanks to the Supreme Court, there will be more Alisons in more hospitals, because Freedom. God bless America.

I want to leave you on a cheerier note, so here’s this: Treble-vaccinated, I am taking care of myself. No symptoms yet from our heedless safari for hummus last week, so feeling I escaped that one. Meanwhile, you do the same. And have a great weekend.

A friend of mine is working on a book with a Detroit history angle, and has given me the great privilege of editing it, at least at the first-reader level. It’s great, and it reminds me of another book project I worked on, another Detroit-history volume. I spent a fair amount of time at the library, reading newspapers on microfilm, and was struck by how different history looks at ground level, as opposed to the 30,000-foot view taken in history texts.

It’s one thing, for instance, to write that “Many middle-class residents fled the city, citing fear of rising crime,” and another entirely to look at some of the crimes we’re talking about here.

One incident happened in 1976. The Average White Band and Kool and the Gang were playing a show at Cobo Arena in the heart of downtown. Gang activity was at its peak then (which tracks; my birth year was the largest of the baby boom, and I would have been 19 in ’76). As the show started, a couple hundred gang members managed to get into the arena, easily blowing past security and the few police working the show. During the break between acts, members of the Errol Flynns (they had some great names, these gangs) took the stage and started yelling “Errol Flynn! Errol Flynn!” into the live mics, while others fanned out through the crowd, robbing audience members of their watches and wallets.

Then they fled into the night, and if anything, the situation got worse, as this clipping from the time suggests:

A 16-year-old black girl said she saw 20 to 25 black youths snatch a white girl’s purse, beat her white boyfriend, and then strip her to her shoes and rape her.

Forty-seven arrests, widespread robberies, one rape, one molestation, followed by gang members smashing storefront windows and looting stores. Fun fact: One of the gang members that night? A young man named Greg Mathis, who grew up to be Judge Mathis.

Imagine if your son or daughter had gone through something like that, even if she wasn’t gang-raped in an alley afterward. You’d turn your back on that city so fast you’d spin like a top.

Something useful to remember.

I see some of you are playing Wordle. I played it for a while, deleted it, added it again. Here’s my technique:

The object of the game is to guess a five-letter word in six tries. The board starts out blank, so I’ve learned you start with a consonant blend and as many vowels as you can get up there, although I didn’t follow the rule here. Gray tiles mean the letter isn’t in the word at all, yellow means it’s there but in the wrong place, and green means the letter is in the right place.

So if the H is correct, then the first letter is probably C, T or W. The L can’t be in the third position, so try it second-from-last, then in the last spot, and then you just take guesses. Mine was lucky.

Now I’ve managed to be even more annoying than the people who tweet their results! Now there’s a winner!