Sometimes people ask if I miss being a working journalist. The answer: No. No, no, a thousand times no. I still have major respect, even awe, for people who continue to do it in this environment, but I have zero desire to join them. Every so often I’m inspired to write something for others to read, similar to what I do here but less messy. I have outlets for that. I don’t feel the urge to do it more than every so often.

Forgive me. I’m having a lost day. Slept very very badly last night, missed my workout, feel like shit. Spent much of the day working without much spark or pleasure, feeling gloomy about everything. Stuff like this, from my city’s email newsletter:

Built with AI, probably ChatGPT. It’s simply amazing how quickly this style has taken over the internet. I see it almost every day, and so much of it is ludicrously wrong — the tennis ball about to hit the woman’s head, the weird jewelry hanging from her neck, the fact that isn’t Lake Front Park, the flag with the weird stars (because without them, we might not know where we are, right?) — to name just a few. “Game, Set, Play.” The leaves on the court. The overall busyness of it. Graphic designers are going out of business because you can send ChatGPT a press release, and it will vomit up something like this.

I figure, if you’re going to oppose data centers, and I do, you have to not do the things that require data centers, like turn perfectly understandable words into AI slop flyers.

But creativity isn’t entirely dead. You may remember that back in May or June, I wrote about the revived, very stupid idea to turn Belle Isle, currently a state park, into a commonwealth or protectorate or something, where very wealthy people could live tax-free, in return for being job creators, or something. It was an idea first rolled out in 2013, when the developer who dreamed it up self-published a novella set some years in the future, after Belle Isle had become the Dubai of the Detroit River. It was a very strange book, with an undercurrent of homoeroticism that was immediately evident to any reader smart enough to know the meaning of the word. Also, a monorail. And F1 racing.

Anyway, a local journalist, Jeff Wattrick, wrote several scathing stories about it for Deadline Detroit, back when the site was new and fully staffed. He most memorably called the Commonwealth of Belle Isle something like “the HOA from hell, with police powers.” When the idea was rekindled late last year, pegged to a b.s. poll and Trump’s idea of “freedom cities” and a very compliant media willing to do anything for content, Wattrick was no longer in daily journalism, but still a writer. He started noodling around with a fictional sequel to the original story, and ended up with a 60,000-word novel. He’s started trickling it out on Substack, along with shorter interstitials about related this and that, like the b.s. poll and other stuff.

“Belle Isle 2: Belle Isler” is a slow starter, because he has to deal with the problem any sequel writer has: How much to assume your readers already know about the world you’re building. There are some very niche humorous moments: A discussion of setting up an emergency blood bank goes sideways, because the idea of donating something and not getting fair market value in return is anathema on Belle Isle. But once the action really starts, it’s showing a lot of promise. It’s a Hiaasen-esque first draft, but I’m enjoying it.

I hope I sleep better tonight.

A few days back, the University of Michigan board of trustees (or regents, or whatever they call themselves) voted to change the grading policy for students enrolled in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, i.e. your basic liberal-arts track. For the first semester of freshman year, students will only earn pass/fail grades.

In this, the university joins many others at the elite level, where students are eased into college life this way. The stated reason was “mental health,” however, which gave millions of Walmart Wolverines a reason to rise as one and shout KIDS THESE DAYS THEY’RE ALL WORTHLESS AND WEAK:

Under the plan, first semester letter grades will still be recorded internally by the school for things like compliance reporting and eligibility for academic honors, the university said. Student transcripts, however, will reflect either “pass” for each course or “no credit.” First-semester grades will not factor into grade-point averages.

And:

The University of Michigan said the point of the change “is to help first-year students acclimate to the demands of college,” and to allow students to set their early academic path with less grade pressure. “For example, they can explore a subject that may not come easily to them or take a course in a new field without the fear that a low grade may have long-term consequences,” the school said in its statement.

I dunno about you, but I don’t find this alarming. Anyone who’s been on a college campus lately knows the pressure for GPAs is intense, for grad school admissions or internship opportunities. In fact, sometimes it seems the goal is simply to graduate with the credential with a suitably impressive GPA, then head straight to Wall Street. The whole purpose of college is, or used to be, to open your mind, learn how to think. If you’re worried about how it might affect your law-school admission, you might not take a dive into a philosophy or creative writing class. One semester is 12.5 percent of your undergrad years, assuming you finish in the usual four. Big deal.

There’s also the problem of the freshman year breakdown, very common in young people at risk of serious mental illness. You pack your kid off in August or September, and they come home for Christmas with bipolar disease or schizophrenia, both triggered in part by stress. I’m not for a minute saying those will be avoided with pass/fail grading, but maybe it can help, a little.

But conservatives, always looking for the next SQUIRREL to distract from Iran/gas prices/grocery prices and everything else, have pounced. This is cheapening my University of Michigan degree is a common complaint, doubtless from people who don’t hold one. How are these kids ever going to learn the hard truth about the world is another. Meanwhile, at that famous cupcake school, MIT:

The new grading plan, reported earlier by The Chronicle of Higher Education, is similar to how the Massachusetts Institute of Technology records grades. First-semester freshman grades at M.I.T. are reported as either pass or no record, to allow students time to get accustomed to an increased college workload and different teaching methods, the M.I.T. Registrar’s Office explains on its website.

Oh, why even waste time thinking about this shit. The world runs on outrage. Let’s opt out for a while.

How was your weekend? I had: A birthday party, suffocating humidity, Eastern Market, not enough sleep. And tomorrow it all starts again.

The birthday party ended on a high note: The Fourth of July fireworks, rescheduled because of storms over the holiday weekend, went off at 10, and we could see them from the street outside. It was perfect. Then the old people went home because we’re old, and the young ones went to the next party, because they can do that. It was a good night.

Let’s have a good week.

Lordy, where did the week go? I’ll tell you: In a million errands, a doctor visit, more errands, all complicated by construction on the major artery at the end of our street. But at the end of the week, all the things on the to-do list are crossed off, and one of them saved us some money. (An adjustment of our car insurance.) So I earned my keep, so to speak.

This is August: Just a big ol’ slog of humidity, road construction and trying to avoid the back-to-school ads everywhere. Realistically, adult summer runs through the end of September, with the beginning of October one of the most glorious parts of life in Michigan. A second June, warm enough to wear shirtsleeves during the day and sweata weatha at night.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Never rush summer, if you can help it.

I need a reset, a place to focus beyond The Current Situation, but is it hard. Every! Goddamn! Day! is something new and horrifying, some outrage against taste or decency or norms or whatever. It’s exhausting. Today alone we got Trump pushback on the Kennedy Center humiliation:

The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted on Thursday to inscribe President Trump’s name on the building beneath the main signage, according to two people with direct knowledge of the proceedings, aggressively testing a federal judge’s order.

According to the resolution approved by the Trump-allied board, the inscription underneath the institution’s name would read: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.” The board’s decision, which directs officials to act by “all legal means,” came shortly after it voted to move forward with Mr. Trump’s plan to shutter the building for renovations.

We talk from time to time about the word hate. We use it too casually, some say. We say we hate everything from liver and onions to Hallmark movies to exes. Hate makes us prisoners of resentment and fear, our betters tell us. It’s swallowing rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. And so on. Even though my sharp tongue may suggest otherwise, I’m actually a pretty empathetic person. I can see the wounded child inside any number of contemporary monsters, and that alone makes it hard for me to say I hate someone, and mean it.

But honestly? I hate Donald Trump. I will rejoice the day he dies. I hope to live to see it. It’s probably a grave sin to say I pray that I live so long, but it does capture the depth of my contempt.

I also know this isn’t news to anyone, that I’ve been indicating it in a million ways for the last decade, but it’s like every single day this summer, it’s something new. Something stupid in the grand scheme — like the Kennedy Center — or something ghastly, like ICE getting new shock gloves, or the sight of Tubby at his desk proclaiming that “a soda can” of vaccines are injected into children, or the jaw-dropping sums being spent, and often wasted, on bullshit like re-gilding statues and the fucking Reflecting Pool, and well, it adds up.

Add to that the toadies like the Kennedy Center board, or the thousands of other cult members, and it just grows.

The other day I had to stop for a couple things at the grocery, just a few minutes after they opened. This was the fancy store, and I passed an end cap stocked with champagne, the good stuff. First thought: Do they know something I don’t? Was there news breaking overnight? Nah, couldn’t be. I’d know by now. At the top of the shelf was a magnum of Veuve Clicquot, a very nice bottle with a very hefty price tag, and I thought: That’s the bottle I’m buying when he dies, if someone else doesn’t buy it first.

I’ll probably have to throw elbows to get to it. Even here, people will clamor.

These aren’t comfortable thoughts. I am not letting them spoil my summer, but man — they are there, every day.

So. Just one bit of bloggage today, another great piece by an independent journalist, a story that would have been written by the Cleveland Plain Dealer or Akron Beacon-Journal back in the day, on the so-called Patriot Games this week in Geneva, Ohio. It was part of the 250th anniversary barrage of half-baked, badly produced entertainments we’ve had all summer. It’s young people, high school age, competing for big scholarship money ($125,000 for one boy and one girl) in American Ninja Warrior-type contests. Laura Jedeed cut right to the heart of it:

I found the Patriot Games somewhat hard to watch. There was no second place; if you ain’t first, you’re last. Crueler things have happened, of course, than falling just a few seconds short of a college education. Maybe these kids have families who can afford it, I don’t know. It still got to me. I wish there’d at least been second place.

…The American dream of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps was always out of reach for most people, but at least it was a good dream. Now, the dream is: get lucky. Win big. Escape the Matrix and exploit everyone beneath you. No one’s going from grocery clerk to CEO in 21st century America. Those days, to the extent they ever existed, are over.

Desperate people make for good entertainment. They make good subjects too. People barely hanging on aren’t going to take risks, speak out, or unionize, especially if they’ve become convinced that AI can replace them. It’s hard to think straight when your cortisol is high, when you spend so much of your time worrying about making rent or staying out of the hospital. Desperation is good business, and business is booming.

With that? Have a good weekend. You deserve it.

This is funny, in a sad-funny-because-they’re-bigots kind of way: The Michigan GOP is attacking Abdul El-Sayed, whom they have come to call Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, because someone found a clip from an eight-year-old documentary in which he is heard to mutter that he “hates” Mackinac Island.** The nerve! They spread it to their hand-picked idiot media outlets, which is to say, Michigan Enjoyer and Facebook, and it spread from there.

No one seems to consider that others might feel the same way. I, too, am not fond of Mackinac. Let me sketch my experience with our famed resort island.

As a high-school sophomore, I and two girlfriends were visiting our friend Paul in the Les Cheneaux Islands, 11 miles away across the open water of Lake Huron. It was a three-week visit, and we were looking for things to do besides lounging on the lakeshore and smoking pot. Their boat was a 1941 wooden Chris Craft, roughly 20 feet or so, and it was stressed to us over and over that we could only take it out on “the big lake” if the weather conditions were perfect, flat calm. Plus we were all 16, 17 years old, not an age to make smart decisions. Paul’s mom vetoed the boat, so we drove to St. Ignace and took the ferry, aka the fudgie boat. I think we walked around downtown a little, then caught a departing ferry and returned to Cedarville. An unmemorable trip.

On subsequent trips, we arrived via private vessel. You can smell Mackinac’s distinctive odor, a mix of horse manure and fudge, before you get there. On these trips, we would go to the Pink Pony, one of a handful of infamous bars there. One thing about operating a boat drunk — while bad things can happen, and sometimes do, the fresh breeze in your face has a sobering, or at least awakening, effect. We never worried about Paul or his brother being drunk behind the wheel of that Chris Craft. Although on one trip, which I wasn’t on but heard about later, Paul was really overserved. He and our friend Jeff pulled out of the harbor and Paul drew a bead on some landmark in the far distance, then turned the wheel over to Jeff.

“Go straight to that mark, and do not deviate, no matter what,” he said, then went to the rear seat to lie down. Sometime later, Jeff called back, “Paul? I know you told me not to change course, but are we getting a little close to that freighter?” Ha ha ha. A 90-degree course change and another Mackinac story in the books.

Anyway, I’ve been to the island three times since then. Once to cover the end of the Port Huron-to-Mackinac sailing race for a book I was editing. Once to attend the Mackinac Policy Conference, the annual throwdown hosted by the Detroit Regional Chamber. And once with Kate and Alan because visiting Mackinac as a family is something every Michigan resident is required to do. I stayed in St. Ignace for the first trip, at some other hotel for the conference, and at Mission Point resort with the family. My takeaway from all visits: The food is bad almost everywhere, and everything from lodging to cheeseburgers is insanely overpriced. The place extracts the lint from your pockets before you leave.

There were some charming moments. Alan bought a kite for Kate, and they flew it from the wide front lawn of Mission Point. Every time a freighter passed by, happy hour prices prevailed for drinks. The place is pretty; supposedly lilac season there is wonderful, and once you get out of the hot, smelly downtown, it has the northern-Michigan charms of blue water, blue skies and low humidity. You can rent a bicycle and ride the 8-mile perimeter road, which is very pleasant.

The Grand Hotel is the place everyone talks about as the ne plus ultra of Mackinac, and it’s where the policy conference is held. If you can afford a starting in-season rate of $700 a night for a room, and don’t mind the dress code to visit the restaurants, and think “Somewhere in Time” is the most romantic movie ever made, well: It’s for you. If you can’t afford to stay there, and just want to amble down the famous porch, it will cost you $14, or $8 for kids. A one-time NN.c correspondent, Dave Bell, has, or had, a house there, on the bluff beyond the Grand. He said to tell the snoots at the gate that I was visiting the Bells, and they’d let me pass by free of charge. So I did. He wasn’t there, but the caretaker allowed me to wander the area and the barn. He bought a house that came with a horse and several absolutely lovely horse-drawn conveyances, including one made entirely of wicker. I don’t know if he’s still there; he dropped out of sight a while back.

The island runs on seasonal immigrant labor, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn this means pretty white European boys and girls in the customer-facing jobs, and Jamaicans everywhere else.

So that’s my Mackinac experience. I have had my fill of it, and if I never see or smell it again, that’s fine. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that anyone who had the typical hoi-polloi Mackinac experience didn’t care for it. You come north to get away from it all, not to dodge manure shoulder-to-shoulder with a bunch of tourists from Lansing.

** Finally, I should note that the exact quote was “I hate Mackinac,” and given that’s what a lot of people call the policy conference — “Are you going to Mackinac this year?” — it may well have been what he was talking about. But this is a silly, silly charge to make, and having already given it this many words, why go on?

Here’s a picture of Paul at one of our parties in the Les Cheneaux. RIP, old friend:

Election Day was…long. Report time was 5:45 a.m. We dropped off the memory cards and assorted supplies back at the Board of Elections around 9 p.m.

Then I went home.

Working an election is not what you’d call fun, but it does make one feel like you’re part of the solution. When you’re that tired, the drama of certain races just becomes a blur. I went to bed learning Abdul el-Sayed had a comfortable lead over Haley Stevens, and woke up learning the lead had shrunk, but was still probably solid. And it was.

Given that was really the only race where the result wasn’t a foregone conclusion, I’ve been reading the reaction pieces today. The race was tighter than anyone thought it would be — the Stevens camp thought she had it in the bag, and vice versa. It turned out to be around 1 percent. So now we’re gonna have think pieces for a few weeks, and then the polling will start, and yadda yadda, etc.

All I know is, it’s gotta work. Abdul has charm, intelligence, a touch of arrogance yes but a thousand times more charisma than Stevens. And how long have progressives been holding their noses and voting for moderates? A very long time. It’s for some favor returning.

I will be getting a new congressman. The extremely weird Shri Thanedar fell to a primary challenge from Donavan McKinney, a DSA candidate for sure. By the end of the campaign, we were getting two anti-McKinney mailers a day, but I voted for him anyway. Thanedar wasn’t much of a rep, and I’ve of a mind it’s time for a change.

As for the gubernatorial race, it’s Jocelyn Benson vs. John James. Of James, he puts me in mind of Jon Stewart’s line about Rudi Giuliani: His campaign consists of a noun, a verb and 9/11. In James’ case, it’s a noun, a verb and a helicopter — he’s one of those guys who looks like he was grown in a lab designed to produce the ultimate urban Republican. Brown skin, white teeth, insincerity seeping from him like water from a sponge. West Point, Iraq war (that’s where the helicopter comes from) and it gets mentioned constantly. He’s like a Harvard grad who figures out how to tell you they went to Harvard in the first 10 minutes of meeting you. When I was flying helicopters in Iraq, etc.

For now, I’m taking a break from caring until Labor Day. Still tired, still want to enjoy what’s left of summer.

In the meantime, even though it’s irrelevant, here’s an amusing story about Haley Stevens’ Meeechigan eeahhhcent. Thick as Mackinac Island fudge.

Still tired.

As the internet continues to transform into a collection of walled gardens and AI slop, I find myself more often on Reddit, which still seems to be mostly human-generated content. A few weeks back I was in the Fort Wayne subreddit, reading a post by a person who said their father had recently been busted coming back from Michigan on I-69, where he’d bought a quantity of marijuana. For some reason six ounces comes to mind.

The traffic stop was bullshit, one of those non-offensive offenses police deploy when they want you for something else. The post author said they know their father, and that he is a weed smoker, but not a dealer; the hefty amount was so he wouldn’t have to make so many trips from Indiana to Michigan. But in Indiana, where cannabis remains illegal, six ounces is felony weight, and so it sounds like dad is well and truly screwed.

How did they know he’d be holding? Another poster offered this observation: The freeway between Fort Wayne and the Michigan border has Flock cameras, the AI-enabled license-plate readers that have become popular with cops and municipalities hungry for traffic-violation money. Over time, it’s easy for the AI to speculate on who’s driving to Michigan purely to buy weed — frequent trips, short turnaround time, etc. It’s entirely possible the police were waiting for this moment, and seized it.

I thought of this when I read this WashPost story (gift link) about how the Flock camera network has become a so-called rogue cop’s best friend:

JEFFERSON, Ga. — Marci Bakely couldn’t understand how her ex-boyfriend always seemed to know where she was.

When she went to buy groceries or on a date or to the doctor, he’d text her about it, sometimes within minutes, despite working 15 miles from her home as a police chief in a small town in the Atlanta suburbs. One day in 2024, when he incorrectly suspected that she’d gone to see a man against his wishes, he messaged her, “I didn’t think you would slip up,” according to texts she shared with The Washington Post.

Bakely, 50, began to feel like she was constantly being watched. She says she installed three cameras around her home and on her patio, to see if he was staking out her cul-de-sac. She bought a hidden-camera detector and nervously waved it down every wall. Three times, in desperation, she says she drove her Kia to a mechanic’s shop, asking them to scan for trackers on her car.

But it wasn’t a tracker on her car. It was Flock, and the database her cop ex could easily consult:

Like thousands of other law-enforcement agencies across the United States, his police force could follow cars spotted by Flock’s sprawling network of artificial-intelligence roadside cameras, which record passing license plates into a mappable database that officers can search while investigating crime.

Bakely’s ex was one of at least 50 LEOs to use the network for non-crime fighting reasons, about half of those to stalk or spy on women. I really, really hate the surveillance state this country is becoming, especially when it’s so easy for bad actors in uniform to use it for nefarious ends.

Where I live, these cameras have been donated by a public-safety nonprofit, and their website is full of happy statistics about all the crime they’ve prevented, the lost children recovered, etc. It’s not hard to envision a future when police spend less and less time on actual patrols or developing intelligence, and more looking at screens and responding to alerts generated by AI analysis of who’s driving where.

And stalking exes, of course. Can’t forget that.

Folks, my week of hell is pretty much over, but Election Day awaits on Tuesday, so we’ll see how it goes. I figure by Wednesday I can finally truly relax. Of course, it didn’t help that I stayed out late Saturday night to see the Gories in Detroit, but it was a very fun show, and I’m entitled to enjoy my life in the go-go phase of my retirement. Slo-go is only a few short years away.

First things first: Many apologies. I have been sprinting through the days since the weekend. My main freelance client moves into red-zone mode around this time, and I’ve been workin’, friends. Plus, the primary election is next week, and I’m set to be a poll worker again. So a few minutes here feels precious, although it’s not really. Today will be chill. I slept in and plan to hit the gym in a bit. But first: A blog.

Did I mention I was trying to break out of my NPR bubble? A few months back, I started making more of an effort to seek out what I consider alternative media, i.e. conservative media, just to see what I was missing. I set radio dials to two AM talk stations, roughly divided, content-wise, along the fault lines of the current GOP. Which is to say, one is stupid and the other, crazy. I spend most of my car time listening to the stupid one, because the crazy one has a signal that goes in and out. Plus, very poor station identification. I can’t even tell you what the call letters are. But I can recognize an also-ran, D-list station by its lineup: Hugh Hewitt, Mike Gallagher, Scott Jennings. Dead giveaways.

The stupid station is all local during the day, although that makes it boring as hell, too. Nothing like a live remote broadcast from a charity golf tournament to make you change back to NPR.

Anyway, back to content: Yesterday I was on my way to the grocery (another neglected duty) when I heard Linda McMahon, yes our secretary of education, on the stupid station, talking about a policy in Ann Arbor public schools, to not inform parents when a child starts asking to be addressed by another name, and shows signs of gender transition. This policy is wrong, vile and should be illegal, the former pro-wrestling executive said.

What’s the world coming to? was the gist of the questioning and caller response. Parents have a right to know!

Reader, I have changed my thinking on this issue: No, they don’t. If a child is keeping this from their parents, they have a good reason.

First of all, kids, especially teenagers, are crazy. They try on new identities like T-shirts. These range from small things — changing the spelling of their name, experimenting with being the kind of girl who dots their I’s with little bubbles, hitting the bathroom first thing to apply truly heinous eyeliner that will be rubbed off at the end of the day — to more serious matters that may or may not have anything to do with gender dysphoria. I went to school with a girl with a very unfortunate name — Melva. She was a little gawky, and in the hands of the mean girls, this moniker inevitably became Melba, then Melba Toast. One day she told all her teachers that forever after, she wished to be addressed as Mike. The new name didn’t last long — once a Melva, always a Melva — but I can only imagine the shrieking at her home if this change had been shared with her parents. So there’s that.

Also, and this is more serious: As you all know, I worked as a census enumerator in 2020, calling on addresses that didn’t do the form online. One day I knocked at a house in Detroit, and it was answered by a rather obviously transitioning teen (M to F). She told me it was a group home for kids like her, and to come back later to speak to the person in charge. You know what happens to kids like her when they tell their parents they think they were born in the wrong body? The lucky ones — the lucky ones — get kicked out of the house and end up in a safe place like a group home. The unluckier ones are kicked out and end up on the street, and selling sex is the easiest way to survive. (You’d think the people always fretting about child sex trafficking would be aware of this.) Others may stay at home, with parents who call them “mentally insane” and badger them into running away or hanging themselves.

So if your kid is gender dysphoric and doesn’t want you to know? Check yourself. It’s never too late to transition to being a better parent.

OK, that rant over, it’s time to tend to myself a little. I’m way behind on this issue, but two items of note in bloggage:

A really good piece about the stupidity of the MOAR TESTOSTERONE attitude raging through Pete Hegseth’s Department of WAAAARRRRR:

As a urologist, I’ve witnessed the mythology around testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) growing for years. Some of it is warranted. TRT can genuinely help appropriately selected hypogonadal men — those with consistently low morning testosterone levels and signs or symptoms of testosterone deficiency, such as fatigue, erectile dysfunction, and low libido. It can improve sexual function. It can strengthen bone density. It can cure anemia and increase lean body mass.

But it can’t make them brave. Some studies show small, highly context-dependent effects of TRT on risk-taking and competitive behaviors. In many analyses it doesn’t change behavior meaningfully above baseline at all.

People treated with testosterone may show a preference toward status seeking, which could be beneficial in a hierarchical military context. It may increase amygdala activation, a part of the brain that processes intense emotions, such as fear and rage, and decrease communication between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, the neural seat of impulse regulation. If TRT does result in a slight increase in reactivity, a tendency toward higher threat recognition, and lower inhibition, I’m not sure it would be an improvement for our military, either on the battlefield or the base.

And finally, a years-old, but still fantastic, This American Life episode on testosterone. I remember hearing this way back in 2004, on a long drive. I so wanted to hear the whole episode that when it started to fade, I pulled into a rest stop for the last 10 minutes. It is fascinating, and they reposted it when the Hegseth story broke. I highly, highly recommend it.

OK, then. Once more unto the breach, and I should come out in one piece after the weekend. Fingers crossed.

It’s been so long since I made the effort to see a film on or close to its opening that I can’t recall when the last one was. But “The Odyssey” seemed worth the effort. So yesterday, we identified an IMAX theater within reasonable driving distance and went to a late-afternoon screening.

“Did we pay matinee prices for this?” I asked. “I dunno,” Alan said. “I bought senior tickets.”

Oof. Although we qualify.

And you know what? It was worth the drive up to Sterling Goddamn Heights, worth the cost of the senior tickets, worth it all. A really impressive piece of work. The dialogue was in modern English, no one put on a plummy “Game of Thrones” accent, the so-called untraditional casting — i.e., actors of color playing Greeks and Trojans — bothered me not a whit. The spectacle of it all was fantastic, the ships, the sea, the battles, the landscapes. It did clock in a little long at nearly three hours, but that’s a quibble. At the end, the audience applauded, causing Alan to note that was only the second film he’d ever seen where that happened. (The first: “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.”)

Here’s really my only complaint: The volume. It was right on the brink of being punishingly loud. Halfway through I fished my earplugs out of my purse and got some relief; I could actually hear the dialogue better with the head-splitting subwoofers muffled a bit. I guess you sign up for this in a modern IMAX theater, but like I said: It hurt, almost. And the volume didn’t really improve the experience. It was just assaultive.

The manosphere is all up in their feelings over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, because HOW COULD A BLACK WOMAN BE CONSIDERED THE MOST BEAUTIFUL IN THE WORLD, etc. That Nyong’o is actually spectacularly beautiful doesn’t seem to occur to them. Armond White at the National Review demonstrates why you should never, ever turn to political magazines for your arts criticism:

Billed as the biggest of big movies (Titanic meets The Lord of the Rings with some Megalopolis thrown in), it continues the corruption of modern movie culture that Nolan started with The Dark Knight, which upped the scale of nihilistic violence to satisfy a hipster’s misconception of original filmmaking. Since then, he’s trained several generations to embrace mere action-spectacle as cinema, which, alone, can be stomach-turning. But it’s not cinema, which enlivens kinetic imagery and emotional response.

Homer’s ancient Greek poem The Odyssey is beside the point of Nolan’s ambition. Adapting the story of Odysseus — the king of Ithaca making an extended journey home after the Trojan War and encountering various natural and supernatural forces along the way — Nolan departs from his regular focus on moral futility. The casting of Matt Damon as Odysseus (rather than an ambiguous figure like Gerard Butler’s feral King Leonidas in 300) lets us know that this makeover is meant for liberals.

Does it now.

They also quibble about the casting of Elliot Page, born Ellen and known for her starring role in “Juno” and not much else since, although it’s been so long since I saw him that I wasn’t entirely sure it was him until the credits rolled. Well, fuck ’em. Let them be miserable and stay home. I liked this film, a lot.

Middle of the week, ugh. Wendy had me up for a couple hours last night, barfing. Missed my morning swim and felt like hot garbage all day. Like the summer isn’t short enough already.

I spoke too soon, last week, fingering gubernatorial candidate John James as the sole Republican to lash out at Canada for daring to have forest fires with border-crossing smoke. I wrote that early in the day on Thursday (because that’s when I had time), and by the end of the day and into Friday, any number of Michigan Republicans, and one Ohio senator, also a Republican, had issued statements of their towering outrage over the smoky-air situation.

It was eerie, how alike they all were, almost as if someone had sent a memo around, y’know?

They all mentioned “Canada’s failure to manage its forests,” thereby leading to these wildfires. Pretty cheeky, considering how many fires start on this side of the border, and rage with minimal containment. (Some of the dumber posts on the subject claimed uncontrolled U.S. fires only happen in the leftist hellscape of California.) And the Canadians lecture us about climate change! Yes they do, because they accept reality, whereas here we just pretend otherwise.

Anyway, it’s good to see all the self-taught epidemiologists who gained their knowledge during Covid have found new employment as forestry experts.

Also anyway, on Saturday the wind picked up and the air was clean again — or at least down in the low part of the Moderate range, which is about all I expect in an urban area — before climbing back a bit on Sunday. We’re currently at Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups, which I can live with. But we’re keeping the a/c on.

All plans for this weekend fell through at the last-ish minute, which ended up being a gift. I finished one book (Lifeguard: A Love Story, by Janet Fash), started another (Outside Looking In, T.C. Boyle) and otherwise enjoyed having a clean-enough-for-company house and a stocked pantry. We did check out the Concert of Colors in hopes of catching the Don Was set, saw the line to get in was about an hour long, and noped out.

I did get to the market to re-up on eggs and blueberries, was thrilled to find the first corn of the season, and drove home in time to hear a fragment of an interview with Hunter Biden. It was…impressive. So much so that I looked up the whole interview online and read the transcript. (Bonus: Reading the transcript spares you having to listen to Scott Simon’s smarminess.) It’s worth a few minutes of your time:

SIMON: Did that open the door for President Trump to pardon some of his supporters, including the January 6 gang?

BIDEN: I think that that is an insane argument. Do I think that pardoning me opened the door for Donald Trump to pardon people that engaged in an insurrection, beat police officers, and then, since they’re pardoned, many of them have gone back to commit crimes, including sexually abusing children. I don’t think that the two are the same thing.

If my dad had won, he would have kept his word. He would not have pardoned me. And the reason that he would not have pardoned me is because I would have told him I have complete and utter faith in the fact that, No. 1, I think that I will win some of this on appeal. But, No. 2, as a first-time offender for a nonviolent crime without a victim, I’m not going to spend any time in jail. And I know that between the Department of Justice, the Department of Corrections and the Department of Probation, I have absolute faith in our system that I would be treated fairly like any other person that had been convicted.

When my dad woke up after Thanksgiving, after the election occurred, and he read that Donald Trump had just appointed Matt Gaetz to be the attorney general, I think that he made a decision then that Donald Trump had made a decision not to actually adhere to the Constitution, the rule of law, and that he intended to take out and mete justice through his own Department of Justice, in his Department of Corrections, in his department of probation.

Duh. Good for the Bidens, father and son.

With that, I’m back to my book, as well as pizza for dinner. Happy Monday, all.

On Wednesday, I was asked by a friend to do a favor that involved sitting in her house for a few hours. So I did. It was very hot outside, and she had robust a/c. When I arrived, the sky was clear and the sun, punishing. When I left around 6:30, the sky was overcast, not with clouds, but with smoke.

And now it’s Thursday morning, and Michigan has the worst air on the planet. Not the Midwest, not the entire country, the whole damn world. A quirk of the wind has swept wildfire smoke from Canada and Minnesota into our state, and the map footprint is eerie; of course there’s bleeding into other states, but the worst of it seems to stop at the state borders. Good news, Toledo! All the air-quality scales are pegged in the Hazardous zone. As bad as it is in Detroit, it seems to be even worse in the U.P. Here’s the Mackinac Bridge:

Another view:

We have our own a/c on, with the fan running constantly. Morning swim was cancelled. The lakefront park is closed. But never fear! John James, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination for governor, the emptiest suit that ever did empty, the man whose whole campaign is, to steal a phrase from Jon Stewart, “a noun, a verb and a helicopter*,” had this to say:

As Governor, I’ll put Michigan first, demand answers, and push Canada to take real action.

As the quip goes, tell me you know nothing about wildfires without telling me you know nothing without wildfires.

* James was a helicopter pilot during the Gulf War, or “Desert Storm,” as he patriotically calls it, every time. He brings it up…a lot.

In other news at this hour, while I was sitting at my buddy’s house yesterday, I did some rabbit-hole moseying, and came upon the latest from the Indiana Policy Review, which exists as a sinecure for the former opinion-page editor of my alma mater in Fort Wayne. He’s been there since roughly 1990, so that’s a pretty good sinecure. The fact the organization barely exists at all speaks more to the pity the wealthy founding families have for their pet mouthpiece, but never mind that.

This week’s column by him (the lower-case “tcl” at the end stands for T. Craig Ladwig) is remarkable for its naked bigotry and elevation of Indiana’s lieutenant governor, right-wing Christian scold Micah Beckwith, to something resembling relevancy. (It’s a quirk of Hoosier politics that the governor and lieutenant governor don’t necessarily run as a team, as they’re independently nominated by the party faithful. The gubernatorial candidate can make their wishes known, but the delegates don’t necessarily have to do their bidding. So in this case you get a more or less normal Republican serving with a lunatic wingnut like Beckwith.) Lately, Beckwith, a pastor of sorts, has been on about the Muslim Menace, and tcl is right there with him:

The need to confront the Muslim scourge in our cities is dividing the Republican Party — or so you would expect. In Indiana, however, only Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith is speaking out while other GOP leaders sit silent for fear that Julia Carson’s grandson, Andre, will call them bigots.

Indeed, the governor upbraided Beckwith for not choosing his words more carefully, for not thinking before he speaks.

OK, if the governor wants a careful word choice, how about “seditious”? That’s when you demand that your religion exempts you from a society’s norms, mores, laws and core beliefs to the degree that you would overturn them to be replaced with your own.

Freedom of religion? Do you think the Founders had in mind someone like Genghis Khan, a devout follower of Tengrism, the shamanic religion that worships “the Eternal Blue Sky.” His armies killed as many as 40 million people, estimated to be 11 percent of the world’s population at the time.

It is terrifying to realize that the leading minds of our GOP are willing to abide an openly hostile, globally controlled Islam as a benign curiosity.

To use a not-that-great internet witticism twice in one blog, tell me you know nothing about American Muslims without, etc.

And no, I don’t know what Genghis Khan is doing in there. But I chuckled when, later in the column, he mentions “the unassimilable Muslim population.” I’d like to escort this elderly hayseed on a tour of Dearborn, Michigan. He’ll see some assimilated Muslims, oh yes he will. They make delicious hummus.

OK, gotta clean the house today. Company’s coming for the weekend.