I was trying to think of something non-Trumpy to blog today, and then I saw this, and honestly, I got nothing better, so let’s start the weekend with a smile and have a good weekend, all.
All the days can’t suck, I told myself this morning, having accepted my morning mood (groggy, lousy) as payment for the joy of having last night’s dinner outdoors, on a restaurant patio on a glorious day, with two of my former colleagues from Bridge. Two of us were fired by the same asshole, so we had that to laugh about. There was a lot of laughing. I didn’t get home until close to 10, which meant I didn’t get to sleep until about 11, and Wednesday is my 4:20 a.m. alarm. Which explains the mood. But! It’s the last 4:20 alarm until September! So it’s not so bad.
Then I caught up on the comments and learned 4dbirds’ terrible news. Her name is Barbara. Barbara, I am so, so sorry. I’ll leave it at that, because there’s really nothing you can say after someone loses a child, other than that.
The drive to the restaurant last night sucked. It was in Plymouth, out in the exurbs, which meant I was facing construction and a blazing sun RIGHT IN MY EYES THE WHOLE WAY, aggravated by listening to a podcast recommended by someone in the comments a few days ago, the New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Dana White, president of the UFC. Dana is a good friend of the president, and assures us that he’s not a racist, not even a little. What about that video depicting the Obamas as apes, David Remnick pressed, gently. The Sgt. Schultz defense: “I don’t know about that,” etc. I laid this item on the table as I waited for my cocktail, and my former editor explained how this is exactly how good Germans were during the Holocaust. Yes, this is small talk with journalists, which is one reason I love my colleagues so.
Another reason I love them: Staff meetings like the one at CBS News about “60 Minutes” earlier this week, the one that led to Scott Pelley’s firing. I had to take Wendy to the vet yesterday, and briefly heard Mitch Albom kinda-sorta defending it, although it was hard to tell because as usual, he was playing the part of the Sensible Moderate, and also the Upholder of Decency and Good Manners. I gather Mitch found Pelley’s comments during the meeting very rude, as well as the secret recording of said meeting, and I rolled my eyes so hard I had to pull over until they rolled back and I could see through them again. How does the meme go? Tell me you’ve never been in a newsroom meeting without telling me you’ve never been in a newsroom meeting. They often go the way it did at CBS, or used to, before everyone was taught to keep their heads down, their tails tucked, and their mouths shut. People yell(ed) at their bosses in newsrooms, and that is a very good thing. A wise former editor explained it pithily: You can’t expect journalists to ask tough questions of public officials and other sources, without expecting them to ask a few of you, too.
OK, then. Just a few notes I’ve been collecting this week:
The new name for the fiasco formerly known as the Great American State Fair: Notapalooza. Har.
Zohran Mamdani continues to demonstrate fearsome political skills. Recall that the last time the president of the United States was surrounded by children, he tried to explain why Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon:
Today, I signed an Executive Order temporarily repealing bedtimes in the City of New York so that kids of all ages can watch our team in the NBA Finals.
As Mayor, you’re forced to make many difficult decisions. This was not one of them.
Go Knicks.
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@mayor.nyc.gov) June 1, 2026 at 3:39 PM
In case you were wondering whether Bill Pulte is qualified to be Director of National Intelligence, let me assure you from his native state: No. He is not.
Finally, dunno if this is paywalled or not, but Roy Edroso, who’s been covering conservative “culture” for years, did a really nice piece on that topic, earlier this week. If it is paywalled, let me assure you that Roy’s Substack is one that is absolutely worth your money:
But when the conversation turns to the arts, something to which the word “culture” more properly applies, conservatives get extra weird. Because, while their target audience may be unfamiliar with the people and trends conservatives like to slander, and thus may be easily convinced to suspect them, everybody likes to see a show or hear some tunes.
And conservatives don’t know what to do about that, especially now that casual sexism, racism, and other retrograde attitudes are less prevalent in pop culture than once they were. That’s why they’re always yelling that fun stuff is woke — Star Wars, Andor, that Odyssey movie where for some perverse reason they let a black lady play the most beautiful woman in the world. Occasionally they try to grab a toehold on entertainment things that seem “conservative” to them — like that weird delusion they recently developed that only the Right had the capacity to appreciate Sydney Sweeney’s tits.
But it always comes off creepy and sad. You might convince some people at least that trans kids on sports teams or bike lanes or vaccination drives or no-fault divorce are attacks on their way of life; but when you tell them the same is true of the movies they watch and the songs they dance to and the stories they read, voluntarily and with pleasure, your chances of success are exceedingly low. It’s like telling them it’s un-American to eat ice cream or take a bath.
OK, that’s it for me today. Gonna try to improve my mood, maybe with a bike ride to the library.
I was reading something about the president’s weird fixation on Jaxson Dart, and couldn’t help but notice how the New York Giants quarterback spells his first name, which I assume was his parents’ choice.
We already have a perfectly fine spelling of that name: Jackson. That’s how it’s been spelled for years. But sometime in 2003, this little baby’s mother said, nope. My boy will spell his name Jaxson.
I’m so old — how old are you? — I’m so old I remember when racists would complain about black parents giving their kids offbeat names and creative spellings, and what’s wrong with Jennifer and Jason, anyway? Now, here we are, years later, and we have Jaxsons and Kynnedis.
Which goes to show you that everything cool starts with black people.
But as a mostly done with the game journalist, I hate “unique” name spellings. You used to have to check all last names and some first names. Now it’s all of them.
Been scarce around this place lately, I know. I sit down to write and think, “does anyone want to hear me complain about the president and his enablers and everything associated with it” and answer hell no. But it’s a large part of what I think about. Yes, the president lives rent-free in my head; no getting around that. I’m starting to think about the calculus of what stress does to the body vs. the civic duty of being an engaged citizen and paying attention as a part of that. If anyone else is struggling with that, do let me know.
How about some pictures? Kate holding a kitty at a party we both attended last weekend:
Here’s someone’s goldfish, released to the wild and grown to be an orange carp, in Lake St. Clair.
And now to gather thoughts for the rest of the week. Hang in there, and the tide will come back in.
There’s a saying that, if you’re online more than just the bare minimum, you’ve probably heard: “I never thought the leopards would eat my face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces party.
In a similar vein, this New Yorker cartoon:
Today, a ProPublica story about a woman miscarrying a 17-week fetus, unable to get the D&C she needs to avoid the possibility of a life-threatening infection:
Raised Baptist in a Republican family, Waldorf struggled to understand what the doctors were saying as waves of grief hit her. How could an abortion ban aimed at women who wanted to end their pregnancies keep doctors from helping a woman who didn’t?
Waldorf didn’t oppose abortion, but she had never considered that the law could apply to her. Her father was a doctor. This was the hospital where she had worked for the past six years. The OB-GYN team treating her had delivered her daughter, and some of them lived blocks from her parents. She was a highly educated 38-year-old woman with connections to the governor. As she lay in a hospital bed, worried that infection could enter her uterus at any moment, she finally understood the ban now applied to anyone losing a baby.
I’m being too hard on this woman, comparing her to the sheep. Her only mistake was assuming she would somehow be different, because she actually needed an abortion, unlike all the women who abort pregnancies…I dunno, recreationally, maybe. Honestly, she is fully aware of the madness of the situation she was in, sitting in a hospital waiting to pass a nearly dead fetus, the infection risk growing by the hour. She becomes feverish, but her temperature has to be past 100.4 before doctors can take action to save her. She has a 17-week fetus, a broken amniotic sac, zero chance of anything other than miscarriage weeks before the outer edge of viability, because the fetus still has a whisper of a heartbeat.
It’s an enraging story. Bottom line: Don’t get pregnant in Arkansas. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders will shine you on.
In other, happier news, it is finally summer, more or less. The weekend was chilly and rainy and then, on Monday, the sun broke through and we had a fine Memorial Day. Let’s hope the rest of the summer is pleasant; we certainly had a shitty enough spring.
Out for a bike ride.
I slept poorly last night, and what else is new. Woke five minutes before the alarm, picked up the iPad to see if Trump kicked the bucket overnight (alas, he didn’t), and texted my boxing-workout group chat that I was going back to sleep.
I did not go back to sleep. Laid there for five minutes, got up and got dressed, hit Starbucks for a giant cappuccino and was the first to arrive. Hit the bag for 47 minutes, did the core set, came home for eggs and more coffee and at the moment? I. Feel. Great. The message is either to push through discomfort or get the extra sleep, because I promise you it will not last.
Might as well get this done first, then.
Big news here yesterday: Former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan dropped out of the governor’s race. His stated reason: The world has become even more divided since he announced he was leaving the Democratic Party to run as an independent, and there’s no longer a path for a uniter who seeks to bridge the divide, join hands across the aisle, and all that stuff. Big cities being cynical places, there’s a large cohort who believe this is a flimsy explanation, and speculate on two alternatives: One, that he’ll be the next president of the University of Michigan, or two, that he’s working a scheme with Jocelyn Benson, the presumptive Democratic nominee (primaries aren’t until August), where he’ll join her on the ticket as her lieutenant governor.
I can be shockingly naive at times, but I think I believe his initial explanation. He left the party in 2024, after the disaster of the presidential race, and regard for the Democrats was at a low ebb. It’s still not exactly high tide, but even haters are going to vote against the ongoing Republican disaster, and a few lefties are doing very well, especially in Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed, a Bernie bro, is leading the polls for the U.S. Senate nomination. I have doubts about his ability to win the general, so I’m still on the fence. It is incredibly difficult to run an independent campaign in the best of times, the higher you go on the ladder. Which is to say, most successful indie campaigns are at the municipal level, a few more at the state-legislative tier, and not many above that. In times like these, it’s almost impossible. I’m not interested in joining hands across the aisle at the moment. I’m interested in taking a flamethrower to the other side of the aisle, in fact. So I get it.
But like I said, I’m often wrong and I could be very wrong here. I don’t see someone like Duggan willing to settle for second banana to Benson. The presidency at U-M would be a cushy perch, but honestly, not that influential. So we’ll see. I need to talk to smarter people before I lay money on anything.
And now, here we are: Movement weekend! The big techno fest, where you don’t even have to set foot in Hart Plaza, where the festival actually is, to participate, because bars and clubs all over the city will be bumping house music through Memorial Day. I’ve got my eye on a couple of opportunities to drink a cold beverage and nod along with the beat. So that’s where I am this Friday.
I hope your weekend goes swimmingly.
This should not have been a surprise, but as I am Old, it kinda was. At one point in the late-lunch colloquy over the table Sunday, someone mentioned a photo most of us had seen but a couple hadn’t — our friend Dustin as a little boy, sitting on Alice Cooper’s lap. In a golf cart — Alice was playing golf at a course managed by Dustin’s father. (Dustin often says he taught himself to read by examining the liner notes on his parents’ albums.)
Anyway, I wanted to show the pic to the uninitiated, but I couldn’t remember when it made its way into my camera roll. Google Photos is my automatic backup, so just for the hell of it I typed “man in golf cart” into the search engine. Immediately, there it was:
But there were other choices, too. A pic from an early-morning swim in the Shores, with a maintenance guy zipping across the sunrise.
A pedal pub downtown. Two, actually:
Weirdest of all, this detail from the Diego Rivera murals at the DIA:
I guess I’ve known you can do something like this — type “steps” or “waterfall” and be served the photos that match. I did not know it could be this specific. AI, which I try to avoid using whenever I can, is kind of scary sometimes.
I wish I had more to offer this morning, but I read about the president’s most recent, peak-blatant act of corruption — this, of course — and was nearly struck dumb with fury. You want to know why Democrats are so angry? Because I expect my elected representatives, all Democrats, to be SHUTTING DOWN THE GODDAMN COUNTRY right now. And it doesn’t appear to be happening. They’re worthless, every last one.
Also, I have to get a haircut. Let’s get though this week, eh?
Last fall I mentioned that I’d purchased a birthday gift for all three of us, the November babies — a two-hour cruise on the J.W. Westcott, the mail boat the services the freighters on the Detroit River. We thought we might be able to schedule it right around Christmas, but the cold weather and ice came in early, and they said we’d be better off waiting until spring.
We set it for Sunday. The day couldn’t have been more perfect — the smash-cut to full summer I’d been predicting for a while. It was clear blue skies, 80 degrees, not a hint of rain and not even that much wind to make the water choppy. The party limit was six, so it was the three Derringers plus friends Dustin, Will and Cam, Kate’s boyfriend.
Upriver or down, we were asked. Down, we decided. None of this see-our-lovely-riverwalk-and-Belle-Isle for us; that’s easy to see. But to go down to look at the dirty ass crack of the industrial Midwest? Yeah, that’s more our speed.
We set out from the Westcott dock in the shadow of the Ambassador Bridge and passed under the nearly complete Gordie Howe Bridge — which our idiot president has threatened not to “allow” to open…
…and got up close and personal with a bulk loader that looks surprisingly good, maybe because it’s only eight years old. Dig that cute little lifeboat. Best wear your seatbelt when it makes its getaway.
Past the zombie-apocalypse hellscape of Zug Island…
…and into the Rouge River aka the other American river to catch fire, back in the day. (Ohioans know the other one — the Cuyahoga, in Cleveland.) It’s much improved, but I wouldn’t go swimming in it for all the tea in China. But it’s where the stuff that makes other stuff gets delivered and taken away and made into more stuff. Aggregate, coke, all that stuff. Even the tugboats look like they’ve seen some shit.
The bridges got out of our way.
Except for on the way back, when we had to stop to let a train go past. Then it was back up the river to the dock and, later, a table for six at a nearby Mexicantown spot. We all agreed it was a fine day out.
This is a trip to take when you’re convinced the city has no more to show you, that you’ve seen it all. You haven’t. I hope it’s a nice day for your cruise, too. And you get to do a mail delivery to a big ship. Although the crew said it’s mostly Amazon boxes these days. And pizzas and Door Dash.
Now I’m dehydrated and sun-dazzled and ready for an early bed. Two more days of summer heat before it moderates again. Eighty-seven tomorrow.
So much for posting three times a week. On the other hand, even I get bored with my own misery over current events. Plus, it’s Wednesday, the worst day of my week. But like a boxer losing in the 11th round, I stagger to my feet and offer…something.
Here’s two things, one a column that I wrote for the Freep. Here’s the official link, which you should click first. Why? Because it’s my understanding that Gannett paywalls are shifty things, determined by AI. If you haven’t hit a particular paper’s site too often, you get in (I guess). If you’ve taken too many free hors d’oeuvres, you hit the paywall. I ask you to at least try that link, because if you get in, it’s good for the paper, which enables them to pay me.
However. If you get walled out, here’s the dodgy free link. Of course, this could be at least somewhat mitigated by a gift-link system, but Gannett doesn’t do that yet. Maybe it never will.
For comic relief, enjoy this short interview with the sculptor who did that ridiculous Trump statue unveiled this week:
Demands to nix the turkey neck and make the model skinnier, missed payments, and calls to install the statue last-minute — no Cottrill commission has been as complicated as the statue dubbed “Don Colossus.”
The tech bros in 2024 paid an initial $300,000 for the initial statue, then paid another $60,000 a year later for the gold-leaf plating, and another $150,000 to use imagery of the statue to promote a crypto token, Cottrill said. But getting the payment was easier said than done.
“‘You were supposed to make these payments nearly a year ago. I can’t trust you to do that,’” Cottrill recalls telling his patrons. “So I held the statue. I put it in an undisclosed location and said it won’t be delivered until the final payments have been made.
You don’t say. Shocked, shocked, etc.
OK, that’ll be it for today. May I sleep well and deeply tonight.
Filled up the tank of my Subaru Outback on Saturday. Seventy-five bucks. I haven’t driven it today; took my bike to a spot three miles distant to have Mother’s Day lunch with Kate. It was a pretty day, on the cool side, so I didn’t arrive all sweaty.
Pro tip, though: If you plan on drinking beer, a jumpsuit is a bad choice. As someone funnier than me observed, once you’re in the bathroom, it’s just you and your bad decisions.
Look at the weeds growing up around the struggling little street tree. Sometimes I wonder if the sheer homeliness of Detroit’s physical footprint is doing something to my brain; sometimes I’ll see some truly wondrous public installation of something, somewhere other than here, and wonder what it must be like to enjoy that sort of thing on the regular. But Mack Avenue resists all such beautification. As Elmore Leonard is said to have written, during his advertising career, “Some cities get by on their looks. Others have to work for a living.”
One thing about a bike ride down a city avenue, you find yourself with time and reason to run little errands. Into Staples for a dry-erase marker I (and only I) can use for the Wednesday whiteboard workout at the pool. Into Village Market for a teres major for dinner. Certainly I didn’t opt for a filet mignon, once I got a look at the price: $50 a pound. On sale. And then home for an afternoon snooze, because: Mother’s Day. And beer.
Here’s something Jeff Borden sent the other day, when he was in Hyde Park, where the Obamas once lived:
Too good to be true? Perhaps. But every so often I see something like this, and I’m gobsmacked, yet again, by the speed of our fall. I saw the first posters for the MMA fight on the White House lawn, and I wanted to cry. I remember the week after the 2016 election, sitting in the conference room in Ann Arbor, and our fearless leader confidently said Trump would get bored by the job and quit after six months, or else he’d be impeached. Well, he was half right. We thought the job would change the man. We never reckoned on this particular man, however.
Let’s go into this week with a spirit of optimism, however. You never know what any day will bring.
I was somewhere in this crowd:
June 1, 1980. Day one of CNN, an abbreviation that was still new to every ear. Cable News Network, the dream of this handsome fella, who died this week at 87:
He was the star of the show that day. What a wild idea, news that ran all day every day. He led small-group tours of the building, with one question coming up over and over, in various forms: How on earth will you fill 24 hours a day with news? Back then, recall, broadcast news came on in the morning (usually a blur of chatty-housewife features), 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. Turner, rich as hell on his daddy’s fortune (billboards) and his own expansion of it (WTCG, an Atlanta UHF station he had the idea of putting on the satellite, renaming it WTBS, aka the Superstation) had a different idea.
You can’t say he didn’t give the staff everything they needed to make it work. He had bureaus all over the world, because Americans needed to know they weren’t the only people in it. He hired commentators to do talking-head editorials, across the political spectrum. I spoke briefly to Phyllis Schlafly on day one. I think Daniel Schorr, who’d recently run afoul of CBS, was another. And a lot of the talent did double duty with WTBS — Flip Spiceland, the weather guy, was one. Here’s a gift link to the NYT obit; the video includes a few seconds of a Flip blooper.
It’s safe to say not everyone believed in this idea; Turner was every inch a southerner, and didn’t share the DNA of the NYC/DC journalism axis. For one thing, he had a sense of humor and believed it was fine to try weird things on the air, even at 2 a.m. Maybe especially at 2 a.m. He hired people like Bill Tush, who was a radio guy, then an announcer, then an anchor, then a comedian, all for WTBS, which also ran 24 hours a day, unlike most stations at the time, which still signed off sometime around midnight.
How do I know all this detail? Because I have a good source, none other than J.C. Burns, who worked first for WTCG, then WTBS, and never exactly for CNN as a full-timer, although he did a lot of work for them, mostly graphic design. And he’s how I ended up in the crowd on day one of CNN — he’d been telling me it was coming, and I offered to cover it for the Dispatch. There was a lot of why-would-we-care, but seeing as how I was going anyway, sure (the editor said), go ahead and get credentialed and file something. My story ran inside; no one cared because no one thought it would amount to much.
But hey, it did. That same why-not attitude he brought to the 3 a.m. time slot on WTCG was the spark for 24-hour cable news. The world bureaus didn’t last, the commentary eventually dwindled away, but the idea of news-around-the-clock did. It’s a mixed blessing, but it’s here to stay.
Later, much later, Turner would go Hollywood to some extent, marrying Jane Fonda, buying his Montana ranch and giving up his media empire. But I’ll always remember the man who resembled a 20th-century Rhett Butler (or Clark Gable, anyway, with that dimple in his chin and ‘stache), a championship sailor who won the America’s Cup and was so drunk at the press conference afterward he sank under the table with a bottle in each hand. He was half-crazy, but he was a smart businessman and he made his mark. RIP.
Trivia question: The first story read on the air on CNN? An update on the attempted assassination of Vernon Jordan in Fort Wayne, two days before.
Two bits of bloggage, both gift links, before we let the weekend wash over us:
Jeffrey Epstein’s purported suicide note is as semi-literate as his emails. “Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!” the note reads. No, we wanted you to stand trial and serve a long stretch in prison, but what’s done is done.
And The Atlantic hits another one out of the park in its probe into Kash Patel, drinking man:
President Trump’s FBI director has a great deal of affection for swag. Merchandise for sale on a website he co-founded—still operating, nearly 15 months into his term—includes beanies ($35), T-shirts ($35), orange camo hoodies ($65), trucker caps ($25), “government gangsters” playing cards (on sale for $10), and a fight with kash Punisher scarf ($25).
One thing not for sale is liquor, because liquor is something Patel gives away for free.
… it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “kash patel fbi director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well.
There’s a picture of the bottle, which the magazine bought on eBay. The seller said it was a gift from Patel at an event in Vegas.
All over the south this week, Republicans are gerrymandering the shit out of individual states and carving up majority-black districts. This moment seems to capture the weirdness and injustice of it all:
Chaos in Alabama:
Last night, Republican State Senators rammed through a bill to advance redistricting while tornado sirens blared, the chamber was being evacuated, and the livestream went dark.
When this is how they pass it – that tells you everything you need to know.
— Fair Fight Action (@fairfightaction.bsky.social) May 7, 2026 at 12:02 PM
And that’s our republic today. I’m not CNN, but I do my best. Have a great weekend, all.