As everything has to come to an end, so to has the 47th annual Detroit Jazz Festival, and my burden is significantly lightened. Posting to social media is a strange thing, not journalism but with elements of it, not quite marketing but with elements of that, too. Truth be told, far more marketing than journalism, but sometimes you can say that about The New York Times. But it was four long days with lots of running around, buttonholing artists for stop-and-chats, being on the lookout for interesting things on and around the various stages.

Truth be told, I cannot top the City of Detroit genius who came to the festival and gave us the Unc Cam:

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This was my breaking news:

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A very fragile and interesting moment I feel fortunate to have captured (not well, but at least I captured it).

The hotel where we all stayed, the Marriott at the RenCen, is enormous, and was also accommodating the Islamic Society of North America and a large Indian wedding. So when any random elevator door opened, you might be sharing it with men in shalwar kameez or a thobe, women in abayas or long dresses with a hijab in contrasting print trailing behind, raven-haired beauties in saris with hennaed hands, or some dude all in black carrying a saxophone case. Today it was a teenager in a T-shirt advertising “a better way to wudu.” I asked him what the better way was; he said it involved a special sock. (Wudu, for those who don’t know, is the ritual bathing before Islamic prayer, and the problematic part is the feet. The University of Michigan at Dearborn, after repairing too many bathroom sinks accidentally torn from the wall by clumsy wudu, installed footbaths.)

Anyway, it was a good weekend of exhausting work and excellent music. Plus uncs. And this lady, the one on the right…

…who is famous. I asked her where she got her sunglasses. She said Reykjavik. I saw her every day, always looking amazing.

Now, friends, I am bone-tired and intend to sleep until my body has had enough. I want you to know that I haven’t forgotten this blog, nor you readers. I now intend to enjoy Adult Summer — the six weeks of good-enough weather that follows Labor Day — to the fullest.

This weekend I learned that the German chocolate cake is not German in origin, but was in fact named for an American baker, Samuel German, who came up with the recipe as a way to use the semisweet dark chocolate he had…formulated would be the correct word, not “invented,” I guess. You can’t really invent chocolate.

I learned this while baking one, for an impromptu party thrown for an ex-editor. I also learned that “impromptu” and German chocolate cake don’t really go together. It’s a recipe that, if you’re devoted to scratch baking as I am, is pretty damn complicated. But it was the birthday boy’s favorite, and so I did my duty. Then I left my phone behind, so I’m enjoying a phone-free Sunday morning, and that’s a very good thing.

But it can’t last forever. I’m heading back over to his apartment in a bit to pick it up.

Work this week will be pretty wild, as we tick down the days to the Detroit Jazz Festival, the world’s largest free jazz festival, a phrase I probably wouldn’t have added before I started working on the social-media team, but that’s social media — marketing, not necessarily journalism. However, the job puts me face-to-face with great musicians and I get to hear some wonderful music in the bargain, so it only feels like work some of the time. It’s a good gig for the semi-retired.

Which is, as usual, my way of advance-apologizing for spotty blogging until we wrap on Labor Day.

That little factoid about German chocolate cake is the sort that sometimes gets me called something like “the walking encyclopedia” when I step out of journalism circles, where everyone is a walking encyclopedia. It goes with the job. “Did you know Dolly Parton had a disco album?” I remarked in a non-journalist text string last week after she died, and it happened again. I can’t help it, as I sit in a firehose of information all day. But today I found myself looking at the fresh New York Times and Free Press on my kitchen table and said, “I’m out.” You have to unplug from time to time, or your brain explodes. (Plus I already read much of it in the last few days, where the Sunday content is trickled out over the web. When our excellent newspaper carrier retires at the end of the year, I may cut back on one or more of our newspaper subs. Or I may not. Advertising in the print editions still supports many of them. I won’t be a party to killing a legit news source, even if they employ Mitch Albom.)

That said, I found a few stories to share today before I clock out:

We all remember the OMG SATANIC CHILD ABUSE IN DAYCARE CENTERS panic of the ’90s, right? Here’s an absolutely infuriating story about a woman who was swept up in it, served YEARS in prison for a crime she never committed, was finally released, and later received a formal exoneration, which would enable her to get compensation from the state of Ohio. However:

The exoneration cleared the way for Ms. Smith to seek compensation. She fantasized about being able to help her children — to pay off her eldest’s house and car and hire a lawyer to extricate her struggling youngest from legal trouble and child support debt. Maybe there would be enough, she hoped, to fulfill her lifelong dream of visiting the Vatican.

Ohio law is intended to make compensation for exonerees straightforward and quick, especially when the local prosecutor poses no objections. Under the law, Ms. Smith would receive at least $1 million. Mr. Tomlinson told the court he believed she had been wrongfully imprisoned and deserved recompense.

But then she ran into opposition from the state attorney general, Dave Yost, who stepped in and had Mr. Tomlinson’s statements stricken from the record.

[The original prosecutor] Mr. Rosenbaum, for his part, advanced a new argument: The exoneration should not have occurred, he said, because it had cleared the way for Ms. Smith to sue him and several others involved in her prosecution.

They were joined in their opposition by Tony Cillo, a Republican who had recently defeated [the prosecutor who supported the exoneration] Mr. Tomlinson, a Democrat, in his bid for re-election. Mr. Cillo called the exoneration “one of the most flagrant frauds upon the entire state of Ohio” and a conspiracy to “acquit and pay” Ms. Smith.

Mr. Yost’s office declined to comment on pending litigation, and Mr. Cillo did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Rosenbaum said, through his lawyer, that he had “prosecuted all his cases with the highest ethical standards, and the prosecution of Nancy Smith was no different.”

Yost, and all the rest of these terrible, terrible people, are slimy pieces of crap. A long read, but worth it.

Speaking of terrible people, Lucian Truscott’s Substack on Pete Hegseth is worth your time.

Finally, Dolly’s death got me thinking about Whitney Houston, for some reason. “I Will Always Love You,” a sweet song about leaving behind a lover (or maybe Porter Wagoner — accounts vary), is one thing in her voice, and quite another in Whitney’s, whose every recording carries the subtext of look what a belter I am. Not only that, she ushered in an age of belters that we’re still living through. Some years back, on a long drive, I cued up a Spotify playlist of various versions of “Lush Life,” a sad song about drinking yourself to death over a broken heart. The more recent the recording, the more likely it is to be belted by a singer who seems not to have actually read the lyrics. What do you think about this? Discuss.

I’ll be here this week, unless I’m not. Carry on.

Even as a native Buckeye, I don’t think I came across the rural Ohio hamlet of East Palestine once before that train derailed there a while back, and here it pops up again on Monday:

San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York pleaded no contest Monday to two misdemeanor charges after his arrest in East Palestine, Ohio, over the weekend.

Columbiana County court records show that York was ordered to serve one day in jail for each charge, to be served concurrently, and was given one day of credit for time served. He also paid two fines totaling $1,150.

Also according to those court records, York’s initial charge was “engaging in prostitution,” which was reduced to disorderly conduct and possessing criminal tools, and that “$160 seized shall be forfeited to MVHTFF (Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force).” When reached by USA TODAY Sports, the MVHTFF did not immediately have additional information.

What, one might ask, is the owner of the San Francisco NFL franchise doing in East Palestine, allegedly sporting with hookers? I asked my Ohio sports-news authority, who replied:

His mom is the sister of previous team owner Eddie DeBartolo, another Youngstown mafioso who was busted on a similar charge some years back. They just like that dirty trailer trash.

Ah, well. That makes sense. Robert Kraft, the Patriots owner, was busted for patronizing one of those massage parlors employing…what was the name of the place? Orchids of Asia Day Spa. It must have something to do with constant exposure to the heart-stopping beauties who populate the ranks of NFL cheerleading squads. One seeks something different, the way a man who can eat all the lobster and caviar his heart desires sometimes might enjoy a hot dog, just as a change of pace.

Anyway, thinking of East Palestine reminded me of one of Charlie LeDuff’s more ridiculous columns, when he was still employed by The Detroit News:

The poor folks of East Palestine, Ohio.

There they stood last week, staring into the sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of Air Force One, which at that very moment was supposed to be flying overhead — 150 miles from the White House as the crow flies — making its way from Washington D.C. to Detroit.

Yeah, I totally believe that happened.

Now it’s Tuesday, and I still haven’t got this done. My freelance work ramps up this week and next, culminating with Labor Day weekend, and after that I’ll have about a month of summer to enjoy. In the meantime, two items from the You Can’t Make This Shit Up file:

The racist racists in the Trump administration, including the director of the Art in Embassies program, describes this painting as “aesthetically terrifying” and “very woke.”

The racist who described it as such is Erin Scavino. Remember that name.

And then, today, this:

President Donald Trump said he is considering changing the name of Lake Ontario, the easternmost of the Great Lakes spanning the U.S.-Canada border, to Lake America, as the U.S.-Canada trade fight escalates.

“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer,” he wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday morning.

I hate the president. And all his racist toadies. That is all. Better get this up before something else derails me.

EDIT: And now Dolly Parton! Arrrgghhh.

The pedestrian/cycling lane on the new bridge has been open about two weeks. The Derringers took their first shot at it today. The weather report was favorable, the schedule was clear, and so we did it.

It’s a beautiful bridge, still clean and sparkling under the blue sky. The suspension cables give you some great details in the pictures. And there are many made-for-Instagram angles.

But ultimately, it’s the sky and the water and the other people on the bridge.

That’s Alan.

It’s a long climb up, and I regretted not checking my gears first, because I’m stuck on the big ring on the front. I mean, I made it, but I was glad for the downhill. On the other side, we blew through customs in a trice. “You have any weapons?” the Canadian border agent asked. “We’re bicyclists, not bikers,” I said. And that was that. Then it was two more miles into downtown Windsor for some Chinese food, and the whole thing in reverse coming back home. My sense was the Canadian climb was steeper, the American climb longer but shallower. So pick your poison. It’s a workout either way.

But overall, I think this bit of infrastructure is brilliant. There was solid bike travel both ways, and plenty of pedestrians, too. I’m not saying it’ll have a major impact on cross-border tourism, but any way you can get people crossing the border is a good thing. Now for an entrepreneur to park a food truck on either side, and you’ve got the start of an economy. In another couple of years, who knows what can happen. All because you made it easy for people who don’t travel in cars.

Just one bit of bloggage today, called to my attention by my Ohio people. An ad for Vivek Ramaswamy, running for governor there. It’s almost like the whole state hasn’t been in the grip of the GOP for years now. I hate this timeline.

But let’s have a good weekend anyway. Summer is fleeting. Let’s enjoy it, even if it rains.

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.