News and Updates

1. So apparently we’ve hit the point in the year where these quick hit posts are the best I can manage, or perhaps we’ve hit that point again. They do tend to crop up more and more, I find. The odd thing is that I’m not objectively all that busy – the semester is over, I’m not teaching any summer classes, my Perpetual Online Class got handed off to some other sucker instructor back in December, and I’m only getting paid to be an advisor two days per week. And yet here we are.

2. It’s not like we don’t have other things to do, though. Friday Kim and I went to a Social Gathering of friends, which was enjoyable. We are all people who enjoy the idea of drinking alcohol more than the actual practice of drinking alcohol so it does tend to build up in our homes and every so often we have a Cocktail Lab Party where the main goal is to get rid of some of the back stock, except (vide supra, re: idea vs practice) it tends not to work very well as far as the main goal is concerned, though we have an enjoyable time anyway.

3. And last night we were at a retirement party for one of our colleagues down at Home Campus, which was both a lot of fun, since there were many good people to talk with, and a bit sad at the same time, since this colleague will be sorely missed. But that is the nature of jobs, and so we enjoy having people around while we can.

4. This lesson got reinforced today when we went to a memorial service for a former colleague from Home Campus, one who had retired back in 1999. It was a long service but it went well and there were a number of old colleagues I hadn’t seen in a while. I genuinely do not like going to these sorts of things, but I’m always glad I went. You pay your respects.

5. I’m slowly making headway on designing my new class for next spring. I taught a version of it a decade ago for a different university and I’m trying to incorporate parts of that, and it will also overlap with the last third or so of my Western Civ II class, so I’m trying to incorporate parts of that as well, and the goal is to do this without it coming out as a Frankenstein’s Monster of mismatched bits and bobs. We’ll get there.

6. Yes, I’ve been paying attention to the news. Let me see if I’ve got some of the recent low points: We’re merging our military with the IDF and likely turning over control of it to the Israeli government, because that’s a surefire long-term winner of a strategy. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump got called out over his election lies by a reporter (a woman, which he can’t handle in the best of times), got pissy with her, and then lurched off camera in a toddler-level snit which he has tried to sell as strength but which anyone with more than six working brain cells knows is just what happens when a weak and cowardly bullshit artist gets cornered by something he can’t handwave away. California is taking its time counting all the ballots in its recent primaries by hand to avoid having the results tampered with by Elon Musk and the American right is melting down over the entire idea of having a free and fair election that they might not win – keep this in mind for November, by the way. Two economists published a thoroughly researched paper that predicts AI will – not might, will – destroy the global economy unless strong countermeasures are taken immediately. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s henchmen recently began removing scientific apparatus from the Atlantic Ocean because it measures how badly the AMOC is deteriorating, which directly contradicts their hallucinatory fantasies about there not being any climate crisis – this despite Congress twice prohibiting any such removals. The DOJ argued in court that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump could have the Statue of Liberty bulldozed tomorrow and there wouldn’t be anything anyone could do about it, because this is somehow different from an unrestricted dictatorship. The World Cup is collapsing in real time due to the vicious and nonsensical Nativist restrictions on players, fans, and officials entering the US. There was a fourth presidential assassination attempt (so-called) that already nobody remembers or cares about. The CEO of Exxon is predicting that US oil stockpiles will fall below viability in July, causing fuel and food prices to skyrocket. Couple this with the approaching Super El Niño and we could see mass hunger and social disruption around the world, since the last time we got one of those back in the late 1800s millions of people starved to death. That’s just what I can remember off the top of my head without bothering to look anything up. Are we great yet?

7. We fired up the pizza oven last night and had our first homemade pizzas of the season, because life is short and there are enough people out there trying to make everything worse so you might as well try to enjoy things while you can. It was good pizza.

8. We’re heading into our first heat wave of the season, and this is why I don’t like summer. People think summers are good but that’s only because they remember the break between school years when they had months of unstructured time and no real responsibilities. Summer itself is hot, sticky, uncomfortable, and overlong. It’s June 8 – only five more months until civilized weather!

9. Today also marks eight years since Anthony Bourdain died. I never met the man but even so I miss him. He was an interested and interesting person who understood that people are people and the best way to get to know them was through food. The world is a poorer place with him gone.

10. We are finally making progress on replacing the Door To Nowhere, which sits at the end of the upstairs hallway and provides instant access to the driveway though the first step is a long one. The wooden storm door is hanging on through sheer inertia and the interior door is mostly single-pane unsealed glass. We’ve been threatening to replace these doors since before the pandemic. Last fall our friend Adam – an actual carpenter – came by and measured everything that needed to be measured. And this weekend I went over to the Mega Hardware Store and told the door guy what Adam told me. And then the door guy asked me about a hundred questions, none of which I knew the answer to, so it took a couple of hours to get everything straightened out (who knew doors had so many options?) and then I sent everything to Adam and he said, “Yep, that’s the right size.” So sometime in July we will have doors, and then sometime after that we will get them installed. Honestly, if we get this resolved before the snow flies I’ll be good.

The Bicensesquiwhat?

Did you know that the United States is celebrating its 250th year of independence this year?

Admittedly this idea has a number of qualifiers attached to it.

It depends on how you define “250th,” for one thing. Americans have always backdated the end of British colonial rule here to July 4, 1776, which is the date that Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Second Continental Congress then meeting in Philadelphia, with some editorial changes that Jefferson wasn’t happy about. As the junior member of the Virginia delegation there wasn’t much he could do about it, though. John Adams thought the date we would celebrate would be July 2, which is when the Continental Congress voted to approve the resolution declaring independence in the first place, but so it goes. Both of those dates rest on the idea that the colonies suddenly became independent simply by declaring themselves to be so – something that the veterans of the Revolutionary War might have had some opinions to the contrary about. It took six years of hard fighting (starting more than a year before the Declaration of Independence was approved) and then another two years of negotiations to produce the formal treaty granting the colonies independence from Britain, but nobody really worries about 1783. We count our independence from July 4, 1776, and that’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

It also depends on how you define “independence,” which seems to be an issue these days as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump takes his marching orders from a parade of failed human beings across the globe, most recently Benjamin Netanyahu but also including Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk. Hard to pretend you’re independent under those circumstances.

And it depends on how you define “celebrating.”

I’m old enough to remember the Bicentennial, back in 1976. No, we didn’t wait until 1983 to celebrate 200 years of American independence. This was the 1970s, a decade that included a deeply corrupt president neck deep in criminal activities and illegal conspiracies to hold onto power, a wildly unpopular war that the US lost, an oil crisis, and a stagnating economy, so it was very different from today. Sort of different. Vaguely different? Yeah, kind of the same, actually. Sorry. Anyway, we needed something to take our mind off all that and the Bicentennial was it.

If you weren’t there, you can’t even begin to imagine how hyped the Bicentennial was.

Every product on the market came in Bicentennial packaging, for example. Beer. Paper towels. Toys. Phones. Lawn décor. Plates. Clothing. Hats. Pencils. Food of all kinds – I have distinct memories of buying Spanish olives that had a Revolutionary War scene printed right on the jar. On and on. Packaging companies ran out of red, white, and blue ink. It was hard to tell brands apart because for nearly two years they all had interchangeable Bicentennial labels. I’m sure in the confusion a lot of money was spent on things people didn’t actually intend to buy, but at least we got to try new stuff that way.

Speaking of money, they even changed the coins for the Bicentennial. We got new quarters, half dollars, and dollar coins, and if nobody ever used the last two that was just how it went. I still find Bicentennial quarters in change even now. They made billions of them. They’re worth exactly twenty-five cents these days, but they’re kind of cool. Also, our local chamber of commerce minted giant aluminum coins that you could buy for 76 cents and then participating merchants would redeem them for a dollar. They called them Continentals, which was kind of ironic if you know the history of Continental currency, but it was a good deal and we appreciated it. I still have a couple of them.

The railroad underpass near my house got an entire Bicentennial mural painted on it and my brother and I would beg to go that way to get to my grandparents’ house – all of three miles away – but it wasn’t on our usual route there so that didn’t happen very often. It was exciting when it did. They finally painted it over sometime in the 80s after most of it had mildewed off the walls.

Tourism flourished to the point where the mayor of Philadelphia – the same deep thinker who once said that the streets of Philadelphia were safe, it was only the people who made them unsafe – openly talked about calling out the National Guard for crowd control, which drastically lowered the number of people who wanted to come to Philadelphia and thus, in a roundabout sort of way, solved the problem.

There were Bicentennial movies, Bicentennial television shows, Bicentennial games, Bicentennial advertisements, Bicentennial sporting events, and Bicentennial cultural events – my personal favorite as a 10-year-old boy being the parade of tall ships that they sailed up the Delaware River that summer. There were Bicentennial parades, picnics, and celebrations. I remember going with my family over to my grandparents’ house on the actual day and hanging out with them and their neighbors who had set up a ping pong table in their driveway. We spent a glorious afternoon whacking a ping pong ball over the roof of the garage and into their back yard and felt suitably patriotic while doing so. It’s what the Founding Fathers would have wanted.

It’s hard, in other words to overstate just how saturated the United States was with Bicentennial everything, and for how long. It started small, sometime in 1974 or so, a cheerful distraction from the sleaze of the Watergate Scandal, gathered steam through 1975, and then was full-blown Everywhere All The Time for most of 1976 until it faded away by the fall in time for the elections. You couldn’t escape it if you tried.

For all the problems facing the US at the time – and there were so, so many – Americans still felt that the republic was worth celebrating. That there was something there underneath all of the grime and if we dug in and tried we could find it and get back on track. We disagreed vehemently what “on track” might look like, but even in the middle of all the crises of the 1970s there was broad agreement that there was still something worth celebrating, whatever it was.

I’m not getting that vibe here in 2026. Really, I’m not.

For one thing, there is almost no hype. I’ve seen some product packaging but only the barest percentage of what I saw in the mid-1970s – a few soda cans, a hat or two, and some paper plates with the “America 250” logo on them surrounded by a flag design that was, objectively, upside down. This might have been an accident or it might have been some clever messaging because an upside-down flag signals distress and that’s where we are right now. In theory we have some new coins to mark the occasion just like we did in 1976, but since nobody uses cash anymore they’re actually kind of hard to find and almost nobody I ask about them – including my bank – knows they exist.

And for another thing, there is very little celebration and even less reason for people to want to change that. We have a blisteringly incompetent, openly kleptocratic government run by a staggeringly corrupt senile convicted felon who has been credibly accused of raping children and is turning the entire federal government into a cover-up machine to protect him from punishment for that crime, among others. He is surrounded by neo-Nazi ghouls working to ethnically cleanse a nation of immigrants while systematically reducing the republic to dictatorship and destroying a century of progress made by better Americans. He’s led us into the worst military defeat in this nation’s history, one whose repercussions haven’t even begun to sink in yet. His minions executed American citizens in the streets for daring to object to his kidnapping and trafficking children to foreign countries, and none of those minions have been punished. He’s gutted American science and research. And if you think the midterm elections will be allowed to happen freely and fairly you’re not paying attention.

Nobody wants to celebrate this, not even the people responsible for this degradation. The only official events that I’ve seen planned are a homoerotic wrestling match to be held on the White House lawn – ironic, given this administration’s outright and perhaps just a little too stridently bellowed opposition to anything that isn’t performatively heterosexual, though apparently large groups of gay men are planning to buy tickets and show up for the event shirtless and fully glittered out just to make the point – and a concert that has now completely fallen apart because county-fair-level has-beens like Milli Vanilli declared it was beneath their dignity to participate. Not that they are wrong about that.

As one internet comment I read so eloquently put it, celebrating the American republic right now feels kind of like attending an Irish wake – nice party and all, but the guest of honor is dead.

I don’t know when things will change or whether I will still be around to see it – several people have recently told me I need to watch what I say here or even delete my internet presence entirely, given my loudly expressed contempt for the current regime and its lickspittle toadies. But it’s my country and they can’t have it, and there will come a time when everyone will have always been against all of this.

And when that time comes, perhaps then we’ll celebrate.

News and Updates

1. I spent most of this week not doing much of anything, which was a really nice break after running flat out for most of the last year or so. My main accomplishment during the workweek was to go grocery shopping. I think there should be more weeks like this in people’s lives.

2. Of course the continued destruction of the American republic by its corrupt, neo-Nazi regime and its bootlicking toadies continued apace the entire time, so there was a certain amount of stress intruding into this idyll even so. I keep thinking I should get back to some political posting and at some point I will, but that point will have to come when I am able to write about it without descending into a wholly appropriate level of obscenity. I am very much looking forward to the prosecution and imprisonment of every single one of those utter wastes of oxygen.

3. After nearly being washed away in April we really haven’t had any significant rain here in Our Little Town since then. On the one hand, this means I haven’t had to mow the lawn and that is an unmitigated win in my book. On the other hand, the farm fields outside of town are starting to look a little worrisome.

4. We had a lovely lunch with Lauren, Aly, and (in a roundabout sort of way) Alexia yesterday, which means that I managed to share meals with both of my children in the space of a single week – not a bad achievement as they scatter off into the world. The conversation was lively, the food was good, and there were things to celebrate even beyond the simple fact of the company, and I’m going to ride that high for as long as I can.

5. Kim and I also stopped off at the nearby Costco because we are addicts and because Kim’s glasses had finally come in. We decided against getting a cart on the way in because we were only there for her glasses and one other item, but that’s a rookie mistake at Costco and in the end we staggered up to the register laden with things. I suppose if you’re going to get some retail therapy to deal with the world Costco is as good a place as any to get it. Plus I ran into someone I hadn’t seen since we were in a play together in 2015 and it was nice to see her.

6. I now have new Kirkland pants, and if you’ve ever heard Sheng Wang’s routine about that you’ll understand.

7. Also, we saw this on the way in. Rarely have I seen such a complete match between vehicle and license plate. Not sure how they got it past the DMV, but there you go.

8. The other productive thing I did last week was get started with developing a new class that I’ll be teaching in the spring. The state legislature in its infinite wisdom decided last year that we needed to revamp our entire curriculum in seven weeks and then the Mother Ship Campus decided to implement that shift in the most obtuse and retrograde way possible by adding a pile of classes to our workload that neither count toward any major nor transfer as anything other than random credits, which all sums up to mean that Home Campus – a very small institution run on baling wire, the willingness of its staff to work above requirements, and a certain buccaneering spirit – will no longer be able to offer some courses because we just don’t have the staff to do both. I’ll miss my Western Civ II class, but we’ll see how the new one goes. The Mother Ship will figure out that this was a mistake in about 3 or 4 years but by then I will likely be retired so this is the task in front of me now. It will be an adventure.

9. Last night Kim and I watched Stanley Tucci’s new series about eating his way across Italy – as opposed to his previous two series about eating his way across Italy – while we shared our first Aperol spritzes of the season, and it is well and truly summer now. Stanley Tucci is basically what happens when you take Anthony Bourdain and file off all of the rough edges and sharp observational skills but he’s still fun to watch, especially with an Aperol spritz or a glass of red wine in your hand.

10. Sometimes I will sit out on the back porch with a book and just watch the neighborhood cats wander up my driveway, cast baleful looks in my direction, and wander off. I’m blocking their access to the catnip patch that we have in our back yard like some cop hanging out at the corner donut stand while the hardworking drug dealers of the world wait for him to leave so they can get back to conducting business. It is a strange position to be in.

A Quick Visit

Sometimes you throw a bag or two in the minivan and head out of town for no reason other than you have time to do that and you have someone to see on the other end.

It’s been a long semester but that finally came to an end last week, as did the giant conference that all of the graduate students in Oliver’s program were conscripted into running. Our summer activities haven’t quite had time to get rolling. We had no particular plans for Memorial Day – a holiday that has been bleached of all meaning anyway. And we hadn’t seen Oliver in person since January. So Kim found us a nice little suite on the second floor of an old house not all that far away from his apartment and we left on Saturday.

It’s a pretty straightforward journey if you don’t mind the fact that you’re driving around Chicago, and we got into town right around check-in time, though we stopped in to see Oliver first so we could deliver a few things that he’d asked for from home – notably a normal window air conditioner to replace the portable floor unit that we’d brought last summer, since this would a) free up a couple square feet of floor space (always a concern in a small apartment) and b) probably use less power (also a concern in a vintage space like that).

In the process we sort of vaguely met Oliver’s new cat, a rescue kitty that he has named Georgia and who is ever-so-slowly getting comfortable enough to let people pet her while she remains deep in her cat cave. Progress!

From there we drove over to our spot to drop off our stuff and plan the rest of the evening, which took some doing, because the roads in that town were laid out by spiders. Nothing goes in a straight line, nothing intersects at right angles, and most of the roads are one-way with no discernable system to them. Also, a good chunk of that town is on a thirty-degree incline. Oliver says this is fun in the winter.

That said it is a nice town, with a pile of good restaurants, some pretty parks, and the air of a place that is working to rebuild from harder times, and you have to appreciate that spirit. I’ve enjoyed visiting whenever I’ve been there.

Every time we’re there we end up at the ramen place downtown, so we decided to check that box early because it is really a great little place and there is no reason to delay good food. Along the way we ran into the Prom.

There is a park right in the downtown, about one city block in size, which you have to pass through if you’re going to do pretty much anything downtown. There is always something going on in this park, and on this night that something involved hordes of Sharply Dressed Teenagers milling about the place getting their pictures taken and hanging out with friends and family. Seriously – kids today have so much more fashion sense than when I was in high school, even after you adjust for the fact that I didn’t have any then and still don’t now. It was fun to walk through the park and just take it all in.

And the ramen place was top notch, as always.

Later we ended up hanging out back at the house where we were staying, talking about whatever came to mind, and if there is a better way to spend time together I don’t know what it is.

Kim and I had Sunday morning pretty much to ourselves, since Oliver’s summer class has already started and like most summer classes it is a “drink from the firehose” experience when it comes to material and he needed to do homework. We found a bakery downtown that sold fresh-baked pastries, hot tea, and coffee, and that’s a marvelous way to start the day. They also make bread of several varieties and we stopped this morning on the way out to get some for home. It’s really good bread, as you would imagine.

The rest of our Sunday was divided into four pieces:

First, we found lunch at an “Eccentric Pub” downtown, and it was very good. We are food-motivated people, what can I say?

Second, there was a Costco run because (see point one, above) one of the privileges of being a parent is stocking your child up with food, plus we really just enjoy Costco runs.

Third, after dropping off the spoils of the Costco run and getting the cold stuff put away we went over to the local art museum, which has a surprisingly nice collection. They had an exhibit dedicated to the history of footwear (mostly sneakers), which largely escaped me since my interest in shoes starts and stops with “comfortable,” but Kim and Oliver had a good time.

The museum also has a wide assortment of paintings and sculptures, my favorite being this one. Not sure why.

Fourth, after an abortive attempt at a campus visit, was dinner was at a pizza place called Bilbo’s, which really commits to the whole Tolkien bit in ways that are a bit strange but surprisingly entertaining.

We didn’t do much Monday morning – mostly slept in while Oliver worked on his homework and fed his friend’s cat while she was away – but eventually we picked him up, found a tasty lunch at a taco place, and then spent most of the afternoon reading our various books at a park just outside of town while a boisterous crowd kicked balls around and splashed about in the lake. It was a nice day to do that. Afterward Oliver showed us around campus a bit, giving us a tour of the various buildings that he as a graduate student calls home. Sometimes low-key is all you need.

We went back to his apartment and, after a fair amount of fiddling with the ratchet strap, managed to get the portable floor air conditioner down the stairs and into the minivan without damaging any component of this escapade.

We let this morning and now we are back home, one visit richer. It was a good way to spend a holiday weekend.

Reading the Names

Another year has come to an end.

When you’re an academic the year starts in August or September and ends in May or June, depending on local conditions. There’s a strange, oddly hot interlude between those points that doesn’t properly belong to any particular year which is why people leave town if they can. They come back in the fall with all sorts of new and exciting diseases to share and that’s why the first month of the school year is always such a festival.

The students show up and go through the year, taking classes and figuring out how this whole University Student gig actually works. Most of them will grow along the way. The ones who don’t tend to drift off into other pursuits. And around this time of year a good chunk of them will complete their time with us and move on to new challenges. From our campus that usually means further education on another campus, but it can also mean a job or something else entirely. It’s up to them.

Last night was our graduation ceremony, an event that I look forward to each year.

We do graduation right, I think. We host it in the gym, because we can fit more people in there than in the theater and we want as many friends and family to attend as we can get. This is a milestone for these students, and they should be able to share that with their people. There are no tickets to buy – as long as people show up on time they can just walk in. We don’t even charge for parking. Welcome! That’s our motto. We also keep things moving right along. Nobody wants or needs an all-night spectacle. They want to come and See The People Do The Thing and then go somewhere else to celebrate on their own, and last night we were done in 71 minutes including all of the speeches and every single graduate in attendance walking across the stage individually.

Since I am the Emergency Back-Up Historian On Call, I get to sit up on the stage with the faculty, all of us in our billowing black robes and oddly-shaped hats happily looking out into the audience where the graduates are. For the last three years my job at the ceremony has been to read the names of the graduates as they walk across the stage. They fill out a little card beforehand, listing their name and how to pronounce it, where they’re heading next, and any shout-outs they want to make, and they hand this to me as they go by the podium at stage right. I usually spend the hour before the ceremony walking up to them randomly and asking “How do you pronounce your name?” because it’s easier to get it right from hearing it than it is from reading it, but the cards help immensely too. I like to think I get things right more often than not.

They walk over to the Dean to shake her hand and get their diploma case (the actual diplomas will be mailed, since grades aren’t even posted until the next day), then to the Chancellor to shake his hand, all while I read out what they wanted me to say. They’ve worked hard for this. Many of them never thought they’d get to college at all, let alone finish a degree, and they should have their names read. There are always cheers from the audience, as is proper.

As an advisor I get to know many of the students pretty well, which means that sometimes I make it into some of the shout-outs. That’s always a good feeling, that they would want to do that on this night. I will admit it is a bit odd to go all Third Person in front of a large audience, but so it goes.

This is why we do this, for events like this when we can recognize and celebrate the achievements of our students.

Congratulations to this year’s class. May the world treat you kindly, and may your future bring you good things.

Closing My Eyes to Eurovision

We skipped Eurovision this year.

For those of you who live under rocks or in the US, Eurovision is an annual song contest. It’s open to any nation that subscribes to some nebulous European television consortium, which is how countries like Australia, Israel, and Azerbaijan get in, and it’s been running for over sixty years now. Each participating nation contributes one song to be judged by both national panels of judges and a popular vote from each country. The winning country gets to host the next year.

We’ve been watching it for a few years or so – Kim longer than any of us – and it’s always been an enjoyable bit of nonsense. Two semifinals and a final event, each three-plus hours of high camp, power ballads, spectacle, the occasional funny or quiet song, and enough gender fluidity to pucker the asshole of every Republican in Texas. It’s pointless, completely unproductive, and a welcome break from a world that insists that such things should not be allowed to exist.

And the songs are generally pretty fun.

Part of the ethos of the thing is that it’s not supposed to be political. It was founded at a time when the scars of World War II were still livid and its organizers wanted to do something that would bring people together a little. Whether it has lived up to that standard is an open question, especially recently – everything has become political these days, and song contests no less than anything else.

Russia hasn’t been able to participate since it invaded Ukraine, for example, and honestly this feels about right. Nobody wants to hear from warmongers.

This does, however, beg the question of why Israel was allowed to participate last year given its ongoing overt campaign of genocide against the Palestinians. It seemed a double-standard, particularly since one of the biggest corporate sponsors of the event was an Israeli company and since – despite the loud boos from the crowd and the deep unpopularity of their presence – they very nearly won with a song that could at best be described as “forgettable mid-list FM filler.” I suspect that the Eurovision folks were very relieved they they’d come in second, because if they’d won this year’s version likely would have taken forty minutes to air in its entirety. 

We now know that the Israeli government spent millions of dollars in advertising to buy the popular votes in the participating nations and urge its own citizens to cast multiple votes for their own act, and while this is technically not a violation of the letter of the rules it is deeply cynical and destructive to the ethos of the thing. Not that the current Israeli government cares about destruction or cynicism.

And before you get your engines revved up, please understand that anyone who accuses me of antisemitism based on the previous discussions will be held up to public ridicule and declared a worthless toady of a genocidal government. I grew up in an area that had a majority Jewish population. The local public schools got Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur off. Most of my early friends and two of my first three girlfriends were Jewish, as are members of my extended family. The sovereign state of Israel is very much not the same thing as the Jewish faith or the Jewish people or their culture. It is a nation state whose actions must be judged by the standards of all nation states, and by those standards it is one that deserves to be shunned by any who abhor war crimes, the slaughter of civilians, and the willful violation of international law and human decency.

It is in other words entirely possible to judge the sovereign state of Israel – and judge it harshly – without being antisemitic, and those who work to obscure that point need to explain why they feel genocide is acceptable if their side is doing it. “Never again” was supposed to apply to everyone, and the fact that a nation founded as a refuge for the victims of the Holocaust is currently inflicting genocide on others is grotesque.

That Israel was allowed to participate in this year’s Eurovision was inexcusable.

As an American, I realize my own government does not leave me with any moral high ground on which to stand – honestly, if the US were a participant this year that would have been yet another reason to skip it entirely. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his merry band of neo-Nazi ethnic-cleansing ghouls have turned the US into an outcast nation in less than two years, and I cannot tell you how infuriated this American is at seeing my country dragged into the abyss of disgrace like this. But since the US isn’t part of Eurovision, that’s a separate problem for another day.

There was a lot of hearted argument in the Eurovision community about the presence of Israel this year. Spain – one of the Big Five countries who fund most of the event – withdrew over it, as did seven-time winner Ireland. Iceland (a perennial favorite), the Netherlands, and Slovenia also announced that they would not participate. Yet nothing changed.

The contest was this week, and it slipped by largely unnoticed in our household, a sad change. I did see the winner pop up in my social media feed, and perhaps someday I will bother to listen to it. I also saw that nothing changed regarding the runner up from last year, also the runner up this year, so maybe I won’t.

This will not bother the Eurovision people at all, of course. I am one obscure person in a country that doesn’t even participate in the event, and my decision to skip it this year will cost them nothing.

But watching would have cost me something I couldn’t replace, and that seemed more important.

A New Master

We have a new Master in the family!

Lauren graduated from Main Campus University last year with her Bachelor’s degree but even at the time we knew we’d be back in a year because she had already won admission to a 4+1 Master’s degree program, where you start taking your graduate courses during your senior year of undergraduate and then finish up in one year rather than two. It’s a nice program and she seemed happy with it, and this past weekend she graduated again, a newly minted Master of Agricultural and Applied Economics.

Naturally, as the proud parents we are, we were there to celebrate. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Plus this was also the year that many of her friends graduated as well, including both of her apartment-mates – Aleksia and Anita – and Chase, who has been part of the group since high school, among others. So it was going to be a fiesta of epic proportions is what I’m saying here, and that’s just the sort of thing you put on your calendar and circle in bright primary colors to remind other events that they aren’t nearly as important.

Friday was the small ceremony, the one that was just for Lauren’s department within the larger college, which is itself just a part of the larger university, and it’s a really nice event. Lauren’s program is pretty small and not everyone comes to the ceremony so there were maybe two dozen graduates in attendance ranging from undergraduates all the way up to PhDs. They have a couple of short speeches from the higher-ups and then they call each of the graduates up to the podium by name to receive a certificate. The diploma comes in the mail later. The graduates have worked hard for this and they deserve to hear their name called, and this is when that happens because if they tried that at the big university-wide commencement they’d still be there when the stadium started hosting football games again. Also, the department provides food so you know it’s going to be a good time.

But first we had to get there.

I had to teach my last class for Far Away Campus that morning, and the moment I got off the Zoom call I dashed out to my car and careened up the road toward the main event of the day. Kim was already up there, as she had long ago volunteered to be in a medical study at the university hospital and they had some tests they wanted to run on her early that morning. It took me a while to find a parking spot – as a veteran of these events I knew to search the garages on the outskirts of campus so the only trick was actually getting to one of them and let me tell you that was indeed a bit of magic in the end – and eventually we all met up at Lauren’s apartment, hanging out and getting ready for the ceremony.

From there it was a good walk on a lovely day over to where the ceremony would be held, stopping along the way to take photos.

The gown you get as a Master’s graduate has funkier sleeves than the one they give to the Bachelors grads. They have deep pockets and you can store all sorts of things in those sleeves in fact, and this, dear reader, is called foreshadowing. Lauren wore that gown a lot while she had it, since it is fairly pricy to rent and she wanted to get her money’s worth out of it. She reported that the hood was actually the best part of the ensemble and that seems about right.

We met up with Kim’s parents at the ceremony – somehow they found a parking spot right nearby, which is astonishing for graduation weekend – and we all hung out at a table waiting for events to start, munching on tasties and generally having a good time. It turned out that the woman who sat next to Kim had been at the same university at the same time as my mom, just a couple of years behind. For all we know they had classes together. And thanks to the miracle of modern communication technology Lauren managed to talk with Shai, who is currently doing his post-doc in Sweden and therefore seven hours ahead of us.

It was a brief but lovely ceremony, as described above. It is a beautiful thing to see your child work hard, do well, and be rewarded for it, after all. And then there were photos. Lots of photos, because moments like this deserve to be remembered. There were family photos, of course.

And photos with friends and her advisor.

And Bucky showed up because an event is not complete without Bucky.

Bucky doesn’t say anything when he visits. He mostly jumps and gestures and bounces around from person to person, and you sort of expect that, but I will admit to being surprised to learn that the headpiece of that costume is structural enough that Bucky can do a hands-free headstand. Color me impressed.

Awarded and celebrated, we decided to walk around for a while, enjoying the day and basking in the glow of a degree well earned. We slowly made our way over to the nearby Student Union, a place that Grandpa had never actually visited before so it was quite an experience. The Union sits on the shore of one of the big lakes in town and it’s a gorgeous spot. You understand why it is one of the main centers of campus life once you’ve sat out there on the terrace on a bright spring afternoon.

The chairs are copyrighted, by the way. I’m not making that up.

There was a bit of a line to take pictures with the big Bucky statue and one of the PhD graduates who came after us used her photo opportunity to make a baby announcement as well, holding an ultrasound picture in front of her gown. Lauren and I congratulated her and pointed out that Lauren was in that position during my own PhD graduation ceremony, and we all agreed that was a pretty cool echo of past to present.

From there we walked over to the Peruvian restaurant for an early dinner – a tradition of sorts, in the sense that anything done twice on purpose is a tradition. It’s a place that we’ve gone to a lot over the years and they have good food, which is all we ask.

Grandma and Grandpa dropped us off at the top of the hill on their way home after that, and we continued our photo project. We stopped by a couple of buildings, including the one where Lauren’s department is housed – a comfortable old building tucked away between other buildings so that if you didn’t know to look for it you’d never find it – before ending up at a small garden space. It was lovely just to walk around together and share the time.

By this point it was getting late and Lauren had plans for the evening and we had to get home, so I dropped Kim off at the hospital parking lot so she could retrieve her car and then dropped Lauren off at her apartment before heading back home, one day down and a much busier day to come.

Saturday was the big ceremony, the one for the entire university, and if you’ve not been to a Main Campus University graduation before it is an experience and a half, though in a good way. The day started off early, as Lauren, Aleksia, and Anita had planned a breakfast spread in their apartment for friends and family. We’d volunteered to bring coffee so at 7:45am there we were, at the best coffee place in Our Little Town, picking up two thermal urns of coffee along with a pile of supplies. “What do we owe you?” we asked. “Not sure,” they said. “Bring them back on Monday and we’ll figure it out.” In the end it was about the same as two or three of those goofy drinks from the National Mermaid Chain and much better coffee to boot, according to those who drink coffee, so buy local.

We got up to the apartment and found The Best Parking Spot Ever. Seriously – right in front of their apartment building, not ten paces from the front door. On graduation day! We should have bought a lottery ticket. Kim did an astonishing job of wiggling the minivan into a space about 18 inches bigger than the van and there it sat for the rest of the day. We brought up the coffee and everything else we had packed into the car, and from there I went out to get donuts.

There’s an astonishingly good donut shop just around the corner from their apartment – one of the few that still does everything on site – and they were happy to provide two dozen freshly baked donuts for a reasonable sum. I was wearing my “Lauren’s Dad” t-shirt because this is the day for that t-shirt after all, and as I’m walking back to the apartment some passerby shouted, “Hey, that’s Lauren’s Dad!” Thank you, good citizen! No autographs please!

The breakfast was lovely. There was a lot of good food and drinks, including a number of variations on mimosas which I had never had before and now I know to have again. There were a lot of good people. And the skeleton was decorated for the occasion, which is how you know the party is going to be thumping.

The roommates were in fine form.

As were friends.

And family.

There was a cake, which was remarkably tasty.

And a shotski, which I’m sure is a thing that exists outside of Wisconsin but we’re professionals in this state so just stand back and let the experts demonstrate how it’s done.

There’s a story behind this photo, as there is with all of the best photos.

Aleksia put together a short video with the graduates in this position for the first few seconds, and then it suddenly switches over to the opposite-gender parents in the exact same poses. There I am, on the left, with my hands on my knee. Very demure. Very mindful. I have seen the final video and it worked as advertised, but you’re just going to have to trust me on this one.

At some point a fairly good percentage of the group was outside on the balcony ringing little cowbells at the graduates walking by on the path toward the stadium. They seemed happy to have the attention, and it made the day just that much more festive.

I think of all the photos from the breakfast, though, this may well have been my favorite. They’ve lived together for three years now, and on this day we celebrate them all.

At some point we all noticed that it was getting toward graduation ceremony time and began making shooing motions toward the door. It’s not a long walk over to the stadium but somehow we managed to get separated into at least three different groups along the way, and somehow – rather less plausibly – we all managed to meet up again just inside the gate on the way in. Not sure how that happened, but it was an auspicious event so we’re just going to run with it.

It has to be said that whoever organized this year’s graduation was far more on the ball than the folks who did it last year – you got the impression that they’d done it before, for one thing. Last year it took us over an hour to get into the stadium. This year it was about 5-10 minutes. Part of the reason for that became clear to me when my camera bag set off the security device and the guy with the reflective vest sort of looked at me, rolled his eyes a bit, and then ignored me. Hey – I’m pretty harmless, what can I say.

We found our way to the upper deck on the shady side of the stadium this year. It was significantly cooler than last year and overcast, so the sunburn problem was much less, and there was a nice breeze going as well. We got there early enough so that the whole group could sit together.

Soon the place was full, though – from the nosebleed seats all the way down to the field where the graduates sat. I never did find Lauren on that field – she’s in the front-most house-right section, with all of the other Master’s students with their yellow hoods – but we did find Anita and Aleksia. Anita is holding Aleksia’s pink mortarboard and Aleksia is sitting just to the left of her. They’re in the section closest to us – house-right, furthest from the stage – not far from the aisle.

Lauren had stashed a good supply of miniature bottles of something in her gown sleeves – for my non-American readers, those bottles are called “shooters” and we Americans know by context whether we’re talking about alcohol or guns because ‘MURCA – and passed them around during the ceremony. She was not the only one doing this at this university, where students and staff all take a certain amount of pride in their drinking powers, and they were well received. She was, however, in all likelihood the only person who thought to stash a vuvuzela in her sleeve. She said that this did not go over nearly as well with the people around her, which is a sign of our humorless times.

It was a surprisingly nice ceremony. The student speakers were interesting. Everyone booed the Chancellor since she a) has made some rather unpopular decisions over the last year or so, and b) left for another job two days later, though it has to be said that she did a nice job of keeping her speech focused on the graduates and not herself. The invited speaker was James Patterson, a novelist whose work I have never actually read but who acquitted himself well. It started a bit rough but we all enjoyed it by the end, especially when he took his shot at the Chancellor (“You know, dear, you can only go through the Transfer Portal so many times…”). At the three-quarter mark of the ceremony they had everyone do Jump Around, as traditional. And they didn’t pipe out the graduates to a song about stripping for a living like they did last year, so that was nice.

One of the lessons we learned last year was not to try to meet up outside of the stadium after the ceremony ended. There is no win there. Fortunately the apartment was close by and we gathered there to graze on the copious remains of the breakfast feast and spend some quality downtime. Conversations ebbed and flowed. Naps were taken. It was a nice break in the action.

Eventually a good chunk of the group went to the Engineering graduation ceremony, where Chase got his degree. The rest of us – those who remained – hung out until the ceremony was over before meeting up at a chicken place on State Street where we had a lovely dinner and watched my Flyers get eliminated from the NHL playoffs, alas. They played well and exceeded expectations for the season but just ran into a better team and that’s all there was too it.

After dinner we ended up at a piano bar, a crowded, dimly lit place that had two baby grand pianos, a little drum kit, and three musicians cycling through them taking requests that the audience would sing along to. They were impressed by Nolan’s singing voice, and to be fair he did major in musical theater. And not long before we left the musicians played the song that Kim asked for – You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman – and that got one of the louder sing-alongs of the night. It is a lovely thing to be out and about with your daughter and her friends, even if by that point you are very tired.

I don’t know where Lauren and the other younger folks went after we left – I have no doubt their evening was nowhere near done – but Kim and I got home around 1am and poured ourselves into bed like day-old coffee.

It was a lovely weekend celebrating good people and their achievements. I wish them all good things in their lives ahead.

Well done, Lauren. I’m proud of you.