News and Updates

1. Continuing our recent mechanical woes, the microwave died last night. Kim put a little bowl of roasted green beans that we had from Monday’s dinner in to reheat and there was a zapping sound and then it just went black. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t the green beans that did it but you never know. They were some fine garden beans. Everything else in the kitchen still runs, so it’s clear that this was a localized failure. We are looking into replacing it, not having much in the way of a choice in the matter, and while Kim enjoys the hunting and gathering aspect of such projects so far my only nonnegotiable point is that whatever we get will be installed by someone else.

2. Also, whatever is installed will not be a “smart” appliance. I do not need my microwave to be connected to the internet, and if any appliance tries to greet me when I walk into the room I will take a baseball bat to it.

3. For those of you keeping score, the list of broken things since mid-July includes two window blinds, a garage light, the water softener, all of the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom including four different showerhead arrangements (the current one still needs a minor tweak but no further new parts), both of the toilets in the house, the front hose connection, my Waterpik, the barbecue grill, and one headlight and all of the tires on my car, all in about eight weeks. This does not count some expensive dentistry (not covered by insurance), the as-yet-unfilled need for new glasses for me, and my general sense of well-being and trust in the nation’s future though to be honest that last one has been crumbling for a while.

4. Speaking of broken things, it was roughly during this same period that HR decided to impose a brand-new software package as a hot-patch – one day everything just switched over – and it has gone as well as you’d think. On the one hand, that was a fiendishly complicated switch and you have to expect some of that. On the other hand, Kim and have already had to take action to recover over $1500 of our money that mysteriously vanished from our paychecks and even after correcting this HR doesn’t know why it was deducted in the first place, which does give one pause for the future.

5. I’ve been mostly trying to focus on getting this summer’s stories written down here so I don’t forget them – there’s still one more post to go – but every now and then I poke my head above the ramparts to see what the rest of the world is up to and sweet dancing monkeys on a stick but that’s not a healthy thing to do these days. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves continue to impose Fascism on the United States while embarrassing themselves and the nation every step of the way – a fascinating combination of incompetence, authoritarianism, and twisted immorality that will someday be considered a case study in how to destroy a once-proud nation assuming there are scholars around someday to consider it. If you’re looking for signs that the end of the American republic is rapidly approaching he certainly provides them in bulk. Israel isn’t even bothering to pretend it isn’t committing genocide against the Palestinians anymore, and the irony of the nation founded as an example of “never again” being the nation currently doing it again is considerable. Ukraine continues to hold out against Putin’s increasingly desperate attempts to wipe it off the map – attempts that now seem to be aimed at bringing NATO into the war directly, which won’t end well. It’s a mess, and at some point I will try to get back to writing about such things. But for right now I will have to be content with a simple declaration that I dissent from all of this, with every breath in my body.

6. It makes it very hard to grade assignments when the world is on fire and your own government is making it worse. But you do what you have to do, I suppose.

7. We are less than a month into the school year and already it has been a time, for all sorts of reasons that will not appear in this space.

8. On the other hand, my students this year have rediscovered the art of asking questions and that has been fun. Also, they seem to be enjoying the classes overall. This week some of my Western Civ students decided to bring in what they said was a homemade replica of a Tudor crown to see if I’d wear it in class, and I did for the first couple of minutes. I’m not a great fan of hats when the temperature is over 60F, but it seemed fair to put it on at least for a bit. Yes, there are photos. No, I don’t have any of them.

9. They keep telling us that the main road on our side of Our Little Town will be completely fixed sometime soon and I’d like to believe it. I can tell they’re getting close because suddenly early this week things got a whole lot worse, which means that they’d finally scraped off a good chunk of what had to be replaced, and today on the way home some of it was already filled back in. So it could happen.

10. I always record my history classes, because I throw a lot of information at students and they find it helpful to have those for review. I’ve been doing that for over a decade now – longer if you count pure audio recordings – and a) it has had no impact whatever on attendance that I’ve ever been able to quantify, and b) student comprehension and grades have both improved. This works very well when the technology works, but as you might imagine the reverse it true as well. Today the internet down at Home Campus was acting up and halfway through class the Zoom recording died, so I had to spend an hour and a half of my evening re-recording it. The jokes are the same.

A Renewal

Kim and I renewed our wedding vows last night. This was not really how we had planned to spend a Friday night in September, but it the opportunity came up and we took it.

She’s stuck with me now.

The original plan was to go to a fundraiser for Family Equality, one of the groups that was instrumental in bringing about marriage equality in the United States – the surprisingly radical idea that Americans should be treated equally under the law and not denied human, civil, or legal rights arbitrarily. I wrote about the unadulterated bigotry of those who would deny marriage equality in this space way back in 2009, and when the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges came down in 2015 and did away with that particular bit of insanity I celebrated it here as well. The fact that Family Equality continues to have a real need to exist – to protect the right of all Americans to marry and prevent marriage from becoming a privilege reserved only for a few favored Americans – is a damning indictment of American culture, but here we are. Add it to the pile of such indictments here in 2025.

A couple of years ago I had an interim boss who was a lot of fun to have around. She was good at the job and she was even better at walking that fine line that interim bosses always have to walk between not trying to micromanage the people already doing the work or make sweeping changes in a limited-time situation, on the one hand, and being firmly and unambiguously in charge on the other. That takes talent. Plus she was always a good person to talk with. We were all hoping she’d stay on, but she’d already retired at least once by then and we ended up just fine with the new permanent boss after she left.  

She and her wife celebrated their ten-year anniversary this year – a direct outcome of the Obergefell decision – and this was their party. Of course we went.

It was a grand and lovely time, it has to be said. There were all sorts of interesting people there and we found some friends to hang out with as well. There was good food and drink. I got to see my first drag show, and it was interesting – I’m not sure whether I’ll ever go out of my way to go to another one but I enjoyed it and I don’t see what all the anguish and panic over these shows is for. If you like camp you’ll like this, and it went over very well with a crowd that ranged in age from middle school to well past retirement. People need to find better hobbies than persecuting harmless entertainment.

It was a fundraiser event, of course, so there was a 50/50 raffle. We’re in the midwest. There will always be a 50/50 raffle. I spent seven years selling 50/50 raffle tickets down at Local Businessman High School for the theatrical productions that Oliver and Lauren worked on (“Tickets! Gluten-free low-fat tickets! One size fits all! The quality goes in before the name goes on! Get your tickets here!”) so I know the drill. You could also just make donations, which of course people did.

One of the highlights of the evening for me was meeting Jim Obergefell, who is a friend of my former boss and her wife. It turns out that he is a lovely and gracious person to talk with about a great many things. Hot sauce, for example.

I hope that he did not mind this middle-aged straight guy fanboying him at intervals during the evening, but in my defense it is not often that you get to meet someone you consider a hero. He has earned a place in the history of American civil rights, and for that he should be recognized and honored. And, it seems, occasionally (politely) fanboyed.

He gave a short presentation describing the events that led up to and followed the Supreme Court’s decision in his case, and it is striking how often being a hero comes from just wanting simple things. To be treated with dignity. To be someone’s lawfully wedded spouse. To want the things that people should have without having to fight for them. To fight for them anyway because someone has to.

It turns out that he is also an ordained minister and my boss and her wife had asked him to officiate for them to renew their vows, and when my former boss asked the crowd if any other couples wanted to join them in this, Kim and I decided we were in.

There were a lot of couples up there, and it was a brief and lovely ceremony in the middle of a larger event, and sometimes that’s all you need.

Kim and I have been married for almost thirty years now. Marriage equality has existed in the US for ten. At this point I feel I have a very good handle on the state of our marriage both before and after the Obergefell decision. There’s plenty of data. And it turns out that recognizing the right of other Americans to marry has never, not once, threatened our marriage.

Marriage is not a limited resource, like strawberry jam, to be spread ever more thinly as the world makes more toast until it disappears. It is instead something that grows as it is shared.  And that is an unmitigated good, for those who wish to share in it.

Europe 25: We Return Home

All good things must come to an end, and eventually it was time for me and Kim to return to our regularly scheduled lives, already in progress. Lauren, however, was just beginning her adventures, though she would be leaving Sweden more or less at the same time we did so she came with us to the airport.

Our flight left very early that morning – long before we were accustomed even to waking up on this trip – and the Airport Math (“let’s see … flight leaves at … and we have to get there how much earlier? … and it’s how long of a ride? … so we have to wake up … oh … oh, my…”) meant that we weren’t going to be getting much sleep that night.

This is us at 3:30am, getting ready to leave Mats and Sara’s home.

Yes, it really is that bright out at 3:30am in June in Sweden. Yes, the sun set sometime not long before midnight as well. Sweden is pretty far north, and that matters when it comes to this sort of thing. Sara did get up to see us off, which was lovely, though Frieda took care of that the night before so she could avoid getting up at that hour with a clear conscience. This is called forethought, and it is to be encouraged.

Mats generously drove us to the airport, which was about an hour away. His job is out in that same general direction so at least he wasn’t going too far out of his way, and it was lovely to have the time with him. There’s not much traffic on the roads at that hour and we made good time, and soon enough we were at Arlanda.

We said goodbye to Mats and went in to find our gate. Lauren’s flight left about an hour and a half after ours from a different gate, so we said our goodbyes there and wished her well in her travels. It would be more than two months before we saw her again! She has graciously allowed me to tell my side of that story here in a future post, so watch this space. 

Getting through security is the same pretty much everywhere these days – intrusive, time consuming, and vaguely funny if you’re in the right mood, which very few people going through security are. Kim ended up in a line with a trainee screener who spent a fair amount of time searching her bag for playing cards, we think, though in the end all she found was gum. Not sure why either of these things is worth an extra search – perhaps playing poker is forbidden above a certain altitude now? it certainly wouldn’t be the weirdest or least useful restriction that has been placed on air travelers these days – but there you have it.

Secured, we headed into the terminal proper where we found pastries and beverages at the only open restaurant, after which Kim went hunting for Pikman Blooms in the terminal while I spent some time just watching the people go by.

Our flight to Munich left right on time and we got there without incident and then – as those of you who have ever flown through Munich already know – the Long Trek started. We had to get from the G gates to the L gates for our next flight – a process that involved stairs, escalators, long hallways, security checks, and a tram and never actually left the terminal. It took about 20 minutes. The last time we did this I ended up stymied by the automatic passport readers in the security line, but for some reason they worked just fine for me this time. I’ll take it.

There was some down time at the gate, which I used to get a proper lunch from the little food truck by the gate. The next flight would be long and tiring and I know they do their best but there is just something about food on planes that makes you wish you’d eaten beforehand, so when the opportunity arises you should take it.

From there it was on to Chicago, which for some reason always feels like it is about twice as long of a flight as it actually is. You can see the clock on your phone slow down to a crawl. The sun freezes in the sky. Children are born, grow up, marry, and fade off into old age. Pinkerton does not return.

One of the most infuriating things about living in 2025 as an American is that I now have to protect myself from my own government. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves have made it policy now that you can be harassed, denied entry, or even jailed simply for having opinions that they find objectionable, and speaking as a goddamned American patriot who is proud of having opinions that Fascists find objectionable I find it unforgiveable that I need to think about things like locking down my phone at the border in order to avoid having some jackbooted ICE thug keep me from going back into my own country and sleeping in my own bed.

But you do what you have to do to secure your phone from illegal search and seizure and – at least in my case – trust in the fact that as a straight white man I have Privilege Armor that is thick enough to protect me from much of the Fascism so far. That, by the way, seems to be thinning rapidly here in September so watch your back, but I’m already here so I’ve got that going for me.

“Land of the free” my ass.

If I suddenly stop blogging for an extended period, you’ll know why.

On the plus side, US Customs now has a little app that – as much as I hate apps in general and on principle – does actually make getting through border control a lot faster and easier. You get it up and running – or, in this case, Kim gets it up and running because I cannot be trusted with such technological tasks – and answer a few questions (“Do I have anything to declare? Oh, son, yes, yes, a thousand times yes – so, so much, in fact – but no contraband so we can just skip that step”) and you’re on your way.

Our original plan was to have Oliver pick us up at O’Hare, but with his foot in a boot there would be no driving for him for some time, so we had to resort to our backup plan of taking the bus back to Our Little Town. They’ve moved the bus station out to the rental car area now, and to get there you get on a tram and ride on out while large men in uniforms stand by the doors and shout directions at you. I was just happy that they were doing so in a language I understood, for the first time in weeks.

It's actually a nice station since they’ve redone it.

The next task was to buy tickets and here we ran into the same fact that I learned in 2004 when Kim and I took our first trip overseas together, which is that the US is always about five years behind Europe when it comes to payment methods. I remember being surprised by the idea of chips in credit cards, for example, and now they’re here too. In the weeks since the Florentine jackals had stolen my wallet I’d gotten used to paying for things with my phone – something I’d previously resisted but which I now stand corrected and feel okay with. But we couldn’t pay for the bus tickets that way, and the online payment system took quite a few tries before it would accept Apple Pay and for a while we were wondering whether we’d have to walk home but eventually it worked out fine and we got on the bus.

Kim’s mom had been staying with Oliver since he broke his foot so she came out to pick us up at the bus station in Our Little Town and we walked into our home about 20 hours after we’d woken up in Sweden. Modern travel is astonishingly fast by historical standards, which is something I try to impress on my students when we talk about distances and explorations and migrations. But that’s still quite a day.

For dinner we went to Culver’s for cheeseburgers because MURCA, and it was good.

We had a lovely time on this trip. We saw fantastic places and shared meals and experiences with good people. There are a lot of stories to remember and treasure.

It was good to go away. It was good to come back. It will be good to go away again.

Europe 25: Street Art in Stockholm

One of the things that I enjoy doing when we travel is looking for the public art – the statues and various artworks that are out there in the streets making the cities more interesting. Stockholm has its share of this, but it’s different from the cities of southern Europe.

There’s very little graffiti in the areas of Stockholm where we were, for example, despite there being a lot of it in the touristy areas of Porto and Florence. I’d say that graffiti was a southern European thing except that Paris is full of it too so I’m not sure what the dividing line is other than that Stockholm falls on the other side of it.

Mostly what Stockholm has for public art is sculpture, and it comes in a wide variety of forms.

My favorites were the animals. You had the standard lions, for example.

But the the one that stood out was the Homeless Fox. I’m sure that it is meant as social commentary and it’s hard not to feel a certain sympathy when looking at it, but there is also just something ridiculous about a fox in a blanket when you get down to it and that is strangely appealing.

There are also many, many statues of people, some of whom I think we were expected to know.

St. George, for example, is pretty well known and he is helpfully a) depicted fighting a dragon, which is generally what he is famous for these days, and b) labeled.

King Gustaf III makes an appearance.

As does King Karl X Gustav, who seems to have spotted something of interest off to his right and wants to share that with us. It probably has something to do with the Danes, with whom he did not get along.

On a smaller note, this plaque depicting the Swedish painter Carl Larsson sits right about where the street scene that I use for my computer desktop is, and it was interesting to see the connection there.

Apparently August Blanche was a journalist. I suspect he was a good one, to have gotten a monument on a leafy boulevard in downtown Stockholm.

Evert Taube was mainly known as a musician during his lifetime, according to the brief internet search that I just did. He seems like someone whose music would be interesting.

Sometimes the statues are just there and you either know who is being depicted or you don’t. The first one struck me as vaguely Indian through it’s possible this is just someone sort of medieval as fashions change and I have no better explanation for it anyway. The second one probably does have a name and if we were on the other side of him we’d have seen it, but from our vantage point he just looked like a guy waggling his privates at the tourists and really who hasn’t been tempted to do that? Even as a tourist I understand that urge. The helmet was a nice touch, though.

There are a lot of more abstract ones that aren’t meant to be anyone in particular at all. They’re just people. This one was done by the same artist who put the big gold statue in the Piazza della Signoria outside of the Uffizi in Florence, for example.

Whenever I see a sculpture like this one I like to assume that the subject started out with a full complement of limbs and cart pieces and has just had a day full of spiraling misfortunes but they keep on keeping on because what else are you going to do?

I suspect that Sven Lundqvist was the sculptor who created both of these works, though only the top one was labeled that I saw. It’s called Tungviktare (Heavyweights) and it’s right outside of the Jerusalem Kebab and Café. It’s easy to miss – it’s only about a meter tall including the pedestal and it’s kind of tucked away behind a building – but it’s adorable. I’m not sure where the other one was other than somewhere in Gamla Stan.

If you’re looking for Carmen San Diego, she’s in Stockholm. She does seem to be looking for a way out, so if you want to find her you’d better hurry.

I think architecture went downhill when they stopped putting goofy little things like this on the public buildings. Minimalism is quick and easy, but it gets sterile after a while. Sometimes it’s fun just to look up and realize that something weird is looking back down at you.

Heroic Comrade Mermaid and Husband Will Protect You, Good Citizen. It is a service they provide.

We stumbled into this one on our way from somewhere to somewhere else and it was worth stopping for a bit to try to figure out just what was going on here. I don’t think we succeeded, but the effort was well spent.

Sometimes the art can just be rather abstract, such as this tower-sort-of-thing in the middle of a large fountain. It felt like my cell service should have been better when I was next to it, but it did have a certain charm to it nonetheless.

It’s nice when the metro stations get decorated as well. This is what you see when you come off the train platform at Huddinge and head down toward the exits.

And if you are headed into the big metro station in Stockholm, in the corner of the plaza is this sculpture. It’s designed to be a place where people can sit for a bit and it’s always a lovely thing when art and everyday life merge like that. We passed it many times on our travels in and out of the city and there was usually someone there.

But not all public art in Stockholm is sculpture. Some of it is painted. If you go into the metro station in Stockholm City the various levels are sort of color-coded (our level was blue) and they’re nicely decorated as well so it’s interesting to walk along to get your train.

The Ocean Bus seemed interesting. Not interesting enough for us to buy tickets to get on, mind you, but certainly interesting enough to pause as it rumbled by.

And there are little things here and there, things that you might miss if you weren’t looking right at them. There’s this streetlight, for example.

And this street sign, which someone has decorated appropriately though I hope nobody alerts the House of Mouse because their lawyers are a notably humorless bunch.

Art is everywhere if you think to look for it, and that is one of the things that keeps us all human in these parlous times. 

News and Updates

1. The thing I miss most about the Biden years was that for a brief shining moment politics was once again boring. The US had competent, sane leadership that spent time on actually solving problems rather than creating more of them, and whatever issues I might have had with their actual decisions I knew that the republic would still be there in six months. None of that is true today. I’d really like to focus on my own little world right now – finish my blogging about this summer’s travels, spend the time I need to spend writing a presentation I’m scheduled to deliver in three weeks, get my classes prepped and ready, grade assignments, and so on. But the increasingly direct and open movement toward Fascism and violence being engineered by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves cannot be ignored. They have declared war – literally, that’s their word for what they’re doing – on their fellow citizens, and it is the solemn duty of every American patriot to resist.

2. But even during times of war, life goes on and should be recognized.

3. We had our family Labor Day event on the Saturday before the holiday because that’s when people could come. Holidays happen whenever you have time for them, and we gathered at my brother-in-law Justin’s house for smoked meats and other tasty foods, conversations, and general good times. We picked up Lauren along the way and she made her first appearance to the extended family since she returned from her summer travels and shared some of her stories. We’re already planning for next year.

4. That meant that the actual Labor Day was kind of quiet, and after a busy summer and a tumultuous year in general that was a welcome thing.

5. Kim and I have reached the point where we are starting to make serious plans for retirement. We met with the Financial Guy a couple of times in August, and while this isn’t imminent we are thinking about when exactly it will happen and trying to get ready for it. My problem is that I have no idea what I’d do if I get to that point, other than that it would be less than what I’m doing now and probably involve more traveling and getting back to a few long-delayed projects. We have one of those books about retirement goal conversations and I have to say that so far my contributions have been pretty minimal. There’s an old cartoon that I can’t seem to find right now that has a group of bank robbers in a vault, completely surrounded by police pointing guns at them, and the leader – clearly responding to a question from one of his colleagues – is saying, “I don’t know. I didn’t think we’d get this far.” And that’s about where I am on this. I’ll have to work on it.

6. Our barbecue grill tried to burn itself down the other day. I managed to shut off the propane before it became a much bigger problem and the flames went out fairly quickly after that, but the main temperature knob melted off before I could get things resolved. I have no idea how old this grill is – at least ten, maybe twenty years – so it doesn’t owe us anything at this point. But we’ll have to look at the end-of-summer sales to see if there is anything that looks interesting to replace it. In the meantime there will be no further cookouts for a while.

7. I’m trying to whittle down my tea supply these days, as it has gotten slightly out of hand, and I found an old tin of looseleaf tea labeled “Phoobsering,” and how can you not love that? Much to my surprise it was still good, and this morning I finished it off. Progress.

8. We went to see Spinal Tap II yesterday as a break from the horrors of American existence and it was well worth seeing. Most of the original cast came back – the ones who didn’t, as far as I can tell, had mostly passed away and couldn’t – and there were a lot of really fun cameos, some of which I wouldn’t have caught if we hadn’t watched the original the night before to get ready for it. It did a good job of capturing some of the silliness and set-piece comedy routines of the original, with more than a few callbacks to some of the best bits, while still being its own thing. Perhaps it is because I am older now than I was when I first saw the original at the TLA in Philadelphia in 1985, but I noticed an undercurrent of melancholy that I’d missed before. The original, for all its spot-on satire of the music industry of the day, was at its core about what it means for men to be friends and the sequel picked up on that theme and carried it into old age. These guys are relics now – holdovers from an era that has long vanished. They’ve moved on with their lives and then get pulled back into it, fairly unwillingly, where they have to fight battles that weren’t worth being won the first time. They’re at the age where they’re looking back, thinking of legacies, and summing things up rather than making things anew, and that’s a complicated age to be playing songs like “Big Bottom.” It’s a fun movie that works well as a lightweight comedy, but there’s more to it if you look and I think that’s a mark of a good film.

9. Down at Home Campus we are transitioning into several major new software packages all at once and it’s going … well, it’s going. People are putting a lot of work into making it all happen and it’s mostly happening but not quite. One of my several bosses has already cautioned us to examine with a fine-toothed comb every paycheck since June to check for errors and Kim – who isn’t even part of that subunit of the Overarching System – has already found some big ones when she did the same. I’ve found some small ones. And thus the depleted state of our finances makes more sense. Technology: what doesn’t quite work.

10. We had a lovely autumn and now it’s summer again. At least the vegetables like it. We harvested the first of the Nardello peppers the other day, for example. Nardello peppers were developed in Ruoti, the little hilltop town in Basilicata where my Italian ancestors are from, and this spring they were being sold at Trader Joe’s (and perhaps they are still!). We bought some, and then Kim decided to plant some of the seeds for the garden and they sprouted up nicely. They’re a long red pepper with no heat whatsoever and they’re really good. A little bit of Ruoti here in Wisconsin!

Thoughts on the Current Crisis

I do not condone political violence.

Morality aside – because if I have to take the time to make a moral argument that killing someone over politics is a problem then we might as well stop here – it is at best ineffective. Movements and ideologies rarely rest on one individual, and shooting one guy isn’t going to change anything. The Civil Rights Movement didn’t stop when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by some right-wing asshole. Charlie Kirk’s neo-Fascist movement won’t stop because he was assassinated by some right-wing asshole either. All those time-travel stories about going back and assassinating Hitler to stop the Holocaust? Yeah, not worth the paper they’re printed on. It doesn’t work that way.

At worst it is counterproductive. If you’re developmentally stunted enough to try this tactic, whatever your goals are you can rest assured that the people on the other side will be baying for vengeance before the body hits the ground and the iron rule of warfare is that once the bullets start flying nobody has any idea where things will end up except that a whole lot of people are going to get hurt and most of them had nothing to do with the original problem. Congratulations – you played yourself and everyone else and now the rest of us have to clean up the bodies. Fuckwit.

As a tool, political violence is something best left to the stupid, the fanatical, and the morally bankrupt.

But neither do I mourn Fascists.

Let’s be blunt here – Charlie Kirk was an asshole of the first order. He openly hated anyone who wasn’t exactly like him – straight, white, heterosexual, cis-male, right-wing – and flatly declared that gun murders were an acceptable price for other people to pay in order to preserve his access to shiny boom toys. The fact that he didn’t think he would be the one to pay that price doesn’t change the fact that he was willing to sacrifice other people for it. He founded organizations whose main goals were to persecute anyone who disagreed with him or dared to be something he didn’t like, and he actively sought to harm others. He was a misogynist, a white supremacist and the sort of dandified thug who dresses nice and speaks clearly but is all the more brutal and dangerous because of it. He devoted his life to selling bigotry and violence to the stupid and the fact that the culture he helped to create is ultimately the one that took him down is just one of those ironies.

This in no way justifies assassinating the bastard. But it does mean that I’m not going to waste time pretending he was anything other than a blot on the landscape.

And now we have a whole new problem.

The modern American right wing is a violent movement – the vast majority of politically motivated violence in the United States since 2000 has been committed by right-wingers; those are the statistics, and no amount of rhetoric will change that – and as predicted they are now baying for vengeance. They have blamed everyone but themselves for the situation we’re in. As soon as Kirk was killed they started shouting that it was the fault of the radical left (we haven’t had a radical left in this country for half a century and haven’t really had a left at all since the late 1980s), the Democrats, trans people, and any number of their other standard targets of blind hatred, and the fact that the little shit who killed Kirk turned out to be a straight white Christian man and, apparently, a member of a right-wing extremist culture called Groypers or something equally inane hasn’t stopped them.

There will be blood. They will make sure of it.

I’ll give Kirk credit for one thing, though – he was actively calling for the release of the entire unredacted Epstein files, something that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves have been fighting tooth and nail for months now. God alone knows what is in those files if they’re willing to fight that hard, and to be honest if I were a more conspiratorial sort of person I’d wonder if this was a false-flag operation they arranged to shut him up. We don’t need conspiracies to see people shot to death in this country, of course – we do that wholesale as a matter of routine. But it is an interesting thought.

I do not condone political violence. But I have been predicting it for a long time now, and the fact that it is here and I was right isn’t really the most satisfying victory in the world.

Watch your back, folks. It’s already ugly in the US. And the American right wing is going to do everything in its power to make that worse.

Europe 25: Stockholm, Day 6

On our last full day in Sweden we had braseola at breakfast in addition to the usual cheeses and meats and we spent some time getting boarding passes for our flights. You have to do that – the boarding passes, not the braseola. It would be nice if the braseola was required as well but it is prohibitively expensive here in the US so I suppose I’ll just have to go back to Lucca so I can buy more there. It is a burden I must bear, my good citizen. No need to thank me.

The plan for the day was that Kim and I would go back to Gamla Stan, where we had a couple of specific things that we wanted to do, and Lauren would head to the local gym for a bit and then join us later. Mats had to stay home to deal with some issues at a camp he is on the board for, and Sara and Frieda had plans of their own. In the end, though, it was just Kim and me, as Lauren’s eSim card had some troubles that very much needed to be sorted before we got on our respective planes so after her gym time she spent most of the day getting that resolved (with occasional input from us). It all worked out, but it would have been nice to spend the time with her since she was heading out on her own adventure once she left Sweden and it would be a while before we saw her next. So it goes.

We took the 41 train from Huddinge into Stockholm and walked from there into Gamla Stan. It was a grey, chilly day whose high temperature was only 13C/56F – perfect summer weather as far as I was concerned – and the city was a lovely sight as we made our way across the bridge and into the old town.

Our goal was the Nobel Prize Museum, which is exactly what it sounds like – a museum dedicated to the winners of the Nobel Prize, an award given annually by the Swedish Academy which is located right around the corner. Kim is a scientist, after all, and the Nobel Prize Museum was a fixed point for her – we were going to go to this before we left and that was all there was to it. Since it sounded interesting to me as well I was happy to go along.

The museum is right on the Stortorget, just across the plaza from the house with the cannonball and the other house with the white blocks in it. It’s not actually that big of a place – there’s a fairly large entry way that has some exhibits lining the edges and, off to the right, a small movie theater showing short films about various winners on a continuous loop and beyond that a children’s exhibit. Straight ahead from the entryway there’s a big main room with more exhibits. Overhead is a track full of banners showing photographs and names of past winners, and these slowly migrate around like plastic-wrapped dresses on an old-fashioned dry-cleaner’s hanger system. We were there for maybe an hour and a half and we pretty much saw everything there was to see about the place.

On the right as you walk in there’s a giant replica of the Nobel Prize medal hanging on the wall, and you can take selfies there if you want. Of course we did that. Why on earth would we not?

We watched a couple of the short movies and explored the children’s section before heading back to the main exhibit hall where we wandered around looking at the various displays.

One of the more fascinating things about the place is that they usually manage to get winners to donate something personal to display. It’s interesting to see what they choose – everything from t-shirts to signed chairs from the Nobel banquet that they hold every year.

I will admit that this particular donation saddened me a little bit. This is almost exactly the calculator that I use every day – a bit newer actually, since mine is an 11C rather than the 15C. My grandparents gave me mine as a gift on the Christmas before I went off to college, back when I still thought I was going to be a math major (or perhaps a physics major – an idea that did not survive AP Physics), and it has been working faithfully now for over 40 years. When I think about it that way it shouldn’t surprise me that the newer model is in a museum now, but still. It was a bit of a shock. The days crawl, but the years fly.

One of my favorite displays was this one. I’m honestly not even sure what it was for, but in some sense that’s kind of irrelevant when you find yourself confronted with a display like this. You just have to soak it in and be glad you’re there to see it.

They funnel you through the gift shop when you leave, as all good museums do – you have to keep the lights on somehow, after all – and while I didn’t buy this on the grounds that I would have no room for it in my carryon, I did like the quote from a Nobel Prize winner.

By this point it was getting on lunchtime and we found our way to the Jerusalem Kebab and Café on one of the little side streets of Gamla Stan. It was really tasty, and very filling. I haven’t had a kebab since I got back to Wisconsin, and I have to say I miss it.

From there we walked around a bit. We passed by this place, which I remember as one of the first places we’d ever gone out to eat in Sweden back in 2004 when the kids were very young and so were we all.

They did not serve moose stew. That was a delicacy left to another place.

We found our way into a couple of bookstores, including one dedicated entirely to science fiction and fantasy books – a favorite place that we try to visit whenever we are there. It’s where Kim bought the new Game of Thrones book when we were there in 2012, and no subsequent volume has been published since. The European edition (in English, thankfully) was printed on slightly nicer paper than the American edition which meant that it was about half again thicker, and that was fun getting home as I recall. It’s still on my bookshelf, patiently waiting for the next one in the series.

We also just sort of wandered around seeing what there was to see in general.

Kim’s other mission on this day was to find a little ceramic house to go with the ones we already had at home. Ten years ago this would have been simple, but here in 2025 it was a lost cause. Most of the souvenir shops in Gamla Stan are either owned by the same people (we noticed several that had the same cashiers working there) or must get their supplies from the same places, because everything we looked at along these lines was the wrong scale, either far too big or far too small. We stopped at a lot of different places but never did find what Kim was looking for.

Eventually we found ourselves sitting on a bench at the top of the stairs that lead down to the plaza where you can go into the train station, just resting and watching the world go by. Kim said there was another store she wanted to try across the way and I said I’d be happy to wait for her on the bench, so she headed out while I sat there on the bench enjoying the people passing through and scrolling aimlessly on my phone, as one does.

This is how I ended up on Swedish television.

Or will, eventually. I think.

As I was sitting there, I noticed a young woman approach and sit down on the steps just in front of me. Normally this would not be particularly notable in a public place like that, but she was followed by a guy with a backpack-mounted camera, another guy with a boom mic, and a third guy with one of those clapper things that they use to announce scene takes.

Ah, I thought to myself. My brother and sister-in-law worked in television for years – I know what’s going on here. So I sat there, quietly scrolling and trying not to be That Guy mugging for the camera in the background of every live television shot you ever see. The woman would walk over, sit down, pretend to scroll on her phone for a minute or two, and then get up and walk away in front of me. They repeated this maybe three or four times before they wrapped things up, and I suspect that my feet are going to be nearly famous in the background of this shot someday.

I asked them about it when they were done, and they said it was for a made-for-television-movie about the Swedish education system that would probably air next year, so a genuine blockbuster event as these things go.

I’m gonna be on TV!

Eventually Kim came back – without ceramic houses in hand, unfortunately – and we headed into the station, stopping by a bakery on the way to pick up some sweet buns for that evening. It took a while to get home as the train was delayed, but we made it out to Huddinge and Sara came to pick us up there.

The evening was a quiet one, which was nice. We hung out with everyone at the table for a while, and even the cat joined in.

We made dinner and then continued to hang out. We packed for the flights out of Stockholm the next day. We said our goodbyes in case Sara and Frieda wanted to sleep in, since we would be on the road by about 3:30am the next day. It was a peaceful and lovely way to spend the last night of our trip.