Our Trip to Canada: Getting to Montreal

We thought about going back to Europe this summer. It’s been a great few years here that way, seeing parts of the world that I never thought I would see and then going back to do it again on a regular basis. If you have the chance, you should do it. It is the single best way there is to open your eyes and heart to the fact that there is a larger world out there beyond your experiences, one that has much to teach you if you will watch and listen.

“Travel isn’t always pretty,” said Anthony Bourdain. “It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”

Most of our travel experiences have been just fine, though. We’ve met some lovely people, seen some beautiful places, and generally returned richer for having done both, at least in a non-financial sort of way. And as for the finances, well, a) it’s not nearly as much as people think, and b) we don’t have anywhere near enough vices to drain our bank account properly so this is how we choose to spend our money.

It works for us.

There are limits even so, however, and when the price of airfare to Europe doubled in the two days we were looking into the matter, thanks to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump losing his illegal and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran, we decided that perhaps we’d set our sights a bit nearer to home this year and save the more far-flung destinations for another time. Because there will be another time, at some point. That’s just how we roll these days.

In the end we decided that we’d visit Geoff and Dave, who had recently moved from San Francisco to Montreal. Neither of us had ever been to Quebec, and it’s been a while since we’ve seen Geoff and Dave anyway, so this sounded like a good plan.

We had a grand time of it, thanks.

We’ve got the prep for this sort of thing pretty much down now. Passports located. One carry-on and one personal item each because there will be laundry when we get there. Places to stay and flights booked thanks to Kim because she enjoys that part of it and leaving it to me would just not end well for anyone. A bit of research to figure out things we might want to do or see, though in this case not all that much since we were visiting family there and Dave had lived in Montreal for 17 years at one point so he knew it better than we would ever figure out. Friends who would take care of the critters at home. We even worked it out with Lauren so she could have my car while we were away and then drop it off at the bus station for us when we returned. We know how to do this travel thing.

Still tough to get out of bed at 5:40am, though.

We arrived at O’Hare and zipped through security fairly quickly, though they did search my personal bag by hand since I was carrying two packages of a particular cheese that Geoff hadn’t been able to find in Montreal. “It’s cheese,” I told them as they turned it over and back in their hands. They stared at me with the look you would expect from someone you had just told that you were running cheese into Canada, decided that this was Too Much Weird Shit to be dangerous, and let me go.

Everything is biometric now, by the way. They don’t really need your boarding passes anymore. You just show them your passport and smile pretty for the camera and you’re good to go. Sort of. The camera is a bit fussy, so I got the “Take your glasses off, sir” comment that made me think of the comedian Ismo who has a routine about how in the UK “sir” means that you have achieved a high honor but in the US “sir” means that you have made a small mistake, and at that point I had to try very hard not to laugh because Security Personnel are not paid to have a sense of humor and they generally respond by not having one and if you think something is funny they will get annoyed and these are people you do not want to annoy because then they will have to do Security Things and nobody involved in that process really wants that to happen.

So it’s just photos and databases these days and if I had any privacy left to lose I’d probably be annoyed but welcome to the New Panopticon. You know, for the kids.

Eventually we made it onto the plane and I think that if you’re going to have a window seat on a plane it should come with a window. Stands to reason. Mine, however, did not. There was one for the row ahead of me, but the person sitting there was resolutely uninterested in opening the shade for it. I suppose we should have switched seats, but it was a very small plane and once you sit down and buckle in on a plane that small you realize that no, you’re good where you are for the next couple of hours, thanks.

I had my book. I was fine.

Montreal’s airport is very nice and we found the Customs area fairly quickly. It’s all touchscreens now, and you spend about five to ten minutes pushing various virtual buttons to let them know that you’re not dangerous beyond simply being an American and then occasionally asking questions of the helpful uniformed staff nearby when none of the buttons seem to fit your situation. I did have to declare my cheese, it turned out, which sent me off into another room that Kim – not carrying any cheese – did not have to enter. I found an official looking person behind a station and he asked me what I had and I said “cheese” and he gave me much the same look that the security people in O’Hare had given me and sort of waved me through with a disdainful flick of his hand.

And suddenly we were free to move about Canada.

We found Dave by the exit and hopped onto a nearby bus, which now makes 22 cities in which I have been on public transportation, evenly divided between US and non-US cities. I am inordinately fond of this fact, and that probably tells you more about me than you need to know.

The bus took us into the city and then we got onto the metro. Subway cars in Montreal have big rubber tires rather than the usual steel wheels you find on railcars, and we took that to our station.

From there it was a short walk over to our hotel, a lovely place that gave us the same room number as my freshman dorm room back in college so that was easy to remember. It had a great view of the McGill University area of the city, which is a fact that will come back in the next post.

After a short rest we headed off to Geoff and Dave’s apartment, ready to begin our trip in earnest.

Thoughts on the Current World Cup

I’m working on the posts about our recent visit to Quebec, but in the meantime we’ve been watching a lot of the World Cup and I have thoughts about this.

1. It’s been a few days now and I still haven’t quite gotten over Cabo Verde v. Argentina. That was a master class on how the game should be played, and it’s not an accident that even Argentinians have applauded Cabo Verde’s efforts. Lionel Messi gave his game jersey to Vezinho, the Cabo Verde goaltender, as a sign of respect. My favorite thing to come out of it was an anime of the contest that was both really funny and absolutely in awe of the clash. Sometimes things work out the way they’re supposed to work out on the pitch.

2. On the other hand, Paraguay’s team should go hide in shame and the referee should be banned from future matches. Their kicking, punching, and general asshole behavior was an international disgrace and the fact that the ref encouraged it was criminal. I’m not a great fan of the French team – dynasties are boring and they play like they expect things to be handed to them on a platter – but by the first hydration break I was cheering for them to rid the World Cup of that bunch of losers.

3. Watching Erling Haaland come charging down the field gives me an appreciation for what the monks at Lindisfarne felt back in 793CE.

4. The reinstatement of US striker Folarin Balogun is one of the more corrupt things to have happened at a World Cup in a long time. On the one hand, I don’t think his red card was deserved. It was a bang-bang play without malice on his part, and it should have been a yellow. On the other hand, though, bad calls are part of the game and once a red card is given it can’t be taken away in a World Cup. The last time that happened was before I was born, which is an unconscionably long time ago. The fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump put pressure on FIFA – one of the most corrupt organizations on the planet – to make this happen is grotesque and does nobody any favors, not even the USMNT. It’s a shame – Balogun is a remarkably talented player with a bright future and the US team is objectively better with him, but at this point any victory the US scores from here on out will be irrevocably tainted.

5. My social media algorithms are still pointing me toward the various World Cup visitors and their experiences in the US (and, occasionally, Mexico and Canada) and it remains one of the most heartwarming things I’ve seen in a long time. I love going to other places and marveling at the ordinary things there – grocery stores, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, little public spaces, street scenes, and so on. It’s been wonderful watching people do that here, reminding us that this can be a great place if we let it.

6. I think the World Cup has been a cultural moment that way. Yes, the US has a lot of problems and all of them are being intentionally made worse by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves, and yes those wankers are deeply embedded in American culture and history, but they are only part of the story and not the biggest part. A lot of people – Americans and visitors – are reawakening to the notion that there are other facets of American culture and we don’t have to live or be the way Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves want us to live or be. We as Americans definitely needed that.

7. At one point while we were up in Quebec we were wandering around Montreal wondering why there were so few people outside when it occurred to us that the Canadians were playing one of their games, and that is what an event like this can do to a place.

8. Someday the champion will come from somewhere other than Europe or South America. Today is not going to be that day.

9. One of the things that I truly love about watching soccer at this level is the fact that these players – objectively some of the best in the world at what they do – screw up so often. Passes go awry. Shots get sent into orbit. Corner kicks go every which way but where they’re supposed to go. I find this comforting in a way, as I go about my daily life trying to do things correctly. If these guys, who are highly skilled and generally highly paid for being so, can screw up the one thing they’re good at so often, then perhaps I’m not doing so bad.

10. The one thing that I always keep in mind at these tournaments is that the players on the field know and understand each other far better than they do anyone else in that stadium, and certainly far better than anyone else in that stadium knows or understands them. They’re part of a very small population who does this at that level, they are often teammates outside of events like these, and they know what everyone on the field is thinking and feeling in a way that none of us watching ever will. This explains a lot of what happens on the field, both during and after games, I think.

11. I have no idea how I will fill the hole in my evenings once this is all over. I suspect I’ll figure it out, though. I did it pretty well for many years, after all. But I will miss all this.

Further News and Updates

1. We are back after a lovely visit with Geoff and Dave up in Quebec. We saw quite a bit of Montreal and Quebec City, ate a lot of very good food, and generally had a grand time hanging out with them. There will be bloggage soon, oh yes there will.

2. It was really nice to be in a country where the government doesn’t actively hate the majority of its citizens. The US used to be like that. We can be like that again.

3. Despite being exceptionally well cared for while we were away, the cat has been pathetically (and heartwarmingly) grateful to have us back. The rabbit remains indifferent, however, as rabbits will.

4. I have now seen World Cup games with play-by-play announcing in three different languages this year, and I have to say that it doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference for following the game. The Spanish announcers seem to be having the most fun, though.

5. Tonight’s Cabo Verde vs. Argentina game was easily the most entertaining game I’ve seen this World Cup. I suspect soccer fans are going to be talking about that one for a very long time.

6. Is tomorrow really the Fourth of July? There should have been a party to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the formal approval of the Declaration of Independence, which is the date the US traditionally gives for its origin as a nation instead of a disparate set of colonies. Apparently the Smithsonian had a party planned out, in fact. Instead, all that taxpayer money got hijacked by the grifters in the current administration and put toward the tackiest tin-horn-dictator slobberfest this nation has ever seen. I’m glad nobody is going and I hope that the people who organized it are mad about that.

7. My goal tonight is to watch more soccer, nosh a bit on random food (because neither of us are up for making any real dinner or eating same), and turn the AC down to Deep Freeze because a) yes it got hot in Quebec too, and b) neither of the last two places we slept had much in the way of air conditioning. First world problems require first world solutions.

8. I did a very poor job of keeping up with my email while I was away and I have to say I’m sneakily proud of this. Vacations should not involve work emails.

9. I don’t know why Our Little Town decided to have its big Independence Day party last weekend, while we were away, rather than on the actual Fourth of July, which is a Saturday after all. It seems a lost opportunity.

10. Tomorrow’s plans involve as little motion as possible and possibly grilling some hot dogs in honor of the day. Enjoy, y’all.

News and Updates

1. Happy Father’s Day to those who celebrate! I have done many things in my life that I am proud to have accomplished, but none greater than being a dad for Oliver and Lauren. 

2. Of course, I had a good role model.

3. I think we need to get up a petition to have Take Me Home, Country Roads declared the backup US national anthem, to be performed at all sporting and cultural events immediately following the official one. Everybody already knows the words, it’s a lot easier to sing even or especially when drunk, and judging from the World Cup crowds the rest of the world already believes it’s the national anthem anyway. Everybody claps after The Star-Spangled Banner because we’re glad it’s over and the game can start now, but we applaud Take Me Home, Country Roads because we like it.

4. Note: while it is also a great song, Old Town Road is a different composition.

5. I have managed to see a fair number of games in this World Cup so far. I saw the US beat Australia in a fairly convincing style. They look like an actual team out there, and they’re already through to the elimination rounds. I also saw the goaltending clinic put on by the Curacao goalie as that nation earned its first ever World Cup point, the sheer overwhelming force of the Netherlands against Sweden, and Cote d’Ivoire very nearly defeat Germany. I just finished watching Iran hold off Belgium for a 0-0 draw that was much more interesting than the score would indicate. It’s been a fun tournament on the field as well as in the streets.

6. If there is a better metaphor for the current American regime than the absolute fiasco that is the Reflecting Pool in Washington DC – an own goal of staggering idiocy and utter predictability – I haven’t seen it. They took something that already worked, awarded a contract to “fix” it to an unqualified loyalist, ignored every scientific and engineering fact that could possibly be relevant to the project in order to cram it into an ideological box, went 1100% over budget only to see the shoddy work dissolve within days and now they’ve stationed the National Guard to keep Americans away from public taxpayer-owned land, they’re arresting people who get too close, and they’re blaming everyone but themselves for all of this. No wonder this administration lost a war against another country. They can’t even win against algae.

7. I spent a portion of yesterday hacking back the trumpet vines that threaten to absorb our fence every year. It turns out we still had a fence under all that greenery. I am always amazed by the sheer in-your-face exuberance the trumpet vines display despite or perhaps especially because of the fact that they’re clearly not wanted. Respect.

8. If you haven’t read KJ Parker’s books (Tom Holt’s alter ego) you’re missing out. I’m on Book 2 of the Saevus Corax trilogy – part of Parker’s ongoing “Charming Rogue” stories – and it’s reminding me of why I used to read all the time. Perhaps I’ll get back up on that horse after all.

9. It’s been a month since the semester ended and I’m not much further along on all of the various projects and tasks that I set for myself this summer than I was at graduation. I suppose I should have seen that coming, but still.

10. I keep looking out for the new 2026 coins but I find I rarely use cash anymore and nobody in the stores has any idea that there are new coins to be found. I am starting to suspect that the whole thing is a Reddit-fueled hoax. It would not be the first, I’m sure.

Fútbol, You Bet

It’s been pretty much all soccer all the time around here of late.

For one thing, Kim, I met Lauren in Madison to see our local professional team play Wednesday night. We’d gone a couple of years ago and enjoyed it, so we figured it would be a lovely evening and indeed it was, storms notwithstanding.

It’s been a stormy year here in Baja Canada, it has to be said. Apparently as of today Wisconsin has had over 280 severe thunderstorm or tornado warnings – warnings mean you’ve got one, while watches mean you could get one – and that’s more in the last four months than all of the previous fourteen years combined. So, yeah, we got that going for us.

Fortunately the severe thunderstorm and tornado passed just a bit south of us and cleared off before game time. We decided to have dinner at a nearby Tibetan restaurant before the game rather than get food at the stadium, though, since the restaurant had a roof and it was in fact raining at that point. It was really, really good food, so if you’re in Madison and looking for tasty Asian food I have a place to recommend. The owners are actually Nepalese, and we had a lovely conversation with them about the various cuisines of the region.

From there it was about a four-minute walk over to Breese Stevens Field where FC Madison plays, and with the earlier rain slowing down all the pre-game activities we even managed to get there before kickoff. The opponents were Fort Wayne, the referee was an idiot who lost control of the game early (which is why the Madison coach got red-carded in the 17th minute – there are certain words that are automatic cards in soccer, no matter how justified one is in using them, and if you use them twice in succession that’s two cards all at once), and in the end it was a hard-fought and entertaining 1-1 draw.

It was also Free Hat Night.

Of course, all of this comes as the 2026 World Cup gets up and running. This year it’s being hosted by all of the North American countries – Canada, Mexico, and the US – which means that it has made a bigger impression on Americans than usual. Most times you’d be hard pressed to find a dozen Americans in any given census tract who even knew what the World Cup was, let alone that it was happening, but since this time it’s spread out across the entire US and our neighbors it seems to have penetrated the zeitgeist a bit more than usual.

And that’s all to the good, I say. Yes, I understand that FIFA is one of the most corrupt organizations in the world, on a scale that rivals Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s kleptocratic tyranny, but it’s the most popular sport on the planet, these are the best male players in the world (the women get to do this next year), and you might as well enjoy the spectacle in this fallen world.

We’ve been watching some of the games as best we can, given the fact that both Kim and I are still gainfully employed – not always guaranteed in the higher education world – and they’ve been fun. We don’t get any of the English-language broadcasts, but fortunately Peacock – to which we already subscribe in order to watch Premier League games (and let us pause briefly for a moment of silence for my poor, extremely relegated Wolves) – carries the Spanish-language broadcasts and let me tell you those are a lot more fun even if, and perhaps especially if, you don’t actually speak the language.

Those guys get excited by the game.

I know only a very small amount of Spanish which is often enough for me to fight my way through something written or spoken slowly but there is no way I can keep up with a conversation at speed, let alone soccer commentary at a much higher speed. All of the words blend together and while I can pick out some words here and there (“pelota!”) and once in a while they throw in some strangely American-accented English (“English Premier League”) I mostly go by tone. When the words speed up more than usual and the tone starts to rise that means something exciting is happening. Or might happen. Or just happened. Or possibly that it’s Tuesday. Whatever. It keeps me on my toes.

I have to admit I was more than a little hesitant about the fact that the World Cup is being staged in the US under our current regime. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves have never once missed an opportunity to be petty, cruel, vindictive, immoral, or violently authoritarian, and their reaction to the World Cup has been of a piece with that.

They banned a Somali referee from coming to the US despite him being fully vetted as Not A Terrorist. Apparently the idea of Somalis in America was just too much for these Nativist clowns. They made it almost impossible for the Iranian team to compete, forcing them to stay in Mexico unless they are actually playing a game in the US and then leave US territory within minutes of the game ending. Don’t even get me started on the shabby treatment of Iranian fans or the fans of several other brown-skinned nations. They yanked the Uruguayan team off their bus and sicced sniffer dogs on them because somewhere one of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s minions read (probably in a comic book) that a lot of cocaine comes from one of those countries in South America and it might have been that one and they might be using their World Cup soccer team to smuggle it into the US because that’s obviously how that sort of thing works. It took formal protests to stop their plan to seed the World Cup stadiums with ICE thugs, and even now I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it anyway – those jackbooted Fascists seem to regard themselves as untouchable, much as the SS did until suddenly they weren’t.

So yeah, I had my fears.

And yet not only has it not worked out that way, at least so far, but also it has been an astonishingly restorative experience overall to watch the visiting fans discover so many of the things about the US that we ourselves have forgotten in the avalanche of deliberately cruel and divisive cultural politics over the last decade or so. It’s been a long few years recently – and a very long two years in particular – and to see these visitors experience what the US can actually be and should actually be has been astonishingly lovely.

For one thing, my fellow Americans have generally responded to these visitors with warmth and hospitality. The entire city of Lawrence, Kansas turned out to welcome the Algerian national team. New Jersey fans partied with Moroccan fans. There’s a marvelous video of a cop hyping up the Egypt fans while everyone was waiting for something or other. And lest you think this is limited to here, the love fest going on in Mexico with the Korean fans and team has been amazing. I’ve trained my various social media algorithms to show me all of these things, and if you haven’t you should. One of my favorites was a reel where someone interviewed three or four big, burly American men dressed entirely in flag outfits, all of whom were asked what they would say to the Iranian fans. “You are welcome here,” they said. “This event is meant to celebrate the world despite our government’s actions.” “The everyday American wants you to feel welcome.” “The World Cup is not about shutting people out.” This is what it should be, not the ginned-up hatred spouted by the current American regime, and to see it coming from these guys in particular was cheering.

One English visitor filmed his friend at a Mississippi BBQ place as they ordered ribs. When the ribs came one of them – in a proper English move, it has to be said – pulled out a knife and fork and the restaurant owner just said, “No” and taught him how to eat ribs properly. The stunned look of joy as the guy took his first bite was worth the entire video. BBQ has been a theme among the visitors, actually – there’s a lot of reels focusing on it. It’s something the US does very, very well and Americans have been happy to share it.

Visitors have posted videos of themselves walking into firehouses and getting tours of the stations, of walking around neighborhoods, of dancing in streets. It’s amazing.

As an American it has been lovely to see them enjoying so many of the things that we just take for granted.

The stores that we go to – Buc-cee’s, Target, 7/11, Walmart, Costco, Bass Pro Shops – that have had them marveling. The yellow school buses that many of them were convinced existed only in movies. Steam vents on city sidewalks. Wild squirrels. It’s all new to them and their reactions make me want to experience these things through their eyes.

The national parks and the open spaces.

The stadiums and all the excess that Americans devote to them – the bald eagle flight before the game, the warplane flyover, the admittedly odd tradition of everyone singing Sweet Caroline somewhere about three-quarters of the way through any game. Watching the future king of England singing along was an experience.

And the food. My god, do they love the food here. As someone who has traveled abroad and marveled at the food there, it is both amusing and deeply heartwarming to see people doing the same in this direction.

The Italian visitor frankly amazed at the idea of free refills on sodas (“I can refill this a thousand times?”). The corn bread. The boiled peanuts. The barbecue, all the time the barbecue. The machines that some fast-food places have that allow you to combine hundreds of kinds of soda and flavors (which admittedly took me a bit to get used to as well).

Ranch dressing. Do they not have this anywhere else in the world? Apparently not. I live in the midwest where people put ranch on everything including pizza so perhaps I’m a bit jaded and that, really is the point. All of this knocks the jaded right out of us and we see through their eyes and it is new and amazing like it was the first time we tried it.

I lost track of all the people flocking to their nearest Waffle House – admittedly an icon of American eating, an experience not to be missed, and a cultural keystone of regret, spectacle, and grease that defines so much of the American experience. You have to love Waffle House.

Texas Roadhouse also seems to be a favorite among the visitors – I’ve seen videos from Africans (who rarely specify their home country for some reason), Australians, French people, and British people talking about it. “I don’t know why Americans are so angry all the time,” said one. “You have Texas Roadhouse. If we had that back home we’d be walking around hugging people all day.”

As one American said, of course our food tastes good. We’re not here getting chronic diseases for nothing.

One of my personal favorites was a Japanese visitor who went to a Mexican restaurant in the US and found himself presented with chips and salsa, and I can’t even explain it in a way that does it justice so here it is in the original:

Some of the best things I’ve seen are just clips of the visitors enjoying themselves here.

The Dutch fans dancing their sideways dance.

Norwegians doing that rowing motion that they do, in the streets and up escalators.

Japanese fans meeting cowboys.

The Ecuadorians, who took over Philadelphia, sang in the El, and partied on the Art Museum steps though nobody told them about the Rocky Curse – no visiting team who puts their jersey on the statue of Rocky at the Art Museum wins their game, and they duly lost to Cote d’Ivoire. The Brazilians are there now, partying just as hard if not harder, but they’ve posted guards at the statue.

And, of course, the Tartan Army. “No Scotland, no party!” as the song goes. They sang with the Iraqi fans in the streets of Boston. They took over Fenway Park during a Red Sox game. They paraded through the streets – pipes and drums calling – thousands strong to get to Fenway. They literally drank Boston out of beer – one bar noted that they did three times the business they usually do on St. Patrick’s Day, and at a nearby liquor store when someone came in to buy a case of water they booed.

They also cleaned the park after they left, much as the Japanese fans did at the stadium where they played. That’s a class act. They even donated thousands to local charities in Boston and Providence where they were staying.

My favorite bit from the Tartan Army is that they have brought the Glasgow tradition of putting traffic cones on statues to America. It started with the statue of the Duke of York in Glasgow in the 1980s, and eventually the city stopped fighting it.

And now it’s here.

The thing is, all of this has been a balm to the American soul. We’ve had a long, hard decade of division, tyranny, and anger. We needed to see joy for a change. We needed to be reminded of who we can be when there is nobody actively working to rob us of that. To see and participate in community. Kindness. Service. Diversity. Welcome. Healing. We’ve been starved of that in the public sphere for so very long, and it took all of these outsiders, all of these visitors, to make us see what we’ve lost so we could find it again.

“The World Cup didn’t need us,” said one American on social media. “We needed the World Cup.”

I watched a video today where a guy from Boston talked about how his city had a whole different vibe now, joyous and oddly unified. It has been wonderful, he said, to see how great it could be if we had things like the World Cup more often to bring people together and bring them into the city to celebrate with each other, and it will be hard when it’s over because we’ve been reminded of how things can be better. “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days when you’re in them,” he said. “This feels like one of those times.”

We still have problems in the US. They haven’t and won’t magically go away because of the World Cup. We’re still ruled by a senile, corrupt pedophile and his cult of slaves. We just lost an illegal war of aggression that he started for no coherent reason. We still have a frightening degree of economic inequality, there are Fascist thugs wearing federal badges hauling the innocent away without due process, we have a racism problem that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough, and so on. None of these things have disappeared.

But it has been good to be reminded of who we can be, of who we are. That we can come together with kindness and community, that we can welcome the visitors and bring them into our lives in joyous celebration, and if we can do that here, if we can look into the mirror that is being held up to us by our World Cup visitors, we can do it elsewhere and we can do it when they’re gone.

We can be better than the last decade. We are better than the last decade. Sometimes you need people from outside to help you see that.

To all our visitors, thank you. Welcome to the United States. We will try to be good and kind hosts, to show you the best of our country and people, and send you home with cherished memories. We will try to carry that over into the rest of our lives and into our broader society. It may take some time. We will not completely succeed. But we will try.

A Trip Up North

The odometer on the minivan reached 200,000 miles this weekend, a milestone that we missed completely because we were actively driving at the time. I remember looking down and thinking, “Only a dozen miles to go!” and then a couple minutes went by and I looked down and thought, “Huh, now we’re six miles over,” and that was that. But now all of our vehicles have passed that milestone. We are the Car Whisperers. Or, more accurately, the guys over at the auto mechanic place are. But we’ll take it.

We hit this Big Round Number on the way home from spending the weekend in northern Wisconsin, up by Kim’s old stomping grounds. It’s pretty country if you enjoy rural areas, small towns, and wide-open spaces, though more often than not we’re heading up that way for somebody’s memorial service which does put a damper on things. But you go, because you pay your respects. And it’s good to go back to one’s roots.

There were actually two memorials, it turns out – one for Veronica and one for Lena, who died about four months apart. It was a rough year up there.

We drove up on Friday and found the little rental apartment with no problems. It was the right-hand side of a small house owned by an older Mennonite couple who were quite lovely to talk with. Despite being fairly new construction the place was clearly designed with 1986 in mind. The “late-Reagan floral with patterned couches” style – complete with an actual oak-stained computer desk with a hutch overhead and a pull-out keyboard holder underneath – is instantly recognizable to those of us who lived through it. But it was a great place to spend a night, clean and comfortable and very quiet, out there on the farm. We watched a storm roll in that night across the fields. We’d stay there again.

Kim’s parents and her brother Randall drove up for the memorial as well and we met them at the diner in Ladysmith before heading to the lobby of their hotel for further hanging out. It’s good to spend time with good people. Afterward Kim and I walked around the public park in the middle of Ladysmith, a place full of memories for her. You get to know people a bit if you spend time in their places.

The next day we headed over to Jump River for the memorial.

Jump River is an unincorporated town with two bars, a church, a store, and a dozen or so houses strung along the highway. At one point before everything got started Kim and I walked around the entire town, which took about fifteen minutes even if you include the random dog that tried to bite me (three cheers for sturdy pants, I say). Kim spent a good portion of her younger days in Jump River Rose’s bar, in fact, because in northern Wisconsin bars function as community centers as well as saloons and it had live music and dancing every weekend. Jump River Rose herself was a fixture when Kim was growing up and was apparently quite a character, as fixtures in small towns should be. According to reminiscences of some of the people at the memorial as well as several newspaper stories I just looked up, she could hold a 16lb maul at arm’s length for five minutes straight, smoked cigars as big as she was, swore like a stevedore and once threw a drunk through the front door. (“Sometimes you ain’t got time to open them,” she said.) She’s long gone now but the bar is still there. Every town needs its landmarks.

I grew up far away from Jump River, out on the east coast, and by “east coast” I do not mean Sheboygan the way people in Wisconsin do when they say “east coast.” Memorials were rather more formal where I grew up then they are in Wisconsin, and I was duly warned about this, perhaps to prevent me from defaulting to some combination of three-piece suit and cape, neither of which I own but wouldn’t it be something if I did? So I was expecting something more low-key than I had experienced in the memorial services of my youth though it did take me a second to adjust to the picnic format.  It has to be said that it was a very good time, though, all things considered. There were a lot of people to whom I was introduced as “And this is Kim’s husband, Dave,” and there were some lovely stories told about Veronica (whom I’d met once or twice) and Lena (whom I don’t think I’d ever met at all), and there was quite a tasty lunch afterward – the “funeral lunch” in Wisconsin being one of the nicer traditions I’ve run into since moving here.

We said our goodbyes and headed off to visit our friends Joe and Lisa, who had just moved into a new house where the backyard is full of deer and golfers. They’re both recovering from surgeries on top of trying to move, which is how I ended up spending a chunk of that evening putting together an entertainment center with an Allen wrench, because this entertainment center was made of depleted uranium and grief and there was no way two people recovering from various surgeries were going to moose that thing into existence. It looks nice and I am hopeful that my construction skills do not lead to it suddenly implode at a random time to be named later.

All four of us are fairly low-stress people and we had a relaxing time of it, Allen wrenches notwithstanding. There was much hanging out. We watched the Phillies beat the Brewers in a game where the final score looked like they were playing football. There were Aperol spritzes and at least one Dairy Queen run, which you can do in town. We had a good time.

It was an uneventful drive back down to Our Little Town Sunday afternoon, and we arrived to one very grateful cat, one deeply annoyed rabbit, and our own bed.

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.