One day a few weeks ago I was dining in the school lunchroom when a kid a table over suddenly began vomiting just as a first grade teacher was striding into the room to collect her class. She veered from her original course and, as she'd already been moving, arrived at the scene of the trouble before anyone else. From behind, she put one hand under each armpit of the puker and lifted him out of there before too much more could drip into his lap.

A picture of the 5-year-old Valley View student being detained by ICE Tuesday afternoon after school. According to our superintendent, the family has an open asylum case with a "no deport" order. Nevertheless, the pre-k student is "being held at a detention center in Texas." A report by the local CBS affiliate, here. And Sahan Journal, here. The picture, in the Sahan Journal piece, of his teacher wiping away tears while listening to district officials talk about her student at a press conference today, is just about more than I can tolerate.

Regarding the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, it's clear that people are going to believe (or say that they believe) whatever it pleases them to believe. It seems a short step from there to the claim that the shooting is essentially a "Rorschach Test" and that objective truth concerning the event doesn't exist: some will "interpret" the evidence this way, some that way, and there are only "interpretations," no truth.

I saw a Replacements tribute show at the Turf Club a week ago and have been listening to their records again ever since. My God. A friend and I like to play the game, Favorite album? Favorite song? For me, it's changed, and it will again, but tonight my answer for the first game is Tim. Notwithstanding the most common free association responses to "punk rock," so many of their songs are, um, …

At first glance, I thought the phone in her right hand was a cigarette, which is about the only thing that could have made for a more indelible image: like Pam Grier contemplating the dumb white cops in Jackie Brown. Unless someone is completely cropped out, I think there are seven of them. Note that the fellow at the left has his hand on the stock of his holstered pistol--because, I guess, two rifles at the ready might not be enough when you're face to face with a black lady wearing slippers. Careful, darling, everyone now knows that they don't call 911, either.

Bought a copy of the Minneapolis daily paper for the first time yesterday in a couple of decades. I think I could have read every word, excluding the sports box scores and the ads regarding mortgage foreclosures, in around an hour and a half. Is it always so skimpy? The sports box scores did not include one for the Timberwolve's game the night before.

Probably it would be prudent for me to stay off of social media when events in my stomping grounds are the lead story in international news reports, and not for the first time in recent memory. But being a boomer, I occasionally peruse what my kids derisively refer to as BoomerBook, and unfortunately cannot give myself an order to regard with equanimity, for example, Tom Emmer, who represents probably Minnnesota's reddest congressional district.

It's a footnote to a sidelight, but watching Trump speak about the events in Venezuela last night, I almost felt a little sorry for the guy. He can barely read a text that's been prepared for him, and when, perhaps impatient with his own bumbling progress, he freelances for awhile, the result is comically irrelevant asides that slink away toward incoherence.

Shoveling snow. Watching sports on TV. Ubering teens to their New Year's parties. Debating with myself whether to be asleep at midnight or to stay up till my young reveler is delivered home by someone else's dad. In short, living life all the way up. According to the actuarial charts, I have maybe 15 years left, so how could I do anything else?

I used to think that law school must be pretty boring, but maybe not. As for the reading, it seems that sometimes even the footnotes to judicial decisions are enjoyable. For example, here is the text of a footnote to an appellate court's opinion in U.S. v Murphy, 406 F.3d 857, 859 n.1 (7th Cir. 2005): The trial transcript quotes Ms.

Got back this morning from running some errands and discovered a dog biscuit sitting atop my mailbox. My mailman--though it's a she--loves dogs, and always has a treat ready when our ways cross on walks. It's to the point that the dog gets excited when he sees those postal service vans, and can hardly be restrained when she gets out. If it's the wrong postal worker .

Jewish gal insists she and her people don't hate Christmas: May your Christmas holiday be beneficial, even if you celebrate.

Ah, made it to winter break, which means this year that I get a reprieve from overhearing 10-year-olds talk among themselves about ICE. Attendance is down and it's not all the flu. People are laying low. Our weekly newsletter implores parents to keep sending their kids to school, and to contact the office with concerns--we will connect them to organizations that can help or, at least, advise.

I understand that some people, as a kind of morbid hobby, scan the obits and impulsively read the ones for fresh decedents younger than themselves. It occurred to me today, while hacking at the 2 tons of crusty snow the plow left at the bottom of my driveway, that the audience for mine is dwindling. For it seems I've reached the age at which dog walkers, having pronounced the normal pleasantries, feel obliged to advise, "Well, take it easy with that." It occurred to two out of the three of them who passed during the half hour or so I was at it to issue this advisory.

In Patriotic Gore, his book on literary figures of the Civil War, Edmund Wilson writes that, "with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe," no American has been the subject of more "romantic and sentimental rubbish" than our sixteenth president. The villain here is Carl Sandburg, whose multivolume biography of Lincoln I dimly remember occupying an entire shelf in the school library.

I'm kind of amused--a better person would probably be repulsed--by all the mincing words applied to the Trump administration's crimes in the Caribbean. If (the details are as reported), then (there might be a legal problem), etc. Either we're at war with Venezuela or we're not. If as seems clear to me we're not, then the targeted killings are straight-up murder.

I've been at Spanish Duolingo for long enough now that I feel sort of confident about being able to ask for directions to the museum, the train station, and the hotel. I'm to the point that Duo has me considering sentences that pertain as much to the human condition as that of a mere tourist. For example, And: Exciting! In another autobiographical bit, I went to the dentist and, for the first time in the last several visits, they did not request a return engagement to address this or that--just made a note of a couple "watch items" and said, See ya in six months.

The Wikipedia article on Elon Musk's chatbot commences: Grok is a generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) chatbot developed by xAI. It was launched in November 2023 by Elon Musk as an initiative based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name. Grok has apps for iOS and Android and is integrated with Twitter and Tesla's Optimus robot. The chatbot is named after the verb…

I'm memorializing yesterday's golf round since it may prove to have been the last one of the year. It's definitely the last one at our home course, Hidden Haven, in common parlance Hillbilly Haven, which is closing for the season today. From the "up tees" on number 17, I hit a driver into a stiff wind that ended on the back of the green, then two putted for a par.

Did not foresee that the Dems, having won every single election in a walk, would conclude that their next move should be to fold faster than a card player holding eighty per cent of a flush. "I believe there are a number of Republicans who are going to join us in trying to address health care costs, but we are also turning the government back on," Senator Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH, …

First time I ever heard the name Blaze Foley was here, in John Prine's intro to "Clay Pigeons." I knew "Clay Pigeons" but had always assumed Prine wrote it. How good must a song be for Prine to cover it?He's got about a thousand great ones he wrote himself. Here's Foley's version. Prine refers to Merle Haggard's cover of another Foley song, "If I Could Only Fly." I'll paste in below a recording of Foley performing that one.