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I really miss the “Four Food Group” recommendations of the FDA.  From 1956 to 1992, the recommended diet for Americans was to eat something from the Four Food Groups every day. 

The Groups were simple.  Milk, Meat, Fruit and Vegetables, and Bread and Cereal. The FDA did not confuse us with portions or ratios.  Just eat something from each group every day. You will be healthy. Other foods were consumed to round out the meals.  These included butter, salad dressing, cooking oils, jellies, sauces, and syrups.     

The fifties and sixties were my formative years for developing great eating habits and I closely followed FDA recommendations.  Using the federal government’s guidelines, I crafted a perfectly balanced and healthy diet.  Let’s run through a typical day’s menu plan.   

Breakfast.  Bacon and eggs, raisin bread toast with lots of butter, and hot chocolate.  Bang, all four food groups right out of the blocks.  You may have missed the fruits and veggies but the raisins qualify.  Obviously, I used milk in the hot chocolate.  I was confused with the appropriate category for eggs.  Is it dairy?  You find them in the dairy section of the supermarket.  Is it meat?  They have lots of protein like meat.  I guess the classic question even applies to the FDAs Four Food Groups.  What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Lunch.  A ham and Swiss cheese sandwich, a big pile of potato chips, a dill pickle and a glass of milk.  Four for four again.  After reading the guidelines, I wasn’t sure that potatoes are vegetables so I added the pickle to be certain I hit all four.

Dinner.  Spaghetti with Italian sausage sauce, apple pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert.  Hey, spaghetti hits three of the four food groups (pasta, tomatoes, and Italian sausage).  Apple pie satisfies the fruit recommendation and reinforces the bread goal. Ice cream bullseyes the milk target.

Late Night Snack.  A pepperoni and Canadian bacon pizza with a bottle of Faygo Cream Soda.  A great and healthy way to end the day.  Again we hit all four food groups (cheese, pepperoni and Canadian bacon, tomato sauce and pizza crust).  In addition, based on the Faygo’s sugar content, I worked some syrup into the mix.  The late night snack was usually consumed on Saturday evening while watching a monster movie on Shock Theater.

Every one of these meals was in total compliance with the FDA guidelines.  Talk about eating healthy!  It required a lot of work and diligence but I was committed to forming excellent eating habits that would last me a lifetime.    

Things started to go down hill when the FDA dropped the Four Food Group recommendation and moved to the Food Pyramid.  The Pyramid was in place from 1992 to 2005. The FDA expanded the food groups to six.  It separated fruits from vegetables and added oils and sweets.  Worse, they defined portion sizes and recommended how many portions of each category you should consume each day.  All of the categories had specific daily portion numbers except oils and sweets that simply said “use sparingly”. 

My staple of raisin bread toast came under fire.  I got a couple of portions of grains but I did not get anything for raisins.  They qualified as fruit (dried grapes) but there were not enough of them to give even one credit for portion size.  I always preferred the raisin bread with icing on top.  That did not fit the Four Food Group standard but it did come under the oils and sweets designation of the pyramid.  

The only good thing about the Food Pyramid was the oil and sweets category.  “Sparingly” is a subjective term. If I had iced raisin bread toast, a snickers bar as a mid-morning snack, and a chocolate malt after dinner, to me, these all could be classified as “sparingly” servings.   

The real challenge with the Food Pyramid was the proportions.  When I compared my very healthy Food Group diet to the new guidelines, I was short on the number of fruit and veggie portions.  I would have been okay if the Pyramid recognized potatoes for what they are: vegetables.  But they put them in an asterisk category called starchy vegetables and they put a significant limitation on everything in the category.  Starchy vegetables are a lot like controlled substances.   You really like them but you are not supposed to have them.  Somehow the triple cheeseburger on an onion roll that I purchased for lunch from Crazy Jims put me way over the meat portion size limit for lunch. In addition, the extra large fries blew away two days worth of starchy vegetable portions.

The Food Pyramid was a clear step backwards in healthy dieting so I was not surprised that the brain trust at FDA made significant modifications to the recommendations in 2005.

The FDA cannot decide on what is a healthy diet.  In 2005, the Food Pyramid was replaced with something called My Pyramid and in 2011 they replaced My Pyramid with My Plate.   I quit trying to follow Federal recommendations when they dumped the Food Pyramid.  I decided that rather than do something that is right for the general population, I would do something that was right for me. 

I returned to my Four Food Group diet and initiated conversations with my Primary Care Doc and Cardiologist.  They said that my numbers looked pretty good but they did not like my diet.  When they talk about “numbers” it is the result of 50 or 60 blood tests that each of them run every year.  The blood tests all have numbers and they all have a desired healthy range based on some kind of standards developed by anonymous people in the medical community. 

The Docs are about as confusing as the FDA.  The Primary Care Physician recommended a high fiber diet with low levels of protein.  A lot of soybeans and small trees that are pulverized into juice with a special blender that is more powerful than the bush hog I pulled behind my Kubota tractor. The staple of the diet is a series of hideous green protein shakes.  Forget ever having a burger and fries.

The Cardiologist says that a variation of the Mediterranean diet, along with some modifications from research with long living populations, is ideal.  They have compiled the South Mediterranean Beach Asian Fusion diet with Outer Mongolian influences.  I YouTubed an interview with a 104 year old Mongol who was speaking in an ancient Asian language.  The interviewer complimented the man on his dedication to a healthy diet.  His response was translated as follows:  “I have been eating sardines in heavy fish oil for 80 years.  I hate it!  I would gladly trade fifteen of those years for an occasional steak, a lot of French fries and a few onion rings!” 

So I am buying in to the Mongol philosophy.  “The more you don’t eat the things you are not supposed to eat, the longer you will live not to enjoy them.”  I returned to my original, 1959, Four Food Group diet.  My last blood test showed total cholesterol of 133 without any medication. Really good numbers.  I’m not interested in dropping that number to 125. 

My doctors may find this disappointing but the last thing I want to do is die with perfect blood test results.                  

I think insurance companies are really good with Venn Diagrams.  John Venn created the diagram more than a hundred years ago.  It is a simple way to illustrate the intersection of different things.  The diagram is a rectangular box.  Inside the box are circles that represent all of the properties of things.  The things may be objects, events, theories, anything.  All of the properties of any one thing is illustrated as a circle within the rectangle.  We all know the expression: “You are comparing apples to oranges”.  A Venn diagram of “apples to oranges” would be a rectangle with two equal size circles, one for apples and one for oranges.  The circles would sit side by side in the rectangle and they would never intersect. i.e they are always different and mutually exclusive.  If we created a Venn diagram for Mustard, Hot Dogs, and Buns, we would have three circles that all intersect at some point.  The intersection is the delectable treat we have for lunch.  A hot dog on a bun with mustard. 

Insurance companies are masters at creating situations where nothing associated with their claims will intersect.  In essence they strive very hard to ensure that any type of loss is likely to escape all of the rules of coverage for their policy.  The perfect world for them is a Venn diagram with no intersecting circles for any type of casualty claim.

Let me explain my recent experience with the Artful Dodger Home and Auto Insurance Company, Inc.  While we were in Michigan, our home in Florida was clipped by hurricane Milton.  When our very helpful neighbor did a post storm inspection, he found that a ten foot section of the ceiling had collapsed.  He took pictures of the damage before any cleanup and I immediately opened a claim with Artful Dodger.  I wanted to give the insurance company the opportunity to evaluate the casualty before any clean up or repairs.  Artful sent Inspector Shirley Teflon out the following morning.  My wife and I loaded the car and headed back to Jacksonville to ride herd on the project.

Someplace in Tennessee, I received a call from Shirley with her preliminary findings.  “Mr. Sinelli.  I could not find any cause for your ceiling collapse.  I toured the inside of the house and carefully inspected the roof and the attic.  There were no holes in the roof and there was no apparent structural damage to the attic.  There was no water intrusion from the storm.  Everything was totally dry. It is our opinion that the damage was not caused by the hurricane.  If you think there is structural damage you will have to retain the services of a structural engineer at your own expense.” 

This was good news to me.  The damage, though likely to be more than $10,000, is significantly less of a challenge without roof or structural issues. My gut response was that a huge wind gust came through the attic vents and the massive negative pressure blew out the ceiling.  My response to Shirley was:  “Isn’t it amazing that the very evening of the hurricane, in fact during the six hour duration of the storm, my ceiling would simply collapse and it was not storm related?  What a coincidence. That’s right up there with a guy named Lou Gehrig contracting a rare disease that happens to be called Lou Gehrig’s disease.  Good news, however.  Since you verified that the collapse is not storm related, I won’t have to pay the $11,000 hurricane deductible. I’m only on the hook for my $500, non hurricane, deductible.”  

The phone got very quiet.  Finally, Shirley came back and said: “I’m going to have to get back to you on this.”                    

At this point the outcome looked pretty favorable.  In our Venn Diagram, the Catastrophe Claim Circle was intersecting with the Pay the Policyholder Circle. 

Meanwhile, I asked my contractor to evaluate the situation and start the remediation project.  The contractor said that the section of ceiling that collapsed was weakened over several years by a condensation problem.  The attic vent blowout theory was almost certainly correct.  However, it would not have occurred without the damp conditions progressing for a long time. The cost to fix the condensation issue and fully restore the ceiling would be $9,900.  So I called Shirley Teflon and passed along the contractor’s findings.  She said: “I am terribly sorry but the policy terms are quite clear.  Artful Dodger Home and Auto Insurance Company, Inc. only covers “sudden” losses.  To cover anything else would invite insolvency for the insurer. The real reason for the collapse was the deteriorated condition of the ceiling which clearly did not happen suddenly.”

Now I was fully victimized by the Artful Dodger’s, mutually exclusive, Venn Diagraming.  Even if I successfully argued that the event was hurricane related, the $11,000 Dollar Hurricane Deductible Circle would not intersect with the Pay the Policyholder Circle.  I have to pay the first $11,000 and the repair was less than that.  The condensation weakening was not a sudden event and so it is not covered.  The Non Sudden Event Circle would not intersect with the Pay the Policyholder Circle.  I got the impression that no matter what I found, one of the hundreds of policy provisions that had been carefully detailed by Artful’s actuarial professionals and legal team would have blocked entry into the Pay the Policyholder Circle.

Without reading and evaluating the thirty three page policy for several weeks and creating your own Venn Diagrams, you cannot know the real protections the policy offers. I hope that, at least, I have some coverage for a major event. That is, if it is both a major and “sudden” event.  However I can see myself embroiled in a conversation with Shirley Teflon that goes like this.  “My house was totally destroyed by a falling meteor. Talk about sudden.  This baby was travelling 5,000 miles per hour.  The collision has been verified by the University of Florida who extracted the rock from my living room and have it on display in their Museum of Natural History.  You owe me the policy limit of $650,000.”   “I’m sorry Mr. Sinelli.  You don’t qualify.  That meteor has been enroute to your home for several billion years.  That’s not sudden.  Besides section 15, paragraph a. of your policy specifically excludes non terrestrial events from coverage.  For your edification that also encompasses damages caused by alien visitations.”

So the Artful Dodger Home and Auto Insurance Company, Inc. are the absolute masters of employing logic to create a bullet proof policy. John Venn would be proud.  It is easier to solve all of the ciphers in the Da Vinci Code than it is to understand the policy coverages. This makes me wonder if any Artful Dodger policyholder has ever made it to the Pay the Policyholder Circle.               

Ann Arbor in 1958 was the perfect place for a kid and a bike.  I think my life hit its peak when I had a Schwinn and two dollars in my pocket on a nice summer day in Ann Arbor.  I would climb out of bed and put on the uniform.  A white tee shirt, blue jeans and tennis shoes.  In the fifties, we rolled up the cuffs on the jeans.  The right cuff was rolled up a little higher so that it would not get caught in the bicycle chain.      

Off to enjoy the world.  I coasted three blocks down Miner Street to Miller Ave.  Turned left on Miller and headed to my first stop at Campbell’s Bakery.  Campbell’s was on North Main, one store from the corner of Main and Miller Ave.  Campbell and Sons opened in 1948 and offered a host of American baked goods.  Every morning they had all of the classics: bismarks, cream puffs, eclairs, donuts, Boston creams and long johns.  They had a variety of cookies, cakes and baked breads. My favorite was the chocolate covered long john.  This was a gigantic pastry stuffed with custard and coated with chocolate icing.  The consistency and quality of the baked goods kept us coming back for years.

The next stop was Riders Hobby Shop.  Riders was a block and a half west of Main Street on Liberty Street.  It had everything that an eleven year old ever wanted.  Lionel trains, models of every size and description, gas powered model airplanes, BB guns, bicycles, a slew of Wham-O products, Frisbees, sling shots, boomerangs, and army men. I could easily spend an hour just looking at all of the great stuff. 

When I was ten, I bought a boomerang from Riders.  A fine, wood Wham-O.  I had watched the adds on TV and was very impressed that you could throw one of these things and it would come right back to you.  I went to a big field by Mack School and fired that sucker with all my might.  The boomerang sailed over the weeds toward the end of the field and disappeared.  I waited for the return.  A few minutes, a half hour, an hour.  How long can it take for the boomerang to work its magic?  None of the instructions gave a timeline.  For the rest of the summer, when I was outdoors, I looked for the returning boomerang.  To this day, sixty eight years later, it still has not returned.  When I am sitting on my patio smoking a cigar, I scan the sky looking for the boomerang.  It is a mystery how the weapon invented by the Australian Native People can find its owner but it does.  I know that someday it will come hurtling back to me and I want to be ready.  These devices can drop a full sized kangaroo.  I need to see it coming before it drops me.

During “Bargain Days”, Riders would get fifteen or twenty beater bikes and sell them for a dollar apiece.  Thirty kids would line up at five in the morning and dash to get their one dollar special as soon as the doors were open.  I tried but never got one.  I think most of the guys who succeeded ended up on the offensive or defensive lines at Michigan.             

Okay, time for a snack.  We had two great “Dime Stores” downtown.  There was a Woolworths and a Kresges.  Both conveniently located on Main Street.  The great thing about the Dime Stores was that you could actually afford to buy a lot of the cool stuff that you saw.  I bought a new kite every March, balsam wood airplanes, glass piggy banks, a glass liberty bell bank, and a plastic reindeer that pooped jelly beans when you pulled its tail.  I still have that very cool item and it still works.  Both stores had a candy and nut counter.  At Kresges, for less than fifty cents, I could get a quarter pound of whole cashews.  These beauties were salted and heated in a special glass oven and display case.  I bought a little white bag of hot cashews and headed to the soda fountain for a cherry coke.  In 1958, the only bottled coke you could buy was coke.  There was no diet coke or flavored cokes.  Just coke.  So it was a special treat to go to the soda fountain and enjoy a fountain coke with cherry syrup.  Talk about living large!  Hot cashews and a cherry coke was as good as it could possibly get. 

Well, I still had a lot of time to kill.  Maybe I’ll ride out to Michigan Stadium to see if there was a baseball game going on.  I know.  That sounds strange.  A baseball game in the big house?  In the fifties and sixties, the gates to Michigan Stadium were never locked.  Anyone could stroll in at any time.  A lot of high school and college athletes used it as a training facility.  They would run the steps.  In essence, they would start at the top of section one and run down ninety two rows of seating, traverse to section two and run up ninety two rows of seating.  The star athletes would continue through all forty four rows of seats.  A lot of my friends organized baseball games in the stadium.  We brought our balls, bats and gloves and set up a diamond in the northwest corner of the field.  We used shirts for bases.  We chose teams and played a nine inning game.  Left field was obviously a short fence.  We all pretended to be Al Kaline or Rocky Colavito when we popped one into the left field seats.  I played baseball in the stadium at least ten times.  I doubt that the groundskeepers wanted us there but we were never tossed out.  Definitely a little different than the high security days of the 2020’s.

Unfortunately, no one was playing baseball today. I decided to take First Street home and stop for a chocolate malt at Washtenaw Dairy.  The Dairy is on the corner of First and Madison.  It opened in 1938 and was one of approximately fifteen neighborhood dairies in the city.  In 1958, they made, perhaps, the best handmade malt in the world.  In 2025, the “Dairy” is still the same.  Talk about classic.  The counter and soda bar may have changed a little but they still make the same, world class, chocolate malt.  I can’t go to Campbells or Kresges or Riders but I can still go to the Dairy. 

In fact, I frequently am asked to join my friends at the Dairy for a cup of coffee and a Dairy donut in the morning.  Another long standing institution in Ann Arbor is Muehlig’s Funeral Home.  Many of my friends are in their 70’s or 80’s and they spend a lot of mornings at the Dairy.  When they ask me to join them for coffee and donuts they don’t say “let’s meet at Washtenaw Dairy” they use an alternative name and ask me to “meet them at Meuhlig’s Waiting Room”.

I may have revisionist memory but I don’t believe my life has ever been better than it was when I rode my Schwinn into Downtown Ann Arbor.

In 2017, Donald Trump proclaimed that, with the changes he proposed to the tax system, most Americans would be able to file their 1040’s on the back of a postcard.  I decided that I would, in fact, file my 2017 return on the back of a postcard. 

The key element of the simplification was the result of substantially raising the standard deduction to the point where most Americans would no longer have to itemize their deductions.  For nearly everyone, the standard deduction was a lot larger than their itemized deductions.  In fact, for the 2017 tax year, nearly 90% of all federal returns used the standard deduction. 

I was in the 90%.  This did greatly reduce my record keeping.  For example, I no longer needed to track all of the charitable contributions in a complex spreadsheet.  Some were straight forward. $200 to the Society for Preservation and Promotion of Barber Shop Quartet Music.  Others were more difficult to determine. What percentage of the 56 boxes of Girl Scout cookies can I deduct?  How much of my season tickets to the University of Michigan Fencing Team program is deductible?  What about my tickets to my grandson’s Rollins College Choir concert? 

Perhaps the best example of complexity for itemizing deductions is tracking the possibility of deducting medical expenses.  I could deduct all of my healthcare costs that exceeded 7.5% of my Adjusted Gross Income (AGI).  What in the world is Adjusted Gross Income?  It is a number that appears on line 11 of my federal tax return after I have entered all of my revenue information for the tax year.  So I can’t know what this number is until I am half finished with my tax return.  As a result, I need to track at least three different Medicare premiums for my wife, three different Medicare premiums for me, all of our doctor charges, all of our prescriptions, and all of our over the counter drug charges.  I collected this data for an entire year aggregating hundreds of transactions. Sometimes I blew away the 7.5% and got a nice deduction.  Other years it was a total waste of time.  Because of pure volume and because I never knew when I could have a very expensive medical event, I tracked all of this information as it occurred each month. I believe that all of the legislation for the Medical Deduction was designed to ensure that very few people would actually go to the trouble required to claim it.

The itemized deduction malaise ended in 2017.  All I needed to focus on was my revenue.  The lion’s share of this is reported to me on thirty different tax reports that I receive from my investment managers and Social Security. 

So I licensed Turbo Tax, input all of the tax documents, and answered all of the weird questions.  “Did you invest in any crypto currencies?”   “Are you hording precious metals?”  “Did you profit from any sports or concert ticket sales?”  “What is your shoe size?  What is your spouse’s shoe size?”  “Did you have passive income?  Usually this is generated while you are binge watching streaming services from your recliner.”  “Did you also have aggressive income?”

After feeding all of the required revenue information into Turbo Tax, the software pumped out a nice, 18 page tax form.  It turns out that I could not fit the filing on a single postcard.  So I reworked the margins with my word processing software and created 87 sequential postcards for the entire return.  Even so, I had to use oversized cards.  I shopped for peaceful nature scenes hoping that they would have a calming effect on the highly stressed IRS workers.  

I put all of the cards in a certified mail package and sent it to the IRS.  Mission accomplished, I completed my form on the back of postcards.

For many years, Turbo Tax Technology has been very impressive and very helpful.   However, in 2025 we can augment Turbo Tax with an Artificial Intelligence tool.  My preferred AI tool is CHUCK.  Acme Technologies developed a very user friendly product that can access all of the digital information in the world and replicate the rationalization processes of the human mind. It responds to most inquiries in a few seconds. They dubbed it “Channeling Hyper Utilization of Computer Knowledge or CHUCK”.

So I asked one simple question.  “CHUCK, do you have any recommendations for minimizing the amount of federal income tax I will have to pay for tax year 2024?”  In eight seconds, CHUCK analyzed all of the digital data in the world and returned the following response.

“Michael Jay, (somehow CHUCK knows my favorite nickname) I have a few ideas:”

You need to claim Harlin Sanders as a dependent.  Harlin is the fried chicken chef at the Jacksonville Beach Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet.  Based on the volumes of your purchases in 2024 you provided more than half of Mr. Sanders support for the entire year.

All of the money you spent on golf should be classified as a Casualty Loss.  All of your greens fees, the new set of TaylorMades you purchased, the thirty four dozen Titleist golf balls should all be included in the loss.  Your club membership and golf lessons should also be added to the amount of loss.  A bit aggressive, but you should also include in the tally, travel to and from all of your golf outings.  A quick review of emails circulated by your playing partners and your golf instructor all say that your golf game is an unmitigated disaster.  Hence the deductible Casualty Loss.

You need to deduct losses for a small startup business on Schedule C.  You sold eight World Class Barbecue Cookbooks in 2023 aggregating royalty income of $24 dollars.  You are in the Barbecue Business.  Research and development for this promising venture include developing two barbecue sauces and a raft of new recipes to accommodate high technology barbecuing tools (especially pellet smokers).  Valid expenses for the enterprise include the two Traeger Pellet smokers you purchased, the cost of all the barbecue feasts you prepared in 2024, all of the meals you consumed at barbecue restaurants, mileage to and from the restaurants, 37 bags of pellets and all of the cooking paraphernalia you acquired.  It is very common for brilliant startups to be in a loss position the first few years.  Notwithstanding, Michael Jay’s Barbecue Company is a legitimate business.

You nearly qualified for a child care credit as the result of listening to distraught Ohio State fans bemoan their loss to Michigan.  You did not qualify because child care was only required for the final month of 2024.  Almost certainly you will be entitled to the child care credit in 2025 after listening to the infantile fans complain for, at least, another eleven months.

For your convenience, I am attaching spreadsheets that fully document all of the information you need to support all three of the above claims. One thousand fifteen transactions have been documented including transportation charges at the allowed IRS mileage rate, where appropriate.

Hope you find this helpful, CHUCK.

Wow!  That was a lot of work in eight seconds.  It appears that Artificial Intelligence saved me a little more than $11,000 in federal taxes. 

Should we love or fear AI?  I am loving it today!  The best job of tax research I have ever experienced and it didn’t cost me $3,000 in accounting fees.  When the three of us celebrate the tax savings at the Chop House, my wife and I won’t even have to pay for CHUCK’s dinner. 

Isn’t technology wonderful!                

My wife and I grew up in Ann Arbor Michigan.  We know from personal experience that it is a wondrous and unusual place to live.   In the spring, summer, and fall, Ann Arbor can feel like Camelot.  In winter, which may run from October 15 through April 15, it often feels like Siberia.

So, as much as we love Ann Arbor, we moved to Florida in 1974.  For 30 years, however, we return to Ann Arbor every fall for the entire University of Michigan football season.  We enjoy spectacular fall weather, cruising the local farms and apple orchards, tailgating, football, tailgating, and tailgating.  Mostly, we enjoy hanging out with great friends from college, high school and even grade school. 

One aspect of Ann Arbor is different than any place I have ever been in North America.  Driving in Ann Arbor is a dangerous and totally unique experience. 

Since the 1950s, the City Road Commission has timed major road construction projects to block one or more of the principal routes to Michigan’s Football Stadium.  This cannot be accidental.  It is a source of pride for the brilliant city engineers.  “You know that bike lane rework we set up on Stadium Boulevard?  It backed up the Notre Dame traffic for three and a half hours.  18 more minutes and we would have had the record!  Yeah, we nearly eclipsed the exit time for the 1956 Ohio State blizzard!  Boy, it was close.”  Okay, game day in Ann Arbor is unique and only happens seven or eight times a year.  It is very predictable, however.   Since 1975, the city’s population doubles for twelve hours at every home game.  Equally predictable, in all of those 48 years, the road commission has closed one or several routes to the stadium with some sort of construction project.

One of the first things I do when we arrive from Florida is cruise the downtown and campus streets.  I want to know where the construction is and plan alternative routes so I don’t spend hours getting from point A to point B.  I know all of the alternative routes in Washtenaw County.  I rode every street in Ann Arbor on my bike in fourth grade and I drove a moving van around the city to pay for my college education.

On the recon drive I discovered a totally unique traffic pattern.  This could only happen in Ann Arbor.  I turned from Main Street on to Madison to transition from downtown to the Michigan campus.  After several blocks I reached a stop sign at the intersection of Madison and 5^th Avenue.  Madison, the street I am on, becomes a one way street coming toward me so I have to turn.  5^th Ave is a one way street as well coming from my left.  The only option, therefore, is to turn right on 5^th Ave.  The brilliant city road commission has closed down and barricaded 5^th Ave to my right.  The only alternative was to make an illegal u turn and head back the opposite direction on Madison.  I understand the need for road construction. I grew up in Ann Arbor.  However, there were no “detour” signs, no “road closed ahead” signs, and no alternative route information.  I was really happy that I wasn’t driving my moving van with the 40 foot trailer at this point.  The citizens and particularly, the students in Ann Arbor are clever and enterprising.  As I was marveling at Road Commission’s work, a young man got out of a car parked next to me and tapped on my window.  He said:  “ Hey Mister, can you help me out?  I got to this intersection four days ago.  I don’t know when they are going to finish this construction and let me make this right turn.  I sure could use a fiver so that I can get a Blimpy burger from Crazy Jim’s.  What do you think?”  I responded that creativity and moxy on this scale was worth more than that and gave him a ten.                

An irony of the Road Commission’s fixation on construction near the stadium is the incredible disrepair of many remaining streets.  Ann Arbor has always been pot hole challenged.  Although conditions have improved in recent years, a lot of the potholes are bad.  Potential axle breakers.  Some are big enough to eat small cars.  I passed one on Traver Road that had two people rock climbing out of it.  So while you are negotiating all of the other traffic challenges in Ann Arbor you constantly have to be evaluating the danger threat of the next hundred feet of potholes.         

At this point, we know that we have to be exceptionally diligent driving around this great midwest city.  Random and illogical construction coupled with sporadic, long sections of potholes requires critical focus.

These are not all of the challenges, however.  A great aspect of Ann Arbor is their focus on liberal and environmental causes.  The admirable support for these causes creeps into the transportation grid.  The city is exceptionally bicycle and pedestrian friendly.  Four lane streets were redesigned to two lane streets to accommodate world class bicycle lanes.  Amazingly, a few streets have been redesigned to accommodate bicycle lanes by reducing the automobile channel to a single lane.  These are not one way streets.  I found myself cruising down First Street in a single lane and encountering an eighteen wheel Peterbilt heading directly at me.  It was pretty clear who was going to yield the right of way.  I waved at Bubba, who was driving the truck, and backed up 200 feet to the nearest driveway.

Pedestrian rights trump automobile rights.  There are many well marked pedestrian crossing areas.  If pedestrians are present cars must yield the right of way.  On a temporary or permanent basis the city will quickly change traffic patterns to accommodate non motorist activities.  For example, many of the downtown streets are closed in the evening and on weekends to allow outdoor dining.  In fact, the city has formalized a “Healthy Streets” initiative to slow traffic in residential areas.  The initiative reconfigures the usage of various residential streets to facilitate bicycle and pedestrian traffic. 

New rules and new driving patterns.  Much more complicated than a 25 mile an hour speed limit sign.  Is my car allowed on this street?  What are the “Healthy Street” speed limits and driving rules?  Are these people really allowed to close the street for a touch football game?  Oh crap, I didn’t see that huge pothole!  Hope I didn’t crack an axle.   

Are these all of the challenges to driving in Ann Arbor Michigan?  No.  The biggest challenge is that the city has an inordinately large percentage of terrible drivers.  I know this sounds like the typical, self aggrandizing, “I can drive better than everybody else” comment.  But it is true and you better be ready for it if you are motoring around the city.  For whatever reason, a lot of people operating vehicles have not learned the basic lessons of driver’s education.  I am a defensive driver and have earned the highest safe driver rating from my insurance company over the last twenty years.  Normally, I expect hazards to emerge from the right, left, front and rear while I drive.  In Ann Arbor, I expect things to come at me straight out of the sky.  I am hyper vigilant.  The general problem is that a higher than usual number of drivers just go wherever they want with no regard for anything else.  Crossing three lanes of traffic to make a right turn without looking happens all of the time.  Traffic lights often seem to be nothing more than a recommendation.  No left turn signs, no turn on red signs, are meaningless.  Turn signals, if used at all, are random and should not be taken as indication of which way the vehicle will be directed.  Aggressive driving, that you may encounter in Atlanta or Tampa, is not the problem.  Rather, you have to assume that some of your highway companions are simply going to drive wherever they want without regard to anyone else on the road or any of the posted traffic signage.              

It always takes me a few days to gear up my driving skills for our autumnal visit to Michigan.  Construction, potholes, bikes and pedestrians, strange temporary driving regulations, and non compus mentis drivers make this a truly unique driving experience.  Last week we were in a grocery store on Maple and Dexter and I asked the check-out professional how long it would take to drive downtown on Dexter Ave.  She replied, “I don’t know, no one has ever made it.” 

Vaccines have been around a long time.  A small pox vaccine was perfected in 1796.  Diphtheria vaccines date back to the 1890’s.  Of course, the great Polio vaccine was developed in 1952 by Jonas Salk.  We have effective vaccines for rubella, mumps and scarlet fever.  Moving into the 21^st century we have hundreds of vaccines for the flu, pneumonia, shingles, RSV and the granddaddy of them all, Covid. 

We can argue about the effectiveness of the new vaccines.  Do they work?  Are the side effects more damaging than the malady they are trying to prevent?  For example, everyone I know who has had an outbreak of Shingles has taken one or two different Shingles vaccine treatments before contracting the infection.

Clearly the pharmaceutical companies find the vaccination process lucrative.  They have made a concerted effort to address thousands of maladies that are particularly troubling to modern humans.     

Through the miracle of Artificial Intelligence and computerized medical research, pharma has blessed us with a host of very helpful inoculations in 2025. 

Here are a few of my favorites.

The Titleist Optimization Serum (ProV1 maximo smackosino)

This vaccine smooths out the golf swing of high handicap golfers and adds significant distance to the length of their shots.  For years, avid golfers have been plagued by high scores as the result of a crummy golf swing.  They have invested thousands of dollars on lessons and equipment.  They spend countless hours grooving their terrible swings on the practice range.  Someone with an average score of 93 who fully dedicates himself or herself to the traditional techniques for six months usually ends up with a scoring average of 96. Studies have found that an annual injection of the Titleist Optimization Serum (TOS) will add 25 yards to tee shots and 15 yards to the irons.  TOS has proven to reduce the average golfers eighteen hole score by five strokes. 

Side effects include: Hitting putts thirty yards past the hole.  An urge to watch every King Kong movie ever produced and a craving for very large bananas. 

Instapotential Calmingitus Vaccination (Nofearing kabooming)

Studies show that 78% of Americans have a deep seated fear of exploding pressure cookers.  They have heard family stories of great explosions in their ancestors’ kitchens in the 1900s.  They believe that the power of these explosions is measured in megatons. They know that the instruments used by their grandmothers explode so well that they are the favorite tool of terrorist bomb makers.   The IC vaccine is targeted to the area of the brain that generates this fear and suppresses the anxiety.  87% of the tested recipients showed no reluctance to use the R2D2 look alike sitting on the kitchen counter a few days after inoculation. 

Side effects include:  A strange fondness for commercial fireworks and a propensity to impress all of your relatives at family picnics by prefacing your actions with “Hey Y’All!  Watch this!!”    

Overthetop Winatallcosts Compulsion Damper (Sloth Serum)

Most Americans have a heightened sense of competition.  Their drive to win at everything is an impediment to a healthy life.  They may spend ten hours a week in the gym so that they can annihilate their four year old niece at Hungry Hungry Hippo. A pickle ball contest is treated like an event in the Hunger Games. Many have tried Yoga to assuage the aggressive behavior.  Typically, they become disappointed and then, angry if they can’t be the calmest person in the session.  An annual shot of the Sloth Serum dramatically decreases the patient’s metabolism resulting in a significant decline in this over the top behavior.

Side effects include falling asleep at hockey games and an urge to sit in a tree and eat leaves on a warm summer day.

Bison Avoidance Serum (Buffalo Begonis)

A highly effective inoculation prevents both the American and European Bison from occupying your living room.  The pharmaceutical makers are not certain how this vaccine works.  However it has been extremely effective.  In fact, for those who have been inoculated, only one instance of Bison Invasion has been reported.  The event occurred in a one room cabin near Theodore Roosevelt State Park, in Montana.  A Bison cow followed her calf through an open door of the cabin.  Apparently the calf was following the scent of mustard greens the trapper was preparing for dinner.  In essence, the vaccine has been completely effective in keeping all types of bisons out living rooms around the world.   

There are no known side effects to this injection.  Because of the incredibly high efficacy of this treatment, the pharmaceutical makers recommend that all 345 million Americans be immunized.  The cost is a reasonable $325 per dose.  A three step treatment is recommended.   

So the vaccine industry is booming.  The big pharmaceutical companies are researching and developing products in record time.  Artificial intelligence cuts the time to bring a drug to market to 10% of the historical development period.  What took years now takes weeks.  Of course this is only done to improve the health of men and women all around the world.  Certainly billions of dollars of profits are created for big pharma in the process.  The drug industry CFO’s tell us that the 100 to 150 billion dollars of net income is needed to sustain development of these great treatments. 

They still haven’t cracked cancer and heart disease.  But vaccines to mitigate the urge of binge watching featured shows from streaming services are just around the corner. 

I really hope they are not working on anything to curb cravings for bacon and fried chicken.  If they are, I hope my wife never finds out about it. 

It seemed that children were a lot healthier when I was growing up.  Okay, we all got pounded by the big childhood diseases: chicken pox, measles (three day and German).  I had mumps. My sister had scarlet fever.  We all had tonsillitis and tonsillectomies.  We had inoculations for the really bad stuff.  For example, small pox, diphtheria and polio. 

I always put chicken pox and measles on my healthcare portal history.  Usually, the medical professional will ask when I had them.  I respond that I don’t know when.  “How do you know you have had them?”  “I grew up in a government housing project. We all had them before age three.”

Other than the standards, we never got sick.  At least that is what our parents told us.  If you felt bad, it was a phase you were going through.  “Mom, I really feel crummy.”  “How so?”  “I have a headache. My arms, legs, and stomach hurt.  I feel hot.”  “It’s just a phase you’re going through.”  “Aren’t these symptoms of the Bubonic Plague.”  “Yes.  But if you don’t break out in pustules, it’s probably just a phase.”  Eventually, all of the symptoms faded and we were never classified as sick.  

“Mom!  Wow, I am really tired.  All I want to do is sleep.  I think I have a low grade fever.  There has been an outbreak of mononucleosis at school.”  “Don’t worry dear.  It’s probably just growing pains.  It’s a phase you are going through and you will feel better soon.”  Sure enough, in three or four weeks everything is fine.  Again, I was never considered sick.

Many years later, we had our daughter tested for allergies.  The physician said that she was very allergic to two or three different allergens common to the State of Florida.  He asked if I had allergies as a child.  I said no.  We were poor.  He took that a little harder than I thought he should.  None of the kids in our neighborhood had allergies because we couldn’t afford them.  Treatments were expensive, so every summer we would go through another phase. Sometime, around peak ragweed season, we would cough and hack.  Perhaps we spiked a weird rash.  When the fall came and the symptoms dissipated, the phase was over.

It is impossible to tell if kids were healthier when I was growing up.  There may have been fewer illnesses but there were a lot more phases.  

Medicine in the 2020’s is so much more advanced than the 1960’s.  I have at least five close friends that would not be alive if not for the wonders of modern medicine.  Treatments for many dread diseases are nearly miraculous. 

In some ways, however, I can still hear the words of my mother. 

A while back, I started to feel a little puny.  Sore muscles, stiff joints, tired and worn out.  I live in the 21^st Century so I took my symptoms to the Mayo Clinic.  After running at least 100 blood tests, they concluded that I definitely have an unusual auto immune disease.  I was born with the propensity for this disease to surface.  It cannot be transmitted to anyone else.  Very importantly, it really is not life threatening or a precursor to anything more serious than severe aches and pains.  The symptoms can be lessened with steroids.  In almost all cases, the disease stays active for eighteen to sixty months.  Eventually, it completely disappears and does not reoccur.

So I am listening to this world renowned Rheumatologist.  He is armed with 100s of tests. He understands this peril in incredible detail.  I visit him every three months and adjust my medications exactly as he prescribes.  Underneath it all however, when I boil down his feedback and prognosis, I am back in 1963.  His advice sounds just like Mom’s.  It is sprinkled with complex medical terms.  Yet, when you sort it all out, he is simply saying: “Don’t worry, this is just a phase you’re going through.”  

. 

When I was seventeen, I wanted to make a big impression on Mary Hadalamb.  She was a big Beatles fan and they were coming to Detroit.  Tickets were $40 each.  The whole evening was going to set me back at least $120.  Did I have the cash?  No, not even close.  My total Net Worth, at the time, was $38.75.  How did I know this?  I checked my pockets.  Well, I had another $4.75 in the Christmas Fund account at the bank but that was it.  The law of limited resources very clearly said, we could catch a movie and follow up with a fine dinner at the Big Boy and not much else.  The really bad news was that Thurston Howell, III did have sufficient capital for the Beatles and Mary accompanied him to the concert.

So it was easy to track our capital before massive technology took over our lives.  It primarily was driven by your cash reserves.  You checked your pockets and your bank accounts.  Using that information, you could make great decisions on how to spend your money and how to get more of it if you ran low.  If you didn’t have the cash, you were not going to the concert.  At seventeen, we were all outstanding money managers. 

Starting my Freshman year at Eastern Michigan, I had three key financial goals.  Sufficient funding for dates, $1.85 to buy a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon whenever I wanted, and $50 dollars to cover a bad day of shooting pool.  The business plan for Mike Inc. clearly showed that I needed to work full time all summer, aggregating a cash position and Net Worth of $2,500 on August 31.  In addition, I still needed to augment my cash flow during the school year with part time employment.  No fine dining with Ms. Hadalamb after Thanksgiving without income from a part time job.  Fortunately, Elsifor Moving and Storage provided the perfect employment opportunity.  I drove a moving van full time during the summer.  Lots of lucrative overtime.  The moving business slowed significantly during the school year.  Symbiotically, part time work, scheduled around my pool shooting class schedule worked very nicely for both Elsifor and Mike Inc.

Things were simple. We really didn’t have many options.  No one was going to give us a credit card and no reasonable bank was going to lend us anything.  So the daily decision making on how to deploy our money was very simple.  What expenditures were required?  Are there any funds left over?  Yes!  What would we like to do with the extra funds?  We then needed to take concrete steps to actually spend the money. There were no hidden disbursements. We paid cash or wrote checks for everything.  After we spent the money, we knew how much was left in our pockets or checking account.  We had a solid understanding of our near term cash needs and of our total Net Worth.  I always made sure that I had a week’s worth of PBR reserves.  In addition, the one Benjamin disaster fund for bad pool shooting was tucked into the corner of my wallet.     

Fiscal responsibility was easy to execute in this environment and most of my friends did a great job of managing their financial resources.  

Fast forward to the 2020’s.  It is almost impossible for anyone to competently manage her or his finances.  Cash is no longer king.  In fact cash hardly even matters.  I have had the same $115 in my money clip for eighteen months.  If we want to purchase something, we flash our phone, tap the credit card, or stick an item in our on line shopping cart and go to checkout.  If there are no red lights, the transaction is processed.  About eleven different IT systems instantaneously run through various aspects of the transaction and some of our capital pile is shifted to the vendor’s pile.  What does our pile look like before and after this transaction?  It’s impossible to tell.  Reviewing the Net Worth economic indicator is completely excluded from the process. 

Vendors, banks and technology companies tell us that all of the electronic processing is designed to improve our lives.  Balderdash!  It is designed to improve their profits.  Little clerical work is required to sell something and collect the funds.  Most of the required effort is actually performed by the customers.  “You don’t really want to send us a check every month.  Just give us permission, and we will, electronically, extract those funds from your bank account or charge your credit card.  You won’t have do anything.”  So I have authorized at least thirty different vendors to automatically extract assets from my pile and put in theirs.  Maybe it happens when I specifically buy something.  Often it is a monthly recurring process that happens until I officially tell the vendor to stop. Some payments are identical monthly charges.  Others are variable.  I have authorized at least thirty vendors or service companies to reduce my Net Worth every month.

All of the green lighting and approval processes are simply directed to whether or not I have sufficient funds or credit to pay for each of the transactions.  “Is there room on your credit card or enough cash in your bank account to cover the ACH?  Yes!”  We get the screen showing a green checkmark and the words “Good News! You are Approved!”    

That whole financial process that allowed me to evaluate the value of the transaction and the impact on my pile before I spend the money is gone.

I knew that I could not take a date to see the Beatles for $120 dollars but I just arranged an outing to see Taylor Swift for $8,500 dollars.  Can I afford this?  Who knows!  The automation accepted everything so the deal is done.  Can I actually pay this off at the end of the month?  If not, my $8,500 just got 25% bigger because of credit card interest.  Potentially, I just spent $10,125 to go to a concert.  Do I need to borrow more money to make the house payment, do I skip funding the 401 k again?  Without a day and a half of financial analysis, I can’t put the pieces back together.  

A further complication is that some of these expenditures don’t require real cash.  I have to use Apple Pay, PayPal, and three other pseudo currencies.  So far I have avoided Bitcoin but it is a matter of time until my physician says “If you want this bypass surgery, you need to pay me with Bitcoin”.      

The day of reckoning occurs after I have spent my money and the credit card bill arrives.

DANGER WILL ROBINSON.    

Yikes!  Amex is $15,402 this month and Visa is $11,307.  I can only pay half of that.  Would have been nice to get a “low capital warning” instead of a simple green checkmark when I was spending all of this money.  By paying half, I am borrowing $13,000 at 25% interest rates.  Even my uncle Vito doesn’t charge this much!

The good news is that having trouble with your Visa bill is not likely to incur bodily harm.  Getting behind in payments to uncle Vito will.  But there is still a lot of pain and challenge in overextending credit card debt.  It is very easy to creep up to the card limit.  Compounding $30,000 of credit card debt at 25% can generate huge numbers very quickly. 

If you decide to pay off the cards with an early withdrawal from your retirement account, more bad things happen.  First the money you take out is immediately taxable and you pay a 10% withdrawal penalty.  For most of us, that is at least another 34% assessment.  In addition, not maximizing my IRA contributions may make it very difficult to retire.  If I don’t make a contribution this year or, even worse, take money out of the retirement account, I may be driving a truck again at age 75.

Before technology, internal control over my finances was proactive.  I knew what impact spending money would have on my Net Worth before I actually made the disbursement.  Technology has made it incredibly simple to spend money but extremely difficult to understand the impact of all these expenditures on our accumulated wealth.  The only weak, back end, control I have is knowing how close I am to the spending limit on my credit cards.  Six or seven hours of analysis will put sharp focus on my financial standing.  However, that is a little difficult to do when I am waiting in the queue for Rose Bowl tickets.   

So, in the 2020’s, spending habits have changed.  When we elect to buy something, anything, we never assess the impact of the decision on our pile of capital (Net Worth).  We just wait to see if the green checkmark and the word “approved” appears on the payment screen.

I haven’t seen Mary Hadalamb for a while.  If she wants to go to The Beatles Revival Concert, I think I need to do a lot more financial research before I hit the “Proceed to Checkout” button.

Very often, Susan and I will make Christmas cookies.  We don’t do it every year but we do it most years.  Sue is spectacular with Sugar Cookies and five or ten other types of holiday offerings.  I am pretty good at making two classic German cookies.    

You truly have to be in the Christmas spirit to jump in to this project.  This year we felt the rapture.  We were chatting about making cookies with our good friends, Ruth and Steve and John and Mary.  We asked if they would like to join us.  We could double or triple our recipes and make a pile of cookies for everyone.  “Great idea! We’re In!” 

This always seems like a simple, idyllic exercise.  We will drink egg nog and listen to an array of Christmas carols.  Maybe, a little Schnapps.  Perhaps the temperature will drop and we will see a few snow flurries in Florida.  We forget all of the challenges we have had making cookies in the past.  For example, last year we used self rising flour instead of all purpose flour and baked up a bunch of tennis balls. The revisionist memory may happen because there is always a twelve month interval between cookie making sessions or perhaps our cognitive skills are trending in the same direction as Joe Biden’s.  

Not with standing, we move boldly forward with a lot of positive energy.  We are planning on making three types of cookies: classic Sugar Cookies and two German favorites, Springerles and Lebkuchens.  We will start the process at 2:00 PM, finish 450 cookies by 6:00 PM, have a few drinks and nice dinner around 6:30 or 7:00.  Maybe we will end the evening watching White Christmas.

Reality starts to set in when we review the recipes.  The Springerle and Lebkuchens are truly family heirlooms.  They have been passed on to me by mother.  She actually got them from her great grandmother.  A lot of unusual ingredients: anise seed, anise extract, almond extract, candied lemon peel, candied citron and Baker’s Ammonia.  A lot of steps for each cookie.  In fact, when you lay the recipes side by side, this cannot be completed in less than three days.  I am convinced that Einstein and Fermi decided to split atoms because it was easier than making their grandmothers’ Christmas cookies.

What the hell!  We all are retired.  It’s Christmas.  This will be fun!

So the day before the big bake session, I whip up two batches of dough for the Lebkuchens and Sue makes a big batch of Sugar Cookie dough.  We stick them in the refrigerator. The plan for bake day is to bake all of the Sugar Cookies and set them aside to cool.  Change the oven settings and bake all of the Lebkuchens.  Sometime during the Lebkuchen process we will break up in to two teams.  Team one will frost and decorate the sugar cookies and team two will finish baking the Lebs.  Finally, we will roll, mold and cut the Springerles after totally completing the baking process for the Sugar Cookies and Lebkuchens.  We can’t actually complete the baking process for the Springerles on bake day.  The nifty thing about Springerles is that they have pictures of different Bavarian symbols on each cookie.  You accomplish this by pressing a Springerle board on the dough after it is rolled out.  The reason we use the weird baker’s ammonia is to freeze the pictures in place.  This can only be accomplished if you let the unbaked cookies rest in a cool place for twenty four hours.

Well the bake day plan seems pretty simple!  I don’t see a problem banging this out in four hours.  Do you?        

Good news.  During the split Leb and Sugar session, the drinking lamp will be illuminated.  The process is sure to go more smoothly after one or two martinis or a few glasses of white wine.

What went wrong?  We completed the Sugar Cookies and Lebkuchens as planned. The Sugar Cookie prep was flawless.  The Lebkuchen prep had problems.  John, Steve and I took turns rolling and cutting these beauties.  I explained that the cookies were simple rectangles ¼ inch thick, 1 ½ inches wide and 2 ½ inches long.  In essence, a CPA, a cardiologist, and tax attorney were conceptualizing the best methods for high volume baking.  We had several rulers and a spiffy tool to measure the rolled dough thickness.  We thought that using a ravioli cutter would add a nice beveled edge to the final products.  Surprisingly, the methods we developed were not the best.  In spite of excessive measuring, there was a great deal of variance in cookie sizes.  The ravioli cutter was hard to use.  It would get completely gunked up after a few cookies. The spiffy beveled edge did not hold through the baking process.  It took a very long time crank out a full sheet of cookies.  We completed the Sugar Cookies and Lebakukens around 6:00 PM and broke for dinner without even starting the Springerles.

In addition to the baking process, an inordinate amount of time is required to buy all of the ingredients and assemble the baking tools.  We have more than seventy five cookie cutters.  Sorting them is an effort. For Christmas you probably want to exclude the alligators, grizzly bears, and Darth Vader cutters.  Sue and I spent at least forty five minutes trying to find our one and only Springerle Board.  The baker’s ammonia had to be ordered from Amazon.  

Starting the Springerles after dinner did not work well. I sensed that some of the World Class bakers were starting to lose their zeal.  Even the Carpenter’s Christmas album playing on the sound system could not retain the Christmas spirit.  Others, especially those who had lubricated themselves with a few martinis, had plenty of spirit.  They were definitely fired up to finish the project.

Because of the volume of dough, the Springerle recipe cannot be doubled.  We made two batches and each batch requires at least twenty five minutes of mixer time.  In addition, they are supposed to cool in the refrigerator for at least an hour per batch before rolling out the dough. We tried to shorten the total time by putting the dough in the freezer for fifteen minutes instead of in the refrigerator for an hour.  We finally finished getting the Springerles to the baking sheets at 10:30.  After baking the next day, the pictures on the Springerles started to fade. 

So we banged out about 450 Christmas cookies.  Our four hour estimate turned in to eight and a half.  The participants fell in to two camps.  One group, mostly comprised of minimalist drinkers, thought “Thank God it’s over.  All’s well that ends!”  The other group, who had been pounding bourbon and martinis, thought we should do another batch or two of Lebkuchens.

Most importantly, all of the cookies tasted great.  The Sugar Cookies looked perfect.  The Lebkuchens always look ugly but the flavor and texture was right on.  In essence, they looked and tasted just the way they should have.  The Springerles looked funny but the taste was terrific.  

The process may be significantly improved by judicious use of alcohol.  We should break out the martinis a little sooner and all of the participants, who are not alcoholics, should be sufficiently lubricated no later than 5:00 PM.  Egg nog with rum, a lot of white wine, or several high balls may really promote the feeling of Christmas.  After dinner, we may spontaneously find ourselves caroling throughout the neighborhood. 

The real magic of Christmas is not that God presented himself to mankind or that Santa can reach six billion households in one evening. The real magic of Christmas is that you will forget the debacle it was to bake Christmas cookies when Christmas arrives next year. After Thanksgiving, whipping up a few family cookie recipes will seem to be one of the most romantic and enjoyable activities anyone could ever perform.

I was very disappointed to see four different college football games end with brawls on Thanksgiving weekend.  In each case, the winning visitors tried to plant their University’s flag in the home team’s midfield logo.  How did this become a ritual?  This is both wrong and stupid.

In 1995, Gary Barnett took over the reins of Northwestern’s football program.  He handed out hats to all the players that said “Expect Victory”.  Since Northwestern had not had a winning season in modern history and was considered by all to be the worst college football team in the country, the hat was very humorous.  The opening game was in Southbend against the highly touted “Fighting Irish”.  ND was at least a 30 point favorite.  In his pregame speech Barnett said: “Look, when we beat these guys, don’t put me on your shoulders and carry me off the field.  That will tell everyone that we did not expect to win the game.  Just walk out to midfield and shake the losers’ hands.”  Gary was truly expecting victory.  He got the fantastic upset and his team followed his instructions.  When the winning team runs out on the field after the game is over with some ridiculous exuberance or stupid ritual, they tell everyone that they are totally surprised that they won the game.

And it still is a game.  One team wins and one team loses every time.  It isn’t life and death.  It’s a game within the structure of a sport.  My Michigan team prides themselves in good sportsmanship.  How does planting a flag at Ohio Stadium show sportsmanship?  You pulled off an incredible upset.  The results speak for themselves.  Shake hands or calmly walk to your locker room. The “Game” is over, end of story.  In game seven of the 1965 World Series, Curt Flood slipped while trying to field a line drive in center field.  As a result, the Tigers took the lead and beat the Cardinals.  Curt felt bad about the physical error but his post game comment put it in perspective.  “I am truly sorry that this happened but its not my life and not my wife so I’m not going to worry about it.”  Curt recognized that even the seventh game of the World Series is still just a game.

I know, you’re thinking that college football has always been emotional.  Fans have been tearing down goal posts after big victories since Knute Rockne was a head coach.  In fact, I took part in this festivity when we beat Ohio State in Bo Schembechler’s inaugural season.  For several hours, I had been warming myself with a flask or two of schnapps.  Storming the field and attacking the goal posts seemed like the right thing to do when the Wolverines won.  The celebration for me was one sided.  I didn’t harass any Buckeye fans and I wasn’t nearly drunk enough to confront any of the OSU players.  I was just over joyed with the victory.  The fans stormed the field and the fans tore down the goal posts.  The football team was certainly celebrating but they were not going after anyone from Ohio or helping with the disassembly of the goal posts.  No poor sports here.

When we won the game.  The competition and confrontation was over.  For me, then and now, if we win a game, I am happy.  If we lose, even to the Useless Nuts from Ohio, I am sad.  I am sad all the way back to the tailgate.  Then I am happy again.  Hey, it’s just a game.  

So winning or losing, even if we are not the actual competitors, has been distorted.  

This perverse view of the consummate importance of winning is spilling over to other aspects of our lives.  We were playing what I thought was a friendly game of euchre while the Turkey was roasting for Thanksgiving.  After edging us out ten to nine, one of our opponents jumped up on the table and mooned us.  It took the edge off my appetite.  Missing a backhand on the pickle ball court could be grounds for divorce.  Not happy with your quarterback?  You have to go out and buy another one.  Any spending level is justified by winning ball games.  

No doubt, a number of Ohio State fans will be miserable until next November.  If we beat them again it could be dark for another year.  In fact, none of the fans are even participating in the competition that is causing all of the angst.  Sportsmanship is not part of the equation.  Winning is all that matters.

Michigan fans are no better. Going into the 2023 football season, I heard a lot of “Jim Harbaugh owes us a National Championship!  If he can’t deliver, we need to dump him”.  Jim didn’t owe us anything.  No one is entitled to winning, especially if they are not actually playing the game. Far more important than winning, Jim ran a clean program and he acted in the best interest of his players.  The really great irony is that Jim did deliver a championship and he dumped us.    

So I believe that flag planting and brawls are wrong and stupid.  I miss the days when I could watch a game and feel good when my team gave it their best shot, played by the rules and showed good sportsmanship.  Win or lose, the competition ended when the clock ran out.  Now, winning itself is not enough.  You have to plant your flag in your opponent’s logo.  A loss is truly one of the worst things that could happen to a bunch of people who are not even playing the game.   

I hope that when the NIL and Portal dust settles, I can find a place to watch some amateur sporting events.  After all, it’s still a game.