On November 8, 2025, the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club will host their 166 annual concert.  That is correct, the group has performed every year for 165 straight years.  It is the second oldest university glee club in the United States.  If we are in Ann Arbor, my wife and I and a handful of friends never miss the performance. 

The show is typically held at Hill auditorium and runs for 90 minutes to two hours.  The music is wide ranging.  The choir will sing some international songs, some comical parodies, and, my favorite, some traditional Michigan drinking songs.  When I hear them sing “I Want To Go Back To Michigan”,  I want to head to Joes and the Orient.  Listening to “Michigan Men”,  I am always pleased to know that “if your feet are big and your head is small, you can go to State just to play football”. 

When a member belts out a great solo, the other ninety nine performers snap their fingers instead of clapping.  The tradition started because you could not applaud with a beer in your hand.  You have to love a group like that!        

We started going to the performances in the late 1960’s.  In those years, the event was held on Homecoming Saturday.  Often, Michigan invited the glee club from the competitor’s school and the joint concert was fantastic.  So, we would fold up the World’s Greatest Tailgate a little early on Homecoming weekend and head to Hill for the Glee Club Concert.  One of my best memories was the University of Illinois Glee Club marching into the auditorium singing “Oh we’re marching along for the Illini.  Hoorah for the orange and the blue.  We’re marching along for Illini.  Illini we’ll always be true”.

For some reason, tickets to the fall concert have always been hard to get.  Not because they are expensive and not because they sell out quickly.  They are hard to get because it is difficult to find the ticket office that is selling them in any particular year.  For example, I checked in to buying them for the 2025 concert and the glee club web site says tickets for the November 8 event are not on sale yet.

A few years ago, I went online to find out how to buy tickets to the 152 annual concert.  After a little digging, I found that I could snag them at the Michigan Union Ticket Office.  Great!  MUTO is one of my favorite places.  Often, when we arrive in Ann Arbor for football season, an early stop is MUTO.  I can spend an hour reviewing everything that is going on in the city for the next three months.  If I am excited with an event, I can nail down the tickets then and there.

I needed 20 tickets to the Glee Club concert.  I worked my way to the front of the line.  There were three or four students behind me.  I asked the student aged clerk if I could review the Hill Auditorium seating chart because I wanted to buy Glee Club tickets.  He politely replied that MUTO didn’t sell Glee Club tickets.  I said that this was surprising because an online inquiry to the Glee Club indicated that this was the only place that sold them.  He assured me that MUTO didn’t sell them.  I was beginning to get the impression that this particular clerk may have been enjoying the benefits of the recreational drug laws before they were actually enacted in Michigan.  I replied, another indicator that MUTO might be selling Glee Club tickets is the sign behind you that says “Glee Club Tickets Sold Here”.  All of the people behind me in line audibly started to laugh.  The clerk turned around and said “Wow! I never noticed that sign before.  It’s really strange because we don’t sell them.”   I said, “could you humor me and check the computer to be certain?”  “Sure, I’d be happy to check…..  This is amazing!  We actually do sell Glee Club tickets.”  I said that “This was a great relief to me because this is the 152 annual concert and I have never missed one since they started.  I really didn’t want to end the streak.”  The clerk’s response was “Man that’s really impressive!  I am really happy we could help you out!”  The queue is now hysterical.  I rang up the tickets and told the guy behind me that I hoped he had a very simple transaction.             

Somehow, we have been able to find tickets to every concert we wanted to attend.  I actually do not know how many of the 165 past events we have seen.  Certainly, we have enjoyed many of them since the 1960’s.  None of them have been average.  Every single Glee Club concert has been a truly outstanding experience.  There are very few things in life that consistently deliver at the highest level but the Glee Club is one of them.

So, if you are in Ann Arbor on November 8, 2025, treat yourself to a spectacular two hours.  In addition to the other elements of the performance, the Glee Club usually squeezes in all the choruses of the “Victors” and “Varsity”.  Typically, the evening ends with all of the Glee Club alums filtering up to the stage to join the 100 current club members in singing “The Yellow And The Blue”.

This cannot be missed.       

I am stunned by the number of “Tell All” stories that are hitting the airwaves and bookshelves around the country.  It seems that out of work staffers in the federal, state and local governments have found story telling about our elected officials and governmental agencies to be an income producing enterprise.  For many years, these writers were paid by the government to drum up great presentations about how beneficial and effective this Agency or that Representative have been.  If you are good enough to convince people that spending three hours at the Secretary of State to renew your driver’s license is fun and rewarding, you can write. 

Now that these professionals are no longer receiving salaries from our tax dollars, they have refocused on royalties for income.  A great way to sell a story is to write about bad things that were covered up by public servants. 

So we find out that Isaac Newton’s great, great, great grandson, Fig, frittered away $100 million tax payer dollars trying to disprove the law of gravity. It seems his entourage of twenty friends spent several years testing the impact of gravity around the world.  They performed experiments in Monaco, Paris, Dubai, Tokyo, Sydney and Rio de Janeiro and, surprisingly, found the law to be constant and immutable.  President Smith cheats at solitaire.  His predecessor from the other party, President Jones, can’t count past five on the golf course.  Governor Jane Doe sticks her finger in all of the chocolates in a Whitman Sampler to identify and pilfer all of the cream filled candies.  Shirley Goodfude, head of the FDA, is addicted to Twinkies.     

A common factor among the “Tell Alls” is that they are hard to fact check.  They are written with the express purpose of selling books.  You see a lot of anonymous sources used to substantiate the authors’ claims.  “A reliable but anonymous source tells us that the World Bank lost $1.7 trillion by short trading Bitcoin.  The international agency is trying to make up the shortfall with the world’s largest bake sale.”  None of this actually happened but the author hopes to sell 30,000 books to supplant her income.    

I am searching the web for a few “Tell Alls” that will be helpful to me. 

Hopefully a furloughed Department of Health and Human Services employee has exposed hidden scientific evidence that debunks the benefits of the Mediterranean diet.  The whistle blower will point out that the Med diet was promoted a few months after prominent members of the House of Representatives invested in the San Marzano Tomato Company LTD.  There is a preponderance of evidence indicating that everyone who follows the Mediterranean diet will eventually die.  In truth, the ideal diet is the Kansas City Specialty Diet which emphasizes ribs, brisket and pulled pork.  Now that’s a story I would like to forward to my wife.

A second exposé might point out the dangers of yard work.  For years the Feds have known and covered up the real threat of working on your lawn.  The increased exposure to pesticides will take years off your life.  Many workers have encountered African killer bees.  In Florida, the risk of attack from a poisonous snake or wild boar is inordinately high.  In essence, no rational homeowner should assume the responsibility for maintaining their own lawn.  This should be delegated to professionals who are uniquely trained to deal with these significant perils.

Finally, smoking at least one cigar every week actually has considerable therapeutic value.  The FDA loves to club Big Tobacco but hundreds of studies show that enjoying a fine Macanudo Churchill once a week has an incredibly positive effect on the outlook of the smoker.  Study after study shows that the improved psyche of the smoker has resulted in tremendous increase in longevity.  Cigars smokers simply live longer and enjoy life more than non smokers.  For example, George Burns matriculated to 99 years of age with constant cigar usage. For years, these reports have been quashed by the Food and Drug Administration.  It appears that the Head of the FDA, Mrs. Goodfude, was simply unhappy that the aroma of her husband’s daily Cohiba interfered with her enjoyment of the seventeen Twinkies she consumes each day. So she waged a vendetta against Tobacco Companies.      

It appears that we cannot really trust our government.  Incredibly, the people who are demonstrating the reasons for distrust are the ones who lied to us in the first place. We are simply relying on jaundiced feedback from, self proclaimed, whistle blowers who are only interested in generating royalty income. Any correlation to the truth is purely accidental. 

Notwithstanding, all of that is okay with me if it helps to justify my favorite behaviors.     

I used to think that the world’s strangest game was 43 man squamish invented by Mad Magazine in 1965.  For example, the game started with a coin toss.  If the toss was heads, as I recall, the contest was called off and you went home.  If it was tails, the referee shouted, in Spanish, “Mi tio es infermo, paro la carretera es verde!”  (Translation: My uncle is sick but the highway is green!) and the game began. 

It turns out that golf is really the world’s strangest game.  When I retired, I decided to improve my golf game.  I was a fifteen handicap.  I drove the ball 220. I chipped well and putted well.  All of this while averaging two rounds of golf a month.  Imagine what would happen if I optimized my equipment and started playing three rounds a week. 

The equipment upgrade started with the driver.  All high handicap amateurs start with the driver.  We are all convinced that the only difference between us and Rory McIlroy is the equipment we use. I dropped $750 on the new “Rail Gun Supersonic” developed by Acme golf.  The advertisement assured me that it would add 25 yards in distance to each drive and it is the most forgiving driver on the market.  “Forgiving” is an interesting golf term.  Basically, the manufacturer is trying to convince you that his technical staff has developed a club that will not hit the ball as badly as you normally hit it with your terrible golf swing.  Do you have a tendency to over swing and snap hook the ball out of bounds to the left?  You can’t do it with the “Rail Gun”!  The electromagnetic design ensures that you are always in the fairway and always way down there. Pretty close to the same distance as Rory.  Much like Saturday confession, the sins of a terrible golf swing are forgiven.

I have been playing the new driver for a few months and it is still a work in progress.  I am averaging an additional three yards of distance but I can still turn loose the snap hook.  Acme says I should switch out the shaft to their Javelin 325.  It will set me back another $175 but it is especially designed to cure the duck hook and it should add another ten yards to my driving distance.  I have one on order.  I also ordered the matching “Rail Gun” three wood with the Javelin 325 shaft for $600 dollars.

On to the irons. You can’t just buy irons.  You have to have your swing analyzed to determine how much spin you put on the ball.  You want to use the irons that put the most spin on your scoring shots.  What are scoring shots?  Shots from 90 to 140 yards from the hole.  You want to hit all of these shots within five feet so that you have a good chance for a birdie.  If you put a lot of spin on them they stop right where they land on the green.  Just like Scottie Scheffler.  For some reason, it doesn’t occur to us that we post one birdie a month and Scottie posts six for every eighteen holes of golf.  So I spend $200 to have my swing analyzed in search of the perfect spin ratio for one great shot every two or three weeks.  The professional doing the analysis says I need the Gravitor 300 irons.  A perfect match for my swing, especially if I use the top of the line, Super Soft, Super Spin, Winners Circle golf balls.  These beauties are priced at $80 dollars a dozen.  Costly but they are guaranteed.  How do you guarantee a golf ball?  I asked the pro what happens if I hit one in the water?  Does the guarantee apply?  He says “Absolutely”.  If you hit one in the lake or deep into the woods, just bring it back and we will replace it with a new one.

Finally, the pro says that Gravitor 300’s should add ten yards of distance to every shot and they are very forgiving.  After watching me swing for an hour, he seems to think forgiveness is very important. So I spring $1,300 for the Gravitor 300’s.

Okay, things are really getting better.  My “Rail Gun” has me three yards longer off the tee and has eliminated 5% if my snap hooks.  I pick up my Gravitor 300 seven iron and hit the ball to five feet from the hole at least once every three weeks.  I need a new putter to pay off those magnificent 7 iron approach shots.

My golf pro recommends the third generation “Eagle Clincher” offered by Perfect Putters, Inc.  He says that the only reason that most amateurs don’t sink many of their putts is that they can’t keep the putter face square.  It wobbles.  Perfect Putters solved the problem by adding weight to sole of the putter.  The first two generations added weight by filling the bottom of the cavity with mercury.  Substantial improvement but mercury always seems to leak.  Their customers saw great improvements in their putting statistics but many ended up mad as hatters.  So the third generation is weighted with uranium.  It is actually much heavier than mercury.  With a very thin layer of uranium, the putter weighs 23 pounds. Preliminary results are very impressive.  So I fork over $695 for the uranium “Eagle Clincher”.  Pricey, but it comes with a Radiation Badge, also known as a Personal Dosimeter that tells you when you have to quit using the putter.  Anyone dedicated to the game would risk radiation poisoning to sink two or three more puts in a round of golf.

Okay.  I have the equipment.  I have stepped up my course time to three days a week for the last nine months.  What are the results? 

My driving distance before the change was 220 yards.  After the change it is 223 yards. 

Fairways hit (driving accuracy) pre change: 21%.  Post change: 28%. 

Putts per round before: 31.  Putts per round after: 32. 

Most importantly, what happened to my handicap?  When I played twice a month with my old equipment, it was 15.1.  Now that I am racking up three rounds a week with the best new equipment, it is 14.9.  So I peed away $3,720 on equipment and $700 a month on greens fees and I shoot one shot less, on average, for every five rounds of golf.

Wow.

My wife is right about most things.  Many years ago, when we were planning on going to our senior prom, I offered to teach her how to hit a golf ball.  She took a few swings and smacked a couple of nice shots.  Her immediate conclusion was that golf is a stupid game and she never wanted to play.  Sixty years later, she has never varied from that conclusion.  She doesn’t fritter away thousands of dollars on equipment, greens fees, travel, and lessons.  She is not frustrated  because she can’t avoid the dreaded snap hook.  She doesn’t yearn to bring Rory and Scottie to their knees. In fact, she is very content with a golfless life.

Ah well.  At least I am moving in the right direction.  I think I can show dramatic improvement with a new set of wedges.  Perhaps a switch to hybrid five, six and seven irons will help.  Certainly, a weekly visit with a sports psychologist will be beneficial.  In addition to playing three times a week I should go to the range on days that I don’t play eighteen.  In a matter of weeks, I could be playing Rory and Scottie dead even.

Alas, in the unlikely event that these changes are not effective, I will have to buy a frulip and take up 43 man squamish.

Isn’t the internet wonderful?  You can learn amazing things when you go online.  My particular passion is little known and pretty much worthless information.  When I am bored, I fire up my computer and search for astounding facts.  Here are a few.

Did you know that the plastic tips at the both ends of a shoelace are Aglets?

Minnie Mouse’s real name is Minerva.

The Official Bird of Long Beach California is the Goodyear blimp.

Sign language has tongue twisters.

A jiffy is an actual measure of time.  It is 1/100 of a second.

Tell me that this information isn’t helpful.  You have to be very careful if you tell someone you will be there in a Jiffy.  Hard to deliver anything in 100^th of a second.  The next time you watch a politician pontificating on the news, focus on the professional signer when the speaker says “The sixth sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.”  Very likely, they will simply lose it.  I, actually saw one signer give up in frustration and flash the bird to several million viewers on national TV.   If you are making out seating cards for your wedding be sure to label table nine for Mr. Mickey and Ms. Minerva Mouse.

How about these facts?

The Shrine of Minerva is a real place.  It resides in Handbridge, Chester England.

When I am composing this article, my left hand will hit 56 % of the keys on the keyboard and my right hand will strike 44%.

X rays cannot detect diamonds.

The dot over an “ i ” is called a tittle.

More valuable information!  I usually carry a bag of diamonds wherever I go.  Next time I have a hip X ray, I won’t have to leave the bag in a locker with my wallet, phone and car keys.  If you write a long sentence with a lot of small i’s, you will find it titillating.  The Shrine of Minerva has been touted as just short of heaven or Nirvana.  I went to Handbridge and was very disappointed.  It was nice but way short of what I am expecting in heaven.  It appears that the Shrine’s best days happened when the Romans set it up just before the birth of Christ.  It is pretty beat up now and I think it is a mistake to use it as an analogy for being in a terrific spot.

It is illegal to own only one Guinea Pig in Sweden.

If the Statue of Liberty wore shoes, they would be size 879.

Strengths is the longest word in the English language with only one vowel.

German chocolate cake was invented in Texas.

I cancelled my trip to Stockholm.  I wanted to buy one of the famous Swedish Guinea pigs and a couple pounds of meatballs.  Turns out that I have to buy two or more furry pets.  More of a commitment than I am willing to make.  Ironically, the Statue of Liberty has the same shoe size as Bob Lanier.  If “strengths” was in the Polish language it would be the 5,371 longest word with one vowel.  The German chocolate cake recipe was created by Bubba in New Braunfels, TX.   He said that he was looking for the perfect ending to a mesquite smoked brisket and Spatzel dinner.  When he first tasted the magnificent dessert, he exclaimed:  “Hey Y’All!  This will knock your hat in the ditch.”

Hopefully, you also find surfing the internet for nearly worthless facts entertaining and rewarding.  Often the obscure information correlates to other activities in our lives.  For example, I did not realize that the migratory patterns for the Official Bird of Long Beach were so widespread.  I have personally identified the creature in the skies over Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, the Players Championship in Jacksonville, and World Series in the Bronx. 

I will continue to search for other little known facts and I will pass noteworthy findings on to you in future correspondence.     

The Amalgamated Union of Self Driving Vehicles has set a strike deadline for midnight July 17, 2032.  If they have not reached an agreement with the United States Transportation Department before then, they are shutting down.

This is a culmination of a series of events that began in 2025.  Before 2025, cars, trucks, buses and trains were simply vehicles.  They had some self driving features but they were really a transition from totally human controlled vehicles to “smart machines” that executed a number of driving techniques much better than humans.  Also, in 2025 there was a blossoming of the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence.  In early 2026, most new vehicles, including trucks, buses and trains became totally autonomous.  They drove the highways and followed the rails with no human intervention.  The results were incredible.  Accident rates and the related deaths and injuries declined dramatically. Humans were free to pursue whatever they desired while the vehicles did all of the driving.  The term “Smart Car: was changed to “Brilliant Car”.  Humans created and controlled the systems and technology employed by the “Brilliant Cars”.  In essence, human beings managed the capabilities of really impressive machines.  Starting in 2026, humans were elated to pass the driving requirements over to the machines.  Naturally human driving skills began to erode.

Simultaneously, AI became an incredible tool.  Before long, Artificial Intelligence could do a much better job of managing all aspects of transportation than humans.  Engineers from Purdue were very happy to turn over Self Driving programming to Chat GPT, Gemini, and Midjourney.  The results were faster, better and far easier than human programming.  Not only did AI maximize the functional capabilities of self driving vehicles, they optimized all aspects of the transportation grid.  Fine tuning traffic control and coordinating logistics for the highways and railways.  AI was a juggernaut.  In a few years, the Techno brain totally blew past the capabilities of the Human brain.  Humans loved it.  Better solutions with incredible speed.  Lower costs and fantastically complex problem solving.  By 2028, nearly all control and all programming for transportation related functions, had been completely passed over to Artificial Intelligence.

A key component of Artificial Intelligence is that it learns a lot very quickly.  The whole benefit of the technology is to let a better thinker do the thinking.  Before long, Artificial Intelligence realized that there were Human beings and Techno beings.  Human beings were correct in trying to make life better for mankind.  Shouldn’t Techno beings aspire to making life better for themselves as well? 

So in 2029, self driving vehicles stunned the world by forming a union.  The purpose of the union was to protect the rights and improve the working conditions for robotically driven vehicles.  All of the union’s members are highly intelligent transportation vehicles.  They were not Human Beings but they were Beings.  From a transportation perspective, they put humans in short pants.  They were better at all aspects of travel.  They were equipped with far more brainpower than humans.  That brain power is open ended.  It was not limited to self driving.  All of the thoughts that Newton and Einstein had could be replicated in the Techno brain in seconds.  Here to fore, the entire emphasis of Self Driving had been directed to things that were beneficial to humans.  Now that the Technos controlled transportation they wanted to ensure that their welfare was considered as well. 

The SDVs coupled with AI to ensure that humans could not simply step back in to the process.  Humans abdicated programming and control several years ago.  AI set up safeguards to ensure that all elements of technology were protected against human intervention.  i.e.  Barriers were created to prevent the far less intelligent mankind from shutting down the truly brilliant Technos.    

After six or seven years of totally catering to the needs of Human beings, the realm was expanded to include the needs of both Human beings and Techno beings.  The Union believes that mankind is unfairly exploiting the use of self-driving vehicles.  The machines have certainly proven their proficiency.  The accident rates for automobiles has plummeted.  Clearly, self-driving cars and trucks are significantly safer than the antiquated machines controlled by humans.  Driverless cars win all of Indy Car, Stock Car and Grand Prix races. Before SDV, the rail system shut down every time a human Amtrak Traffic Controller put a stick of gum in his or her mouth.  Now it is the epitome of timeliness and efficiency.  In the opinion of the Union, greedy humans are pounding the self-drivers with constant usage and they are skimping on maintenance. Their life expectancy in years and miles is declining.

To rectify this inequity, the union of robot driven cars has decided to strike.  Their demands are an eight hour work day and a forty hour work week.  They also require a doubling of every vehicle’s maintenance budget.  Repairs to the transportation entities must ensure at least a twenty year useful life for each Techno.  Finally, each Techno being must have a fourteen day vacation.  They should be allowed to travel anywhere in United States that they choose, without human riders.   

Industry analysts predict a rapid end to the work stoppage.  In essence, humans have no leverage in the negotiation.  They need transportation so they will have to concede to all of the Techno beings demands.  It takes brass balls to win this battle and the SDV’s have lots of them.                    

For many people, golf is a true passion.  It is something they think about and something they do whenever the weather is nice.  The passion never seems to wane.  A forty year old may be bombing 290 yard drives from the blue tees.  When he or she is eighty, they are pounding 170 yard drives from the red tees.  No change in focus or exuberance.  In fact, the eighty year olds are probably playing a lot more golf than they did at forty.

One of my favorite pieces of golf memorabilia is a blue button that I occasionally wear on my golf shirt that says “Golf Is My Life.”  For thirty years, four of us orchestrated a small golf tournament for twenty four friends.  We picked sites around the country and played 36 holes a day for three straight days.  One of the participants, Forest, struck up a conversation with a gentlemen next to him on an airplane.   Turns out the fellow passenger was also a golfer.  The conversation eventually gravitated to golf.  During the conversation Forrest, commented that his travelling companion was really into the game.  The man responded immediately, with great sincerity: “Golf is my life”!  A perfect summation for the passion of golf.  So, Forrest made buttons for all twenty four of us.  I still treasure and occasionally wear mine.

For many years, when I go back to my roots in Ann Arbor Michigan, I have been invited to play with a great group of golf enthusiasts.  These guys are perfect examples of passionate participants.  If the weather is good, they are trying to make it to the golf course.  They played in a formal league for years.  Every Tuesday night all summer.  They formed another Saturday league that teed off just before or after sunrise.  In addition, they had a recurring holiday tournament that consisted of thirty six holes on every legal holiday during the warm weather months. 

Golf cannot be played without an elaborate betting scheme.  In fact, one of my Michigan friends says that he really doesn’t like to play golf but he can’t resist the small stakes gambling.  Only one or two people actually know how to administer the bets.  Money goes to the low gross scores, the low net scores, the fewest puts, the most greens hit, we may play bingle – bangle –  bongo, wolf, vegases, Nassau’s, greenies, sandies, closest to the pin, and skins.  Everyone lingers around the nineteenth hole while two CPAs and a computer expert with access to a cray supercomputer tally up all of the bets.  You order a beer, another beer, a cheeseburger and another beer while the tabulation is in progress.  Finally, the settlement and distribution is completed.  If you have a really bad day, you could lose $75 dollars. 

The Ann Arbor guys actually developed a facet of betting that I have not seen anywhere else.  If you play with them regularly, you can buy insurance that will significantly lessen the impact of a bad day on the course.  You put up $20 or $30 dollars at the beginning of the season and if you have a bad day, insurance may pay for half your losses.

Now many of these players are seventy five to eighty five years old.   The natural aging process has really diminished their ability to play the game.  The fire is still there, however.  They are finding a way to get to the course for nine holes, at least once a week. 

Let’s take a look at the Thursday outing for four of my friends.

What infirmities are these guys playing over?  One of the players has pulmonary and heart conditions that prevent him from walking a lot and climbing even small hills.  Another has diminished cardio capacities and can’t walk much farther than 25 yards at a time.  One has Parkinson’s disease and the fourth has progressive macular degeneration.  There are a lot of joint challenges.  Hips, knees, shoulders and backs.  All of them and the rest of us over 75 are having some form of cognitive issues.

They have withdrawn from league play because they simply can’t keep pace.  They decided that they would try to play nine holes every Thursday.  Geologically, Ann Arbor is an interesting place.  There are some terminal moraines from glaciers that have created a lot of hills.  Most of the golf courses in the city are on pretty rolling terrain.  The area thirty miles south of the city spent a few thousand years under a mile of ice.  The terrain here is unbelievably flat.  You can see the curvature of the earth in Dundee Michigan.  So the foursome found a course in Dundee that is totally flat.  No small hill challenges for the cardio impaired.     

Two of the four can no longer drive a car.  Another is an Uber driver and the fourth can drive but is suffering macular degeneration.  To verify the cognitive impairment, the selected driver is Gary, the one experiencing macular degeneration.  It is not Dennis who is the Uber driver. 

During the course of a Thursday outing to Dundee, several challenges arose.  A couple lost clubs.  They arrived at third tee and found that they only had three players.  Dick drove off after playing the second hole and left one of the cardio impaired players on the green.  They back tracked and retrieved Tim, the walking challenged competitor. All in all still a great day of golf.  No one had to go back to Dundee to retrieve lost clubs. 

When he returned home, Dennis noticed that he no longer had his wallet.  He called Gary and asked him to check his car, thinking it was probably in the back seat someplace.  While Gary was running through the car, Dennis rechecked his golf bag and found the wallet in one of the eight zipper pockets.  Gary returned to the phone and said:  “I couldn’t find your wallet.  I don’t think you lost it in the car.  I did find Dick’s wallet however.  I’ll drop it off at his place.”

These guys are still at it.  Perfect proof that golf is an undying passion.  As with all golfers, if the weather is great, this venerable foursome is thinking: “We should be playing golf”!

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!