Hackneyed

  • There and Back in the USSR

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    Soviet-era illustrations from an edition of The Hobbit.

  • Proud that I was asked to join Jocelyn Benson’s Small Business Coalition.

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    Always happy to share my experiences and thoughts, and hopefully help others in the process. 👏 Congrats to Maria Popova on twenty years of The Marginalian, “marginalia on our search for meaning” and “learning to live.” Always inspiring. 🎨 11 things learned in art school. Among them: “You don’t have to like an important work…

  • Dee-Troit Basket-Ball

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    Boston led by over 20 before Detroit eventually won 121-113. I didn’t love that first half, but that run in the 4th was insane. Javonte Green hitting five threes in the second half has me excited. Hoping he and Duncan Robinson can keep ’em coming. Fun way to start the season, even if I’d prefer…

  • A Recipe for a Zesty Life

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    (Harry Bliss cover of the New Yorker, published a year ago today.) Published by Joshua Allen, 31 years ago this Halloween: Every day I should create a little and destroy a little. The NBA is back, baby. Please direct all reasonable basketball discussion elsewhere. Detroit vs. Everybody.

  • Arrr, Matey!

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    Facts 🏴‍☠️

  • DoorDash.com Once Peddled Porn

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    Unearthed from the Wayback Machine: TikTok.com was once a couple’s homepage. In 2000, Hinge sold hinges and Threads sold threads. In 2001, DoorDash was a pornhub and OnlyFans was a hub for music and film fans, only. At least until 2003, Hulu belonged to a couple named Hung and Lucy. (Via Annie Rauwerda)

  • Robby Hoffman in Royal Oak

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    Went to Robby Hoffman as an early birthday celebration for Will and Lydia and now I am tired and hungover, but if that’s the excuse to eat pizza all day and watch Weapons and It Follows and A Nightmare on Elm Street, then pour me another drink. 👻 ‘Tis the season. 🌭 Metro Times picks…

  • A Pain from an Old Wound

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  • Tetris, Records, Innovation, Effect, McNugget

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    It’s the game I’ve spent the most time playing in my life and, oddly enough, the one I’ve had the most communal experience with. My friends, family and I never really paid attention to points. We were always gunning for the most lines. Unless there was a tie, of course, then points came into play.…

  • Watchin’ Reacher

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    Laura Olin says it better than I could ever: “I don’t think Reacher is my favorite show, but it’s one of the shows I most enjoy. If you are a person who has not yet experienced it, the series is about a guy called Jack Reacher (who goes by “just Reacher”). He is very tall,…

  • Dolly 💔

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    From Gloria Steinham, 1987: “People who haven’t listened to Dolly Parton or to feminism may be surprised to learn that they go together. In fact, she has crossed musical class lines to bring work, real life, and strong women into a world of pop music usually dominated by unreal romance. She has used her business…

  • 2001 Concept Art

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    Concept art, reproduced in Piers Bizony’s The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The artist is uncredited. (Via scifi.art)

  • Detroit, July 25th, 2026

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  • Project Hail Mary

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    Watched, enjoyed, but don’t anything to add to the discourse. Just really want Gosling’s jacket. According to Reddit: “The jacket was custom designed for the film by costume designers Glyn Dillon and David Crossman; not sourced from a retail brand. Why it stands out is because it’s not a standard raincoat: it’s a hybrid design.…

  • Today was my last day on East Lansing’s Downtown Development Authority.

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    It has been a privilege to serve on the Downtown Development Authority for the past eight years. Looking back, it feels like the culmination of a long chapter of civic service that began with the advisory board for (SCENE) MetroSpace in 2010, followed by the Arts Commission, and later serving as the Chair for the…

  • The Stanley Kubrick Collection

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    I still have a DVD set of his that I got in high school, that replaced a VHS set I had bought a few years prior. While on the subject of Criterion, I like this virtual closet, “of 1,327 real Criterion editions, shelved in spine-number order — exactly as a true collector keeps them. Look around,…

  • 82-0

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    I’ve had about a dozen people mention this to me. Didn’t take me long to get to an 82-0 team, but I think I’d take this 69-13 team over them all day. You can’t help off Curry, which means Jordan gets endless single coverage. That’s basically illegal basketball.

  • The Body

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    Wil Wheaton’s reading of Stephen King’s The Body made for the perfect companion while I did yard work and walked my dog along nearby trails. Having played Gordie in Stand by Me, he brings a deeply personal resonance to the narration. It feels like a full-circle moment, Wheaton returning to the story with an insider’s…

  • 70 Up Coming

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    Asif Kapadia will “bring the long-running ITV documentary series Up to an end with a concluding instalment that will air this year,” so says The Guardian. “The series, which began in 1964 and was voted the most influential UK TV show of the last 50 years in 2024, has followed a group of people from…

  • A Chicago Fan’s Incredible Show Archive

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    Aadam Jacobs “secretly recorded over 10,000 local concerts since 1989. Now, they are cleaned up and ready to listen to for free online.” “On July 8, 1989, a young music fan named Aadam Jacobs, with a compact Sony cassette recorder in his pocket, went to see an up-and-coming rock band from Washington for their debut…