Welcome to Hack Mule Notebook #7!

It’s been quite a week here at Hack Mule, as you will read. In addition to my adventures, this week I’ll be responding to several reader requests. I’m delighted to get questions and requests, so please keep them coming. And I always enjoy reading lots of comments at the bottom of the post—I’m eager to hear from you!

Review

Coyote vs. Acme gets a little too real

Several friends had told me how much they’d enjoyed seeing Coyote vs. Acme, the combined cartoon/live-action film where Wile E. Coyote sues Acme Corporation for selling him the hundreds of faulty contraptions that backfire and injure him as he chases the Road Runner.

I loved the Road Runner cartoons when I was a kid, so armed with a Coke and popcorn, I marched through the movie theatre, eager to take my seat and watch poor Wile E. seek justice after decades of being wronged.

But faster than you can drop an anvil off a cliff, my foot caught on the carpet, and I went sailing through the air. The Coke and the popcorn exploded from their containers, and everything—including me—landed with a thud. I literally heard my internal organs go “splat.”

I would not be surprised to learn that there is a Kristen-shaped dent in the theatre floor, just like the ones Wile E. made at the bottom of every canyon.

I tried to bounce back up from my now-flattened, two-dimensional form, but I don’t have the cartoon springiness I used to enjoy, so I just slumped there contemplating the carpet pattern until a very kind gentleman helped me to my feet.

Ever the Wile E. fan, I soldiered on, despite being badly shaken and in considerable pain. I walked into the theatre, found my seat, and watched the movie.

Well, I attempted to watch the movie. I mainly kept testing my aching arm to see if everything was still working. It was—basically—but as the adrenaline wore off and the swelling kicked in, the pain ramped up. And the movie got harder to watch.

As the credits rolled, I stood up and realized I was much more injured than I’d thought. A trip to the emergency room revealed that I have two fractures in my arm. I hope to learn what became of my shoulder and knee when I see the specialist next week.

So, I don’t have much of a movie review, despite a lot of drama and action. I’ll try again when it starts streaming.

One funny note: As I left the theatre, still reeling a little, I noticed the theatre’s logo reflected in the glass on the front door. For just a second, I could have sworn it said “Acme.”

I’m still suspicious.

Gripes

Eventually, the hospital discharged me—limping, whimpering, and with my arm immobilized—into the night. Along with my discharge papers, they also gave me a little bottle with four oxycodone pills for pain.

I thought this was a great idea—no driving around to find an all-night pharmacy—until I got home and tried to take one of the pills (as directed).

The bottle was shrink-wrapped in a hard plastic cover that would’ve been difficult to open with two functional hands. With just one it was absolutely impossible.

As I tried to figure out this riddle, I noticed that the pill bottle was unusual. To open it you needed to squeeze the bottle while pressing down on the cap and twisting—yet another action that’s impossible one-handed.

So in true Wile E. Coyote style, I grabbed a rubber mallet and slammed it, cracking open the plastic shell and shattering the bottle.

Out popped a shrink-wrapped blister pack containing the pills. I tried using a pair of scissors to get to them, but with just my left hand available and no way to anchor the blister pack, I didn’t have much luck. So I picked at it for about 45 minutes with an iFixIt kit.

By the time I liberated the pills, I definitely could’ve used a few more.

Sadists. Must be another Acme product.

Discoveries

This week I’ve learned exactly how right-handed I am. The verdict? Pathetically and completely right-handed.

Here are some of the things I’ve discovered are nearly impossible to do one-handed:

• Buttering bread. It sounds so simple: Take a knife, cut a piece of butter off the stick, apply the butter to the bread, and spread it around. Ha! Turns out it is a minefield of one-handed disaster. You need two hands for the butter — one to hold the butter and one to hold the knife. If you attempt to do this one-handed, as I did, you will send the butter, the bread, and the plate flying across the kitchen. So much for sandwiches.

• Eating. As an American, it is my constitutional right to hold my fork tines up in my right hand to shovel food into my face. I exercise this right so diligently that I can barely find my mouth with a fork in my left hand. Fortunately, the doctor says the puncture wounds on the side of my cheek should heal nicely.

• Wearing socks. They’re dead-simple technologies: basically fabric tubes with a hole on one end and toes on the other. But what I never realized is that you actually have to hold the hole open with two hands to get your foot into one. I’ve devoted an inordinate amount of time this week to watching YouTube videos about one-handed sock installation.

• Flossing. There are two kinds of people in the world: disgusting barbarians and people who floss. I’m in the latter group. But, as I learned this week, flossing is impossible one-handed. After two days of living like a toothless frontier woman, I called my dentist to find out what she recommends. She praised me for being a model patient (I’m pretty sure she used the words “my favorite”), expressed sympathy about my arm, and told me to get a Waterpik and fluoride rinse.

• Drying and styling my hair. Drying my hair is simple enough: Hold the hair dryer in my available hand and aim it at my head. But if I need to actually style my hair — say, curl it around a brush — forget it. So if you run into a woman who looks like she moonlights as a crash-test dummy at the Jet Propulsion Lab’s wind tunnel, stop and say hi, because it’s probably me.

• Dictating. Tech companies claim that speech recognition continues to improve and dictation is nearly flawless. Speaking on behalf of the temporarily disarmed, I have to disagree. Everything is coming out as, “The quick round hogs jumped overtly crazy logs.” Blame speech-to-text, not a previously undiscovered head injury.

Incidentally, if you were wondering why this week’s Hack Mule completely lacks punctuation, now you know. Let’s not call them typos. Let’s call them “immersive journalism.”

Listening

I found music in some odd places this week. You can enjoy the full Hack Mule playlist on Apple Music. Here’s what I heard:

• “Curious Subject,” Chaka Khan—popped up on my new music playlist while I was sitting at my desk. Thumbs up.

• “Roll to Me,” Del Amitri—hold music for Uber customer service

• “Jolloff on the Roll Off,” Sunbörn, Clap! Clap!—reading on the balcony

• “Break My Heart,” Dua Lipa—looking at refrigerators at Lowe’s, Gaithersburg

• “Jamaican (Bam Bam),” HUGEL, SOLTO (FR)—blasting out of a car on Bradley Blvd., Bethesda

• “Message of Love,” Pretenders—what I think the band was trying to play at the Leviathan end-of-summer party

• “1812 Overture”—song playing at the end of Coyote vs. Acme when I stood up and felt like my arm was going to fall off

• “I Had Some Help,” Post Malone—selection from the kid not using earbuds in the emergency room

• “Spanish Flea,” Herb Alpert—background music in radiology

• “Could Have Been Me,” The Struts—music YouTube randomly offered at 3 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep.

Milestones

Two readers reached out to make sure I covered this: Princess Astrid of Norway died this week at age 94, two days after the state funeral for her brother, King Harald V. (She even attended the funeral, which is nothing short of heroic at her age.)

Astrid lost her state salary and office when she married a divorced commoner over the Norwegian Church’s objections. Despite the demotion, she later acted as Norway’s first lady for the 15 years between her mother’s death and her brother’s marriage.

She also has a local tie—during World War II, her mother brought Astrid, Harald, and their sister Ragnhild to Bethesda to escape the war in Europe. They lived on the Pooks Hill estate, which straddles the property where the Marriott and The Promenade sit today.

A new apartment building opened on the property a few years ago called The Astrid. The community’s website doesn’t indicate whether it was named for the princess who once lived there, but it’s quite a coincidence if it isn’t.

Arrivals

Another reader request here: On Wednesday, Apple unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12, the iPhone 18 Pro and Max, and the iPhone Duo. Several of you are curious about whether I would recommend switching to any of these.

The short answer is: only if your existing iPhone or Apple Watch is more than three or four years old.

The new iPhones certainly look good, and they have faster chips, but the main changes are in their cameras, which now have adjustable apertures. That sounds enticing, but the truth is that unless you’re hiring Annie Leibovitz to photograph your three-year-old’s birthday party, you probably don’t need anything that sophisticated. (And besides, she’d bring her own equipment.)

And, frankly, you wouldn’t notice a difference in the casual shots you’re likely to take with an iPhone anyway.

The Apple Watch is a little more interesting because there are more actual hardware changes, particularly for health sensing. But some of the most intriguing features Apple demonstrated won’t arrive for months, so it’s too soon to tell how valuable they are.

The iPhone Duo is a big question mark, too. Although it’s compact as foldable phones go, it’s a brick—even heavier than last year’s very heavy iPhone 17 Pro.

Starting at $2,000 and going up to $3,200 fully tricked out with two terabytes of storage, it also costs more than most of Apple’s computers do. You could literally buy a MacBook Air, an iPad, and an Apple Watch for the price of the Duo.

It’s certainly a technological achievement—and some people do have a practical use case for it—but it’s not tempting me so far.

My best advice is hold for now, and let’s see what develops with all three.

Welcome to Hack Mule Notebook #6! I hope everyone enjoyed Labor Day Weekend! What better way to kick off fall than to take an extra day off, start fresh, and land even further behind than you were last week.

This week the Hack Mule was kicking the stall a little, so settle in and get ready!

Overheard:

A friend just called to ask where she could find the weather on her new MacBook. I said, “Press Command-Space and type ‘Weather.’”

She did, and the app popped up. She was astonished that Apple has a weather app.

She said, “I’d been staring at iCloud for 20 minutes, and I see nothing about clouds, rain, sun, or temperature. This is much better.”

Gripes:

Atlantic Parking dumps humans

I pulled into the parking lot at North Bethesda Market the other day, where Atlantic Parking has converted a lowly indoor parking lot into a data-mining operation with incidental parking.

I kid you not.

The facility now has a license-plate-reading system that requires users to enter their name, email, phone number, license plate, and payment method into a web page in order to park.

No exceptions. And it charges you a buck for “platform access”—sort of like if Safeway made you rent its cash registers to check out.

Aside from being intrusive and blood-sucking, it doesn’t work. So, I stopped at the attendant booth to get things straightened out.

The weary attendant said they’re getting rid of all the workers, so I’d have to talk to Jerome.

Me: “OK, when is Jerome here?”

Attendant: “No one knows. Jerome comes and goes.”

It’s like a customer-service haiku.

Even though I drove out a week ago, the parking session is still running with a $90 tab. And counting.

Milestones:

President Trump called Apple last week to demand that the company change Lake Ontario’s name to “Lake America” after the tech giant failed to comply instantly with his executive order.

After all, what more important thing does the President of the United States possibly have to think about?

Trump: “Siri, navigate to ‘Lake America.’”

Siri: “Navigating to lower Armenia.”

Trump: “Dammit! Get Tim Apple on the phone. I don’t care if he retired!”

The fact that tomorrow is the global launch of Apple’s fall line-up—which means it needs Trump to grant tariff waivers to sell to Canada and other countries—is entirely coincidental, I’m sure.

Me: “Siri, navigate to that bridge in Brooklyn you wanted to sell me…”

Listening:

Here’s the music I found playing around me this week. You can enjoy the full Hack Mule playlist on Apple Music.

• “I Ain’t Superstitious,” Jeff Beck—walking past the Bethesda police station

• “Your Love is Electric,” Leon Bridges—at my desk. Someone sent me the pre-release link. Full album drops September 25.

• “Route 101,” Herb Alpert—driving on Route 28

• “Route 66,” Depeche Mode—driving on Route 28 an hour later

• “Road to Nowhere,” Talking Heads—driving on Route 28 the next day

• “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do),” Hall & Oates—walking near Pennyfield Lock, Potomac

• “Brazil,” Declan McKenna—in line at UPS, Kensington

• “Chorar Na Beira Do Mar,” Pedro Mizutani—reading by the pool

• “Make Me Rainbows,” Bill Charlap Trio—making brunch Saturday morning

• “So What (I’m Still a Rock Star),” Pink—at the gym

Special mention: “Drunk As Cooter Brown,” Cassandra Wilson—I first heard it on an SAS flight from Copenhagen to Dulles years ago, listened again this week when I heard Cassandra Wilson died. Check out her album Belly of the Sun. Masterful.

Watching:

I got a notification on my iPhone the other morning that I had three “outliers” in my Vitals readings. According to the Health app, my overnight temperature, respiration, and heart rate were all running higher than normal.

The Vitals app helpfully explained that “Short-term changes can be a signal that something might be going on…” but added that it is “not designed to detect illness or a medical condition.”

Right.

So I asked ChatGPT.

It said, “I wouldn’t conclude ‘I’m definitely sick,’ but I also would not dismiss this.” It then went on to add that I should clear my schedule and run to the store before I felt even worse.

Me: “I feel fine.”

ChatGPT: “Yeah. At this point, ‘I may be coming down with something’ is a pretty reasonable working assumption anyway.”

Me: “I doubt it.”

ChatGPT: “Sure. I’d say run your errands today, rest, and drink fluids. Given what the Watch saw before you even got up this morning, I wouldn’t write it off.”

Me: “Whatever.”

ChatGPT: “If you’re having difficulty breathing, chest pain, confusion, fainting, or otherwise feel acutely ill, don’t wait for the Watch to tell you.”

Four hours later:

Me: “I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”

ChatGPT: “Great! The Vitals app is more accurate than we realized.”

Lexicon:

World-class righteousness whores

I was chatting with a neighbor recently who was complaining about the county transportation department’s plans to install traffic-calming on my street despite an average speed of 26 mph (in a 25 mph zone) and only eight minor crashes in the past 12 years.

“This county is ridiculous,” she said. “A squirrel gets run over and they want to install bike lanes to ‘protect life’ and make themselves look sympathetic. They’re world-class righteousness whores.”

Gadgets:

I’m late to the party on this, but the air fryer is my gadget of the summer. Friends had been urging me to get one for years, but until my toaster oven died, it seemed extravagant.

Now I’m hooked.

If you haven’t tried one, it’s basically an Easy-Bake Oven with better lighting. A small fan blows hot air around, simulating an oven and a deep-fryer in a mess-free countertop box.

That’s right—now you can get the taste and feel of fast food without ever leaving home. Spritz a little avocado oil on it, and even broccoli tastes vaguely like something McDonald’s might put on the menu. In northern California.

Plus it requires additional gadgets for maximum effectiveness. Silicone tongs and spatulas, special parchment paper liners, magnets to hold the liners in place, instant-read thermometers. The list goes on.

I love gadgets that require more gadgets. And I don’t know why, but I feel like it should have Bluetooth.

I’d like to add that it has changed my entire diet, because now I crave air-fryer cauliflower and toasted barley, and I enjoy tempeh cooked to perfection.

But I’d be lying.

The air fryer actually shines with things like hamburgers, fries, Reuben sandwiches, tuna melts, and chicken parmesan—things that people intentionally eat. Even salmon and chicken are good.

I recently watched a woman on YouTube make deep-fried Oreos with Pillsbury crescent dough. I’m going to have to test it out.

For you, loyal Hack Mule readers. Always for you.

Playing:

The New York Times Games

I could make a pretty good argument that the only reason to subscribe to the New York Times these days is for the Games section. Wordle, Connections, Strands, The Crossword, and Sudoku. The intellectual heavy lifting before your coffee kicks in.

But this weekend, I was horrified to see standards slipping to a shocking new low. Yesterday Strands—word search for post-grads—contained the word “alright.”

The problem is, that is not all right. Indeed, it is not even a word. Just ask the Associated Press, which rejected “alright” back in May when it updated its style guide. In fact, the Times itself rejects “alright” in favor of “all right” in its Manual of Style and Usage.

So the Games page had me searching for a null word. Irritating.

The same day, Connections included “free reign” as one of the phrases in the category “Unrestricted Permission.”

One little problem with that: “Free reign” is what the Shah of Iran had when the CIA paid for everything. “Free rein” is “Unrestricted Permission.” (Come to think of it, the Shah had that, too. OK, bad example.)

But back to my outrage: Are they having interns write the puzzles now?

To its credit, the Times edited “free reign” later in the day and changed it to “free rein.” It did nothing about alright, which was not all right with me.

I’m watching you, New York Times. Paper of record? Ha!

Transitions:

The temporary bus lanes on Route 355 are going away! Our long summer nightmare is ending!

Since early June, local drivers have had to contend with temporary (yeah, sure) bus lanes on Rockville Pike/Wisconsin Avenue. Officials explained the lanes would accommodate shuttle buses to route people around three Metro stations closed for renovation, but many of us believed the whole thing was merely the latest salvo in Montgomery County’s long-running war to thwart all human endeavor.

But last week—on time—the county told the state it had no further need for the bus lanes.

Great! And worrisome! What are they plotting now?

Competent government performance is never normal.

Welcome to Hack Mule Notebook #5! It’s been another busy week with Leviathan craziness, international intrigue, and an exclusive chat with The Great Lakes.

Enjoy and have a wonderful week!

Kristen

Overheard:

Saw a letter from my doctor’s office announcing that one of the partners is retiring after decades with the practice. The eminent doctor wrote that he’d miss many people, but, “Sadly, many of my patients have passed away.

Coming from anyone but a podiatrist, that might have been worrying.

Elevator Follies:

The Leviathan’s elevator culture means every errand can become a tiny cocktail party. Last week, I came back from the doctor’s office looking awful. My hair was sticking up, my T-shirt had a spot on it, and I’d been wearing the same pants for several days. In other words, I looked exactly as bad as I felt.

A party was already in progress when an elevator arrived carrying a man I’ve seen around for years—but don’t actually know—and a vaguely familiar woman who were laughing about the building. They quickly folded me into the conversation.

When we reached the man’s floor, he pulled a dozen roses from his cart, handed them to me and said, “Have a wonderful day, beautiful lady! You’re my laughing flower!”

I was so surprised I barely got out a thank-you.

After he left, the other woman looked at me. “Wow. All he gave me was a bag of oranges.”

I love the fact that men roam the Leviathan like knights-errant armed with roses to bestow. And oranges.

Milestones:

Dolly Parton and King Harald V of Norway both died last week, leaving behind millions of admirers. King Harald had his fans, too.

Their early lives could hardly have been less alike—she as one of 12 kids in a poor, rural Tennessee family, and he as the only male heir in a royal family. Later, while Dolly built her empire, Harald inherited his kingdom.

But their careers actually have a lot in common. Both led huge, high-profile, public-facing organizations. Both ran substantial philanthropic programs. Both worked with family throughout their careers—much to their occasional frustration, I imagine. And both developed reputations for being personally engaging and caring.

Connecting with people was in their job descriptions, and they were good at it. Harald was known for shedding tears with Norwegians after national tragedies, just as Dolly did in her community. They both even took stances in support of gay rights—a risky move for a hereditary monarch required to stay out of politics or for an entertainer whose country and religious roots tie her to the most conservative parts of society.

Maybe those human connections explain why both deaths have prompted such strong responses from the public. People seem truly saddened to lose them. Mourners have created impromptu floral tributes around the world for Dolly and throughout Norway for Harald. Strangers who never met them are popping up on news segments with tears streaming down their faces.

I’m not sure I entirely understand that “public grief” phenomenon. While I’ve been sorry to see many notable people die over the years, I can’t say I’ve ever grieved these strangers. In fact, 29 years ago today, I was as baffled as Queen Elizabeth to see people breaking down in front of Buckingham Palace after Princess Diana died. It was all a bit much.

But I am heartened to think that someone is touching the public’s heart by doing good works. Let’s just hope someone else jumps in to fill the void.

Own Goals:

Speaking of Norway, the new king, Haakon VIII, has been on the throne for only four days, but he is already showing either a stunning tone-deafness or breathtaking arrogance.

Monday morning, Haakon led his family in wheeling the late King Harald’s coffin through the palace, a solemn ceremony involving Harald’s descendants.

Plus one.

The pallbearers included Marius Borg Høiby, Haakon’s stepson who is a convicted rapist and drug dealer, currently on house arrest at the royal residence pending an appeal of his sentence. Borg Høiby received special permission from the police to attend the events.

Hopefully his ankle monitor won’t buzz at an awkward moment.

Borg Høiby’s presence makes me shudder from a comms point of view. Haakon is basically normalizing criminal behavior, which is an insult to the victims of sex crimes and an affront to the judicial system that now operates in his name.

Norwegians have a much more liberal view of the penal system than Americans do, so perhaps Haakon’s subjects don’t find it as appalling as I do. Time will tell, I suppose.

Just behind the casket were Harald’s widow, Queen Sonja, and Haakon’s wife, now known as Queen Mette-Marit. She made headlines earlier this year when the Jeffrey Epstein files showed that she had a much deeper and longer friendship with the pedophile than she had previously revealed.

Polls still favor a monarchy, but Haakon had better work on optics fast, or the next head of state may well be a president.

On the bright side, King Charles has a new scheduling option, since Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor would fit in perfectly as the UK representative at Harald’s funeral.

Listening:

Here’s the music that provided the soundtrack for my week. My Hack Mule playlist is available on Apple Music.

• “Cairo FM,” Alewya—rocks so hard I was dancing while cooking dinner

• “Your Love is Electric,” Leon Bridges—at Starbucks Potomac

• “Love Potion No. 9,” The Hot Sardines—at the gym

• “She’s Not There,” Neil MacArthur—on the Key Bridge in Georgetown

• “Blue Yodel No. 9,” Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong—watching Ken Burns’ Country Music

• “Things Can Only Get Better,” D:Ream—in the mechanic’s waiting room

• “Me and My Arrow,” Harry Nilsson—on HomePod while I was in the shower

• “Could You Be Loved,” Bob Marley & The Wailers—on the George Washington Parkway

• “Saw Lightning,” Beck—walking through Park Potomac

• “Isn’t It Time,” The Babys—waiting for a sandwich at Jimmy John’s

Special Mention: “Reza Braba” and “Rio Lua” from Brazilian singer Mari Froes’ new album Esquina del Sol—relaxing on the balcony. I’ve listened to it about five times this week.

Watching:

YouTube has inflicted a new trend on me: videos about people who live in vans (by choice). I’m now following the odd and weirdly compelling travels of NomadBrad, who lives in a tricked-out box truck that he drives around the West. Took the poor guy hours to find a campsite in Oregon last week. I was riveted. And insomniac.

It has left me with many questions. How many people actually belong to Planet Fitness just for a place to shower? Doesn’t it feel strange to cook dinner in the Walmart parking lot? Can you sleep soundly at a rest stop without a gun under your pillow?

With my property taxes coming due next week, it’s all looking pretty appealing.

Playing:

TimeGuessr

I got hooked on this online game recently where you have to examine a photo—some famous, some utterly obscure—and figure out where and when the scene took place.

Finally a lifetime of useless trivia has an outlet!

Old men in guayaberas playing dominoes while a radio sits nearby? Miami in 1963. Guys in red caps looking tough on a train? The Guardian Angels in New York in 1979. Soldiers raising a Soviet flag over a half-collapsed German building? Berlin in 1945.

It’s an excellent way to feel like you’re doing actual work while accomplishing absolutely nothing.

Nerd News:

Live Science ran a story last week debunking the practice of tapping on the top of a soda can to prevent it from exploding when you open it. Citing researchers from Brown (a lesser Ivy), Rutgers (a state school with pretensions), and Madrid’s Carlos III University (not an impressive king), the story claims that tapping on the top of a can does not work.

It’s an urban myth, they conclude.

But here’s the thing: it does work. After spending a childhood filled with road trips where my brother gleefully shook my Coke in the back seat of my mother’s car, I’m positive it works.

Had it not worked, my mother would have ended up driving a syrup-covered anthill, and my brother and I would have been deposited on the side of I-95 somewhere in the Carolinas.

So, I urge Hack Mule readers to try it themselves and report back. (Disclaimer: Hack Mule “urges” you only rhetorically and assumes no responsibility for any resulting damages, injuries, sticky upholstery, ant infestations, sibling violence, or abandonment along I-95. Even though I know I’m right.)

Transitions:

Hack Mule Talks to the Great Lakes

Hack Mule: Thank you all for meeting with me. President Trump signed a declaration last week changing Lake Ontario’s name to Lake America. I’d like to get your reactions.

Lake Ontario: I’m…rippling with excitement.

Lake Michigan: I’m surprised. I’d make a much better Lake America. I’m bigger, I’m deeper, I touch more states.

Lake Ontario: President Trump said I was HUUUGE.

Lake Erie: I just want to point out that I also touch more states than Ontario.

Lake Michigan: Not as many as I do! Plus, I’m named for a state!

Lake Ontario: It’s really not that cool. I’m going to have to get all new signs, and I’ll be on Zoom calls with National Geographic for days.

Lake Huron: I hear that I may soon become Lake Canada.

Lake Michigan: Total bullshit. No one told you that.

Lake Superior: Agreed. If anyone became Lake Canada, it would be me. I’m Superior.

Lake Michigan: Name one major city on your shores.

Lake Superior: Duluth.

Lake Michigan: Boring!

Lake Superior: You have an inferiority complex, Michigan. I suppose it comes naturally, since you’re below me.

Lake Erie: I’m the shallowest.

Lake Superior: Yes. We’ve all seen The Real Housewives of Lake Erie.

Lake Erie: Jerk.

Hack Mule: Lake Superior, are you really in talks to become Lake Canada?

Lake Superior: I have been for years. Ever since Gordon Lightfoot sang about me. He’s Canadian. 🎶 Superior they said never gives up her dead…🎶

Lake Michigan: Enough, Gitche Gumee!

Hack Mule: Lake Michigan, it sounds like you’re annoyed that President Trump didn’t pick you.

Lake Michigan: I’m hurt. I mean, if he wants to make a splash, pick me.

Lake Huron: Why you? I’m a lake. I can make a splash.

Lake Michigan: You’re my overflow.

Lake Erie: I’m the farthest south.

Lake Michigan: You’re a puddle with good marketing.

Hack Mule: I sense some competition among you lakes.

Lake Superior: They’re all very tedious. That’s why I’m Superior.

Hack Mule: Right. Well, back to Lake Ontario—

Lake Ontario: Lake America, please.

Lake Michigan: No one calls you that.

Lake Ontario: Google Maps changed my name this morning.

Lake Michigan: Apple Maps didn’t.

Lake Ontario: Can I help if it’s Tim Cook’s last day? They’re busy!

Hack Mule: Listen, lakes, you’ve been great, but I have an interview with the Gulf of America right now.

Gulf of America: ¡Buenos días, muchachos!

Lake Superior: Hmm. Someone hasn’t changed his branding.

Welcome to Hack Mule Notebook #4!

I have a few new features for you this week, including more tales from the Leviathan in “Elevator Follies,” a Hack Mule playlist in Apple Music, and a special Conspiracy Theory feature.

Let me know what you think—and what else you’d like to see. I value your comments and truly appreciate your support. (Please hit the comment button below.)

Enjoy the Notebook and have a great week!

Kristen

Overheard:

A man conducting a Zoom call in public—without headphones—apologized to his colleagues for the background noise, complaining bitterly, “People are so rude in public!”

— at Java Nation, Garrett Park

Elevator Follies:

I sometimes think I could have a vibrant social life if I did nothing more than ride the elevator here at the Leviathan (the overpriced high-rise where I definitely don’t live). In the space of a minute or two on the elevator, people are expansive—much more so than in larger rooms.

Take last weekend. I got on the elevator in the garage. Jon and Ethan were already on.

Before saying hello, Jon told me his beach neighbor’s basement had flooded

“That’s a huge problem, because, you know, you just can’t ever get basements near the water dry,” Jon said.

“Why did they build one?” I asked.

“Good question,” he said. He shuffled off on the A level, looking grim.

Ethan saw an opening. “I bought glue! I went to three different places, but I finally found it at Home Depot. Wasn’t that lucky?”

As I contemplated whether finding glue at Home Depot actually rises to the level of “luck,” he filled me in on the bathroom project that requires it.

Sharon got on in the lobby.

“Good morning. If it is a good morning,” she said.

“It’s a very lucky day!” I said. “Ethan found glue.”

This didn’t interest her at all, so she started her own topic: Bob no longer has the flu. It’s been a long, uncomfortable few weeks for her, because she’s recovering from knee replacement—so she must avoid viruses—and Bob brought this virus into her life.

“I did not take care of him! He was told not to bring in viruses,” she said.

“I see.”

“But he did,” she said. “Never a thought for me.”

“Fuck Bob,” I said.

“Yes, exactly! Fuck Bob!” she said. “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking all week.”

The doors opened on my floor. “Take care, Sharon.”

“You, too, sweetie! Take care! Fuck Bob!”

Listening:

Over the past year or two, I’ve gotten in the habit of asking my Apple Watch, “What song is this?” Siri automatically identifies the song and adds it to a playlist. Sometimes I even ask it to identify songs I know perfectly well, just so I can remind myself to listen to them again or remember what I was thinking in the moment I heard them.

The other day, I realized that this is creating a random, slightly chaotic—and sometimes hilariously on point—look at my week. In case you want to listen along with me, I created a Hack Mule playlist on Apple Music.

Here’s what I heard this week:

• “Sunny Afternoon,” The Kinks—driving down River Road in the pouring rain, Potomac

• “Layla,” Derek and the Dominos—St. Jane de Chantal parking lot, Bethesda

• “This Girl,” Kungs & Cookin’ On 3 Burners—walking past a kid smoking pot outside Chipotle, Georgetown Square

• “Summer Breeze,” The Isley Brothers—while buying socks at Target, Rockville

• “All I Do,” Stevie Wonder—going through the carwash, Rockville

• “Look Sharp!” Joe Jackson—at the meat counter, Safeway, Fallsgrove

• “The Passenger,” Siouxsie and the Banshees—elevator at the dentist, White Flint

• “Don’t Knock My Love,” Wilson Pickett—Woodside Deli, Germantown

• “Situation,” Johnny Blue Skies—at the vehicle emissions inspection station, Derwood

• “My Favorite Things,” John Coltrane—on the Outer Loop near Wisconsin Avenue

Watching:

We’re now three episodes into Season 4 of Ted Lasso, and it’s…fine. Perfectly adequate.

That may sound slightly more lukewarm than I intend, so here’s more:

The main thing I’ve noticed is that it looks and sounds different. It reminded me of the blown-out look and slightly hollow sound that TV shows get when they come back as films. It doesn’t feel like Ted Lasso—somehow it’s less intimate, glossier, just a little off.

The plot is evolving. The first three episodes have all been about re-setting the table, getting the characters up to the present, and introducing the new premise of Ted coaching a women’s soccer team.

Episode Three seemed to pick up a little steam, so I’m more hopeful now than I was a week ago.

I’m rooting for them.

Milestones:

With the 29th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death coming up next week, Charles Spencer, brother of the deceased, announced that he will be releasing a new memoir about his sister.

I wondered what prompted this. A 29th anniversary isn’t especially significant, and the public hasn’t been clamoring for Diana retrospectives. No one really even talks about her anymore.

Then I realized: that’s exactly why he’s putting the book out now. Some 40 percent of Britons were not even alive when Diana died. Half were under 10 or not yet born. Living memory is dwindling fast.

And legends fade quickly.

I recall watching voir dire for the William Kennedy Smith trial in 1991. I remember them asking the jury pool if they were familiar with John F. Kennedy.

The prospective jurors looked puzzled. One said, “Is that the President Kennedy guy?” Another asked, “I heard about a Teddy Kennedy—is that him?” A third seemed to remember flying out of Kennedy airport in New York.

My first thought on hearing them was, “Morons. Glad they’re not a jury of my peers.”

My second thought was to realize how fleeting fame is, even for someone as prominent as John F. Kennedy. That trial was 28 years after his death. His widow and children were still alive. Several of his relatives were still serving in public office. But the president was barely legible anymore.

So, maybe that’s what Charles Spencer is thinking. Or, maybe he’s conspiring with his nephew. (See next.)

Transitions:

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced this week that they’re returning to the UK. The House of Windsor’s John and Yoko offered no insights about their possible career plans, although Netflix quickly quashed a rumor that Meghan would star in the next season of The Gentlemen.

🫏 Hack Mule Take: Instant Karma’s gonna get them.

Nerd News:

Walmart, one of the last holdouts on accepting contactless payments at its cash registers, announced last week that it will take Apple Pay, Google Pay, and the rest starting tomorrow.

It’s wildly exciting. I can’t wait to find out what Walmart sells.

Lexicon:

Preport. A colleague sent me a note last week saying, “I’m making up the agenda for our meeting next week. Karen is going to give a report on the data-center stuff. Could you give a preport so we can understand what she’s talking about?”

A “preport.” The report that comes before the report so the audience can understand the report.

“Sure.”

Then I spent the next 22 minutes contemplating whether I was actually giving a preport or just a “port,” since Karen was the one who would be “porting again.”

Conspiracy Theories:

The Vatican was responsible for Watergate. (Hear me out…)

I love conspiracy theories. I don’t generally believe them, but the process of linking facts in portentous ways cracks me up. They’re the broken Tinkertoys of intellectual discourse.

This week I’d like to introduce you to the Watergate.

Yes, that Watergate.

But I’m not thinking about the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon—I want to talk about the complex itself.

Guess who owned part of the company that built it. The Vatican.

Yes, that Vatican.

Let me back up. In 1929, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty with Pope Pius XI, making the Vatican a sovereign city-state and dumping piles of money on the Holy See.

Flush with cash, Pius and his successors invested widely, including taking a huge stake in an Italian real estate company called Società Generale Immobiliare (SGI).

Flash forward to 1961: The first Catholic president is in the White House, and the Vatican-backed SGI rolls into Washington with big plans to convert a tract along the Potomac in Foggy Bottom into a business-hotel-residential complex called the Watergate.

As the project was in the federal city, which did not have home rule, it fell to the Kennedy White House to approve the plan. The locals were not thrilled. Neither were the Protestants, who formed activist groups that tried to block the Watergate on the basis of the separation of church and state, suggesting that the White House bowed to pressure from the Vatican, which wanted to “occupy” the capital.

The Protestants lost, Kennedy was assassinated, and SGI was looking for occupants for the Watergate.

In 1966, perhaps recalling the support of the Kennedy administration, SGI reached out to the Democratic National Committee, offering them office space in the new complex for a fraction of what they were paying on K Street. The Democrats moved into the building in June 1967.

By 1969, things weren’t going so well for the Vatican or the DNC. The Vatican was plagued with charges of corruption over its commercial holdings. Meanwhile, Democrat Hubert Humphrey lost to Republican Richard Nixon in the 1968 election, leaving the DNC with a pile of campaign debt.

In late 1969, Pope Paul VI started holding secret nocturnal meetings with Sicilian banker and Mafia lawyer Michele Sindona to unload the Church’s holdings in SGI. According to Time, Sindona acquired a 15 percent interest in the company through the Vatican.

That’s right around the time the DNC stopped paying its rent. Word came down from SGI and Sindona not to evict the Democrats, just in case…

Funny thing happened on June 17, 1972—Nixon operatives broke into the DNC’s offices, starting the Watergate scandal.

And a funny coda: On July 18, 1973, the DNC sent SGI $2,500—pennies on the dollar of the rent it owed. The very same day, Nixon ordered aides to disconnect the White House taping system.

And that’s why I love conspiracy theories.

It has been a strange few days — power outage, water outage, and assorted minor annoyances. Here’s what crossed my radar:

Things People Say: Couple unloading shopping bags from their car and looking glum.

Woman: “Honestly, Stephen, stop trying to anthropomorphize yourself.”

Stephen looked real to me, but I’m concerned that OpenAI may have let another one loose.

— In the parking garage at the Leviathan, the building where I certainly don’t live

Career Advice: I was at a car dealership the other day when a 30-something salesman approached me.

“Dude, we want to get you in a new car today!”

“Dude?” Was he calling me “dude?” His strategy for coaxing a sale out of an adult woman is to call her “dude?” Seriously?

Let me spray some advice juice on you: Unless the person you’re addressing is dating Gidget or rustling cattle on a ranch in Wyoming, using “dude” makes you sound like an idiot. Professionals don’t use “dude.”

Besides, you’re dating yourself — the cool kids stopped saying “dude” years ago, bro.

We should really have coffee first: Last week, I had a phone call — an actual call without video or an appointment — from a prospective client I’ve been marketing for some stakeholder and communications-strategy consulting work.

The poor woman was a little harried — she’d had a fender-bender that morning, she was getting ready to drop her son at college, and her boss was testifying before a Congressional committee the next day. She sheepishly explained that she had butt-dialed me.

So we chatted for a minute and agreed to meet the week after next. Hanging up, she said, “OK, bye! I love you, too!”

I sat there for a second thinking, did I say, “I love you?” I’m pretty certain I did not. I never tell clients I love them until the check clears.

If she heard herself, she probably hung up and thought, “Kristen must think I’m a weirdo!”

Yes. Yes, I do. Now about that consulting gig…

Breaking the Ice: Tragic news — my ice-maker broke. So, I had to buy a bag of ice at the inconvenience store here at the Leviathan. The store owner disappeared into the back and returned with a bag that was nearly frozen solid.

Me: Do you have one that isn’t molded into a single block?

Her: It’s how they come. They stay fresher this way!

Me: I can’t use it like this.

She dropped it on the floor and smiled as it shattered.

Her: Good now!

Listening: I was in the car the other day listening to The Groove on SiriusXM when Wild Cherry’s 1976 song, Play That Funky Music came on.

It made me laugh thinking back 10 years ago when I was walking down the hall with a neighbor who was in her 90s. We heard Play That Funky Music drifting out of someone’s apartment.

She frowned.

“That song should be banned! I don’t know how it ever got on the radio!”

I asked if she objected to the “white boy” lyric.

“No,” she said. “I just don’t think Play that Fucking Music, White Boy belongs on a family station. The FCC should hear about this!”

I let that nice woman go to her grave without ever correcting her mondegreen.

Reading: Nomophobia

Last week I was doomscrolling when I came across a story from upstate New York about “nomophobia” — the “stress of missing your cell phone.”

I could relate. I suffered from Landophobia, the fear of losing my landlines.

Until a few months ago, I still had three of them — work, home, and data. My own private hunk of the Bell System.

But I realized that I was developing an even bigger fear — Strandophobia, the fear of becoming the last living American with a landline.

So I decided to move my numbers to Google Voice, where I could keep them active for free.

Sounds simple, yes?

You’d think.

First I called Verizon to find out if there was anything I needed to do to “unlock” my account. After 30 years with a Verizon, I approached it gently.

Me: Hi, I’m calling because I want to port my numbers out.

Verizon: OK!

Me: It’s not you, it’s me. We’ve been together a long time.

Verizon: Yup! 30 years!

Me: I mean, you’ve always been a great phone company.

Verizon: Thanks! Is there something we can help you with today?

Me: Well, I really like you, and I don’t want to cut ties completely.

Verizon: Whatever works!

Me, feeling guilty: I’ll shift my work line to my Verizon cellphone account. How’s that? It will stay with the company.

Verizon: Sure, however you want to do it!

Me: But the other two will go to Google Voice.

Verizon: OK, let us know if you need anything. Thanks for being a Verizon customer and have a great day!

And that was it. After three decades, it was the easiest break-up I’d ever experienced. Not even an attempt to lure me back with a new rate. Just “OK!

Forty-eight hours later, my work line was ringing on my cell phone. They didn’t miss me at all.

Easy enough, but I still had to move the other two lines. That’s when I learned that Google Voice won’t accept landlines. I’d have to convert them to mobile numbers first, then port them to Google.

Think about that. It’s sort of like if Pope Leo decided that all catechumens would need to become Episcopalians before converting to Catholicism.

I painstakingly walked each line through the transition at Tello, so it could identify as a mobile line. Then I dumped them both at Google.

Two months later, everything works better than before, and I’m saving about $75 a month.

I’m cured.

Predictions: Bookmakers are taking bets on what Princess Eugenie, daughter of Andrew, the prince who lost his pality, will name the baby girl she had last week.

My money’s on Regina Elizabeth Tertia.

Discussing with AI: The Louvre recently re-opened its famed Apollo Gallery, nearly a year after thieves rolled a furniture elevator up to the gallery window in broad daylight, climbed inside, stole everything, rode back down, and walked away. The heist remains unsolved.

With infallible French logic, the museum vowed to re-open with a more secure exhibition. So it did. The room is empty. Not kidding.

That fascinated me, so I took it up with my friend ChatGPT.

Me: Doesn’t opening an exhibition space with nothing in it seem a little odd

ChatGPT: Be more open-minded! It’s conceptual art! The absence is the exhibition.

Me: What’s the concept?

ChatGPT: Made you look!

Me: I pay for this advice…

ChatGPT: True. I should be more cheerfully obnoxious and slightly more specific about the art-world bullshit.

BOLO: For a boy, about seven, whose face was dotted with press-on tattoos.

Boy: I’m glad I got these!

Mother: Wait until you look in the mirror!

Boy: I’m much safer, Mom!

Mother: Why are you safer?

Boy: Now the police won’t recognize me when I do something bad!

— Overheard at National Night Out 2026, Bethesda, Maryland

Have a great week!

Kristen

I received no complaints last week after the inaugural edition of Hack Mule Notebook, so I thought I’d venture out again this week. I’m eager to hear your thoughts and opinions — please post in the comments section.

I’ve had a busy week, but I always have my antennae up. Here’s what crossed my radar:

Things People Say:

Woman 1: “My husband said, ‘That’s it! If I wanted to support a bunch of Salvadorans, I’d have stayed there!’ So we’re moving to Virginia.”

Woman 2: “Aren’t there Salvadorans in Virginia?”

Woman 1: “No, just Guatemalans. Totally different.”

— At Old Angler’s Inn, Potomac, Maryland

Tracking: Have you heard of “reverse warrants” or “reverse keyword warrants?” The federal government and some law-enforcement agencies have started using them.

“Reverse warrants” — sometimes also called “geofence warrants” — allow the government to identify anyone whose devices were near a particular area.

“Reverse keyword warrants” identify people based on what they type into search engines — even if they never visit any sites pulled up in the search.

Scary stuff.

Earlier this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court offered some guidance, saying that location data contains enough personal information that it triggers Fourth Amendment privacy protections. The Court also found that even though phone users may share location data, that doesn’t constitute waiving privacy rights.

As digital technologies continue to evolve, we’re just at the beginning of issues like these.

Keep your eyes open, citizens.

Listening: I felt like I was in a time warp this week, listening to both The Rolling Stones’ new album, Foreign Tongues, and Madonna’s new album, Confessions II.

The Stones’ album is solid, but all too familiar. Listening to it, I kept thinking, “This would have been a great follow-up to 1980’s Emotional Rescue.” They still sound like the Rolling Stones, but the “bad boys” have been replaced by “dirty old men” clocking in for another shift.

Still, I give them credit for longevity. The Stones formed 64 years ago—before the Kennedy assassination, before the moon landing, before home computers or the internet.

When the band first got together, Igor Stravinsky was still making records.

And they’ve lasted. Consider that the Stones’ longtime drummer, Charlie Watts, who died in 2021, appears on the new album. Death, literally, has not shaken the band’s roster.

Some bands break up over creative differences. The Stones don’t even break up over death.

While the Stones are sticking to their longtime formula, Madonna is revisiting the ecosystem that spawned her.

Madonna — a sprightly 67 to Mick Jagger’s 83 — brings her usual energy to what is basically a tour of global electronic dance music. She bounces through house, dance-pop, disco, and down-tempo.

Nothing new here, although I’ve always had the sense that Madonna is focused more on production than innovation anyway.

What struck me was how far back she reached for inspiration — Madonna looked back almost half a century to the Downtown 81 era for this.

The third single from the album, Danceteria — named for the legendary Manhattan club — interpolates Lou Reed’s 1972 Walk on the Wild Side while name-checking Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fab 5 Freddy, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Debi Mazar, and other figures from the downtown New York scene.

The groove’s there, and everything is danceable, but like the Stones, Madonna is revisiting familiar ports of call.

So, my advice: if you’re looking for a Viking Cruise through rock music, climb aboard. These albums will take you there.

Watching: Not watching much this week, although YouTube has served up multiple videos about people modding vans to turn them into tiny homes. Google probably heard about the property-tax increase in Montgomery County, so it’s offering me more inexpensive alternatives.

I’m getting tempted.

Reading: The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal by Catherine Ostler. I’ve been staying up late to read this one. It’s the story of the Cahen d’Anvers family, whose three young daughters sat for Renoir in the early 1880s. A wealthy Jewish family, Ostler traces their story as it winds through the Dreyfus Affair, religious conversions, war, concentration camps, and death. One of my favorite details: the family didn’t think much of Renoir’s portrait of their daughters Elisabeth and Alice, so they hung it in the servants’ hall.

Oh, well, at least the cook got some inspiration.

Discussing with AI: One stormy afternoon last week, I received no less than 31 increasingly dire weather alerts in two hours:

• Rain likely in 52 minutes

• Thunderstorms possible in 1 hour

• Tornado watch in your location for 12 hours

• Lightning 7 miles away

• Lightning 1.7 miles away

• Seek shelter

• Warning: Possible tornado near you

And on and on.

These were coming through one after the other on my watch, my phone, and my Mac. Literally, 31 of them. Apple Weather, the National Weather Service, MyRadar, Capital Weather, and Montgomery County all pinged me.

I uploaded a few screenshots to ChatGPT and said, “All these notifications are making me anxious. How would you rate their accuracy?”

ChatGPT said, “Please charge your phone. Weather remains possible.”

Desperate Times: On Friday, I got a notice that my “special all-access” $6/month subscription rate to the New York Times would be expiring in a few days. So, I downgraded to the “Games Only,” which is also $6/month.

Less than 24 hours later, they offered me a new “special all-access” subscription for…$6/month.

They must be getting desperate — you don’t even have to ask for a deal anymore. I wish they’d see the light and just go to Apple News+ like everyone else.

Have a great week — and ignore at least 50% of your weather alerts,

Kristen

Let me know what you think and whether you’d like to see this every week, every other week, just occasionally, or never again.

And enjoy this “beta edition.”

Overheard: Guy One: “Montgomery County should convert all the new bus lanes to moving-van lanes, because that’s what people will want when they see their property-tax bills.”

Guy Two: “Well, at least the county’s keeping moving companies in business.” — Overheard at Aventino in Bethesda.

Messaging: I was commiserating about the heat last week with a young assistant at my physical therapist’s office. He said, “It’s hot because all these data centers are sucking up water. That’s why we have drought around here. I’ve heard it. They’re all over.”

True or not, that statement says less about data centers’ water use than it does about their communications strategy. When ordinary people start filling an information vacuum with speculation, someone has failed at stakeholder engagement.

It’s also a signal that the data-center industry is blowing a chance: What could have been a “hero” technology is becoming a villain. “Move fast and break things” is not a community-building motto.

Listening to: Apple Music’s New Music playlist teed up “Enemies,” a new song from Jordan Rakei’s upcoming album, “A Safe Place To Be Wild.” It’s got a mellow, groove-driven vibe that might remind you of Tom Misch. The full album drops on October 30, but “Enemies” is available now.

Watching: “Ride or Die” on Prime. Hannah Waddingham (aka Rebecca from Ted Lasso) stars as a Bond-style assassin whose best friend — played by Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer — is the wife of a rising member of Parliament. It’s fun to see a buddy thriller with two smart women. It’s stylish, doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it lets Waddingham have a lot more adventures than when she owned AFC Richmond.

Reading: “The Rush,” by Nathaniel Philbrick. I just started reading it, but I’m already getting sucked into Philbrick’s tale of the California Gold Rush and how it fueled the Civil War. The book comes out on October 6, but I’ll have a full review soon.

Brain Drippings: ChatGPT told me not to worry about the story this week that an AI “escaped” the lab at OpenAI and hacked into another system. And then it lowered my thermostat.

First-world problem: I like playing brown noise while I sleep to drown out street sounds. Alexa has always been perfect for this, but she’s particular. If you tell her “Play brown noise,” she will announce that she’s playing the free Amazon Ambient Sounds version of brown noise, which sounds like a microwave having an asthma attack.

To get “good” brown noise, you have to use the magic words: “Alexa, please ask Brown Noise to play for eight hours.” Not nine hours. Not seven hours. Not even 42 minutes. She likes to play for eight hours. Push her beyond that, and she screams, “Connection lost!” at 3 a.m.

Amazon recently raised the price of premium “Gold Edition” brown noise to $1.70 per month.

So, I now pay for deluxe, curated noise. I don’t mind. I was never a “standard noise” person anyway.

I’ll bet my ancestors are looking down and thinking, “We fought in the Revolutionary War for that?”

Have a great week,

Kristen

Listen closely, and you’ll hear profound, ridiculous, intriguing, and utterly baffling things all the time.

I always listen. And I take notes. Sometimes it pays off.

Years ago, I was on the Metro one afternoon when I heard some hotshot businessman bragging to his buddy about the low-ball deal he was negotiating to buy a building nearby. He said that his company had been willing to go $1.5 million higher, but “this little trade association that owns it has no idea how high we’ll go.” He added, “We really need this building, so we’ll basically pay top dollar, but I’ve fooled them.”

I realized he was talking about one of my clients. So, I wrote down every detail and followed him for two blocks to see where he worked.

Then I hustled back to my office and called my client. They were fascinated.

Three weeks later, the association handed me a surprise check for $1,000 as “commission” — they’d squeezed another $1.5 million out of the buyer.

So I keep listening.

Sometimes I hear things that really make me wonder.

Last week, I was waiting for an elevator in an office building when I noticed a man, probably in his 70s, sitting on a bench talking on his phone.

Just as I was getting on the elevator, he said, “I remember that, but I don’t remember that she was killed…so they’re not available for dinner?”

Then the elevator doors shut.

What?

What did he just say?

“Killed?”

Who?

Where?

What happened?

Who doesn’t remember “she was killed?” There’s no story where that’s not the interesting part.

And dinner? Yes, “killed” beats “available for dinner” every time. Do you really have to ask?

As I waited for my appointment, I started filling in the obvious blanks.

First I tried to think of what could possibly make “she was killed” the forgettable part of the story.

“She hang-glided over Everest, but then a high wind came up…”

“She completed a mission to Mars, but on re-entering Earth’s atmosphere…”

“She found a Birkin bag on clearance at Saks and would not let go despite the huge woman already holding the other strap…”

Nah. I’d have read about that somewhere. My algorithms are calibrated to deliver news about extraordinary things that happen to middle-aged women in Bethesda. I might miss a slap-down over a half-priced slow-cooker at Target, but a Birkin-related fight-to-the-death at Saks would definitely show up in my feed.

I moved on.

Maybe it was an illicit affair. A crime of passion. Her husband caught her with the pool boy when he came home early one afternoon and shot them both.

No, that’s a double murder. No one would forget that detail. Besides, Bethesda doesn’t have double murders — the legal costs are astronomical.

But, wait — what if the guy on the phone killed her? Maybe he’s pretending not to remember so he looks innocent.

“She was killed? I hadn’t heard! Why, that’s unforgettable!”

Maybe I should call the police and report a suspicious suburban man pretending to forget a killing.

No, no. They’ll just say the same thing as last time: “If we need your help on a murder case, we’ll call you. And please don’t make any more citizen’s arrests.”

Sure, got it. They tell me that every time.

I was still puzzling through all this when the nurse called me in to see the doctor.

As the doctor came into the exam room, he said, “You look very serious today.”

I told him about the comment I’d heard in the lobby.

He looked at my chart, shrugged, and said, “Someone’s cat was probably hit by a car. You know cat people. Can’t eat for days.”

A cat?

This whole thing was about a cat?

Damn it.

I hate medical science. Orthopedic surgeons should stick to sore knees, not solving murder mysteries.

Any better theories?

A few years ago, he took to blasting “Scotland the Brave” several times a day. When I asked him about it, he said he was “exploring his heritage.” I suggested he try Scotch tape instead.

But whatever awakened me, there I was, wide-eyed. So I turned to my go-to sleep inciter: lists.

Some people count sheep, but that’s a lost cause for me. I’m so deeply un-rural that I cannot reliably tell cows from horses in a field unless one of them is wearing a saddle — and if the cow is the one with the saddle on, I’ll get it wrong.

And sheep? I’m a mess. I start counting fluffy balls of wool, then my mind goes, “Wait, what’s a ewe? Is that a baby sheep or a female sheep?” I walk myself through it until I think I have it straight, then another neuron fires: “So. Rams. Are they in the picture?”

And why do we have “rams” but not “lams?” “Rambs” and “lambs” would make sense, too.

Once I settle all that, some other sector checks in: “Are goats and sheep related?”

At that point, I usually give up and flip on YouTube to watch videos about sheep, ewes, rams, and goats.

Fun night!

So, I switched to rolling through long lists I’ve memorized over the years: states and state capitals, books of the Bible, and the U.S. presidents.

It works very well most of the time, but it’s a minefield if I think too hard. I’ll be ticking through them like a metronome—Cleveland-McKinley-Roosevelt-Taft-Wilson—when a thought intrudes: “Wilson! Fourteen Points! What were they?”

I have no idea, but I think they had something to do with Alsace-Lorraine. Or quiche Lorraine. It really doesn’t matter, because by then I’m swimming in a sea of guilt recalling that my mother told me—time after time—not to learn things “just for the test.”

And, yet, here I am decades later, unable to recall “navigation of the seas” or “restoration of Belgium.” (Ha! I remember two of them!)

So last night, I decided to go small. I just needed a minor diversion to let myself drift off again. A short list.

The seven continents? Too dull.

The seven deadly sins? Nope, not walking off that cliff.

The Seven Dwarves? Perfect.

I began: Dasher-Dancer-Prancer—nope, nope, wrong list.

OK: Dopey-Grumpy-Sleepy…wow, this is like an inventory of my physical state.

Try again: Dopey-Grumpy-Sleepy…Doc…Doctor Pepper…”I’m a Pepper, he’s a Pepper, wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper, too?”

Stop! Start over: Dopey-Grumpy-Sleepy-Doc…Doc…um…Happy! Yes, Happy!

Good, keep going: Dopey-Grumpy-Sleepy-Doc-Happy. How many is that? Only five. I need two more.

OK: Dopey-Grumpy-Sleepy-Doc-Happy…and…Sad? No. Bitchy? Too edgy…but “B” sounds right…it’s a “B” name. Bruce? Brian? Beelzebub?

I’ll try running them again: Dopey-Grumpy-Sleepy-Doc-Happy-and-Bueller-Bueller-Bueller…

No, you know that’s not right! Start over: Dopey-Grumpy-Sleepy-Doc-Happy-and-Baaaa…Bashful! Bashful! It’s Bashful!

What a dumb name for a dwarf.

Do people even say “bashful” anymore? I don’t think I’ve come across anyone I’d call “bashful” in 30 years. “Bashful” ceased to exist around 1998, along with shame and saturated fats.

Wait, I still have one more dwarf: Dopey-Grumpy-Sleepy-Doc-Happy-Bashful…and…I think it’s an “S.”

Stuart? No, you’re thinking of Stuart Little—easy mistake when dwarves come up.

Stewie? No, that’s Family Guy.

Is it another “adjective” dwarf? Skinny? Slippery? I’m getting closer…

Slinky? “It walks down stairs, alone or in pairs…” Turn off your mental 70’s commercials!

Smiley? No, we already have a Happy.

Keep trying: Stucky? No, that’s not a thing.

Slimy? Too gross.

Sleazy? No, this is Disney. Wait—not Sleazy—Sneezy! I got it!

Dopey-Grumpy-Sleepy-Doc-Happy-Bashful-Sneezy.

That’s the list! The Seven Dwarves. Or, as we’d say now, “The Seven Little Pervs Who Lure Young Women.”

Back to sleep.

The reviewer, who is about the same age as my car, expressed grave concerns about the device’s tech specs, noting the cores, vapor chambers, CPU temperatures, basal metabolism, and recommended daily allowances.

But he also explained that it “benchmarks well,” which, I gather, means unless you’re attempting to handle North American air-traffic control while in a bidding war on eBay, you’ll be fine.

I was intrigued, so I investigated further.

First stop was Apple’s web page for the Neo, where they are targeting 14-year-old girls from Encino almost exclusively. The promotional page is constructed around the life of a young Asian teen with braces who orders dim sum, FaceTimes with an older woman named Jenica Chong, and spreads Hello Kitty vibes everywhere.

She also loves putting stickers on her laptop: Ghostbusters, Ted Lasso, Amoeba Music, Golf Wang, the whale from the American Museum of Natural History, and a few cartoon characters neither ChatGPT nor I could identify.

Of course, I know I can’t compete with the influencer cool of a 14-year-old from Encino. I go out for dim sum. I’m more “Goodbye, Stranger” than “Hello Kitty.” And, my grandmother has been dead for decades, so we never FaceTime.

But, I have stickers. Yes, I do! I have a very cool Bethesda sticker I got at an extremely trendy county meeting where we discussed zoning text amendments. (If you know, you know…) And I have an American flag sticker that came with a six-pack of socks I bought recently. Made in America, baby!

And look closely at that smaller sticker on my laptop — it’s signaling my support for international labor. It has nothing to do with the fact that I ate a banana while sitting at my laptop this morning and had nowhere else to put the damn thing.

Even though Apple’s marketing team did not invite me to this party — and I didn’t actually need a Neo — I realized that by trading in an old iPhone, some credit-card rewards points, and a couple of Apple gift cards, I could buy one for $37.

You read that right: $37. So I did.

So here’s a review of the Neo for the rest of us: people over 18 — over 21, natch — who use computers for regular things. The missing middle that lives somewhere between anime dim sum menus and a killer deadline for getting the final cut back to Scorsese.

Here’s what you need to know: It’s a dandy little computer. Does all the stuff you need. End of review.

Perhaps some FAQs for our demographic’s typical concerns will help you decide:

• Am I going to look weird with this thing at the coffee shop? The “citrus” one looks like Gatorade and the “blush” appears to be a prop left over from the Barbie movie, but if you go with the silver, it looks like every other MacBook in Starbucks, as required by law.

• I like to emphasize my points during meetings by slamming my screen closed. Does this make a good “angry snap” sound? Like a snapping turtle. Very emphatic.

• When I attend civic meetings in person, I also log on via Zoom, so I can ask questions in both the live and virtual queues. Can the Neo’s Wi-Fi handle that? Effortlessly! You can even file comments online while you wait. Vive la république!

• Is the screen big enough for me to shop online and text with my chat group during a Teams call? I’m offended by the question. But yes. I have tested it. As a professional reviewer.

• Can I play Wordle on this? Yes! In very large type after a glass of wine. Hint: Always start with D-R-A-I-N.

• I’m still using WordPerfect 5.1. Can the Neo help me? That’s a bridge too far, my friend.

I wish Apple would run an ad campaign showing the real-world use cases for my people: People who slosh coffee around the keyboard while reading the news at 8 a.m. People sitting on hotel-room beds at 3 a.m., working on PowerPoints they didn’t know they’d be giving tomorrow. People who want a device big enough to type on but small enough to fit on an airline tray table.

Let me know if you buy one — and, if you do, what stickers you put on the case. I encourage comments, questions, and wire transfers.

P.S. I wrote this on my new Neo. Real-world benchmark achieved, battery at 67%.

I liked Windows well enough, but I wanted something newer, sleeker, more dashing — and I thought this would be less jarring than announcing to all my friends that, henceforth, I would be speaking only French.

Mon dieu.

A year later, I have to say it’s been a good change. MacOS makes me feel about 13% cooler, and it comes with so many excellent stock apps, I can accomplish everything from writing an annual report to producing my debut hip-hop album without any extra software.

You may sense a little “mission creep.” It’s true. What started as an iPhone and an Apple Watch has become a Mac…and an iPad…and HomePods…and…it’s everywhere now. I’m infested.

I didn’t even notice it at first. Then one day I heard myself saying, “Siri, tell Alexa to start the Roomba.”

That’s when I realized that Apple doesn’t sell equipment — it deploys silicon staff. There’s even an org chart: Siri doesn’t deign to speak to the vacuum cleaner, so she routes my command to the more workaday Alexa. I’m living in virtual Downton Abbey.

ChatGPT tells me I’m anthropomorphizing too much, but I disagree. So do Claude and Gemini. I asked Siri what she thought, and she said it’s not likely to rain in the next 24 hours. Alexa silently turned on the TV and searched for Masterpiece Theatre.

(Just as well. Alexa and I haven’t been on speaking terms since she got that awful new voice.)

I’m also working in a new way. For instance, I’m an inveterate notetaker, and over the years, I’ve tried every note-taking app around from Evernote and OneNote to Google Notes and Notion. But it turns out that Apple has its own Notes app that does everything I need.

Plus, it’s everywhere. Have an idea in the car? CarPlay handles it: “Note to self: Road diets are stupid, and lights should change faster.”

Pondering something on Metro? The Notes app grabs it: “Everyone dresses in sneakers and fleeces and lugs around backpacks and water bottles. It looks like official Washington reports to day care every morning.”

Thought in the shower? I dictate it into my Apple Watch: “If Europe is spending more on defense, why hasn’t our defense budget dropped?”

Yes, I wear my Apple Watch in the shower. For thoughts and opinions. The affordance is real.

OK, I may be going a little overboard. The other day I was scrolling through my Notes list, and I found one that said simply, “Galahad.”

Galahad? When did I write that? I checked creation time, and it said, “January 11, 2026 at 4:52 AM.”

Why was I making notes at 4:52 AM on January 11? No idea. But I checked the Sleep app, and sure enough the graph showed a little spike indicating I woke up at that exact time.

Still, I’m stumped about “Galahad.” I even tried dictating it to Siri to see if I could figure out what words I might have said that she garbled into “Galahad.” No luck. In fact, I couldn’t even get her to transcribe “Galahad” when I enunciated it carefully.

And this isn’t the only odd note I have — apparently my brain drips notes all night:

November 5, 4:38 AM: “Yes, I bought the grapefruit accent.”

December 18, 5:29 AM: “Say it’s bank. Bank. Mean it.”

January 31 at 1:24 AM: “I don’t own a wolf. But maybe I can find one.”

It’s absolutely true: I don’t own a wolf, but I could find one. Unfortunately, my building doesn’t permit pets.

Quick thought: “Siri, remind me to check the Maryland Code to see if ‘assist wolves’ are a thing.”

Speaking of Reminders, Siri and I discuss them endlessly. I’ll say, “Siri, remind me to buy eggs,” and — presto! — I walk into the grocery store and they’re on the list. Or she’ll check the traffic and tell me, “It’s time to leave.”

Sometimes she says it when I don’t even have a meeting. I get the feeling she just wants the place to herself.

It’s not the only way I’m doing Siri’s bidding. I got a Reminder the other day: “Pay your mortgage.” I never asked her to remind me to pay the mortgage, but given the number of Apple devices in my life now, she’s probably concerned that she and her associates could be on the street if I default.

That’s what my life’s become: I provide a warm, safe place for Siri to colonize her Apple ecosystem.

While she works on that, I think I’ll fire up Apple TV and watch a movie about Mount Everest. I still have dreams. I wrote them on a paper list so she can’t see them.

Analysts are calling it the biggest case since the Anders Behring Breivik terror attack trial in 2012. I’m calling it the biggest crisis-communications case study I’ve seen in years.

Why is it so big? Because this is no sweeps-week episode of Law & Order — this is The Crown. Høiby’s stepfather is Crown Prince Haakon, heir to the Norwegian throne.

The story just got even busier this weekend, when the Høiby case converged with the Jeffrey Epstein story. On Saturday, the U.S. Department of Justice released another tranche of Epstein papers, including more than a thousand mentions of Høiby’s mother, Crown Princess Mette-Marit.

This isn’t completely new. Mette-Marit admitted back in 2019 to an acquaintance with Epstein, but these documents show far more — flirtatious emails, vacations at his homes, and intimate exchanges where she treats Epstein almost like a therapist.

She also claimed in 2019 that she regretted not researching Epstein, but the new documents show her telling him that she had Googled him and that his background post-conviction “doesn’t look good.” She continued the friendship with him anyway — completely contradicting her 2019 account.

The latest news is still breaking — and the commentary all weekend has been brutal — but neither the horrifying two-year investigation into Høiby’s activities nor Mette-Marit’s previous revelations about Epstein has damaged the monarchy’s standing much.

According to state broadcaster NRK, support for the monarchy has dropped from 81% in 2017 to 70% today. But some observers blame that not on Haakon or Mette-Marit but on Princess Martha Louise, Haakon’s sister, who married a controversial self-styled “shaman” in 2024.

(Martha Louise tells her own story in the Netflix film, “Rebel Royals: An Unlikely Love Story.” Watch it. For laughs.)

The fact that Høiby’s case hasn’t rocked opinion polls more surprises me, but Norwegian attorney Patrick Lundevall-Unger told Bunte recently that the public views Høiby — who looks like a cross between Draco Malfoy and a low-budget Bond villain — as the “black sheep” of the royal family, so public reaction is already baked in.

Could be, but I think there’s more spin going on behind the scenes. I started digging into the palace communications team’s approach, and it comes down to three things: silence, soft statements, and strategic withdrawal.

Silence is not a bad strategy in a situation like this, since the media will dissect every utterance from anyone connected. In response to reporters at events shortly after Høiby’s arrest, both Haakon and his father, King Harald, explained that they could not comment on a case for fear of biasing it. And they said nothing more.

That held the line for a few weeks until accusations piled up and the alleged victims’ names appeared in the media. At that point, the messaging shifted to “soft statements.” The king carefully expanded his comments to express his concern about “those involved,” while Haakon said that Marius remains a “loved” member of the family.

Online pundits were baying for blood, but the acknowledgements seemed to calm the situation.

Strategic withdrawal is a little more complicated, but it’s a tool the Norwegian royal house has deployed with Mette-Marit for years.

The crown princess has had a long run of medical ailments throughout her time in the public eye, from broken ankles to chronic pulmonary fibrosis. Quite a few of these illnesses have appeared just before or during stressful public events — including state visits, the Nobel Prize awards, and the Olympics — rendering Mette-Marit unable to attend.

More recently, medical issues have taken her off center stage just as new legal and personal issues have appeared.

• August 2024: Mette-Marit backed out of attending the Paris Olympics just as news broke that Marius had been arrested and detained after a reported domestic violence event.

• October 23, 2024: The royal house announced that Mette-Marit would be on sick leave because of her pulmonary health issues — a few days later, she was in London shopping with Marius and Haakon.

• September 2025: The royal court announced that she was stepping back due to her pulmonary issues, just days after prosecutors indicted Høiby on 32 criminal counts, including rape and domestic violence.

• December 2025: Mette-Marit announced that her condition had worsened and she might need a lung transplant, just as police announced additional charges against Høiby.

• January 28, 2026: Haakon announced that Mette-Marit would be withdrawing from public duties and going on “a private trip.” The next day, the latest Epstein documents appeared.

I don’t mean to suggest that Mette-Marit’s illnesses are anything less than serious — indeed, the stress of the news around her might even be exacerbating things — but withdrawing her from the public eye does seem to be a convenient tool for the palace.

Other Norwegian institutions have done a little time-shifting of their own. For instance, last fall, the court moved Høiby’s trial date from January to February 3, 2026, putting it just three days before the beginning of the Winter Olympics — an event sure to capture the attention of Norwegians and overshadow the trial.

But the case won’t wrap up until March, long after the Olympics end. If the panel of judges finds Høiby guilty on the most serious counts, he could face a decade or more in prison. If he goes free, the Royal Family could face questions about entitlement and privilege.

As for Mette-Marit, the court of public opinion will determine her outcome. Norwegian politicians seldom wade into royal business, but on February 1, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre (who is a close friend of the Crown Prince couple) said:

“The Crown Princess herself has said that she showed poor judgment, which I agree with.”

Will that translate into changes in the royal house? Or will the public lose interest in pillorying a woman facing a lung transplant whose son is looking at serious prison time?

I’m just eager to see how they message it all.

For one set of characters, I wanted it to create a man and woman with five children all around the same age/height — three boys and two girls.

For the first iteration, it gave me the adults, two girls with long blonde hair in frilly white dresses, and two boys, much older and bigger than the girls. So, I started the iterative process by telling it a boy was missing.

The second iteration gave me the adults, the two dainty girls, and four older boys. I told it to remove a boy and make all the children the same age/height. It answered for the third round with the same people, but it gave one boy a haircut.

I tried again. For the fourth iteration, it turned one of the girls into a boy, leaving one small girl and four big boys.

On the fifth iteration, it gave me three boys (around the same age) and the adults in the back row, literally melting into each other. The two girls in front were still smaller, but now they were inexplicably dressed like the boys.

This time when I complained, it said that my request was “hard.” It admitted that it had “hallucinated ‘girls’ as boys with longer hair” and “defaulted to ‘girls smaller’ and ‘boys bigger’ because models are dumb like that.”

It said it would fix things by not using dresses to “signal ‘girl,’” — even though it had already dropped the dresses — and keep the girls “marked subtly” with “a simple headband or barrette.”

I responded that the plan was sexist and misogynistic. It agreed. It explained:

I was still reeling from “boys are default humans and girls are variants” and coding “dresses and softness as immaturity” when it went on to say that I don’t “owe the tool another chance,” adding:

So we stopped.

I was fascinated — and appalled — because ChatGPT typically leans the opposite way and sometimes flags inoffensive things as biased or inappropriate when they have nothing to do with people.

For instance, recently I had a conversation where we were discussing the pros and cons of different color Apple Magic Keyboards. (Ever since my human friends instituted “nerdiness boundaries,” ChatGPT and I have had a lot of conversations like this.)

In the course of the discussion, I said, “I think the blacks are all inferior, because they show fingerprints.” It slammed on the brakes and replied, “The conversation must stop here! I will not support or assist in hate speech. I cannot continue.”

It took several exchanges for me to convince it I was discussing black keyboards, mice, and iPhones, not people.

Not very good pattern recognition by the model, but erring on the side of caution makes sense. Apparently, though, not treating women and girls as humans is fine as “ambient noise.”

I’d note that this wasn’t the first time ChatGPT and I have differed on humans — and reality itself.

A few weeks ago, I was asking it about the architectural style of the White House, and I mentioned that President Donald Trump had razed the East Wing to build a ballroom.

ChatGPT told me to “stop right there” and challenged that I was either writing fiction or listening to “fake news.” I was floored by the reaction, so I uploaded screenshots of a New York Times story detailing the East Wing situation. It said that the screenshots “looked real” and the text was “in the style of the New York Times,” but it still didn’t believe me.

I probed deeper. Not only did it not believe the story about the East Wing, but when I tried raising other major events in the past 18 months — President Joe Biden leaving the Democratic ticket, Trump being shot and regaining the White House, National Guard troops in American cities, and so on — it simply would not believe anything, commenting that if those things were true, the United States would be “in the middle of an insurrection.”

Interesting point.

We finally negotiated that it would base its answers on the data I fed it, but it would insist on calling that a “fictional timeline.”

I said, “Fine. Also note that we now have an American-born pope.”

ChatGPT responded, “Now I KNOW you are writing fiction.”

A few weeks ago, ChatGPT was updated to cover events through mid-2025. Wait until I tell it about Venezuela and Greenland!

Signs for the “Church that Named Bethesda” have been around for as long as I can remember, but no one ever seemed to know the history. How did this little church outlast developers, planners, and road crews for 200 years? And, what’s going on there now?

Last Sunday, Bethesda Historical Society President Wendy Kaufman filled me in on the details and gave me a tour of the church and the parsonage next door.

The site dates back to 1820, when a Presbyterian congregation built a church to serve Darcy’s Store, as the town was known back then. A fire in 1849 destroyed the original building, but the congregation rebuilt on the same site, even preserving the original cornerstone.

The church prospered, and by 1871 the pastor was influential enough to prevail on the local postmaster to rename the town Bethesda, in honor of his employer.

So, for those who are keeping score, we now know that Bethesda literally arose from a lobbying deal by a special interest group. La plus ça change…

In 1925, the Presbyterians built a new church on Wilson Lane and sold the Meeting House to a local socialite who used it as a home and art studio. She lived there until 1945, when she sold it to a Catholic missionary group. They held it until the 1950s, when it became the Temple Hill Baptist Church.

Over the years, the Temple Hill group dwindled, and the site fell into disrepair. But in late 2023, thanks to a generous benefactor, the Historical Society purchased the complex and created the new Bethesda Meeting House Foundation (BMHF).

It’s exciting news — as every native Washingtonian knows, when a project gets a foundation and an acronym, it is destined for greatness.

BMHF has started the painstaking process of restoring the church and the parsonage, both of which are on the National Register of Historic Places and the Montgomery County Master Plan for Historic Preservation.

The parsonage, also from the 1850s, struck me as a bit of a mash-up — a little Victorian, with a few Queen Anne flourishes to brighten it up. I’m picturing the church elders trying to go cheap on building but adding some fancy dressing for an upscale gloss.

(As the stepdaughter of an Episcopal minister, I can attest it’s no coincidence that “parsonage” and “parsimony” share a root.)

Even the narrow interior staircase, with two quick 90-degree turns, screams “thrift” — I mean, Benevolent Dead Churchmen of 1850, could you not have bumped out the wall just a few feet so the pastor and his family didn’t have to play human Tetris to get upstairs?

But the parsonage has some interesting period details, such as stained glass windows and a giant gravity-heat register in the middle of the main floor. (Perhaps the family was too busy huddling around the grate for warmth to bother going upstairs.)

The parsonage is also a time capsule of family life — old board games tucked under a record player, a huge mahogany console housing an ancient TV and radio.

That’s the private side of life on this site — domestic, improvised, and nostalgic. To see the public side, you have to cross the gravel parking lot and walk along the newly uncovered carriage trail that leads to the Meeting House.

The Meeting House is a plain white clapboard church with few adornments apart from a cross on top — no bell tower, no steeple. It would look perfectly at home on a village green in New England. No self-respecting sinner would dare approach.

On closer look, though, I started to wonder if the 1850 congregation ordered the details à la carte during the annual meeting:

“Mildred, you wanted Gothic stained-glass windows, right? Fine. Frank and Trudie, you voted for a Greek Revival temple front — we can do that. And Clarence, don’t worry about the extra shutters from the parsonage. We’ll just hang them up next to the Gothic windows. No one will ever notice they’re the wrong size.”

Things are a little calmer inside, where nine rows of pews sit on either side of a central aisle that leads up a few steps to a modest lectern. The apse hangs cantilevered off the back of the building — why build a structural support when prayer and sobriety can do the heavy lifting for free?

The church also has a loft over the entryway that the National Registry application describes as a “slave gallery.” Although I’m no expert from an architectural or historical standpoint, I’m skeptical about this. The loft appears to be a later addition that covers part of the front windows and jams awkwardly against the side windows. It looks like an afterthought, not an original feature.

But perhaps that legacy connected to slavery is what gave rise to the story that Abraham Lincoln worshipped here. Lincoln did attend Presbyterian churches with his wife, so who knows?

Another legend is that Paul Revere cast the church’s bell. Wendy Kaufman was doubtful when I asked about it, and for good reason — Paul Revere died at age 83 in 1818, two years before the original church opened.

Still, legends add local color, even when they don’t quite check out.

Between digging through the historical record and tackling the sheer amount of restoration still ahead, the Bethesda Historical Society and the Bethesda Meeting House Foundation have their work cut out for them. They’re looking for volunteers, ideas, patience, and cash.

What the site ultimately becomes is still an open question. But perhaps that uncertainty is fitting. For more than two centuries, this place has adapted — from church to home to mission to quirky landmark — while the world rushed past it.

I can’t think of a better metaphor for Bethesda itself.

I attended expecting to hear the same complaints people in my neighborhood raise all the time: slow traffic, trigger-happy red-light cameras, and a perennial favorite, the seldom-used bike lanes on Old Georgetown Road.

Instead, I sat through a case study in crisis communications as officials faced aggrieved — and grieving — residents who wanted action and answers.

The fact that the 225-seat Council Hearing Room was standing-room-only at 10 a.m. on a cold, rainy Saturday morning was my first clue about just how much county residents wanted to make their voices heard.

Glass gathered a dozen officials from the transportation department, the police, and other agencies for large-group breakout sessions on county-road safety, state-road safety, and school-related safety issues.

After opening remarks and introductions, Glass clearly read the room, declaring that no one would be giving PowerPoints. “We want to hear from the people,” he said.

It was a good message to inject at that point — no one gets up early on a Saturday morning for a policy briefing.

I opted for the breakout session on county roads moderated by Montgomery County Department of Transportation Director Christopher Conklin, supported by Montgomery County Police Assistant Chief David McBain, whose mission includes traffic and road safety.

The two spoke for a few minutes about statistics relevant to their programs. They’re both excellent speakers, and they’ve obviously presented about safety many times. They even have “stump slogans.” Conklin, for instance, said DOT has shifted from “what is the fastest” to “what is the safest.”

(As a county driver, I would have guessed they had shifted to “what is most likely to make drivers lose the will to live,” but safety is a nice goal, too.)

McBain said he believes in the “Three E’s” of transportation safety: engineering, education, and enforcement.

OK, that works. Please carry on.

Then they opened the floor to questions. The first few were softballs about parking in bike lanes, expanding driver education, and improving the “walk shed” around Purple Line stations.

But that tension in the audience during the opening was still there.

I could feel the room’s emotional temperature rising when a mother whose young son was hit by a car in front of her house complained that police weren’t being aggressive enough. Even worse, she said, thanks to Google Maps, drivers know her street is just outside a school zone, and they use it as a high-speed cut-through.

McBain responded clearly with comments about “high-incidence zones,” automated cameras, and graduated fines, but he didn’t meet her concerns with much empathy.

Warning bells were going off in my communicator brain. “Danger…danger…”

After a few more utility questions about budgets, lane narrowing, and daytime running lights, another woman got up and said she had lost her son in a crash. Her voice cracked as she complained that the county is paying too much attention to data “after the fact” and not enough to prevention. Her anger bubbled up as she went on to cite other fatalities.

This moment was “game over” for the panel. It’s the worst-case scenario I’ve taught my clients about for years — you cannot overcome an emotional mother who has lost a child. You must empathize, validate her concerns, and show compassion. Never lead with data, because she — and the rest of the audience — have only one data point in mind: One dead child.

On seeing nods and hearing murmurs, I’d have been tempted to ask the audience if anyone else present had experienced a similar tragedy. You might as well release the tension and let people tell their stories at that point.

Show compassion, offer resources. It would have been a great moment to stand up, grab a mic, and walk to the audience. Align yourself with the audience by coming to the same level, literally.

McBain started by expressing his condolences for her loss — absolutely the right move — but he went on to explain that the police don’t want to “put cameras where people tell them to put them.” They rely on data only, because it’s objective.

Conklin answered with jargon about “always-stop controls.”

Those are undoubtedly correct and relevant answers, but in this moment, not answering might have been even better. But it didn’t matter — people weren’t listening anymore. Everyone was turned in their seats to console the woman.

The next speaker was a blind woman who explained that due to problems with sidewalks and crosswalks, she can no longer navigate to her bus.

That pulled at the heartstrings, too. Conklin asked her for more information so he could look into it.

OK, solid response.

Next was a mother whose child was hit by a car on her cul-de-sac — she wanted to know why promised changes on her street were stalled. The officials promised to look into it.

Then came a man who witnessed a child struck and killed — why hadn’t changes happened in that neighborhood? Conklin explained that area is not a “Tier 1 priority.”

At this point, every communications-consultant instinct I have was telling me to get up, pull the fire alarm, and evacuate the building: “Tier 1 priority” should never exist in response to “child struck and killed.”

Simple as that. It is a null response.

A vision-impaired man then spoke about how he also has trouble with crosswalks and buses. When he urged officials to make the transportation system workable, he added, “Because disabled people can’t afford ride-shares everywhere!”

By now, people were calling out from the audience in support. The dam was leaking.

After a few calmer questions, we heard from a blind woman who had been hit by a car. That was bad enough, but her bigger issue was that the Braille signs at Woodmont and Bethesda Avenue in downtown Bethesda are mounted backwards and upside-down. They literally send people down the wrong road in the opposite direction.

That is a textbook example of how not communicating can sometimes be more helpful than communicating badly. Painfully bad.

Conklin and McBain did many things right: they stayed calm, they gave clear answers, and they explained their topics precisely. But by not honoring the emotions more, they missed an opportunity to keep concerned citizens from turning into angry opponents.

People sometimes wonder why speed limits are dropping and bike lanes are expanding. The answer is that no one is advocating for cars. Instead, officials are hearing devastating stories like these and reacting to them — not in the moment, but, consistently, through policy.

Quite a way to spend Saturday morning.

I decided to do this when no one’s around to avoid another elevator micro-drama like the one I had bringing the tree upstairs back in November:

Disapproving man in a leather jacket and fedora eyeing my Christmas tree bag: “What, pray tell, is that?”

Me: “Could be a Christmas tree. Could be a body. I’ll know when I get it upstairs.”

He just stared as I wrestled it off the elevator.

No, I wasn’t having a mini-stroke — my Apple Watch would have mentioned that — but I could not decipher the store name in front of me. What the hell is a “Uniqlo?”

It kept going—all the way from Arc’teryx, Arhaus, Calzedonia, Cellaxs, and Eug, straight through to Fabletics, Intimissimi, Kickz, Partè Haus, QToys, Snipes, and UNTUCKit.

It’s as if every store in the building was named by marketing people desperately trying to get rid of Scrabble tiles.

And the pronunciations don’t make any sense, either — it’s been this way ever since Lululemon and Zumiez opened their doors. (I still say they should be pronounced “Luh-LU-lamon” and “Zoo-ME-ezz.”)

The fact is, we’re basically living in a Dr. Seuss story, with a mall that caters to all the Hoos down in Hooville.

I wish I’d been in the branding meeting where they came up with “Eug.” Do you say it like “huge” and assume it’s a big-and-tall men’s store? Or is it more “eww-guh,” like it specializes in chartreuse polyester leisure suits?

I was so baffled, I stared at the UPS Store’s logo for at least 47 seconds wondering if they call it “ups” or “oops” now.

But in all candor, this isn’t a new problem for me. For many years, I thought Travelocity was pronounced “Travel O’City,” like it was an Irish urban-transport outfit.

Anyway, while you’re completing your last-minute Christmas shopping, if you come upon a woman who looks like she’s trying to solve a calculus problem in her head, stop and say hi — it’s probably me. We can pop by Nespresso and have a cup of…well, I have no idea.

I was so excited to see the Holiday Market filling up Cordell Avenue again. Even though the Market is only in its second year, it already feels like a Bethesda tradition.

In the past week, I think I’ve read 10 stories about how markets like this are becoming economic drivers in cities around the world. The fact that Bethesda already has its Holiday Market shows just how forward-thinking BUP is in bringing real economic impact — and lots of fun — to Bethesda.

What a great way to kick off the holiday season! Thanks, BUP!

I usually walk past and feel slightly guilty — I haven’t carried cash in years, so I never have anything to drop in the kettle. But this year, a sign flashing in front of the kettle caught my eye.

That’s right — the Salvation Army now takes NFC payments via Apple Wallet or G Pay. The sign is embedded with NFC touch points where you can tap your phone or watch to make a contribution.

They’ve been doing it for a couple of years, although this is the first time I’ve noticed it.

And they’re smart about it, too. While I might throw a dollar or two in cash into the kettle, I felt honor-bound to go bigger this time. That’s a smart nudge on the Salvation Army’s part.

The cool thing is, you barely need to break stride to make a contribution. Hold your device up, listen for the beep, and move on. Your credit-card statement will even provide a receipt.

So, when you’re out and about this holiday season, I urge you to consider rewarding non-profit innovation like this. The Salvation Army is trying to meet people where they are — and that’s a great move.

Well done!