First column for the Substack done, ready for blast-off on Monday. I will, in time, loosen up the columns a bit, broaden the scope - but they will not be hot-button-pushers or screeds. That is not what this particular instrument is for. It is for classic humorous essays in my style. The end.

Or rather, the beginning, he said deploying that clever wordplay for which he was known! And yes, I will charge. A little.

Let me ask the class a question: if you introduced 11 new writers for your food section, each with their own bios, and one was singled out as being a vegan, what assumptions might you make about the other ten? You would assume they eat meat to some degree or another, since a particular care had been taken to point to one whose dietary habits deserved mention.

No reason I’m asking; just curious. (Note: he was, of course, lying.)

We had another town hall today to introduce this and that, and give away boxes of geegaws and trinkets branded with the old logo. I got a reusuable sandwich bag. I got a keychain. It has a button and when you press it a small light bulb illuminates.

It feels odd to look at the name and logo, the things for which I once had such pride and attachment, and it's like looking at a logo for a German gas station chain or a Brazilian sandwich shop.

As I feared, the letters column in the paper this morning titled the reactions to my vanishing as "James Lileks’ Retirement". Gah. NO. Well, I don’t blame them. I couldn’t say the column was dismissed, and besides, why would the column stop if I didn’t retire? I evidently enjoyed it! Guess he’s going off to play golf in Arizona - Godspeed! No. They were very apologetic and will issue a correction, but whether it’s on the letters page or in the corrections section, I don’t know. This may seem petty, but it's actually important for me to push back against that word in every instance.

Oh - I forgot. The twitching light in the ceiling in the lobby is no longer twitching. I take that as a sign. Do you remember how I agonized over the name of the scissor-lift? Started with a K?

THAT'S NOT IT. Unless I was Mandelaffected. And I wasn't.

The other day I walked to the Walgreens downtown to get some aluminum foil. You might ask: why? Because I knew I was reheating some ribs for supper, and would have to wrap it in foil. As I passed the Gaviidae Commons, part of the beautiful Cesar Pelli-designed complex that includes the Wells Fargo tower, I noticed that most of the street-level doors are locked. Some sections of the facade have fallen off, with insulation bulging out, a sickly sight, like a pink version of the corpuscles that ate Donald Pleasence in Fantastic Voyage. One of the doors:

Made me smile, but you know, that was a beautiful door.

We're talking THE prime intersection of downtown Minneapolis.

I went up to Walgreens, and beheld the bounteous sights of goods spilling forth in American abundance:

You had to buzz someone over to get the paper products. Also:

I presume it's because they're used for drugs. These are two things we now accept as normal: useful things will be locked away because theft is rampant and the stores make no effort to stop it because the police don't care, and the needs of drug users will affect your ability to just walk in a store and get a common item.

Everyone's used to it. Shrug and move along. This is baked into the local urban experience now. Also, property taxes are going up.

Okay well that's enough Donald Downer for the week, but I've bled all of the bile out of the system. It's cold-eyed strategy and end-game plotting from here. I am curious about the weekly Letter from the Boss, which recounts the last week's triumphs and outreach and popular stories and must-reads. Will I merit a mention? Will it have the word "retirement"? I'll update in the morn.

I was in New York to give a speech or attend a convention. It wasn’t clear. I was walking around the old streets in Lower Manhattan when I came across an enormous rail complex.

It seemed incredibly daunting, with huge gauge rails, and you wondered how anyone got around it, or what the trains looked like. Just then a huge train zoomed past, and a woman ran at it, leaped 20 feet, and fit perfectly into a narrow gap on the train’s exterior, as if it had been custom fitted for her. We all admitted that’s one way to catch a train.

I went to give my speech, running over my opening remarks. “You all know how nuclear power is generated, right? Rods in the pile, pull ‘em out or put ‘em in, and you have electricity. What I don’t know is what electricity actually is. Positive, negative, I don’t get it.” I figured I’d just vamp from there.

Big room. I actually started talking to the crowd about something else, and was interrupted by the MC who had some other things to tell the crowd. Fine. I went back to my seat and sat next to Jared Caine, who was there to talk about nuclear power because of his role in Chernobyl. We watched something happening on an iPad - seemed to be some sort of Mars exploration with a Rover bumping into a buried object, perhaps a statue, which rolled down a cliff and disappeared in a great ravine. Oops.

I let after that and found a bookstore to read up on nuclear energy but there wasn’t anything relevant, so I picked up a copy of “The Quotes of Kraftwerk” from their rather extensive Kraftwerk section.

Someone tried to get my attention by calling me Hey Nuclear Power Boy or something else that. Then I woke.

Wouldn't mind visiting this bookstore, though.

And now, a related feature that will provide some Friday amusements:

I was doing last-part-of-summer-abandoned-America low-info prompts, as you no doubt noticed. To your dismay.

It's the palm tree that really does it.

When I aske it to add carhops, it obliged. I like the bowtie that is fastened by spearing your windpipe:

No, I did not add "go full Mormon" on this one.

Again, it's the limitations and errors and hallucinations I find interesting. How it completely screws up the interior of the car - two steering wheels - but gives you a briefly convincing reflection on the hood.

Here the AI had a brain-fuse and conflated the idea of the drive-in restaurant with the drive-in movie, I think.

And that's it for Fridays! Ha ha kidding, of course it's not.

Remember, we're working up from the bottom.

Like Fetch, they were always trying to make Ska happen. You can imagine the kids going out on the floor and dancing to this in an increasingly indifferent fashion, heading back to their chairs and Cokes before it was done.

Their previous hit was a cover of "Stay." The days of novelty were stil to come.

Now we're done. Thanks for your visits this week. Exciting things coming on Monday.