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Bank’s Furlough Bridge Loan APR Climbs 0.4% Every Day Congress Doesn’t Vote

Cody Thompson
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Bank’s Furlough Bridge Loan APR Climbs 0.4% Every Day Congress Doesn’t Vote

TYSONS CORNER, VA — At the Dominion Heritage Bank branch on Leesburg Pike, a teller named Marisol re-laminates the lobby rate sheet every morning at 7:54 a.m., because the APR on the bank’s new Patriot Bridge Advance — a short-term loan for furloughed federal employees — climbs another 0.4% with each day Congress fails to pass a continuing resolution.

The product, launched Sunday evening by parent company Dominion Heritage Bancorp, allows GS-9 through GS-14 federal workers to borrow up to $4,200 against future back pay at a starting rate of 8.49% APR, escalating daily until a funding bill is signed. As of Monday morning, with the shutdown entering its first full business day, the rate sat at 8.89%. By Friday, if no deal is reached, customers who signed Monday will be paying 10.49% — a fact the loan documents disclose in a font roughly two-thirds the size of the Dominion Heritage logo.

“It’s not predatory, it’s kinetic,” said Garrett Pelham, the branch’s senior consumer lending officer, who two years ago was financing used Highlanders out of the same desk. Pelham, eating a paper cup of pineapple from the lobby Keurig station, said the rate structure was designed to “give borrowers an organic incentive to advocate for resolution.” When asked how a furloughed USDA inspector was supposed to influence Senate floor scheduling, Pelham pointed to a tri-fold pamphlet titled Your Voice Matters next to the peppermint dish.

The loan is collateralized by an automatic assignment of the borrower’s eventual back pay, which Dominion Heritage receives directly from Treasury once the shutdown ends. Borrowers who decline the advance and elect to wait it out are still welcome to take a complimentary granola bar from the lobby basket, which corporate has classified as a pre-approved community engagement expense.

Outside the branch, Denise Whately, a furloughed Bureau of Labor Statistics analyst who showed up Monday morning to ask about an overdraft fee, said she had been told by Pelham that the Patriot Bridge Advance was “honestly her best option,” and also that the branch was running a separate drawing for a Yeti tumbler. Whately, holding a manila folder of pay stubs and a printout of her Hyundai Tucson loan terms, said she did not feel like a member of the patriot tier.

Internal materials reviewed by branch staff describe the loan as “civic-aligned consumer paper” and project that a 14-day shutdown would generate approximately $1.1 million in net interest income across Dominion Heritage’s 47 Northern Virginia and Maryland branches — a figure that a regional VP, in a Monday morning all-hands held in a conference room with a ficus that had not been watered since August, called “frankly conservative.”

A spokesperson for Dominion Heritage said in an emailed statement that the bank “stands with the federal workforce in this difficult moment” and noted that the rate ceiling is capped at 14.99%, after which any unpaid balance converts to a standard personal line of credit at 19.99% APR. The statement was signed with a small graphic of an American flag stylized to resemble the bank’s logo.

Pelham said he expects strong loan volume through Wednesday. The rate sheet, he added, is laminated because customers keep asking to take it home.

Marlene’s Kickoff Candle Lists Hot Dog as a Top Note and Cleo Got a Nosebleed

Brooke Ellery
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Marlene’s Kickoff Candle Lists Hot Dog as a Top Note and Cleo Got a Nosebleed

The Panthers had not finished the coin toss before Cleo walked out of Marlene’s living room with one hand cupped under her nose and the other still holding a pretzel rod, and I knew before I even looked at the coffee table what had done it. There, between a bowl of chex mix and Trent’s IPA, was a 14-ounce soy-blend candle in an amber jar, flame leaning sideways, throwing off something that smelled like a concession stand had been set on fire inside a Yankee Candle.

It was called Stadium Sunday. The brand is Hearthwick & Hollow, which Marlene’s daughter Aubrey gets at a boutique near the Trader Joe’s, and the lid lists the notes in a little curly font like it’s perfume. Top: fresh-cut turf. Heart: ballpark hot dog and bourbon barrel. Base: “leather glove,” “stadium air,” and something called “crowd musk.” I am not making any of that up. Crowd musk is a thing they decided to bottle.

I have been in the Facebook group Candles & The Quiet Damage They’re Doing for almost a year now, and the women in there have done the work. A “fragrance” listed as one ingredient on a candle label can be a black box of forty to two hundred undisclosed compounds, most of them phthalates, and the way you know is that no one selling them will tell you. Hot dog is not a smell that exists in nature without help. To get a candle to smell like a hot dog you have to ask a chemist to build you one, and the chemist does not work for free, and he does not work without solvents.

I said this, calmly, while Cleo bled into a paper towel printed with little footballs. Marlene picked up the jar, pointed at the side, and said “Brooke, it says clean burn,” the way people say clean burn, like the words are a doctor’s note. Clean burn is a marketing term. Clean burn means the wick is cotton. The wick was never the problem. The problem is that we were aerosolizing a chemistry-set hot dog into a closed great room with eleven children and a golden retriever in it.

I texted my sister-in-law Jessa, who works the front desk at a pediatric ENT in Hendersonville and has watched enough of the appointments that she is, functionally, basically a nurse. She wrote back inside of a minute: “nosebleeds in fall = synthetic fragrance 100% of the time, especially the gourmand ones, the food ones are the worst, tell her to open a window.” I read it out loud. Marlene said the windows were already open. They were cracked maybe an inch and a half. That is not a window. That is a suggestion.

Meanwhile Trent, who is a wonderful father and a deeply unserious man, kept leaning toward the candle and saying it smelled like the Sheetz off Exit 53, in a tone that meant he wanted to eat it. At one point he asked Marlene, sincerely, if it was a queso. Marlene’s husband Brett told him it was a candle four separate times before halftime. This is the man I have built a life with.

By the second quarter the dog had walked himself out onto the deck and would not come back in even when Brett shook the treat bag. Wyatt, who has the same fall sinus situation Cleo has, started rubbing his eyes the way he does in the car wash. Aubrey’s friend Marin, who is twelve and confident, told me the candle gave her a headache but that she liked it because it “smelled like the mall.” That is not the recommendation she thinks it is.

I went out to the Cherokee and got the beeswax taper I keep in the glovebox for exactly this kind of afternoon. Real beeswax, single-ingredient, sourced from a man named Phillip outside Weaverville whose hives I have personally seen. I lit it on Marlene’s mantle and asked everyone to just sit with it for a minute. Marlene took one polite breath and said, kindly, “Brooke, that smells like nothing.” I said: exactly. That is what air is supposed to smell like. Air is not supposed to have notes.

Cleo’s nosebleed stopped before the two-minute warning, which is its own kind of data. Marlene blew the Stadium Sunday out around the third quarter, mostly to humor me, and Trent ate three more bowls of chex mix and did not once try to bite the beeswax. The Panthers lost. The candle is, as of this morning, sitting on Marlene’s porch railing, lid back on, where she said she would “think about it.” I will be checking.

Ashland, WI Has One Federal Employee. He’s Been Told to Just Stay Home.

Hal Cranston
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Ashland, WI Has One Federal Employee. He’s Been Told to Just Stay Home.

ASHLAND, WI — The federal government may or may not shut down at midnight Tuesday, but in Ashland County the matter has already been settled by Dale Furlong, the rural carrier on Route 3, who was advised Wednesday by his Eau Claire supervisor to “just take next week, we’ll call you, play it by ear.”

Furlong, 58, is — per the Ashland Chamber of Commerce — the only federal employee residing within city limits, a distinction he has held since the Forest Service ranger transferred to Hayward in 2014 and never came back.

“We were told to model our response after Dale,” said Margie Linnert, who runs the Chamber out of a converted dental office on Vaughn Avenue. “And Dale’s response is to drive to his daughter’s in St. Cloud.”

Local reaction has been measured. The First National Bank moved Monday’s flag-lowering to “whenever Tom remembers.” The VFW post pushed its fish fry up an hour, citing “general concern.” Marv Ostlund, who delivers propane on the same route, said he would carry Dale’s mail in his truck if it came to that — “but only the magazines, and only as far as the lake.”

Furlong, reached at the Black Cat Coffeehouse, said the key to a federal shutdown is to stop checking the news. “Last one, I painted the porch,” he said. “The one before that, I painted the porch again. I’ve got maybe one more porch left in me.”

His wife, Diane, was less philosophical. She told a reporter she has begun referring to the U.S. House of Representatives as “those people” and to her husband’s accumulated leave as “the Lord’s mystery.”

A spokesperson for Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District office, asked Friday whether residents of Ashland should expect any disruption, replied via email that “essential services will continue uninterrupted” and included a link to a furlough-readiness PDF that would not open.

Furlong is scheduled to leave for St. Cloud on Sunday afternoon. He has been asked, by three separate neighbors, to bring back rolls.

Our High School’s New $400K Jumbotron Plays Ads Between Plays

Duke Holloway
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Our High School’s New $400K Jumbotron Plays Ads Between Plays

I sat down on the aluminum bleachers Friday night for the home opener, lukewarm coffee in one hand and a program in the other, and before the kids had even finished stretching, the new end-zone jumbotron lit up with a 38-second spot for Heritage Ford. The truck on screen was bigger than my first apartment. The kicker was still on the sideline trying to find his tee.

This is what $412,000 buys you in our school district now. I know the number because the booster club put out a glossy fold-over flyer about it, and the flyer was sponsored too, by a real estate agent named Tasha who I have never met but whose face I have now seen approximately as many times as my own children’s.

Between every series of downs Friday, the screen cut to something. Third-and-long was brought to us by Pillar Mutual. Punts were sponsored by a sub shop called Hoagie Town that I am told is a chain. Halftime was “presented by” the same Ford dealer, which I guess is what naming rights look like when you don’t have enough names to go around. There is now a QR code on the field-level signage that goes directly to the booster club’s Venmo, and a man in a polo at the gate told me, without prompting, that I could “tap to give.”

Coach DiMaggio, who ran our program from ’71 to ’89 and once made me run a mile in cleats for chewing gum on the sideline, had exactly one piece of audio-visual equipment at his disposal: a scoreboard with bulbs that worked maybe sixty percent of the time and an air horn the assistant trainer kept in a duffel. If you wanted to know the score and the lights were out on the seven, you walked over and asked somebody. Nobody died. Nobody got a notification.

The booster president — a guy named Greg who sells industrial flooring and refers to the field as “our digital experience” — explained the math to anyone who’d listen. The board pays for itself in three seasons, he said. The advertisers love it. The kids love it. “It’s the same thing they see on Sundays.” Yeah, Greg, that’s the problem. The kids are sixteen. They are not supposed to see the same thing they see on Sundays. They are supposed to see two yards and a cloud of grass-clippings and a guy named Mr. Hennessey blowing a whistle.

Ray Kowalczyk called me Saturday morning from his porch in Mentor, Ohio, where his grandson’s high school just installed something called a “coaches’ tower” with WiFi and a dedicated film-review iPad station. Ray said the tower has a sponsor too. The sponsor is a chiropractor. “Duke,” he said, “there’s a chiropractor logo on the tower where the offensive coordinator stands.” I told him I’d seen worse. I had not seen worse. I just didn’t want him to feel alone.

The kids, for what it’s worth, played their hearts out. My grandson Wyatt caught a slant for nine yards and got up like he’d done it before, which he hadn’t. The quarterback is a junior with a decent arm and the kind of haircut you can only get if your mother drives you somewhere specific. They are not the problem. They never are. The kids show up and run the plays and shake hands with the other team’s kids afterward, and none of them asked for a fog machine.

I sat next to a man in section B named Marv who has been coming to home games since 1974 and was, on Friday, eating peanuts out of a paper bag like a civilized person. He watched the screen flash a spot for a regional bank, then a spot for the boosters, then a spot for Hoagie Town, and he turned to me and said, “Used to be you came to watch the game. Now the game’s a thing they put between the commercials.” Marv should be writing this column. Marv should be running the school district.

Denise is bringing chili to next week’s tailgate. She heard about the recipe on a podcast.

4th Grader’s Sephora Receipt Longer Than Her Teacher’s Paycheck

Tara Sparks
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4th Grader’s Sephora Receipt Longer Than Her Teacher’s Paycheck

PLANO, TX — A receipt printed Wednesday at the Sephora inside Willow Bend mall measured 14 inches long, was paid for in birthday money, and belonged to a 9-year-old named Brinleigh whose teacher took home $487 last week before taxes.

Brinleigh, a fourth grader at Plano West Elementary, is part of a growing demographic known online as ‘Sephora kids’ — tween skincare obsessives whose nighttime routines include retinol products formulated for menopausal women and whose haul videos pull more views than most local news affiliates pull viewers.

‘She has a Drunk Elephant Bronzing Drops. I have a tote bag from a 2019 Scholastic conference,’ said Ms. Pettigrew, Brinleigh’s teacher, who tutors on weekends and shares a Hulu password with her sister. ‘I asked her what glass skin was. She looked at me like I had just told her Santa was real.’

Brinleigh’s evening regimen, posted to her mother’s TikTok, contains 14 steps and includes Protini Polypeptide Cream, a $58 hyaluronic serum, and the Sol de Janeiro Brazilian Bum Bum body butter. She does not have a bum bum. She is nine.

‘It used to smell like Goldfish in here,’ said Marcus, a custodian who has mopped Plano West since 1998 and now describes the third-floor girls’ bathroom as ‘a Bath & Body Works that fell into a Trader Joe’s.’ He said he found a $42 face mist behind a toilet on Tuesday and turned it in to lost-and-found, where it was claimed within nine minutes.

At Wednesday’s pickup, Brinleigh’s mother, Krista, defended the haul while holding a $68 cleanser her daughter had specifically requested by SKU number. ‘We just want her to have nice skin,’ said Krista, 38, who used St. Ives Apricot Scrub at the same age and has, by her own admission, ‘paid for it.’ She added that Brinleigh’s birthday money came from her grandmother, who ‘doesn’t really get what any of it is, but supports her.’

Pettigrew, who has been told by administration that she cannot ban skincare products from the classroom because ‘they are technically just lotion,’ said she now spends her morning prep period quietly googling what a ‘slug’ is. She has also been informed by several students that her own skin barrier is ‘compromised.’

The Sephora at Willow Bend declined to comment on a Wednesday afternoon rush its assistant manager described as ‘every Tuesday and Thursday after 3:15.’ A small sign at the register reads ‘Please No More Than 4 Tweens At The Tester Bar,’ which staff installed in August and which is openly ignored.

At press time, Ms. Pettigrew was applying a sample packet of Olay she received at a CVS in 2021, and Brinleigh was unboxing a Laneige set on Instagram Live to 1,400 viewers, none of whom were her teacher.

The Scholastic Book Fair’s New Pencils Smell Like a Tire and Cleo Got Six

Brooke Ellery
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The Scholastic Book Fair’s New Pencils Smell Like a Tire and Cleo Got Six

I walked into the Maple Grove Elementary gym Monday morning at 8:14 a.m. and I knew before I rounded the cardboard castle that something was deeply, chemically off. It smelled like a UPS Store inside a nail salon inside a brand-new Kia. Cleo was already three feet into the tent, vibrating, with what I would later learn were six (6) free pencils clutched in her fist.

Those pencils, for the record, smell like a tire. Not metaphorically. Like a Goodyear. I held one to my nose in the parking lot and got an instant pressure headache behind my left eye, which my sister-in-law Tessa — who works the front desk at a pediatric office and has been around enough sick kids to basically be a nurse — says is one of the first signs of acute VOC exposure in moms who have not yet had coffee.

Here is the part nobody at the PTA meeting wanted to talk about. The Scholastic truck rolled in Friday afternoon. The cardboard castle, the foam standees, the seventeen vinyl banners, the laminated bookmarks, the little plastic erasers shaped like avocados — all of it sat sealed inside a closed elementary school gymnasium from 4 p.m. Friday until 8 a.m. Monday. That is sixty-four hours of off-gassing in a room with no airflow and a wood floor that absorbs everything. The kindergartners walked into a chemistry experiment and were handed a tote bag.

I posted in Bookfair Mamas Reading the Fine Print (3,200 members, very tight community) and within twenty minutes a mom in Tulsa named Lindsey had taken a photo of the back of one of those scratch-and-sniff bookmarks. The ingredient list said “fragrance.” That is it. Just “fragrance.” Lindsey’s pediatric chiropractor told her “fragrance” is a legal umbrella term for up to 3,000 unlisted compounds, and I am sorry, but if I cannot pronounce what is making my third grader’s bookmark smell like buttered popcorn, my third grader is not licking it.

Now, before anybody emails me — yes, I let Wyatt buy a book. Two, actually. But I want to be very clear about my reasoning, because consistency matters. Used books from the school library are fine. Those volumes have been releasing their VOCs into open classroom air for, in some cases, four decades. They are essentially inert. A 1994 copy of Hatchet has nothing left to give. It is the brand-new glossy hardcovers, sealed in shrink wrap and stacked next to a foam castle for a long weekend, that I am asking questions about. This is the same logic as sourdough. Time is not an ingredient. Time is a remediation.

Tessa told me that on Tuesday afternoon a third grader at her office came in with a nosebleed and the mom mentioned, just in passing, that he had spent forty-five minutes at the book fair the day before browsing the gel pen wall. Tessa is not allowed to draw conclusions in her professional capacity. I am, because this is my blog. The gel pen wall is doing something.

I tried to raise this gently with Karen from the PTA in the pickup line and she looked at me like I had asked her to cancel Christmas. Karen said, and I quote, “Brooke, they’re books.” I said Karen, the cardboard castle has a smell. She said all cardboard has a smell. I said not like that, Karen. Not like a freshly resurfaced parking lot. She rolled up her window. That is fine. Karen and I are going to be okay. Karen has her path.

So here is what we did. I let Cleo keep one (1) of the six pencils, which is now quarantined in the garage in a Mason jar with the lid off, and I told her it had to “breathe for a season.” She cried. I get it. I bought her a paperback Boxcar Children from the church basement sale for a dollar — yellowed pages, slight mildew, perfect — and she is reading it on the porch right now, completely fine, and Wyatt is on his second chapter of a 1987 Beverly Cleary that smells the way a book is supposed to smell, which is like a grandmother’s attic, not like a Jiffy Lube.

Loan Officer Dials 14,000 Old Refi Leads, Reaches Mom and a Dentist

Cody Thompson
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Loan Officer Dials 14,000 Old Refi Leads, Reaches Mom and a Dentist

COLUMBUS, OH — Within four hours of the Federal Reserve’s quarter-point cut last Wednesday, senior loan officer Brent Vukelich had personally autodialed 14,062 dormant refinance leads from a Plantronics headset older than two of his children, reaching, in this order, his mother, a Cleveland dentist who said he had the wrong number, a Mansfield woman whose husband had died in 2019, and a man named Doyle who wanted to know if Brent had heard the good news.

Vukelich’s branch — a SunTrust-turned-Truist storefront sandwiched between a UPS Store and a Jeni’s in Worthington — had been planning for the cut since August, when corporate sent down a 41-page “Rate Cut Readiness Playbook” whose first action item was, verbatim, “Call literally everyone.”

The mortgage industry has been waiting on a refi wave the way a man stranded in the Sahara waits on rain, and the 25 basis points did not, in fact, deliver one. The average 30-year fixed printed at 6.13% the morning after the cut, which is approximately 380 basis points worse than every loan Vukelich originated between 2019 and the back half of 2022, and still slightly higher than the rate his mother is paying, which is how that call ended.

“He doesn’t really need to be calling me, I have a fixed-rate from 2017,” said Linda Vukelich, 68, who confirmed her son had phoned her twice within the same hour and once put her on hold to take what he later described as “a hotter lead.” The hotter lead was the dentist.

Inside the branch, Truist regional sales lead Marisol Gantt was eating a Jersey Mike’s #13 Mike’s Way over a Bloomberg terminal that had not been logged into since Friday, and described the morning’s outreach as “frankly, a tremendous opportunity to reconnect with the customer.” Asked how many of the 14,062 calls had resulted in a completed application, Gantt swallowed, looked at the number on her screen, and said the pipeline was “early.” The number on the screen was one. The one was Doyle.

By 11 a.m. the branch’s marketing intern had stapled “RATES ARE BACK!” yard signs along the median of High Street, in a font color the corporate brand book lists as “Truist Purple” and that pedestrians described as “bruise.” A Worthington woman who received one of the calls, Patty Erskine, 54, said she had told the loan officer she was currently on a 2.875% from 2021, at which point the loan officer had paused for what she described as “a long, sad inhale,” and then asked if she had any friends.

The branch closed Wednesday with three completed applications, two of which were the same household submitting twice because the wife thought the husband hadn’t done it. Corporate’s after-action report, leaked to the parking lot Friday, listed “net new origination dollars” at $312,400 against a campaign cost of roughly $1.9 million in salaries, dialer licenses, and one severance package belonging to the marketing intern, who had used the wrong shade of purple.

At 7:47 a.m. Monday, Vukelich logged back into the dialer, adjusted his headset, took a long pull from a coffee that said WORLD’S OKAYEST DAD on the side, and clicked into lead number one of 14,062. It was his mother. She did not pick up.

Mrs. Whatley’s Hip Has Reduced the Coshocton Sub List to Two

Hal Cranston
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Mrs. Whatley’s Hip Has Reduced the Coshocton Sub List to Two

COSHOCTON, OH — With Marlene Whatley’s left hip officially scheduled for replacement on October 7, the Coshocton City Schools substitute teacher list has, as of Monday morning, been reduced to two names — both of them men older than the elementary building they would be expected to walk into.

The remaining subs are Ed Hossler, 78, a retired guidance counselor whose card in the binder includes the handwritten note “does not do recess, fractions, or weather below 40°F,” and Don Brindle, 71, who coached JV softball from 1992 to 2004 and currently runs Brindle Small Engine out of his garage on Walnut. Mrs. Whatley, who has functionally been the entire substitute corps since 2019, will be unavailable through Thanksgiving at the earliest.

“Marlene was four, sometimes five days a week,” said Sarah Linden, the district’s substitute coordinator, paging slowly through a three-ring binder that has not been updated since Obama’s second term. “She told me once she did it to get out of the house. We did not have a backup plan for the house getting better.”

Coshocton Elementary principal Bill Ortega briefly floated the possibility of calling Tom Whatley, Marlene’s husband, before being reminded that Tom Whatley has no teaching certificate, has never been inside a classroom in a professional capacity, and once told a Cub Scout den that the Civil War “ended in a tie.”

The district has formally identified its options as: combining classes during prep periods, lengthening morning recess from 20 to 35 minutes, and “drawing on the senior-class study hall as a kind of resource.” The Ohio Department of Education has not been notified of any of this and, per Linden, will not be unless somebody asks.

Hossler, reached over breakfast at the Hen Roost on Second Street, was firm about his terms. “I’ll do middle school social studies, period,” he said, stirring a coffee that had gone cold around 7:15. “I will not do third grade. I did it once in 2019. I did not care for the way they looked at me.”

Brindle was unavailable for comment Monday, having been called in to cover a sixth-grade language arts block that was, by the lunch bell, simply a forty-minute lecture on the importance of changing your oil every three thousand miles regardless of what the dealership tells you.

Reached at her kitchen table, Mrs. Whatley said the surgery was overdue and that she would be back “the second the doctor lets me.” She did note that Tom had recently begun reorganizing the spice cabinet alphabetically, which she described, after a long pause, as “a development.”

Until November, the seventh-grade math classes will rotate among whichever certified teacher has a free period. The English classes will read silently. Kayla Reinhart, the 26-year-old art teacher, has been quietly informed she may be asked to “cover a few things,” but has not yet been told what those things are, or for how long, or in what subject.

Linden closed the binder gently, the way a person closes a casket. “We’ll get through it,” she said. “We always do.” Outside in the bus loop, a yellow Bluebird idled in neutral, waiting on a driver who was, district records confirmed, also Don Brindle.

QB Wore a $4,200 Cardigan to the Stadium, Threw for 142 Yards

Duke Holloway
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QB Wore a $4,200 Cardigan to the Stadium, Threw for 142 Yards

I turned on the pregame at noon expecting football and got a runway show. A young man I am told is a starting quarterback in this league walked from a black SUV into a tunnel, and three different cameras tracked him doing it. The chyron said TUNNEL TIME. There was a logo for Tunnel Time. Tunnel Time is sponsored by a watch company.

The cardigan, I was informed by a sideline reporter wearing her own coat indoors, cost $4,200. It was oatmeal-colored. He paired it with sunglasses, which he was also wearing indoors, and a small leather bag that the analyst called “a moment.” Eight minutes. Eight minutes of network airtime on a man walking sixty feet in a sweater. They went to commercial and came back to a slow-motion replay of the walk.

Coach DiMaggio at Lincoln High wore one windbreaker for nineteen seasons. It had a coffee stain shaped like Florida on the left sleeve. When he walked into the field house on a Friday night, the look he was going for was “man who has somewhere to be.” Nobody filmed it. Nobody needed to. The look told you everything.

I called Ray Kowalczyk during the second commercial because I needed a witness. Ray was a defensive coordinator at three different junior colleges and once chewed me out for ordering a salad at a steakhouse. I told him about Tunnel Time and the cardigan and the bag, and Ray said, “Duke, you’re making this up.” I sent him a screenshot. He called me back forty seconds later and said one word that I cannot print and then hung up.

The thing they don’t understand — the producers, the brand consultants, the twenty-six-year-old social media manager whose job title is “vibe architect” — is that the uniform used to start at the locker. Coat and tie if your coach was old-school. A clean polo if he wasn’t. You were going to work. Now they’re walking the red carpet to work, and the work is getting sacked four times by a defensive end from Mississippi who, I will note, did not have a tunnel segment.

Petey Corrigan played fullback for the team my father coached in 1973. Petey wore the same Carhartt jacket to every game for fourteen seasons, including the three he played for money in Canada. When the jacket finally fell apart his wife sewed a new lining into it and he wore it nine more years. Petey would have looked at a $4,200 cardigan and asked who died. Then he would have asked if the funeral was catered.

The QB, by the way, threw for 142 yards. Sacked four times, two interceptions, fumbled once on a sneak. The cardigan trended on three platforms. The hashtag is still going. There is a TikTok where a man my grandson’s age explains the “silhouette” of the outfit and uses the word “silhouette” eleven times in ninety seconds. I counted because I had nothing else to do during the actual football game, which the network kept cutting away from to show a graphic of which player wore which designer.

I’m not saying men can’t dress nice. Tom Landry wore a fedora. Madden wore whatever fell off the truck and looked great doing it. What I’m saying is that we used to celebrate the thing the man did on the field, and now we celebrate the thing the man wore to the field, and somewhere in that swap we agreed that the sweater is the story. The sweater is not the story. The man got sacked four times. That’s the story. We’re just dressing it up better.

Anyway, Ray’s coming over for the late game. He’s bringing the good chips. Denise is making chili. She says the recipe’s from a podcast.

Trump Marks UN’s 80th Birthday by Telling It to Drop Dead

Nash Grayson
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Trump Marks UN’s 80th Birthday by Telling It to Drop Dead

NEW YORK, NY — Standing before delegates from 193 nations gathered to mark the United Nations’ 80th anniversary, President Donald Trump on Saturday delivered what aides described as a “warm tribute” and what the rest of the building described as a 47-minute argument for the institution’s immediate dissolution.

The President opened with a brief acknowledgment that the UN had existed, paused for applause that did not arrive, and then pivoted to a detailed accounting of every war the organization had failed to prevent, every check the United States had written, and every escalator inside the building that had personally inconvenienced him in 2018.

“They do nothing. They do absolutely nothing. They write letters. Strongly worded letters,” Trump told the General Assembly, gesturing at a room full of people who had, as a condition of attendance, written strongly worded letters. “Frankly, I could fix every problem in this room in about twenty minutes, and that includes the air conditioning, which is terrible.”

Marcus Vellan, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Heartland Project who studies multilateral institutions, said the speech represented a notable shift in tone from previous addresses. “In 2017 he merely threatened to destroy a member state from the podium. Saturday he threatened to destroy the podium. That’s growth, in a sense.”

The President’s remarks escalated steadily across the hour, moving from grievances about UN peacekeeping to grievances about the UN gift shop, before arriving at what observers called the speech’s emotional core: an extended riff on how the building’s lobby “smells like a hospital, and not a good one.” At one point Trump appeared to suggest the General Assembly relocate to Mar-a-Lago, where, he noted, “the food is excellent and we don’t allow Iran.”

Delegates reportedly responded with the polite applause reserved for moments when a head of state has finished talking and there is no clear alternative. The Norwegian ambassador was photographed mid-blink in a manner several outlets described as diplomatically devastating. France’s representative, asked for comment, gestured at the ceiling and walked away.

White House staff afterward circulated talking points framing the address as “a love letter to global cooperation,” a characterization that survived contact with the actual transcript for approximately eleven minutes. By Saturday evening, official messaging had downshifted to “a frank conversation among friends,” then to “a speech,” and finally to “a series of statements made in chronological order.”

The President closed with what aides confirmed was an unscripted addition: a suggestion that the UN building, which he reminded the room he had once tried to win the contract to renovate, be converted into “luxury condos, beautiful condos, the best.” He noted the views were excellent and the current tenants “weren’t really using it for anything.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, seated behind the President throughout, maintained an expression that members of his staff later described as “the face you make when your smoke detector starts chirping during a funeral.” He has not yet responded to the speech, citing a prior commitment to do literally anything else.

The 80th General Assembly continues through next week, with the United States delegation scheduled to participate in roughly none of it.

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