The baseball game was on a streaming service. When I muted the sound to read, closed captioning came on. I assume that the captions were not entirely accurate, or the commentary was unusual. One time when I looked up from my book, I found out that the Yankees were playing the “Baltimore Oreos” and another time a player struck out with a “swing animist.

The main point to watching the Yankees right now is Aaron Judge. Each time he comes to bat, I wonder what his birth mother is thinking.

I don’t know the couple, but from public presentations they look happy. There are pictures of them looking tenderly and smiling at each other and laughing together. No one seems to doubt their marital devotion, and perhaps more wives could learn from this marriage. Wives should never, ever, ever burden their husbands with the stuff that is truly important to them. Keep it to yourself and don’t share. And husbands—and I suspect this will be easier for many of us—should never, ever pry into what our wives consider important. Apparently, this has worked for Ginni and Clarence Thomas.

Whenever there is an evacuation order because of a predicted natural disaster, some people don’t leave. Who are they? Are they just a random collection of the affected people? Or do they tend to share certain demographic characteristics? If so, what are they? And is more effort and money spent helping these people on average after the event compared to those who evacuated? Do we ever try to collect that difference from them?

Hurricane Ian should produce self-reflection, but I doubt Ron DeSantis does much of that. He has been quite strong in stating that the current federal administration from the President on down comprise incompetent socialists. Even so, the man came hat in hand–close to groveling–asking for federal assistance for Florida. He was met with words of graciousness: This is America, and this is what Americans do: help each other. Did DeSantis blush? I didn’t see it, did you? He should have. A decade ago when new to Congress he voted against aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy. He had “principled reasons,” which few ever thought were sincere. It was a political stunt to appeal to supporters who were happy to stick it to the liberal Northeast. Those “principled reasons” are not mentioned by DeSantis now as he begs for federal aid. The virtue of DeSantis is flexible, as flexible as . . . . What simile do you have? I’ll try one. His virtue is as flexible as that of Brett Favre’s.

Brett Favre might have been the poster child for the Mississippi scandal, but clearly there is corruption there that goes beyond one ex-football player. Case in point is the shocking water problem in Jackson, which gets reported as a problem separate from the use of welfare money for volleyball courts. But they are both examples of the same broken system that is Mississippi. There are reasons why it is so poor. I have a car old enough to have an outmoded sound system with a CD player. My collection of discs has been sitting untouched on shelves for years, and I thought I would listen to them again while driving. I grabbed four or five, and by happenstance found myself listening to Nina Simone singing her famous song from years ago, Mississippi goddam. I recommend it.

I was told this was a state motto of Alabama: Thank God for Mississippi.

Brett Favre has said that he thought that he had suffered three concussions in his pro football career, which ended in 2010. He counted three because he had been knocked unconscious three times. (Gosh. How many times have you been rendered unconscious by your work?) Since then, he has learned more about concussions, and has realized that every time he saw stars or heard ringing in his ears, he probably had a concussion. By those standards, he had “thousands” of concussions. He has talked, quite touchingly, about not remembering part of the childhood of his oldest daughter and that he does not remember at all her playing soccer. (Hence his eagerness to build a volleyball court in her honor?) Perhaps these are extenuating circumstances for Favre (well, no, they’re not), but I doubt that Ron DeSantis has similar extenuating circumstances for his flexible virtues. Instead, he is like a pocket left after floodwaters recede, scum.