How the Michigan election for Senator turns out might well determine which party controls the U.S. Senate for the next two years. The Democrat primary election was highly contested between U.S. Representative Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, which El-Sayed won by a margin of only one percent. Polls indicate that the general election between El-Seyad and Mike Rogers might be equally close.

After saying for months that she would support El-Sayed, on Sunday, Stevens formally endorsed Republican candidate Mike Rogers, apparently because she was excluded from a campaign event.

Let me get this straight. Because of a slight (whether real or perceived), this Democratic Congresswoman is willing to try to torpedo a Democratic chance to change control of the U.S. Senate. Apparently, now that she’ll be out of a job in January, she doesn’t care about her party any more.

Just for comparison, here are the biographies of the two, compiled from available public sources.

El-Sayed was born of Egyptian parents in Rochester Hills, a Detroit suburb, captained his high school’s wrestling, football, and lacrosse teams, then continued to play club lacrosse at the University of Michigan, where he majored in biology and political science. He went on to study medicine at Michigan, Oxford University (as a Rhodes Scholar), and Columbia University, where he received his M.D. He then pursued a career in public health epidemiology as a tenure-track professor and later led the Detroit health department. In 2018, El-Sayed resigned as Detroit’s health director to run for governor but lost the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer. After serving as Wayne County health director, he decided to run for the Senate seat in 2026.

Haley Stevens was born in Rochester Hills, Michigan, and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from American University. Before taking office as a member of Congress in 2018, Stevens worked for the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute in Chicago. Prior to that, she worked in the Obama administration as chief of staff for the short-lived Auto Task Force inside of the U.S. Department of Treasury. She was involved for a short time in setting up the Office of Recovery for Automotive Communities and Workers and the White House Office of Manufacturing Policy.

Expressing pique is one thing, but trying to sabotage your own party out of pique is quite another, at least from my perspective.

Every communications pathway I’m likely to use, for whatever purpose, is filled with beggars.

My emails are besieged with political and charitable appeals for funds, both with direct appeals, i.e., just give us money; guilt-trips, i.e., if you don’t give us funding the children will die, or the other evil political party or candidate will triumph and the Republic will fall; or apparent appeals to my better nature, i.e., do the right thing (and give us money).

My snail mail is filled with the same, although the charitable solicitations there vastly outnumber the political ones.

And now, of course, every form of electronic entertainment or news is largely dominated by political solicitations, although the charitable beggars aren’t all that far behind.

This entire array of electronic commercial solicitations is largely and ostensibly aimed at making my life safer or somehow better, whether with high end “natural” food for my canines (with the implication that anyone who doesn’t buy it is depriving their dog); car repair insurance (asking whether I want to pay for unexpected vehicle damage or failure or have the insurance pay for it, ignoring the obvious fact that I’d be paying for repairs one way or the other); insurance buy-out scams; endless appeals for various forms of alcoholic beverages; and suggestions for medical products of one type or another (accompanied by a list of side effects that sound worse than the disease or condition the medical product purports to alleviate).

Then, assorted publications (and these are ones to which I subscribe) offer me the chance to provide, free of charge, the gift of a one-year subscription to someone else, thereby having me do some free marketing for them.

All this makes me feel like a curmudgeon, of the type portrayed in the “The Merry Minuet” song by the Kingston Trio some 70 years ago, where a stanza ends up “and I don’t like anyone very much…”

The other day I ran across a review of Last of the First that called it “boring,” which is certainly unrepresentative of readers, given that 70% of Goodreads’ readers gave it five stars and another 23% gave it four stars.

The reader/reviewer who called the book “boring’ clearly didn’t like the book, and the rest of the review explained why – in essence, the book was “boring” because it wasn’t action-packed. I’ve known for years that my books generally don’t appeal to readers who want action in every chapter, and preferably on most pages.

And there’s nothing wrong with readers who prefer non-stop action.

But those comments got me to thinking about how prevalent the word “boring” has become in our society.

The dictionary definition of boring is: dull, tedious, or uninteresting to the point of causing mental weariness, and there are certainly “boring” forms of artistic expression, but the implication of the definition is that, for something to be boring, it’s boring to most people. Instead, today, from what I see and hear, “boring” has become a generic personal and dismissive excuse for not appreciating or liking anything.

It’s so much easier to dismiss something as boring, rather than saying it doesn’t appeal, or because it deals with unfamiliar matter or concepts, or because it requires reading in depth, or for a number of other reasons. You could even say it’s not your kind of book. Instead, too many readers just say it’s boring.

I could say I find most romantasy boring, which might actually be a compliment, given that in my limited reading of romantasy novels (all best-selling and favorably reviewed books) I found the graphic sexual descriptions both overblown and largely superfluous to the actual plots, and possibly because, as I’ve often said, no one can write sex as well as those who’ve experienced good sex have felt it, and for those who haven’t had that experience, anything written describing sex will be highly misleading.

Yet, for me to call romantasy “boring” would be misleading. From the sales figures alone, romantasy can’t possibly be boring to its readers.

So…for the readers who will likely never read this blog, I’d say that boredom is a lazy excuse, and we already have too many lazy excuses.

The title of this blog is also the title of a 1967 film, starring Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, and Katharine Houghton. The film, which garnered ten Oscar nominations and two Oscar wins, depicts a dinner party at which a white young woman introduces her would-be black fiancé to her parents over a dinner at her parents’ house.

While the film was definitely ground-breaking when it was made and released, times have changed, and, while cross-cultural marriages are far more common and legally accepted (which they were not in 17 states when the film was released), one other aspect of American life has changed even more than that – the very idea of having friends and/or acquaintances over to dinner.

Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month, but then Americans stopped, or slowed, having parties. From 1975 to 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half, down to sixteen percent of families, and the number saying they never entertained people at home tripled. Since 1998, the giving or attending a dinner at someone else’s house has dropped by another twenty percent.

My wife and I have experienced this trend personally. When we first moved to Cedar City, even as comparative newcomers, we were invited to dinner parties, and we had quite a number of parties for others. Over time, that’s changed.

We still give dinner parties for friends, but we’ve noticed that only two other couples that we know regularly host such parties, and we’ve gotten the impression that some people we’ve invited have politely declined. Some gentle investigation has revealed that it’s not just us they’re declining, but that they also aren’t giving dinner parties for anyone.

So, it wasn’t exactly a surprise to read in a recent issue of The Atlantic that this trend is nationwide, and the number of those families/individuals who host dinner parties is continuing to decrease, as are other forms of interpersonal socializing.

Perhaps it’s that throwing a dinner party takes forethought, planning, preparation, and effort, and expense, and most Americans are overscheduled. Or perhaps, as a society, dinner parties are now outdated or passe, but whatever the reason… as a society we could use more dinner parties and less politics.

Congress may well consider and possibly pass legislation making Daylight Savings Time the “standard” time for the United States — again.

Too many people have forgotten (or never knew) that the US has tried year-around DST twice before, once during WW II and again in 1974. And each time, once was enough. Now, it appears that another generation will try again.

The problem here isn’t Daylight Savings Time or Standard Time, but Americans looking for the perfect single answer. The current compromise actually works better than either DST or ST being mandated year around.

With year-round DST school children in much of the nation would be going to school in the dark, as well as a greater number of workers heading to their jobs.

This tendency to seek the single perfect answer goes far beyond the question of DST or ST. It crops up in many places, if you just look. Education is infamous for seeking the “single perfect answer,” by insisting that children either be taught to read through either the phonics or “whole language” approach. Studies have shown that phonics is better for most, but far from all children, but that controversy still simmers… along with quite few other “single” mandated policies and procedures.

Abortion is another issue we continue to fight over what law should be the single “right” legal way to govern abortion, a fight that was rekindled by the Supreme Court’s rejection of Roe v. Wade (which represented what seemed to be an acceptable compromise).

So… will Congress force year-round DST to avoid the twice-yearly (and comparatively minor) discomfort of changing clocks and send millions of school children out in the dark in a vain effort to find another single perfect answer?