+
“A balm for the soul”
  review on Goodreads
GOOD PEOPLE Book
upworthy

michigan

A size 21 Nike shoe made for Tacko Fall.

A local reporter at Hometown Life shared a unique and heartfelt story on March 16 about a mother struggling to find shoes that fit her 14-year-old son. The story resonated with parents everywhere; now, her son is getting the help he desperately needs. It's a wonderful example of people helping a family that thought they had nowhere to turn.

When Eric Kilburn Jr. was born, his mother, Rebecca’s OBGYN, told her that he had the “biggest feet I’ve ever seen in my life. Do not go out and buy baby shoes because they’re not gonna fit,’” Rebecca told Today.com. Fourteen years later, it’s almost impossible to find shoes that fit the 6’10” freshman—he needs a size 23.


The teen's height doesn't stem from a gland issue; he comes from a family of tall people. Both his parents are over 6 feet tall.

Eric plays football for Goodrich High School in Goodrich, Michigan, but doesn’t wear cleats, which led to a sprained ankle. He also suffers from ingrown toenails that are so severe he’s had two nails on his biggest toes permanently removed.

Last year, the family was lucky enough to stumble upon five pairs of size 21 shoes at a Nike outlet store. It was discovered they were made especially for Tacko Fall, the NBA player with some of the most enormous feet in the game. To put things in perspective, Shaquille O’Neal wears a size 22.

However, Eric soon grew out of those as well. The family was left with one more option: have orthopedic shoes made for Eric at the cost of $1,500 with no guarantee he won’t quickly grow out of those as well.

After his mother’s heartfelt plea to Hometown Life, the family got much-needed help from multiple companies, including Under Armour and PUMA, who are sending representatives to Michigan to measure his feet for custom shoes.

CAT has reached out to make him a custom pair of boots. Eric hasn't had any boots to wear for the past five Michigan winters.

Kara Pattison started a GoFundMe campaign on behalf of the family to help them purchase custom shoes for “the rest of the time Eric has these feet.” It has raised nearly $20,000 for the family in just over a week.

“The success of this fundraiser is well beyond what was ever expected,” Pattison wrote on the site on March 18. “The Kilburns plan to open a bank account dedicated to Eric's future footwear and some specialized sports equipment. He can use this to get a helmet that fits for football along with pads. They will also look into a football and track jersey for him.”

The sense of relief felt by Rebecca, Eric and the rest of the Kilburn family must be incredible. It has to be frustrating to be unable to provide your child with something as basic as footwear.

“It’s been overwhelming,” Rebecca told Hometown Life. “I have been this puddle of emotions, all of them good…It’s the coolest thing to be able to say we did it! He has shoes! I am not usually a crier, but I have been in a constant state of happy tears…We are so grateful.”


This article originally appeared on 03.23.23

Jinx the cat got to spend a day as the mayor of Hell, Michigan.

Every cat believes they are the ruler of all they survey, but only one special cat can genuinely brag about being the mayor of Hell.

That's not a joke. A quirky black cat named Jinx was sworn in as mayor of Hell, Michigan on April 24, and she held the title until she was impeached that evening.

Hell, Michigan, is an unincorporated community approximately 60 miles from Detroit, and the 72 (ish) citizens of the town have a sense of humor to match the name. The town's official website—gotohellmi.com—has a form where anyone can sign up to rule Hell by becoming the town's temporary mayor. Literally anyone—even a cat.

Jinx is a black cat with unusually large eyes, funky feet and a huge following on TikTok and Instagram. She doesn't live anywhere near Hell (unless you consider California to be hell) but her owner Mia decided to make her mayor of Hell for a day anyway.

I mean, how could you not make this cat mayor of something?

@bigfootjinx

no thoughts, just violence and vibes. #bigfootjinx #cats #catsoftiktok #meme

Jinx is the first animal to be named mayor of Hell, much to the delight of the town's minister, Reverend Vonn, who was slated to swear the feline in over the phone.

“We love our in-person and distant mayors,” Reverend Vonn of Hell told MLive. “Our Mayor of the Day package is the perfect gift for those who are hard to buy for and/or have everything. They get to have one Helluva fun day and at the end of it, will receive the dreaded phone call to be impeached.”

Mia found Jinx in her backyard when she was just about three weeks old.

“She had big eyes and as she grew bigger, her eyes didn’t get smaller and I also noticed she had big feet," Mia told MLive. "She doesn’t have a condition and the vet says she’s healthy. She just has these birth defects. She’s also not as agile as most cats and is a little clumsy. She only learned how to land on her feet a year ago.”

Mia also explained how Jinx got to be mayor of Hell:

“I made a joke on Twitter saying, imagine Jinx will run for President. I had also seen animal mayors before and I sent a Tweet out asking how to make Jinx mayor and someone mentioned Michigan and that you could pay to be mayor of Hell for a day.”

It costs $100 to become mayor. Check out the Instagram announcement of Jinx's day-long mayorship.

Not only do Hell mayors get to say they ruled over Hell for a day, they also get to own 1 square inch of the town.

Hell is an interesting place that embraces its quirkiness and kitschiness. It has a mayor already, sort of. Since it's an unincorporated community it doesn't have an official mayoral title, but long-time resident John Colone is the self-proclaimed mayor of Hell, because why not?

He explained to "60 Second Docs" what makes Hell a special place.

Congratulations, Jinx, on the swearing-in—and sorry about the impeachment. Politics moves fast these days, especially in Hell.

On Tuesday night, the Wayne County, Michigan Board of Canvassers gave half the country a minor heart attack when it appeared that the four board members were deadlocked on certifying the vote count. Wayne County is home to Detroit, the largest city in the state and the city with the highest percentage of Black voters in the country. Delaying the certification for a county that handed Biden tens of thousands of votes over Trump would disrupt the entire electoral process—which is exactly what Trump is trying to do.

The Board of Canvassers, who are in charge of certifying the vote count for the county, was split 2-2 along party lines (such a shocker) with the Democrats for and the Republicans against certifying the vote count right up until the final hours before the deadline. The two Republican members, after hearing passionate commentary from the public, changed course and voted in the final hour to move forward with certification. The vote for Wayne County has officially been certified and sent to the secretary of state.

However, in another not-shocking development, however, both of the Republican board members have released signed documents saying that they wish to rescind their agreement to certify. This comes after GOP board member Monica Palmer received a phone call from President Trump.


According to the Washington Post, Palmer claims that the president called to ask her about her safety in the wake of alleged harassment she had received. Surely that's 100% why he was calling and not at all to try to convince her that she shouldn't have certified the vote count. Surely him talking about her safety was not any kind of a veiled mafioso-like threat—that would be as insane as insisting you won an election that you clearly lost and making up crazy global conspiracy theories in an attempt to cling to the power you so desperately crave. And surely he wasn't trying to pressure her into rescinding her vote—that would be as corrupt as attempting to delay the certifications in swing states, push the elector decisions to GOP-led legislatures, create a chaotic picture of widespread fraud, and get the Supreme Court to wipe out the election results and rule in your favor because you think picking three judges and having a conservative majority means that they will automatically crown you the victor.

The whole no-yes-no flip-flopping is a rather pathetic display of partisan ugliness and Trump sycophancy to any objective observer, but of course that's not how Palmer is portraying it. She insists that there was no pressure from the president—as if a phone call itself from the country's highest office who also happens to be a candidate in the race she's certifying isn't pressure in and of itself. When asked by the Washington Post if they discussed the certification in their two-minute phone call, Palmer said, "It's hard for me to describe. There was a lot of adrenaline and stress going on. There were general comments about different states but we really didn't discuss the details of the certification."

Not sure what "general comments about different states" means—why would the president call a Wayne County, Michigan canvassing board member and discuss states other than Michigan? It's all totally moot anyway—legally the vote has been certified and rescinding on paper doesn't change that—but trying to make any of it makes sense is enough to make you batty.

But making us batty is probably the point. Trump appears to be taking Steve Bannon's "flood the zone with sh*t" approach to the media, but also applying it to our electoral process. It doesn't matter if he's 1–29 in post-election court cases. It doesn't matter if the legal team keeps getting replaced with kookier and kookier players. It doesn't matter if every statement the president has made since the election is a bold-faced lie or a repeat of fringe right-wing media conspiracy theories. The chaos and confusion are the point. If you create an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, paint a picture so outrageous and so evil that it seems like there's no way someone would make something like that up, keep engendering distrust in actual journalism that serves as a check on those in power, and you can almost make a case for just tossing the whole election out due to the chaos you yourself created.

Of course, this damages the U.S. in immeasurable ways, but who cares about the damage done to the country as long as Trump's narcissistic needs are met? That's where we are. And far too many Republicans are going along with the madness, naively waiting for a president who is incapable of admitting defeat to finally admit defeat, and foolishly ignoring the monster their coddling of his ego is creating in the body politic in the meantime.

Wayne county's flip-flopping is just one of many more nutty things we can expect to see in the coming weeks as certification deadlines loom. Trump is not going to miraculously concede the election, ever, and he will pull as many people along on his power trip as he can. Let's just hope the country's foundation can hold out long enough for the will of the people to prevail as it should and for sanity to return to the Oval Office.

In a now-deleted tweet, President Trump engaged in one of his favorite pastimes on Wednesday—accusing another elected official of committing a crime on Twitter.

This time, the object of his accusation was Michigan's "rogue" Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson. The crime? Trump accused her of "illegally and without authorization" sending absentee ballots to 7.7 million people in her state. He threatened to withhold funding to Michigan saying, "If they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!" (Ahem, is "voter fraud" a proper noun, sir?)

Benson responded to Trump's tweet in the best way possible—she fired back with facts and a reminder of her name.


"Hi!" she wrote, with a wave emoji. "I also have a name, it's Jocelyn Benson. And we sent applications, not ballots. Just like my GOP colleagues in Iowa, Georgia, Nebraska and West Virginia."

Jocelyn Benson/Twitter

The president was roundly called out for being so inaccurate. Trump partially corrected his previous tweet two-and-a-half hours later, only adding the word "applications," but but still falsely claiming the mail-in voting broke the law.

The president seems hell bent on making people believe that mail-in voting is "ripe for fraud" and that making it easier for people to vote by mail is somehow beneficial for Democrats. Let's not forget he voted by mail in Florida in March. Or that Washington and Oregon, who have had all-mail-in voting for years, both have Republican Secretaries of State overseeing their elections. Voter fraud, despite claims to the contrary, is a statistically insignificant occurrence—and a bipartisan one at that.

Benson, again, responded with the facts. And again, she reminded him that she has a name.

"Hi again," she wrote. "Still wrong. Every Michigan registered voter has a right to vote by mail. I have the authority & responsibility to make sure that they know how to exercise this right - just like my GOP colleagues are doing in GA, IA, NE and WV. Also, again, my name is Jocelyn Benson."

Benson insisting that President Trump call her by her name may seem like a small thing, but it's not. In fact, it might be the most powerful part about her responses. The president has a habit of not referring to women he doesn't like by name, instead making up childish nicknames for them or simply omitting their name altogether. It's a power play of sorts—one that Benson expertly diffuses in her tweets to him.

As political historian Heather Cox Richardson pointed out on Facebook:

"From Moby Dick's famous beginning 'Call me Ishmael' to the fear in the Harry Potter books of calling the evil Voldemort by name, invoking someone's name makes them a power to be reckoned with. In this case, a woman doing her job, insisting on reality that interrupts Trump's narrative, repeatedly demands that he use her name.

It's a powerful moment. At a time when senators and government officials appear to have ceded their power to Trump, it is ordinary Americans like Jocelyn Benson, ordinary women like Jocelyn Benson, who are standing up to him. 'Hi!' she wrote. 'I also have a name.'

Indeed she does. That's exactly what the president is afraid of."

Strong, smart and self-respecting women who don't peddle "alternative facts" are Trump's kryptonite. He doesn't know what to do with them, other than attack them with false claims and nicknames. In the space of two tweets, Jocelyn Benson managed to not only correct the president's falsehoods, but also show that she's not going to let him play that game. It's ridiculously unfortunate that government officials have to battle lies from the president on Twitter, but since that's how he's chosen to communicate, that's where it has to happen.

Of course, Benson's office also issued official statements on the matter, because despite appearances, governance is not actually done over Twitter. The Department of State wrote:

"President Donald Trump's statement is false. The Bureau of Elections is mailing absent voter applications, not ballots. Applications are mailed nearly every election cycle by both major parties and countless advocacy and nonpartisan organizations. Just like them, we have full authority to mail applications to ensure voters know they have the right to vote safely by mail."

We need to see women standing calmly and confidently in the storm, providing factual, low-key fierce rebuttals to the blatantly false accusations that keep flying from the president's fingertips.