After six years of absolute loyalty, I’m ready to bail on the iPhone. I quite like the size, luminosity and reported speed of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3, and am figuring Samsung is on the stick better than Apple these days. I almost jumped earlier this month but I don’t want to leave behind those familiar iPhone apps. But Apple has become a caretaker company — it’s no longer the place it was under Steve Jobs — and I want a phablet, dammit. I’ve read that the iPhone 6, due either next May or or sometime during the summer (or perhaps next fall), will be “jumbo” or close to Galaxy 3-sized. But I’ve also read the following: “Apple puts a ton of effort into keeping its devices pocketable and usable with one hand, [and so] the overall size of the iPhone 6 is likely going to be much smaller than the Galaxy Note 3. It may feature a larger screen than the iPhone 6 but we expect Apple to thin out the bezels and keep the size change to a minimum.” There’s also a report from BGR that the iPhone 6 will be bigger “but not as big as…Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3.” If the iPhone 6 re-design seems too small or cautious, I’m gone. I’m sick of Apple’s timidity.

Toward the end of the 1986 Academy Award telecast Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley were handed the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for co-authoring Witness, the 1985 Peter Weir film starring Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis. When he got to the mike, Wallace said “I have a sneaking suspicion that my career just peaked.” 25 years later Colin Firth said almost exactly same thing when he picked up his Best Actor Oscar for The King’s Speech. And here’s The Wolf of Wall Street‘s Jonah Hill saying roughly the same thing about a week ago. Wallace, it turned out, was speaking the truth. Perhaps Firth was also — who knows? But Hill, 30, has loads of great work ahead of him. He’s just beginning so the egg noodles and ketchup remark (an allusion to the diminished quality of life that Ray Liotta‘s Henry Hill is coping with at the end of Goodfellas) doesn’t wash.

Four days ago the L.A. Times opinion page posted a short recollection piece by novelist and former L.A. cop Joseph Wambaugh. It’s about Peter O’Toole and Lenny Bruce getting pulled over by the fuzz a half-century ago after attending an illegal after-hours club that offered drugs and prostitute services. A petty, nickel-and-dime bust by today’s standards but this was 1962, when the country was still vaguely in the grip of prudish Eisenhower-era values. O’Toole was in town to do interviews for the then-upcoming Lawrence of Arabia, which no one had yet seen. Anyway it’s a good story. I love the idea of Bruce and O’Toole enjoying a late-night drink and a toke together and basically being up to no good. My kind of rambunctious company, even though both were known to be judgmental pricks on occasion. (Thanks to Todd McCarthy for the link.)

(l. Peter O’Toole; (r.) Lenny Bruce.

This new Miley Cyrus video is a profoundly flat experience. That whitewall pixie haircut obviously makes her look boyish and asexual. Okay, a bit dykey. But the main problem is her constant eyeballing of the lens, which for me is an instant death zap. Eye contact is basically a straightforward “hello, I’m open, come on in and we’ll see what happens.” But the essence of erotic intrigue is about wanting but not quite having that front-door access. Intimacy and eroticism is about hair aroma, sounds, secretions, close proximity, body warmth, touch, etc. It’s about being in a cave. You’re not trying to reach me with eye contact. We’re not addressing each other. I’m not there, you’re not there. Eye contact is for one-on-one chats at Starbucks or in a bar or in a kitchen. Or for job interviews. 99% of the time standard fourth-wall rules forbade the great exotic actresses of the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s to make eye-contact with movie cameras. This discipline resulted in a “restricted access” vibe that is/was 15 times hotter than anything in this video.

It suddenly hit me five minutes ago that director-writers Joel and Ethan Coen (Inside Llewyn Davis, A Serious Man, No Country For Old Men) need to go a little dumber and sillier for their next film. They obviously do this from time to time (Burn After Reading, Intolerable Cruelty, The Big Lebowski). I happen to regard Inside Llewyn Davis as a kind of glum, sardonic comedy. Every time I watch it (five times now) I go into a kind of serene LQTM mode. I’m just thinking that after the grayish, downhearted, “God more or less hates me and my life is constantly frustrating and depressing” vibes in ILD and A Serious Man (True Grit was more of an adaptation vacation than a deep-down Coen Brothers film) that they need to joke it up a bit more on their next outing. They probably know this better than I. A little change-up for the fans. Can’t hurt.