Day: June 16, 2025

Here’s Paul McCartney’s son, James McCartney. The 47-year-old James is a serious musician (but man, what a generational burden) as well as a vegetarian; his mom is the late Linda McCartney. Hail fellow well met.

Dennis Hopper took this famous photo, titled “Standard Standard”, sometime in the early 1960s. He was driving south on Doheny Blvd. and making a left turn onto Santa Monica Blvd just before the Melrose Blvd. right-leaning juncture.

Look at this photo — it’s nothing. I know, that’s the point — flatness, gas station, billboards, parked cars, and those stark, scarecrow-like telephone poles and streetlamps — but there’s “nothing, really nothing to turn on”…nothing to contemplate or meditate upon except the general blandness of West Hollywood before it turned gay.

Okay, the large, bulky phantom car in the rearview mirror adds a certain intrigue. Peter Sellers’ Clare Quilty could be behind the wheel.

Posthumously cancel Van Johnson (who stood 6’2″ in his prime) for hanging with Roman Polanski? Joan Crawford is already a villainous figure. Mia Farrow has been a steadfast Polanski friend all along.

Even AI bullshit should have higher standards than this.

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According to a 6.16 Variety aricle by Abigail Lee, Dakota Johnson‘s matchmaker character in Materialists — Lucy — pays $3,200 per month for her apartment in Brooklyn Heights (technically a region between Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill).

Lucy’s annual salary is $80K, which works out to $6153 monthly and $1538 weekly before taxes. Subtract her rent from her pre-tax monthly gross and she’s left with $2953 monthly or $738 weekly to cover everything else — food, utilities, MTA card, savings, clothing, entertainment (dinners, movies, clubs). God knows what her income is after taxes. But to live like a human being, Lucy would have to earn an annual salary of $125K, no?

I went last Friday to an ear doctor and discovered that my left ear canal and especially the left ear drum were totally jammed. I was told to go home and squeeze several drops of Debrox into this afflicted ear two or three times on Saturday and Sunday. Which I did.

I returned to the doctor’s office this morning and an assistant whirred and vacuumed me out with warm water, and guess what? Both ears are now totally clean and semi-purified, and now my hearing is better…really.

What I mean is that I can now hear as well as I did 20 or 25 years ago, or maybe even 30. My hearing isn’t as good as my granddaughter’s, but I feel renewed regardless.

And if I can’t quite hear what you just said in the midst of a loud clattery party, it’s your fault because you’re slurring your words and/or failing to speak with the diction of a RADA-trained Shakespearean actor. Learn to project and enunciate like Ian McKellen (whom I’ve hung with on a couple of social occasions so don’t tell me) and we’ll both be better off.

…but it’s still funny regardless. Especially the “Jesus, I really need to take a dump” sequence.

What the hell happened to Paul Walter Hauser? He used to be much, much fatter.

What Dustin Hoffman achieves in this second-act portion of Kramer vs. Kramer would never, ever happen, but it’s fun to ride with it regardless.

The best part is the contrast between Hoffman’s anxious isolation as he waits for a decision amid all the boozy pre-holiday gaiety.