There can be no all-inclusive, across-the-board assessment of the attractiveness (or lack thereof) of human beings. If you insist on a general answer, the only optimistic verdict I can think of is “attractive with serious bugs.” Life has taught me that only about 10% to 15% of humans are genuinely attractive in terms of looks, intelligence, good energy, kindness, open-heartedness, inventiveness. Most people are slightly lacking (some more than slightly) in various ways, especially among the less affluent and less well-educated — the Trumpian dregs of society.

Hotshot criminal defense attorney F. Lee Bailey was one of the original high-profilers. Always or at least often with the headlines — Dr. Sam Shepard, Albert DeSalvo, Patty Hearst, Cpt. Ernest Medina, O.J. Simpson. I couldn’t think of much to say except boilerplate stuff when Bailey passed two days ago at age 87, but Marshall Fine knew him and wanted to make a doc about his career.

Wiki excerpt: “For most of his career Bailey was licensed in Florida and in Massachusetts, where he was disbarred in 2001 and 2003 respectively, for misconduct while defending marijuana dealer Claude Louis DuBoc. Following his disbarment, he moved to Maine, where he ran a consulting firm. He later sat for the bar exam in the state of Maine, though in 2013 he was denied a law license by the Maine Board of Bar Examiners, a decision upheld by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in 2014.”

An ivy-league college education is a hustle masked as a reasonable trade-off. Put yourself into a six-figure debt situation that will take a good 20 or 25 years to pay off, and in return you’ll get…well, not that much when you get right down to it. College is worthless unless you embrace the discipline of constant education and curiosity into your day-to-day life. If you’ve ever been to a high-school or college reunion you know, of course, that most college grads are smug and incurious. People enslave themselves to college debt in order to feel less socially insecure, more confident. College is generally regarded as a stepping stone to better job opportunities and financial comfort, etc. But does anyone know any GenXers, Millennials or Zoomers who are genuinely, wholeheartedly glad that they owe all that dough, and are certain it was worth it?

“Never confuse eduction with intelligence — you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.” — Richard P. Feynman

The basic drill in the two Quiet Place films is that making the slightest sound can lead to terrible death. Because the idiotic, fang-toothed, gaping-cranial-plate crab monsters, constantly on the prowl for humans (not to eat but merely to kill), have highly attuned hearing, and all you have to do is drop a pair of scissors on the floor to put yourself in harm’s way. And so your entire life is about “shishhhhh” — be careful, step lightly, quiet as a mouse.

This is my life, in a sense, every night in West Hollywood.

After 10 pm or thereabouts I go into Quiet Place mode for fear of rousing a certain light sleeper in a nearby bedroom. The slightest jarring sound will result in a hellish response. The crack of a triple-A battery falling off the coffee table and onto the wood floor…the accidental clinking of a glass or the rattle of cutlery in the kitchen or the unwrapping of a loaf of bread…even the creaking of the floorboards in certain areas of the living room will lead to terrible repercussions. The punishment can happen straight off or sometimes the next morning, when your failure to maintain absolute radio silence the night before will be topic #1.

Due to no fault of their own light sleepers are unable to recover once woken up, you see, and their mood the following day, trust me, is inevitably sour and sullen. Light sleepers float on the surface of the pond, and woe betide anyone who rouses them from fragile slumber.

Deep sleepers like myself sink to the bottom of the pond, and are generally oblivious to odd glass-clinking or battery-dropping sounds. I can sleep anywhere, in almost environment. I can lie down on the floor of a carpeted airport lounge and nod off in less than two or three minutes.

There’s a fairly close resemblance between the pit bull below and the one who sank his teeth into my upper thigh yesterday. Except yesterday’s beast looked like a junkyard dog (light gray coat, satanic eyes, scattered white spots, no choker). Uglier and muttier. The bite wasn’t initially accompanied by barking or growling so for a split second I was asking myself what that odd, piercing sensation was. Then came that guttural sound from the gates of Hades. Dr. D, the physician who treated the wound last evening, said I was lucky in that some attacking pit bulls will bite into flesh and refuse to let go, like a snapping turtle. My pit bull just took a nip and let it go at that.

I was pedaling through central Caye Caulker around 8:45 am this morning, and somehow my iPhone, which was in the front basket, hopped or popped or flipped out of the basket…gone. I realized it was missing around ten or twelve minutes later. I did a “Find my iPhone” search on my laptop, and saw the green dot about four or five blocks north of where we were standing. Tatiana and I went to the local police and asked for help. Two female cops and I golf-carted up to The Split, and I checked “Find My iPhone” laptop again on the laptop. It reported that the thief had crossed the channel and was in the northern section of town.

We hired a motorboat guy to take us across the channel and went searching around…nothing. We talked to a couple of shifty-looking guys…zip. We tried the wifi at a club called Koko King, and “Find My iPhone” said it was still on this side of the channel, in some remote area. The cops asked this guy and that guy…nothing. We went back to the Koko King, and we met up with Tatiana, who had access to my “Find My iPhone” data and was sending messages to the thief and offering a cash reward. ($100 U.S. — too little?) The thief was reading her messages, she said, but wasn’t responding. Tatiana was positive that the location was the same — a brushy area off the main road.

I went back to the search area with the two cops, and then got out and started looking around. I talked to a couple of guys who said “man, this is bad, I feel your pain,” etc. I told them to please tell whomever that I would pay $200 (ransom is rising!) for the iPhone’s return — no questions asked. I went searching around in the nearby bush, and suddenly heard a growling sound and felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my upper thigh, right below the right butt cheek…bitten by a pit bull! Ahhggrhh! Now I need an antibiotic shot.

It’s now 11:20 am, the phone has been missing for two and a half hours, the dastardly thief is out there, the phone is out there…a mystery yet to be solved. “Find My iPhone” keeps changing its mind — one minute it says the iPhone is in the northern section, and then I refresh the page and it says the location is south of the Lazy Lizard. Update: “Find My iPhone” now says the phone is at the Belize Water Taxi pier. Developing…

4:55 update: Went to the local Caye Caulker medical clinic to get an antibiotic (rabies) shot — closed. What else? Try again tomorrow. Obviously the medical infrastructure on this island isn’t what it could be.

8:15 pm: I found a guy named Dr. D who administered to my dog-bitten upper thigh — cleaned wound, bandages, antibiotic shot, etc. He said I wasn’t wounded too badly — he’s seen much worse. I’m just glad the pit bull didn’t bite me in the family jewels.

HE has eaten anchovies (on pizza), German sauerkraut (different than American kind), steak tartare, raw fish, crabs, salt-water escargot, scallops, rabbit (lapin), blue cheese salad dressing, duck (too fatty), foie gras (yuck), and Pinks hot dogs with mustard, chili and onions.

No brains, no Rocky Mountain Oysters, no sardines, no chicken feet, frog legs or pigs ears…nothing too weird. And I hate tofu.

…I’d never heard of nurse sharks. This puts me in the same ignorance category as Cher when she claimed in ‘75 that she’d never heard of Gregg Allman when she first met him earlier that year.

Herewith the first images from Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Searchlight, 9.17). Jessica Chastain as the late Tammy Faye Bakker; Andrew Garfield as the still-living Jim Bakker. Yokel bumblefuck hypocrite hustlers of the lowest, slimiest and most shameless order. Only in rural America…