Jeff Wells

Olbermann vs. Tur (Again)…”You’ve Lost The Plot”

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A year and a half ago (December 2022) Keith Olbermann, whom I’ve always enjoyed and mostly agreed with, unfavorably described certain behaviors by ex-girlfriend Katy Tur. (They were “seeing” and mostly living together between 2006 and 2009.) Here’s a summary. I paid no attention then, but I’ve just listened to a 4.30.24 Olbermann podcast, the last third of which rehashes the Tur material.

The best policy when it comes to ex-lovers or ex-married mates is always to let it go. Shrug it off, try to be friends, try to be cool, turn over a new leaf. But this is fascinating. You don’t have to, of course, but you might want to begin listening at 33:15…

“It turned out that Kellyanne Conway was one of Katey’s sources. In fact, she might have been the main source for the networks and the big newspapers during the 2016 campaign and beyond. Apparently she cannot stop talking.

“But even so, Katy’s attitude towards [Conway] and against me was out of the blue and really offensive.

“Anyway, it passed, and maybe two months later I got a text from her at 9:14 pm on December 11, 2016. This is called having the receipts. Trump had won. Our nightmare had begun, and Katie had gotten a book deal about her experience. I’d been keeping a document in my laptop with hundreds of pages of Trump stories and links and commentaries that I used for the Resistance video series for GQ. It was my Trump doc, and given that Katy was writing that book. I’d offered to give her a copy of it so she had something chronological to use as research as she wrote her book because she hadn’t really been keeping notes — she’d just been trying not to get killed.

“I still have her text. It reads, ‘Do you still want to share your Trump doc with me?’ I joked back, ‘Sure, how much?’ And she joked back ’10, 20 dollars.’ And while we were texting, I emailed her the doc and I said, ‘No charge, but don’t forget my one demand — do not leave me out of your acknowledgments in your book.’

“More than a month later, at 2:35 pm on Sunday, 1.22, 2017. I was just back from LA and I had just done Bill Maher‘s show for the last time, and Katy Tur texted me about why they had never invited her to be on Bill Maher‘s show, and then she switched topics…’want to write this book?’ I wrote back at 5:32 pm…’What? You’re not serious? How would that work?’ That’s when she phoned. She was about to give the advance money back to the publisher. I can’t write a book. I’m like fifty thousand words short, and it’s terrible.”

“Late Blossoming Stockholm syndrome“?

Imagine A World

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…in which films about interesting female lead characters aren’t about female empowerment or revenge against male scumbags. Stories about women just hanging in there and holding their own as best they can…coping with tough or trying challenges and circumstances, and who suffer setbacks but then pivot and gain the upper hand…women who are adult, anxious, aggressive, capable, angry, defensive, morally conflicted, smart, determined, criminally inclined, scared, corrupted, more stable than unstable…women who have a steady, reasonable, non-fanatical sense of their own power and capabilities, and are (gasp!) straight like 95% of the women out there and aren’t caught up in political theatricality …women who just are what they are without the yoke of #MeToo mythology around their necks.

Adult women, in short, who behave like adult women in French films aimed at adults.

Enduring Infidelity Relationship Downer

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An 18-year-old Steve Wonder wrote this song? You coulda fooled me. I don’t associate Wonder with this kind of bluesy downerism. I’d certainly never listened to his original version until today.

The Rolling Stones version (i.e., the only one I’d ever listened to for decades) is included on Metamorphosis, a rarities compilation released on 6.6.75.

“I Don’t Know Why” was recorded during the sessions for Let It Bleed — on Thursday, 7.3.69 — apparently in the evening. It was this exact same night that everyone learned of the death of Stones founder and guitarist Brian Jones, who had been found at the bottom of his swimming pool three or four weeks after he’d been fired from the band over drugs. (Jones announced his departure from the band on 6.9.69.)

“Outside Agitators”

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From Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (‘67):

Berkeley landlord (Norman Fell) to Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman): “You’re not one of those outside agitators, are you?”

Braddock: “No.”

Berkekey landlord: “‘Cause I won’t stand for that.”

“Fall Guy” Retort

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Michael DeGregorio to HE: “If you want to be as miserable as you always look in pictures, that’s on you.

“I saw it and had the most fun I’ve had watching a film in a theater in a long, long time.

“This is an audience film, not a critics film and that’s not a lower standard — it’s just a totally different set of guidelines.

“All a filmmaker has to do is film two or three people, always in a love triangle of some kind, make it dreary and sad and hopeless and then kill one at the end (disease, suicide or something), add a nice subdued musical score and the critics will call it spiritual or stunningly romantic or something flowery like that and hail the filmmaker as the next __________(insert cool indie director).

“The Fall Guy is a total unabashed love letter to stunt men and the stunt industry as a whole. It moves like a fast train and even wraps the making of a film and a massive stunt into the climax of the third act.

“I’m sure you will call me a knuckle-dragging ape with no taste who smells up your comment section and anyone who likes this film is an uncultured scumbag who should be put into a reeducation camp, and that’s fine.

“The point is, this is a film for the audience to enjoy and I doubt that David Leitch really cares of the critics call him satan or the devil or anything else.

“Critics don’t pay the rent.”

Zoomer Entitlement (Hamilton Hall)

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Pro-Gaza, anti-Israel Columbia Zoomers to world media: “Speaking as militant, keffiyeh-wearing revolutionaries, we’ve occupied Hamilton Hall in order to dramatically demand an end to Israel’s policy of murder and terror in the Gaza Strip. But at the same time our stomachs are growling…waaahhh….Columbia University administrators need to send us food and drink…pizza and sodas anyway…waaahhh.”

I somehow don’t recall anything about radical student activist David Shapiro, who was notoriously photographed smoking a cigar while sitting at the desk of Columbia University president Grayson Kirk during a six-day revolt in late April of ’68…I don’t recall Shapiro or any of his SDS comrades demanding food. They either toughed it out or snuck out and grabbed takeout for the occupiers.

Authoritarian Animal

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Following two interviews with The Beast, a summary from Time reporter Eric Cortellessa:

“To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.

“He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.

“He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers.

“He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding.

“He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury.

“He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense.

“He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

Silver-Haired Guy Yelling….”C’mon!”

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Zero Day is an upcoming political thriller series for Netflix. Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, it costars Robert De Niro, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Bill Camp, Angela Bassett and Matthew Modine. Logline: “A political conspiracy thriller centering on a devastating global cyberattack.”

@user5469336782915 #robertdinero #zerodays #newmovie #nyc #newyork #wallsreet ♬ original sound – user5469336782915

“Lowered Expectations” Is Putting It Mildly

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[Posted six months ago — go to 1:45]

Scott Galloway: “We all know women…I’m sure this happens to you all the time…really interesting, high-character, successful, attractive women…usually in their 30s, some into their 40s…who will say ‘I can’t find anyone to date.’ But it’s not that they can’t find anyone to date. It’s that they can’t find anyone they want to date.

“And there’s some dynamics here. Warren Buffet said that the key to a successful marriage is low expectations.

“A podcaster named Chris Williams…he calls it the high-heels effect. And that is that every year for the last 50 years [or since the mid ’70s] women have become better educated and are making more money. They’re also getting [physically] taller every year. 50% of women say they won’t date a guy who’s shorter than them, except that figure is probably more like 80%. Also women are getting ‘taller’ and men are getting ‘shorter’ metaphorically. The pool of viable men is shrinking every year. Women have been told they can have it all. What I’ve found is that you can’t have it all, or certainly not all at once.”

“A woman of average attractiveness can have a ‘relationship’, and when I say relationship that’s code for sex…[within the straight realm] they can have a relationship with [a man] who’s in the top ten percent. But that male individual is probably not going to establish a longterm relationship.

“The bottom line is that the top 10% of men” — financial stability, looks, apparent emotional stability — “are getting 80 or 80-plus percent of the opportunities for short-term relationships. So they can engage in what’s called Porsche polygamy. So the guys that most women want are the least likely to establish a longterm relationship.”

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Had Honestly Never Heard This Colloquialism Before Last Night

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“Momala of the country”…

In a May 2019 letter to Elle magazine in celebration of Mother’s Day Sen. Kamala Harris explained the origin.

“When Doug and I got married, Cole, Ella and I agreed that we didn’t like the term ‘stepmom’ [so] they came up with ‘Momala.'”

Fine and good but Kamala Harris‘s rickety whiney voice still grates. Her speeches lack a certain musical quality…a gift that Barack had in abundance. We all know there’s a reason she dropped out of Democratic primary contention in December 2019. Women (particularly women of color) are in her corner but that’s about it.

While Rome Burns

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In other words: General reporting about Supreme Court righties having side-stepped and folded on Donald Trump‘s behalf was brief and unsustained, while college activists ignored this acquiescence in favor of strident and agitated pro-Gaza occupations. We’re just about cooked.

20 months hence the obviously lucid, thoughtful and charming Dick Van Dyke will turn 100.

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Gladhanders Lead The Charge

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If Emily (Jungle Cruise) Blunt has anything to do with it, it’s not funny — this is HE’s hard and fast rule.

Give Clayton Davis credit for at least admitting out of the gate that The Fall Guy (Universal, 3.3) is empty jizz-whizz. I proudly steered clear of last night’s all-media showing, and will mournfully submit to it Wednesday night like an Egyptian sphinx. I don’t care how many easy lays come out of the woodwork to insist how “funny” or “purely pleasurable” it is. So much of present-tense movie life is about spiritual drainage. Douse me with anhydrous butter fat, Leitch…pour gasoline, light match.