Off With Truth-Teller’s Head!

National Public Radio’s newly-installed honcho Katherine Maher, by any fair-minded standard a flared-nostril, POC-worshipping, white-male-hating woke storm trooper, has wasted no time in bull-whipping (and nearly terminating) NPR senior editor Uri Berliner for having written a sharply critical 4.9 Free Press article about how NPR went over the woke waterfall five or six years ago and thereby lost the trust of moderately liberal and centrist listeners.

Berliner surely understood that his Free Press article, however truthful and grounded, would be a bridge-burner and that the odds of keeping his NPR job wouldn’t be good.

Right now Berliner is only suspended but you know he’s going to be facing great difficulty in the weeks ahead.

Younger Brother Shares My Bedroom

I could never decide where to scatter Tony’s remains. (He passed in the fall of ‘09.) I still have no good ideas. So he resides inside a small wicker storage thing in my bedroom. It’s not grotesque — he’s just there. Inside a dark-blue imitation velvet pouch with a drawstring.

Ripley Binge

Last week I rewatched the final three episodes of Steve Zallian‘s Ripley and then decided to re-watch Anthony Minghella‘s The Talented Mr. Ripley as well as Rene Clement‘s Purple Noon (’60).

Okay, I actually gave up when it came to re-watching the Minghella, but I’ll get to it this evening.

Basic conclusions or re-realizations: (a) I love Ripley‘s luxurious, laid-back Zen vibe… you can get lost in it, very pleasurably, and after two episodes you’ll never want to leave;

(b) The ultra-tight narrative of Clement’s version feels kinda great after you’ve been Ripley-ing;

(c) The late Marie Laforêt, who played Marge in Purple Noon when she was 20, is ten or twelve times hotter than Dakota Fanning‘s Marge in Ripley. Which is not a problem for Fanning, of course — she’s totally fine, excellent actress — but watching Laforet is…how to put it?…good for the soul.

Zen and The Art of Toilet Cleaning

I made a choice during last year’s Cannes Film Festival to sidestep screenings of Wim WendersPerfect Days, which I re-titled in my head as Toilet-Cleaning Guy.

It’s not that I was afraid of the subject…okay, I was a little bit. I might be an outlier in this regard, but I’m terrified of medium close-ups of turd-clogged toilets.

The film, of course, is about the spiritual (musical, literary, emotional, cosmic) life of Kōji Yakusho‘s Hirayama, and not his day job. Naturally.

Elite critics have praised Wenders’ film from the get-go, and now it’s getting the royal Criterion treatment.

Under Maher, NPR Will Almost Certainly Double Down on Woke

Last month Katherine Maher, 40, succeeded John Lansing as CEO and president of National Public Radio (NPR). In contrast to many NPR predecssors, Maher has never worked directly in journalism or at a news organization. She is, however, an adamant wokester Millennial, or she was, at least, four years ago during the George Floyd riots.

I’m presuming that under Maher’s leadership NPR will not be reverting to that mellow, thoughtful, sensibly measured news-and-reporting outlet that many of us knew during the Obama years and before.

Like much of the liberal realm, NPR began turning into a woke-talking-points platform when Trump took power on 1.20.17, and then veered into hardcore Stalinist woke-ism when the George Floyd riots happened in May 2020.

I’m certain Ira Berliner is very sorry. Me too.

Adding insult to injury Maher is from HE’s home town of Wilton — went to Wilton High School, etc.

Maher (no relation to Bill) turns 41 on 4.18.24. She has an agreeably deep and somewhat raspy voice, and bears an obvious resemblance to Rachel McAdams.

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Unavoidable Implosion

I’m not much of a numbers guy, but Warren Smith appears to be. This straight-talk explanation video, focused on the alleged inability of Hollywood to sustain itself, is what I intended to post yesterday afternoon…until I got sidetracked. I trust Warren’s eyes. Look at them as he’s speaking.

Not One To Mince Words

Bob Costas two days ago: “What I’m about to say doesn’t mitigate the crime that [O.J. Simpson] quite obviously committed.

“He was a hail-fellow-well-met, and everything changed on the night of June 12,1994.

“We can hold multiple truths in our head at the same time, even if some of those truths at [that] time confused people…people who are inclined to view it through an emotional prism” — i.e., O.J. murder trial juror Brenda Moran, a.k.a. “Brenda Moron” — “rather than a rational prism.

“It is simultaneously true that there’s a long history of injustice by the [Los Angeles] justice system toward African-Americans, and that continued well into the 1990s and to some extent continues today.

“Plus the Simpson situation was not long after the Rodney King situation…the beating caught on camera and then those officers acquitted…there was a lot of tension, to put it mildly, between the African-American community and the LAPD. All these things are true.

“It’s also true that Mark Fuhrman was a racist who lied about this and used the n-word. It was also presented that some of the chain-of-custody was mishandled. There were mistakes there.

“All those things can simultaneously be true, and it’s also true that it’s impossible to even postulate that anyone other that O.J. Simpson committed those crimes. The evidence, both circumstantial and hard evidence, is simply overwhelming, and there’s no other explanation.”

Rough Sex Choking Is Actually A Thing?

There’s really, really something wrong with college-age males who are into sexual choking. Ditto the young women who are also allegedly into it, as choking does nothing to heighten pleasure or bring about orgasm.

Yes, this is an actual thing, and there’s something truly foul and psychologically fucked up in the hearts and minds of the eager-beaver perpetrators. I’ve lived a vigorous sexual life for many decades, and I’ve never so much as flirted with even the idea of choking…are you kidding me?

The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex“, posted by Peggy OrensteinN.Y. Times, 4.12.24:

“For the past four years, Dr. Debby Herbenick — one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior and director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University — has been tracking the rapid rise of ‘rough sex’ among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking.

Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized ‘major Midwestern university’ said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.

“As someone who’s been writing for well over a decade about young people’s attitudes and early experience with sex in all its forms, I’d also begun clocking this phenomenon. I was initially startled in early 2020 when, during a post-talk q & a at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl asked, ‘How come boys all want to choke you?’ In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, ‘Why do girls all want to be choked?’ They do?

“Not long after, a college sophomore (and longtime interview subject) contacted me after her roommate came home in tears because a hookup partner, without warning, had put both hands on her throat and squeezed.”

Perfect Comments

Comment #1: “It’s so strange how a song called Perfect Day is one that I find myself wanting to listen to when my day is everything but perfect.” Comment #2: “This is what having fun with depression is like.” Comment #3: “After listening to this I have a sudden urge to clean toilets in Tokyo.” Comment #4 “You made me forget myself…I thought I was someone else, someone good” might be the most relatable lyric in history.” Comment #5: “This song is like watching something beautiful die.”