Taken outside Barnum Roma (Via del Pellegrino, 87, 00186 Roma, Italy) on 6.2.17 — exactly 49 months ago.

HE has been merged with Patreon for a few days now, and I wish I could say I wasn’t embarassed and irritated by their sluggish behavior so far. But I am.

One, they make users sign in every damn time — you’d think they could adjust the mechanism so users would have to sign in every two or three weeks, like they do with the N.Y. Times. (Are they deliberately trying to irritate people?) Two, they won’t let me charge an annual fee of $49 ($11 cheaper than paying $5 monthly) as an incentive deal. And three, they seem to be making it difficult for HE management to hand out free entry codes to certain friends and colleagues. Why — because they’ll earn slightly less money if they allow people like me to offer comps for five or ten friendos?

Other paywall sites recognize your name and password instantly without requiring a laborious sign-in process. Patreon has been in operation for eight years now. You’d think they’d have the bugs ironed out by now.

I’m really starting to hate the paywall rackets and the racketeers who make and enforce their chickenshit rules.

I considered Substack but couldn’t go there — it would have meant moving out of the HE home that I built with my own two hands (not to mention the proverbial blood, sweat and tears) starting in August ’04 and moving into a small Substack condo unit…totally unacceptable. I tried to get going with Memberful but they also turned out to be obstinate jerks with poor communication skills. It’s such a heartache and a headache.

Why isn’t there an operation out there that offers a paywall structure partnership without a small-minded cheapskate mentality? There are designers who’ve created intelligent paywall software mechanisms (like the Texas-based guy who created the paywall for Graydon Carter‘s Air Mail) but I can’t afford that kind of arrangement. I’m unfortunately stuck with the two-bit racketeers.

What do I have to do — drive up to San Francisco and wait in the lobby of Patreon’s corporate office?

Why is everything in life ALWAYS an uphill slog?

I always regarded the late Donald Rumsfeld with a certain detachment mixed with disdain. A Republican hustler, operator, D.C. politician…Gerald Ford‘s Secretary of Defense (’75 to ’77) then George Bush‘s from ’01 to ’06…basically a craggy, cynical, chessboard prick. But I related to Steve Carell‘s version of Rumsfeld in Adam McKay‘s Vice…he was an amiable, recognizable, vulnerable human being. So I’m thinking more about Carell this morning than the Real McCoy…no offense.

Emily Blunt put-on riff: “I am so sorry about earlier…something very weird happened…it was like this rogue trailer…this, uh…desperate, delusional, sad trailer…[which has] no relation to the film that we made…it was like, it was like….how can I say?…it was like the trailer had lost its mind.”

Imnagine working for the Disney marketing and publicity divisions charged with promoting Jungle Cruise (Disney, 7.30)…imagine the desperate, delusional sadness that has overtaken these poor, hard-working people…it would be like…how can I say?…it would be like the marketing and publicity staffers have lost their collective mind, or something along those lines.”

The trailer says it all. The trailer sucks you dry.

Variety has promoted Angelique Jackson to Senior Entertainment Writer…congrats on a new title and a larger salary. Jackson will continue to write about the film and media business, etc.

A day after the Soderbergh Oscars ended, Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister asked Jackson if the Academy “got it wrong” by handing the Best Actor trophy to The Father‘s Anthony Hopkins. Jackson answered “absolutely,” and then said: “We were all hoping for something that was gonna shake things up, but I don’t think that [the Hopkins win] was in any way what the Oscar producers intended. There was a lot of hope that we were going to end with this very emotional, heartfelt moment…all these things were pointing toward a great, great emotional catharsis. Instead we had this real kind of catastrophic surprise.”

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court court has vacated the sexual assault conviction against Bill Cosby on some kind of gobbbledygook technicality, and so the legendary “While You Were Sleeping” scumbag-to-end-all-scumbags, accused by more than 60 women of either sexual assault, rape, drug-facilitated sexual assault, sexual battery, child sexual abuse or sexual misconduct, will soon be a free man.

The state Supreme Court rationale says that “a previous prosecutor’s decision not to charge Cosby, 83, opened the door for him to speak freely in a civil lawsuit against him, and that testimony was key in the comic’s conviction in criminal court.” Repeating: Cosby was persuaded by said prosecutor’s decision not to charge him in a civil lawsuit…that decision led Cosby to speak candidly about this or that aspect of the civil assault charges against him, and this or that candid admission led to a subsequent criminal court conviction,” blah blah.

In short, Cosby convicted himself by blurting out this and that, and it was a certain prosecutor’s fault that he did that.

This is straight out of The Postman Always Rings Twice….calling Hume Cronyn!

Cosby, 83, was found guilty in September 2018 of three counts of aggravated indecent assault, and sentenced to three to ten years in prison. He’s been held all this time in a state prison in Skippack Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The address is 1200 Mokychic Rd, Collegeville, PA 19426.

HE to Tarantino: Groundhog Day wasn’t “a Bill Murray movie.” It was a movie about numbing repetition leading, ironically, to illumination…about spiritual life cycles and Buddhist notions of spiritual gain and advancement…about the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — by way of Kübler-Ross. It’s basically a life-is-hard-but-it-gradually-gets-better movie…a metaphor about spirit and light and seeing through the crap…about “even in a day as long as this, even in a lifetime of endless repetition, there’s still room for possibilities.”

So Murray’s weatherman character, Phil Connors, gradually turning into a more spiritually advanced fellow than he was at the film’s beginning…that wasn’t a cop-out, that was the idea.