Sen. Jon Ossoff can’t compete with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s rhetorical ease, balls and all-around charisma, but he has a solid honest center. He strikes me as well-grounded.

HE is a sensible centrist, but in the above context my closest allegiance is with the “abundance libs.”

The odious implications of modern advertising were explored in Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self (‘02), a landmark doc with laser-like insights into a few bizarre corners of the human psyche.

This reminds me of a certain legendary ad copy line for Clairol hair coloring…a line that came from the contours and tendencies of the culture of the mid to late ‘50s but finally broke through in the first year of the Kennedy administration.

Tom Wolfe nailed it in his legendary 1976 essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”

In 1961 a copywriter in the employ of Foote, Cone & Belding named Shirley Polykoff came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!”

The basic attitude of having “only one life,” said Wolfe, contradicted a general belief among families and nations that had existed for centuries, which you could sum up as a belief in “serial immortality.”

Boiled down, serial immortality means that we’re all part of a familial stream — our lives being a completion or fulfillment of our parents’ lives and our children’s lives completing and fulflling our own, and everyone understanding that we’re part of the same genetic river of existence and spirit.

Polykoff’s copy line basically said “the hell with that — it’s just me, it’s just my life and my goals, and I’m going to satisfy myself!”

By the time the early ’70s rolled around the culture had begun to believe in the “me first” philosophy en masse.

And then, exactly ten years after Polykoff’s brainwave, came Erhard Seminars Training (EST).

And then, in ‘77, along came Michael Ritchie‘s Semi Tough, a satire of the human potential movement and, really, the whole damn ‘70s decade.

That completely aside, the 1970s were arguably the greatest nookie decade in the history of Western civilization, and they’ll never, ever return. That was then, this is now.

HE-posted on 1.25.09: When the Changeling Bluray pops on 2.17.09, drinking games will commence nationwide. One swig all around whenever Angelina Jolie says “I want my son back!” Double swigs all around when she says “that’s not my son!”

Clint Eastwood‘s drama opened theatrically on 5.20.08.

This hilarious John Carpenter interview happened during the filming of Halloween in May 1978. “Hilarious” because of Carpenter’s reaction to the interviewer mentioning the avant- garde, envelope-pushing nature of Robert Altman‘s Nashville (’75).

Go to the :39 mark — Carpenter’s eyebrows arch dramatically as his eyelids briefly close. In his eyes and eyebrows, Altman is a dead man.

Differing HE opinion: I agree with Carpenter about Nashville, but there’s just no slagging Altman’s M.A.S.H., McCabe and Mrs. Miller, California Split, The Long Goodbye and The Player. You can’t dismiss these five…verboten.

The most recent HE Nashville put-down piece was posted on 7.8.25.

N.Y. Times, 2.19.26, reported by Ashey Ahn: “The banners follow a string of efforts by the administration to emblazon the president’s name and face on everything from coins to national park passes.

“Such displays are more often a feature of countries run by dictators, not democratically elected leaders.

“‘This is not just egotistical self-satisfaction…it’s a way of expanding presidential power,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, told The Times recently. “A president is more powerful, I assume he believes, if he is ever-present than if he keeps his head down.”

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I was an ardent lefty for so much of my life and such a good malcontent in so many ways (anti-authoritarian, irreverent, iconoclastic), and when I first saw Hal Ashby‘s Coming Home at Manhatttan’s Magno Screening Room in January ’78…well, that movie just poured right into me, and I sank into it right back.

I felt moved and melted down, and was nodding in recognition at so much of what it was saying…I felt so emotionally caught up during Jon Voight‘s big speech to those high-school kids at the end. And the late ‘60s soundtrack.

I wound up seeing Coming Home three or four times after it opened on 2.15.78, and felt so enthused when Voight and Jane Fonda won Best Actor and Best Actress Oscars, and Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones won for Best Original Screenplay.

My Bluray version of Hal Ashby’s best film is sitting on the bookshelf in the living room, but I haven’t popped it in for a few years. Being a lefty was such a different thing back then. I was such a whole-hearted believer. It’s hard to accept that early ’78 was nearly a half-century ago.

It tolls for thee.

2.19, 7:10 pm eastern: Out of 213 replies so far, many have mentioned Salt, Malificent, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Callas, Gia, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Changeling. But quite a few have said “none,” “nope, “no thanks,” “forget it” and so on.

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These two items feed into each other:

Early last evening I walked into a nearby Walmart and bought the new 4K Ben-Hur 3-disc package. 15 minutes later I popped disc #1 into HE’s 4K Sony Bluray player, and right away I was going “whoa…this looks significantly better than my 2011 Ben-Hur Bluray”…my eyeballs were going boooiinngggg!

Seriously, this puppy is truly exceptional…the details are dazzling…this kind of bump is what 4K should always deliver…the red tunics of the Roman legions are so radiant you might feel a slight urge to shield your eyes…you can really see and savor the fabric threads…Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting looks like it’s been painted upon actual plaster…the sparkling eye colors and moist, lived-in skins of men and women of all ages…the flickering green of windblown olive tree leaves…the gleaming gold-accented chest armor…the chiselled hair patterns of that crouching, giant-sized discus-thrower in the center of the chariot stadium…the exquisite, vibrantly-colored fabrics and robes…all of it. Every shot fills the milk pitcher of your soul.

For the first time in my life I noticed that the late Stephen Boyd (aka Messala) had oversized, oddly-shaped big toes…plus you can see the caked makeup of Hugh Griffith‘s overly dark, painted-on Arab face more clearly…the blacks are mine-shaft deep, velvety and super-smooth…and while you can see a very fine layer of grain if you put your nose right up to the screen, it’s really almost nonexistent. The 4K Ben-Hur is almost like watching the live Cinecitta sets and actors through a just-cleaned window. I was half-chuckling at this, musing that the grain monks — those fanatical asshats who love heightened, extra-visible grain in Blurays of older films…the grain monks might be upset by this…”too smooth and clean!”

And then 20 minutes into disc #1, it froze….”I just bought this!“, I shouted. I hit eject, popped in my lens-cleaning disc, wiped the newbie clean and started over. It was fine after that but c’mon…20 minutes into your first viewing of a brand new 4K disc and it quits?

I still lose interest after the chariot race sequence ends. The air goes out of the balloon, and it becomes tedious. All of that endless suffering of Martha Scott and Cathy O’Donnell in the Valley of the Lepers…”you mustn’t look upon us, Judah!”…relax already! Okay, you’ve got some ugly warts on your face, but you’re still relatively healthy and able to get around….why not just accept the disease and move on and do what you can? Hiding in a cave?…later.

Yes, Robert Surtees‘ tracking camera work during the final two or three minutes is impressive.

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Today is Wednesday, 2.18. Roughly two weeks ago (okay, possibly in very late January) I bought a half-gallon of milk. The expiration date was for 3.12 or thereabouts, so I figured I had at least three weeks of use without concern.

By late last week (2.11) it had turned slightly putrid, which is what milk does before changing into cottage cheese. Even if I had discounted the 3.12 sell-by date and went instead with a March 1st “drink it or lose it” deadline, I was still getting screwed.

AI sez that “properly refrigerated pasteurized milk typically lasts 5 to 7 days past its ‘sell-by’ date”…nope.

Whatever the sell-by date is, subtract 30 days…that’s the lesson.

While visiting a friend’s upstate New York farm in the ’90s, I was given a tall glass of chilled, farm-fresh, right-out-of-the-cow milk. I’ve never forgotten that wonderful taste, that wholesome feeling of slurping the real thing. I also ate some freshly-slaughtered pig sausage that weekend. I can’t even think about killing an animal for any reason, but it was beyond delicious.