I haven’t written anything by hand in literally decades. Maybe an occasional sentence or two but I haven’t hand-penned so much as a paragraph, much less a personal letter, since the mid ‘70s. Professionally-speaking from the Jimmy Carter era onward it was all typewriting until word processing (Wordstar) began in the mid ‘80s.

Yesterday I bought a note pad and a couple of pens. It’ll take a while but I’m going to force myself into the practice of occasional hand jottings. The idea, I suppose, is that writing by hand is somehow more pure or direct or something. I only know that I want to re-learn or recreate the skill of what used to be called half-assed cursive.

Maybe I’ll branch out into occasional drawing — I used to draw faces and figures lot in my tween years. I took a drawing class at Silvermine when I was 16 or 17.

During last night’s SNL monologue, comedian-actor-writer Ramy Youssef, 33, said he’s not happy about voting for Biden or Trump, and would prefer a woman candidate (HE feels the same as long as the woman candidate isn’t Kamala Harris) or even a trans-woman.

Youssef is half-playing around and half-serious, and so am I. If there was a formidable biomale trans candidate as smart and practical-minded as Pete Buttigieg (i.e., not a woke lunatic), HE would vote for her. But of course, the odds of a formidable biomale trans candidate even getting through the primary process are negligible so what are we even talking about?

…for encouraging social standards that frown upon traditional male energy and identities in favor of politically cautious, laid-back girlyman attitudes, hence the phenomenon of depressed, drifting, girlfriend-less young men, hence “wokefish.”

Read more

…in a more profound and heartfelt way than most present-day “Christians” understand this all-but-superfluous holiday, and I’m bending over backwards in saying this.

>

Another indication that woke terror ain’t what it used to be (i.e., back in ’19, ’20 and ’21) is that genius comic Anthony Jeselnik, whose material uses “ironic misdirection, non sequiturs, biting insults, low-key arrogance along with amoral or psychopathic stances,” is alive and well and un–cancelled.

Nobody pulls off the “icy but casual sociopath with a chuckle” thing better than Jeselnik.

His career started to really happen in his early 30s, or around the beginning of the Obama era. He had a nearly four-year relationship with Amy Schumer. I know the #MeToo brigade hates him, and that at the peak of their “cancelling careers and destroying lives” power in the late teens and early ’20s they would have loved to terminate Jeselnik with extreme prejudice, but somehow he’s still thriving.

I know nothing and yes, this is two days old but…

Puck‘s Dylan Byers (3.29.24): “In the aftermath of the Ronna McDaniel hiring-and-firing scandal, the NBC News Group blame game has begun to point back toward chairman Cesar Conde, his hands-off leadership style, and his very transparent ambitions.”

“Ronna McDaniel fiasco reveals chaos in upper ranks at NBC: ‘A head needs to roll’“, by Alexandra Steigrad (3.29.24)

“Media executives and industry experts close to NBC said the Ronna McDaniel fiasco exposed the chaos in the upper ranks at the Peacock network — with one top honcho telling The Post that ‘a head needs to roll.’

“The hiring and abrupt firing of the former chair of the Republican National Committee under intense pressure from NBC and MSNBC talent, led by Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow, revealed the power vacuum at the network, multiple sources told The Post on Thursday.

“’Someone needs to pay for the clear lack of leadership on this issue,’ said one media bigwig, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity. ‘A head needs to roll.’

“NBC brass reversed their position on hiring Ronna McDaniel earlier this week, after pushback from talent. But the stunning reversal has exposed gaps in leadership at the network, sources said.

“’There are some serious conversations happening in Philadelphia,’ the source added, referring to the headquarters of NBC-parent Comcast. ‘If I’m [Comcast president] Mike Cavanagh, I’d be like what the fuck!’

“A possible fall guy could be NBC News Group Chairman Cesar Conde, who took ‘full responsibility’ for signing off on the reported two-year, $600,000 deal that landed McDaniel as an on-air contributor at NBC and MSNBC last Friday.

Read more

I recently invited a friend to a NYC screening of Alex Garland’s Civil War (A24, 4.12).

“Thanks but I don’t think I’m’interested,” he replied. “I’m just not in the mood for a Very Important Movie (read: explicitly political) right now.”

I was going to explain that the narrative backdrop, according to the reviews, isn’t explicitly political, at least in terms of reflecting the red-vs.-blue, Trump MAGA vs. woke libtard dynamic. But that’s okay…

Posted on 3.14 after the SXSW debut:

Posted four years ago: Speaking as a life-long cat lover, I can say with authority that some cats are on the locoweed side. Inexplicable behavior. One out of several hundred, I mean.

If none-too-bright cats are unhappy or freaked about some kind of confining situation, for example, they’ll sometimes do anything they can to escape, even at their own peril. Or they’ll take revenge upon the person they think is responsible.

(1) A woman I knew was driving with an anguished male cat on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The weather was cold, a mild snowstorm was blowing, and her car was surrounded by a fair amount of traffic. She was going the usual highway speed. For some reason she leaned over and rolled down the driver-side window, and the cat immediately leapt out.

(2) My ex-wife Maggie and I had a calico cat who was accustomed to outdoor access, and who became extremely upset when we moved into an 8th floor high-rise apartment. The first night we moved in the cat climbed onto a waist-high balcony wall that overlooked the eight-story drop. I put him inside the apartment as this obviously seemed risky. Later that night he got out and jumped. We’d loved him, petted him, fed him, etc. Go figure.

(3) In the late ‘90s I was driving down Franklin Avenue with a cat who couldn’t handle being in moving cars. Jett and Dylan were with me. The cat was howling and freaking, and at one point jumped onto my shoulder and took a serious milkshake dump all over my neck and onto my blue workshirt. I remember the smell filling the car and the kids screaming with laughter.

(4) My sister and I knew that our excitable cat hated water, so we decided to take him with us on a short rowboat trip to the middle of a pond. As a training exercise. We waited until we were 30 or 40 feet out and then let him go. He looked around, assessed the situation, jumped into the pond and swam ashore.

(5) A girlfriend and I were sharing an apartment on Boston’s Park Drive. Her male cat, Tom, was bunking with us. I love cats but Tom was extremely hostile to me — the only cat I’ve run into who was this negative. One night we came back from a restaurant and found that Tom had peed on my sleeping pillow on our conjugal bed. That was it. Over the next day or two we found someone who was willing to take him.

A few days ago I twitched once again at the sight of the term “sex positive.” I’ve riffed about this once or twice before, but this time it was in a Zack Sharf Variety piece about The Idea of You (Amazon Prime, 5.2.24). It’s about an affair between Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway), a 40 year-old single mom, and Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), the 24-year-old lead singer of August Moon, a super-hot boy band.

Sharf: “Hathaway was drawn to the film because it shows it’s never too late for a woman to come of age. The film is also sex positive.”

I wrote the following a couple of years ago: “‘Sex positive’ sounds a little too nice…a little too much like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Tame and tidy, not skanky enough. The best heteronormative sex is usually untidy and objectionable in some way — rude, hungry, raw, animalistic, runting, howling, pervy.

There’s an old Woody Allen line (probably from Annie Hall or Manhattan) that answers a question about whether sex is dirty or not. Reply: “It is if you’re doing it right.”

In the mid ’80s I was “seeing” a pretty British woman in her early 30s. She had apparently come from a conservative family, or had somehow gotten the idea from her mother that when it came to the possibility of sexual congress and the “yes or no” moment…she had been told that behaving in a cautious or conservative or even prudish manner was a safe, sensible way to go.

But I’m telling you that one of the hottest things I’ve ever heard a woman say at the moment of surrender came out of this lovely lady — “oh, God, I love it!”

It wasn’t so much the “I love it” (which was fine) as the “oh, God” part that got me. What that meant, I determined, was that deep down she was apologizing to God the Father for enjoying being harpooned. “Oh, God” meant “dear Lord, I’ve tried so hard to be a more virtuous woman and here I am failing again…I can’t help myself…send me to a nunnery.”