New trailer for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny." Holy cow, this looks fantastic.
‘Farce of Democracy’: Tennessee Republicans Just Expelled 2 Black Democrats for a Peaceful Protest. “Republicans voted to kick Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson out of the legislature, while a vote to oust Rep. Gloria Johnson failed by one vote.” … “Asked why she was not expelled along with the other two Democrats, Johnson told CNN: ‘I think it’s pretty clear. I’m a 60-year-old white woman, and they are two young black men.’”
Republicans are the party that supports free speech.
Republicans: The party that cares about children.
If It’s Advertised to You Online, You Probably Shouldn’t Buy It. Here’s Why.. Ads are serving us lousy, overpriced goods. (NYTimes / Julia Angwin).
Not covered in this article: Microtargeted ads are reportedly no more effective than contextual ads. So we’re giving up our privacy, advertisers are paying a premium, and the advertisers aren’t even making more money than they’d make if they just advertised their refrigerators against people searching Google for the word “refrigerator.”
For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from [Dallas businessman Harlan Crow] without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.
The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The luxury trips contrast starkly with the public reputation Thomas has cultivated.
In Thomas’ public appearances over the years, he has presented himself as an everyman with modest tastes.
“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” Thomas said in a recent interview for a documentary about his life, which Crow helped finance.
“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”
— Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica
Cory Doctorow reviews Thomas’s ignominous career. “… the elevation of the unrepentant rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the bench could never have occurred but for the trail blazed by Thomas as a sexually harassing, pubic-hair distributing creep boss.”
Thomas wants to ban same-sex marriage again, Cory notes. “And of course, he’s set precedent by hearing cases related to the attempted overthrow of the US government, despite the role his wife played in the affair.”
Thomas is not alone in furthering the right’s mission to destroy the morale of constitutional law scholars by systematically delegitimizing the court and showing it to be a vehicle for partisan politics and dark money policy laundering, but he is certainly at the vanguard.
Today I learned “Fiddler on the Roof” is a smash hit in Japan.
Since 1967, the musical’s seen hundreds of Japanese revivals. Joseph Stein, who penned the book to Fiddler, was once approached by a Japanese producer who asked, “Do they understand this show in America?”
“Yes, of course,” replied Stein, “we wrote it for America. Why do you ask?”
“Because,” the producer said, “it’s so Japanese.”
— 12 Things You Might Not Know About ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ (Mental Floss / Mark Mancini)
We watched “Murder Mystery,” a 2019 comedy-mystery starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston as married couple Nick and Audrey Spitz, a New York cop, and a hairdresser. On a flight to Europe for a bus-tour vacation, she strikes up a friendship with a dapper gentleman on the plane. The dapper gentleman spontaneously invites the New Yorkers to join him for a celebration on his billionaire uncle’s yacht. On the yacht, someone is murdered, and the Spitzes are the prime suspects.
It is an oddly old-fashioned movie. The gags all depend on the premise that the Spitzes are amiable lower-class shmos in a world of elegant toffs. We’re at an Agatha Christie murder mystery on a yacht, but instead of Hercule Poirot, our heroes are Oscar Madison and Laverne from Laverne & Shirley. Even the names Nick and Audrey Spitz seem to echo Nick and Nora Charles. I particularly liked the wardrobes—Sandler in baggy cargo shorts surrounded by men and women in tailored evening wear, Aniston in her outfits from Target (not Marshalls—she’s very clear on that point!).
The movie clocks in at 97 minutes, the ideal length for a movie, and ends in a lovely car chase through European streets.
You will like this movie very much if this sounds like the kind of movie you’d like. It is, and we did. 🎥
📷 My Bar Mitzvah photo. That jacket was kickin in 1974.
