I can't hear anything about Mitchum without wanting to watch this scene from Out of the Past... His final line is so fucking cool, and perfectly sums up all that was awesome about him (which is why it became the title of his autobiography).
It's interesting as well how this kind of bias against intellectuals is entrenched from childhood. I lived in Europe for a while, and was fascinated when I compared notes about our respective high school experiences and cultures. In my friends' schools in France, for example, the "cool kids" - other than the pretty people (which is a universal bias) - were the class brains - the kids who argued politics in class, who wrote poetry, who excelled in academics. Because extracurricular sports weren't really a factor at school, the idea that the captain of the football team or the cheerleading squad should be the class alphas instead was never an issue.
I wonder, if the kids who win science fairs were more popular at age 15 than the kids who throw footballs, would we hold scientists in higher esteem later on in life, too...?
In LA, it's simple: everyone is either "Industry" on the one hand, or "civilian/non-pro" on the other.
Ever read the wedding/birth/engagement section of Variety? It's hilarious... "Jane Doe, the first distaff prexy of Studio A, gave birth to a girl, Kundalini Vinyasa Schwartz, at Cedars on Monday. Father, John, is non-pro."
Apple is like McDonald's - it does the same things as many of its competitors, but because of its enormous market share it has the possibility to change things in the way that its competitors don't. If Apple were to demand that its suppliers paid a living wage and offered good working conditions, it would affect the entire industry - a larger-scale version of the penny-a-pound increase tomato pickers got McDonald's and Yum Brands to agree to, which served to raise wages for the industry as a whole.
I generally hate Cute, and I hate it when girls lose their shit for no reason. But Kristen Bell gets a pass from me ever since I read that her 30th birthday party was Hunger Games-themed, and she'd gone all out with costumes and party stations for each of the different districts. This is a chick totally in touch with her inner dork, and I kind of love her for it.
Google gets my age right but thinks I'm a boy (I'm not). To be fair, though, I think my Tivo is confused about my gender, too, based on how many sporting events it records for me unasked - maybe because I have a Game of Thrones season pass and keep hitting multiple thumbs-down whenever Tivo suggests anything relating to shopping, home & garden, reality TV, or programming on Lifetime. That said, for a while Tivo Suggestions kept insisting I wanted to watch women's golf, so maybe it just thinks I'm a lesbian.
He's the epitome of a Glass Closet case - he never denies or tries to hide his sexuality, but he won't be appearing on the cover of People with a "Yep, I'm Gay" tag line, either.
It would be interesting to get Sroufe's take on the explosion of adult ADD diagnoses, too. A former friend of mine had a boring job she found difficult to concentrate on, was told that her difficulty was caused by adult ADD, and was given a prescription for Adderall. Unsurprisingly, she was able to cope with her shitty job better, and is convinced that all her life she had undiagnosed ADD. Now, this is a girl who got straight As in high school and a top-ranked university, excelled at grad school as well, and who had never encountered any particular difficulty in maintaining her discipline in challenging environments (in fact, she was much more disciplined than me by a longshot) - but now she's addicted to legal meth while convincing herself that for the first highly successful 30-odd years of her life she was actually suffering a debilitating disease, despite all evidence to the contrary. Point is, adults don't just use Adderall as a shortcut to dealing with their kids' problems - they use it as a shortcut to dealing with their own as well.
It's not just babies one is forced to acknowledge the alleged adorableness of - it's anything baby-adjacent. I had to go to a baby shower a couple of weeks ago and all the other chicks would squeal and ooooh over the itty-bitty wee onesies and sooooo-cuuuuute burping cloths and please please please just kill me now 'k? Some of us heterosexual females have a congenital allergy to kawaii that leads us to find clothes for babies as interesting as clothes for chihuahuas.
This is literally the stuff of my nightmares.
I prefer Gore Vidal's quip, after Norman Mailer punched him party: "Once again, Norman, words fail you."
Follow this link if you're a political geek with a lot of time to kill... It's the speech Al Smith, former NY gov, gave upon his acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination. Not only does the first half of the speech in particular seem eerily/sadly relevant today, but the overall sophistication of the language, combined with Smith's faith in the ability of his audience to digest complicated economic data and policy proposals, goes to show how badly political language has devolved since then. I mean, can you imagine how much flack Obama would get if he ever mention, as Smith did, "the reactionary element [which] seeks to vindicate the theory of benevolent oligarchy"?
Read more at the American Presidency Project: Al Smith: Address of Acceptance at the State Capitol, Albany, New York [www.presidency.ucsb.edu]
I don't know whether I'm more disappointed in Gawker for morphing into HuffPo or more disappointed in myself for clicking on the goddamn video.
This backfires, though. If you actually ARE a high-achieving student, and you see kids around you just getting "A's for effort" while producing really shitty work, it totally kills your motivation to excel.
I was curious whether they were still together when Macy showed up at the Emmys and the afterparties with an attractive Asian woman who was definitely not his wife. But maybe Huffman had a genuine scheduling conflict at the time.
The Supreme Court is currently considering the issue of "fleeting expletives," and a positive decision would mean this kind of nonsensical bleeping would be a thing of the past. But I think it's odd that "naughty words" are considered an issue at all - if you watch broadcast TV in other countries and other languages (including state-owned channels), there aren't the equivalent of the "seven dirty words you can't say on television." Our sensitivity to this stuff seems to be something pretty unique among Brits and Yanks.
Is this any different than Google's system of having bots mine Gmail for keywords that are then the subject of targeted ads?
Thank you - my utter distaste for/bafflement by American football is something I'm quite comfortable with, but it occasionally does lead to confusion when making small talk with heterosexual males. I love it when Gawker gets service-y.
He's like the white Kanye: megalomaniacal, thin-skinned, and prone to engaging in deeply entertaining rants.
I like to think of myself as a non-girlie-girl, and someone who operates free of the constraints of gender stereotypes. But then I realized I said about 90% of the shit on ShitGirlsSay, and was forced to admit I'm not quite the unique snowflake I thought I was.
