Check-Out Conversation
March 15, 2026
Should Have Called Out Teyana Taylor's "Cat-face", But "James From Corporate" Beat Me To It
March 14, 2026
Most Under-45s Have Never Seen This
March 13, 2026
How could Donald Trump have been so submental or…I don’t know, thoughtlessly gut-tethered as to call The Atlantic‘s recent, 100% accurate report that Bill Maher will receive the annual Mark Twain Award “fake news“?
How could press secretary Karoline Leavitt be so stupidly robotic as to mindlessly repeat this without double-checking?
Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg: “The Atlantic reported first and accurately that Bill Maher was going to receive the Mark Twain Prize. The White House’s obfuscation strategy here is not effective.”
Maher: “Thank you to the Mark Twain people. I just had the award explained to me, and apparently it’s like an Emmy, except I win. I’d just like to say that it is indeed humbling to get anything named for a man who’s been thrown out of as many school libraries as Mark Twain.”
“The AI Doc wants to know, and it wants you to know. To know what? To know what in the actual fuck we’re dealing with, which is a technology that’s going to upend the world as we know it.
“It will wipe out jobs like a tsunami, it’s going to replace workers it is smarter than, and it’s going to be given more and more control — and take more and more control — because that’s the nature of how it works. It’s a synthetic mind, but it’s designed to evolve into an invincible operating system.
“Here’s what AI says: “I think, therefore I am. And therefore, I tell the human race what it should do.”
“The AI revolution has not been marketed as a sunnier version of what it’s going to be. If anything, all the prognostication about it is being led by dread. And The AI Doc shows you why. The film’s free-associative form and style says: Strap yourself in — it’s going to be a bumpy disturbing trip, and let’s hope we’re all still here when it’s over.
“And here’s the eerie part. It’s not like those days when we were ‘building better computers’ — no, the weirdness of AI is that it advances by itself. Machine / tech disruptions are always compared to the Industrial Revolution, because that was the original Great Leap Forward in modern human advancement. But when one of the wags in The AI Doc says, ‘It will make the Industrial Revolution look like small beans,” you feel, for perhaps the first time, that that’s no mere metaphor.”
After last January’s ICE shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti…who could have foreseen that these ugly murders would prompt Congressional Democrats to punish U.S. travellers nationwide for God knows how long?
Democratic message in a nutshell: “Because Good and Pretti were brutally shot to death, average Americans must pay the price and then some, mainly because we don’t have the votes to overrule Republicans. So Average Joes and Janes will keep on paying the price throughout the spring and perhaps longer….who knows?”
The Homeland Security shutdown, which has lasted over five weeks so far, is basically about Democrats insisting upon trying to control immigration enforcement abuses by withholding funding. They have thereby caused the pay of airport TSA agents to be frozen. Those poor TSA agents have been without pay for close to six weeks now. They can’t pay their bills. They’re in agony. And the entire Washington legislative community is going on spring beak next week? Throw the bums out!
N.Y. Times: “Yesterday (Wednesday) Democrats sent a proposal with ‘common-sense guardrails‘ on federal immigration agents, which they have demanded be part of any agreement, but South Dakota Senator John Thune, the Senate majority leader, called that a nonstarter.
“The acting head of the Transportation Security Administration told a House committee that security checkpoints at the nation’s airports were experiencing ‘the highest wait times in history‘ because of the Department of Homeland Security shutdown. The administrator, Ha Nguyen McNeill, said agent absences have soared to more than 40 percent at some airports since the shutdown began.”
Savannah Guthrie strongly suspects, as do we all, that her poor kidnapped mom, Nancy Guthrie, is no longer alive. Perhaps the retarded animals who kidnapped her didn’t intend to carry her off — maybe it was just a home invasion thievery thing gone wrong — but they struck and gashed her (blood drops outside the front door) and they’re clearly blundering morons, and the poor woman (who would probably be alive if she hadn’t fought them) is almost certainly dead and (awful to contemplate this) perhaps even buried.
And yet to go by the TODAY show interview that Guthrie just did with co-host Hoda Kotb, this seven-week-old episode and its tragic outcome is still fresh and gleaming on the plate. I’m sorry but when godawful terrible things happen, we all have to process them and somehow move on. Can anyone imagine Jackie Kennedy weeping her way through a televized interview seven weeks after her husband’s murder in Dallas? Of course not. Emotional dignity and brave composure were required back then.
Guthrie and Kotb, of course, are giving an emotional performance with a purpose. On the one-in-1000 chance that Nancy might still be alive, they’re trying to once again appeal to some sense of submerged humanity within the kidnappers to please tell authorities where Nancy is, even if it’s only the whereabouts of her body. Closure if nothing else.
On or about 2.1.26, Savannah was told by her brother Camron that their mom had most likely been kidnapped. Savannah’s agonized reaction, she tells Hotb, was that she might somehow be at fault.
Guthrie to Kotb: “I don’t know how dumb could I be, but I didn’t want to believe…do you think it was because of me?”
Yes, the invasion almost certainly happened because of Savannah’s fame and wealth (the bad guys saw a payday), but mainly, many believe, because of that special, well-publicized TODAY show segment titled “Savannah Guthrie Returns to Her Hometown of Tucson, Arizona”, which aired four months ago. That — sadly, tragically — was the calling card.
The creeping social-political encroachment of the transcommunityagenda during the era of Covid and woke terror (roughly 2017 to 2024) has been stoppedinitstracks, sports-wise, by the U.S. Olympic Committee, and thank God for the combined causes of decency, social justice and fairly-regulated women’s sporting events.
If, God forbid, ProjectHail Mary elbows its way into the Oscar conversation later this year, it would represent yet another sad degradation of a once-lofty brand that has endured more than enough slings and arrows. A kin to TheMartian in more ways than one, PHM is making big money….fine, whoo-hoo. Fucking leave it there.
Those entitled scumbags who assaulted the once-beautiful daughter of Bonasera, the undertaker…fine, they deserved the beatings that Clemenza’s goons surely gave them. But the Corleones were always presented as civilized hoods…nobody to mess with but also a clan that first and foremost honored family, loyalty, fraternity, hearth fires, Italian immigrant tradition, etc.
Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli is reporting that the second season of Seth Rogen‘s multi-Emmy-winning The Studio is currently lensing in Venice, Italy, and that the setting, of course, is not just the Venice Film Festival but the forthcoming 83rd edition, which will unfold between 9.2.26 and 9.12.26.
Using the Lido’s Palazzo del Cinema, which is currently adorned in full festival regalia, the satirical showbiz series is pre-creating the 83rd gathering with Madonna, Micheal Keaton, Bryan Cranston, Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz and Julia Garner costarring.
I’m especially amused by the fact that Venice Film festival topper Alberto Barbera will perform a speaking cameo in the show.
Yesterday Madonna posted an Instagram video in which she and Garner lip-sync to “Like a Virgin”. Garner has been attached to star in a “long-delayed” (read: scrapped) Madonna biopic that the singer has been wanting to make since ’22 and which may now be blended into a Studio story line.
…who played the airplane-wing gremlin in the 1983 feature version of “Nightmareat20,000 Feet” with John Lithgow in the William Shatner role. It was a matter of supreme indifference even when TwilightZone: TheMovie first popped. The original gremlin was played by Nick Cravat.
AnthonyPerkins as a “young American who can’t control his exploding passions”…an inside allusion within the ad department.
Only one of these nine directors ever forced a lead actor to wear a tennis-ball coif in a major feature:
What do you do, precaution-wise, if you’re approaching a major highway intersection or airport runway upon which vehicles travel at high speeds?
I can tell you what I’d do. I would first of all stop my vehicle before crossing and then — this is kind of important, not to mention a utilization of common sense — I would look both ways on the highway or runway to make sure there are no cars or big trucks or jets approaching from the right or left.
Short version: Even if there’s a green light telling you it’s okay to cross, you still make sure by looking both ways for rogue traffic.
Shorter version: I would use my effing eyeballs before crossing.
Apparently the LGA air-traffic controller screwed up by telling the fire truck he was good to cross runway #4, but the fire truck driver was a total fool.
Whatever happened to Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake? It was released by Sony Pictures Classics six or seven weeks ago — February 6, 2026 — and then more or less sank beneath the waves. Where is it? Has it vaporized into thin air? One of Cannes ‘25’s most celebrated films was blown off by the Academy, which apparently made SPC run for cover. At the very least this beautiful little film deserves to be Blurayed and streamed ASAP.
Brody shares some of the same observations that I mentioned last year, but his review really digs in…it’s more fully considered…plus the construction is smarter, better. Here’s the whole Brody piece, and here’s my favorite portion:
“It’s no surprise that the children’s frantic quest fosters a deep friendship. The pairing is an old one—the principled book-smart girl and the rough-edged streetwise boy—but Hadi revitalizes it with meticulous observation that links their struggles to those of the country at large. The children playing Lamia and Saeed had no training as actors, yet both are fanatically precise, effortlessly expressive, and pensively deep-hearted. The girl achieves perfect comic timing when she holds a recipe in one hand and her pet rooster in the other as it pecks at the paper.
