Bacon & God's Wrath (2015)

Several years ago, I tried to corrupt a Jehovah's Witness. She was in her 20s. I urged her to sneak out of her parents' house and register to vote. She didn't listen to me. I thought it must be nice being able to engage in a perfectly ordinary activity and feel that you've done something wildly sinful.

Watching a nine minute documentary on Fandor about Razie, a 90-year-old Jewish woman about to eat bacon for the first time.

The movie is an interview with Razie, illustrated with video, drawings and animation. She had been watching YouTube videos of Christopher Hitchens and it turned her atheist. I never really liked bacon but---I'm giving away the ending here---she thought it was "perfectly okay".

By the way, there's a YouTube video of Slavoj Žižek talking about the difference between faith and fundamentalism. He said that Anne Frank's statement, "...I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart," was a statement of faith. She acknowledged that she was going against all evidence. If you disagreed, she couldn't very well attack you for it since you would have facts on your side. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, simply deny there is any evidence against their views.

Razie had come to take Hitchens' view that all faith was like believing in the tooth fairy.

It seems like there's a trend now---the Jewish religion is being presented as less innocuous than it has in the past. Hassidic Jews are no longer portrayed as urban Amish. There was a movie, Holy Rollers, about Hassidic drug smugglers and Fading Gigolo with Woody Allen being targeted by armed Hassidic enforcers. Contrast that with a movie like A Stranger Among Us or old episodes of Barney Miller.

In this movie, Razie tells the story of how the rabbi rallied a mob against her grandmother and her grandmother's twin sister who had been seen doing something they weren't supposed to. The only way to calm the rabbi down was for the twin sister to be punished. Razie wouldn't say how, but an animation shows her tongue being cut out. The rabbi was later arrested for selling guns.

A film by Sol Freidman.

Fat, 2013

When I was a kid, I saw something on TV. They were talking about the warning signs of compulsive eating. I just googled it. The warning signs are different now and make a lot more sense. But back then, it was, "Do you eat one meal planning the next?" Well, yeah. Sure I did. It just seemed like common sense. But because of that, I walked around thinking I was a compulsive eater. Now the warning signs are binge eating, eating huge amounts when you're not hungry, inducing vomiting---stuff that's clearly abnormal.

I watched the 2013 film Fat. Mel Rodriquez plays Ken who is pleasant most of the time. But he's addicted to food. He's a physical wreck. We see all the meds he takes. He has a Sleep Apnea mask, takes blood pressure medication and medication for gout. His health gets worse as it goes on. His friend tells him he's starting to smell. He's fired from his job for lousy work ethic, watching porn on his computer and leering at female co-workers, although I'm not sure those things are weight-related. He's stalking an ex-girlfriend and has hacked into her email.

He hits on women and turns nasty when one says she has a boyfriend and he's insulted when his friend wants to introduce him to an overweight woman friend.

Written and directed by Mark Phinney based on his own experiences but I don't know how autobiographical it is.

Surprising amount of nudity considering. Reportedly filmed in Boston but I couldn't tell.

Available on Fandor.

A critical review

There's a short film on Fandor called "Who is on First". It has 3 stars out of 5. Made in 2005, produced by Nathan Zellner and directed by his brother David. 5 minutes long. Apparently available on YouTube as well.

Two people sitting in chairs for some reason in front of walls lined with baseball cards go through that terrible Abbott and Costello routine. Yes, I know. It's "classic". But it was stupid and contrived, people named "Who", "What" and "I Don't Know". If they were named Hu and Watt it would make sense, but why would a person be named "I Don't Know"?

Sesame Street made better use of that gag. Someone keeps telling Grover that he's looking at the letter "Y" but he thinks she's saying "Why".

The movie was done with Dragnet editing, cutting to a close-up of who ever's speaking. And it was done with Dragnet acting, where the actors read their lines neutrally.

But the editing wasn't fast enough. The movie just wasn't very good. If they had at least been standing or had some reason to be having this conversation in the first place it might have been better.

I always liked Dragnet. It made me feel like even I could be an actor. Just stand still and read your cue cards as fast as you can.

And movies like this are what intrigued me about film to begin with---that you can put very little effort into a very short film and it would be considered a major achievement. I read about a guy who became a major figure in art film by making a 30 to 90 second Super 8 film every year. Then I read about "one shot" art films----films shot in a single take. One guy pointed his camera across a highway. It was a sound movie, and it wasn't stereo, so there was suspense because you would hear a car approaching but you didn't know if it was coming from the left or right. Another film was a two minute shot of a rotating beer sign with a nature scene.

"Who is on First" starred Anthony Holsome and Se Young Min.

Maybe I shouldn't attack Anthony Weiner

There's really not much point in attacking a guy who EVERYONE is already attacking, although I am about the only one who keeps pointing out the unrelated fact that he's a Zionist. I think I'm seething with less hatred than others. I haven't speculated on what indignities await him in prison but I think I'd be more amused than other people if he turned fugitive.

Really though! Blubbing in court! Is two years really that bad? Palestinian children are treated far worse every day.



Republicans attack him as a typical Democrat and Democrats blame him for Trump's election. The FBI found Clinton's emails all over Weiner's laptop while investigating his sex crimes.

The girl he was sexting was trying to write a book about him. I'm not sure a book by a fifteen-year-old would have much chance, but you can self-publish anything now. I'd probably buy it on Kindle if she made it available.

In fact, since they're not publishing her name, anyone could write a book claiming to be a teenage girl who sexted with Weiner. When it's exposed as a hoax, just say it was satire.

A lot of convicts pass the time by writing. This would be a good chance for Weiner to write a self-pitying yet steamy sext memoir. His political career is over. He can't get a teaching job. He's not a lawyer like other Congressmen---his now-worthless degree was in Political Science. He had reportedly been looking for work in the restaurant business and I guess someone might hire him even though he'll be a registered sex offender when he gets out. Maybe writing books on sexting would be a good career for him. How-to books are always big.

Start with a sexting book. Then a memoir about sexting rehab. Then a book about sexting relapse and more sexting. Later, he could write a thriller about a handsome young congressman who uses his sexting prowess to thwart a terror plot on Capitol Hill.

Weiner sentenced to 21 months

 
Sinewy Zionist pedophile Anthony Weiner blubbed in court, sitting with his face in his hands, as he was sentenced to a modest 21 months in prison for sending obscene material to an innocent young shiksa. The girl had reported him when she found out he was two-timing her, also sexting a grown woman.

Weiner's lawyer argued that he should get probation because it was sexting he was into, not underage girls.

He has until November 6th to turn himself in, so he can still make a run for it if he wants.

I'm hoping he gets his fellow Zionist sex offender and Sharknado "actor" Jared Fogle as a cellmate.

Weiner either trying to cry or trying not to cry or maybe trying to look intelligent as he walks into court.

A psychiatric report on Martin Shkreli?

Someone requested a psychiatric report on Martin Shkreli as he sits in jail. No word on who requested it or whether they're going to do it.

One of the witnesses in the trial said that he had been depressed, but that was because his hedge fund fell apart and he found he owed Merril Lynch $10 million, so it wasn't a sign of mental illness. Another said he was mentally unstable because he kept lying to his clients after he lost all their money, but Madoff did the same thing in order to pass himself off as a genius.

I suppose a psychiatrist could figure out if he was a psychopath. I'd kind of like to know what the hell's wrong with him.

Anthony Weiner to be sentenced Monday

It won't be long now. Traitorous New York Zionist Anthony Weiner will be sentenced Monday for molesting a 15-year-old shiksa online. Prosecutors want him to get 21 to 27 months in prison.

I don't like that guy, but I'll probably feel a little bad about it when he's sent to prison. Then I'll feel bad when they let him out.

He's got one day left to flee the country. He could still make aliyah and flee to the Holy Land. His wife and son are Muslim and wouldn't be allowed in, of course.

Dotard

I'm surprised people had to look up the word "dotard" after Kim Jong Un called Donald Trump one.

But the only other time I've heard it was watching The Seven Samurai. When the samurai arrive at the village, Toshiro Mifune raises a false alarm to bring the farmers out of hiding. He yells at them for a minute then says to the town elder, "Any objections, dotard?"

I had a little better context to get its meaning.

Violent movie children

There was a low budget movie about murderous feral children in the woods around a small town. It ends with the children's parents killing them all. It was a cartoonish horror movie and I was surprised the child actors were able to keep from smiling as they were killed in horrible ways.

But, at Cannes, a large audience was in a theater to see another Troma Team film. They showed the preview to the feral children movie and the entire audience walked out in disgust. The filmmakers had become so warped making their crappy horror movies that they had no idea they had gone too far.

During the making of the feral children movie, the filmmakers tried to shield the child actors from the violence and gore effects, but the kids loved that stuff and wanted to see it.

Didn't Henry Thomas from E.T. say that he went into acting because he wanted to be in Star Wars movies? I saw an early interview with poor Corey Haim who said his dream was to play Rambo's son who would help his Dad kill people.

I listened to the commentary on the DVD for Swoon, a New Gay Cinema film about Leopold and Loeb. The director tried to treat the kid playing murder victim Bobby Frank very gently, but the kid wanted them to be more violent and called for more fake blood while his mother stood back smoking a cigarette.

Anyway, I bring it up because Nolan Gould killing a man in a Civil War movie was deeply disturbing to any right-minded adult but was probably one of his happiest moments as an actor. For a brief instant, he was an action star.

Field of Lost Shoes

See how cute he is when he's killing a man.

I've posted a couple of things about Nolan Gould on here so I watched a 2014 Civil War movie in which he played a supporting role. Field of Lost Shoes is about a real incident where cadets from the Virginia Military Institute took part in a Civil War battle. It shows them killing U.S. troops---Nolan Gould stabs a man in the back with a bayonet---but we're supposed to feel bad that four cadets got killed. I say good riddance to them.

I haven't seen any of the other recent Civil War movies so I don't know how they compare. This one was reportedly low budget and it shows.

The cadets in this thing are upper-class pro-Confederate Southerners, but they're opposed to slavery and go around helping black people. It reminded me of those World War Two movies from the '60's and '70's where the Nazis all secretly hate Hitler and are only fighting out of devotion to the Fatherland. The most revolting example was The Eagle Has Landed. Michael Caine plays a Nazi who rescues a Jewish girl from other, less virtuous Nazis before going on a mission to kidnap Winston Churchill.

Heaven's Gate

David Letterman was doing a bit long ago. They had new state flags. The one for Wyoming was a map of the state with a little picture of every person who lived there.

More recently, there was an ambitious young woman who thought that becoming Miss America would be her key to success. She moved to Wyoming and it worked. The population was so small and there was so little competition that she became Miss Wyoming and was first runner-up in the Miss America pageant.

So why are there so many people in Heaven's Gate? Cheyenne looks like New York or Hong Kong, packed with people, hundreds of extras all in costume bustling around. 

The movie was a critical and commercial failure when it came out, but I've heard that people are reassessing it. It's about the Johnson County War in 1892. It's pretty slow. Starts with the a few of the middle aged stars playing college boys graduating from Harvard twenty years earlier. Includes a big scene of a large number of people waltzing in a large open area. It looked impressive, but where was the music coming from and how they could hear it out there? I don't think it would work now with modern amplification.

It's a long movie, 3 hours and 37 minutes. Critics hated it, but some of the attacks on it were for things that were historically accurate. Roger Ebert thought it was ridiculous that a guy who wrote a last note before being killed while trapped in a burning cabin signed it with his full name. But that happened. If you're about to be murdered and you write a note that might be used as evidence, you probably should sign your full name.

Right-wing talk show host Michael Medved and his less-successful half-brother Harry attacked the movie as anti-American because, when the cavalry arrives in the end, it's to save the villains. This, too, was historically accurate.

The movie cost a fortune, $40 million, equal to $140 million in todays dollars. It looked great, but Michael Cimino was no David Lean. It wasn't Lawrence of Arabia. It wasn't gripping. It was long and it seemed long.

The Lone Ranger cost $215 million and The Wild Wild West cost $170 million, so even adjusting for inflation it wasn't the most expensive western ever made.

Like The Lone Ranger, Europeans liked Heaven's Gate better than Americans. I've never understood why westerns are so popular outside the U.S. Stalin liked them and the Dalai Lama still says John Wayne is his favorite actor.

I kept trying to picture it as a Werner Herzog movie.

Now available on Fandor.

Jeffrey St.Clair's review of Hillary Clinton's What Happened

Read the whole thing here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/15/hillary-happened/ 

Notice the lack of a question mark in the title. This is a telling punctuational elision. It signals that this text will not be an investigation into the dynamics behind the most perplexing election in American history.   Don’t skim these pages in search of a self-lacerating confession or an apologia. What Happened reads more like a drive-by shooting rampage. The book is a score-settling scattershot rant, enfilading anyone who stood in Clinton’s way, from Bernie Sanders to James Comey. Amid Hillary’s hitlist of villains, even toothless Joe Biden gets gut-shot. 

There are, naturally, two ways of interpreting the results of the 2016 elections pitting the two most unappetizing candidates in American history against each: either Trump found some way to defeat Hillary or, more probably, Hillary managed to lose to Trump. But Hillary’s psyche can’t swallow either scenario. So, she endeavors to create a mystery where there is none. The outcome was so inexplicable, she reasons, that there must be some hidden mechanism at work: Russian hacking, press bias, left betrayal, FBI sabotage. Clinton summons a lineup of the possible suspects: Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, the New York Times, CNN, and Jim Comey. Alas, Hillary and her ghost-writer are not John LeCarré. She can’t spin a coherent and plausible cyber-spy yarn, in part because Clinton keeps getting sidetracked by a compulsion to wash her own hands of any culpability in blowing the election. 

...

Of course, Hillary Clinton has never been able to conceal her contempt for her enemies, real and imagined. It’s one reason she’s never been a successful politician. Where others are supple, she is taut. Unlike Bill, Hillary is a prolific, but graceless and transparent liar. She is also probably the nastiest political figure in America since Nixon. Yet she lacked Nixon’s Machiavellian genius for political manipulation.... 

Martin Shkreli bail revoked

Imagine that guy as your cellmate.

Just for offering thousands of dollars for someone rip out a handful of Hillary Clinton's hair

Shkreli's bail has been revoked after he posted on Facebook a couple of times offering $5,000 per hair anyone could manage to get from Hillary Clinton.

When he repeated the offer, he wrote: “$5,000 but the hair has to include a follicle. Do not assault anyone for any reason ever (LOLIBERALS).”

According to the NY Times:

“Stupid doesn’t make you violent,” Mr. Brafman said, adding that his client’s Facebook posts had shown “immaturity, satire, a warped sense of humor.”

But Judge Matsumoto was unmoved.

“What is funny about that?” she responded. “He doesn’t know who his followers are.”

 ...

Mr. Shkreli, dressed in a lavender button-down shirt, was animated for much of the hearing, as he had been throughout his trial. But his behavior changed when Judge Matsumoto said that she had decided to jail him, and he sat quietly at the defense table for the rest of the hearing.

After the hearing, two deputy United States marshals led Mr. Shkreli to a holding cell adjoining the courtroom. He will be held at a federal jail in Brooklyn.

The Marx Brothers, all five.

From left to right, Gummo, Zeppo, Chico, Groucho and Harpo.

Poor wretch who looks like Martin Shkreli

My mother was watching a movie about Steve Prefontaine. She thought it might have been filmed at the University of Oregon because the track in one scene looked a lot like the one at UO.

"It either is or it isn't," I said. "If it doesn't look exactly like it in every way, it's not it."

And it's like this with people. There was a documentary about a bland-looking mass murderer on the run from police. They found a guy who looked just like him. Enough so that his neighbor thought it was him. But the FBI agent said no, his nose was slightly different, and fingerprints showed he was another guy who was long known to police.

And now...now some poor wretch in New York is being threatened by strangers because he looks vaguely like Martin Shkreli.

I'd say he looks as much like Shkreli as James Coburn looked like Lee Marvin. As John Travolta looked like Lilly Tomlin. As Don Knotts looked like Jimmy Carter.

By the way, if you're ever out in public with someone and you see someone who looks like them, don't point it out to them. Don't say "There's someone who looks just like you!" I've seen it happen. No one is ever flattered by this.

I worked a job where everyone called me by the wrong name. They finally told me I looked exactly like a guy who worked another shift. I finally got a look at the guy and was terribly hurt.

I was watching Jaws 2 and my friends pointed to an extra who they said looked exactly like me. Later they showed me a picture of a elderly Chinese guy photographed in the 1930s who they said looked like me, then a picture of a then-recently deceased Lebanese phalangist.

So imagine this poor devil walking around looking like Martin Shkreli. There are pictures of him. I don't think he looks enough like him to fool anyone unless they have some degree of face blindness.

Otto Preminger's Skidoo, 1968

Cesar Romero and Arnold Stang look on as Jackie Gleason smacks Frankie Avalon

It was just awful. A big budget comedy made by a bullying director with no sense of humor.

I had heard different things about it---that it was a popular and critical failure when it came out but that people had reassessed it. And I found the idea of Jackie Gleason with a gun appealing for some reason.

The plot was rather disjointed. Jackie Gleason is a retired mafia hitman living with his wife, (Carol Channing), and hanging around with a former mob associate (Arnold Stang). He is upset that his daughter is hanging around with hippies. Cesar Romero and Frankie Avalon bring him a message from the mob boss known as "God" (Groucho Marx) who wants him to come out of retirement to murder Mickey Rooney who is in prison and will testify about the mafia before a congressional committee.

Gleason eventually agrees to do it.

Carol Channing disrobes in Frankie Avalon's bachelor pad.

47-year-old Carol Channing appears in underwear that's not entirely opaque. She invited the hippies to stay at their house with her and Gleason. Both Channing and her daughter are trying to find Jackie Gleason who has slipped into prison to kill Rooney.

In prison, Gleason borrows his new cellmate's stationary, licks the envelope and is then told it's laced with LSD.

 

Roger Ebert once observed that no good movie has ever been made with a hot air balloon and this is no exception.

With Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin, and George Raft who, along with Cesar Romero and Preminger himself, had been special guest villains on Batman.

With Slim Pickins as a prison switchboard operator, Peter Lawford as a congressional committee chair. Harry Nilsson, who did the music, as a prison guard.

Carol Channing sings "Skidoo"

At one point it turns into a musical as Carol Channing sings the movie theme song, "Skidoo" as hippies raid a boat that, in real life, was owned by John Wayne.

Groucho Marx smoking marijuana.

Groucho seemed to be in pretty good shape but his talents were wasted in the role. He reportedly dropped acid in preparation for it and found it a pleasant experience so at least he got that out of it.

With Michael Constatine (the principal from Room 222) as a serial rapist sharing a cell with Jackie Gleason. They had the good taste to leave him behind when they escape.

Hippie dialog by Rob Reiner (uncredited).

Preminger was known for abusing and bullying actors. He did this to Groucho Marx and Jackie Gleason threatened him if he tried it on him.

But it was just awful. Not one funny thing. They murder Arnold Stang. There were hippie women wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and body paint in the presence of hippie children, which they couldn't film today. I hope Cesar Romero wasn't there when Gleason referred to a hippie as a "faggot".

Trump, Clinton, global warming and so forth

How long has Trump been president? I know he's a monster. I've hated him for as long as I've known of his existence. But since he's been elected, it's only been in the last couple of weeks that I've stopped seeing criticism of Trump as support for Hillary Clinton.

This may be the result of being forced to listen to hours and hours of MSNBC. With them, it probably is nothing but support for Clinton. They hate Sanders (now the most popular politician in the country) even though he campaigned for Clinton (who is now even less popular than Trump). All they do is drone on about Russia because it lets them attack Trump without opposing his policies or being in any way progressive.

Clinton was and is horrible. She may have been the lesser evil, but it's hard to tell. Her only campaign promise was to parlay the war in Syria into World War Three. On global warming, Trump still doesn't believe in it, or he pretends not to, and is doing all he can to accelerate it. But he did end the Trans Pacific Partnership that would have made it impossible for countries to impose new regulations that might slow it down.

Who do you think is adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, North or South Korea? Living standards in North Korea are probably the best we can hope for without wrecking the planet. We should be on their side.

I sit around with my family and their friends. They talk about how terrible global warming is and how much worse it will get, but then they put down Russia for not being richer and they ridicule Communist countries for not emitting enough carbon gases. They think they're doing their part because one of them has a Prius, but then talk about all the places travel by air.

Portland's Taco Festival

I didn't go to it. I just read about it.

People never visualize failure. Some people don't anyway. I always do.

You might also visualize people thinking you're racist.

There was just a disastrous "Taco Festival" in Portland, Oregon. I knew nothing about it until I read this online from the Oregonian:
 

In a statement, the Portland Taco Festival's Colorado-based organizers blamed a lack of signage and infrastructure problems for some of Saturday's problems, which included heat, long lines and a what appeared to be a limited number of vendors actually serving tacos at the festival, held at North Portland horse racing track Portland Meadows.

...

The event was first announced in early summer, not long after controversy erupted around Kooks Burritos, a breakfast burrito food cart run by two white women who claimed to have learned their tortilla recipe by "peeking into windows" of restaurants in Puerto Nuevo, Mexico. The festival drew similar criticism out of the gate for its broad depictions of Mexican culture, including a "chihuahua beauty contest" and attendees posing in lucha libre masks.

"The Portland Taco Festival ads plastered with hipsters posing behind hard shell taco cutouts and white boys donning Lucha Libre masks are just another example of the Pacific Northwest's tone-deaf, casual racism," Latino-focused digital media company Mitú argued in a recent post.


...

But that was nothing compared to the social media maelstrom that started during the festival's first day. Facebook posts and tweets by the hundreds warned that the festival was not going as advertised, with high entry and parking fees leading to only a handful of taco carts, some of which reportedly sold out after just 90 minutes. The chaos drew comparisons to Fyre Festival, the luxury music and lifestyle event from rapper Ja Rule that was canceled after attendees arrived in the Bahamas to find a festival in disarray.

"Where were the tacos?" Facebook user Joe Dabrowski wrote in a typical post. "I saw Greek, BBQ, fried chicken, icecream but only 4 taco trucks at the taco fest!?!?!? On top of that half the places didn't have power for hours, there were no trash cans and the DJ sucked."

"We went to this festival on Saturday, August 26th and left within 30 minutes," Richa Khandelwal wrote in an email. "There were several things wrong with it. There were only 5 food trucks with 2 hours wait, additional charges for parking when advertised for free, bathrooms not adequately supplied with toilet paper, ran out of water, food trucks losing power supply, ran out of food etc.

Don't use psychics in documentaries

When I was a kid, I went to a Bigfoot "documentary". At one point, they proved the existence of Bigfoot with a visit to a French psychic. They talked to the French guy about Bigfoot, then they showed him a box. They didn't tell him what was inside, but they wanted his psychic impressions of its contents. He said he saw a big hairy apeman who lives in the woods. The opened the box and inside was a plaster cast of a Bigfoot footprint!

That was better than the one in a UFO documentary. A psychic was in communication with a space alien. His name was pronounced "krill", but it was spelled Crylll. Three L's. And they have the equivalent of a letter C and...why am I trying to debunk this idiocy.

So I watched a documentary about Robert William Fisher who is on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list having murdered his wife and two children before blowing up their house in Scottsdale, Arizona. He fled in his wife's car.

The documentary seemed fairly conservative. When people gave their opinions they were careful to explain that they were opinions and they could be wrong.

Then they brought in a stinkin' psychic. She said he lives near a beach in a house made of wood, not stucco, and he has a new wife and son.

Why do they do that?

Kate Middleton topless outrage

So all you have to do is marry an inbred "British" prince, flounce around topless and if anyone takes your picture you get €103,000 ($122,700).

Kate Middleton and her idiot husband won their lawsuit against a French magazine for publishing pictures of them lounging around half naked.

William was really losing his hair.

Hollywood's first male sex symbol

You know Sessue Hayakawa who played Colonel Saito in Bridge on the River Kwai? Did you know he was a major silent film star, one of the highest paid in Hollywood? Thomas Ince put him in Wrath of the Gods and The Typhoon, in 1914.

Cecil B DeMille made sex movies before moving on to religious epics. In 1915, Hayakawa starred in DeMille's The Cheat, which made him a Valentino-like superstar. According to his biography on imdb.com, "He played an ivory merchant who has an affair with the Caucasian Fannie Ward, and audiences were 'scandalized' when he branded her as a symbol of her submission to their passion. The movie was a blockbuster for Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount), turning Hayakawa into a romantic idol for millions of American women, regardless of their race."
 
He also started his own company making movies aimed at Asian-American audiences. His popularity waned in the '20s with the wave of anti-Asian racism and he spoke with a strong Japanese accent which hurt his career in the sound era.

Fyre Festival forced into bankruptcy

Fyre Festival ladies.

The company that owned the Fyre Festival has been forced into bankruptcy. A couple of the investors got a judge to order this. I don't know what the advantage is for them, but it must be a good thing.

Billy McFarland has reportedly been trying to get a plea deal on the criminal charges against him.

As you enter into any sort of business enterprise, always keep in mind the years you might spend behind bars when things go wrong. Martin Shkreli seems freakishly cheerful about it. But look at the movie Save the Tiger. Jack Lemmon and Jack Gilford face serious consequences as their business fails.
 
Some time back---I don't remember what it was about---was it a tobacco industry guy? A wealthy executive got drummed out of the business for doing the right thing about something, I don't remember what. But now he was reduced to living in a relatively inexpensive apartment and working as a teacher. The guy lived better than a lot of us but we were supposed to feel bad that he wasn't rich anymore.

"I have to drive a Chevrolet."

Billy McFarland will be just fine. He'll spiral into decline, end up working for minimum wage. His new co-workers won't hold his crimes against him. His main victims were the fabulously wealthy and the good-looking.

Shelley Berman RIP

 
It was true what he said. People who like buttermilk really like buttermilk. When they drink it, you do feel like you shouldn't be watching.

Actor/comedian Shelley Berman has died at age 92. A comedian known for doing long, one sided phone conversations. He was mad at Bob Newhart, claiming he stole his act. Newhart pointed out that it had been done for years before Berman started doing it.

I used to listen to my parents' old Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart records. They weren't that similar.

Berman had gone into acting and was part of an improv group. But there was a thing he wanted to do and he couldn't get anyone to perform it with him, so he had to do it alone and the only way he could think of to do it was as a phone conversation.

I was surprised to see him playing Larry David's father on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Look him up on imdb.com. He's done a lot of TV over the years. His last credit was Hawaii Five-O in 2012.

You can hear a long interview with him on Marc Maron's podcast here.