Trump supporter Mitch Albom

Elderly sports writer Mitch Albom lashed out at football players who don't want to go to the White House to meet Donald Trump.

Albom is also the author of Tuesdays with Morrie and some semi-religious stuff.

The aging millionaire wrote:

But these days, few people just go about their business. Not when a statement can be made. So even though a dated invitation has yet to be made, some Patriots felt compelled to tell their fans how repugnant the idea was to them

It is surely their right to do so as Americans

It is also rude.

No one is asking them to endorse a candidate. And taking a photo with your nation’s elected leader doesn’t mean you surrender your right to disagree with every single thing he does. That’s the beauty of America. In fact, the visit may give you a rare chance to express your views to the leader himself.

He writes in the short simple sentences favored by simple-minded rubes who go for that kind of crap.

Well, I for one am glad that he wrote this.

If an elderly relative ever tries to make ME watch Tuesdays with Morrie or The Five People You Meet in Heaven, I'll tell them the books were written by a dirty stinkin' Trump supporter.

Someone who looks like Hitler

Austrian police are looking for a suspect in the crime of looking like Hitler. He's been seen lurking about Braunau, Austria, where Hitler was born. They say he dressed like Hitler, but I'm not sure what that means. Glorifying Nazism is a crime in Austria.

Yes, dressing like Hitler SHOULD be a crime.

After World War Two, it was suspected that Hitler was still alive. There were thousands of Hitler sightings reported to the FBI. There must be lots of people who look like Hitler. It would be terribly humiliating for the poor wretch in this case if he isn't doing it on purpose.

Michael Cera (left) looks like Hitler's mother.

There was the movie Sherman's March. The filmmaker hears that Burt Reynolds is in town filming a movie. He goes to the hotel where Burt is staying. Then he spots him! Burt Reynolds! He goes to talk to him. Burt Reynolds tries to hide in a phone booth. The filmmaker talks to him and discovers it's just a local who looks like Burt Reynolds who came down with a vague idea of being hired as a double. 

So, I really have nothing to say about it. I just hope they catch that son-of-a-Hündin.

Trompie

Trompie lying to his horrible South African father.

Watched a South African children's movie from the 1970s called Trompie. Based on a South African children's book series about a South African tween who's always into mischief and then lies through his teeth about it. I was uncharmed, but it was probably one of the less offensive Apartheid-era South African movies I've seen. It was almost all White which either let it avoid the issue of racism or made it even more racist, depending on how you look at it. It showed only care-free petit bourgeois youth, but it still made the place look like a hell hole.

I kind of understand parents now who are infuriated by their kids lying to them.
 
There are other movies based on the same series on YouTube.

Afrikaans is an ugly language, but I hear it has extremely simple grammar. If you want to learn it, all you do is memorize a list of words and you're done.

The way South African cavalry were ordered to mount their horses was "Grappen on der beests!" If you can understand the Katzenjammer Kids, you're already halfway there.

Trompie (left) and friends lie to the minister of their
racist South African church after stealing his baboon.

The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne

An interesting documentary about then-80-year-old jewel thief Doris Payne on trial at the time for stealing a ring from Macy's. It goes over her long life of crime. I'm not sure what people think of when they hear "jewel thief'", but she was more shoplifter than cat burglar and had to overcome racism to succeed in this challenging field.

Payne cites racism as her reason for going into jewel theft. As a teenager, her mother took her to buy a watch. The jewelry store owner was very kind until a white customer came in and he wanted her out of there quick but forgot she was still wearing the watch she had tried on. Later, she says she wanted to be a ballerina but was told she couldn't because there were no Black ballerinas.

The second story seems less plausible since she didn't mention having ever studied ballet or having any interest in it.

She's been arrested a couple of times since the movie came out. She probably shouldn't have been involved in the documentary if she was going to continue with her career. It was noted in the movie that times have changed. They have better security than they used to. She kept escaping from jail when she was younger, but at this stage, all she's going to do is rot in prison.

It shows the importance of saving for retirement and paying into Social Security no matter what your job.

Available on Fandor.

Binge watching Arrested Development

 
Arrested Development gets old fast when you're binge watching. It's almost as if they intended viewers to see only one episode a week.

Each character has only one trait which wasn't that funny to begin with. The show went off the air for a few years until Netflix brought it back. Michael Cera didn't age well. It's always a problem with young actors--you never know what they're going to look like in a few years--but it came as a surprise to me in his case.

I don't entirely understand this thing where sitcoms are made to look like documentaries. On Modern Family, who's supposed to be interviewing the characters and why? Arrested Development was supposed to be in a documentary style, like a typical "reality" show about rich people who don't deserve to be rich. So how do they have an omniscient narrator who's able to show flashbacks to their childhoods?

But it's a lot better than the old three-camera sit-coms. Norman Lear said he thought of episodes of All in the Family as one-act plays.

Littlerock (2010)

The movie Littlerock (2010) took me back to my youth. I'd get in a car with some friends and soon discover that they were taking me to see some of their other friends who were scumbags I wanted nothing to do with. They took me to a guy's house without telling me that they intended to hang around there all day. This was their last chance to see him because he was running away from home, heading for Tennessee. He had slashed his neighbors' tires in anticipation of the trip and told about conversations he had with his probation officer.

I don't know why he wanted to go to Tennessee. Did he think juvenile prisons were nicer there? I can't imagine anyone thinking I'd want to hang around this moron's house for hours on end.

Littlerock was about a brother and sister from Japan visiting the United States. Their rental car breaks down and they're briefly stranded in the town of Littlerock, California. They start hanging around with local riffraff. The sister, who speaks no English, wants to stay there with her wonderful new friends. The brother leaves her to go to San Francisco.

She spends a couple days there. There's an aspiring actor/model being threatened by a local thug he owes money to. They ride around on bikes. They drink beer, smoke cigarettes and smoke something else, I'm not sure what. She eats her first TV dinner.

The movie was pretty good, but I sat there wondering what the girl saw in these people.

Available on Fandor

Ronan Farrow's at it again

Ronan Farrow

Ronan Farrow is again hinting that Frank Sinatra was his father.

I've known people who've gone through life not knowing who their fathers were. They didn't joke about it. It's rather perverse that Ronan Farrow wants to keep rumors going about his mother's sex life.

When he was in his 70's, Frank Sinatra began forgetting the lyrics to songs he had been singing for decades. The guy wasn't known for brains to begin with and he was a functioning alcoholic.

Woody Allen, on the other hand, is still making a movie a year in his 80's. His father was still working at age 90 and was 100-years-old when he died. His mother was nearly 100 when she died.

I hope Sinatra was Ronan Farrow's father! He deserves early-onset senile dementia and a predisposition to alcoholism! Sinatra had terrible genes.

But we know Ronan Farrow's date of birth and we know where Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra were nine months earlier. Farrow was filming the movie September in Connecticut and Sinatra was with his wife in Las Vegas where he was performing.

Poor Ronan Farrow. He's pushing 30. Nancy and Frank Sinatra, Jr, were far more successful at his age, so if he is Frank's spawn, he's the pitiful failure of the family. If he didn't launch attacks on Woody Allen every year and hint that his mother was a whore who secretly flew cross-country to sleep with an elderly married man, no one would know or care anything about him.