It’s not in the movie, but in the book Gumb is obsessed with the mother who abandoned him. She was a runner-up for Miss Something-or-Other and may have gone on to be in Corman-esque nudie films. Harris draws a pretty straight line from this fixation to Gumb deciding “well, what if I was a woman”.

Oh boy, Benny Shaps finally gonna get to make a movie out of his terrible screenplay turned terrible novel, True Allegiance. He’s probably going to cast himself as the hero “Brett Hawthorne” and Carano as his wife. He’s going to need to stand on a box to kiss her.

I used to use horse conditioner when I had long hair, but like, I knew it was for horses. I didn’t suddenly realize months later that the product called “Mane & Tail”, which came in larger bottles than anyone who wasn’t Crystal Gale could possibly need and which had a picture of a horse on it, was for horses, then…

My sister works in the music industry and has known him for a long time; he offered her (and the friends she lived with at the time) to stay in his house (yes, that house) during the LAPD/King riots and lent her his car when someone T-boned her and totaled her car. That’s just one anecdote and not definitive proof of…

I’m pretty sure it started as a way for Hubbard to make boatloads of cash and not pay taxes on any of it. He did start drinking his own Kool-Aid at some point though; in Going Clear a former Scientologist relates a story about how Hubbard was convinced he had a “body Thetan” so strong that he wanted this guy, who was…

My brother has halfway believed we’re in the Matrix since Anthony Weiner’s career imploded. “A guy named Weiner can’t stop sending dick pics? C’mon.”

A couple Christmases ago my brother gave me and our other siblings DVDs of bad movies from our Gen X childhood, which is how I saw the 1979 version of The Amityville Horror for the first time since the mid-‘80s. I seriously thought Steiger was going to have a stroke in the scene where he’s trying to convince his…

Alan Rickman makes this movie worth it, especially the scene where they’re on a stake-out and he pulls out all the snacks he brought, like gourmet salami and Little Debbie and multiple bottles of wine. I don’t even remember how his character gets involved in the investigation--isn’t he an artist?--but I remember him…

I finished The Mandalorian but I’m keeping the Disney+ subscription for another month, so I decided to watch some of the MCU stuff. Not that I’ve never seen any of it, but I’m a casual viewer at best (first Iron Man, first Avengers, Black Panther... Deadpool is technically part of the MCU, right?). Picked Captain…

Frank Grillo: Yay!

It was good, provided you aren’t only reading it a Harriet the Spy superfan. Only because it wasn’t a huge part of her life—she was in her mid-30s when she wrote it and only lived to be 46. Originally she was a painter and an illustrator. But she certainly had an interesting life.

Currently reading We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper. Audio is Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, the first time a woman has translated it into English, read by Claire Danes.

I finally got around to watching A Wilderness of Error. Which, for the record, didn’t do a damn thing to change my mind about Jeffrey MacDonald’s guilt. But then I thought it would be fun to watch the old NBC mini-series of Fatal Vision with Karl Malden and a baby Gary Cole (something something TPS reports), which I…

‘60s girl groups are one of my absolute favorite musical genres, so that’s something I struggle with every time I throw on a record. It helps to know that without talented singers, musicians, and songwriters, he wouldn’t have had anything to work with.

I first noticed Kim way back in Angel, where he was one of the lawyers for Wolfram & Hart, the literally demonic law firm. I wish I could remember who said it, but someone in a TV review once said (please make allowances for imperfect memory) he was so handsome, his face looked like it had been designed by a CAD…

Given the entire history of Trump’s business dealings, Roodles should have seen that one coming a mile away. (Maybe the hair was running into his eyes.)

I don’t agree, but the chapter about Hudson Hawk in With Nails justifies the purchase price of the entire book.

The episode about Amy Winehouse was where I checked out. I had been having trouble with the seemingly gleeful way he related violence against women, but presenting Winehouse’s dying thoughts as fact was a solid “No thank you to any of this” moment for me.

The good news is that the Centers For Disease Control “says small rodents like squirrels are almost never found to have rabies”

I take it from the glowstick he’s waving around that this was one of those cringey Star Wars rip-offs.