I feel like we’ve gone quite a few rounds of “this guy is unfortunately not the guy you want him to be,” and it never really sticks.

When you find that your dialog is rattling off the four names you’ve given a character to remind everyone they’re all the same guy, your lore may be too dense. Possibly.

It is, of course, true. And the bit after it, which is about rainbows being announced on the PA system, is also true.

Whatever will we do if billionaires start trying to figure out ways to avoid paying taxes, we should definitely not anger them so that they will continue their long track record of willingly paying their fair share

The things I rediscover while working on 50 Wonderful Things for the year.

I personally think his best roles are the ones that lean into the fact that he’s got a bit of d-bag energy in the best of circumstances. My single favorite performance of his in many ways is “Lady Bird.” Just such an amazing portrayal of a brutally disappointing teenage boy.

Gotta get on these thieves’ tails and claw back the money they lost.

Passersby are “unreliable”? You mean they don’t voluntarily take time out of whatever they’re doing to go up to a car that’s not theirs, that is probably tracking everything that happens, and fix the unanticipated problem of the door being left open?

Zoiks. That’s real bad.

Coincidentally, my IG stories today (@lindaholmes97) are all about my long history of seeing Glen Hansard (guitared beardy here) perform. It is a pleasure everyone should have.

Minnesota! I am obsessed with how adorable this dog is. He is still available for some reason. And you can trust John. Please consider bringing The Professor into your family so that you can supply me with pictures of him forever.

I enjoyed SONG SUNG BLUE early, when it was an offbeat love story about two middle-aged midwestern dorks (complimentary). But then it goes in more conventional movie-like directions, which are in fairness true to real life, and it gets less interesting. Which is not really fair! But it happened.

At the end of a hard year, I give myself the best gift of all: a sweatshirt with my dog’s face on it.

I feel so bad about all the things I didn’t get around to reading or hearing or seeing this year. It has been a really challenging time, and I’ve been pretty turtled up for a lot of it. I’m doing my best to get out of that, but I’ve mostly been trying to stay afloat. I want to see more things.

Delightful.

If I had to analyze this statement and make a guess about what is most likely to have people incandescent with rage, I would pick the deployment of the phrase “this is 60 Minutes.”

Imagine if just by refusing to comment, you could stop any story from running. You would literally never find out anything unflattering about anybody. It amounts to asking people for their blessing to publish your reporting about them.

I tried really hard to like IS THIS THING ON, but when Will Arnett’s first stage appearance outside of open mics had him appearing between Sam Jay and Dave Attell, it kind of clicked for me that he movie is in fact the middle-aged dude fantasy it very much wants not to be.

More of this kind of rich person, please.

I mean. He’s basically acting exactly how he acts on Shark Tank and every other time he’s on television. The beats are identical.

No news story has ever made me feel older. People insisted this morning that it was probably rigged, and now I’m trying to figure out whether a prank-show dude would voluntarily let his jaw get needs-surgery broken, and then I think maybe, and mostly I don’t understand why *anyone* watched this.

I am far from the first person to point it out, but I think I will not be tuning in for a discussion of God sponsored by a bank.

It is hilarious that people managed to confidently say “there is no point in objecting to this” in the few hours between when the initial rules were announced and when they were taken back because people didn’t sit there limply insisting there was nothing to be done. Looks good on you, goobers.

Brian hopes that today, somebody put an arm around you and told you that you are good.

This is actually quite upsetting to me. If you’ve pursued somebody for years to license their IP and they’ve said no, the decent thing to do is leave them alone.

This is potentially devastating for so many families and for so many kids, including people I know and love. I'm just sick at heart over it.

Many things are terrible, but Glen and I both like Sexy Hockey Show. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...

Note: I deleted a thread about an anonymously sourced piece about the Reiner’s, because I think I have a theory about the sourcing and I don’t want to make it worse.

I really wish I could share with you all the full list of @ghweldon.bsky.social brainstorms for HEATED RIVALRY episode titles, but I cannot. I can only tell you that I treasure them and hold them close to my heart. (We both like the show.)

I really feel like it was more than this. I’m pretty sure everybody who follows me thinks it was more than this.

I guess “kissed Timothee Chalamet” is one way to describe the scene yes

Adapting a deeply personal story in a way that makes the person who wrote it experience it all over again is a real kindness and a small miracle. There's been a lot of pain adjacent to this film, a lot of sad stories that touch it. But Reiner seems to have done his part with great kindness.

So the new Spielberg summer movie is … terrifying and upsetting? Okay.

I think anybody who reads Reddit has seen randos be too eager to tell other people (strangers) to cut off family members or friends quite casually over ordinary conflict. But that’s a foundational rando problem. That is VERY VERY different from believing people are actually *doing* it casually.

There is a moment in this clip that broke my heart. She says, “They’re not deranged or crazed. What they—“ And then she hesitates, and I think you can see her decide not to say either “what they are” or “what they were” in a flash. So she says “What they’ve always been…” and continues.

As someone just pointed out to me, perhaps a top contender in the annals of “It Only Tuesday” Tuesdays. theonion.com/it-only-tues...

From last night: My remembrance of Rob Reiner, who was, not for nothing, one of the great American directors of romance.

By the way, I’m pretty sure the Parks & Rec scene that inspired the Schur line in this piece was Tom Haverford talking about apps and zerts.

I said roughly ten percent of the things I could have said about Rob Reiner.

My internet has been out all day, and Comcast has provided a rolling estimate of when it will be resolved, which is always coincidentally "three hours from now." Or three hours from when they declared the outage, but then they just declare a new outage and start the three hours again. It is absurd.

This scene has such a wonderful little theater joke buried in its music. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJKQ...

I have just realized that Moonlighting premiered two days after The Sure Thing opened in theaters. So if you want to know what happened to me romcom-wise, it was March 1985. March 1985 is what happened.

One of the truly great, truly iconic openings-up of verse into chorus.

I so wish THE SURE THING were streaming somewhere, because I can tell from some of the very appreciative posts about Rob Reiner that a lot of people don’t know it. I’m not sure what happened to it rights-wise, but it’s a real shame.

I can’t gather all my Rob Reiner thoughts at this point in the evening, but my very first favorite grown-up movie that was My Favorite Movie, like I went around telling people for years that it was, was THE SURE THING in 1985. A very big part of the romcom switch being flipped for me.

People are driving around out there who start shaking with fear if they suddenly have to actually operate the car themselves. Great. Cool cool cool. “Unsure of positioning.” LOOK OUT THE WINDOWS, YA DOORKNOB.

Well, the dog has refused his nighttime trip out, presumably preferring to hold it rather than go outside and wave his undercarriage around in the 18 degree weather (with wind chill of zero). I can’t really blame him.

The other day, one of the 🐝 words was a word I knew. I knew what item it described (“that thing that’s not ginger!”), I was pretty sure all the letters were there to spell it, but I couldn’t remember the word. I tried several versions, no dice. Brains are wild. (It was there; I looked it up later.)

Accurate.