Jonah Hill. Or Josh Gad. Or Daniel Day-Lewis comes out of retirement and acts the fuck out of a fat 30-year-old man-child crypto scammer.

xkcd still has the best approach to this; four random common words

Being incredibly guilty and having a jury that’s going to have to come back next week if they don’t finish by 8pm is a dangerous mix.

Me fail English? That’s unpossible!

I think the judge gives him an extremely stern last-chance warning tomorrow and if he does it again, he gets cited for contempt. Doesn’t have to be much, chuck him in a private cell in the Manhattan Detention Center for 1 night with Secret Service outside the door, but it seriously hurts the rule of law to have him able to get away with this sort of crap with no consequences.

This is great + well-deserved, plus it has the side benefit of making some of the world’s worst people really, really mad.

I almost planned a trip to DC with the kids for Columbus Day, glad I didn’t.

(probably not a good idea to plan to fly anywhere in October, actually - possibly November too)

Vonnegut wasn’t a Too Good For This recluse like Pynchon or Salinger or whoever, and the content of his books made him fairly well insulated against charges of being a sellout; they probably offered him a bunch of money and he shrugged and said sure.

They very well might, but Biden has already had 3 years of appointing judges, and he’s already gotten probably the only Supreme Court appointment he’s going to get for this term. Refusing to let them replace Feinstein now gains them little - maybe a couple of extra unfilled district court slots - while if a Republican wins the White House and then Grassley dies in 2025/2026, the consequences for Republican judicial confirmations could be catastrophic.

Placeholder Senate seat isn’t so bad, you still get to be a Senator even if only for a little while.

They only said they’d do that if she took a leave of absence. The next 4 oldest Senators are Grassley (90) - who’s on Judiciary, Bernie (82), McConnell (81), and Risch (80 - Republican from Idaho); if they start playing the “no committee replacements for dead senators” game it’s likely to come back and bite them in the ass very quickly.

Here’s a video of her arguing with children about climate change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu-VzZ45MwI

Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don’t forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.

Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.

Ginsburg was worse; Feinstein at least was doing this in a situation where if she did keel over, a Democratic governor would replace her with somebody whose politics were broadly similar to her own, but Ginsburg knew perfectly well that her replacement might undo everything she accomplished and she refused to retire despite that.

I feel bad that she spent her final few years Weekend At Bernie’s-ing for her staff instead of getting to retire + relax a bit.

I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.

(I think the reality is that they’re mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)

Connecticut is especially dicey because they have a 1:4 ratio right up to age 3; if you have 2 kids under 3, like one of the mothers in this article, you’re effectively paying 1/2 of a full-time employee’s salary plus your share of all of the other costs (rent, utilities, insurance, supplies, administration) associated with running a daycare.

Childcare is an absurdly labor-intensive business and I don’t know how to make it work for non-wealthy people without massive subsidies.

I mean that was more-or-less Werner Herzog’s natural delivery, they just had him go in and read a buncha lines; somebody decided that Basically Werner Herzog was the right fit for that character and then they went out and got him to do it.

(I imagine this is how Stephen Tobolowsky gets many of his acting jobs too)

I wouldn’t discount Harris’ innate advantages there too; he was 10 years older than Gambon, aged more poorly (having been an alcoholic hellraiser in his younger years), and his natural delivery - even when he was much younger - had that sort-of wizened wheezing sound to it; “old and physically frail but with incredible magic power” was sort of baked in even before he added any actual acting to the mix.

But I don’t know if there’s an alternative who would have been better in that regard; the three I’m aware of them talking about were Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen, and Peter O’Toole, but the latter two would have played him very much like Gambon did, and I’m not sure if Lee could have pulled off “frail” either given his voice + physical stature.

One of the few non-Avengers in the list of all-time highest grossing actors.