"Fans gathered as close as they could to the arena in the 37C heat, hoping for a glimpse of the invitees."

The London Times reports the news/"news": Taylor Swift got married, in "Taylor Swift gets married to Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden/The bride chose Christian Louboutin shoes and jewellery from Cartier and both wore Dior for the ceremony officiated by the comedy actor Adam Sandler."

I see that these days, "Any person eighteen years old and over can solemnize a Marriage Ceremony in New York State AFTER obtaining a One-Day Marriage Officiant License from the Office of the City Clerk."

So you too can have a comedian officiate at your wedding.

"Sounds like schools assume all families have a lot of spare cash."

Says one commenter, at "Why is it always spirit week? Schools keep adding theme days, and parents can’t keep up" (WaPo).

From the article: "Some themes are simple enough (wear blue for autism awareness, wear pink to stand against bullying), but others ('Book Character Day,' 'Favorite Animal Day,' 'Adam Sandler Day') are far more likely to involve advanced crafting skills or a panicked 9 p.m. Target run. 'Some of it is just wildly specific: ‘Wear a Dr. Seuss hat.’ Who has that just lying around? "Crazy Sock Day." Socks are expensive!; says... a single mother.... 'I think I spend a good $200 on spirit days every year.'"

"How Brie Larson, Amber Tamblyn, Lena Dunham, and More Have Responded to the Accusations Against Harvey Weinstein."

At W.

Rose McGowan is an interesting outlier:

Anyone who does business with __ is complicit. And deep down you know you are even dirtier. Cleanse yourselves.

Do you see how that's different from, say, "As always, I stand with the brave survivors of sexual assault and harassment. It's not your fault. I believe you" (Brie Larson)?

Rose McGowan calls everyone to a higher level of morality. Here's a picture of her with Harvey Weinstein:



I think Weinstein is part of a system that uses some people and rejects others and that extrudes a commercial product that we've been consuming with insufficient attention not only to the suffering entailed in its manufacture but to the unwholesomeness of the product we allow to infuse our brains. Movies reach us on a deep level, they invade our consciousness, they shape us and the culture around us in unknowable ways.

I would not eat food that came from a questionable location.

And deep down you know you are even dirtier. Cleanse yourselves.

ADDED: I'm going to start following Rose McGowan on Twitter. I just found this from 2015:

casting note that came w/script I got today. For real. name of male star rhymes with Madam Panhandler hahahaha I die pic.twitter.com/lCWGTV537t

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) June 18, 2015

And here's a Buzzfeed article about here from 2015: "Rose McGowan Is Starting A Revolution
After 20 years of acting — and finally realizing she hates it — Rose McGowan has become Hollywood's feminist whistleblower. To the industry, she says, 'Fuck your rules.'" That article talked about the "Madam Panhandler" tweet:

One week after her tweet about the [Adam] Sandler audition...  she checked her phone and saw an email from Innovative Artists, her agency — dropping her. "Like, 'We no longer want to work with you,'" she said. She felt a wave of "semi-panic — my ankles shook a little.... And then I was like, fuck ’em! Fuck you," she said for emphasis. And then I just wrote back, 'You're hilarious.' Because I thought it was hilarious." She also tweeted about it, of course: "I just got fired by my wussy acting agent because I spoke up about the bullshit in Hollywood. Hahaha. ‪#douchebags ‪#awesome ‪#BRINGIT."

"Breaking story after story, two great American newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, are resurgent, with record readerships."

"One has greater global reach and fifth-generation family ownership; the other has Jeff Bezos as its deep-pocketed proprietor and a technological advantage. Both, however, still face an existential foe."

James Warren (in Vanity Fair).

What's the "existential foe"?

But an existential threat is... many Americans won’t believe a thing either newspaper says, no matter how great the accuracy, attention to detail, or fair-mindedness. The sharp uptick in Times and Post readership may obscure a larger cultural change. The unequivocal evidence* of Russian involvement in the presidential campaign exemplifies the state of play. In June, a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll showed that more than half of those surveyed believe that the Russians interfered in the presidential election, with about one-third believing it influenced the outcome, and more Americans buying Comey’s explanation of his dismissal than Trump’s. But half think the press has been overly dramatic and irresponsible in its Russia-related coverage, with two-thirds of Republicans simply not believing that the Russians interfered at all, despite evidence assessed by four different U.S. intelligence services. Dig deeper and you find that, while 89 percent of Democrats believe in the importance of the media’s “watchdog” role, only 42 percent of Republicans do, according to the Pew Research Center. It is the widest gap that Pew has ever seen. What’s astonishing is that in early 2016, according to Pew, Democrats and Republicans essentially agreed on the role of the press, with Republicans (77 percent) actually outpacing Democrats (74 percent) in their support.

No link to that Pew poll. I'm not "astonished" by the degradation in confidence over that short period of time, because you're comparing the idea of "the role of the press" to our response to a particular performance in that role.  If you polled people about whether Hamlet is a great role and got almost everyone to say yes and then, a year later, a movie came out with Adam Sandler as Hamlet and a poll showed very few people considered it a great performance, it wouldn't mean that respect for the role of Hamlet had plummeted in that time period.
__________________

* What "unequivocal evidence"?! Or... oh, well, I guess I'm the existential foe, an American who's not believing what you say. But my skepticism isn't insensitive to accuracy, attention to detail, and fair-mindedness. I'm looking at your words, what they mean, what evidence you proffer, and trying to put it all together and see if it adds up. I notice where you slide along and I stop and ask why you're doing that. Yet I'm the foe. Or a subpart of The Foe which is the agglomeration of suspicious Americans like me.

Movies streamed in January...

... by readers using the Althouse Amazon portal: "American Hustle," "Born On the Fourth of July," "Bride And Prejudice," "Coda," "Consumed," "Crossed," "Guys and Dolls," "The Book of Life," "Uprising."

Thanks to all who support this blog by using the Amazon portal. And, no, I can't see who's buying what, so feel free to buy whatever you want and watch whatever you want.

ADDED: Why so many movies with 1-word titles beginning with the letter C? I wondered in the comments and said:

Made me wanted to suggest "Compulsion" and "Contempt." I'm sure there are many others. "Carrie." "Cops." Is "Cops" the name of a movie?

I knew "Cops" was a TV show, but it seems that such an obvious name should be the name of a movie too. I look it up on IMDB and end up with this fantastic movie-poster image:



Plot summary:

Police officer Benny is obsessed with American police cliches and livens up his own boring everyday life with dreams of duels with bad guys. But poor Benny and his colleagues doesn't have much to do in the small town of Högboträsk. Most of their days are spent drinking coffee, eating sausage waffles and chasing down stray cows. Peace and quiet is the dream of every politician, but for the Swedish authorities, the lack of crooks is reason to close the local police station. When the cops investigate a suspected act of vandalism, they realise that they themselves may be able to raise the crime statistics high enough to stay in business.

Great! But you can't buy that in the U.S. (unless you've got a "region 2" DVD player).  There's some chance of an American version, presumably to be called "Cops." Adam Sandler bought the rights a decade ago.

The Adam Sandler movie "Jack and Jill" won in every category at the Razzie awards.

It's a record that can only be equaled, never exceeded (unless they add new categories). 

Among the "wins" for Sandler: Worst Picture, Worst Actor (for Sandler's work in "Jack & Jill" and "Just Go With It"), Worst Actress (as "Jill"), Worst Supporting Actor (for Al Pacino's cameo as himself), Worst Supporting Actress (for pal David Spade as "Monica"), Worst Screen Ensemble (for the entire cast), Worst Director (Dennis Dugan for "Jack and Jill" and "Just Go With It"), Worst Remake, Rip-off or Sequel ("Jack and Jill" for ripping off Ed Woods' camp classic "Glen or Glenda"), Worst Screen Couple (Sandler and Katie Holmes, Sandler and Al Pacino or Sandler with himself) and Worst Screenplay.

Yeah, Sandler won in both the actor and actress categories, but I think the funniest thing there is that Al Pacino won Worst Supporting Actor when he was playing the role of himself. How can you screw up playing yourself? Ah! That seems like a deep and metaphysical question. It reminds me of the notion that made André Gregory cry, as described by Wallace Shawn in "My Dinner with André":

The reason I was meeting André was that an acquaintance of mine, George Grassfield, had called me and just insisted that I had to see him. Apparently, George had been walking his dog in an odd section of town the night before, and he'd suddenly come upon André leaning against a crumbling old building, and sobbing. André had explained to George that he'd just been watching the Ingmar Bergman movie Autumn Sonata about twenty-five blocks away, and he'd been seized by a fit of ungovernable crying when the character played by Ingrid Bergman had said, "I could always live in my art, but never in my life."

But let's check YouTube for what Pacino actually did in the movie "Jack and Jill." Here:



Pacino's got the perfect lines, revealing that Sandler, et al., knew their movie was perfectly bad:

"Burn this. This must never be seen... All copies! Destroy them!"

Michelle Obama is out of synch with the fatshionistas.

Robin Givhan writes about the body acceptance movement. Most of her essay is about the desire for cutting-edge fashion in plus sizes. (She embarrasses the president of Lane Bryant for saying his customer is mainly concerned with comfort and "might be a year behind" on style.) Tucked away at the end is the part about Michelle Obama. The First Lady has been Givhan's prime subject these days (unfortunately), and it's surprising to find something critical of her in a Givhan column (even if it is given low prominence).  Let me highlight it:

What some currently see as the most distressing assault on their dignity is first lady Michelle Obama with her fight against childhood obesity.

"I'm really appalled at the first lady's campaign. I think it will do more harm than good," says Linda Bacon, author of "Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight." "I applaud her for some of the specific programs, but when it's done in the name of obesity, it's going to backfire on her."

Bacon was one of about a dozen researchers and authors who signed a letter to Obama voicing concern that her emphasis on weight was stigmatizing a population rather than dealing with the broader health issues. "I think it's great for kids to have a better connection to their food," Bacon says. 

Bacon. Great name. No seriously.

A grand and lustrous name. And if you thought a joke was in order, you should be ashamed of yourself... of your mind. Not your body, of course. Love your glorious, ample body.

Back to Linda Bacon:

But by focusing on weight, "you're teaching kids that they did something wrong to get the body they have."

The women do not dismiss decades of scientific research on obesity, but they are distrustful of the conclusions as well as the methodology. They know they exercise; they feel healthy. One young woman shared that she was a vegan and has always been a big girl. Mostly, however, they argue that everyone should eat better and move more -- not just the overweight. So why point a finger at fat people?

Givhan has the access to extract a response from Michelle Obama. The questions I'd ask: How can you talk about taking personal responsibility when what people hear is blame? If people are saying they feel good about themselves, do you really want to make them feel bad? Even those of us who don't favor inspiring self-esteem all the time want to know why you want to tear people down in the effort to get them to do something they'll probably never be able to do very well? But Michelle Obama is someone who's big on promoting self-esteem, so she's got a particularly difficult problem achieving coherence. You can't just be for everything that's good. Everyone must feel good and be virtuous. How does that work?

I assume Givhan will get back to us with the First Lady's response. Until then, let's speculate. I predict she'll go on about her garden and how delicious vegetables can be: If only these women would taste vegetables — really taste her most excellent vegetables — then they will love eating right and all the incoherence will melt away. You can love yourself, love your body, love all your food and eat right and be healthy — feel healthy and be healthy. Of course, that's emphatically not true, but one feels so pretty saying it. And that is what we want — to feel pretty.

ADDED: