"Rumblings in town had suggested that Gal Gadot, the Israel-born star of Wonder Woman who served in the IDF years ago, was behind the event...."

"The proceedings — ahead of which attendees were required to sign an NDA promising not to record or recirculate the sensitive footage — kicked off with remarks from Rabbi Marvin Hier, the outgoing head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance. After noting that it was the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, Hier said that experts have estimated there should be 200 million Jews in the world today but 'there are only 14 million because we are the leftovers of pogroms,' like the one of Oct. 7. He labeled Hamas terrorists 'the Nazis of the 21st century.'... As was forewarned, the footage was gruesome.... For some, it was all too much — a number of attendees could be heard weeping, and some left the theater mid-film, unable to watch anymore. For others, it was not enough... several attendees marched out of the theater and shouted that viewers should not have been spared any of the atrocities that were committed...."

From "Gruesome Footage of Oct. 7 Hamas Atrocities Screens in Hollywood Under Heavy Guard/On Wednesday night, with a sizable security presence and protesters audible through the walls, some 200 members of the industry screened 'Bearing Witness,' comprising 43 minutes of uncensored footage, at the Museum of Tolerance in West L.A." (The Hollywood Reporter).

True love.

Disney is just determined to lose money. Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot don't get it. Girls and grown women dream of true love. It's not old-fashioned. It's not even exclusive to women. Men dream of having a good wife as well. Don't stand on the shoulders of giants and then take a… pic.twitter.com/GI3M6yQxvf

— Black Tea News (@TrueBlackTea) August 1, 2023

Steve Martin gets it just right — the celebrity response to the coronavirus.

I won't call attention to celebrities who've gotten it wrong — other than to say Gal Gadot — but here's a celebrity doing it as close as I can imagine — and I do mean imagine — to perfect — right down to the natural soft setting and the delicate colors of his clothes and the gentle smile....

Banjo balm. pic.twitter.com/eQ6jUkHSHm

— Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) March 21, 2020

"It's a place where Gal Gadot, Brie Larson, and Sigourney Weaver could come onstage to offer the awful platitude that 'all women are superheroes'..."

"... in the same evening in which Sound Editing winner Donald Sylvester got a round of applause for thanking his wife for giving up her editing career so he could pursue his."

Writes Alison Willmore in "The Academy Awards of Self-Flagellation" (Vulture).

Here. Subject yourself to the painful display:

"Gal Gadot’s Seemingly Innocent Tribute To Stephen Hawking Pissed Off Some People/ Several disability rights advocates called it ableist."

I haven't read this HuffPo piece yet, but I'm pretty sure I know the sentimental, conventional idea that Gadot expressed and exactly why people who care about disability rights got pissed off. I'm not irascible enough to get "pissed off" about it, but I've been objecting to quite a few things, including a cartoon I saw that showed Hawking's wheelchair empty, and the figure of Hawking walking toward the stars — free at last, supposedly, even though Hawking, the real man, famously said "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Now, I'm reading what Gadot (AKA "Wonder Woman") tweeted, and it's exactly what I thought: "Rest in peace Dr. Hawking... Now you’re free of any physical constraints. Your brilliance and wisdom will be cherished forever."

To me, that's like saying about a Christian who has passed on something like "It's so sad that his beautiful soul is gone forever." You're imposing your religion on the person who had his own religion/atheism.

But it's worse than that, because it's saying that the life that he did have was a burden he's lucky to be rid of. Especially given that he did not believe in an afterlife (or so he said), the life he had was all he had. It was not worse than nothing. Hawking said (at the second link, above): "I accept that there are some things I can't do. But they are mostly things I don’t particularly want to do anyway. I seem to manage to do anything that I really want." And:

Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

I'm now reading what the supposedly pissed off people said, and it's what I thought, not just people flying off the handle and being inappropriately mean to an "innocent" actress trying to deliver a "tribute":

I think you’re fantastic Gal but this tweet is very ableist. His physical constraints didn’t stop him from changing the world. People with disabilities don’t wish for death to be free of their challenges. We wish to be valued for what we CAN do, not pitied for we can’t.

You know, Wonder Woman, Gadot's movie character, has superpowers, and we love our superpowers in the movies. We need to think harder about what we celebrate, and Hawking is a stellar example of living well within limitations, and we all have limitations.

Not even one "Weekend Update" joke about Harvey Weinstein on last night's "SNL."

The Daily Mail observes, in "'Where's Harvey Weinstein?' SNL stays SILENT on sexual abuse allegations against movie mogul much to the anger of social media who accuse the show of liberal hypocrisy."

ADDED: After writing this post, I watched about half of last night's "SNL" (which I had on the DVR). Not only was there nothing about Harvey Weinstein, but it was full of sexism. Nearly everything involving women was about women's bodies. Despite all the female performers on the show (including the guest host "Wonder Woman" Gal Gadot). roles for women were all Women as Sex Object, including Gal Gadot — wearing a black bra under a tight white tank top — doing a sexy dancing move involving holding lemons in front of her breasts and Kate McKinnon as a highly sexualized Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly dancing in glee at insults about things like penis size. Women are only funny as sex objects — that seems to be the "SNL" theory. Here, check it out:



By the way, the "horny granny" character was a longtime meme in Playboy as a cartoon character drawn by Buck Brown: