By request, an interruption of the ordinary alphabetical order of things for a “dumb comedy week of the Neverending Film Festival” — three comedies recommended by readers. None are really dumb, all were fun watching, and there’ll be more, soon.
Burn After Reading (2008) Inspector Ike (2020) Tropic Thunder (2008)
Burn After Reading (2008)
Osborn Cox (John Malkovich) is a CIA analyst, working the Bosnia desk at Langley. He’s not as brilliant as he thinks it is, and quits in a conceited rage when he’s accused of alcoholism and reassigned to a less important desk.
Unemployed, he decides to write his memoirs. This worries nobody at the Agency and would probably interest no publishers, but in a moment I must’ve missed, his manuscript is misplaced, and soon discovered by Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, a/k/a “the League of Morons.” They have no grasp of what they’re reading, but recognize it as espionage, so of course they take it to the Russian embassy, hoping to make their fortune by selling out America.
With George Clooney, Tilda Swinton. Richard Jenkins, J.K. Simmons, and the expert writing of Ethan & Joel Coen, every scene and line of dialogue seems so plausible you could take it at face value as a thriller and be thrilled. I saw it in first release, and remembered it as a drama, but tonight I was laughing. It’s subtly slapstick and subversive, and becomes winningly ludicrous as the clockwork plot circles around on itself.
There’s a message to it, too, handled so lightly you might miss it — the CIA’s ordinary office flow of immorality, deaths dismissed and lives ruined with a shrug by Agency higher-ups, is seriously evil. And funny too, because it’s true.
Verdict: BIG YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Inspector Ike (2020)
“Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they will never be disappointed.”
Here’s a satire of 1970s made-for-TV murder mysteries — Columbo, mostly, but it was a genre for years. Most of the familiar tropes get the once- and twiceover, and the murder happens in New York City’s Theater District (on Avant-Garde Alley, specifically) so it’s also a satire of bad acting in local theater.
With a literal twinkle, Ikechukwu Ufomadu stars as Inspector Ike, the low-key know-it-all detective who interrupts the proceedings to make chili and share the recipe. A key Q&A scene takes place on stage, while actors rehearse or improv hilariously in the background. And every line is delivered slightly askew, intentionally amateur, on sets expensively crafted to look cheap.
Inspector Ike is amusing, not laugh-out-loud funny, but it might be my favorite flick on this page, because it’s the strangest, the smallest, the most D-I-Y and zine-ish. It looks and feels and might actually be just a bunch of people having fun, making it up as they go. Plus it expertly evokes that Mystery Movie vibe from shows I grew up watching.
Like the Inspector’s chili, this is comfort food.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Tropic Thunder (2008)
As small as Inspector Ike is, Tropic Thunder is huge — a ginormous comedy with explosions and an all-star cast, mocking Vietnam war movies, Hollywood movie-making, and movie stardom. Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr, and Jack Black star, each playing fictional movie stars, are introduced via hilarious trailers for their upcoming movies that sadly don’t exist. Toss in Tom Cruise as Harvey Weinstein, and it’s a blockbuster movie poking fun at blockbuster movies.
And it does all this while dancing on the border of what’s offensive, with blackface, retard jokes, hilariously overwrought violence, and the most flatulent fart jokes ever smelt. Not many movies are boycotted by the Special Olympics, but here’s one. Be offended if you want to be, but it only makes you the butt of the movie’s jokes.
Tropic Thunder loses its lightning toward the end, but it’s never not funny. Despite juggling a high concept and big budget, it’s made with heart, delivers a thousand laughs, and even offers a few moments of near-gravitas and meaning… but nah, it’s just another joke. The laughs are the point.
The movie’s most famous quote is, “Never go full retard,” crucial to one of its funniest scenes, but my favorite line is, “I’ll cradle the balls, stroke the shaft, work the pipe, and swallow the gravy. Get it over here, buddy. Let’s do this.”
Yeah, do this. Stiller directed and co-wrote, and it might be his best work.
Verdict: YES.
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
7/29/2026
Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. — — — If you can’t find a movie I’ve reviewed, or if you have recommendations, please drop me a note. — — — No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.
In a dream last night, I was working as a basic office flunky for Donald Trump. It was pre-politics Trump, when he was just an empty-headed billionaire blowhard, not yet an existential threat to democracy, the environment, the economy, and the life of any random person anywhere.
Trump employed me to do basic data-entry and corrections, but my direct supervisor was a faceless suit, as was his supervisor, and his supervisor’s supervisor. We rarely saw Mr Trump, but on the day of my dream, he pranced into the office and directly to my desk, where he held two tennis balls, one in each of his tiny hands. One ball was light greenish-yellow, the standard color of tennis balls these days, and the other ball had a world globe printed on it.
“Holland, drop whatever you’re doing,” Trump said too loudly. “See my balls? They’re sold at my Trump Sporting Goods store at 75th Street & Grunion Ave, but on the rack the global balls are above the basic balls. You’re going to go to the store, and put the global balls under the basic balls.”
This was an idiotic assignment, of course. He could’ve called the store and barked his command into the phone, and the display would’ve been changed within minutes. But it wasn’t the dumbest chore I’d ever been given. Outside this dream, I spent 40 years as office flunky for dozens of companies, and much of the work made less sense than rearranging Donald Trump’s balls.
Our office was a mile from the store, so it might take an hour, or longer if there were lots of Trump’s balls to hoist from one basket to another. It was a pleasant enough day, though, so I shrugged and said, “Yes, Mr Trump,” and walked to the store.
The walk was the best part of the dream, just being out of the office, barked at and barking back at dogs along my way, watching pretty women walk by in summer dresses, and daydreaming within this night dream.
At the store’s tennis ball display, I moved about a thousand basic balls to the upper shelf and a thousand global balls to the lower shelf, and thought about how stupid it was to be doing this. Not only was it not my job, but just from a marketing perspective, why display plain tennis balls you could buy anywhere more prominently than the fancy balls?
But what the hell, I did as instructed, and then un-snapped and re-snapped the price display to properly match the product on the shelves, and introduced myself to the store manager, and explained that I’d made the switch at Trump’s request, so she wouldn’t immediately have the balls moved back to the bins they’d been in before.
Having finished my work, I whistled the theme from Gilligan’s Island as I walked back to the office, where Trump was fuming.
“You’ve been gone an hour, wasting my time and wages, so you’re fired.” He said it like I’d been a contestant on The Apprentice.
“I walked,” I said.
“You walked?” He was incredulous, almost offended, like most people if I tell them I don’t drive a car.
“Yup. I always walk or take the bus, Mr Trump, like I told you in my job interview.” The interview had not been part of this Donald Trump Cinematic Dream Universe, but “Fired,” he’d said, so fired I was. Nobody talks Donald Trump into changing his mind, and I was cleaning stuff out of my desk when I woke and needed to pee.
♦ ♦ ♦
I peed sitting down, scribbling what I remembered from the dream while dripping into the toilet. An hour later, typing the dream, I realized that my boss had young Donald Trump’s face, but in behavior and management style he was actually young Jim Houston.
Mr Houston — that’s what employees were supposed to call him — was a plump, well-dressed, middle-aged white dude who owned Jim Houston Ford. I’d been one of his office flunkies, in the early 1980s.
He was smarter than Trump, but at least as dishonest — every month’s profit & loss sheet was fudged and re-fudged until the company was profitable, and I’m not sure the company was ever actually profitable. The co-owner of Jim Houston Ford, but not Mr Houston himself, was eventually sent to White Collar Prison for the financial statements’ falsifications, because Mr Houston, like Mr Trump, was willing to implicate others for his crimes.
All these years later, it strikes me that Mr Houston probably would’ve voted for Mr Trump. They had a lot in common. Mr Houston had a mercurial temper, and issued orders like a military commander, expecting immediate obedience. If he thought you’d made a mistake, he’d berate and insult you in front of everyone. Once, for reasons unknown to me, Mr Houston was angry at the service manager, and had him detail cars for a month, presumably just to see whether he’d quit.
For whatever reason, though, Mr Houston liked me, and I kinda liked him too. He had no sense of humor, but was often unintentionally funny, playing the role of Brilliant Businessman, which he wasn’t. Working for him was more entertaining than most work, and unlike Mr Trump, Mr Houston’s kingdom was only a car dealership, so he couldn’t do much real damage to the world.
Best of all, when he was especially pleased with my work, Mr Houston sometimes let me borrow my choice from his collection of a dozen beautifully-restored 1960s Ford Mustangs. Back then I drove a car, and when I showed up for a date with my girlfriend driving a classy classic pristine ’65 Mustang instead of my beat-up old Subaru with last week’s milk shakes and burger wrappers in the back, it always led to a blowjob in the driver’s seat. I wiped away any spills, and said “Thank you, Mr Houston” in the morning.
Whether this backstory about Mr Houston adds anything to the dream about Mr Trump is for you to decide, dear reader, and if you regret the few minutes of attention you’ve given this stupid essay, you’re invited to rearrange my balls.
4th Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Excerpt: “Doesn’t the law … indicate that subpoenas are the last step, not the first step?” Subramanian asked, adding at one point, “Why don’t you tell me what the exception is that you’re relying on?”
Subramanian added: “I’m just trying to make sure I’m not missing anything.” Buckley replied that the exception was triggered when the attorney general said that subpoenas could be sought right away.
“It specifically says that before you seek a subpoena you need to make all reasonable attempts to seek information” elsewhere, Subramanian said at another point. “It’s just a matter of basic compliance with the law.”
This is non-news, ain’t it? Religion is a business, businesses have employees and consultants, and you’ll find damned few preachers, prostitutes, or propagandists who aren’t paid for their work.
The only way to implement this is by requiring everyone to upload their ID’s for social media access. Which is the point. More and more surveillance, always.
Pro football is not my beat and I rarely give a sliver of a damn, but this is indicative of American journalism’s eagerness to comply with corporate control: The 49ers’ head coach was in a car wreck, the team asked media to keep it quiet, so there wasn’t a peep for eleven days.
Before the headline slips from your consciousness, be aware that this is an alumni chapter, wherein adult men repeatedly brutalize other adult men and pretend it’s not a kink.
Excerpt: The suit alleges Uber’s executives knowingly concealed the scale of the sexual misconduct problem with its drivers, publicly disclosing only 12,522 accounts of “serious sexual assault” in the six-year window, in which 400,181 total reports of sexual assault or misconduct were actually made.
Excerpt: Major stock indexes have set record after record in recent years, fueled by seemingly boundless appetite among investors for anything connected to artificial intelligence. The total value of the US stock market has more than doubled over the past decade to over $75-trillion, roughly two and a half times the annual output of the entire US economy, itself a record ratio.
Much of that value exists only on paper, bets on future profits that may or may not materialize in the years ahead. But the boom is supporting real economic activity today, pumping trillions of dollars of investment into semiconductor factories, data centers, power plants and transmission lines. And the wealth it is creating is helping to drive consumer spending, particularly among affluent Americans, whose appreciating stock portfolios make them more willing to shell out for luxury vacations, pricey electronics and meals at high-end restaurants.
That spending and investment have helped carry the US economy through a tumultuous period of inflation, tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty. But it also creates a vulnerability: If investor confidence in AI falters, the economic activity built atop it could come crashing down.
Oh, bullshit. Meta knows damned near everything about its users, and what it doesn’t know, it’s researching. Pervy uses are the main, essentially only purpose for these devices, and anything the company does to pretend it’s shocked, shocked at how users are misusing the tech is 100% PR.
There are no ‘questions’ about vetting. There’s nearly no vetting, and ICE is staffed mostly by Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, boogaloo boys, and other wingnut racists.
Excerpt: “The pattern in this case — arrest, rapid cycling between facilities, brief attorney contact, predawn transfer to a removal flight without notice to counsel, and an official tracking system that now shows Petitioner as merely ‘released’ with no location data — is precisely the conduct that courts have recognized as deliberate obstruction of the right to seek habeas corpus,” Pallipamu wrote in a habeas corpus petition.
I am only a small mind in a fat body, but this seems laughably foolhardy — shouldn’t the nation’s emergency oil reserves be reserved, so to speak, for an emergency? Keeping prices artificially low is not an emergency.
There no evidence except the perpetual liar Trump’s say-so that these dead soldiers supported his war. I would also quibble when the Times says “Trump attended a dignified transfer for the soldiers.” Uh, no — if Trump was there, it wasn’t dignified.
Sorry and sad to say it, but believing anything the FDA says under this administration requires more faith than I can muster. If the problem didn’t start at Taylor Farms, Trump’s FDA has done lawsuit-level damage to the company. Much more likely, Taylor Farms is the source, but the explosive diarrhea really traces back to ‘DOGE’ and Trump’s war on competency.
Any resident or visitor to a nursing home can vouch, many or most of the employees are immigrants. So we’ll soon see ICE raids on old folks homes, as the insanity runs amok.
Well, of fucking course they knew. I knew it, decades ago, and I’m nobody with no degree. Anyone with a functional noggin knew it. It wasn’t ever a secret.
I ain’t saying Trump is working against American and human interests everywhere all at once and on purpose, but if he WAS … what would he be doing different from what he’s already doing?
Excerpt: Meanwhile, Tamboli has had to contend with brigades of rightwing review bombing on Google, as well as threats of violence against him, his wife and child, who are now staying somewhere other than his home. Detractors are unhinged, he said.
He said he engaged with one, briefly, to thank them for the attention. The person responded, attaching a screenshot of his conversation with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok.
“He had asked Grok if it was possible that Tamboli’s was doing well this week, and Grok said no. And he took a screenshot of that and sent it back to me, calling me a liar,” Tamboli said. “I feel like that tells you everything you need to know about this group of people and their hold on reality.”
Here’s the future, which is now the now: Politicians, corporations, and officials influencing (or more likely, controlling) the answers to your every question.
Excerpt: Former Northwoods Police Officer Samuel Davis, 28, was convicted in March of violating Charles Garmon’s civil rights after prosecutors said he drove Garmon from a Walgreens on July 4, 2023, to a Kinloch field several jurisdictions away instead of taking him to jail.
Davis turned off his body camera, pepper-sprayed Garmon, beat him with a baton, broke his jaw and threatened to kill him if he returned to Northwoods, prosecutors claim. A passerby later interrupted the attack after spotting Davis’ patrol car and found Garmon bleeding and calling for help.
Another former officer, Michael Hill, 54, was previously accused of having a role in the incident but was ultimately acquitted of all federal charges.
During the trial, Davis called the transport a “courtesy ride” and denied turning off his body camera, while his attorney suggested a power outage at the station may have caused the issue.
Excerpt: Modern economies are adapted to relatively stable climatic baselines. Agricultural productivity, infrastructure design, insurance pricing and financial risk management all rely not only on expected mean conditions but also on the predictability of variability.
Farmers need to factor in lost harvests; architects and urban planners need to account for extremes of temperature, wind and rainfall; and financiers and insurers need to consider the cost and scale of damages. But once these factors are no longer predictable, all bets are off — life becomes uninsurable and the world becomes unsafe.
The New York Times‘ headline is “Former conductor to plead guilty in child sex abuse imagery case,” which is a strange obfuscation, like he’d led the Philharmonic or something?
Excerpt: Peter Thiel – co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, among others – has spoken of science fiction as political blueprint. He references Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966): a lunar colony that rebels and establishes a libertarian society with minimal government. In a New York Times podcast with Ross Douthat in 2025, Thiel discussed his transhumanist views. When asked whether the human race as we currently know it should endure, he hesitated before answering ‘yes’.
But Heinlein’s novel deserves more than Thiel’s reading of it. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is not a libertarian pamphlet – it is a genuinely complex political novel about what revolution actually costs. Heinlein’s lunar colonists are not entrepreneurs: they are prisoners, deportees and their descendants, people with nothing to lose who have built a fragile community out of shared deprivation. The novel’s most memorable character is Mike, an artificial intelligence who becomes politically conscious through friendship with the human rebels – motivated not by efficiency or profit but by curiosity and the desire to belong. The revolution Heinlein imagines is messy, compromised and pyrrhic; the book ends not in triumph but in exhausted ambivalence about what has been won and lost. Heinlein was genuinely fascinated by the tension between individual freedom and the social bonds that make freedom possible and worth having. Thiel reads none of this.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until billionaires fear for their lives.
7/27/2026
News always and only from reliable sources, and I decide what’s reliable — no right-wing bullshit, no Substack because fuck Nazis, no RawStory, Newsweek, or other clickbait sites, and no Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Matt Taibbi, Matthew Yglesias, or other famous writers with nothing left to say. Written news is preferred; video links will be rare, and damned near never to videos where the reporter sits, stands, or strolls in front of a camera — that’s show biz, not news.
If you’re blocked from reading anything linked above, please send an email, and I’ll reply with the article’s complete text, via my vast array of fine ad-blockers and paywall-vaulters.
Special thanks to Linden Arden, Becky Jo, Joey Jo Jo & John the Basketemeritus, the aforementioned Mr Meyer, Dave S, Name Withheld, and always extra special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and proved that the world isn’t always shitty.
