Edit: For some reason, this posted with comments closed. Open now.

Like seemingly everybody else in the world who cares about movies, we saw “You Can See Everything” this weekend. Hoo-boy.

I want to start by telling you everything you may have read about it already is true. Let me lay out a few:

It is the most imaginatively crafted and executed documentary I’ve seen in…maybe ever. Co-director (and onscreen talent) Nathan Fielder has really grappled with the ideas of truth, facts, and their relation to humans, and come up with something that raises more questions than it answers. It makes Michael Moore’s body of work look like a fourth-grade filmstrip on how cottage cheese is made.

You should definitely go into it knowing as little about it as possible, so I won’t reveal any major spoilers here. However, I will discuss it generally. If you’d like to leave, see the movie and come back later, that’s fine. You do you.

You should know the basic facts, however: Elizabeth Holmes was co-founder and CEO of a startup she named Theranos, which she said would revolutionize medical testing by reducing the amount of blood required to do these tests to just a few drops. You may recall photos of her in her heyday, wearing a black turtleneck, her blonde hair streaming over one shoulder, her lips carmine-red. (She was said to be entranced by Steve Jobs’ similar uniform.) She is usually shown holding a very small capsule between her thumb and forefinger, containing the aforementioned few drops of blood. Like so:

The startup’s aim was to install a box about the size of a computer printer in drug stores around the country, where you could pop in, suffer a small pinprick and, before you left, get the results of any one of hundreds of tests — HIV, cholesterol, PSA, the gamut. And it wouldn’t cost much at all.

The only problem was, the machine didn’t work. It never worked. So Holmes and her partner in both work and life, Sunny Balwani, constructed an elaborate fraud, faking results long enough to wheedle hundreds of millions from credulous angel investors, all the while hoping they could someday, somehow make it work.

When it collapsed, both Holmes and Balwani were convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison terms. Appeals failed, and Nathan Fielder joined Holmes and her new romantic partner, Billy Evans, for the last month of her freedom before reporting to Bryan Federal Prison Camp, current home of Ghislaine Maxwell, in Texas.

“You Can See Everything” is the premise of the “radical transparency” offered by Holmes and Evans, who in the interim between trial and prison managed to produce two children, also seen onscreen.

And we see a lot. Holmes signature look, featured heavily in the teaser for the film dropped at the Telluride festival in late summer, is on abundant display. Her big blue eyes, her abundant hair, her seeming ability to look directly at you and never blink — that’s the Holmes look. And while we can debate forever why she was seemingly able to hypnotize so many people who should have known better, I think the most important fact is this: Most of them were men. And Holmes is not hesitant with demonstrating Pretty Privilege.

John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose work exposed the fraud, now works for the NYT. He wrote about the film this week, too:

Ms. Holmes has wanted to tell her side of the story for a long time. In the summer of 2016 she had discussions with Errol Morris, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker she had hired to make sleek Theranos commercials at the height of her pre-scandal fame. Mr. Morris entertained the notion of doing a film about Ms. Holmes seriously enough that he called me to ask me to participate.

“I see it as a ‘he said, she said,’” he told me.

“That’s not how I see it,” I responded. “There are basic facts and those facts show that Elizabeth Holmes committed fraud.”

I think it’s safe to say that Holmes is a strikingly attractive woman when she wants to be. She got David Boies, correctly described by Carreyrou as “one of the country’s most feared litigators,” to work for her. She lured Henry Kissinger, Gen. James Mattis and former Secretary of State George Schulz to sit on her board. Here’s the board list (from Wikipedia) from May 2016:

Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO
Riley Bechtel, former Bechtel Group CEO
David Boies, a founder and the chairman of Boies Schiller Flexner
William Foege, former director of the CDC
Richard Kovacevich, former CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo
Jim Mattis, later U.S. Secretary of Defense
Fabrizio Bonanni, former executive vice president of Amgen

I see one woman — Holmes — in that list. I suspect the other half-dozen all have eyes and penises.

The most charitable thing one could say about Holmes is, she too has eyes, and has seen how so many Silicon Valley startups are like hers, smoke and mirrors that don’t work, until one day they do. There’s a scene in the film where Holmes and Evans assemble the component parts of a Theranos machine, then struggle to explain how, exactly, it will work. (Because it doesn’t work now, but it could! Once “the chemistry” is figured out!) They babble a lot of words that rely heavily on “the cloud” and a few other tech buzz words, but anyone who understands English should recognize they’re saying nothing. At some point, Evans suggests that Holmes, who he calls “an inventor,” just has a brain that works differently from everyone else’s. And that’s what makes her so special and great.

Her brain does work differently. But it makes her a sociopath, not a genius inventor.

Here’s a typical description of Holmes, from a no-name website before the fraud was exposed:

Her home is a two-bedroom condo in Palo Alto, and she lives an austere life, sleeping four hours a night. Although she can quote Jane Austen by heart, she no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn’t date, doesn’t own a television, and hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. She eats most of her meals at the office. She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, spinach, lettuce, and celery.

“I was probably, definitely, not normal,” she said. “I was reading ‘Moby-Dick’ from start to finish when I was about nine. I read a ton of books. I still have a notebook with a complete design for a time machine that I designed when I must have been, like, seven. The wonderful thing about the way I was raised is that no one ever told me that I couldn’t do those things.”

I do not believe she read “Moby-Dick” at 9 years old. And may I see the hands of any parent who would tell a 7-year-old that their “complete design for a time machine” wouldn’t work? This woman, I swear.

Trust me, this movie is wild and weird, and you will be thinking about it for days afterward.

Finally, thanks to Heather for flagging this video, in which a former metro editor for the Chicago Tribune yells (figuratively) at an NYT “assistant managing editor at The New York Times’ for Trust and Standards,” and while Mr. Chicago can’t seem to convince Mr. NYT that they’re doing anything wrong, it is a satisfying watch, BECAUSE HE SPEAKS FOR SO MANY OF US.

OK, I gotta get some work done. Let’s have ourselves a week.

It’s been so long since I made the effort to see a film on or close to its opening that I can’t recall when the last one was. But “The Odyssey” seemed worth the effort. So yesterday, we identified an IMAX theater within reasonable driving distance and went to a late-afternoon screening.

“Did we pay matinee prices for this?” I asked. “I dunno,” Alan said. “I bought senior tickets.”

Oof. Although we qualify.

And you know what? It was worth the drive up to Sterling Goddamn Heights, worth the cost of the senior tickets, worth it all. A really impressive piece of work. The dialogue was in modern English, no one put on a plummy “Game of Thrones” accent, the so-called untraditional casting — i.e., actors of color playing Greeks and Trojans — bothered me not a whit. The spectacle of it all was fantastic, the ships, the sea, the battles, the landscapes. It did clock in a little long at nearly three hours, but that’s a quibble. At the end, the audience applauded, causing Alan to note that was only the second film he’d ever seen where that happened. (The first: “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.”)

Here’s really my only complaint: The volume. It was right on the brink of being punishingly loud. Halfway through I fished my earplugs out of my purse and got some relief; I could actually hear the dialogue better with the head-splitting subwoofers muffled a bit. I guess you sign up for this in a modern IMAX theater, but like I said: It hurt, almost. And the volume didn’t really improve the experience. It was just assaultive.

The manosphere is all up in their feelings over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, because HOW COULD A BLACK WOMAN BE CONSIDERED THE MOST BEAUTIFUL IN THE WORLD, etc. That Nyong’o is actually spectacularly beautiful doesn’t seem to occur to them. Armond White at the National Review demonstrates why you should never, ever turn to political magazines for your arts criticism:

Billed as the biggest of big movies (Titanic meets The Lord of the Rings with some Megalopolis thrown in), it continues the corruption of modern movie culture that Nolan started with The Dark Knight, which upped the scale of nihilistic violence to satisfy a hipster’s misconception of original filmmaking. Since then, he’s trained several generations to embrace mere action-spectacle as cinema, which, alone, can be stomach-turning. But it’s not cinema, which enlivens kinetic imagery and emotional response.

Homer’s ancient Greek poem The Odyssey is beside the point of Nolan’s ambition. Adapting the story of Odysseus — the king of Ithaca making an extended journey home after the Trojan War and encountering various natural and supernatural forces along the way — Nolan departs from his regular focus on moral futility. The casting of Matt Damon as Odysseus (rather than an ambiguous figure like Gerard Butler’s feral King Leonidas in 300) lets us know that this makeover is meant for liberals.

Does it now.

They also quibble about the casting of Elliot Page, born Ellen and known for her starring role in “Juno” and not much else since, although it’s been so long since I saw him that I wasn’t entirely sure it was him until the credits rolled. Well, fuck ’em. Let them be miserable and stay home. I liked this film, a lot.

Middle of the week, ugh. Wendy had me up for a couple hours last night, barfing. Missed my morning swim and felt like hot garbage all day. Like the summer isn’t short enough already.

It was a few years ago that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” hit the premium pay level of streaming new-release movies, and stayed there an inordinate amount of time. So long that when I checked months later, when the rental price should have dropped from $20 to $6, it was still at $20. Even after the Best Picture Oscar, they still expected me to pay the theater price for Alan and I to watch it from the couch.

So I forgot about it for…three years.

Then it appeared, as if summoned by the God of Stuff You Forgot About, on one of the streamers this weekend, free with the price of your subscription. Saturday night at home? Sure, let’s check out this best-in-all-the-land movie.

We turned it off at the two-thirds mark. I was yawning more or less continuously, had utterly lost the thread of the plot — such as it was — and could see the resolution coming like a marching band in a parade. Spoiler: Love is the answer. In between, it was just irritating. This has been Old Woman Considers the Oscars, with your host, me.

Should have watched “Nuremberg” instead. Something cheerier, you know.

Nevertheless! Sunday was a true spring-like day, temps over 50, so we put the bikes on the car rack and took them to Belle Isle for a lap. It was…windy. Sustained at 16 mph, gusting to maybe twice that. All I know is, the flag at the entrance was standing at full extension and it was hard pedaling on the back half of the loop, with the wind in our faces, but we made it. Just a shakedown for the first bike ride of 2026, but I’d call it a win. Still ice on the river in the slow parts:

But look at that sky.

Finally, ai-yi-yi, this war. I just don’t have the bandwidth to write about it on a day to day basis, although my jaw is perpetually in my lap every time I open a news site. I’ve started thinking about false-flag attacks, which would indicate I have not quite gone off the deep end, but I’m standing on the edge of the pool looking into it. I will sign up to work the elections this year, though; that might keep my head from exploding until November.

Breaking: Iran has replaced Ayatollah Khamenei with…Ayatollah Khamenei.

Let’s have a good week, all.

I watched “Jay Kelly,” the new George Clooney movie, this week. I found it to be entirely enjoyable, yet also, as the kids say today, mid. Which is to say it may be like the book I talked about earlier this week: It wasn’t terrible to watch, but I’ll forget every frame of it in 10 days. My main takeaway was this: George is old now.

For me, it might be the most unsettling part of aging — seeing the movie stars I grew up with turning into senior citizens. Some of the most striking women of my youth, beauties like Sharon Stone, Michelle Pfeiffer, all old now. The men, those lust objects like Clooney: Old. Robert Redford had a cameo on the last season of “Dark Skies,” and looked as lined as one of those dried-apple dolls, and he’s dead now, anyway.

It’s unsettling, of course, because it means I’m old now too, which I objectively am, but apart from the pain in my knees, honestly, I don’t feel old. I feel…mature. Capable of holding my tongue in situations where I once would have let loose, to no good end. I can take the long view more often. I have no interest in chasing trends, or even knowing anything about them. You say baggy jeans are back? That’s nice. I think I have a pair in my drawer. From the ’90s. And as someone who could never, ever coast on her looks, I even think I look better than I did at, say, 30. I’m a better-looking old person than I was a young person. That has to count for something.

“Jay Kelly” is about an aging actor, and — this is not a spoiler — culminates with a career-tribute highlight reel, many of the shots recognizable from Clooney’s earlier work. He watches it with a slow tear sliding down his cheek, tinged with all the joy and regret over roads taken and not taken, and I guess that’s what life is like at our age. George and I are about the same age but he took the rich-Hollywood-movie-star-male-division life path of marrying a much younger woman, so he could have children. I wouldn’t want to be mothering twins at 56, or even 39, the age of his wife when she gave birth, but I can’t afford round-the-clock nannies, either, so it all works out.

We’ve spoken here often about growing old, and I know I’m still in early old age, that everything can go south tomorrow, but so far so good. Look me up in five years, see how I feel.

I’ve almost grown out of one of my bad habits of aging, which is to say, comparing my physical decrepitude with that of other women my age: Look at that crepey cleavage. At least I don’t have that, and so on. Sooner or later the crepe is all we have. Live until you die, I guess.

Getting older means I’m more likely to be a victim of a scam, something I’m reminded of almost daily, as I read about some miscreant persuading one of my cohort into depositing cash into a Bitcoin ATM to avoid prosecution for child porn, or something. I worry that one day I’ll get a call from someone close to me, begging for bail money, and I’ll fall for it, but it’ll turn out to be an AI sample of their voice. I think we should discuss a family code phrase to use. I think I should let Kate have veto power over big withdrawals from the nest-egg funds, so it doesn’t all go to Chinese or Russian thieves. Then I think, nah. Not time to panic yet.

Alan used to chide me for peeling off a couple singles for every panhandler we pass, arguing that it was just going to go for booze or drugs. That’s a type of scam, I guess. No one asks for money on the street for a pint of Mad Dog. On the other hand, everyone should have a small pleasure. So I keep giving.

Why so philosophical today, Nance? Can’t say. I had an enjoyable morning, meeting two friends of the blog in town for a couple days. Then a quiet afternoon. Indiana rejected further gerrymandering the state, indicating the cracks in Tubby’s coalition are widening.

I hope I live long enough to see him die, though, preferably of natural causes, in public and painfully. It’ll be awesome. How’s that for maturity?

Have a good weekend, all!

Apparently “Sinners,” released around late spring, was one of the big summer movies, only prestigious, y’know. So I decided not to read anything about it, and try to have one of those rare experiences, wherein we can take in a work of art without knowing anything, or much, about it.

I knew it starred Michael B. Jordan, and there were vampires. That’s it.

So I averted my eyes from the headlines that speculated it might be an Oscar contender, although that made me want to watch it more. An Oscar-worthy vampire movie? Count me in. It finally came to HBO a couple weeks ago; Friday was the night to watch.

And, sadly, I was disappointed. It wasn’t that great. Points for locating the vampire plot in a new location (a ’30s juke joint in rural Mississippi). Points for some great music within. But the rest? Meh.

Jordan plays two characters, it turns out: Identical twins. There’s no story reason for making them twins, they could just as easily have been non-twin brothers with a second actor, but oh well. There’s a couple-three references to cunnilingus that suggests the brothers were masters of the art, but again, it didn’t really pertain to the story. I had high hopes the vampire clan, who started out all white, might thematically suggest what white people did to black music of the Mississippi Delta, but he didn’t really explore it. There’s a tacked-on KKK mini-plot that seemed to exist so the audience could get the thrill of watching a while klavern mowed down with a machine gun.

I’m not much for horror, but vampires are at least interesting monsters. These vampires…were not.

In a summer of brutal weather, starvation in Gaza and a full-on assault on American democracy, this doesn’t count as a tragedy. Just a disappointment. But it’s always good to see cunnilingus get a free public service announcement, I guess.

And the brutal weather continued. It’s about 90 as I write this, and will stay that way for two more days.

Also: A man randomly attacked 11 people with a knife in a Traverse City Walmart, which then exposed idiots who cannot use a map and understand that the northern Michigan resort city is not Dearborn, and a suspect by the name of Bradford James Gille is unlikely to be Muslim. In fact, he sounds like one of the many, many mentally ill souls in this country, having self-published a book about his revelation that he is, in fact, Jesus Christ. He hails from Afton, a dot on the map and still a bit of a drive to TC, about 90 miles to be exact.

Good thing the president just signed an E.O. requiring homeless people to be involuntarily committed to the scores of nearly empty mental hospitals that exist throughout this great land, just waiting to be filled. Mr. Gille will be right at home there.

Any Redditors on here? I am, because in the enshittified web, it’s often the only place I can get a fairly simple question about cooking or styling or whatever answered. Because I don’t want to spend my whole life there, I’m not in many groups, but one I am in is Boomers Being Fools. For the comic relief.

Friends? Fellow boomers? We are not well-liked by the youngsters.

I believe I’ve said before what my answer is when I hear younger people accuse my generation of getting all the jobs and buying all the cheap houses and then pulling up the ladder behind them, etc. I tell them that I’m very sorry that happened, that I missed the generation-wide meeting where that was discussed and voted upon, and then, if I’m feeling puckish, I’ll mention that the guy who informed my newspaper that we were phasing out pensions and going to 401Ks was way older than me.

But I signed up for the 401K! Glad I did.

Anyway, Boomers Being Fools is a ridiculous Reddit group, with the tone of petulant children. I was on an airplane and there was this whiny boomer lady or I had to spend time in the hospital and the boomer in the semiprivate room turned on Fox News or a boomer cut me off in a parking lot, etc. It’s actually kind of fun to read, and realize how sensitive today’s young people are. I try to please and thank-you my way through life. I don’t recline my seat on airplanes. I return the cart to the cart corral. I try not to be a Karen, and now I have to try not to be a boomer. It’s no use, I fear.

So, we watched “Mountainhead” on HBO over the weekend. You might have heard about it — a feature film written and directed by the “Succession” showrunner, and dealing with the same subject matter, i.e. the ultrarich and the blithe path of destruction they leave in their wakes, as well as their utter lack of self-awareness. (True fact, not in the movie: Jeff Bezos’ $500 million yacht travels with another, $100 million yacht as a tender. It contains all the toys for the guests on the big yacht — the Jet Skis, etc. — as well as the helipad. It recently traveled to Cannes, where Lauren Sanchez, Bezos’ girlfriend, was to receive some sort of award for her “environmental advocacy.”)

It wasn’t a four-star movie, but I’d give it a solid three, three and a half. A lot of the surrounding publicity is about how fast it was written, filmed and produced, as so much of this world defies and outruns satire, but the punches did land. The outline: Four of these tech titans are having a boys’ weekend at the mountaintop home of one, the poorest of the lot as a mere $500 millionaire. In the background, the world outside is burning because the richest of the quartet, plainly an Elon stand-in, has released an updated version of his social network that allows for undetectable deepfakes that have plunged much of the globe into chaos. He doesn’t give a shit, of course. The one with the slightest trace of a conscience has an AI product that could help users tell fact from fake, but he won’t sell it because the longer he holds out and the world burns, the richer he gets. The fourth member of the group is the elder, has a cancer whose reality he hasn’t accepted because he’s convinced transhumanism is around the corner and he can be uploaded into immortality.

In other words, pretty much the kind of poker weekend you have with your friends, right?

Atlantic story about “Mountainhead,” in gift-link form.

Now our week begins. Supposed to actually get above 70 tomorrow, if you can believe that forecast.

I watched “Emilia Pérez” this week. It’s, shall we say, a rather experimental film. One critic described it as “Mrs. Doubtfire” meets “Sicario,” plus a musical. Written and directed by a Frenchman (and filmed almost entirely in Paris), it has received a buttload of cultural criticism; one critic noticed none of the characters in this Mexico-set story spoke Spanish with a Mexican accent. To this I can only shrug; it was so weird and imaginative it seemed to take place in a world where accents were the least of anyone’s worries. The plot, in a nutshell:

Rita, a female lawyer (Zoe Saldana) frustrated with her work, is plucked off the street, literally, by a Mexican drug lord, Manitas, who wants her to do an unusual service: To relocate him and his family, separately, to a place where his enemies will never find him or them. His motivation: He intends to complete his gender transition and become a woman. For this service Rita will be rewarded with riches beyond her wildest dreams. She does so; this is the first act. Manitas, now Emilia, is in London, his wife and children in Switzerland. After some years, Emilia misses her children and wants to live with them again, and Rita is again enlisted to reunite them, this time with the cover story that Emilia is a long-lost aunt, and this is where the Mrs. Doubtfire stuff comes in. The story gets even more spirited from there, and I won’t tell you more, other than to say: I liked it short of loving it. The performances were excellent, and I even identified with Emilia in the sense that we have similar high-school-linebacker-size bodies; every time I saw her in the frame with the Hollywood-tiny Saldana, or Selena Gomez, who plays her wife, I was startled by the contrast.

As a rule, the Oscar-bait films come out at the end of the year and I haven’t seen many this year. I get dispirited by 10 months of superheroes, toy-based crap, animated garbage and so forth in the local multiplexes, and can’t always find a dozen free weekends between Labor Day and the King holiday to cram all the good stuff in. I think the last thing we saw in theaters was “Megalopolis.” But we’ve set aside tonight for “A Complete Unknown,” so there.

Anyway, I’ve come to admire art that really swings for the fences, and while “Emilia Perez” has many many flaws, it does indeed do that.

It’s been a weird week. Every time I look at a news site, I see further evidence we’re doomed. I don’t want to look away, as many have; it’s our responsibility to stay woke, as we once said. But there are days I have to think about the movies for a while. So I leave you with some bloggage, OK?

A smart piece on Pamela Paul, departing NYT columnist.

Finally, a photo I’ve vividly remembered from my college years, and could never find, until the name the photographer gave it when it made the contest rounds came to me all at once, burped up by my memory. A quick Google, and there it was. Not wanting to violate whatever copyright might still pertain, here’s a link. The backstory: The Ohio KKK held a rally on the Statehouse steps and some anti-racists showed up to fuck up their shit, so to speak. One made it all the way to where the Grand Wizard, or whatever those douchebags call themselves, was standing and delivered a fine blow, caught at the exact instant of impact by a UPI photographer. Title: “The Wizard Gets Walloped,” an image that regrettably will probably be duplicated in our own time. This may mark me as old-school, but I love, purely love, black-and-white news photography, and no video will ever change that.

Have a good weekend, all. Welcome to new readers. Thanks for stopping by.

Before Jimmy Carter’s grave grows too much grass, I want to talk about his funeral a little more. It was, of course, interesting to see the seating of the first few rows, where the former presidents and other dignitaries were placed. There was a certain chatter, especially on the right-wing socials, about a shot of Obama smiling as Trump talked to him, which, depending on your degree of insanity, either means UNIPARTY or SEE THEY GET ALONG, SO PUT US BACK ON YOUR CHRISTMAS-CARD LIST. To me, it looked like polite cordiality, but that might be my own prejudice.

Melania looked utterly miserable. Karen Pence stared straight ahead and refused to look at Trump. Michelle Obama was said to have “a scheduling conflict” that could mean anything, but I’m choosing to think it meant no, I will not sit next to that racist piece of shit and you can’t make me. And I was struck by this photo:

The Quayles, Dan and Marilyn, of course. Now, we just watched “The Substance” this weekend, and I will never shame a woman for not going all-in on the insanity of cosmetic surgery, or even procedures. Part of me is glad she doesn’t give a shit about being anything other than properly presentable; I mean, she’s 75 now, and that’s a good thing, as anyone who’s checked out party pix from Mar-a-lago can attest. No one looks their best at a funeral, and it would be gross if anyone put in too much effort. It’s not about you. My only note, as we say in Hollywood, is that it’s time to rethink the hairstyle you’ve had since…at least 1984:

I haven’t thought about this woman in nearly that long. She will forever be fixed in my mind with the late ’80s, in Indiana, when she smiled sometimes but often had that who-farted look on her face. When I’m feeling empathetic, I think it must be terrible to be a smart woman who sailed through law school, and had the sort of steel-trap mind that drove her to choose induced labor for her first child, so that she could take the bar exam on schedule. (She was said to have sat on an inflatable donut.) She always seemed to be about 30 IQ points smarter than her husband, but she was imprisoned by her own politics, which called for her to be happy as a mommy and not ask for anything more. When I’m not feeling empathetic, I recall she was always kind of a bitch; I remember reading that she was distressed to learn the expensive D.C. private school she was enrolling her kids in also had the children of journalists in the student body, like our kids were common white trash who should have been happy in public schools.

It sounds like I’m saying I wish she was softer, but I’m not. I give her credit for her comment, when someone tried to imply her husband had screwed some woman he met at a golf tournament, something like: “Anyone who knows Dan Quayle knows he’d rather play golf than have sex.”

The world needs bitches, too, and this was before the modern political era, when an army of stylists would have descended upon her, dressed her in different clothes, cut and styled her hair and done their best to Stepford-ize her into something she wasn’t. People project whatever they want on you, anyway. Melania is a bitch, too, but there are millions of MAGA chuds who think she’s warm and elegant. Bottom line, Washington is a hard place to be anyone’s spouse, particularly at this level.

So yeah, we saw “The Substance.” An interesting movie overall, but very gory and, as so often is the case these days, about 15 minutes too long. Recommended for an inexpensive rental, but I’ll never watch it again. Demi Moore is naked for much of it, and Margaret Qualley ditto. Although one plays the used-up Older Woman and the other the super-hot Younger Woman, both look pretty ghastly rolling around in a white-tiled bathroom, but that is the point, I think. We rented “Conclave” on Saturday night, and it was way better than I expected.

The week ahead! Let’s enjoy it! We finally have some snow on the ground, so yay.

The only thing I had on my calendar Thursday was a 9 a.m. appointment to give blood. Why do I still donate, knowing that the Red Cross emphasizes the “donor” part and never, ever talks about how they sell this donation? Eh, because people still need blood, and because I’m an adult enough to know that fresh blood is a commodity, and it would be foolish not to handle it as such. And the donation is at my gym, and the owner likes a good showing by members. People-pleasing is my business. Also, I’m HIV-negative and healthy, so: Shrug.

On the way over I drove past a few of the big trend in mid-level holiday decorations this year: The enormous inflatable. Regular inflatables have been around for a while, of course, but the enormous inflatable — big enough to approach the roofline on a two-story house — are new, the Christmas equivalent of the 12-foot skeleton. They’re sort of festively terrifying. I wonder what it must be like for a kid to look out the window and see a Rudolph or Frosty the size of a dinosaur swaying in the yard. But they’re catching on.

The problem, with it and all inflatables, is what to do in the daytime, the downtime for holiday decorations. Most people seem to turn the blowers off when the sun’s up, which leaves yards covered by what looks like holiday-colored parachutes, or maybe just dead snowmen and reindeer.

I got to the gym, spotted the blood crew on the basketball court, and started the routine. There’s always a lot of warnings and concerns about fainting, but I’ve never seen it happen. “So does anybody really faint?” I asked the phlebotomist.

“High-school kids. They go down all the time. And once one falls, they all do,” she said.

“But they’re young and healthy,” I said.

“And they never eat breakfast. Then they lie to us about how they ate breakfast. I asked one girl, ‘I thought you said you had a big breakfast. What did you eat?’ and she said, ‘Fruit snacks.’ I told her to eat a big lunch, and she came back and said she still felt sick. ‘What did you have for lunch?’ I asked. ‘A bag of apple slices.'” Damn, kids these days. I finished my bloodletting, drank a bottle of water, chose Cheez-its for my snack and headed out.

OK, Cheez-its AND mini Oreos. I wanted both salt and sweet.

It was a good Christmas hereabouts. I got many gifts, both thoughtful and practical, and Alan gave us a bike rack for our cars, one that slips into the trailer hitch and carries them on the outside, bus rack-style. That’ll be nice for exploring some car-free trails in the warm weather, maybe heading up north. I had a dream once of spending a big chunk of winter in a warm climate, taking both bikes and dog along, but after checking out seasonal rental rates for the Florida Keys (the only part of Florida I think I could tolerate), eh, maybe not.

Another thing I did over the last few days was watch a documentary — on Hulu, I believe — called “The Disappearance of Shere Hite.” Having remembered how “The Hite Report” on female sexuality rocked the usual suspects, it seemed worth a trot down memory lane. Hard to imagine her most newsworthy finding — the most women need more than PIV to reach orgasm — landed as hard as it did. But it did. And I came away thinking that younger women seem to have benefited from this. Far fewer men have Soprano-level opinions about oral sex, and thanks to Hite and many other people willing to talk about sex frankly, in general I think younger women might have an easier time of it than their grandmother’s generation did.

Then the Matt Gaetz report dropped, and: Nah.

Gaetz is a sleazebag of the first order, but we already knew that. I came away from it feeling for the girls who partied with him and his terrible friends. There’s always a lot of loose talk when something like this happens, that so-and-so “raped a child.” We can quibble over whether a 17-year-old is a child, and whether having consensual sex with a 17-year-old is rape. Personally, I don’t think it is, but I do think it’s fucking gross, and I wonder why there are so many girls that age willing to put themselves on websites like Seeking Arrangement and accept $400 to have sex with people like Gaetz and his friends at parties. They’ve been desensitized by porn, yes, but it takes more than that to turn a junior in high school into a prostitute. I suspect it takes lots of mom’s boyfriends, virtually no life of the mind beyond wondering what the Kardashians will be up to next, an obsession with social media and a few other poisons in the cultural stew to do it. (Although I also acknowledge there have always been girls like this, and likely always will.) Soon enough she’ll show up in porn loops with her hair in pigtails, pretending to be 15 again. She won’t fool anyone.

Gaetz, for his part, should be tarred and feathered. Failsons like him never are.

Don’t mean to bring you down this near-holiday weekend! It’s a unique liminal space, the only one of the year. Enjoy it.

I don’t believe we have yet said goodbye to Mitzi Gaynor. She died last week, at 93. She was mourned in the usual modern fashion — some amusing clips of her energetic dancing posted online, some YAS QUEEN, a note added to the lengthening list for the In Memoriam reel at next year’s Oscars.

I will remember Mitzi mainly for her effect on Eddie Fisher.

Eddie was a sportswriter in Columbus, already past his prime by the time I arrived in 1979. I don’t know if he even had a beat, but he looked like the kind of guy who’d cover horse racing. A bachelor. He always had a wet cigar stub clamped in his jaw, smelled like a wet cigar stub and had a tendency to look at women like a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon. Eyes bugging out on springs, tongue rolling out like a carpet runner — you know the type.

He’s gone now, and his obit informs me that he spent a stretch as the paper’s entertainment editor. Even though he toiled in Sports, he hung on to one assignment from his earlier job, and that was writing advances for at least some of the Kenley Players summer-stock productions, and certainly the ones starring Mitzi Gaynor. I think he considered her a friend of sorts.

He loved, loved, loved Mitzi, and rarely missed the chance to drop her birth name into his slavering stories: Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber. I once walked past his desk when he was interviewing her. I think he was actually drooling.

Admittedly, Mitzi was quite something, an energetic hoofer with the legs to match. Her summer show wasn’t a play or musical, just “The Mitzi Gaynor Show,” with hoofing and jokes and false eyelashes and a crowd of backup dancers in tight pants and top hats. If you like that kind of thing, it was your kind of thing.

Mitzi had an active Instagram account, where she or her reps would post old clips of her dancing in some short number with a rhinestone-studded fringe hem. I guess that means she was young at heart. I could certainly watch her sing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” on repeat for about an hour.

In the midst of looking up stuff, I found a short piece about John Kenley, founder of the players, with this startling revelation:

Born to Slovakian saloon keepers in 1906, John was born in Denver Colorado, after the family had fled increasing prohibition laws on the East Coast. Born intersex, John (who occasionally went by “Joan” but utilized male pronouns when at work) entered show business when the family moved to Cleveland Ohio, where he worked as a female impersonator, acrobat, dancer, and audience plant at comedy show before he made the move to New York City.

I had no idea.

So farewell, Mitzi. You were a true entertainer.

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