Question for the room: Is there an actress as fantastic in every sense as Tilda Swinton? I don’t think so, so let’s close the discussion on that one right here, and instead speak of the glory available to all Netflix subscribers, which is to say “Okja,” streaming now.

I heard an interview with the co-screenwriter, Jon Ronson, on the way back from Columbus. The role of Netflix in producing films isn’t without controversy; hardcore film fans want films to be films, projected in theaters and watched by audiences. Netflix makes films to be streamed on televisions, which is where most Americans watch movies, these days.

I guess, when a Netflix-produced film debuted at the Cannes film festival, the audience booed. I’ll leave that debate for those who care about such things. But I was struck by something Ronson said in the interview, about how often film studios say no, but Netflix says yes. And in this case, the “yes” was to an action comedy that isn’t for children, with plenty of social commentary, and half its dialogue in Korean, with subtitles.

But it’s so! Fabulous! And funny, and warm, and touching, and a satire of modern life, spectacle and…TED talks, I guess. Tilda plays the CEO of a rapacious, relentlessly greenwashed Monsanto-like company that is breeding a super-pig to feed the world. It’s a 10-year project, with specimens distributed all over the world. The Korean pig is the Okja of the title, and boy, is she cute. What’s more, she’s spent the last 10 years becoming best friends with an even cuter girl, who is now a young teen. With the decade up, the company is coming for its property, trailed by a film crew making propaganda to flatter it.

Things get complicated from there. But it’s a wonderful journey, with what you’d expect — chases, jeopardy, complications — but produced with wit and verve and all very fun to watch. Even the soundtrack is surprising. When was the last time you heard “Annie’s Song,” really?

The following night we watched something very different, also on Netflix — “American Anarchist,” the story of how a 19-year-old working out his anger at the government wrote “The Anarchist Cookbook” and opened Pandora’s box in the process. Since 1970, the book has been found in the possession of school shooters, terrorists and ne’er-do-wells of all stripes.

The author, William Powell, went on to do real good with his life, as a teacher of special-needs children all over the world. But the book trailed after him like a demon, coming up time and again. The most powerful scene in the film is when director Charlie Siskel, who comes off as a bit of a scold here, lays out all the cases, many of which Powell appears to not even know about. He cops to Columbine, but there were more, many more, and you can see Powell deflating as it goes on. Powell was (he died last year) clearly highly intelligent, and as he points out in the story, all the information was freely available in the New York City public library, on open shelves. (He mainly used military manuals.) But his story is the 1.0 version of today’s social-media nightmares, where nothing ever goes away, no matter how much your repudiate and walk back and deny.

Should a man be held accountable throughout his life for something he wrote when he was 19? That’s the question.

And that concludes today’s movie reviews. What happened in the world today?

Eh, who cares? The president is in Europe, and doom will surely follow.

Have a swell weekend!

As a card-carrying member of the evil media, I’ll acknowledge being a little out of touch, but there’s one thing you civilians do that has always bugged me. And that’s the insistence that when terrible crimes are committed, it’s somehow wrong to pay any attention to those who perpetrate them.

Seriously, I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard people claim that it was wrong to put O.J. Simpson on the cover of some newsmagazine, or Tim McVeigh, or anyone other than, oh, Osama bin Laden. (Funny how this rule is suspended for certain terrorists.) Sometimes this goes to extremes; one of the best criticisms I read about the Oklahoma City memorial was that McVeigh is barely mentioned, and his cause not at all. We wouldn’t want to offend the families of victims, who don’t want to see him mentioned.

How such an unspeakable tragedy can happen in a vacuum escapes me. And I don’t think O.J. killed his wife and another man to get on the cover of Time magazine. But that’s how people think, and all I can do is argue.

This came up because Alan and I watched “Tower” on Saturday, an interesting and excellent documentary on the sniper shootings from the University of Texas tower in 1966. (Last year was the 50th anniversary.) The film uses actors, and the animation technique known as rotoscoping. This gives you the effect of hearing young people describe a 50-year-old incident, which gives it a sense of immediacy. It also covers up for the lack of contemporary footage – contemporary with 1966, that is. There’s some of that, but it being the era before cell phones and video, there’s not enough to make a whole movie from it.

But here’s what’s missing: Charles Whitman. I believe his name is mentioned once, and there’s zero discussion of his motivations, admittedly oblique. So what? So this: As these hideous incidents pile up, an amazingly consistent throughline is emerging – domestic violence. In fact, Whitman’s first act, before he climbed the tower, was to kill his wife and mother-in-law.

So when you say you don’t want to “glorify” killers, consider what else you’re doing, i.e., turning your back on knowledge that may be valuable in the future.

Last year I did a story on human trafficking, and one of the advocates made a comment that’s stuck with me; that is, that human trafficking is, in terms of public awareness and understanding, approximately where domestic violence was 30 years ago. The better we understand the link between domestic and mass violence, the better prepared we’ll be to put a stop to the next one.

But we can’t do that if we act like it’s somehow wrong to talk about the men — and it’s always men, at least so far — who perpetrate these things, that won’t happen.

Just sayin’.

It’s a good movie. On iTunes. Recommended.

Man, this week started at a gallop, and it’s still galloping. Worked last night, worked a little tonight, gonna work on the usual schedule all week because you all know what comes on Friday, right?

And today I drove back and forth to Ann Arbor. In a driving rain. I listened to a Chapo Trap House podcast, a Pod Save America podcast, and missed the day’s big news – the pardon commutation of Chelsea Manning’s sentence. What should we think of this?

The Obamas have started their move, evidently.

And that’s all I got. Back to work.

As a car-show widow for the last few days, I invited a friend over Monday night for dinner and a movie – “Bright Lights,” the Carrie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds HBO documentary that was rushed into release after you-know-what.

The film was just fine, an enjoyable tour through the past and present of both women, along with Fisher’s brother Todd, who comes across here as an amiable fellow who mostly escaped the family curse, but never learned it’s not appropriate to wear a baseball cap with black tie. The clan is (was) obviously close and loving, while at the same time a bit tetched in the head, as they say, but that’s showbiz. There’s marvelous, well-preserved archival footage of Carrie and Todd as children and teens, perhaps some of it from the famous MGM publicity apparatus. The various glimpses of magazine covers and newspaper clippings give younger viewers a hint of how ferocious that was at guarding and cultivating a very particular image of the various show ponies in the stable. The studio ran your life. Lots of people were happy it did. (As for me, I want to know where I can find the black-and-white dress Debbie wore in the birthday-party clips.)

Of course, the reality was as squalid as it appears to be now. Eddie Fisher not only left Debbie for the sexiest dish in town (Liz Taylor), he was shooting methamphetamine, which he referred to as “vitamin shots.” (It was very likely supplied by a studio doctor.) A brief scene of him at what had to be the very end of his life was painful to watch. And while the kids grew up with every advantage, as we like to say, it’s hard not to see how doomed they were, especially the pretty daughter called onstage at 14 by her mother to sing — we see a weird version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” — as part of mom’s cabaret act.

Carrie Fisher was renowned as a great writer and wit, and the latter is on full display here. She’s also an interior decorator nonpareil, and I would watch another documentary where the camera just poked around her house for a while.

But people, I gotta tell you: If you wanted a clearer, more sobering case against a life of smoking, drinking and related drug abuse, you couldn’t do better than Carrie Fisher. That fresh-faced gamine who played Princess Leia was only a year older than me, but you could hardly see the plucky leader of the rebel alliance in anything but her quick wit. The smoky-lens eyeglasses seemed to be hiding something, her hair was thin (I know she took medication to stabilize her mental illness, and I know it has side effects) and her lovely face looked badly used by too much ill-advised plastic surgery. Required to exercise under the gaze of a trainer for a part in the latter-day “Star Wars,” she struggles on an elliptical like someone far further down the road. We often refer to Hollywood as the beautiful people, but there has to be a better way to grow older.

This seems a good place to drop in this wonderful moment from “Postcards From the Edge” – Shirley MacLaine in the closest thing to a Debbie Reynolds impersonation you’re likely to find on YouTube.

Just a bit of bloggage today: A useful, deeply reported profile of Jared Kushner from New York magazine. The family history alone is fascinating.

Finally, a simultaneously hilarious and infuriating piece by Neal Pollack on the trials of educating one (1) kid in modern America. At least if you aren’t wealthy:

The school gave him math homework where the first problem was “1-0,” even though he already knew long division. And his teacher sent home an information sheet that began “To many times, their are students who …”

We pulled him out after two weeks, instead enrolling him in a “progressive” charter school that was only a 15-mile drive from our house. This school, located in a former mental hospital at the edge of a toxic waste dump near the airport, was so radical that it didn’t have a principal. Parents ran everything. The cinderblock buildings didn’t get washed very often. Supplies were in short supply. They combined fourth and fifth graders into the same class, which led to bullying problems. We spent three hours a day in the car, hauling Elijah back and forth.

At the end of the first semester, in lieu of a Christmas concert, the students performed a winter solstice dance in the midst of a freezing, stick-strewn field, like something out of a Lars von Trier film. My wife and I looked at each other and said, “no more.”

The kids I tutor in the after-school program where I volunteer frequently work from typo-strewn materials, too. Charters, almost to a person.

OK, good midweek to all.

Alex said something in the previous post about idioms and language that gets lost between generations. Forte was his example, which became “Ford tape” in another’s ear/speech. It so happens I was editing a piece the other day and came across the phrase “like a broken record,” thought for a minute, and struck it. Who even knows what that means? How long has it been since vinyl records were in common enough use, and that particular defect well-known enough, to understand the reference?

Truth be told, when my records were scratched enough for it to be audible — and (she said modestly) I always took excellent care of my records, handling them by the edges and using that Discwasher stuff pretty often — the worst I heard was a pop or skip. The defect that makes them actually repeat, which is what the idiom refers to? I can’t even remember when that happened (although I’ve heard it). Must be a Victrola thing.

Once you start noticing them, you can’t stop. I had a boss who was obsessed with visual shorthand, like depicting a doctor wearing a head mirror. Is there a soul alive who has ever seen a doctor wearing a head mirror? (And yet, apparently they’re still a thing, maybe in places where they don’t have electricity or batteries.) Why is a cartoon dead person drawn with Xs for eyes?

These are Tuesday thoughts. Today it’s Wednesday. Sorry for two nights of no-show. Last night we went to an early screening of “Gimme Danger,” the Stooges documentary by Jim Jarmusch, with special guest Iggy Himself. It was good falling short of great, a touch over-long, but an otherwise enjoyable experience. Iggy walks as though his hip is bothering him. [Pause.] I wonder how many times I’ll write a version of that sentence before all these guys are planted.

Actually, I find his bandmate James Williamson’s story more interesting. Click that link and listen to the KQED podcast “The Leap,” about him.

So. Two more weeks to the election, and we seem to have entered a lull. After the rat-in-Skinner-box feeling of the last months, it’s a little strange. Well, there’s Newt Gingrich telling Megyn Kelly she’s “fascinated by sex,” which is simply too pot-kettle for words.

I cannot tell a lie: When this election season is over, I’ll be relieved, of course. But also kind of deflated. You?

Folks, I don’t know how much more of this I can handle. The campaign, you know. It’s barely started — it hasn’t started, if you consider Labor Day the formal kickoff, a quaint idea we might want to consider reviving — and I don’t think I can drink from this firehose much longer. If Donald Trump’s campaign strategy is going to consist of saying outrageous shit twice a day, my only options will be leaving social media, gouging my eyes out or moving to Sakhalin Island until Thanksgiving.

Keep in mind, it is my job to pay attention to politics, at least at the state level, so add one more layer to the madness. The bright side: We have far fewer Trumps in Michigan, although I’m sure a few will pop up soon. The state’s primary is tomorrow.

I simply lack the capacity to sustain this level of outrage for the duration. So if you pop into this page and see a kitten video here and nothing else, know that I’m rebooting in an attempt to stay sane.

I’m also taking a bit of time off from posting links to election stuff, unless I feel fairly sure it’s something most of you haven’t seen yet. Trying to keep up is too damn distracting from my real work.

Hope everyone had a nice weekend. I worked at home four out of five workdays, so by Friday I was ready to jump the damn fence. We went to a new Chinese-ish place in what used to be Detroit’s Chinatown. I guess there really was one, once upon a time. It was a block or two long. Anyway, this place serves small plates (because every new place does, now), and when I say Chinese-ish I emphasize the -ish. Case in point: The cheeseburger eggroll, which sounds awful but was delicious. We sat by the window, the better to see the obviously poor family on the other side of the street, who had pulled up a couple of strollers to visit, while the kids played on the sidewalk and tree planters. That’s Detroit’s Cass Corridor in one frame, right there.

Saturday was the traditional million errands followed by a fine dinner and movie. Which was? “Midnight Special,” a film I hadn’t even heard of until Saturday night. We’re generally not supernatural-thriller people, but damn if it wasn’t half bad, buoyed by a fantastic cast. Whoever said there are no small parts, only small actors must have been thinking of Sam Shepard, who has one or two brief scenes and makes you want to want to follow him offscreen, just to see what he does next. Add Michael Shannon, Adam Driver, Joel Edgerton and Kirsten Dunst, and you want to follow everybody offscreen. Even the detective from “The Night Of” is in this, and makes a single line resonate.

The story? Meh. But I liked the execution.

And now the week ahead yawns. Not much bloggage (see above, me going around with my hands over my ears), but there was this splendid tale of how the home pregnancy test went from a to-the-trade item only to something in every drugstore. Of course a woman was behind it.

I’m going to think Sunday-evening thoughts now: What’s for dinner, is the laundry done, will this season of “Ray Donovan” turn around. You think your Monday thoughts, and I’ll see you soon.

Thursday was the first night of the Free Press Film Festival here in Detroit, and a few of us went to a screening of “T-Rex,” a documentary about Claressa Shields, the first woman to win a gold medal in women’s Olympic boxing, which she did in 2012. She was just 17 when she won, and is training in hopes of repeating in Rio this year.

Shields hails from Flint, and that’s where most of the film was set. As you can probably guess, she doesn’t come from money. In fact, she comes from some pretty grinding poverty – her mother, seen in only a few scenes, is missing most of her teeth and seems to be a pretty enthusiastic drinker. Her sister is a feral force of nature; in one scene, the sister tells us how she dislikes her mother’s current boyfriend. As if on cue, he steps into the scene and the two exchange insults.

She calls him a pervert. I sighed. How often do we have to learn this lesson? When a teenage girl calls mom’s boyfriend a pervert, pay attention to her, because she is telling you something very important. Sure enough, a little googling and look here:

There frequently wasn’t food much on the table. The family received food stamps, but the food stamps never seemed to turn into actual food.

“I honestly don’t know what happened to the food stamps, but I think she sold them for drugs,” Shields says.

But mostly what Shields remembers from those early years is the men. Her mother had a lot of acquaintances, she said, and every time she turned around, there was another one, it seemed.

Three of them, she said, raped and sexually molested her.

A friend of mine is a therapist, and did a stint in a low-income mental-health facility. She said sexual abuse of her clients was so common that it was easier to just assume they’d all been molested by someone in their lives.

Shields isn’t asked about this in the film; she only revealed it later. But the sister’s exchange with the boyfriend got a big laugh, I guess because she’s so sassy and all.

But the film was good. I’ve seen so many lousy documentaries I wasn’t expecting much, but it was shot well, the story was coherent and reasonably honest and the conflict that so many docs have to trump up was right there – Claressa fighting her way through qualifiers, trying to have a relationship with her sparring partner (a young man, as there were no other girls in her gym to spar with), and the classic athlete’s story of gradually growing away from the first coach who believed in her. The coach and his wife took her into their home, and for that they deserve a medal of their own. But sometimes you can’t go further until you change teachers; it happens, it’s not a tragedy, but it’s sad for the ones left behind.

Oh, and for those who assume an Olympic gold medal is a ticket to riches? She didn’t get one endorsement offer, not a single solitary one. With her strong features and stocky body, and her comments in interviews that she actually enjoys landing punches, I guess corporate America just couldn’t deal. Things seem to be going better this year; some of the rough edges have been sanded off, and of course, the attention paid to Serena Williams in the past year helped the world accept bad-ass black women.

I’m rooting for her, anyway.

And that was why no blog on Friday. Out late Thursday.

The rest of the weekend was spent relaxing. Sunday was ladies’ schvitz brunch, and I took a friend. We killed a bottle of champagne, sweated through a few cycles in the steam, went shopping and found myself a floor-length Tadashi Shoji gown at a vintage pop-up, for $5. The boobal area may need some special foundation wear, but I’m set for the next auto prom.

Eight years ago this blog picked up a few readers when I pointed out some plagiarism by a guest columnist in the paper I used to work for. The following isn’t precisely plagiarism, just extreme aggravated laziness by the editor-in-chief, to fill his always-mediocre Saturday column space. The column is here. The source material, here. He added one quote, from George W. Bush, one that Slate included in its Bushisms collection. Sigh.

Thanks to Deborah for pointing out this outstanding piece on Aretha Franklin, including a quote from the current president, when asked about his reaction to her recent Kennedy Center Honors performance. You might recall it; Obama shed tears.

When I e-mailed President Obama about Aretha Franklin and that night, he wasn’t reticent in his reply. “Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R. & B., rock and roll—the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” he wrote back, through his press secretary. “American history wells up when Aretha sings. That’s why, when she sits down at a piano and sings ‘A Natural Woman,’ she can move me to tears—the same way that Ray Charles’s version of ‘America the Beautiful’ will always be in my view the most patriotic piece of music ever performed—because it captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”

I’d bet a paycheck he wrote that himself, or gave the quote to the press secretary. What do you think?

A trip to Crazytown, with the full transcript of a recent WashPost interview with Donald Trump.

Finally, since y’all like dog pictures, here’s my Friday-morning editor. Wendy likes to suggest changes before I get too deep into the weeds:

Let’s all have a Monday, shall we?

I can’t be the only one who saw this picture of the Obamas in Old Havana, and thought of this painting in the Art Institute, can I?

Late update today, sorry. Last night was the inaugural meeting of a new movie club some friends and I are trying to get going, and I didn’t get home until late. The theme was Shot in Detroit, and we watched “Only Lovers Left Alive.” I think I was the only one who really liked it, but then, I’m a sucker for Tilda Swinton in pretty much everything, and my husband is a Jim Jarmusch fan, so I’m predisposed. In the discussion afterward, one guy made an amusing point about scenester vampires and their quest for authentic food. That was funny.

Always nice to see old friends, this being the old filmmaking crew. One of the guys is the poster boy for Michigan’s changing economy, having gone from autoworker to special-effects makeup artist. When the tax incentives were cut, he got way less movie work, but now he’s hooked up with a guy who makes prosthetic limbs, a perfect fit for a guy who used to make prosthetic zombie limbs. He said one of their clients recently tripped a metal detector and when she told the guard she was wearing an artificial leg, he couldn’t tell which one.

So now it is Tuesday, and all is better than it was on Sunday. I think I do need a vacation, but not until June.

The president went to Cuba, and Donald Trump went to Washington. Trump met with the Washington Post editorial board and talked about his hands again. He also dodged a few questions:

RYAN: You [MUFFLED] mentioned a few minutes earlier here that you would knock ISIS. You’ve mentioned it many times. You’ve also mentioned the risk of putting American troop in a danger area. If you could substantially reduce the risk of harm to ground troops, would you use a battlefield nuclear weapon to take out ISIS?

TRUMP: I don’t want to use, I don’t want to start the process of nuclear. Remember the one thing that everybody has said, I’m a counterpuncher. Rubio hit me. Bush hit me. When I said low energy, he’s a low-energy individual, he hit me first. I spent, by the way he spent 18 million dollars’ worth of negative ads on me. That’s putting [MUFFLED]…

RYAN: This is about ISIS. You would not use a tactical nuclear weapon against ISIS?

[CROSSTALK]

TRUMP: I’ll tell you one thing, this is a very good looking group of people here. Could I just go around so I know who the hell I’m talking to?

Keep your fingers crossed, America. One lump in Hillary Clinton’s breast, and this guy is your next commander in chief.

We have talked about trolls here before, but this Bloomberg reporter’s troll story is way worse than mine, or Lindy West’s: A vengeful Chinese businessman made her a target for two years, heaping vile abuse upon her head via his “news” website. Her and others, actually:

I wasn’t the first person accused of racism on TheBlot. Before me, there was Michael Emen, a Nasdaq official. In 2011, Nasdaq delisted a Wey client called CleanTech Innovations. (The decision was overturned by the SEC in July 2013 after the company appealed.) A piece labeled “opinion” appeared on TheBlot focusing on Emen’s role, alleging abuse of his powers, discrimination, and racial profiling. “Michael Emen Reveals Racism at Nasdaq” is still at the top of a Google search on his name.

Similar “investigations,” as they were tagged, began to appear regularly on TheBlot. The attacks reflected Wey’s obsession with what he saw as the unfair treatment of Chinese companies by the U.S. media and regulators. TheBlot went after Roddy Boyd, a freelance reporter who’d doggedly analyzed accounting irregularities at U.S.-listed Chinese companies; Jon Carnes, a short seller; Francine McKenna, who wrote about AgFeed on her accounting-focused blog; and a pair of Barron’s reporters who’d covered reverse-merger companies and Wey’s business. The accompanying graphics grew coarser and coarser, including photos of toilet bowls full of feces.

It’s a long piece, but this, THIS is the money quote:

Decades into the Internet Age, there’s no surefire method to get defamatory material taken down if the person responsible for it is ready to put up a fight.

So, so, so true. It’s hard to get stuff taken down even if the person doesn’t fight. Hey, Google is just the messenger, doncha know.

Finally, more bloodshed, this time in Belgium. A developing story, as they say. We’ll see how it develops.

Another Christmas in the books. When Kate was younger, I used to think of the Three Hurdles of Autumn — Halloween, birthdays and the holidays. By this point, with Christmas behind us and only the new year and tree-dismantling ahead, I’d feel like a racehorse halfway down the stretch.

It’s not as grueling anymore, so I’m enjoying these last few days. It helps that I don’t have to work, that the past year was a good one, that 2015 brought only the normal wear and tear to me and mine. Still, I have this pipe dream of organizing the house before 1/1/16. We’ll see if I can at least get a couple of rooms done.

Meanwhile, I hope you all got the presents you wanted, and a few you didn’t know you wanted. We all did just fine here.

With the 30 Days of Abstention ahead, I’m wondering if I should go whole-hog and try a Whole 30 in January, too. A friend of mine posted about it on Facebook, saying it got his pre diabetic blood-sugar numbers down in a shockingly short period of time, but I dunno — a whole month without bread, pasta, rice, sugar, dairy AND alcohol? Talk about a shock to the system. On the other hand, if I’m already going to be booze-free… What’s the harm of trying?

Never mind the self-improvement for now. How about the weekend’s pleasures?

Alan got stuck working Christmas Day, so Kate and I took ourselves to “The Big Short,” which I can’t recommend highly enough. Hide all the weaponry in the house, however, lest you be tempted to go out and knife random investment bankers afterward. It’s very entertaining and does a tremendous job explaining some frankly impenetrable financial instruments, although there were moments when I was at sea. It didn’t matter — the narrative carries you through the rough parts, and the fourth-wall breaking is a stroke of genius. Go. You won’t regret it.

Then we came home and watched “Inside Out” on iTunes, and that was equally fine, although in an entirely different kind of way.

This is pretty much all I want to do on this break — lie on the couch, let entertainment wash over me and clean closets.

A little bloggage to start the week, whether you’re working or not:

The worst and stupidest health claims of the year, kicking off with none other than Gwinnie Paltrow:

Gwyneth Paltrow told women to steam clean their vaginas. Don’t do this.

OK, I won’t!

For you Michiganians, a particularly harsh take on the legislature’s year.

And in the Freep, a lovely farewell from one columnist to another, who happens to be his wife. (And isn’t leaving anything other than her job.)

More laziness in the week ahead. Enjoy yours, eh?

I don’t know why, but it seemed this year’s Thanksgiving break was just about perfect, kicking off with my birthday on Wednesday and winding up with family not-thanksgiving today; my sister-in-law came up and we had lasagna, which is traditional, right? Anyway, I’ve been away from the grindstone just long enough, and it’s back to work today.

A few things we did:

** Had a Friendsgiving this year. There were some scheduling changes this year, and so we were freed to have the big banquet in the evening, not at 1 p.m., our usual time. You ask me, I think the candles sparkle brighter on the table after the sun goes down, but I bend to the will of the crowd — I’m just there to cook. But because of the later hour, we had more friends at our table, and it was lovely. The wine was spectacular, I made a stuffed boneless turkey breast and I just ate the last of it in a sandwich. Makes a nice bookend on the weekend.

** Saw “Spotlight,” the film about the Boston Globe’s priest pedophilia investigation. To paraphrase David Simon, for a journalist, it’s like watching porn. Just a really well-done film, admirably underplayed, that doesn’t traffic in shadowy parking-garage meetings or other low-rent cloak-and-dagger stuff. Journalism in stories like this mostly takes place in ugly offices and fluorescent-lit courthouses and other unglamorous places, where everybody dresses badly, in shades of beige, black, navy and oxford-shirt blue. Underdoing it like this gives the brief scenes where someone speaks a raw truth — “And then one day he asks you to jerk him off or give him a blowjob, and now you have another secret” — a great deal of power. The cranks, like the founder of the victims group SNAP, are not de-cranked for narrative purposes, and the strange, twitchy victims, you can immediately see, were chosen by their abusers because they were strange, twitchy kids.

I can’t think of any part of the story that was goosed for dramatic purposes, with the possible exception of one montage scene, where a children’s choir sings and a character comes to terms with the inexorable evil he and his colleagues are confronting. And that was hardly unforgivable, given some of the nonsense I’ve seen in journalism movies over the years.

** Went to the Eastern Market on Saturday. Beheld this:

No comment.

** Started a new book, “Slade House,” which Kate gave me for my birthday. I put aside Margaret Atwood for now, which I now see is worth the very low price I paid for it in Toronto.

** Finally, we cut the cord. The cable cord, that is. Those of you who have dealt with Comcast know what it’s like to deal with Comcast, so I won’t bore you with the details. But we got rid of the digital-cable box, picked up HBO Now and Showtime-via-stream, and Alan picked up a weird-looking antenna, with which we can receive all the local channels, in widescreen HD, and I think that’s going to do us just fine. Net savings: $110 a month. I’ll take it.

And now the holidays start in earnest. I have a jump on my shopping and for once am facing the next month un-frazzled and almost, dare I admit? A little festive. Let’s get into it. And let’s start this week.

On the film “American Sniper,” I have no opinion. Had no opinion. Tell me lefty film buffs found it offensive, and I yawn. Tell me Michael Moore said snipers are cowardly sneaks, and I guffaw. Tell me it’s a crappy movie, and I shrug. Tell me it’s a great one, and ditto.

By which I mean, every piece of creative work isn’t for every single person. If liberals get movies that flatter their biases, why shouldn’t conservatives? So Clint Eastwood votes Republican; who cares? Judge his movies on their own merits. And since I really had no interest in seeing the Chris Kyle story dramatized on the big screen, I stayed away, content to savor Bradley Cooper’s Texas accent via the trailer and commercials. I read a few reviews about it. I know the outline of the story, and I figured I’d catch it when it came around on cable. Which it has.

The other day I surfed past “American Sniper” in progress on one of the premium channels and was caught up in the climactic scene, a firefight where Kyle takes a minute to pull out his sat phone under heavy fire and call his wife to tell her he’s ready to come home. Figured there were but 20 minutes or so left, and decided to watch. It unfolded pretty predictably: Chris the civilian is on edge, Chris needs some time to adjust. Chris attacks a family dog roughhousing with his children. Chris sits in a bar. And then, whaddaya know, here comes Chris walking into his kitchen with a revolver in his hand, through the living room where the kids are playing and into the kitchen. Jeez, is he going to shoot his wife? I don’t remember reading about this part. He points it at her and she doesn’t scream. In fact, she smiles. “Drop them drawers,” he says.

It’s a playful love scene! She throws up her hands, and they banter as he spins her around the kitchen, the gun still in one hand. I’m practically gasping at this example of responsible gun ownership in action. What are the pro-gun people always telling us? Relax, we have training. We secure our weapons. They are never anywhere a child could get to them. And so on. Apparently, having a weapon pulled is enough of a thing in the Kyle romantic-move catalog that the Missus doesn’t even blink. I was reminded of Janice Soprano confiding to Carmela that she isn’t worried about her fiancé, Richie Aprile, having a side piece because she’s the only one who would let him hold a gun to her head during sex. Carmela gasps, Janice shrugs and says, “Usually he takes the clip out.”

I went a-Googling to see if anyone else noticed this scene. Gail Collins did, bless her heart:

This is, by virtually any standard, insane behavior. Mike Huckabee, a big “American Sniper” fan, recently published a book called “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,” which is so wildly opposed to any weapon regulation that Huckabee opens his chapter on modern education by complaining that public schools are anti-gun. Yet he also presents a list of universally accepted gun safety rules, many of which boil down to don’t point it at anybody as a joke.

…“American Sniper” could actually be seen, at least in the final scene, as a good-gun, bad-gun message. The real Chris Kyle did enjoy walking around the house, twirling a pistol. His wife said that as the clouds lifted after his Iraq service, he would playfully point a gun at the television and pretend to shoot down the bad guys.

No wonder we’re separating into two Americas. It’s not red and blue. It’s sane and insane.

So, now that we’ve gone there, another thing that was published a while back that I only saw a couple days ago: A very entertaining exegesis of the men who hate Hillary Clinton, and the, uh, interesting ways they express it:

Let’s begin with Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., author of “Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House,” since if Hillary’s biographer-foes sound like embittered ex-husbands, in Tyrrell, founder and editor-in-chief of the far-right American Spectator, we’re fortunate to have a biographer who’s occasionally mused in print about his actual ex-wife. So who gets it worse—Hillary or the ex? Actually it’s a toss-up. Who would have predicted: coincidentally it turns out that Madame Tyrrell and Madame Hillary share an uncanny number of similar traits. Hillary’s a self-righteous, self-regarding narcissist, “a case study in what psychiatrists call ‘the controlling personality,” and assumes the world will share her conviction that she’s always blameless. Compare with Tyrrell on the soon-to-be-ex, from his political memoir The Conservative Crack-Up: “She resorted to tennis, then religion, and then psychotherapy. Finally she tried divorce—all common American coping mechanisms for navigating middle age.” When Tyrrell worries that suburban women will secretly identify with Hillary’s independence and break from their husbands’ politics in the privacy of the voting booth, clearly suburban women’s late-breaking independence is territory he has cause to know and fear.

Hillary’s disposition is dark, sour, and conspiratorial; she has a paranoid mind, a combative style, is thin-skinned, and “prone to angry outbursts.” Whereas the ex-Mrs. T., we learn, was afflicted with “random wrath”; and as divorce negotiations were in their final stages, threatened to make the proceedings as public and lurid as possible. Hillary has “a prehensile nature,” which makes it sound like she hangs from branches by her feet. (Tyrrell has always fancied himself a latter day Mencken, flashing his big vocabulary around like a thick roll of banknotes.) And while he nowhere actually says that his ex-wife hung from branches by her feet, the reference to protracted divorce negotiations probably indicates that “grasping”—the definition of prehensile (I had to look it up)—is a characterization he wouldn’t argue with. When Tyrrell writes of Bill and Hillary that there was an emotional side to the arrangement, with each fulfilling the other’s idiosyncratic needs, as we see, he’s been there himself.

It gets better:

On the sexual creepiness meter, Klein gets some stiff competition from Carl Limbacher, who writes for the far-right news outlet NewsMax and is the author of “Hillary’s Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton’s Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House.” Here’s another biographer a little too keen to nose out the truth about Hillary’s sexuality: Bill Clinton is a predator, Hillary digs it, and this is the key that unlocks her character. If Hillary didn’t literally hold down the victims while Bill did the deed, she was complicit nonetheless—“a victimizer who actually enabled her husbands predations,” since “a woman with half the intellect of Hillary Clinton would understand that she’s married to a ravenous sexual predator at best—a brutal serial rapist at worst.” At least he compliments her intellect. I’m dying to know what Limbacher imagines Hillary’s wearing when he fantasizes about her in the henchwoman-to-rape role—her Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS outfit or the navy blue pantsuit.

I recall it was said of Bill Clinton that he was fortunate in his enemies. That goes doubly so for Barack Obama, and probably triply so for Hillary. I cringe to imagine what the discourse over President Hillary will be. Just cringe.

OK, then, let’s get to the miscellanea:

Thanks to Jeff for bringing me up to date on the many lavish purchases of Leslie Wexner, Columbus tycoon and probably the richest person I ever interviewed. (He was very polite and sent me a lovely handwritten thank-you note later.) He appears to have bought a Downton Abbey-like house in the Cotswolds, solely to have a nice shooting estate for his wife, who is a trap and skeet enthusiast. They use it two weeks out of the year. I wonder if they use beaters, and whether they carry their own guns.

Chris Christie was kicked out of the quiet car, or, as the NYPost calls it, Amtrak’s “notorious” quiet car. I’ve heard anecdotal quiet-car stories that lead me to… not take a side on this one. No, not even the governor of New Jersey can yell into a cell phone in the quiet car; that’s why the quiet car exists. On the other hand, it seems quiet-car denizens can get upset by the quiet rattle of a keyboard, so there’s that. As someone who lives in a place where commuter rail is essentially non-existent, I’ll be Switzerland here.

And that’s it for the weekend, then. Shall we bite the new week in the ankle? Let’s.