Matthew Butcher

Wong Kar-wai’s Leaked Audio Criticizing China’s One-Party Rule Pulled From Weibo - Vision Times A viral audio recording has triggered controversy in China’s entertainment industry after allegedly capturing famed Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai

I'd seen a little about the Blossoms script controversy, but now I find it's ballooned way beyond that?

www.visiontimes.com/2025/11/13/w...

The sequel, Richard Lester's THE MOUSE ON THE MOON, has a sieg-heiling German-American rocket scientist a year before DR. STRANGELOVE.

This is your "subtle and interesting case."

thecjn.ca/opinion/pers...

Franken groped and forcibly kissed multiple Democratic staffers. Whether that rises to the level of criminal assault or not, it's definitely the sort of thing that gets you fired.

There's a fairly prominent slap-drone character in Surface Detail; not following a criminal, but trying to keep someone out of trouble.

It's a money-free society, so there wouldn't be much in the way of white-collar crime. I imagine stalkers would be nagged to get therapy and, if necessary, physically restrained.

No, no (though I guessed correctly), no.

Yeah, I kind of wonder if the source was a staffer or staffers rather than an actual senator.

Well, sure. But *somebody* connected to the caucus is telling them this stuff.

Why Does Schumer Keep Trying to Cave? - The American Prospect The Senate Democratic leader and his Gang of Eight keep trying to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. On Thursday, they told their caucus colleagues they had ten votes to reopen the government—i...

There's reporting indicating that this pretty much happened, except that some of the caucus dissented and are making off-the-record complaints.

prospect.org/2025/11/08/w...

*jugger. A banker: 1925, Leverage; April 1933, The American Mercury, Jim Tully (' Yeggs ’), who implies its currency at least as early as 1919 ; 1933, Ersine, ‘ Juggers . . . Bankers who buy stolen bonds ’; extant. Ex jug, n., 3.—2. A bank- thief : 1925, Leverage ; extant. Ex jug, n., 3.

Westlake might have got this one from Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of the Underworld. "Jugger" is 1920s slang for a bank robber (a "jug" was a bank). It's sense 2 in the definition below.

And the Heritage plan had no resemblance to the ACA beyond its use of an individual mandate. Nothing like the Medicaid expansion, for instance.

Ivan Stang's High Weirdness by Mail

Ever see this book? I never actually subscribed to any of the mailing lists mentioned inside, but they were great to read about.

I mean, that's a long-standing way of showing that your villains are really evil. Wouldn't surprise me if the inspiration was THE MAN FROM NOWHERE, which predates QAnon.

Does the guy have Graves' disease? When I Google "Kash Patel eyes" I only find comments about his strabismus, but clearly there's more than that going on.

Do they do this kind of thing with hats, or only jerseys and T-shirts?

www.csmonitor.com/2007/1024/p0...

I mean in Regency England maybe

Rubbish headline, yeah, but the Star is Canadian-owned.

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Here's a project for a rainy day: the IT REALLY HAPPENED! CURSED VIDEO series. I think they're up to part 113 by now. There's an incomplete list on Letterboxd.

letterboxd.com/films/in/hon...

There are versions with each of those animals; I haven't seen one with all three in combination.

CNN was worse. I'd call it bloodthirsty, but that doesn't convey how tacky it also looked.

Cf. George Harrison's "What Is Life."

He was writing several posts deep in a thread about Totenkopfs, underneath an image of a Totenkopf, and he never noticed that he had one on his own chest? This is seriously the argument you want to make?

Try reading your own post. The Reddit thread was literally about an image of the Totenkopf.

But it shows conclusively that he's lying now about not knowing what it meant.

It was shown in the East Room (which weirdly isn't in the East Wing). But they'd already had screenings of CABIRIA and short nature films elsewhere on the grounds.

"No no no, my KKK-hood tattoo is merely a tribute to my favourite Skrewdriver album"

Google Books shows people using "would wish to" like that up through the 19th century. I'd guess it's just that "would" has mostly retreated to conditional or habitual action in modern English outside of some common set phrases like "would like to."

A communist fends off vampires with the hammer and sickle in The Curse of Fenric, a Doctor Who serial from 1989.

I love Paul's nod and "Oh, yeah" that greets each new detail of the Time review.