Odds and Ends News

The Neil Simon-based film The Goodbye Girl was on TCM last night. The film is a bit too corny at times but enjoyable.  Nice to see the "precocious" daughter has basically kept the same personality:

At the age of 9, Quinn Cummings learned a new vocabulary word—precocious. That’s what people were calling her 1977 Oscar-nominated turn as Marsha Mason’s glib, brainy daughter in Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl. Never mind that Cummings was the same offscreen; she despised the word. “I asked my mother if it was Latin for brat,” says Cummings, now 34. Her movie mom had a more appropriate description. “Quinn knew all of her lines way before Richard [Dreyfuss] and I,” says Mason. “She was so incredibly enterprising.”

See also this stand-up routine. 

==

I also saw presidential-related stuff that I wanted to flag.  First, following up on a C-SPAN history lecture from a month or so ago, more correction of the stereotype that President Carter was a total loser.  Carter did accomplish some things, even if his personality and the times made things hard for him.  One important precedent: human rights. 

"All told, these temporary humanitarian programs could become the largest expansion of legal immigration in decades."

I have also seen numerous complaints from the left side regarding President Biden's immigration/border policies.  This is a mixture of okay pushback and unfair one-sided sentiments that regularly do not address the times he is dealing with and the basic reality of a moderate president.  

I think this NYT article comes off a bit too one-sided (did some Biden person write it?) but it helps remind us there is more than the proverbial "dime worth of a difference" between Biden (about to declare for 2024) and others.  

==

There is always more news and you can be lost in worrying about it. We should make sure not to lose perspective, even if I will always be somewhat concerned about current events.  And, sometimes notable things occur.

Two surprising departures.  Don Lemon is gone from CNN and (more shocking) Tucker Carlson is gone from Fox News.  Neither apparently expected it.  Carlson ended his last broadcast on Friday with a "see ya Monday" sort of thing.  And, I saw something that even this morning the network was still promoting him.  

===

A day when there are a lot of social media back-and-forths on these topics is an appropriate one for SCOTUS to decide to take a couple cases regarding public officials blocking people on Twitter/Facebook.

Sotomayor (with the liberals) also found another criminal justice case (often death penalty related as this one is) that she thinks they should have taken. Again, they have one more set of oral arguments, none of which look to be too earth-shattering.  

ETA: Various proposed amendments to rules of procedure were also submitted.  I have noted in the past that the Supreme Court has jumped ahead and started to put this term's opinions in a new volume. The Supreme Court also now a citation.