Sure, Let's Punish Cats and Crippled Athletes for Being Russian
Sure, Let's Punish Cats and Crippled Athletes for Being Russian
It makes sense if you don't think about it
It sucks to feel helpless.
You’re watching the news, and you see a bloodthirsty tyrant bombing civilians and shooting up nuclear power plants and other chaotic madness, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The situation is beyond your control. Your heart goes out to the suffering victims, and you’re filled with rage at the evil bastard who’s slaughtering regular people who just want to live their lives without his boot on their necks.
Then you realize there might just be something you can do… Say, isn’t there a Russian restaurant nearby?
There, that’s better. You sure showed that rat Putin. As for the restaurant owner, what are a few broken windows compared to bombing schools and hospitals, right?
Vandalizing a restaurant isn’t the only way you can confront tyranny. You can also punish cripples
for their place of birth:
Sure, the Paralympics are being held in a country that unleashed a deadly plague on the world and is currently committing genocide against the Uyghurs. But so what? It just feels good to show that rotten prick Putin what we can do to his disabled athletes. Standing up to those who cannot stand.
Oh wait, you know what else Russians like? Cats. Let’s punish Russian cats!
At least those guys are doing something.
To some household pets.
At the furious rate this anti-Russkie hysteria is sweeping the planet, I expect the streaming services to announce they’re digitally altering The Big Lebowski to remove all visual and verbal references to White Russians. Disney Plus had better get rid of those funny Russian gangsters on Hawkeye, or somebody might complain on Twitter. And now that Barry is finally coming back to HBO, is it really okay that NoHo Hank is Russian? Or is he Chechen? Whatever, cancel him immediately or else somebody might think you like Putin.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate Putin too. I hate him like cancer. I hated him when hating him wasn’t cool. I’m just not stupid enough to believe that punishing people for being born in Russia will do anything to stop any of this.
Fuck Putin, and fuck bigotry.
Lori Lightfoot is back in the news, and thank goodness.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been accused in a lawsuit of hurling obscenities at a city lawyer who tried to defy her wishes by allowing Italian-Americans to display a removed statue of Christopher Columbus at a parade…
“You make some kind of secret agreement with Italians,” said Lightfoot, according to the complaint, which was first reported by the Chicago Tribune. “My d**k is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest d**k in Chicago.”
Lightfoot is fantastically entertaining as always, because I don’t live in Chicago and her insanity has no effect on my life.
Now it’s only a matter of time before we get another amazing Tim Dillon rant about her. Here’s one from last summer:
“A true Batman villain.” How timely!
Man, the current Supreme Court sure knows how to start the weekend right:
Snuffing out that little worm won’t bring those people back, but at least he’ll be dead. Whatever you want to say about Trump, and I’ve said plenty, his Supreme Court picks go a long way with me.
You know what this means, though: another Rolling Stone cover.
If you’re anything like me — and I regret to inform you that if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be reading this — you watched Reacher on Amazon Prime, nodded respectfully at how well it captured the tone of the Lee Child novels, and wondered which other crime series the House of Bezos might tackle next.
I’m a big fan of the late Donald E. Westlake, specifically the grim, grimy potboilers he started cranking out in the early ‘60s under the pseudonym “Richard Stark.” Stark’s main character was a career criminal known only as Parker, who would be characterized today as a high-functioning sociopath. Parker is not a good guy, not a nice guy, but you find yourself rooting for him because his fellow crooks, who invariably double-cross him, are even worse than he is.
Several attempts have been made to bring Parker to film, which for some reason usually means renaming him. He was “Walker” in 1967’s Point Blank, “Stone” in 1983’s Slayground, and “Porter” in 1999’s Payback. And when we finally got a cinematic Parker, in 2013’s appropriately titled Parker, he was played by a guy with a British accent. It was a pretty good movie, but c’mon, Parker is as American as stealing an apple pie.
So I’m pretty pumped for this:
Now we’re talkin’!
If you’ve seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which almost nobody did when it came out in 2005, you know Shane Black loves old crime novels. Downey is great in it, but he plays a bumbling doofus who only prevails by accident. I’m trying to picture Downey as Parker, who is so unlike any character he’s played lately. Tony Stark is a long way from Richard Stark… Downey did portray a psycho killer in a 1999 movie called In Dreams, so I guess I need to check that out. I love research.
The Parker books are great and you should read them immediately. The first one was 1962’s The Hunter, and Westlake published 23 more until his untimely death in 2008. Remarkably, Westlake put the series aside in the early ‘70s before jumping right back into it in the late ‘90s. Parker picked up right where he left off after almost 25 years, as if no time had passed.
God bless Donald Westlake. And don’t screw this up, Downey and Black!
It’s Friday, so usually I would put in a big long shpiel here about how you should pay me to write for you instead of being a deadbeat who expects something for nothing. I’m too tired to beg right now, but here are some buttons to click. Do what you want.
I get to use the c-word because I am one. No, not that c-word. Well, okay, that one too.
Beyond allowing Russian cats to compete, we should grant political asylum to any Russian cats who defect. Also, what about dual-national cats?
For being a lesbian, Lori Lightfoot is awfully fixated on d-cks. (Find the whole conversation and you'll see what I mean.)
Thanks for another great week of newsletters.