Throughout the world, people who make Internet inquiries about Kuwa6226 meet violent deaths.
In online forums and chatrooms, people are warned not to mention the mysterious entity.
But who, or what, is Kuwa6226? A supernatural force? A cult? A global conspiracy?
Most people say that it’s better not to ask…and Kuwa6226’s reign of terror goes unchallenged.
***
Then two unlikely sleuths, from opposite sides of the world, unite.
Minoru Watase is a corporate IT employee in Japan. Julie Lawrence is a college student in the American Pacific Northwest.
Julie and Minoru have each lost a friend to Kuwa6226. Together, they are determined to discover Kuwa6226’s true identity and eliminate the menace.
Their search will take them from the streets of Tokyo to an American college town in Washington State. When they finally come face-to-face with Kuwa6226, Julie and Minoru will be unprepared for the revelation…and the ruthlessness of their adversary!
Kuwa 6226 is a horror-mystery with endless twists and turns!
The ride share app Uber is piloting a new program that will allow female drivers and riders to be paired exclusively with riders and drivers of the same sex.
I’m not going to be deliberately obtuse about this. I can understand why many women would want this feature.
I am 57 years old. I cannot think of a single instance in my life when I have felt physically threatened by a woman. And a person in a car is vulnerable by definition.
I see two problems with this at the implementation level, however:
1.) What is going to stop male drivers and passengers from simply identifying as women to get around the rule?
The mainstream media and others have spent the last decade normalizing the idea that gender identity is a matter of choice. Media outlets like CNN now regularly use gender-neutral terms like “pregnant persons”. How will Uber define womanhood, for the purposes of this new feature?
2.) What is Uber going to say when male drivers and passengers demand the same option: i.e., to be paired only with members of their sex? What if a male Uber passenger says that he doesn’t “feel safe” with a female driver, because he believes that men are better drivers?
Men and women are different, and we have different concerns and vulnerabilities.But that’s the moderate, 20th-century man in me speaking.
During the 1980s, I belonged to a gym that had separate workout areas for men and women.
In practice, the women sometimes ventured into the men’s workout area to use the heavy weights. Also in practice, male members of the gym could walk over to the women’s side if they were taking an aerobics class—all of which were held on the women’s side of the facility.
Likewise, I can understand why some men in the military might have concerns about being led into combat by female officers. That doesn’t mean I think women can’t do the vast majority of jobs that were once male-exclusive, or mostly male-exclusive: engineer, attorney, surgeon, CEO, president, etc.
But our physical capabilities and vulnerabilities are different. That’s why many women would have a concern about being alone in a car at night with a man they don’t know. That’s also why, if I ever need a bodyguard, I want [him] to be a 6’4” male who can bench-press 350 lbs.
***
Common sense and moderation. What novel concepts!
Common sense and moderation have largely been discarded in the twenty-first century. (See #1 above, in particular.)
Therefore, I predict that Uber’s new program—while reasonable enough on the surface—is going to start a dumpster fire. (And this already seems to be the case on social media).
While poking around on Amazon this morning, I noticed that the electronic version of Stephen King’s 2018 novel, The Outsider, is now available in Kindle Unlimited (KU). This means that subscribers to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program can read the electronic version of the book for free.
(Note: At least for now. Kindle Unlimited terms run for a period of 90 days. So if you’re reading this post a year from now, The Outsider may or may not be in KU.)
Amazon launched its Kindle Unlimited program more than a decade ago. Since its inception, there have been arguments for and against the program.
On one hand, Kindle Unlimited is to books what Netflix is to movies. KU thereby allows subscribers to discover new books and authors for free (aside from the KU subscription fee).
On the other hand, Kindle Unlimited requires books to be exclusive to the Amazon platform. (More on this shortly.) This creates a “network effect” that arguably disadvantages other stores like Apple Books and Kobo.
Another concern with Kindle Unlimited is that it tends to be skewed toward certain kinds of genre fiction, like romance, urban fantasy, and space opera. In the past, critics of the program (mostly book reviewers) have complained that Kindle Unlimited doesn’t contain enough titles from bestselling, household-name authors.
Well, you can’t get any more household-name than Stephen King. If a Stephen King title is available in Kindle Unlimited, then the program has all the bona fides it needs.
There is one important catch, however. And this quibble comes (mostly) from the perspective of an independent author/publisher like me.
The Outsider is still available on other platforms, like Kobo and Apple Books. (I checked.) Stephen King’s title is not subject to the normal rules of KU exclusivity.
This is an important exception. If I place a book in Kindle Unlimited, I have to agree to make it exclusive to Amazon (not available anywhere else) for a period of 90 days. This means that readers can’t find it on other platforms, and I can’t sell it on other platforms during the Kindle Unlimited enrollment period.
So Stephen King gets different, more preferential treatment at Amazon than I do. I’m neither outraged nor surprised. Having spent many years in the corporate world, I know how the corporate world works.
As someone once told me, many years ago: “Rank and status have perks.” At the time, we were discussing the egalitarian implications of reserved parking spaces for top managers in the company parking lot. The corporate world is far from egalitarian. It would be naive to think that book publishing and retailing are “special” in this regard. Business is business.
On the contrary, I might benefit from this. The placement of The Outsider in Kindle Unlimited will bring new horror fans into the subscription program. After they’re done reading The Outsider, some of them may read one of my horror novels, like 12 Hours of Halloween, Revolutionary Ghosts, or Kuwa 6226. They may even give my historical horror series, The Rockland Horror, a try.
Yes, that was a little self-promotional plug, tongue-in-cheek though it was. Like I said: Business is business.
Some romcoms are good, and Mystic Pizza is one of the good ones. This movie came out shortly after my twentieth birthday, but I somehow neglected to see it.
Mystic Pizza is about three Gen X working-class Portuguese women who are in their early 20s. (Since this movie came out in 1988, Gen X was still young, and still not widely referred to as Gen X.)
Structurally, the movie reminds me a little of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), insofar as there is an ensemble cast (Julia Roberts, Lili Taylor, and Annabelle Gish), each working her way through a slightly different moral and emotional conundrum.
These dilemmas deal with issues of love, sex, socioeconomic class, and ethnicity. (I should make clear, though: Mystic Pizza is not a “message film”. It is simply an artifact from a time when even young adult date movies had artistic worth.)
Vintage 1988 theatrical release poster
The movie is set in the late 1980s in the fictional town of Mystic, Connecticut. All three of the young women work at “Mystic Pizza”, a mom-and-pop pizza restaurant run by a late middle-age Portuguese couple.
This was the movie that launched Julia Roberts’s career, more or less. Mystic Pizza also includes the then-unknown Matt Damon in a very minor, nonspeaking role.
Most impressive of all, though, is the performance of Vincent D’Onofrio, who plays the marriage-minded boyfriend of one of the young women. What is impressive is that the previous year, D’Onofrio starred in Full Metal Jacket as the bumbling but mentally disturbed Private Leonard ‘Gomer Pyle’ Lawrence. D’Onofrio displays an impressive range, moving easily from a psychotic villain role in a war movie, to a leading man role in a romcom.
Mystic Pizza is a must-see for all Gen Xers who may have missed it in 1988. Millennials will find some aspects of the movie they like. Gen Z viewers will probably not understand the relationship portions of the movie, but they will marvel at the payphones and Internet-free world of 1988.
The other day I began watching my favorite Japanese talk show program on YouTube. I was shocked to find that everyone on the show was speaking awkward, robotic English. It was all autodubbed!
I spent some time searching around, before I figured out how to turn the damn autodub off, and get the original Japanese content again.
YouTube recently rolled out a new autodub feature for videos, whereby videos in a language other than your national language are automatically dubbed for you.
So if you live in Germany, Portuguese and American English-language videos are automatically dubbed into German. If you’re in the USA, YouTube assumes that you speak nothing but American English, and autodubs content in French, Spanish, Japanese, or Mandarin into robotic American English. Or something resembling American English.
Based on the YouTube comments I’m reading, most YouTube users don’t welcome this latest implementation of an “AI” solution in search of a problem.
I don’t object to autodubbed videos, for those who are unmotivated to learn other languages. What I object to is YouTube’s forcing this new “feature” on viewers (and unwitting creators).
This should have been an opt-in system for viewers, rather than an opt-out system. Don’t give us autodubbed videos unless we specifically ask for them.
If you speak any major language (English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Russian, German, etc.) you can already find plenty of natively produced content in your own language. (Even native Hindi speakers have many choices nowadays, with all the creators making videos in that language.) So if a person is watching a video in a foreign language, the odds are high that they specifically want the foreign language content.
I don’t suspect that this is a YouTube conspiracy to keep everyone monolingual. Rather, this arises from the fact that Google—along with the other tech giants—have over-invested in under-performing and overhyped AI technology. They are therefore intent on cramming AI down users’ throats whenever possible. Autodubbed videos that we didn’t ask for, and don’t want, are just the latest example. There will be lots more of this kind of thing, before the AI bubble finally and mercifully bursts.
The question “Where’s the beef?” was a common “meme” in American culture in the mid-1980s. (Nobody used the word “meme” back then, though.) “Where’s the beef?” implied that something lacked value or substance.
It all came from a series of Wendy’s commercials, starring Clara Peller (1902-1987). Pellar made this inquiry whenever she was confronted by a hamburger that was too much bun, not enough beef.
Wendy’s made the size of its beef patties a selling point. And while fast-food hamburgers were never among my favorite foods, the Wendy’s burgers were better than most, at least in the 1980s.
This commercial is pure genius. It is entertaining in itself, but it also conveys an effective marketing message.
Everyone is talking about the Astronomer scandal: the married 50-year-old CEO, Andy Byron, and the married 52-year-old HR chief, Kristin Cabot, were caught in a tender embrace at a Coldplay concert. Byron has resigned as of this writing.
This news story belies a common cliché: that the powerful older man will necessarily seek out the company of a much younger woman, often one in a subordinate position. Notice that Byron was not caught with a 25-year-old new hire, or a 21-year-old college intern. He was caught with a managerial colleague who is two years his senior.
I did my final stint in the corporate world in the US division of one of the major Japanese automakers. I worked in Northern Kentucky, and almost all of my coworkers were Americans.
I saw many cases of high-level managers jumping into bed with each other, often destroying their marriages in the process. In one case that comes to mind, two [married] managers had a workplace affair, divorced, and remarried each other. Everyone pretended, of course, that there was nothing unusual about this.
Rarely were there rumors of senior managers engaging in dalliances with much younger women who were way down on the corporate totem pole, à la Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
I do remember one case in which this happened. The [single] woman was about 30, and the [married] male manager was in his 50s.
The company’s senior management was alarmed by the impropriety, so they remedied the situation. The woman was rapidly promoted to a general manager level herself. The married manager divorced his wife, and the workplace lovers were married.
Problem solved.
The corporate world is like Peyton Place, with the most tawdryactivity occurring at the highest levels.
-ET
TERMINATION MAN
A tale of sex, lies, and violence in the corporate world. Inspired by the author’s experience in the cutthroat automotive manufacturing sector!
I’ve been aware of Johnny B. Truant for years now. I was a long-time listener of the (now defunct) Self-Publishing Podcast. Truant cohosted this podcast with his writing partners, Sean Platt and David Wright.
The Self-Publishing Podcast was quite informative. I really miss it.
Truant and his two cowriters provided instruction on what quickly emerged as the “standard” way to do indie publishing in the era of Kindle Unlimited and increasing competition. But now Truant has become a critic of an overheated indie publishing ecosystem, dependent on high ad spends and mass production techniques.
I recently listened to Truant being interviewed on the Self Publishing Info with the SPA Girls podcast. What follows are some highlights from the interview, with my own editorial asides liberally sprinkled in.
Two trends have distinguished indie publishing for at least a decade: a focus on high-volume output (aka “rapid release”), and a doctrinaire conformity to “tropes” within a very limited range of genres (aka “write to market”).
Neither of these was an entirely bad idea from the get-go.
Jonathan Franzen, after all, averages one novel every five years. No writer can make a living that way. Historically, fiction writers have had a tendency to be far too dithering and far too precious.
Writers may also be tempted to engage in excessive introspection, thereby writing self-indulgent stories that are too personal or too odd to ever find a mass audience. (Deeply autobiographical novels are notorious in this regard.) The writer should always ask herself: is anyone—besides me—going to want to read this?
Rapid release and write-to-market initially brought some business sense to what has traditionally been an artsy, undisciplined endeavor: the writing of fiction. Treat your writing like a business, was the overall message of rapid release and write-to-market.
This was, again, basically a good idea.
But as is so often the case in the Internet age, a basically sound idea was taken too far.
***
Here are some of the problems that have caught my attention. They dovetail with some of what Truant talks about. (Truant is not the only one unhappy with the current state of indie publishing.)
I’ve noticed a trend toward ever-increasing subgenre specificity, and repetitiveness within genres. Everyone trying to copy (and thereby piggyback off the success of) everyone else.
Spend some time in any online indie publishing forum, and you’ll see what I’m talking about: endless novels in which witches, cats, or dogs solve mysteries…reverse harem romances…enemies-to-lovers romances…billionaire romances. (Okay, just about every kind of romance.)
Nothing wrong with any of these subgenres, per se. (Okay…some of the romance subgenres are just plain weird, but I’m trying to be diplomatic here.)
The point is: do we want a publishing landscape in which every author must join a particular “subgenre guild”, and then narrowly follow the rules and tropes laid out within?
The imitation and sameness within the current indie publishing landscape also open up the door to a looming threat: the spewing electronic anus known as AI. AI-generated novels have already become a threat to the Kindle Unlimited ecosystem. The more similar indie-published novels are, the easier they are to replicate with AI.
***
Johnny B. Truant doesn’t seem to be telling anyone that they have to forget about market trends, or reduce their output to Franzen-like slowness. Instead he advocates a more traditional, fan-based approach. What he calls an artisan approach.
For example, Truant likes to focus on selling books at in-person events, rather than chasing algorithms on Amazon. In the SPA Girls interview, he states that in-person paperback sales have become his primary revenue stream.
He doesn’t tell anyone that they have to do the exact same thing. Rather, he encourages authors to do their own thing.
To consider my own situation as an example: I like blogging and essay writing. (I’m a big fan of PJ O’Rourke and Joseph Epstein.) I enjoy the essay just as much as I enjoy fiction (both as a reader and as a writer).
For years, though, the self-appointed high gurus of indie publishing have declared that blogging is a waste of time, as is every minute not spent writing in a long series in one of half a dozen pre-selected genres. (The only other worthwhile activity is spending money on PPC ads, tinkering with PPC ads, or taking the expensive PPC ads course of a certain indie author/guru based in the United Kingdom.)
Likewise, the writer’s website must not contain a blog. The writer’s website must not contain any frivolous content; everything must lead to the email autoresponder and the “sales funnel”.
***
No one forces indie authors to listen to any of this advice, of course. But self-publishing is a lonely business. Most indie authors will eventually seek out information online, and most will find their way to a predictable group of forums, gurus, and (if the indie author is a true masochist) live communal events.
Johnny B. Truant’s artisan author message is a much-needed counterpoint to the hive mind. His new book is already in my Amazon shopping cart.
-ET
(Note: Johnny B. Truant doesn’t know me or endorse me. Nor did he have any part in my writing this piece. If any part of this offends you, blame me, not him.)
Xavier University was one of the universities I actively considered back in the mid-1980s, when I was a high school student shopping for a college. XU has long been one of Cincinnati’s major institutions of higher education, along with the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University. I’ve met many people over the years who attended Xavier. All of them have had good things to say about the school.
But Xavier University is anticipating a 17% drop in incoming enrollment during the 2025-2026 academic year. The university will be making some cuts to cope with the shortfall.
Back in the mid-1980s, the university was considered a high-growth business model, almost by definition. Practically all universities were in a constant state of expansion, even in Cincinnati.
But university enrollment has been declining for more than a decade now, after peaking in 2010. Colleges and universities reported a 15% decline in enrollment between 2010 and 2021.
Some analysts are blaming the “demographic cliff”. Birthrates in the USA have also been declining since the 00s. There will be fewer 18-year-olds in the fall of 2025 than there were in 2005 or 2015.
But US birthrates have always fluctuated. My generation, Generation X, was much smaller than the Baby Boom generation. And yet, college enrollment either increased or remained steady. There was certainly no sense of an enrollment crisis.
Here’s the real problem. Tuition at Xavier University now costs $52,736 per academic year. And that’s for commuting students. If you live on campus, the cost is $67,256 per year. This means that a 4-year degree at XU will cost somewhere between $210,944 and $269,024 per year, based on current rates.
The XU website notes, “Nearly all incoming Xavier students receive financial assistance each year through grants, scholarships, loans, and work-study opportunities.”
Perhaps. But that’s by no means a guarantee. Wouldn’t it make more sense to price the product affordably to begin with?
Xavier, I should note, has never been a cheap school. It was expensive even in the mid-1980s. (That’s one of the reasons I didn’t go there.) But it wasn’t this expensive, even when you factor in inflation.
Tuition at the University of Cincinnati (where I actually got my degree) now runs about $14,000 per year at the main campus. That’s an improvement on $52,000, to be sure.
But annual tuition when I attended UC, from 1987 to 1991, was around $3,000 per year. The cumulative inflation rate since 1989, the middle of my time there, is 160%. So factoring in inflation, annual tuition at UC should be about $7,803 today.
But the increases in university tuition costs have long outstripped inflation. In the late 1980s, I met some non-traditional students in their late 20s and early 30s, who had completed part of their education at UC during the 1970s. They couldn’t believe how expensive UC was in the late 1980s.
And almost 40 years later, this relic from the late 1980s wonders why an education at the University of Cincinnati costs almost twice as much now, in real terms, than it did in my student days.
And keep in mind: there was no Internet back then. The Internet was supposed to make everything cheaper and more efficient, right? Except higher education, that is.
Back to declining enrollment. I have no idea how college students and the parents of prospective college students get their arms around these costs. When I was an incoming college freshman, a university education was an investment. Nowadays, it’s a high-stakes gamble.
We are now a little less than six months from the start of the second Trump administration. So how’s it going? The president has had his share of missteps, minor scandals, and flub-ups, to be sure. But nothing has really stuck. Teflon Don chugs on.
The president’s often draconian immigration (deportation) policies alarm some. But the president won the 2024 election on this issue. He is fulfilling his election promises, according to one interpretation.
Trump’s on-again, off-again trade war and tariff policies have spooked business interests. But iPhones have yet to rise to $3,000. The most dire predictions have not come to pass.
Still, the current occupant of the White House remains divisive. The best thing the Democrats could do? Find a viable, broadly appealing alternative to MAGA.
Instead, the Democrats have found Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist who advocates—drum roll!—government-run grocery stores. Not a fresh, new agenda, but reheated nonsense from the Soviet Gosplan. Mamdani’s potential election to the New York City mayor’s office threatens to drive even more businesses (i.e. employers) from the rotting Big Apple.
But wait! We’ve got it! There may be something over here! The Democrats and the mainstream media have found a 22-year-old birthday note, ostensibly written by Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein. The 2003 note is unverified, and Trump denies having ever written it. And Jeffrey Epstein, of course, has not been denying or confirming anything since his death in 2019.
But there may just be something! Some evidence! Of something!
I have no idea if the note, which reportedly reads, “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret,” is authentic. I have no idea what it would prove even if it were authentic. First Lady Rosalyn Carter was once photographed with John Wayne Gacy. That did not make Mrs. Carter a serial killer.
First Lady Rosalyn Carter and serial killer John Wayne Gacy
That President Trump hobnobbed with Jeffrey Epstein (before his crimes were exposed) is beyond dispute. So did Bill Gates, former Presidents Clinton and Obama, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, and Naomi Campbell. Et cetera, et cetera. In addition to his business activities, and his more unsavory interests, Jeffrey Epstein was quite the socialite.
Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates
The mainstream media is preoccupied with Jeffrey Epstein, and shoehorning in a Trump conspiracy theory somehow. They would do better to hammer Trump on tariffs and inflation. People actually care about economic issues. No one I know, here in Ohio, gives a rat’s patootie about Jeffrey Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein is a 2019 news story. The alleged birthday note from Trump is a 2003 news story. Twenty-two years ago. The only people who care about this issue in 2025 already dislike Trump.
This is a Hail Mary pass. This will be a fishing expedition filled with innuendos and kinda-sorta-maybe plausible accusations, but no smoking guns. MAGA will write the whole thing off as fake news. And given the way the dog and pony show of Russiagate turned out, who can blame them? (The Democrats have never proved that Trump is a Russian asset, but the Kremlin has now decided that Melania Trump is a Ukrainian asset. So there is no end to stupid conspiracy theories nowadays, coming from all quarters.)
I write the above as an American who would agree that President Trump and his agenda are far from perfect. Want to sway my vote in the 2026 midterms? Give me competent Democrats, not scatterbrained moppets like Zohran Mamdani. And, please—for the love of all that is decent and holy—spare me the six-year, postmortem regurgitation of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Give me something real, not this ridiculous Hail Mary pass.
To say that network television is in decline has become almost a cliché in recent years. The mainstream news media has been in decline, too.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was not quite a serious news show (like 60 Minutes), and not quite pure entertainment with the occasional political jab thrown in (like Saturday Night Live). The Late Show was a show dedicated to a single man and his opinions.
This week CBS announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert would be cancelled. According to the network, this is purely a financial decision. Some Democrats, including Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren, allege otherwise.
Who knows? On one hand, the current occupant of the White House has demonstrated a willingness to involve himself in private-sector matters that former commanders-in-chief would have considered off-limits. This week, the president pressured the Coca-Cola Company to use cane sugar instead of corn syrup in its beverages.
Reasonable people can disagree on the importance of that one; but I can’t remember any former president involving himself in a debate about soft drinks. And Stephen Colbert, while on air, was one of Trump’s most trenchant critics. So who knows?
On the other hand, the partisan political orientation of Colbert’s program automatically cut the show’s viewership in half. Network TV isn’t talk radio or the Internet. Network TV has always faced a pressure to play to the middle, to the least common denominator.
What is the market, in the Internet-dominated year of 2025, for a network show consisting of a 61-year-old white guy delivering political monologues, and interviewing some predictable guests? (Colbert recently invited Zohran Mamdani, NYC’s Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate, to appear on his show.)
I’m a 57-year-old white guy in Ohio, and I never watched Colbert (except for clips posted on the Internet). How many members of Gen Z, a more liberal, more diverse generation, were tuning in? How many members of Gen Z watch network television at all?
In the current environment, it isn’t hard to believe that CBS factored political considerations into its decision to cancel The Late Show. It’s also not hard to believe that The Late Show, originally launched in the pre-Internet era of 1993 (with David Letterman as host) was simply a relic whose time had passed.
Book Riot reports that the newest Kindle Unlimited (KU) scam involves rapidly produced, AI-generated novels:
“AI-generated books can be easily created and uploaded, and they’re flooding search engines—making it so that real-life authors, particularly self-published ones, are difficult to find, drowned out by books that aren’t written by humans. And now, some users are using AI to clone real-life books, and even generating and publishing books falsely attributed to trusted authors’ names.”
This doesn’t surprise me. Almost as soon as the Kindle Unlimited program was launched, back in 2014 (eleven years ago, now). There were individuals and criminal networks looking for ways to scam the system. Amazon has had to make various changes over the years in order to counter the bad guys.
Nor am I surprised that an unholy alliance between AI and scammers is the latest permutation of the problem. AI is the manure-generating cow of the Internet, after all. And its barriers to entry are relatively low. AI is an irresistible temptation for people who are already trying to make money without doing anything productive.
Book Riot further reports that the romance genre is where most of the scamming is taking place. Once again, no surprise. Since the beginning, KU scams have been concentrated in the romance field.
The reason here is the sheer numbers involved. Just as a certain kind of man will always be drawn to Pornhub, a certain kind of woman will always be drawn to romance novels, especially the “spicy” (i.e., sexually explicit) ones.
Some of the most voracious romance readers consume a book per day. These are the ultimate “whale readers”, and targets for Kindle Unlimited writers and scammers alike.
In the title of the above-quoted article,Book Riot asks the question: “Can Kindle Unlimited Survive AI?”
My guess is: yes. AI-everything, like various fatuous trends of the past (consider the “pet rock” craze of the mid-1970s) will find its way into the dustbin of history. But in the meantime, there will be some disruptions.
I am an American by birth, but I have long been an enthusiastic Anglophile.
My grandfather spent part of World War II in Plymouth, England. He was inspired by the British people’s forbearance and fighting spirit during the Second World War. I am a fan of most all things British—with the notable exceptions of mashed peas and Benny Hill.
This past week in Rugby, England, a 12-year-old girl named Courtney Wright was sent home from class when she wore a British flag dress to school to celebrate “Culture Day”. Her teacher considered the Union Jack to be hate speech, apparently.
Sadly, this kind of thing happens a lot in the United Kingdom. In recent decades, Churchill’s England has become the England of Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer. Jeremy Corbyn, who aspired to be Prime Minister, pointedly refused to sing “God Save the Queen/King”, the British national anthem. Imagine an American presidential candidate refusing to participate in such a basic ritual of civic pride. And yet, Corbyn, now 76, was once the leader of the Labour Party.
As an American, I don’t really have a dog in this fight over Culture Day attire at a school in Rugby, England. But I nevertheless admire this brave young lady, Courtney Wright. She set an example for many British adults, by standing up for healthy patriotism. In her own way, she is a modern-day Boudicca.
The Union Jack is the symbol of a great civilization. The British Empire was not perfect. (Americans certainly expressed that view in 1776.) But the British Empire spread the rule of law, free-market economics, and British culture/language throughout the globe. Show me an empire that was more benevolent, that brought more net benefits to more people. This is why the citizens of so many former British colonies seek to emigrate to the UK.
Kudos to Courtney Wright, and perdition to the teacher who sent her home from school on Culture Day. God save the King!
And now, for something trivial: is Jennifer Love Hewitt still “hot”?
This was the question that I saw fervently debated in both my Twitter and Facebook feeds in recent days. The actress appeared at the Hollywood premier of the I Know What You Did Last Summer remake.
Hewitt, now 46 years old, starred in the 1997 original version at the age of 18. (She has a cameo role in the remake, apparently.)
Hewitt, who was lithe and slender in her youth, has put on some weight. (That’s not a judgment, just an observation.) The social media debate therefore followed the usual pattern: There was a faction who fat-shamed, and another faction who asserted that the noticeably heavier, now middle-aged Hewitt was “hotter than ever”.
Allow me to propose a middle ground. Forty-six is within grasping distance of 50. When I was a kid, 50-year-old women were typically grandmothers. Even today, many 50-year-old women are grandmothers. Grandmothers are not 18-year-olds in the bloom of youth. (Nor are grandfathers, for that matter.)
I will soon turn 57. I’m a runner and a weightlifter, and my weight is pretty close to what it was when I was 18. But I’m also bald as a cue ball, and my beard now comes in white. And hey—I was never exactly Tom Cruise or Ryan Reynolds in the looks department.
Is a 46-year-old woman supposed to be the siren that she was at 18? And is it necessary to either a.) loudly observe that she’s not the slender beauty she once was, or b.) declare, in a virtue-signaling manner, that she’s “hotter than ever”? Both stances, in my opinion, are missing the point.
Jennifer Love Hewitt has starred in some movies I’ve enjoyed over the years, including I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). Her weight, at the age of 46, is her own business.
I’ve seen most of Mel Gibson’s movies, but I somehow missed Payback (1999). I watched the movie tonight and was distinctly underwhelmed.
Payback, as the title suggests, follows a boilerplate revenge plot. Mel Gibson plays Porter, an unlikable underworld figure who has been shot, left for dead, and cheated out of $70,000. Most of the movie concerns his violent quest for retribution.
Payback seems to be influenced by the nihilistic violence of [the much overrated] Pulp Fiction (1994), which was then recent in the public memory. There is much bloodshed in Payback, but none of it is very believable. Characters sustain fatal gunshot wounds, but recover long enough to deliver a coherent wisecrack or two, before falling off to sleep.
Payback proceeds with a smirking, tongue-in-cheek tone and vibe. The result is a movie that is not enough of one thing or another. Payback is too grim to succeed as a comedy, it’s too ridiculous to succeed as an action film.
Mel Gibson has starred in some great movies over the years. Payback isn’t one of them.
-ET
VENETIAN SPRINGS
Read it in Kindle Unlimited or paperback!
Mark Baxter thought a trip to the casino would mean easy money. Instead he faces a desperate fight to save his wife from a ruthless narcotics kingpin.
Sex work is not a topic that we discuss here much. I’d much rather talk about books, Gen X pop culture, and such.
But I recently learned that three states—Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina—have made the exchange of money for sex between two consenting adults a felony.
I’m having difficulty even processing this. I’m a Gen Xer who grew up watching Night Shift and Risky Business—two Reagan-era comedies that involve the world’s oldest profession.
Live and let live, is my motto. My rights stop at the end of your nose, and vice versa. I may not approve of what you do in your personal life…but hey, that’s your thing.
Also, get your priorities straight, if you’re an elected official. Here in Ohio, my Republican governor, Mike DeWine, recently vetoed a bill that would have provided property tax relief to middle- and working-class homeowners. Meanwhile, DeWine’s attorney general, Dave Yost, is obsessed with rooting out any form of transactional nooky. Dave Yost practically lives for prostitution busts, and he spends millions of taxpayer dollars on his personal crusade.
Let’s begin with the obvious. In an ideal world, no one would choose to patronize sex workers or to become one. In an ideal world, everyone would have a meaningful, committed sexual relationship, and everyone would earn their living as a veterinarian, a CEO, or a web designer.
It’s also true that in an ideal world, no one would smoke cigarettes, eat too many refined carbs, or make political rants on social media. No one would get divorced. No one would be rude, promiscuous, or sarcastic toward others.
But the ideal isn’t the issue here, nor even the question of whether or not two adults exchanging sex for money is a “good” thing. (It probably isn’t a “good” thing.)
The question is whether or not the government has the right to use state violence in order to make and enforce this decision for consenting adults.
I would say no to this one.
The premise that doesn’t work
Most of the arguments calling for a scorched-earth legal approach to commercial sex rely on a single premise: that no woman could possibly, under any set of circumstances, engage in sex work voluntarily.
Ergo, any woman who engages in such commerce must be the victim of violent compulsion. There is no other possibility. There are no exceptions.
And yet—we have empirical evidence to the contrary.
Consider Mia Lee, the New York-based forensic accountant-turned-escort, who charges $1,500 per hour. Lee has an advanced degree. She’s given interviews to the media. We can be reasonably certain that she isn’t the victim of modern-day slavers. Ditto for Alice Little, the (legal) Nevada escort who made $1.2 million in 2019.
$1,500 per hour? $1.2 million per year?
We should all be so exploited.
Yes, I’m probably a little jealous, if anything, at how much money Lee and Little are making for an act that most people find pleasurable. I’m also wondering about the psychology of the men who plunk down that kind of coin for sex.
But is anyone involved in such a transaction a felon? Public enemy number one? I don’t see the case for that.
What about those female Marines Corps officers?
The assumed victimization of all sex workers also contradicts the tenets of feminism and equal rights. We now ask men to follow the orders of female Marine Corps officers in combat situations. At the same time, laws felonizing commercial sex assume that every woman is a hapless, impotent victim. Otherwise, none of them would charge $1,500 for sex. They’ve all been forced into it at gunpoint.
If you want to make the case that women should be Marine Corps officers, you can do that. If you want to make the case that women are fragile, pliant creatures who must be protected from consensual sexual encounters where money is exchanged, you can make that case.
But you can’t make both of those cases at the same time. You have to choose. The strong woman or the born victim. Those two narratives contradict each other.
***
None of the above implies or asserts that the government should attempt to normalize transactional, commercialized sex, in the same way that some state governments have foolishly normalized (and thereby encouraged) the use of recreational marijuana in recent years.
I actually think that recreational marijuana is much worse than commercial sex. (I’m not a fan of commercial sex, but I actively loathe anything related to recreational drug use.) I wouldn’t want my son to be a pothead, and no, I probably wouldn’t want a daughter of mine to be a sex worker, either. But I’d be far more disappointed in the pothead. A sex worker can at least make $1.2 million per year.
You might disagree—especially about the marijuana thing. Maybe you relax by smoking a bowl now and then, and you can’t understand why I’m so uptight about it.
That’s fine. We can agree to disagree. Adults should be able to do whatever they want with other consenting adults, in the privacy of their own homes. This might include smoking weed (though I think that’s really stupid), or it might include charging (or paying) big bucks for something so mundane as sex.
So long as you aren’t violating anyone’s rights in the process, or imposing a clear and present danger to others (i.e., don’t smoke weed and drive), what you do as a consenting adult is none of my business. Nor is this rightfully the business of anyone in government.
