George Clooney doesn't care if you think he's gay.

He says:

"I think it’s funny, but the last thing you’ll ever see me do is jump up and down saying 'These are lies!' That would be unfair and unkind to my good friends in the gay community.

"I’m not going to let anyone make it seem like being gay is a bad thing. My private life is private, and I’m very happy in it. Who does it hurt if someone thinks I’m gay? I’ll be long dead and there will still be people who say I was gay. I don’t give a s---."...

Making a comparison with Cary Grant, who some people still claim was gay, Clooney said he thought the late star "would have laughed at that and not cared what people thought."...

Rumours about Clooney's sexuality were fuelled when his friend Brad Pitt, also a campaigner in favour of same-sex marriage, joked that he would not marry his partner Angelina Jolie until Clooney could legally marry his partner.

Nice attitude. Good points.

Beauty... love... kisses...

One reason I enjoy blogging so much is that there's something about my brain that visualizes everyone as beautiful.

If I don't see your photograph or hear some description that stops me, I picture the men looking like Cary Grant and the women looking like... No, not Myrna Loy!



Myrna Loy today would look frumpy. That hairstyle! I picture the women looking more like Jennifer Connelly.

What's wrong with me?! I like to think I'm an optimist. But it's a problem when I try to step out of this life of the mind — oh, come on, humor me, blogging is the life of the mind — and interact with real people. I believe I'm swanning around at a posh cocktail party in a 1930s Hollywood movie, and it's quite a shock to see that things don't look like that at all.

This is a topic upgraded from my Twitter feed, where I've also been talking about my other cognitive quirk: I visualize things outside of my immediate physical sphere as much smaller than they are. For example, I "small-visualize" government, industry, geography, historical time, and outer space. My theory is that this is a natural consequence of evolution: We're hard-wired to understand a world that has the scope it had when we lived in a small, walkable place, when the things we knew about had a human scale.

The smack in the face.

A teaser for a forthcoming diavlog.

What do you think we're talking about?

ADDED: Glenn Kenny guesses "Chinatown," meaning this:



Is there more famous slapping in the movies? Well, there's Cher slapping Nick Cage in "Moonstruck":



This isn't really slapping:



Nor is this:



Now, this is slapping, but it's not movies, just TV:



But then, I said a "smack in the face." Is that different from a "slap"? Isn't it odd that a "smack" can be a slap or a kiss?

***

There's also this.

AND: Commenter Peano notices something disconcerting:

"Write me a letter!"

Said Cary Grant fending off Katharine Hepburn in the last scene of "Bringing Up Baby," which John quotes when I remark that it's pretty funny that we keep emailing each other when we're sitting three feet away at side-by-side tables, here at Espresso Royale.

Let's try shaming first.

John Fund has a Wall Street Journal editorial arguing for term limits for Supreme Court Justices:

A seat on the high court is now so powerful and so heady that many justices stay long past their prime. Legal scholars have concluded that half of the last 10 retirees have been too feeble or inattentive to fully participate in the work of the court.

The secrecy that shrouds the high court can also allow someone to turn his chamber into a nursing home, as William O. Douglas did in the 1970s. He was so determined to hang on until a new president could appoint someone philosophically compatible with him that he refused to leave after an incapacitating stroke. This is not only irresponsible, but for, say, a liberal justice hanging on through a series of Republican presidents, it is directly at odds with the preferences of the electorate. In Douglas's case, his colleagues were so concerned that they informally agreed that during the last year of his service none of the court's decisions would be valid if his was the deciding vote. They finally pressured him to resign in 1975. A weakened Thurgood Marshall often looked to his fellow octogenarian William Brennan on how to vote because he no longer could hear well enough to understand the arguments other justices made during their conferences.

Fund makes a strong argument. (Read the whole thing.) But he does not address how term limits would affect presidential campaigns. We'd know which Justices were slated to leave in the upcoming presidential term. As it is now, we just engage in a guessing game, saying things that are often ridiculously off-base. (In the 2000 campaign we were told the next President would probably get three appointments, but in fact, he got zero.) Maybe the people voting for President should know which Justices are coming up for replacement. And there is something unseemly about the Justices -- supposedly aloof from politics -- timing their retirements to try to control the ideology of the next occupant of their seat.

But I still resist changing the Constitution, and even if I didn't, I'm realistic enough to know how incredibly difficult it is to amend. A more moderate approach, which I want to recommend, is shaming.

While we do criticize Justices for their opinions, we hold back from criticizing them for clinging to their seats too long. I think we may be observing the general social norm that frowns on age discrimination and accommodates disability. But maybe we ought to set aside that generality and get specific about Supreme Court Justices: they wield immense power and they cling to it. Why don't we talk about that? Why don't we shame them for staying too long?

We don't spare the criticism for other persons who tighten their grip on power. Before we try to amend the Constitution, let's try shaming. I think the Justices are vulnerable to our criticism. Much as they may love their power, they must also love our good opinion. They must want to be remembered as great Justices. But insulated on the Court, surrounded by respectful admirers -- should I say sycophants? -- they may need to hear stronger voices from the rest of us. Why don't we put aside our stock politeness and say more clearly and more often that it is wrong to hold your seats too long and wrong to let too many years pass without giving the President a chance to appoint someone new.

I'll leave you with this passage from Bill Maher's book "New Rules":

New Rule

Just because you have a job for life doesn't mean you have to do it for life. It's well and proper that we venerate our elders -- but give it a freakin' rest....

Now, I know it must be hard to give up your job when your job is literally sitting on a throne, or being on a "supreme" court, or keeping women out of the priesthood to make room for the gays -- but at some point it starts to look like you think of yourself as indispensible, and no one is indispensible, including you, the late Mr. Infallible...

[T]here's a reason that names like Cary Grant, Joe DiMaggio, and Johnny Carson inspire a special kind of awe: They all did something that made them more beloved than anyone else -- they left before we got sick of them.

"What do actresses see in their scruffy men?"

The International Herald Tribune inquires:

The once glamorous Hollywood of Cary Grant and Steve McQueen has been taken over by greasy-haired, scruffy-bearded, baggy-pants-wearing men who could be mistaken for vagrants if their $30,000 watch didn't give them away.

The obvious example of this frog mentality is Mr. Britney Spears, Kevin Federline, whose arrival in the city of angels set the stage for this latest Hollywood trend. Granted, Spears was never a leading lady in film or fashion. But even classic beauties with fashion know-how like Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Garner, and Kate Hudson are all being squired about town by men (Chris Martin, Ben Affleck, and Chris Robinson respectively) who wouldn't make the dress code if they showed up alone.

Here's my theory. Only someone genuinely young and good-looking can get away with with the look. So it's very daring and exciting to be one of the few people who can do it. Let ordinary men attempt to get in on the super-elite trend and they will humiliate themselves.

That cross-dressing reality show.

Stephen Bainbridge wants to know what Tung Yin and I think of the new reality show "She's a Lady," a cross-dressing competition for men. Prof. Yin characterizes it as a dumb makeover show. It looks as though they are trying to get some (lame) excitement out of fooling the men:

They thought they were competing for the title of "All-American Man." They couldn't have been more wrong.



This fall, eleven manly men will compete to become...the ultimate lady. And the winner will take home a quarter of a million dollars!

Thanks for informing us that the men are "manly." That reminded me of this Virginia Heffernan critique (in the NYT) of Bravo's "Manhunt: The Search for America's Most Gorgeous Male Model":

When the guys, who have manly names like Tate and Blake, talk, their conversation is about how definitely not gay they are. When induced to strip to their underwear and skydive, each with a male instructor strapped to his back, they get very serious in their complaining that everyone would rather be skydiving with a girl. Got it?

So let's have a reality show about cross-dressing, but let's structure a competition to assure the home viewer that no one is gay. Having a very masculine man dress as a woman is an old comedy theme, though. The oldest example that springs to mind is Cary Grant in "I Was a Male War Bride." It was Milton Berle's game. And everyone remembers Gene Hackman in "The Birdcage." Cross-dressing actually is a field of endeavor that lends itself to humorous competition, and by using contestants who (we are assured) aren't otherwise interested in cross-dressing, the audience can stay in its comfort zone.



Another harmless TV confection. I'm not offended, really. But I certainly won't watch.

Insight into the mind of Amazon.

Amazon emailed me this:

Greetings from Amazon.com Alerts.



As you requested, we're notifying you of new releases matching the

following criteria:



DVD and Video with "Cary Grant" in the Actor's name. ...

Dracula



Publication date: July 20, 2004 ...

We hope you enjoyed receiving this message.

Well, first, I did enjoy receiving this message. It was quite amusing, in fact. Cary Grant was in Dracula? I click on the "more info" link and see it's that 1992 Francis Ford Coppola version of Dracula--the one with Gary Oldman as Dracula. Winona Ryder is in it. I saw that movie, and even if I hadn't, I'd be damn skeptical that Cary Grant was in it. I click on the link to see the full cast of the movie. I search the page for "Grant" and then "Cary" and find the actors Richard E. Grant and actor Cary Elwes. Amazon isn't quite as smart as we might think.