Nostrovya!

I get it. Frankly, i was surprised that ALL my Muslim clients, who also came from India, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, South Africa, and other countries, didn’t have problems of their own. I also had people from many other countries luke Vietnam, Phillipines, Russia, Serbia, England, etc. None got hassled at all. This one guy just won the Border Patrol Lottery. Yay!

The closest I saw was when one got pulled over by a local cop, who kept asking him over and over “Who else is in the car?”, when it was easy to see that the guy was all alone in the vehicle. The only thing i could think of was that in order to get from my shop to his hotel, he had to travel through a small zone that is known for prostitution, and a lone brown guy in a car tickled that cop’s lizard brain. That area is also a MAJOR tourist/ convention zone, so its not the only reason to be there. 99.99% of the people going through are there for perfectly legitimate reasons, including just getting from here to there. My client didn’t even know about the prostitution angle, and was horrified when i told him.

I used to teach a unique culinary technique, and had clients visit me from all around the world for training, including several Muslim countries. Only one client had a serious problem at the border, a young Muslim guy from India. His dad was a major Bollywood director, and was fairly wealthy.

He had gone to college in America, so he was using this trip to both visit me for a few days for his training, then going on to Miami to meet up with his American college friends.

His visa said he was here on a pleasure trip, but for some reason he was pulled aside for grilling. They demanded his phone, and looked through his texts, where they found messages between him and I, making arrangements for his training.

That lit them up, and they started claiming he was coming here for work, not pleasure. He explained that he wasnt being paid, he was paying me, and it wasn’t work. It was educational, if anything. It was really just an expensive experiential vacation adventure for a rich kid, which was something I’d experienced before. Some clients really wanted to learn this technique to expand their culinary portfolio, while others just wanted to try it out for fun, and had the time and money to do it. If you came to America to learn to scuba dive, or surf, would it be considered work, or even educational?

The fact that he was here for education or work wasn’t the point, the point was that the visa was for pleasure, so they were claiming it was a violation, even though most of the trip was with his friends (3 days with me, 2 weeks with his buddies).

Then they focused on his money. He was carrying about $2600, and they acted like that was an outrageous amount of cash for a rich young man to carry on an international trip. They demanded he tell them exactly how much cash was in his wallet, which they were holding, and had searched. He told them the exact amount, because he had counted his money on the plane, after they had landed. They told him he was lucky he knew the exact amount, or they would have kept his money and sent him home.

Eventually, they grudgingly allowed him to leave, and he got his training, and visited his friends, but he went home with a very negative view of the US government.

This all happened during the first MAGA administration.

Where did you get that information? Because all it said in the article was:

Officials became suspicious of potential illegal work intentions after learning the teens had not booked accommodation for their entire five-week stay in Hawaii,

How not booking hotels for their entire trip equates to “potential work intentions” escapes me. If you were planning on working for five weeks, wouldn’t you book a hotel near where you were planning to work? Was there a job lined up? Are we supposed to believe that in the middle of a round-the-world graduation trip, these girls wanted to spend 5 weeks working?

Alternate explanations:

• the “work” they were doing was shooting video of their adventures and posting it on YouTube in the hopes of establishing a career as travel influencers, so they can travel the world for a living. Basically, this trip was an investment in their future.

• border agents got pissed off and jealous of two rich girls traveling the world, and decided to fuck with them

• the girls became indignant at being treated like common illegal immigrants, and mouthed off, and agents decided to teach them a lesson.

Frankly, the real story is probably a combination of all three.

Much of America is rural, and pick-up trucks are extremely useful on a daily basis in that world. Then country music made it a metaphor for masculinity, and dopey suburbanites embraced it to enhance their personal brand image as tough guys.

Babylon was a massive bomb, and i dont understand why. I think it’s a masterpiece.

Pig was another underappreciated masterpiece. When Nic Cage did his AMA on Reddit (one of the best ever), he said it was one of the acting jobs that he’s most proud of. He deserved an Oscar for it, but wasn’t even nominated. The screenplay, too.

Buckaroo Banzai is one of my all-time favorites. It is the quintessential New Wave film, featuring John Lithgow’s most unhinged performance - “Laugh while you can, monkey boy!”

Also “No matter where you go, there you are.”

No killing required, but all religions should be heavily taxed, until they can be abolished. Weak religious freaks need to find a different way to cope with the hardships of life. That’s not asking too much, most people get by fine without religion.

My worry is that these rights reversion deals are going to the top tier film-makers for their top-tier films. In 25 years they’ll revert to the film-maker, and who knows what will happen to them?

What if the director has died? Now the film is in the hands of the estate, who might not know what to do with it, or even care. Some will handle it properly, others wont. Some will be greedy, some may be ashamed of it, some will neglect it, etc.

It’s inevitable that some of these classics will become innaccessible, and even lost.

During HitlerPig 1.0, Erdogan came to America for a meeting with HitlerPig. As he was coming out, there were protesters to meet him. Erdogan ordered his security team to assault the protesters, and they viciously beat numerous peaceful protesters. HitlerPig said and did nothing about it. He allowed a foreign security force to come to America and severely assault people for exercising their 1st Amendment rights.

My first presidential election was in 1980. I have voted in every election since, and I have NEVER voted for a candidate I liked. The best I could ever hope for was the lesser of two evils, and sometimes the difference wasn’t so wide.

But that wasn’t the case in 2024, where the difference between the two sides was far wider than I have ever experienced. I am very distressed at the situation in Haza, and I did not support Biden’s weak, cowardly approach at all, but I also knew that Trump’s approach was going to be far, far worse. And Harris’ approach was an an unknown, since she refused to say anything that signalled any difference in policy from Biden.

But all of it is just blathering because that didnt make any difference in this election. It was totally rigged, and we ALL know it.

I caught that the instant he said it. So they are planning another round of Market Manipulation in a month or two, got it.

We’ve already had 3 rounds, in less than 90 days. It seemed like his 90 day pause on this last round was a bit longer because he wanted to let it cool down, but I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist the lure of dirty money at the expense of the poors.

I’m happy for the heads up. Unfortunately, I dont have the kind of money required to take full advantage of this, but at least Ill know to hang on.

I really think Tom Cruise is a weird and creepy guy, but i can’t help it, his movies are nearly always great. I’ll watch anything he does, and at least 9 times out of 10, I’m blown away.

Bullying a bully is not bullying.

And everybody knows that going for the safe bet is the sure-fire formula for a classic that will return profits to the studio for decades.

For our next question: Why is nobody going to the movies any more?

If you cut payments, they’ll be executed immediately, innocent or not.

My theory is that the Mission Impssible franchise is about to wrap, and Tom Cruise is going to calm down on the stunt work, now that hes getting older. I cant blame him for that.

So they can’t count on him to continue doing big stunts in the future, so they better give it to him now. So he’ll be nominated for the final MI movie, and he will win. And frankly, he deserves it, for his amazing body of stunt work.

Being on fire isn’t even a top tier stunt any more. I’ve seen amateur student films with people on fire.

This has always been the argument against having an oscar for stunts, but its hard to imagine that stunts could get much more dangerous that they already are.

Most stunt pros want to protect themselves from death even more than their defenders. They plan these stunts extensively and train hard for them. They do their best to leave nothing to chance. Yet they still take it to the edge, often, and they’ve been doing it since the beginning of film. Its highly doubtful they could even get more dangerous that those old Buster Keaton stunts, or the car chase scene in Death Proof, or many of Tom Cruise’s stunts in the Mission Impossible franchise, etc. We can all name 100 jaw-dropping stunts.

Getting killed or maimed is not likely to get you the Oscar, so I don’t think its a valid reason to not have a category for Stunts.