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Katharine Hepburn jumped four times into Venice’s canals for Summertime. That night, her eyes burned, itched, and watered. She contracted rare chronic conjunctivitis that stayed with her for life. Director thought it wouldn’t look real if they used double.

Last fall, as my 86-year-old father-in-law lay dying of cancer at his home in Lakeland, Florida, the pool guy told my wife—who was tending to her dad—that he was owed $2,000 for past services. He claimed that he’d left my father-in-law’s check “out in the rain” and it had been ruined. Although distraught over her father’s situation, my wife is a sensible person and asked to see the “ruined” check before writing a new one. Weeks pass, and the pool guy starts to get pretty aggressive about demanding payment, before he finally produces the “ruined” check on which he also claims to have spilled ink (!)—and shows her many other similarly “ruined” checks. My wife logs into her father’s bank account and sees that the check—in perfect condition—had been cashed by the pool guy months earlier. So he’s obviously trying to take advantage of her vulnerable situation to scam her. We were outraged and concerned that he’d pull this stunt on others, so we immediately contacted the Polk County Sheriff’s Department. We were assigned a Detective to whom we presented the evidence: emails demanding payment, the copy of the bogus “ruined” check, and the bank’s copy of the intact check that was cashed. Alas, they’ve now ghosted us since we last reached out 3 months ago asking for an update. And that brings me to my point: I don’t know what’s happened in our country, but our law enforcement agencies and prosecutors seem more interested in doing their paperwork than in actually enforcing the law. I hope we can change this before people stop bothering even to bring wrongdoing to the authorities’ attention, as has happened in many other countries. The rule of law requires enforcement of the law!

Like I said two weeks ago, The Gulf is essentially in an existential crisis if the Iranian state now does not collapse, As they would be entirely repriced as at the whims of whoever runs Iran just firing missiles at them whenever. So it seems like the UAE is pivoting towards fully joining the war and escalating it. There’s tons of capital there that’s becoming quite Asian-curious, and their goal is to try to nip that in the bud earlier than later.

I’d like to extend a sincere apology to Joe Kent. I wasn’t familiar with your game, and I misjudged the situation.

My uncle was drafted into Vietnam. He was a door gunner in the 101st airborne. He was air support at hamburger hill. He came home with photos of rats in the drinking water; a bronze star for killing a teen that threw grenades in his jeep as he and his friends were trying to get clean water at a well. He resented the award. A lot. His friends died… for clean water. He didn’t think it was heroic at all. He ended up with kidney failure from said dirty water. He had photos, he had a documented bronze star… the VA STILL refused him because “it’s coincidence”. He is finally va connected. But again, how are these people doing this? Do they just spend all day at sick hall? How are these people not being kicked out for malingering?

I am looking for a volunteer surrogate mother to produce my 7th child, with option to convert to girlfriend within a 12 month window if desired. High intelligence preferred. All living amenities and needs covered. DM or jeanfrancois.gariepy@gmail.com.

There is a valuable lesson to be learned here— people with very little impulse control end up limited to a certain subset of jobs while people who can learn to understand social norms of their environment & have self control can advance further. Children see this as “being fake”

George Lucas traded $350,000 in directing salary for something Fox executives thought was worthless: the right to sell Star Wars toys. It was 1976. Over 40 studios had already passed on his script, including Disney. Fox only greenlit the project because they wanted Lucas for other films. Nobody at the studio expected to make money on a space opera with no stars, so when Lucas offered to cut his directing fee from $500,000 to $150,000 in exchange for merchandising and sequel rights, Fox said yes on the spot. Movie merchandise was a dead business. Fox had lost money on Doctor Dolittle lunchboxes a decade earlier. They thought they were getting the better deal. Lucas couldn’t even find a toy company that wanted in. Kenner, a division of cereal company General Foods, finally bought the licensing for a flat $100,000. Then Star Wars opened. Between 1977 and 1978, Kenner sold $100 million worth of toys off that $100,000 investment. They couldn’t make enough for Christmas ’77, so they sold empty boxes with IOUs inside, promising to mail the action figures later. Parents paid real money for cardboard and a promise. Nobody around the production saw any of this coming. Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan, privately called the script “fairy-tale rubbish.” But he was shrewd enough to negotiate 2.25% of royalties instead of a flat fee. About 20 minutes of total screen time earned his estate somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Lucas himself was so convinced the film would flop that he offered Spielberg a bet while visiting the Close Encounters set: swap 2.5% of each other’s profits. Spielberg took it. That handshake has paid him around $40 million. And then the money started compounding. Lucas poured his Star Wars profits into ILM, the effects house he’d built for the film. When its computer graphics division got too expensive to maintain, he sold it to Steve Jobs in 1986 for $10 million. Jobs renamed it Pixar. Disney bought Pixar twenty years later for $7.4 billion. Then in 2012, Disney came back for the rest, buying Lucasfilm itself for $4.05 billion. Total franchise revenue today sits around $46.7 billion, over $20 billion from merchandise alone. The filmmaker 40 studios passed on is now worth $5.3 billion according to Forbes. Fifty years ago today, cameras rolled on a desert in Tunisia. The $350,000 pay cut that made it all possible might be the best trade in business history.

Work on BOB HOPE’s extraordinary Palm Springs home started in 1973 and was finally completed in 1979.

This really angered me… 😡

Marco Rubio has what it takes to be the 2028 GOP nominee. He would absolutely eviscerate whoever the Democrats put up as their nominee. He’s a bonafide generational political talent.

🚨 WATCH: Keir Starmer’s calls with Donald Trump are mocked in the launch of Saturday Night Live UK #SNLUK

Ta-Nehisi > Tucker He actually answers the question directly and gives the right answer. Tucker’s mishmash and “what do you mean by X?” is tedious. You actually can just say “no.”

Lau's getting her license back in three years and quickly transferred her real estate to some LLCs to alleviate the level of compensation she'd have to pay out A whole family was killed. This is not justice. She deserves more than just probation and a 3-year license suspension

The transformation of liberals into "progressives" since 2013 has seriously been the worst thing to happen to American culture in my lifetime. Just absolutely gutted so much of what was good about this country. End of a golden age.

As Hawaii endures its worst flooding in more than 20 years, officials were urging people in hard-hit areas to "LEAVE NOW." Muddy floodwaters smothered vast stretches of Oahu's North Shore, a community world-renowned for its big-wave surfing. Raging waters lifted homes and cars and prompted evacuation orders for 5,500 people north of Honolulu.

RFK I know you're busy but can we ban this please

her looking exactly like she did 20 years ago... this is EXCELLENT work #RHOBH

• be john wesley hyatt • a printer from albany, new york, 1863 • a billiard ball company is offering $10,000 to anyone who can replace ivory. elephants are being slaughtered by the thousands to supply america's pool halls • you soak cotton in nitric acid and add camphor • it works. you've just made the first synthetic plastic. you call it celluloid • you test the billiard balls • they explode. not every time. randomly. • a colorado saloon owner writes you a letter: every time two balls collide hard enough, every man in the room reaches for his gun. sounds like a gunshot • your factories keep burning down • you never collect the $10,000 • but to process the material at all, you had to invent something nobody had ever built: a machine that heats raw material until soft, then forces it into a mold under pressure • you file the patent in 1872 and think nothing of it • you move on. you invent a water purification system, a sugarcane mill, a roller bearing • you hire a 28-year-old draftsman named alfred sloan • you promote him to president, then sell the whole firm to general motors in 1916 • sloan goes on to run GM, invents the modern corporate org chart, and builds the management template every large company on earth still runs on • you die in 1920 having never collected your prize and not fully understanding what you built • the machine you invented to make combs and denture plates is now how the world makes M1 helmet liners, javelin missile housings, UAV fuselages, body armor backing plates, M16 stocks, IV syringes, car dashboards, lego bricks, and iPhone casings • 8 trillion parts per year. every one of them made by forcing hot material into a mold under pressure • the entire polymer layer of modern civilization -- consumer, medical, automotive, defense -- runs through one process • patented by a printer who was trying to win a contest he lost • absolute, relentless consequence from a single failed billiard ball

The mayor of my town’s phone number is listed on the website. Whenever I have an issue I stopped trying to talk to the people in the office because they never answer the phone, when you go in person, the lines are out the door and if you wait nobody cares. When I call the mayor, things are fixed that day. Now that i think about it, I stopped having issues with the city since I started to do this. I highly recommend this tactic.