As the Southern Hemisphere prepares for autumn, we Northies get ready to slather on the SPF-40. Here comes summer!
It was easy to identify the dead body of John Wilkes Booth, the man who killed Abraham Lincoln.
He had his initials JWB tattooed on his wrist.
That body is interred right here in Baltimore, if you can dig it, at Green Mount Cemetery.
Whatever you do with this information, please, don't tell Lainey Litton about it.
Lainey is a little girl of three from down Tennessee way. She took a trip with her family to Washington, D.C. At Ford’s Theatre, she saw the exhibits concerning Lincoln's murder. Later on the trip, she recognized the statue of the 16th president at the Lincoln Memorial and has since developed a deep fear of Booth, the Confederate loyalist who did him in.
Her mom says,“We were at church one Sunday, and the preacher was talking about how Jesus loves us. She looked at me, and she said, ‘Mommy, I love Jesus.’ I said, ‘That's awesome. I'm glad you do,'" Cassie recalls. "She said, ‘Jesus loves us.’ I said, 'That's right.' She said, ‘You know who we don't love? I said, ‘Who?’ She said, ‘John Wilkes Booth.’ "
“It's not something that we tried to bring up to her, but she's aware that John Wilkes Booth was not a great guy.”
Like any three-year-old, Cassie has a little trouble understanding that Booth, having taken his final bow in 1865, no longer presents any danger to her.
In my own case, I've never feared Booth, and years of meditation helped me over my notion that Charles J. Guiteau, the disappointed office-seeker who shot President James Garfield, and Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist whose bullet ended the life of President Wm. McKinley, had ill intent toward me.
But I can't shake the suspicion that Elon Musk has my Social Security #.
It was not my favorite part of being a supervisor to conduct job or promotion/transfer interviews, but it gave me, as an inveterate observer of mankind, a great chance to see people in action. Oh, the stories I could tell! (I have told them!)
And from the other side of the desk, I could tell you things I saw other people do in interviews, too, such as a supervisor telling a female applicant she was "very pretty." Uh, no. Can't so that.
But in case you find yourself going to, or conducting, a job interview, you should know that these questions are also forbidden.
1. What's your age?
This question is out of bounds because some employers might have a thing about not hiring someone over a certain age, or under a certain age. "What's the point of hiring someone who's just gonna go ahead and retire in three years?" is in the same family as "She's just gonna quit anyway when she starts college." The only time frame that should matter to the employer is how well this person will mesh with the organization right now.
Plus, it's demeaning to tell someone they "look too young" to do a job. And if you say that, the other person should have the right to come back with, "Well, you look too stupid to do yours, so where does that leave us?"
2. Are you married?
The answer to this is personal. One's marital status has not a thing to do with their ability to do a job, and has no place in the judgement of their qualifications. Since I was employed by county government, I did not see this happen, but some workplaces pay men different salaries than women for the same job. The unbelievable stupid justification for this is, "Well, he has a family to support." And a woman might not, huh?
I know that sort of thing goes on out there, but, I mean, really? Same job, same pay, makes sense.
3. Do you have kids?
This comes up when they want to worry about whether the applicant is sufficiently devoted to the job. which is their way of saying, "People without children can be expected to work late because they have nothing else to do."
You don't want to work for people like that, anyway. I always look askance at people who said they thought nothing of staying around the office until 8 or 9 pm just because of their superior dedication to the cause. I felt that people who couldn't get their job done in the time allotted were not...superior...
Plus, having kids around for Take Your Child To Work Day is a blast. Today's kids are tomorrow's adults, not an inconvenience or a scheduling problem.
4. Where are you from?
It can cut two ways to ask a person where they are from. We'd like to assume the question stems from an honest interest in the person's background and the provenance of their delightful manner of speech.
But it's also likely that the question plays into prejudice, such as, "Whaddya, from Schenectady or somethin'? Because my cousin married a girl from Schenectady, and man, what a loser she was!"
Remember, they are looking to hire someone to do a job now and in the future, and where a person was born has nothing to do with their ability to do it, unless they are from the moon and cannot function on Earth.
5. What's your religion?
Of course, they can't refuse to hire you on the basis of your faith, and they can't ask if you go to church. Or where. Or if you play bingo, or are a member of Hadassah, or the Sodality, or the Luther League. Your religion, or non-religion, is protected under the law.
Whichever side of the interview desk you sit on, the only purpose of the interview is to find the most capable person to do a job. Whether that person has children or Chesapeake Bay retrievers, drives a moped, hails from Cincinnati, whatever, that has nothing to do with it.
Good luck!
What was this one, the eighth "Mission: Impossible" movie that just opened over the weekend? And Tom Cruise is asking us to trust him "one last time"?
How many "No, We Really Mean It This Time!" Farewell Tours did The Who have? Every time you turned around, there's Roger Daltrey and Peter Townshend packing their suitcases and bringing the magic of windmill guitar to Akron, Poughkeepsie, and Des Moines.
We started talking the other day, the better half and I, about Jamie Lee Curtis and her 47 "Halloween" movies. All I know about those pictures is that Peggy loves them and that I don't. But she said there won't be any more, because in the last one, they stapled Michael Myers to the bulletin board or something. Whatever, he's done for, and he's not the Austin Powers Mike Myers. Yeah, baby!
But I told my loving spouse that the movies are in business to make...not great movies, but great money! Just wait a couple of years, and watch. It will turn out that the killer Michael Myers has an identical twin, Milton Myers, who was just released after serving thirty years in prison for failing to answer a subpoena. Freed and feeling out of sorts, he comes to town and sets off a whole passel of mayhem.
And yes, there will be more commercials with that guy Mayhem for auto insurance. Some things, they don't even bother to claim they're over with.
There's an interesting article from NPR by Elizabeth Blair. It reminds me of a way a teacher I knew used to find out if her students actually read the books they claimed to have enjoyed. She would ask if, for example, Holden Caulfield learned a lot by spending a summer working as a mechanic in a beach town.
As soon as a student began sputtering, "That was a good way for Holden to learn about human nature, helping people get their cars running again..." she knew she could reel in another imposter.
And now we deal with fakery even worse than some high school Harry pretending to have read a book. And some newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer fell for it, publishing a syndicated article with a summer reading list that lists made-up books by real authors. Horrible.
Readers are very familiar with the Chilean-American novelist Isabel Allende, but she never wrote "Tidewater Dreams," which this artificial-intelligence list called her "first climate fiction novel."
The 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to Percival Everett. But it's pure fiction to say that Everett wrote a book called "The Rainmakers," about a future town out West "where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity."
The list of summer reading holds 15 titles; five of them are real books. This reflects badly on the newspapers that fell for the deception perpetrated by King Features, a unit of the Hearst Newspapers, and on the list's writer Marco Buscaglia, whose journalism career should be over tonight. Replying to NPR's questions about it, he wrote, "Huge mistake on my part and has nothing to do with the Sun-Times. They trust that the content they purchase is accurate and I betrayed that trust. It's on me 100 percent."
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| Reading a real book |
Yeah, it's on you, buddy, and the shame is that this seems to be part of a trend in which real librarians and book reviewers are replaced by this insidious AI. I can't stand it. Artificial intelligence is no substitute for the real thing, and if this keeps up, how can anyone trust anything they read is real?
I hope someone will ask Buscaglia how this happened, and I hope that the next thing he writes will be a postcard from his new job detasseling corn in Kansas.
You really have to admire commitment, even if it's just to one's mullet.
And in the case of Tami Manis, here is the depth and breadth and length of her mullet commitment: she is 58 and has spent the last quarter century growing her magnificent Mississippi mudflap. At 5 feet, 8 inches, her mullet is four inches longer than she is tall, and here she affirms her commitment with a promise to take that tribute to Billy Joe Cyrus with her into the afterlife:
“At my memorial, they can take it off then, and drape it across my urn."
Guinness World Records, which began as a publication to settle bets among people drinking Guinness over just such things as "who has the longest female mullet ever?" named Ms Manis, a nurse from Knoxville, as the crowned record holder in that category.
She reflects: “Growing the longest mullet never really started out as anything other than it was the ‘80s and everybody had a rattail. And I started growing mine, and over the years, it’s just kept growing, so I’ve kept it.”
She names February 9, 1990 as her "mullet birthday." She was getting a haircut that day and while her long tresses were being shortened, she asked the stylist to leave a rattail back there to honor Aimee Mann of 'Til Tuesday, who did that song "Voices Carry" with a long McGyver down her back.
Aimee Mann is still around, performing a solo act these days, and so is Manis's mullet, kept in shape with every-other-day shampoos and a weekly application of leave-in conditioner, and a weekly braid done by a friend, which is the only way to keep that tassel off the floor.
She says it gives her patients something to focus on while she is treating them, which is good.
"Gimme a head with hair. Long, beautiful hair. Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen," they might say.
In an elaborate ceremony attended by dozens in December, 1973, Peggy and I were wed. After the long, long silence that greeted the preacher's question about anyone seeing any reason why this man and this woman should not be legally wed, we slipped golden bands on each other's third-finger-left-hand and embarked on our voyage on the sweet sea of matrimony.
Coming up on 52 years later, we're still cruising along, but last November, my knee replacement surgeon insisted that my ring come off prior to the cutting and stitching. My fingers are not the same skinny sticks as they were all those decades ago, so prying it off was no good. An intern, brandishing a tiny Sawz-All, showed up and carefully went to work. Another long silence, broken only by the whine of the saw and the patient, followed, and at length, the deed was done.
So, months later, I took my naked finger and the severed ring to Smyth Jewelers in Timonium, out by the State Fairgrounds, for repair, and for just 85 clams, they restored the ring that cost 30 clams in 1973.
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| All repaired, shined, and reinstalled. |
But they told me that the same ring today goes for $1000, so my advice is, if you're going to get married, do it in 1973.
And marry someone who will put up with you, as I did.
I have mixed feelings about the late Jim Irsay, whose father, Bob, bought the Baltimore Colts football team and gave Baltimore such misery by moving them to some town in Indiana somewhere. I understand they did not change the name of the team after they arrived in Hoosierland, but I will never call them the Colts.
Before the team moved, we used to see Jim around their training camp acting as ball boy and gopher for the coaches. I guess he stayed in that role of subordinate to his unbearable father, whose own mother once called him "the devil on earth," until he assumed ownership of the team when Bob finally shuffled off to wherever in hell he went.
But let's be fair. It wasn't Jim's fault that his father took the team away, and he did have a good quality or two.
He collected rock 'n' roll memorabilia. He was a great admirer of Jack Kerouac, and purchased the original scroll on which Kerouac typed out his picaresque masterpiece "On The Road."
Not only that, but he wasn't one of those collectors whose idea of having is not sharing. Jimbo put that scroll on the road and exhibited it all around the country so that others could see the treasure. He honored Kerouac that way, and lots of people benefited from his generosity.
Irsay was 65 when he died in his sleep yesterday afternoon. He once told an interviewer that he overdosed "one time" because he "mixed multiple drugs that I didn't know anything about," and went "code blue" and stopped breathing, and had been in rehab "at least 15 times."
I don't put much stock in dream analysis. Who can say what a dream means? As that wise old Englishman E. Scrooge said, a dream "may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.."
And I used to follow a blog called Pepperoni Dreams, in which people deliberately ate spicy pizza right before a nap, and reported on the results. But I haven't seem the blog online lately. Maybe I dreamed about it all along.
All right. Recently, when I am occupying the recliner, I have seen a hornet hovering outside through the deck window. He may well be related to the hornets into whose nest I shoved my nine-year-old hand while climbing a neighbor's tree, which led me to replicate Isaac Newton's discovery of gravity as I plummeted earthward. I don't know. He just hangs around for a minute and then flies off.
But here's the scenario of yesterday's daynap dream: Someone has given Peggy a porch swing for her to use while she sits outside in the morning, sipping coffee and chatting with passersby while I cook breakfast and watch "Kojak." (We are two very different people.) But in the dream, I volunteer to attach the swing to the porch ceiling, so I know I need to brace it with a 2x4. I measure for the 2x4 and go to attach it, and I see a hornet's nest up in the corner, and I head to the garage to get the hornet-and-wasp spray...
And that's when I woke up.
Dream analysts, do your thing. I know Peggy would enjoy gently swaying on the swing, but she would insist on the hornets being displaced. In the dream, do the hornets represent my longstanding resentment of being bitten by some hornets and falling out of Mrs Gallup's tree? Does the swing represent the recent fluctuations in the stock market? Is the 2x4 a metaphor for the logs it sounds like I'm sawing when I snore?
I can't wait to hear what you think.
I can't blame you if you say you don't know the name of Marsha Hunt, an actress who brought a lot to the world in her life, which ended just five weeks short of her 105th birthday. Yes, 104 years, from 1917 - 2022, and that belies the old saw that says "Only the good die young."
They don't come much better than Marsha Hunt, as you can find out if you stream the documentary "Marsha Hunt's Sweet Adversity" on TCM. She wanted to be an actress and got into it by starting out as a Powers Model at age 16 in New York at the height of the Depression. It wasn't long before she found herself in front of movie cameras in Hollywood and launched a film, stage, and radio career that was going quite well before she was blacklisted for daring to be a compassionate person.
If you don't know about that dark age in American history, it was after World War II. Powerful people here decided that "communists" (or "Godless communists") were out to ruin our nation of freedom and independence, so anyone who had ever spoken out in favor of freedom and independence wound up on a list of people who were not to be hired as actors, screenwriters and so forth.
No it didn't make sense but remember, Ronald Reagan was involved...
Whoever wrote about her in the Wikipedia said it best: "In the midst of the blacklist era, she became active in the humanitarian cause of world hunger and in her later years aided homeless shelters, supported same-sex marriage, raised awareness of climate change, and promoted peace in Third World countries."
Quite a woman. She was not content to simply pose for publicity photos for worthwhile causes or have press agents sign her name to releases. She worked and served on committees to help people.
If you watch the documentary, you will feel pretty good about how helpful a person can be when they devote themselves to worthwhile causes. Marsha's acting career was seriously dented by the right-wing maniacs, but she still played roles and wrote songs and performed them right until the end.
Because, to steal another old phrase, you can't keep a good woman down.
https://www.facebook.com/marshahuntdoc
Unless you are abnormally prescient, you don't have the faintest idea what's going to happen to you in the day ahead as you pull on your socks and underwear in the morning. Sure, you plan to finish the pile of work that's getting dusty on top of your desk, grab some lunch, go to a work meeting at 2 and go home to a dinner of baked salmon and a nice salad.
Tell me how often that works out. It's more like you get to work and your pc is down, and it takes the IT guy an hour to get to you, and then the boss wants to talk about the O'Hoolahan account, and you wind up having to eat crackers out of the machine for lunch, and there's a cake for some joker you don't even know, but it's his birthday....
Life rarely works out like you plan for it to, which is why I don't like that the guide channel on cable TV puts the little synopsis on the screen when you're streaming a show. "Rusty feels guilty when he's caught rummaging through Pat's trash can. Vernon forgets to hit the ATM and has to bum a dollar to get a soda at lunch. Half of the office is being transferred to Akron, and half of the half doesn't know where Akron even is. And Danny discovers the true meaning of life when he meets a Tibetan working at the emissions test station."
Excuse me, but I would rather have these things come as a surprise to me, as they do in real life.
I don't want to have to worry about Stewie being forced to throw Rupert in the trash! Let the stories come as surprises.
Unless you're of an uncertain age, the name Jimmy Webb doesn't mean much to you. But if you've ever ridden in an elevator, you have heard his music, or someone's version of one of his songs.
But two things he never fails to mention are what a genius he thinks he is, and how unfair it is that the "left-wing folkie exclusivity" fails to give him the respect he is due. Webb was a fine songwriter, no doubt, but that never meant that people wanted to hear him sing his own songs. Time after time, he tried to mount a performing career, only to receive solid evidence that people preferred The Fifth Dimension and Glen Campbell singing his songs over Webb's weak-throated bleating.
The talk turned to Sonny Bono the other night. The topic had been "people who are born to be salespeople." That list did not include me. I couldn't sell a bucket of water to someone whose pants were on fire. Whatever facility of language I have does not involve persuading people to part with their money, so no sales career for me.
But now, you take Sonny Bono. You might only know him as the shorter, less-attractive half of Sonny & Cher, but he had that gift.
He was born Salvatore Phillip Bono in Detroit, moving with his family to Southern California when he was seven. Even as a kid, he wanted to be in the music business, and started writing songs for others. He was selling meat door-to-door in Los Angeles when he got a job as an all-around office guy for Phil Spector, the greatest producer of rock and roll records ever (but not a great man.) Sonny learned the record business from Spector and lost his job for daring to criticize one of Phil's decisions. By then, he was writing more songs, e.g. "Needles and Pins" for The Searchers and "She Said Yeah" for the Rolling Stones.
By that time, Sonny was ready to make his move. He found Cher and formed a singing and personal partnership with her. They had hit records as a duet and individually. They made a movie. You wanted entertainment; he was ready to sell it, even if he had to wear a vest that make him look like a yak, and take insults from Cher on national TV about his height, his looks, his atonal singing.
He did not mind this. Sonny knew that the wives at home, in the days when family TV viewing presented a choice among CBS, NBC, ABC, and whatever 1/2ass local station was showing "Highway Patrol" reruns, made the decision on what to watch. Women enjoyed seeing skinny Cher in her Bob Mackie gowns, and their show was a hit for years, until S&C couldn't stand each other any more and went to divorce court. Believe me, showing their divorce proceedings on live TV was something that Sonny would have done had this all taken place in 2025, instead of 1974.
Out on his own, Sonny was not finished selling, so he went into the restaurant business to sell food in Palm Springs, and then sold himself as a politician when he grew frustrated with the machinations of local politics. He became the mayor of Palm Springs and eventually was elected to the US Congress from California's 44th District, where he was serving when he died in a skiing accident in 1998.
To date, Sonny Bono remains the only member of the US Congress to have had a #1 Billboard hit. He was only 62 when he died, and I have absolutely no doubt that if he had lived, he would have become the president of the United States.
I mean, why not?
Michael Bosworth Jr. was all set to celebrate the culmination of 12 years of school with his graduation exercises this week from Massaponax High School in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
The exercises will go on, sadly, without Michael, who was killed on Saturday while filming what people are calling a prank for a social media trend.
Those final seven words are nothing but trouble. Bosworth and two other teens were doing that stupid "ding dong ditch" game, and, Spotsylvania County police say, Tyler Chase Butler, a resident of the pranked home, opened fire. Police say someone had called 911 reporting an attempted residential break-in in progress.
One of the other teens was shot and lived to tell about it. A third was not injured.
Butler, 27, stands charged with second-degree murder and other offenses. He's being held without bond.
Khamoni Keys, a fellow soon-to-be-graduate, and a close friend of Bosworth, told a Washington TV station, "It's been very emotional, honestly, because you know we graduate (this) week."
I remember kids in our neighborhood doing this stunt a long time ago. Doorbell rings, you go to the door, no one is there, maybe they do it again, ha ha. Dumb. I get the feeling that the only reason someone 17 or 18 is up to this nonsense is because of the elevated thrill of putting your stunt on TalkTalk or whatever that social media is.
And when you read more about this, more questions come up. Butler's neighbors say the shooting took place in the back yard, which is not where doorbells are usually located. Clearly, this prank was all wrong.
Well, in Fredericksburg, on the banks of the mighty Rappahannock River, there was a significant Civil War battle in 1862. And here we are, 163 years later, and Americans are still shooting Americans for no good reason.
Isn't it about time to stop it? I think the Bosworth family and all of Fredericksburg might agree. Now, if we can just get the rest of the country to do so...
This is a perfect example of what the news business calls "burying the lead."
You may have seen this story on the news, about a Kentucky mom who allowed her son to play on her phone "as a reward," only to find out that he went on Amazon and ordered $4,200 worth of Dum-Dums lollipops, without her knowledge, of course.
The woman involved is Holly LaFavers of Somerset. Last week, she told "Good Morning America" that he had the urge to check her bank account last Sunday before church, and found out she was deep in the red because of the $4,200.
Fun fact: 4200 simoleons will get you 70,000 Dum Dums from the big A. That is 70,000 more Dum-Dums than I have ever had, being a Tootsie Pop kid in my day.
Holly does allow her son, Liam, to window-shop on Amazon, but he's a second-grader, so he might not know the difference between "just looking" and "ordering."
Old joke from my childhood: "My girlfriend can't stop window shopping. Last week she went out and came home with 47 windows."
Back to Holly's house...there was a mixup for sure. The Amazon guy dropped off 22 cases of suckers on the front porch and was coming back with more, but Holly contacted Amazon and got the whole thing credited back. So in the end, no harm, no foul.
BUT only if you read all the way to the end of the story do you learn that Liam lives with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). His mom says he was diagnosed at age 4.
FASD is defined as "a range of physical, behavioral, and cognitive impairments resulting from alcohol exposure during pregnancy. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is the most severe form of FASD. It's characterized by specific birth defects, developmental disabilities, and neurodevelopmental problems due to prenatal alcohol exposure."
I'm no expert in this field, but it's plain to see that the young man will need professional help with the sort of problems that come along with his syndrome, namely, low birth weight, slow growth, physical deformities, learning disabilities, behavioral issues, and mental health challenges, according to experts.
Can't blame the boy for playing on the phone, and it's probably good for him with his development. BUT can the mother not find a way to disable the app from placing orders? Or give him a phone that doesn't connect to the internet, maybe.
I feel bad because the mother has allowed the situation and the publicity to point out her son's mistake, and that might not be the best thing for him. I hope someone who is trained in early childhood development can step in and help them both.
By the time one gets to be 85 years of age, most people, at least, have figured out the path forward, and have put it in autopilot for the descent.
I don't know any other way to say it, but if you don't have your life plan in place by the time you hit four score and five, you might as well forget it.
OR, you can be like Televangelist Jim Bakker, who with his bizarre wife Tammy Faye was deep into one of the biggest religious scandals since someone swiped the bingo money. Jimbo says he’s in desperate need of cash right now, and if you don't shell out a million clams but quick, he will lose errthang and be homeless.
I'll wait while you dry your eyes.
“If everyone that watches this program will give $1,000, we’ll be able to pay our bills and stay on the air,” he said on his show the other day. “Otherwise we got about another, maybe a month.”
And...
“If they foreclose on this ministry, they will take my house too, so I’ll be on the street,” he said.
He says he doesn't take a salary out of the all the moolah he rakes in, and that he has no money to call his own. He even adds that an unnamed "they" has been ripping him off for millions!
It seems that his financial woes began during the pandemic, when he began selling something called "Silver Solution," which he said was an "Enhanced Colloidal Silver Liquid – Ultimate Immune Support Supplement... Immunity Boost & Immune Booster for Adults.
One of the inevitable lawsuits that landed on his altar wound up as a settlement with the Missouri attorney general that involved a restitution of $156,000.
Like all these shifty sinbusters, Bakker used the threat of impending bankruptcy to beg his flock to sheepishly replenish his coffers.
And now he goes with this hoary pitch: if you give him your money, "I guarantee you God’s going to do something. God’s gonna bless you as you give, because when you give, you’re gonna receive.”
And while he asks for your money to line his future with your gold, he continues to claim that we are in the "end times," so he is selling food buckets and prepper items on his shows and website.
So stock up on food for the future that might not take place.
Sounds right.
I remember watching that "Sixth Sense" movie a long time ago. I think the writers and producers were trying to turn the sentence "I see dead people" into a national catchphrase, but it didn't work out. I think that was because that picture came out just a few years after "Titanic," and that's the movie where, when it (finally) ended, relieved theatregoers were walking out, saying, "Icy dead people," and there was too much confusion.
But that wide-eyed kid from the "6th" movie is back in the news, and not for anything good. For lack of anything else to do, he apparently got himself a little buzzalilly on, went to a ski resort in California, and turned the air fetid with some antisemitic slurs about the officer who was fitting him for a pair of handcuffs.
He's 37 now, well past the age at which he should have known better. He is also the older brother of Emily Osment, who plays Mandy on "Georgie and Mandy's First Marriage, " so he should stay home on Thursdays and watch that show, rather getting shafaced at ski lodges.
And Haley Joel Osment wants you to know that he is “absolutely horrified by my behavior. Had I known I used this disgraceful language in the throes of a blackout, I would have spoken up sooner.”
He used some really, really offensive language while discussing his arrest with the officer. The district attorney out in Mono County, Calif., said that Osment was charged with possession of cocaine and disorderly conduct under the influence of alcohol in public, both misdemeanors.
He blames all this on having lost his house in the recent Altadena Fire in California, but tell me: if you lost your house in a fire, horrible as that is, would you a) shove cocaine up your nose and booze down your neck and go skiing, or b) get to work rebuilding your life?
Come on, son. Pull it together. There are always parts in movies and TV shows for odd-looking former child stars.
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| Osment's mud shot (left) and movie still (right). |
