Cartoons Tuesday!

Plus Kimmel, more tributes to Jimmy Cliff with Willie Nelson and The Boss, and today's film pick and photo.

Greg Mitchell has authored more than a dozen books (see most of them here) and directed four recent PBS films. Subscribing to this newsletter is still FREE—so if you want to help fund, maybe purchase one of my books, thanks!

Jimmy Kimmel last night:

Two weeks ago we thanked John Oliver for hosting a segment on the Trump-ordered funding cuts for PBS and NPR, and for launching a wacky auction to raise funds for these entities. Up for bidding were various props and other goofy stuff used for his show. Well, the bidding ended last night and they removed the results when it was over, but before they did that we spotted over a cool million for a Bob Ross painting, $55,000 for LBJ’s giant balls and a very good number for Russell Crowe’s jockstrap, $5000 for a full-sized Nixon dummy, and various props signed by John for 3000 to 4000 bucks including wine bottles, baseball jerseys and bats for the minor league team he adopted this year, and much much more.

From The Washington Post:

More than 20 percent of students stayed home from school in Charlotte as President Trump’s immigration crackdown hit the city. One wore a tag that read “I’m a U.S. citizen”; another carried an American passport to elementary school.

Then there’s this from NY Times:

Self-Driving Taxis Are Catching On. Are You Ready?

Paul Krugman this morning

Although DOGE is gone, its malign legacy endures. Arguably DOGE’s biggest “achievement” was shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development. And the dismantling of USAID has left a legacy of death. According to one recent study, closing the agency “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.”

Back at home, DOGE wreaked havoc on the U.S. government through a combination of arrogance, ignorance and sheer incompetence….Less obvious, but arguably just as important, is DOGE’s misappropriation of Americans’ personal information along with the destruction of institutional norms on safeguarding that information.

We saw great movie this past weekend, “It Was Just an Accident,” the latest widely-hailed from formerly jailed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Savage, if often humorous and entertaining, takedown of oppressive Iranian regime and society (and others like them). Might get him locked up again.

From Variety, but to my mind this Lennon tape has been covered pretty well already:

Stephen Soderbergh has completed his still-untitled documentary centered on John Lennon‘s final interview which he describes as “an incredible historical document” that is “even more relevant today” than it was 45 years ago on the fateful day of December 8, 1980, when Lennon was killed. “I’m excited about it,” Soderbergh said.

Given the interview’s historical importance, the job is to present the doc “in such a way that it enhances the interview and doesn’t distract from it,” he said. “I’m not looking to re-invent the form. I’m just hoping to create a film that gets as many people as possible to hear what John and Yoko had to say on that afternoon before he was killed,” Soderbergh noted.

Adding to our Jimmy Cliff tributes yesterday: Willie Nelson’s “The Harder They Come” seems like bad idea at first but then really pays off.

Same song with Jimmy fronting Springsteen and band….

Great early Jimmy song we missed yestterday, “Trapped.”

And Springsteen’s fine cover of it (he performed it live for many years).

From Tunes to Toons

Goris:

Barry Blitt:

de Adder:

Ann Telnaes:

Tjeerd Royaards

Photo Finish

My new daily feature, from my camera, let me know what you think. Today:
”Sundown in Sedona.”