PicoBlog

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real. — If you follow entertainment journalism, one of the biggest stories of the past month was the relative failure of The Fall Guy.

It’s a long one this week! We’re doing a preview of all the awards-fodder films coming out before the end of the year, plus my thoughts on Killers of the Flower Moon. Scroll through and land on whatever piques your interest — or just skim the list to get an idea of what’s ahead in the movie world!Friends, it’s November! The season when I scroll NYT Cooking recipes for status symbols like “ombré pie,” “galettes,” or “perfect pie crust,” and then go back about my business, never touching a single baking dish or rolling pin.

Good morning! Hello to all new readers, and welcome to the latest subscriber-only edition of the Vietnam Weekly. Today’s topics include a major private-sector fraud case and the ongoing difficulties facing the property sector. If you haven’t already, you can upgrade to a paid subscription for US$5/month or US$50/year below. I’ve added a couple of new options as well, including a 20% discount for group subscriptions (two or more people) and a seven-day trial for anyone considering upgrading to the paid version.

After finally arriving home last night after the mad-rush trip to San Antonio and back, I fell into an exhausted sleep, my cracked tooth still firmly embedded in my jaw. My dentist (yes, I made it back in time - with 90 seconds to spare, in fact), after taking another x-ray and assessing the risks of causing further damage by digging around in my decaying mandible decided to err on the side of caution and refer me to a surgical specialist in Calgary.

Last week I wrote a column about my unforgettable afternoon visit more than a decade ago in London with the late Pervez Musharraf, the exiled Pakistani president who bragged to me about his country’s ability to hide its nuclear arsenal deep underground. Two days later, my colleague Jeff Stein, whose SpyTalk newsletter covers American intelligence, turned over his column to Jefferson Morley, an author who has spent decades tracking the CIA and other state secrets stemming from Jack Kennedy’s assassination onward.

On the eve of the release of a new Napoleon movie, from Ridley Scott, we today mark the 20th anniversary of another epic film, from a major director, that was set during the Napoleonic Wars. That film is Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, a seafaring adventure that arrived in theaters in November 2003.  Based on multiple novels from Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series, Master and Commander is set in 1805, and… I’ll just quote the famed opening titles like its fans on Twitter often do: “Napoleon is master of Europe and only the British fleet stands before him – oceans are now battlefields.

If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏 Buy Hedge Mystic a Cuppa The 12 Days of Christmas are over, and Plough Monday ( the old festival on the Monday after Epiphany marking the return to work and winter plowing for agricultural workers) has also come and gone. But never fear; our Medieval ancestors had yet another feast day ready and waiting to make the long winter more bearable.

Last year we took our children to Japan for the summer. It didn’t turn out quite as we had hoped. We landed. We melted. We celebrated an eighth birthday at Disneyland on the hottest day of the year. We went to more convenience stores in three days than I had been to in my life. I tried to focus on the basics: stay cool and hydrated, find food they will eat, be spontaneous, have fun.

Norah Vincent wanted to experience what life would be like as a man. As a journalist, she decided to conduct an 18-month gender change experiment using herself as a guinea pig. She documented her findings in her 2006 book ‘Self-Made Man’. Although she was a lesbian and never identified as transgender, she was curious about living like a man. As part of her transformation into her male alter ego Ned, she created fake stubble using tiny pieces of wool and exercised with weights to develop her shoulder and chest muscles.