Micah's Read of the Week, Vo.20
Dazed and Confused, Tony Hsieh, The Texas Lawsuit, Jim Grey, Preparing our pets for post-pandemic life, Recipe Corner, and more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.
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Read of the Week Pt. 1
‘We Basically Smoked Austin Out’
The Dazed and Confused cast remembers what it was like at Richard Linklater’s “summer camp.”
This oral history of Dazed and Confused is excerpted from a book on the subject. This portion focuses on the general vibe around the film’s production.
When they weren’t shooting, they were swimming, boating, running around barefoot, and getting into trouble. Linklater didn’t try to rein anyone in. No one did. Dazed was about ’70s kids coming of age at a time when adult supervision was sporadic, and behind the scenes, these kids were unleashed. It was summer camp, for sure. But it was summer camp with alcohol, weed, and locked doors.
Adam Goldberg (Mike): Everyone was just drinking and getting stoned the entire time.
Cole Hauser (Benny): As you get older, you can’t get smashed on a Sunday from 1:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., fall asleep, and wake up at 6:30 p.m. and feel good. But at 17 years old, you’re like, “Give me a bottle of water! I’m ready to go.”
Adam Goldberg (Mike): I got so high one time in Jason’s room, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I think that was the last time I smoked pot while we were shooting. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and thought, I don’t know who you are.
Jason London: We basically smoked Austin out of all of its weed, and the person who was the worst was Milla [Jovovich]. The rest of us were like, okay, we just have to wait till we can get more weed. She just went into full meltdown mode.
It might’ve been just her getting into character, but there was a certain point where people were like, “There’s no more weed! I gave you all we had! It’s not like this shit is growing in the backyard. This shit comes from Mexico.”
There are also some great stories about a young Ben Affleck:
Jason Davids Scott (unit publicist): Ben Affleck got a baby Siberian husky, but he had to keep it in the hotel room and not let them know, so he just didn’t have them clean his hotel room, and it smelled.
Ben Affleck: Only when you’re 20 do you think, “I’m broke, I have nothing, maybe I can be responsible for an animal?”
Peter Millius: Ben liked to be the alpha male. He was definitely one of the guys who was like, “Yeah, let’s go to the gun range!” Him and Cole.
Cole Hauser: We’d shoot all kinds of guns: .44s, 57s, shotguns. Man, they would give you anything. If they’d had a bazooka in there, we would’ve shot it.
Peter Millius: One time, we all went out drinking. At 9:30 in the morning, we get back to the hotel, and someone says, “Hey, let’s go to a shooting range!” I thought, “Guys! We’re all hammered as hell. There is no way anyone’s gonna give us guns.” We get to the gun range, and everyone’s so excited, they all run in ahead of me. When I walk in, half the guys already have guns in their hands, shooting! And I can’t believe they’re giving all of us guns! It’s a Texas thing. They’re like, “You want a cup of water, or you want a gun?”
I think Ben and Cole actually bought guns.
And of course, there are some McConaughey tales:
Adam Goldberg: I thought McConaughey was just a bartender who got a kitschy, nonsense role. He directed me in the last scene we shot together, like he was telling us what to do. I was just like, “Oh, I’ll let this local have his little power trip.” I mean, that’s Matthew.
Cole Hauser: Matthew was like, “C’mon guys, get out of your hotel room, let me take you down to the river.” You’d have these tubes, and you’d just throw a big cooler of beer in the middle, and you’d just float. It’s muggy and nasty in Austin during the summer, so to have a cool spring with a beer in your hand and beautiful girls cruising by? It was heaven on earth.
Renée Zellweger (extra): They were bonding as a cast, and I wasn’t part of that. But the stuff they were doing? That was my life! We were always at the lake on the jet skis, or tubing, or whatever. That’s just Austin.
Alright, alright, alright.
Read of the Week Pt. 2
The Most Magical Place on Earth: Inside the great NBA bubble experiment.
Here is the definitive 5000-word inside-the-bubble history of the end of the 2020 NBA season. Written by Turner Sports reporter Taylor Rooks, it’s a fascinating look inside the strangest 3 months in league history.
You can hear it all on my podcast, Mind of Micah, coming later this week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and get every episode as soon as it’s released.
OK, let’s talk about Tony Hsieh
Well, this is a whopper of a story. If you don’t know, Tony Hsieh founded Zappos. He sold the company to Amazon in 2009 for more than $1 billion but stayed on as CEO until August of this year. In November, he died in a house fire at 46.
According to reports, he struggled with drug and alcohol abuse at the end of his life. Here are some of the bizarre details, including an all-time spending spree:
Hsieh spent at least $50 million on properties in Park City, Utah, in the months before his bizarre death in a shed fire.
Hsieh, it appears, hoovered up at least seven multimillion-dollar homes, a private club, and a vacant lot in the months before his death. He paid at least $35 million for the properties, using a real-estate company he named Pickled Investments. The transactions were in addition to his previously reported purchase of Crescent Ranch, a 17,350-square-foot mansion on a private lake for $15 million.
The reports mesh with claims by The Wall Street Journal that Hsieh “had offered to pay friends to move to Park City” while other people close to him said he gave these people “jobs with vague descriptions; some collected salaries while doing little and living in his homes, and encouraged his drug and alcohol abuse.”
Then we get to the really weird stuff:
He apparently became obsessed with candles. Paul Benson, a real estate agent, said he discovered 1,000 candles burning inside the Crescent Ranch mansion when he stopped by. Hsieh was apparently interested in the effects of oxygen deprivation. He died from smoke inhalation after locking himself into a wooden shed at his girlfriend’s house in Connecticut where he was reportedly using a heater to lower the oxygen level. His death has been ruled an accident.
The Journal said Hsieh starved himself of food. His bizarre challenges included trying not to urinate and going on a 26-day alphabetized diet, only eating food beginning with the letter A on the first day, B on the second, and so on.
“The final Z day amounted nearly to fasting,” one friend said. His weight dropped to under 100 pounds.
Hsieh was said to be experimenting with extreme behavior, including sleeping as little as four hours a night. He also attempted daunting physical challenges; he once climbed the three highest peaks in Southern California in a single day.
These wild-ass details are really something. But, this is a tragic story. The super-rich have the same struggles as anyone else: mental health issues, substance dependencies, and generally reckless behavior. The difference is that people like Hsieh can put enablers on the payroll.
Friend Scott Roeben told DailyMail.com, “He went down the same rabbit hole as Howard Hughes and truly lost his way.
“His life changed over the years. When he started, his drinking and drug use were perceived as fun and upbeat, but that all changed when he moved to Utah where it got much darker.
“But he had built a cult around him—he paid people to be around him and there was no incentive to tell him to stop because he would put people on time-out and ice them out of his life. So the gravy train would come to an end for anyone who tried to stop him.”
Sad stuff. On the day before the fire, he was making plans to check into a rehabilitation clinic in Hawaii, the Journal quoted friends as saying.
Look out for your friends and loved ones. It’s been a very tough year and we all can use some help from time to time.
About the Texas Lawsuit
Erick Erickson is an evangelical conservative. He’s an extremely influential radio host and writer who’s worked for Fox News and CNN. He endorsed and voted for Trump in 2020.
Last week Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General filed a lawsuit challenging the election results in several states. The Supreme Court decided not to hear the case. That is because the case was preposterous.
Let Erickson explain:
Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of Texas, is under a federal investigation and would love a presidential pardon. His lawsuit is just more performative leg humping by someone desperate to curry favor with President Trump.
I personally think my company should pay me workers compensation for brain damage for having to read that lawsuit and related filings. It really is one of the stupidest bits of performative leg humping we have seen in the last five years. These attorneys general are willing to beclown themselves and their states all to get in good with the losing presidential candidate.
The suit is absurd on its face. These states seek to interfere in the internal affairs of other states when those states are not actually electing the President, but allowing their voters to chose members of the Electoral College.
Let me explain just how absurd this case is:
Texas can cite no cases at all in its claim that it has standing to sue the states for the administration of their own internal elections.
Texas alleges the other states changed election laws due to the pandemic without the legislature’s blessing. You know one state not being sued that did that? Texas.
The states allege it is illegal to count ballots received after election day. Several of the states making that claim also do that.
Their expert argues a sign of voter fraud is that it is not likely Trump 2016 voters would vote for Biden in 2020. The expert also uses dubious statistical modeling comparing Clinton to Biden.
The Missouri amicus all but says they don’t necessarily agree with Texas’s legal statements, but the case is so important the Supreme Court should hear it.
Texas could not even get its Solicitor General — the man who argues on behalf of the state before the Supreme Court — to sign onto the lawsuit. That’s how frivolous it is.
The level of debasement these people have been willing to engage in makes them seem more the ball-gagged gimp from Pulp Fiction, humiliating themselves for their master. They should be ashamed and embarrassed.
There is a strong possibility this is the first and last time we’ll be featuring writing from Erickson. But, “performative leg humping” is a good phrase that I will be using in the future. Thank you, Erick.
Jim Grey has some good stories
The veteran reporter has interviewed basically every major figure in sports over the past 40+ years. He has a new book out, and some of the stories behind the interviews are quite noteworthy.
On that Pete Rose interview:
I was well acquainted with Pete. We were very friendly but weren’t friends. Pete and I knew each other quite well. I had been a guest on Pete’s radio show countless times. So I didn’t hang out with Pete on the road. I wasn’t ever over to his house.
Look, it was the first time he was on the field in ten years, he’d signed away his own banishment from baseball. It was an opportunity for Pete to be back involved with baseball and so I would’ve had to have asked the questions whether he was my next door neighbor or whether I’d never met him before.
On The Decision:
About The Decision you wrote: ”I don’t think LeBron deserves much blame at all, even though I’ve felt over the years like I’ve been pushed by outside forces and the volume of harsh reaction to cast fault in his direction. I haven’t, and I won’t. Mostly, when I think of LeBron and ‘The Decision,’ I feel responsible that he suffered for something that I helped create.”Can you elaborate on this?
Well, it kind of speaks for itself. The outside forces—look at the avalanche that came down on him for what happened. And I wasn’t gonna be pushed and I won’t be pushed. It’s not fair to do it. That’s how I feel, and you know it would’ve been easy to join that bandwagon and to jump on it, but it would not have been right and I won’t do it.
Do you think there will ever be a day when a majority of people see ‘The Decision’ as positively as you do?
I can’t speak for other people, but I think what I pointed out is just exactly what I wrote. It’s the Curt Flood moment, and Curt Flood is rightly revered. This was the empowerment of players and LeBron took it on his shoulders and obviously there were some quirks and some flaws, but look at now, [the players] can all owe a huge debt of gratitude to LeBron. That doesn’t mean it was perfect.
I tried to give an honest appraisal with the passage of time. A decade of seeing it, hearing it, and feeling all of the reaction as to where in my mind this should be placed, and where it fits. I think the reaction now is much different than it was then. And obviously it was very hurtful to the people in Cleveland and very hurtful to the folks in Ohio who were losing this great player and felt the way that it was handled wasn’t the best way possible. And you know what? Those feelings should’ve been taken into account in a much more sensitive way, by me, by the network, and by the way it was handled. We could’ve done better there, and I believe I say that a few times.
It’s time to start preparing Fluffy and Fido (and Charlie) for post-pandemic life
Everyone working from home through the pandemic has wondered what it means for our pets. How will they respond when we go back to work and we’re not in the house all day? According to experts interviewed by WaPo, the time to start training your pets is now.
It might seem too soon to think about preparing pets for the time humans will return to offices and schools. But according to animal expert Zazie Todd, author of “Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy,” the eventual separation will be easier for pets “if you make changes gradually, starting potentially a long time beforehand.”
Will my pets be okay when our house is suddenly empty during the day?
“The good news,” Todd said, “is that probably they will be okay for things to go back.” But if you’ve been with your pet 24/7 and are suddenly going to be gone for a large chunk of each weekday, she added, “that’s a huge change” that should be introduced gradually. Dogs and cats relish routine, Todd said. “They would prefer to get their meals at the same time every day. And your dog would rather go for walks at the same time every day.”
What steps should I take to gradually prepare my pets for this change?
The experts advised establishing a routine that’s close to the one you will keep when life goes back to “normal.” Think about when you wake up and go to bed, when you feed them — even, Udell said, the temperature of your house and the light-dark cycle. Then, gradually include some alone time for your pets. That might be tough if you’re in an area where you’re supposed to be sticking close to home, Todd acknowledged. “In a worst-case scenario, it might be going and sitting in your car or going for a walk for half an hour, just so that your pet gets some time on their own,” she said.
In the end, though, I think it’s all gonna work out.
And keep in mind that your pet might not be as devastated as you fear. Wynne noted that although pets enjoy interacting with people, they also need to sleep about 12 or 14 hours a day. “So if a dog has been in such a busy household that it’s overstimulated,” he said, “it’s probably just going to be grateful to get a bit more sleep.”
Recipe Corner
Millionaire's Shortbread
Winter cookie szn rolls on with this easy-to-make dessert.
Crust:
2.5 cups AP flour
2 sticks of butter
1/2 cup sugar
salt
Filling:
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup corn syrup
1 stick butter
salt
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate
See the link above for easy directions. You can do this. Eat like a millionaire. You deserve it.
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