Yeah, lots of news going on and haven’t been ’round these parts for a while now.

I suppose the two biggest issues of this day are the continued fighting in the Ukraine against Russia. It’s a horrible situation initiated by a lunatic who seemed to think he could just waltz into Ukraine with his mighty army and everyone would simply give up when faced with their overwhelming might.

The reality, if it weren’t for all the lives lost and cities destroyed, would be the stuff of bitter comedy. The Russian forces have been exposed as under-trained, ignorant of what they are doing (not their fault), and brutal (very much their fault). The fact that Ukraine looks to be about to go on the offensive and is only miles from the Russian border is yet another element that almost makes you want to laugh at the ineptness of the Russian forces… but again, only if we were to ignore the rapes, murders, general war crimes, and savagery this war has created.

Oh, and you gotta love how some Russian media is mulling the use of nuclear weapons as a potentially legitimate thing going forward.

Way to make a bad situation all the worse, eh?

Speaking of which, the leak a few days ago about Supreme Court Judge Alito’s Roe v Wade ruling, effectively gutting it, has also sent out shock waves across the country.

I suppose we once again have one of those “if it weren’t so fucking terrible it would be a comedy” type situations. Love this short video, presented on twitter, from The Daily Show…

The Daily Show on Twitter: “These judges make lying fun. It’s the Black Robe Comedy Tour!

Serious shit, truthfully, yet also hilarious because it’s so fucking true as well.

Alito and his ilk, as so clearly presented above, lied their way into their Supreme Court “jobs” and now are in hiding because of the furor of this ruling, something they claimed beforehand to “respect”.

I’ve noticed that some of the more right wing elements out there, for instance, the truck drivers who were creating blockades in Washington DC, were perplexed when people shouted at them and gave them the middle finger.

“How can you be against us when we’re trying to free you?” I recall one such demonstrator stated.

It’s a delusion, truly. A feeling that you know what’s right and everyone else is going to go your way, even though you clearly don’t know what’s right and a majority of people are very much against your actions and ideas.

The anti-choice crowd doesn’t get that but let’s see what happens in the upcoming elections. Their hubris might yet be their undoing.

One hopes.

Finally, there’s the Johnny Depp versus Amber Heard trial.

For those living in a cave, Johnny Depp’s career has really sunk in recent years, partially because he’s been in a string of absolute stinker films and because, he claims in this lawsuit, of an editorial Amber Heard wrote which talked about -without mentioning Johnny Depp by name- being in an abusive relationship.

I can’t seem to wave a dead cat around the internet without smacking into Johnny Depp fanatics who are livid about Amber Heard and demand “justice” for Johnny and damnation for her.

And… I can’t understand it.

I’m not a Amber Heard “fan”. I’m not a Johnny Depp “fan”. I’ve seen a few of the things presented in trail so far and Johnny Depp, IMHO, strikes me as a deeply vindictive man who is trying his absolute best to destroy another person, that being Amber Heard.

His career, from what I’ve read and seen, was already very much on the rocks BEFORE that 2018 editorial came out which he claims so defamed him so already I’m wondering what this whole lawsuit is about.

There were plenty of stories about him allegedly being out of control on movie sets, of allegedly consuming mass quantities of alcohol and drugs and often supposedly arriving late to work without any idea of his lines or what he was even supposed to do. Interestingly, in the trail at one point he was asked about the movies he was recently in (perhaps to get at this point I just mentioned) and he replied he had no idea of the films he had just done and couldn’t name any recent works.

Weird.

A trail in England brought by him and against a newspaper over reports of him being abusive resulted in a very clear loss for Depp and a finding by the court that he was indeed abusive and therefore the paper he was suing had not defamed him by stating this.

I can’t help but think when all is said here in this trial, we’re going to see much the same result.

Is Amber Heard a “good” person? I truly don’t know. There is some evidence, I have read, for at least one pretty gross thing she is supposed to have done on his bed… but as gross as that is, is it abusive? Depp himself, of the stand, stated that he couldn’t help but “laugh” at that.

So… ok?

Depp claims she cut/slashed his finger, but there are contemporaneous tweets and interviews where Depp himself says he did it to himself. Was he lying then and isn’t now or is he lying now and wasn’t then? What are we supposed to believe in that case?

There are those who say both of them engaged in abusive acts and its certainly possible, but I wasn’t there nor were many of them so its kinda engaging in speculation, no?

One probably should let the trail work itself out and each side present their evidence and what happens will happen, whether Depp be vindicated or not.

Having said that, one thing I already feel works very much against Depp I’ve already mentioned above: The idea that Heard’s 2018 op-ed somehow was solely responsible for his career nosedive and not the many bad movie choices he made from roughly 2012’s Dark Shadows on.

I mean, not counting that film, these are some of the major movies he has been in since 2013:

The Lone Ranger (2013, a pretty big box office flop), Transcendence (2014 another box office flop), Into the Woods (2014 ditto), Mortdecai (2015, does anyone remember this one?), Black Mass (2015), Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016), Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016… I suppose this one was a success, but was it in the league of the Harry Potter films in terms of box office? Also, if memory serves, he only appeared at the very end of this film in exactly one scene, no?), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017, a definite box office success but also the film where many of the stories of his alleged bad behavior on set and the need to use stand ins to get things done originated. Again, this movie was released a full year before Heard’s editorial), Murder on the Orient Express (2017, I suspect this film did well but it was a very big ensemble cast and Depp’s role was pretty small, though pivotal, as he was the murder victim), and, going into 2018, we had such minor fare as Sherlock Gnomes (a cgi animated film that I doubt many remember now), The Professor (has some decent reviews but does anyone remember this one?), and the more well-known Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (this is his last foray into the J.K. Rowling series as by this point he was indeed being viewed as toxic).

Anyway, a lesser actor may well have fallen far more quickly based on the string of unsuccessful works he was in along with the reputation -whether true or not- he had developed.

Either way, it’s in the news and a source of curiosity, certainly, if nothing much more.