There was something terribly morbid and terribly wrong about FBI Director Kash Patel’s VIP snorkeling dive on USS Arizona. It’s yet one more example of this administration’s casual indecency.

I take it personally, and this is why.

Two sailors who died on Arizona were from my hometown, Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in the 1940 Census. Wayne Morgan and Jack Scruggs had been second-grade classmates in Arroyo Grande in 1932.

Arizona’s destruction had a tragic impact here: 25 of the 58 seniors in the high school’s Class of 1942 were Nisei, or second-generation Japanese. On April 30, 1942, they were taken away to be incarcerated in the Arizona desert. Many never came back.

More than eighty years later, Project 85 is devoted to using refined DNA science to identify the battleship’s casualties. Many of the unidentified sailors and Marines were buried, some in mass graves, in the Punchbowl Cemetery on Oahu.

In December, those remains will be disinterred for DNA testing.

I just sent Project 85 a sample of my DNA. An Arizona sailor, Electrician’s Mate 3c Charles B. Taylor, is my cousin—we share a common grandfather—and, God willing, they might find him so that my family can bring him home.

“Home” would be the Boone Creek Cemetery in Missouri. His mother, my Aunt Aggie, is buried there, along with Charles A. Taylor, the sailor’s father. Despondent over his lost son, in July 1942, Charles A. Taylor walked out to the middle of one of his farm fields, put a .22 rifle to his heart, and pulled the trigger. Aggie Gregory Taylor carried the burden of those losses for the rest of her life, for thirty-eight years.

We got Christmas cards from her, and my dad a birthday card, every one of those years.

So, yes, Kash Patel, in my mind, you had no right to your little “joy dive.”

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My knowledge of Japanese cinema pretty much begins with “Seven Samurai” and ends with “Rashomon.”

Director Yasujirō Ozu knew–directing, in the hat, above, knew to compose a frame, as John Ford did. Ozu’s, framed by Japanese interior screens, are particularly intimate. And, unlike Ford, he was much more understanding of women–his women were lovely, and they register emotion, including deep anger–and he worked particularly well with children. With children, he liked to include fart jokes in their scenes. I am okay with that.

That’s a good thing, because much of his work–he died in 1963–was focused on postwar Japanese families, bewildered and drifting apart in a sea of social change.

It reminded me of a song that played a lot on KSLY, our San Luis Obispo County, California, AM station in 1963, with the Americanized title “Sukiyaki.”

But it’s a song about the kind of loss that Ozu addressed. The lyrics follow the excerpt from his performance.

The singer, Kyo Sakomoto, born three days after Pearl Harbor, was killed in the 1985 crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. It was the worst single-airplane accident in history; claiming the lives of 520 passengers and crew.

I thought this was kind of cool, in an immensely somber way.

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Yesterday, I contacted an organization in Hawaii in the hope of identifying Wayne Morgan, one of two Arroyo Grande sailors killed on the ship on December 7, 1941.

Some of the victims, unidentified, were buried onshore and new DNA techniques make their identification possible.I got the most thoughtful reply from the group, called Project 85, this morning. Evidently, the DNA trail for Morgan has run out–not enough living relatives. Damn.

However, they asked me if I’d like to donate a sample to potentially identify Electrician’s Mate 2c Charles Taylor, an Arizona sailor from Rock Island, Illinois.

He’s my cousin. We share a common grandfather; his mother was my Aunt Aggie.

Sadly, his father took his own life seven months after Pearl Harbor.

I was just told by telephone that my DNA would be a close enough match, and they’re sending me a DNA swab kit.

I am deeply touched.

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World War II took a toll on my father’s family. Like Charles B. Taylor, Roy Gregory was his nephew—and my cousin.

Nedra Talley Ross, the last Ronette, has passed away. Here they are performing “Be My Baby,” 1963.

Wow.

I loved those girl groups, even if I as only ten or eleven. When a song of their came on the local AM station, KSLY, I couldn’t help but dance along, if nobody was looking.

Love the Big Hair, too.

What the Ronettes did was to pave the way for other girl groups, just as electric, especially if they were from Motown. For example:

Double Wow!

And, of course, The Supremes. That little hip-check thing they do in this 1965 video is devastating.

Paris, 1965. This one makes me a little nervous.

One of the best song titles ever.

The Chiffons, 1963.

The Shirelles. Pretty darned sexy song. And the lead singer, Shirley Alton Reeves, is beautiful.

And, damn, I am old. I don’t think that’s true of the music.

This is what the president* has cost us. These are World War II reenactors.

The people in the first two photos are French.

Those in the second two are British.

They want to play heroes, and to honor them, too. So they chose us.

When Amber Derbidge and I took AGHS kids to northern France, a Frenchwoman insisted on giving us a tour of the Rouen Cathedral simply because we were Americans.

When AGHS German teacher Mark Kamin took his students to Bavaria, an older woman approached the group with tears in her eyes.

“Your soldiers,” she said, “were so kind to me when I was a little girl. I just wanted to thank you.”

Dear [redacted]

Can you kindly inform your creative team, the creators of “Don’t Look in the Fridge?” that they are soulless assholes?

Doubtless, all of them are far too young–and far too ignorant– to remember Jeffrey Dahmer (below) who, thankfully, was beaten to death by a fellow inmate, with workout weights, in 1994.

Dahmer killed at least 17 young men and stored their body parts, on which he sometimes dined, in his fridge and freezer.

Your commercial is not funny, is not “darkly humorous,” nor is it clever. It’s not even Dexteresque or Lecteresque. It is mean-spirited and inept. Most of all, it’s reprehensible.

Jim Gregory

Who used to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch on occasion.

I could watch Trevor Howard (above) eat a bowl of Weetabix. Incredible actor. Last night, TCM showed David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), and was compelling, as usual, as a doctor, married, who falls in love with Celia Johnson, married. The film was based on a Noel Coward play, which gives it an impeccable British pedigree. I could not overcome, however, Celia Johnson having to deliver her lines from beneath some that have not aged well.

As long as we’re being shallow, it also struck me that the British drink so much tea that they may well have the largest bladders in Europe. May that helped win the War.

Then there was His Kind of Girl, with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. I could watch Mitchum eat a bowl of Wheaties, and I know Russell (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with her close friend MM), but her performance equaled Mitchum’s—she gave as good as she got—and he got to rub suntan lotion on her back.

Russell’s elegant jawline struck me, too and, yes this isn’t what she was known for. This film was produced by Howard Hughes, who so famously displayed Russell’s chestly endowments in The Outlaw. Russell was devout, and Mitchum teased her about it, and when one critic asked her how she reconciled her religion with her racy scenes, she replied “Who says Christians can’t have big breasts?” (Thank you, TCM, for that anecdote.)

She sang twice in this film, and here she is, with Marilyn, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:

She lived in her later years in Santa Maria, and used to sing at the Radisson Hotel near the airport. Her accompanist, if I’m not mistaken, was Mr. Lee Statom, our much-loved local music teacher.

I wish I had seen those two perform.

One of the early triumphs of PBS, now diminished for its wokeness, was its airing, in 1976, of the BBC production of I Claudius. Quick summary: Claudius is a minor, minor member of the imperial family thought to be, because of his stutter, a simpleton. That is a mistake. Claudius, played brilliantly by Derek Jacobi, is a survivor.

Today our president,* as part of his snit with Pope Leo, who is being stubbornly Christian, posted an image of himself as Christ, healing a sick man who appears to be Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart. It is so offensive that I will try to make it as small as possible.

It reminded me immediately of John Hurt’s Caligula, also brilliant at the moment he reveals to Claudius that he has become a god. (Claudius’s response is both funny—integral part of the series and its frequent murders–and aptly demonstrates why he is a survivor.

As the president* was boasting, until recently, that Iran had been decimated, obliterated, flattened, and decapitated, and at the same time whining that he was not being given appropriate and laudatory press coverage, Caligula here is returning to Rome after his overseas victory. He whines, too, but his victory, like the president’s*, is a product of his imagination.

Caligula isn’t just any god. He’s Jove, the father of all gods. And now Trump is Jesus. The two men share two traits: both are batshit crazyand neither has a sense of irony.