Ethan writes:
In this MS vs MS matchup I can’t imagine enjoying Stewart. I doubt she’d talk about her time in jail, just use the seminar to push her latest venture.
Actually, Martha talking about her jail time is something I woudn’t want to hear. Some redemption story about how she found serenity in prison, blah blah blah.
Jonathan writes:
Martha was not a tax cheat at all, so I’m not sure what she’s doing in this category at all, much less top seed. What she *was* convicted of was lying about something that wouldn’t have gotten her into trouble even if she’d told the truth about it.
Sendak, on the other hand, “refuse[s] to lie to children” but seems preoccupied by a number of amusing, if not particularly well-founded, hot takes: ” Of Salman Rushdie, who once gave him a terrible review in the New York Times, he says: “That flaccid fuckhead. He was detestable. I called up the Ayatollah, nobody knows that.” Roald Dahl: “The cruelty in his books is off-putting. Scary guy. I know he’s very popular but what’s nice about this guy? He’s dead, that’s what’s nice about him.” Stephen King: “Bullshit.” Gwyneth Paltrow: “I can’t stand her.”
Wow! That sounds great. Let’s definitely bring Maurice in to give a talk. An hour of that sort of ranting would just be amazing. “He’s dead, that’s what’s nice about him.”—that’s prime material!
Today’s matchup
That’s Steve McQueen the British movie director, not Steve McQueen the American movie star. Quisling is the Norwegian traitor.
Steve’s namesake played an escapee from a Nazi prison; real-life Vidkun was an actual Nazi. I guess if Steve made a movie about the 6 Jan 2021 insurrection, his namesake could play one of the heroic Capitol Police officers and Vidkun could play one of the plotting congressmembers.
Who could give a better seminar talk? Do you want to hear about the ins and outs of film direction or the ins and outs of German troops? It’s your job to make a convincing case!
The definitive Quisling biography was written by Dahl — no, not that one, or we could get a two-fer from Roald. But there’s this from the biography in Wikipedia: “During formal dinners he often said nothing at all except for the occasional cascade of dramatic rhetoric. Indeed, he did not react well to pressure and would often let slip over-dramatic sentiments when put on the spot. Normally open to criticism, he was prone to assuming larger groups were conspiratorial.” Ummmm…. not ideal for our purposes?
I guess this should have gone in yesterday’s comments, but those are already old news.
Jonathan wrote “Martha was not a tax cheat at all, so I’m not sure what she’s doing in this category at all, much less top seed. What she *was* convicted of was lying about something that wouldn’t have gotten her into trouble even if she’d told the truth about it.” But this doesn’t seem to be the case. I think Jonathan somehow missed the fact that Stewart was involved in two separate shady deals: she didn’t pay property taxes in New York for a few years (and was ultimately forced to pay $220K in back taxes to make up for it), AND she was convicted of insider trading.
Admittedly the property taxes thing is a bit iffy. A judge ruled against her and made her pay up, but this seems to be one of those I-don’t-understand-the-law situations in which the burden was on Stewart to prove she didn’t owe the taxes, rather than the burden being on the government to show that she did. I guess it’s because it was a civil case rather than criminal, so there’s no assumption of innocence? At any rate she fought the law and the law won, declaring that she had attempted to evade taxes and that she needed to pay up. So I think it’s fair to call her a “tax cheat”, at about the same level that it’s fair to call Jane Fonda a “traitor.” There are much worse tax cheats than Stewart and much worse traitors than Fonda, but they are both on the wrong side of the line.
All irrelevant since Sendak advanced anyway, but here on this blog we are sticklers for correcting the record.
As long as we’re correcting the record (and I already apologized for the tax thing) she was not convicted of “insider trading” not least of all because there is no such crime. There is a crime of misappropriation of corporate information, which she was charged with, but the charges were thrown out at trial for lack of proof which a jury might have reasonably relied upon.
> I think Jonathan somehow missed the fact that Stewart […] didn’t pay property taxes in New York for a few years
The fact is that it was an income taxes thing – not a property taxes thing.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/19/tax-me-if-you-can
OK, glad we straightened all this out. Just to get everything down here on the record.
1. Stewart was a tax cheat: she didn’t pay New York income tax for years when she says she didn’t live there but the State says she did. If Stewart was in fact right then she didn’t actually cheat on her taxes and this is a miscarriage of justice. But a court found against her so I think we can go with ‘tax cheat.’
2. Jonathan says there is no crime that is officially called ‘insider trading.’ That seems kinda pedantic. There are laws against insider trading even though they don’t use that term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading However, although Stewart was accused of this, it never even went before a judge.
3. Stewart went to prison for “conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and two counts of making false statements to a federal investigator” with regard to the alleged insider trading. One could ask why she lied if telling the truth wouldn’t have revealed a crime; I don’t know the answer to that.
I had a PowerPoint Bullitt joke all lined up but it turns out it’s the namesake McQueen not the cool-person McQueen. On the other hand, it’s hard to want to vote for the Nazi.