Dateline: Who Cares?

From what I’ve been able to gather, Johnny Depp is an American film actor who has made several movies, including a series of prequels and sequels based on the lives of pirates depicted in a Disneyland amusement park ride. He’s been married a couple of times, his latest to an actress named Amber Heard.

Like many a Hollywood romance, theirs ended in divorce, preceded by scandal and followed by vicious rumors started by their Beverly Hills divorce attorneys. Ms. Heard alleges that Depp was abusive to her and wrote about it in an opinion piece for The Washington Post. The piece, for which she was paid a reported $35 for first reprint rights, doesn’t call Depp by name but refers to its author as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” To be completely accurate, she should have referred to herself as the “victim.” But we all know how stars like to fight for top billing.

Depp was not pleased with how he was portrayed by Ms. Heard and sought $50 million in a defamation suit brought against her in the Commonwealth of Virginia. (Since he wasn’t named, doesn’t it seem a bit strange that he recognized himself in the article?) Anyway, Ms. Heard counter-sued for $100 million also, I assume, in Virginia.

According to some internet services that keep track of such things, Ms. Heard is worth somewhere between $2.5 and $8 million, far short of the dollar figure that would make the swashbuckling Depp disappear from the public spotlight. Depp is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 million, according to some of those same sources. He claims his career, in the aftermath of all this drama, is kaput; hers, it should be noted, never got to the point where it even could be called kaput.

Simple math indicates that Depp is trying to extract blood from a turnip. Ms. Heard, on the other hand, is seeking just enough to leave Depp $50 million—the exact amount he sought in his lawsuit.

I’m no lawyer, but it would seem that by using the wisdom of Solomon both parties could part company by dividing the total dollars in question, thus allowing each of them to walk away with $75 million. Those figures do not include court costs and attorney’s fees which, when all told, leaves each of the parties with somewhere in the neighborhood of half-a-million. That figure would provide most Americans more than enough to live a life of relative comfort, provided that such a life didn’t involve yachts, the south of France or a few grams of cocaine per day.

Virginia is about as far from the celebrity spotlight as can be. But that hasn’t stopped such pillars of journalism as Court TV and Entertainment Tonight from providing their own spotlights. Gavel-to-gavel coverage has gripped many Americans irreparably. Inside Edition refers to the trial as being what everybody might find to be about as important as the high cost of milk.

Meanwhile, Depp was seen in London during jury deliberations playing rhythm guitar in a garage band at Royal Albert Hall. An ex-girlfriend, Kate Moss, was seen throwing articles of her clothing at him from the front row.

After six weeks of exhaustive—and exhausting—trial shenanigans, the seven-person jury basically reached a verdict of mutual churlishness on the parts of everybody involved, with the possible exceptions of the bailiff and the court’s stenographer.

When the verdict (which speaks less of the #MeToo movement than it does of plain and simple greed) was handed down this past Wednesday, Inside Edition led with more coverage of the Uvalde tragedy. ABC World News Tonight led with the Depp travesty. And in Thursday’s editions, The New York Times called the trial an event that “transfixed the nation.”

I, for one, wasn’t transfixed. At best, the whole shebang was but a blip on the who cares? radar of these challenging, yet sadly pathetic, times.

Turning to the world of sports, has anybody paid any attention to the controversy that is taking place in the world of professional golf? I didn’t think so.

It seems that a consortium of Arab nations is trying to launch its own series of golf tournaments. Played on vast, arid sand courses where there are actual grass traps, this new tour is threatening to undermine the PGA Tour’s dominance of the multi-millionaire boys club in which, if you make the weekend cut and finish dead last, your paycheck is still about what it would cost to buy a small town in Tennessee. Or Mississippi. You pick.

So how is this Arab entity threatening the PGA? How else but by giving the top names in golf more money to show up than if they had each won seventeen tournaments in a single season. That’s right, the top players go to Dubai or some such place, leaving the PGA to host tournaments where the top competitors are overweight duffers in ill-fitting plaid pants with, at best, a 23-handicap in a contest determined by a closest-to-the-pin final hole.

And speaking of sports, let’s see what’s new with the Royal Family…theirs, as in Sussex and Worcestershire and the Queen; not like ours, as in Kardashian and whatever Reagans might still be lingering about.

While it’s unlikely that many veterans of the Revolutionary War are still alive, one would have thought we’d at least have remembered what the point of the whole little skirmish was all about. Lemme guess now. Oh, that’s right, throwing the damn lot of the British off the land we were busy stealing from the Natives.

And lo these many centuries later, if one of the members of England’s biggest family of welfare recipients should so much as sneeze, there are Americans willing to take note and send off a bouquet of pollen-free flowers and a Hallmark card.

Today marks the last day of what will no doubt have been an excruciating, four-day celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s 70-year reign of inconsequential rule. (I snicker every time I hear David Muir refer to it as “70 years on the throne.”) There will be no shortage of matching horses ridden by matching men in furry hats. Many not-so-lucky men in furry hats will follow the horses which, it seems, was pretty bad planning. The Queen’s ball will feature line-dancing to rockabilly hits to drown out the bagpipes. The event will end with Her Majesty reading some of Winston Churchill’s most memorable quotes about alcohol.

But how does Lizzie’s brood of inbred royalty really differ from that of Americans on welfare? Glad you asked.

The Royal Family doesn’t have to explain its having cellphones and tattoos to the others in the grocery check-out lines who had to work for their food. Not only that, Liz and the kids don’t even have to cook it.

Photo illustration by Courtney A. Liska

Mincemeat Pie

A shining star of the United Kingdom’s questionable culinary tradition, mincemeat pie is a sweet mixture of dried fruit and spices such as cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Typical of most British dinner fare, it needed the promise of something else—in this case, meat—to get the masses to even consider eating it. Sometimes called “Christmas pie,” it was the main reason Scrooge found the holiday so unbearable.

There is no formal recipe for this gooey concoction. To re-create traditions that predate Charles Dickens by five centuries, merely buy a frozen pie shell and fill it with such delectable things as apricots, raisins and pineapple—dried, of course. Season the whole thing with the aforementioned cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Add some sugar. Bake for an hour or two at a blistering 475° F. If it doesn’t combust, remove the molten mess from the oven, let cool, and then toss into an empty trash receptacle.

Next week: Yorkshire pudding, which isn’t a pudding at all. Not even close. What is up with the Brits and their misleading food labels?