Not that I expect you to be setting your watch to Get Your Phil deliveries, but we're a little behind schedule this week, due to a paying gig that took precedence. I love all the Get Your Phil subscribers dearly, but the one thing I love more is money.

As previously established in this space, my wife and I are fans of driving to nowhere in particular, heading out in one direction or another and drive until we find some place interesting, usually a beach or scenic overlook. Part of the appeal is the joy of discovering a new locale, and getting out of the house is not without its charms. But honestly, just getting the two of us in a car together where there's no distraction, save for the occasional bad driver, offers a nice venue for reminding ourselves that we enjoy each other's company.

Given that mindset, then, you'd imagine me and the missus would be the prime targets for a Threads post about using car time to reconnect with your significant other by having deep meaningful talks prompted by a series of probing questions that force you to glance into the abyss of each others' souls. You would be mistaken. I am only aware of this Threads post because my wife shared it with me so that we could enjoy some mutual disdain.

The secret to a long-lasting marriage? Cultivate many of the same dislikes.

The questions come from an author and self-help guru who frames this exercise thusly:

The questions start out easy ("If we got $500 that had to be wasted on fun, what are we doing?") before ramping up in seriousness ("What's a grief you carry that you think I've forgotten about?"). By the end of the journey, you're supposed to be asking things like "What question do you wish I asked more often?" or "What's something we should quit together?" Ideally, the answer to that last one isn't "Having conversations based on Threads prompts."

"So what do you think?" my wife asked me.

"It's an interesting exercise," I told her, "though I'm not sure how far down the list of questions we'd get before I calculated at what speed I could safely fling myself from the car to avoid exploring my secret grief."

"Be sure to bend your knees when you jump," my wife helpfully suggested. "It reduces patellar impact on the landing."

Look, I don't want to yuck anyone's therapeutical yum. Some couples need all the help they can get keeping the conversation flowing, and if you agree that a windshield serves as "truth serum" and not a handy way to exit the vehicle when things get uncomfortable, I'm happy to have directed you to a conversational starter kit. Certainly, the missus and I have had our share of heart-to-hearts while traveling from Point A to Point B, though the downside to getting into things while trapped in 2.2 tons of speeding metal is that there's no place to excuse yourself if the talk goes sour. One minute, you're asking your partner "What song do you secretly still love that I'd tease you about?" and before you know it, the two of you are staring into the middle distance while you roll through Redding. 

Since I am an imp of the perverse, all this talk of conversation prompts for you and your life partner got me riffing on Conversational Topics You Should Definitely Not Introduce the Next Time You and Your Sweetie Are Trapped in a Car Together. To wit:

Be sure to ask these on your next road trip. Windshield time is truth serum time!

Remember all those past newsletters where I talked about how I had a big project brewing? Well, brewing time's over — I had been tasked with revamping the best cell phone plan picks over at Wirecutter. 

It was a pretty involved project. I started by researching many different plans before culling down the list to the top picks. I also went over the existing text, updating the still-relevant portions and adding my own insights. I liked how it turned out — hopefully, the assigning editors and readers feel the same way. At any rate, editors of all publications are encouraged to send work Phil’s way.

As for less labor-intensive personal news, if you listened to the latest Magnum, Podcast episode, you'd know that the other two fellows who appear on that show are going on the road with me. And if you don't listen to the podcast, well, you know that piece of information now.

Specifically, we're heading to Detroit, Michigan, for the annual Magnum, PI Day at Comerica Park. Canonically, Thomas Magnum is a Detroit Tigers fan, so one Sunday in August each year, fans of both the show and team show up in their finest Hawaiian shirts and celebrate the way Magnum would have wanted them to. 

(Throughout the series, Magnum famously was prevented from watching his beloved Tigers, much like God stopped Moses from reaching the Promised Land; only in this retelling, there's a lot more Alan Trammell.)

Anyhow, the game's on August 16, and if you're in or around the Detroit area, you should stop by. At the very least, please pass along suggestions on where to eat. I already plan on paying a visit to Devereux Wigs.

After last week's talk of the Trump phone, I don't want this newsletter to have a weekly What's Your Beef section about the president. Sadly, the big lummox keeps butting into areas of my interest, and the real victim in all of this is you. Sorry.

The Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series last fall, and one of the rites bestowed upon champions is a visit to the White House. In normal times, these are painless, brainless affairs, where the team clusters around the president, presents him with a jersey and laughs politely at some sort of stilted joke like "I could use your impressive offense the next time I go up against Congress."

These are not normal times, particularly if you're a team from Los Angeles. Donald Trump has spent the better part of the last year treating Los Angeles as an occupied city, dispatching troops there largely for the purposes of intimidation and because "they didn't vote for me." 

The administration's immigration crackdown — which, for all practical purposes, is simply a way to harass brown people — has been felt particularly hard in Los Angeles. On multiple occasions, Trump's ICE goon squad has even tried to use Dodger Stadium parking lots as a staging area, until the Dodgers, sensing that this was bad for business, pushed back.

It's understandable then that Dodger fans were hopeful the team would give a wide berth to a president who is making the lives of many Angelenos appreciably worse. The team did anything but, though, going out of their way during stops in Philadelphia and New York to serve as props for a strongman who would love nothing more than to bring the city they represent to heel. All but two players made the trip (and one of the ones who didn't was somewhat apologetic about skipping the whole thing).

The Dodgers' White House visit is another reminder in recent months that professional athletes may wear a shirt bearing the name of a particular city, but their actual connection to that city is tenuous at best. 

(Closer to home for me, the San Francisco Giants have made it perfectly clear what they think about the values of their home city with the way they handled this season's Pride Night fiasco.)

While there are always exceptions, for the most part, professional athletes are hired hands who, the second the season ends, light out for other parts with a rich-athlete-friendly approach to taxation. Professional athletes don't care to understand or share the concerns of the fans cheering them on, because they assume that money and fame insulates them. And recognizing that your local athletes are athletes first, locals almost never, will  probably result in a more healthy relationship to your local sports team.

At least the Dodgers had some incentive to suck up to Donald Trump — the team's owner is facing a federal investigation, and not many people would pass up the chance to whisper sweet nothings into the ear of a president who's more than eager to bend the rules for the right amount of obeisance. No such reason existed for anyone who attended last weekend's hastily re-assembled White House Correspondents Dinner other than a humiliation kink.

The account of the misbegotten media event in Status — the word "disgrace" is used prominently — makes it sound like no choice of chicken-or-fish is worth any of this. The fallout from the dinner seems to be Donald Trump's hour-long speech, in which he rambled from one insult to the next, excoriating attendees, perceived enemies and whatever happened to hove into his consciousness at any one given moment.

The right time to attend such an event in the first place is approximately never, but if you must go, the time to leave is when the insults start flying. While journalists should be able to take criticism, consenting to be used as the administration's props in an overlong version of Big Brother's Two-Minute Hate is another matter altogether.

And yet, by most accounts no one walked out or booed or ripped the microphone out of the ranting dotard's hands. They just sat there, easily the worst possible response. 

(Well, no — the worst response is to hug the guy who just berated your colleagues, which is apparently what the incoming president of the White House Correspondents Association did, according to one report.) 

The business of journalism requires accurate reporting no matter whose toes you're stepping on; it's hard to imagine the WHCA dinner attendees doing that since it's clear their first priority is having a seat at a social dinner no matter what's happening outside the ballroom.

There is a bias toward news within a three-hour drive of my house in this week's links section, for which I do not apologize. All news is local, after all, especially when the locality in question is mine.

I left the comfort of my home this past week to hit a cinema, so I could see that blockbuster movie everyone's talking about — you know, the one where a mysterious gift forged by seafaring warriors sets a fantastical plot in motion.

Yes, I went to see The Maltese Falcon*. Is there another such movie in theaters right now?

I've seen The Maltese Falcon countless times, easily more than 20 if I had to put a number on it. But a revival of the film was showing on a big screen as part of the Paramount Theater's Movie Classics Series, and when you get a chance to see a 35mm print of one of your favorite movies in an Art Deco theater in the heart of downtown Oakland, you make the trek.

There are many reasons to take in a flick at an old-timey movie palace beyond just the film itself. In Oakland, before the screening begins, you're treated to a concert on a Wurlitzer organ, the hipster's favorite instrument. There's a raffle conducted by a man in a blood-red jacket who looks like he emceed the Last Supper. And you get to see trailers, back before people knew how to make trailers. I challenge you to watch this Rear Window preview and pick out the moment where the crowd in Oakland screamed with delight.

If I have any regret about going to the movies at the Paramount, it's that I missed the other screenings on offer earlier this summer. It would have been a hoot, for example, to see Purple Rain in a theater where Prince actually performed.

Besides, there's a value in seeing a movie with an audience, even if it's a film you can recite by memory. It's fun to see how other people react to your favorite lines, whether it's Peter Lorre trying to search Humphrey Bogart's office or Bogie telling Mary Astor that with any luck she'll get out of Tehachapi in 20 years.

And no spoiler alerts, but I think that falcon statue isn't what it seems to be.

I've already mentioned last week's newsletter, and I think the insights contained in the lead item about Jason Momoa's role choices was undercut only somewhat by me misspelling his name. Not once, not twice, but... well, I wouldn't like to put a number value on it. Let's just say the count reached embarrassing totals.

My apologies to both you, the reader, and Mr. Momoa, who is most definitely not a reader, not anymore anyway. The text has been corrected online, and as a show of good faith, Jason Momoa is now permitted to spell my name improperly as often as he likes, even if it means inserting superfluous Ls. Lord knows I have plenty of Ls to go around.

And that's your Phil for this week — thanks for reading. Until we meet again, which will hopefully be when we're both trapped in an automobile so you can answer me my questions three with no hope of escape.