Grim news these days, huh man? Looking for a little relief from all the doomscrolling — like some rambling thoughts on frivolous topics that can bring a smile to your face? I can certainly supply the frivolity, I make no promises about the smiles. That's the Philip Michaels guarantee.

I would bristle at the notion that I'm a Disney adult. I don't buy the merch, and now that my daughter's a teenager, I have been relieved of my ceremonial duties of accompanying her to whatever animated fare Disney trots out to our nation’s cineplexes. Other Disney-owned cinematic properties either failed to capture my interest (the Marvel stuff) or squandered residual goodwill thanks in large part to a toxic fanbase (Star Wars). I maintain an open mind about the Muppets. So as much as one can remain free from the clutches of a multi-tentacled entertainment conglomerate, I don't really dance to the tune that the Mouse House calls.

Except for the theme parks. I love the Disney theme parks.

As I'm a life-long Californian, visits to Disneyland (and later California Adventure) have been on the rotation the entire time. I went there as a kid. In college, me and my school chums would take advantage of the off-season promotion where Southern California residents could get in the park for $20. (That's my "Things cost less in my day" story I use to bore young people.) My wife and I used to have a tradition of doing our taxes — the most adult task there is — and then taking off for Disneyland to claw back our youth. And I've taken my daughter multiple times, even stopping off at Disneyland Paris when we took her overseas for the first time. (Verdict? It's better than the EuroDisney jokes of the mid-90s would have you believe.)

Basically, Disney parks have been a part of every stage of my life, and nearly every memory I have of them is a happy one. (The glaring exception: We went to Epcot at the tail end of 2005, just about the same time a pipe in our newly purchased home on the other side of the country burst and flooded the house. The lesson I've chosen to take from this is never set foot in the state of Florida, lest God punish you.)

I've got Disney parks on the brain because this is the 25th anniversary of Disney opening California Adventure across the esplanade from Disneyland. If you've not been, DCA (as us park-heads call it) marked Disney's attempt to turn its Anaheim property into a Florida-like destination with multiple parks — and multiple places to drop your hard-earned dollar. The original vision — dubbed Westcot — was much grander, but the aforementioned troubles with EuroDisney forced the company to dramatically scale back plans.

Truth be told, I really liked the more budget-friendly final product, which Disney pitched as a celebration of California. You had your Hollywood Studio section, your recreation of an old-timey boardwalk, and your nods to the wine country, central valley and Sierra foothills — the latter of which featuring a meticulously themed rapids ride. At the risk of sounding like I'm in the tank for both my home state and the Disney Corporation, California Adventure really underscored the very best aspects of this state. And they served beer and wine! Walt’s cyrogenically frozen head must have been spinning in its holding chamber beneath Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln!

Or as Todd Martens puts it in a look back at the first 25 years of California Adventure that appeared in the Los Angeles Times:

Ah yes, the redesign. It turns out that I was in a very small minority of people who enjoyed the original vision of DCA. The overall verdict was that the park needed more attractions and a whole lot of sprucing up, even if that meant stripping out some of the Californian-ness from the scene.

I must admit a lot of the changes have been for the better. The front of the park is a lot less garish now, as it's been remodeled to look like the Burbank of the 1920s when Walt Disney came to town. Cars Land has perhaps the best theming of any section of any Disney park, and the addition of other Pixar IP to the boardwalk area has been an upgrade.

But other additions have been less successful. The Avengers Campus has two banger rides in Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout and Web Slingers, but it's a pretty spartan design without a lot of visually interesting features. Hollywood Land and Paradise Gardens Park are holdovers from the original DCA, and they're really showing their age.

Mostly, though, the California Adventure of today feels thematically disjointed to me. The unifying Cool Things About California theme has given way to more of "Well, I guess we can stick this extra IP here" philosophy. Maybe that's just as well — I don't even like Cars or the Avengers, but I really enjoy elements of their respective DCA lands. I just wish there more to tie these disparate elements together.

Maybe that's something for Disney to work out in the next 25 years.

There's a clip of Broadway director/producer Hal Prince recalling the first time he listened to "Cats," Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical about... well, it's all there in the title isn't it? "I said, 'Andrew, is this something I don't get? Is this about Queen Victoria, she's the main cat, and Disraeli and Gladstone, they're other cats, and there are poor cats? Am I missing this?'" Prince says. "And he took a terrible, painful long pause, and said, 'Hal... it's about cats.' And we never discussed it again."

Put more simply: "Cats" is not a story that we would characterize as rich with incident. And outside of "Memory," none of the songs really make much sense outside the context of the musical. (No, not even the Rum Tum Tugger song, as much as a laugh that can be in the right hands.) It's essentially a dance production, and once you stop concerning yourself with things like "plot" and "emotional arcs," then it becomes a lot more tolerable.

Well, not the movie version. Nothing's going to save that.

But my wife brought a rebooted version of "Cats" to my attention — one that's had a run off-Broadway and will be coming to the Great White Way later this month. It's "Cats: The Jellicle Ball," and it finds a way to make those old T.S. Elliot poems surprisingly relevant.

Per a story in Vulture:

When you give it some thought, turning "Cats" into a drag show makes a lot of sense, and not just because we're talking about two cultural entities that share much of the same timing. Certainly, the thematic elements that the Vulture article goes into gives "Cats" more heft than the original that had Hal Prince so baffled. 

Unemployment means I'm not heading to New York any time soon, but if I were, tickets to "Cats: The Jellicle Ball" would certainly be on my wishlist, as I think it's a really clever way to breathe new life into an otherwise ordinary musical.

Put off by the high cost of beef these days? Well, frog-throated eugenicist and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has a solution to your problem. No, it's not dying from a disease that could have been eradicated through herd immunity — that's the long-range plan. Instead, RFK Jr. thinks you should be loading up on liver.

Via a write-up in The New Republic:

This is irritating on a couple of levels. First off, the reason liver is less expensive than other cuts of meat is because there's little demand for it. If we all start making a beeline for the liver case at our local butcher shop, the price will rise accordingly. Secondly, while I'm no health expert — a trait I share with the Health and Human Services Secretary — a brief consultation with Dr. Internet reveals that some people shouldn't eat liver more than once a week, as over-consumption can lead to Vitamin A toxicity. Liver also isn't ideal if you're trying to reduce your cholesterol intake.

But the other reason this has me steamed is that I actually like liver. To make sure we're getting ethically raised protein, we tend to buy shares of cows, pigs and lambs from nearby farms, and along with the regular cuts of those meats, you also get a lot of offal as part of the bargain. Waste not, want not, I figure, so I've become pretty handy at finding things to do with liver* and kidneys. This pork liver stir fry recipe by Maggie Zhu, for example, is a cracker.

So now when I get a hankering for liver, I fear my local meat merchant is going to think I'm one of those RFK Jr. freaks. I hadn't anticipated bringing my vaccination card with me to my next butcher shop run, but I guess that's life in America in these our troubled times. Thanks a lot, weirdo, for ruining meat for me.

* If you do find yourself trying the linked liver recipe — or really, any type of liver recipe — I urge you to soak the liver in milk before you start cooking. Thirty minutes will do the trick, but an hour is even better. The milk gets rid of that metallic taste that puts people off of liver and makes for a much better finished dish.

Friend of the newsletter Jason Snell has gotten in touch about last week's item on my Sacramento road trip. Jason reminds us that while I am correct to suggest Pete Wilson served as California's governor after Jerry Brown's first two terms in office, he wasn't Brown's immediate successor. That honor goes to the best-forgotten George Deukmejian, and I can confirm that his gubernatorial portrait is wedged on the third floor of the State Capitol Building between Brown's and Wilson's.

I can only apologize for the mistake and claim that my brain locked on the 1982 U.S. Senate race between Jerry Brown and Pete Wilson and a pretty funny bit that the late comedian Jim Samuels used to do about Jerry Brown's desperate campaign ads from that election. ("Didja know Pete Wilson killed your mom?" "He killed my mom? Gee, that's not fair. Maybe I will give Jerry Brown a second look.")

Some interesting things I've read recently, because not everything requires hundreds of words of my blather.

I haven't had a chance to sit down and watch many movies this week — or at least, none I'm inspired to gab on about — so instead, let's talk books, which I always thought of as Movies for the Mind. Yes, I do more than watch movies in my spare time, I also read books. 

In this case, it's a book about movies.

Specifically, Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge by Joseph McBride looks at the movies of writer-director Billy Wilder, with really an emphasis on the "writer" part of that hybrid. It's not that Wilder didn't have his own visual style, but really, the appeal of his pictures are the arched turns of phrase and back-and-forth repartee that he cooked up with collaborators like Charles Brackett, I.A.L Diamond or whomever else he paired up to produce a script. (A refugee from Austria, English wasn't Wilder's native language, and though he developed an outstanding command of it, he seemed to find comfort in working with folks who learned the language early on. Plus, he appreciated the give-and-take of collaboration.)

There are plenty of biographies about Wilder, and this isn't one of them, though McBride does delve into how Wilder's life and times informed his screenplays. Instead, Dancing on the Edge is a book about film criticism, and a rather hefty one at that. McBride covers the leitmotifs that popped up in Wilder movies — the fascination with masquerades and disguises and the common theme of the schmuck who becomes a mensch. He also spends the book arguing that it’s wrong to dismiss Wilder’s films as cynical and misanthropic, as Wilder is really more of a frustrated romantic, particularly in his later pictures.

It's not a book for a general audience — you really have to be into Billy Wilder movies to get something out of Dancing on the Edge. But if that describes you, you'll enjoy the discussion of Wilder's work — it certainly inspired me to dig into Wilder movies I hadn't seen like Kiss Me, Stupid (funny, if a bit broad for my tastes) and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (pretty undistinguished, frankly), both of which are streaming for free on Tubi.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. Keep watching the skies.