WHAT KIND OF FOOLS ARE THEY?

There's a fine line between kidding oneself and trying to pull the wool over everybody else's eyes. The former is often a way to get through an otherwise doomed decision (or even life). The latter is merely an insult to whatever intelligence we have left. 

Prigozhin tells us how many months he has to live.

Yevgeny Prigozhin is exhibit A of the former -- was he the only person in the stratosphere who truly believed he would die a natural death at a ripe old age after trying to overthrow his capo dei capi Vladmir Putin? This is not the way a crime syndicate works. When you go after the top dog, you make sure you get the job done. John Gotti managed to successfully hit Paul Castellano with just a handful of trusted wiseguys in the middle of Times Square during Christmas shopping season. 

Prigozhin had tanks and a trusted group of psychopathic ex-cons trying to help him pull a similar job. Yet, unlike Gotti, he made the mistake of warning his target -- and the world -- via the internet, before turning tail. The Kremlin's Godfather's public response? No harm, no foul! Now let's get back to work. Nobody except perhaps Prigozhin believed that Putin wouldn't take revenge in the most public way possible. The same way Castellano would have if he survived his steakhouse slaughter. 

Prigozhin was the McLean Stevenson of Russia -- a supporting actor who thought he was the real star of the show. Both men paid the price for their self-delusion by getting cancelled in their subsequent jobs. The difference is that Stevenson lived longer than another eight weeks.

Markle demonstrates how she has Harry by the balls.

Speaking of B-list actors, let's turn to the celebrity who's doing her best to make us believe she's the next Helen Mirren (if she knew who Helen Mirren is). Now that Meghan Markle has become a middle-aged nepo baby by marriage, she's ordered her posse of "anonymous sources" to whisper that she's in talks with "big name directors and producers" for future work.

The only way this could possibly be true is if she's talking to social directors of cruise ships and producers of gossip columns. This alleged return to acting is said to be due Netflix airing her previous TV series Suits, otherwise known as the TV show nobody heard of on a cable channel nobody watched until she quit the show for a better gig. 

Maybe by saying she's "in talks with" directors, Markle means leaving messages with people named Scorsese, Nolan, and Cameron, all of whom have the same response: How the hell did she get my number? But if Markle's vision board is any indication, she'll have the last laugh since, as one of her besties tells us, "She thinks an Oscar would be in her future." 

Unless she's talking about an Oscar Meyer hot dog at her next family picnic, Markle is not just trying to pull the wool over our eyes, she's got her hands on an entire flock of sheep. Yet that same friend claims that her "fans" want to see her act again. Currently, Markle's Twitter account has 2,158 followers -- not quite enough to for anyone to risk $50-million or so in production costs. 

I believe that, deep down, Markle knows that only a director right out of film school would hire her for a movie role. But she has to convince the world that everyone in Hollywood wants her. It's pathetic, no doubt, but it's better than King Charles blowing up her private jet.

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