#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor
I think at some point it is fair if we just take a moment to observe and, inevitably, resent the fact that the godforsaken #trumpswindle is somehow tied into the otherwise inexplicable fact that Dumb and Dumber To actually exists.
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Maddow, Rachel. “With new players, details Trump Russia probe seems far from over”. The Rachel Maddow Show. msnbc. 9 March 2018.
To: Comcast Cable
re: What is your fucking problem?
It is not so difficult to understand. You are asking me for someone else’s social security number in order to find out the answer to a simple question: My cable box isn’t working properly; do I need to replace the box, or is this just a temporary glitch?
No, seriously.
That’s all I really want to know. Except your phone system is doing everything in its power to prevent me from asking anyone who can actually answer. At one point, it even asked me for someone else’s social security number.
Okay, so the basic rule is that I had to suffer through it, therefore you must suffer through it, too.
I know, it’s not much of a rule, is it?
The point being that by the time you read down that amazing sidebar list of stories from Huffington Post, it will be too late to realize that you really should have looked away.
For the record, my time stamp says June 30, 2013, 2:45 AM PDT.
Rule number one: Never have a folder on your desktop called “Organize This!”
Rule number two: Failing rule one above, clean the folder en masse, instead of file by file, saying, “What’s this one?”
There is no rule three.
At any rate, the Bob Cesca article that sidebar went alongside is worth a read, too. Yeah, I forgot all about that part, because, well … right.
Well, nobody could see that coming. Before I had time to get up the preceding post discussing Lindy West’s arrogant histrionics†, she took the drastic step of blocking me from her Twitter account.
My crime?
@thelindywest It’s @SethMacFarlane, FFS. Who expects PC or feminist humor? Don’t presume nobody notices. It’s just part of the expectation.
No, really:
Even better, Ms. West offered me an animated picture of someone named Alithea making a masturbatory gesture.
Briefly, then: You’re doing it wrong, ladies.
Poor Lindy West.
No, no. It’s just that as much as I sympathize with feminist issues, her whine—along with the rest of society’s apparent shock and horror—about Seth MacFarlane’s performance as host of the Oscars just doesn’t sit right.
West’s rant at Jezebel, titled, “Sexism Fatigue: When Seth MacFarlane Is a Complete Ass and You Don’t Even Notice”, is the sort of thing that really doesn’t help anyone or anything:
A strange thing happened on Sunday night when I watched Seth MacFarlane joke that Zero Dark Thirty is a movie about how bitches be naggin’, and listened to him croon about how lovely Jodie Foster’s naked boobs looked mid-simulated-gang-rape. I felt…nothing. Just nothing. Nothing beyond exhaustion and an extreme desire for wine, anyway. I wasn’t happy about it, but compared to what I was expecting from MacFarlane, it was a yawn. Compared to the sheer volume of hate and misogyny I filter every day for my job, it was a sneeze.
So I wrote happy jokes about other stuff instead. I bowed out, essentially. And I was thrilled to read and disseminate smart takedowns of MacFarlane’s primetime misogyny on Monday morning, letting other people do the heavy lifting that I was too fatigued to engage with. Because this fatigue—it’s really something.
My struggle as a feminist and a critic isn’t to contain my outrage—it’s to remind myself to feel anything at all.
This fatigue is self-induced. There’s no other way to put it: You’re doing it to yourself, Lindy!
One of the problems with the infotainment industry sector known as cable news is that it is, well, entertaining. Even when they’re not trying to be. To wit, during post-Irene coverage, a CNN anchor whose name escapes me, with a turd-under-the-nose blueblood sort of posture and delivery, was trying to cover first the people who were dumb enough to stay on outlying islands to the result that 2,500 of them are without road access to the mainland for perhaps two weeks. And then he tried to manage an interview with a woman who was among twenty-three stranded in a rural area of New York. The whole sequence was macabre.
But then there are the deliberate entertainers, the punditry hosts who raised FOX News to dominance or transformed the inept MSNBC into a GOP fundraising bogeyman. The persistent, even seemingly teflon Keith Olbermann has landed on his feet at Al Gore’s network, Current, with a version of Countdown that sounds much the same, and only looks any different as a matter of budget. And yes, we know Keith is politically active and wears his bias on his sleeve. Yes, we know how conservatives loathe him. But it’s so much more fun when he tells the latest story of FOX News’ Bill O’Reilly, himself a lightning rod of such comedic scale that you can’t write this kind of fiction. Mr. O’Reilly topped yesterday’s “Worst Persons in the World” list, and Olbermann clearly enjoyed the hell out of explaining the logic behind that:
You may recall years ago before he was fired from his syndicated radio show, that a caller mentioned my name to O’Reilly and he responded by saying that the caller’s name would then be turned over to Fox security, and soon he’d be receiving a little visit from the police. You may also recall there was a little problem with Bill and one of his producers, and his phone calls to her about three-ways and loofahs, and improbably about falafels.
Today, the two topics merged into one. This is going to be easier if I just read the first paragraph directly. Shall I?
“Last summer, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly came to believe that his wife was romantically involved with another man. Not just any man, but a police detective in the Long Island community they call home. So, O’Reilly did what any concerned husband would do, he pulled strings to get the police department’s internal affairs unit to investigate one of their own for messing with the wrong man’s lady.”
Wait, Internal Affairs investigated Mrs. O’Reilly’s alleged internal affair?
Gawker has identified the Nassau County Internal Affairs Unit detective actually assigned to investigate Billo’s alleged cuckolder. “The source provided contemporaneous e-mail traffic to support his account. He told me, ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me the other day. Do you know Bill O’Reilly?’ I got called into my boss’ office saying they wanted me to meet with these two PIs”—that would be Private Investigators—”working for O’Reilly to go over some information because a detective was having an affair with O’Reilly’s wife.”
He’ll turn this over to Fox Security! He’ll be receiving a little visit from the local authorities!
“The investigation was highly sensitive for two reasons, the source said. One, it was ordered directly by then-police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey, and, two, O’Reilly was at the time considering making a major donation to the Nassau County Police Department Foundation, a private, not-for-profit foundation Mulvey helped found in 2009 to raise money for construction of a planned $48 million police training facility at Nassau Community College. These internal affairs cops were on the case at the behest of Mulvey in order to get O’Reilly’s funds,” the source said.
Oh, great. So now it’s not trying to get the cops to get a cop to stop an alleged affair with Mrs. O’Reilly. It’s trying to get the cops to stop a cop to stop an alleged affair with Mrs. O’Reilly, in exchange for donations to the policemen’s charity. So where’s the evidence?
Unfortunately Gawker not only has records of Mrs. Billo buying her own house down the street from the family home, and being removed as a director of the O’Reilly Family Foundation, but the Nassau Police Commissioner kind of confirmed the investigation when he told them, “I don’t know if the investigation is ongoing or concluded,” Mulvey said, “so I wouldn’t comment.” You just did.
Some friends have finally given me a reason to play around with that social networking phenomenon known as Twitter, and for the time I won’t knock it. Nor will I encourage it.
But Twitter, indeed, brings me today’s great betrayal. No, no, it’s not anything profound. I’m not talking about the Obama presidency. Nor would I deign to comment on Disney’s posturing as a family-oriented company. Rather, it’s just a small thing:
As we contemplate the complexities of the reality check presented us by the proposition of a bunch of Hollywood A-listers getting gaga over British royalty, we also note with quiet and passing dignity that social networks are just one more way in which the internet allows truly clueless people to feel important.
I don’t know. These people are following me. Likely because I got myself one o’them Tweedledee thingies. You know, so I can Twit my grocery list to … oh, never mind. It’s a stupid joke, anyway.
But, yes, apparently some rich, famous folks in southern California were made slightly uncomfortable by having to think about eating under regal scrutiny.
Yeah. I needed to know this. Look, if a robot is going to “follow” me, can it at least be an intelligent one? I’ll even take sinister. Yeah, like those slow-assed shiny things from the original Battlestar Galactica series, with the Vocoder talkboxes? Yeah. I’d love to be chased by one of those. I can outrun it. The damn thing can’t shoot straight. And it sounds really groovy when I’m stoned.
Oh, right. Betrayal. Yeah. Reality check. Tinseltown and royalty. Those two sentences are very nearly mutually exclusive.
Rule number one of Twitter: If you want to Tweet, get used to looking like an idiot. Well, in the first place because you’re Tweeting. And, in the second, a lot of stupid people will follow you just because they want you to think they’re somehow important or admirable, yet they’re just morons who would suggest that some manner of “reality check” can be achieved by giving a damn about what Tom Hanks thinks about Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.
All things considered, the numbers are surprising to me. Then again, I’m not hip, anymore.
The top-earning tours of 2010, from Pollstar via BBC:
Sad.
Simon MacCorkindale has died:
Actor Simon MacCorkindale, who starred in BBC One’s Casualty, has died aged 58 after suffering from cancer.
His publicist, Max Clifford, said he died in the arms of his wife, actress Susan George, on Thursday night in a London Clinic.
The actor revealed last year he was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2006, but was told it was terminal after it spread to his lungs a year later.
He spent six years on the BBC medical drama as Dr Harry Harper.
He was also known for starring in 1980s series Manimal and Falcon Crest and appearing in the 1978 Agatha Christie film Death on the Nile.
Ms George said: “No-one could have fought this disease any harder than he did since being diagnosed four years ago.
“He fought it with such strength, courage and belief. Last night, he lost this battle, and he died peacefully in my arms.
“To me, he was simply the best of everything, and I loved him with all my heart. He will live on in me forever.”
That’s quite the résumé, and yet I recall MacCorkindale from the overlooked television series Counterstrike. Yeah, that’s right. That one. Yeah … that one.
Never mind.
Raise the glass. Thanks, Simon.
Disturbing thoughts. Or, according to David Schmader:
The week continues with a creepy new real-life drama starring Andy Dick, the troubled comedian who was arrested early this morning on charges of sexual abuse in West Virginia. Details come from the West Virginia Herald-Dispatch, which reports the 44-year-old Dick was taken into police custody around 4:00 a.m., after two men accused Dick of groping them at the Huntington bar Rum Runners. In a press release, the Huntington Police Department reported “two alleged incidents of a patron engaging in nonconsensual sexual contact with a bar employee and another patron. Based upon statements of two victims and independent witness accounts alleging that he had engaged in unwanted and uninvited groping of the two victims’ genital areas, [Dick] was arrested and charged with two counts of Sex Abuse in the First Degree.” As the Herald-Dispatch reminds us, this is not Dick’s first alleged sex crime: He’s currently serving three years probation following his alleged sexual battery of a 17-year-old girl, whose tank top he allegedly yanked down to reveal her breasts. If convicted of today’s alleged gropings, Dick faces one to five years in prison.
I mean, four thousand jokes come to mind, and not a damn one of them any good. But part of me actually wonders what this guy is repressing. Really, why behave this way? Sure, “He’s an asshole,” serves well enough for many, but what is the psyche of an asshole? Does the detail serve as a punch line? Or is it just freaking sad?
B.D.'s Last Refuge 