Midweek Meh-Ness [DOT 24/1/24]

24/1/24 MegMegMcGee 36

Happy Wednesday gang! I am still in corporate team building literal hell. If anyone wants to take me out back and shoot me you won’t have to twist my arm. I wish I could accurately describe how bad our dinner was tonight. Like I’m up in my room contemplating $11 Reeses or $7 Kit Kats. Luckily, earlier I stuffed two cookies in my purse.

Primary News

Nikki Haley vows to stay in race despite Trump’s win in New Hampshire primary – live
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/jan/23/new-hampshire-primary-live-donald-trump-nikki-haley-republican-vote

So Christ like!

‘The Lord told us to’: US pastor says he stole $1m from Christians to remodel home
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/23/us-pastor-1m-cryptocurrency-scheme-christians-denver

Sprots!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/01/23/adrian-beltre-joe-mauer-todd-helton-baseball-hall-fame/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/01/23/adrian-beltre-joe-mauer-todd-helton-baseball-hall-fame/

Stonks!

Netflix adds 13.1 million subscribers, tops revenue estimates as membership push gains steam
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/23/netflix-nflx-earnings-q4-2023.html

I don’t get this whole obsession

Target workers reportedly fired for buying popular Stanley mugs
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/23/target-fired-workers-buying-stanley-mugs

It me.

Have a great day!

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36 Comments

  1. I wish I were as good at grifting as politicians and religious figures seem to be. Here I am, toiling away to “earn my daily crust,” as George Russell put it in the first season of “The Gilded Age,” and these people are raking it in by gulling the gullible. Of course, standing before a congregation and making up fairy tales that no sane person would believe, or having to go before voters who would decide my fitness for office, is an absolutely horrifying prospect. I’ve served on so many juries and grand juries. That’s enough of the vox populi for me.

    I will say though that I’m usually pleasantly surprised by how funny and engaging my fellow New Yorkers are. I think it’s the hard-bitten cynicism and our ability to recognize each other for the loons special breed that we are. I also used to make a hobby of helping out tourists, if they seemed lost and/or bewildered, and they were also great fun.

    “Pittsburgh! I’ve always wanted to go. It looks so beautiful in the photos I’ve seen.” I’d get handed a business card. “Now that the kids are out of the house we have a couple of spare bedrooms. Drop by any time!”

    Who needs Airbnb?!?!

    • New Yorkers — and NYC in particular — are all-time “seem mean, actually lovely” champions. The polar opposite of the South and Midwest’s “seem sweet, often kinda terrible” people. Bless your heart, and all that.

      There’s just a certain amount of go-along-to-get-along-but-keep-it-moving you need in a place where you live with 8 and a half million other people, and outsiders tend to mistake the don’t bother me look as meanness. It really isn’t!

      • It really isn’t. When I first moved into Manhattan in the 1980s I was very curious, eager, but also dubious, but I was kind of shocked at how nice and helpful everyone was. You’re on a subway train and not sure the best way to get to your destination? People couldn’t be more helpful. “Go to [whatever stop] and transfer to [whatever line]…”

        The subway is the great leveler. It’s vast and sprawling but not entirely intuitive. I can’t tell you how many directions I’ve given over the years. How to get to JFK? Well, first of all it’s shitty by subway, but if you must…(and the trip to JFK has a monorail at the tail end!)

  2. Can I delight you with another “Hawaii 5-0” recap?

    Murder victims are showing up around Oahu. We know who it is. It’s a guy with a remarkable center-part longish hairdo and John Lennon glasses. They try to do a profile of him and bring in a psychiatrist. She says “he has a menial job.”

    Well, as we know, he’s an assistant at a dog-grooming business. While at work, and holding dogs who look completely terrified (I don’t think the actor had a lot of experience around dogs, or maybe the filming experience was unpleasant) while he reads a daily comic strip that he’s obsessed with. It concerns a woman who’s in constant peril. So the guy goes around Oahu and if he spots someone who looks like one of the comic strip villains he kills them. Of course he does.

    At one point he confronts our heroine, and she gets freaked out, and luckily there’s a patrol car passing by so he runs away. Imagine that happening in New York in 2024. It would—no, I’m getting sidetracked.

    The heroine is taken in by 5-0 and they call in the police sketch artist. Fabulous. She also says that he was calling her by a name. They figure out that the name was the main character of the comic strip. They start doing a little compare ‘n contrast, and realize that the unsolved murder victims look like those comic strip villains.

    So what do they do? They fly the cartoonist in from Chicago and they ask him to devise a storyline involving a cop who looks like my boyfriend Danno. He does, and then Danno is fitted out with a cop uniform (so hot) and roams around in public. The lunatic wrestles with Danno, if only I had had the pleasure, but Danno is being trailed, and when the murderer gets up Quick Draw McGraw McGarrett takes him out with one shot.

    That’s another thing about “Hawaii 5-0.” There will be all kinds of gunplay, Danno, Chin Ho, Ben (Komo’s replacement) but the minute Steve McGarrett shows up one bullet and it’s all over.

    I cannot tell you how enjoyable this series is. My mother was a huge fan when it first ran but I was never particularly impressed by it. Now I cannot get enough. Although I suppose a preteen at the time wouldn’t have recognized its genius.

    • If only the weirdo was obsessed with something a little less violent like Lil Abner or Peanuts.

      Imagine him being obsessed with Calvin and Hobbes? Any little girl that looked like Susie Derkins would be a goner.

  4. Jeebus loves me! This I know,
    So let me remodel my home;
    Faithful ones give their cash,
    Cause they don’t need a marble counter top.
    Yes, Jesus loves me!
    Yes, Jesus loves me!
    Yes, Jesus loves me!
    Let me remodel my home.

    • I went to my sainted mother-in-law’s Presbyterian church a few times and they’d sing that “Jesus Loves Me” song.

      The first time I heard it I leaned over to Better Half and whispered, “How do they know? Jesus might hate them.”

      “Would you shut up and just play along? We’re going to Legal Seafoods for lunch.”

      And then they broke into the “Our Father.” I don’t know why, but I broke into the German version. “Vater unser, der du bist im Himmel…”

      This was like 30 years ago, at least. Ach, where are those Obama death panels we were promised?

  5. Imagine the closers on the violent e-mail:

    – Your fate is sealed,

    – Watch your back,

    – No regrets,

    – See you in hell,

    – May you end up in permanent house arrest at Mar-a-Lago

    • That’s the thing the scumbags at the NRA and idiots who believe 80s action movies are real life depictions of gun violence never talk about.

      Once you pull that trigger, you can’t undo what comes after.

      I get being paranoid and scared. I was there mentally post Cokehead Narcissist (sleeping with a baseball bat for four-six months) but there would have been a pretty good chance I would have killed the garage door technician who was late coming to adjust my new garage door if I had been armed with a gun. I didn’t thankfully.

      It seems I think about that moment when I hear about sad stories like this and thankful I kept my mental shit together. Unfortunately I know a couple of people like that old guy. Not only paranoid and scared (why?), but also desperate to “prove” something (that scares me more.)

      • The thing is, there are people who have legitimate fears of being attacked, and that is really hard to cope with. I get it. There are dangerous places to live and there are dangerous people, and that can make it a hard calculation.

        But I know where this guy lives and while nowhere is 100% guaranteed crime-free, it’s a quiet little corner of the world. There really aren’t many safer places to live and yet he was still so terrified that he was ready to pull the trigger.

        • See, that’s my issue, right there. Terrified people lock their doors and wait with their guns. These people keep yanking open their doors and opening fire. Or charging out into their yards and opening fire. They’re attacking, not defending.

    • I’m starting to think that these assholes WANT to murder people. They’ve bought all this weaponry, they’ve sat around fantasizing what it would be like, and they take the first opportunity that they think they can get away with to murder someone. They’re not scared, they’re looking for their chance.

      “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Fuck you, you sonofabitch. You’re not remotely sorry. And if they let you go you’ll do it again.

      • I suspect for many it’s proving to themselves that they’re a REAL man, a tough guy etc.

        One of the guys I alluded to in the email above, is a gun nut and completely insecure. The insecure part is what scares me because I’ve witnessed him doing stupid things/saying stupid things/making stupid choices because of his massive insecurity and it always leads down a very dark stupid path, usually for him. I don’t know what drives his insecurity (but it’s there and obvious to anyone who knows him… he seems to think no one else sees it.)

        It’s why I don’t hang out with him anymore.

    • “He truly believes what happened was an accident. That he stumbled and he fell and the shotgun went off by accident,” Mausert said of his client.

      OK, Boomer.

    • The purpose of rewriting gun laws to let you shoot first, ask questions later is all about creating this paranoia. Fox News and the rest of the right wing press decided to flood their audiences with stories about how these laws “worked” to save lives of innocent gun owners, and to push the idea that there were roaming hordes out there determined to ravage you and your home.

      It’s another example of why people need to help their uncles and aunts and grandparents wean themselves off that diet of Murdoch-style press. We can only hope that’s behind Netflix’s growing subscription base, as linked above.

    • I mean, this is the story of American capitalism in pretty much every industry, and has been for a long time. It’s gotten worse and more stark, but it’s also because the government has gotten more hands-off about letting companies kill people in a way we used to at least frown upon.

      • Regulation is under attack in a lot of places, but passenger air is an example of how to do it right. That article cites the industry advisor who is fine with flying Boeing now specifically because of government oversight, but he’s worried about the manufacturing process before planes go into service.

        Air travel was very safe 30 years ago and it’s gotten even safer. But agencies like the NTSB will have a bullseye on them if the GOP takes over. These things barely come up in the press whenever the GOP threatens a government shutdown – all they can talk about is the horserace aspect, in part because political reporters are woefully ignorant about real life. It’s trivially easy for the GOP to spin them that their games will have no effect on public safety because political reporters don’t know and don’t care about how things actually work. As far as the Peter Baker types go, those things are for other beats to worry about.

    • I mentioned this the other day.  Most of my neighbors work for Boeing or Boeing related companies.  They have all been pissed off for years at how the company went from all about the product to all about the corporate profits.  They have fucked over the unions so hard in the last 20 years & moving much of the production to South Carolina to break the unions has made it 10x worst.  For the first several years of the 787 not a single plane was certified that was built in SC, they all had to be brought to Everett to be repaired.  Now this…

      https://www.levernews.com/airlines-filed-1-800-reports-warning-regulators-about-boeings-737-max/

  8. Trump only polled 54% in New Hampshire. For context, his percentage of the vote was almost the same as when Buchanan challenged Bush, and his margin was worse than what Bush managed.

    Polling had Trump ahead by a lot more, and the collapse of his numbers underlines how poorly polls are working this year.

    It doesn’t follow that this is a big deal in favor of Biden. The level of softness in his support hasn’t been tested. But it points to a lot of softness in Trump’s support in his own party, and it’s probably worth a lot of people rethinking the implications of the circular reasoning behind “Trump loyalists are loyal to Trump”

    • It’s of course not getting any press, but Trump’s position is declining. He scraped by with 51% of the vote in Iowa. During his previous Iowa primary, he got 97% of the vote.

      The same situation is true in New Hampshire. He won, by a substantial margin, but a lot of voters voted against him. Of course, we’re seeing these meager wins presented as “overwhelming victories.” Nobody mentions that Biden got 97% of the vote in a state where he didn’t campaign and wasn’t on the ballot. Of course, now we hear that the Biden campaign is running on fumes. Uh, no. No, it’s not.

      • Primaries expose the worst weaknesses of national political reporters. It’s all vibe-based reporting by reporters parachuting into a state from DC or NYC. They lack contacts on the ground, so they spend their time dialing up the same handful of consultants.

        Only after they’ve been spoonfed by those consultants a narrative that loosely fits the facts do they bother going out to talk to voters. And even then, it’s to go to the diner or American Legion hall recommended by the consultants as a rich source of the quotes they need to manufacture the apearance that they’re actually taking the pulse of voters.

      • …and yet, will those voters who didn’t pull the lever for Trump in the primaries instead pull the lever for Biden in the general?  No, they will not.

        Will they just stay home?  Maybe, but it will depend entirely on how much bullshit they’ll get fed about how Biden is sending the country straight to Stalinist Russia over the next several months–and they will continue to eat that bullshit and ask for seconds.

    • I called this 6 years ago: Trump’s act was eventually going to bore/turn off more voters than it enchanted, and sure enough, it happened in 2018 and again in 2020. Could voters have a goldfish memory and have already forgotten that? Perhaps! But thanks to [waves hands at everything smoldering in a dumpster fire] it’s not like he’s been out of the public eye recently.

      My question with him is always: Is he adding new voters to his totals? I honestly haven’t seen it since 2016. That doesn’t mean Ol’ Joe can’t lose enough voters to capsize the boat, but that’s a different argument. And we’re not even into “Trump’s crimes are on the front page for three straight months” season yet. That’s not going to be good for him!

      • Reporters in 2016 (and even now!) loved to cite The Apprentice, but none of them seriously watched it.

        Season 1 it was a top ten show, and then ratings started dropping. By Season 4 the ratings had tanked. People initially tuned in because of relentless promotion by NBC and the catchphrase, but they tuned out when there was nothing more.

        Jeff Zucker stuck with it because he was the worst network president ever and he had no ability to develop new programming. And now we’re seeing the same situation with the execs in charge of the news – they have no idea how to develop new formats and stories.

        It’s as bad as TV in the late 1960s, except instead of endless sitcoms with a perky housewife and wise, bedraggled dad, the format is the panel discussion and the tropes are bothsiderism and worsening partisanship.

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