Monday Mood [DOT 15/1/24]

15/1/24 MegMegMcGee 27

It’s MLK Day here in the USA so you may have the day off. If you do, I hope you have a nice long weekend. If not, then stay warm while working!

Iowa:

Trump-dominated Iowa race barrels to contentious finish in frigid weather
https://wapo.st/3O2QFXg

It’s going to be hard to stay warm anywhere!

An arctic blast pummeling much of the country is setting up impactful snow and ice in the South
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/14/weather/south-snow-storm-ice-forecast-climate/index.html

That’s crazy!

Houses set alight as lava from volcano eruption reaches Icelandic town
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/14/volcano-erupts-near-reykjavik-forcing-evacuation-of-residents

Sprots!

Green Bay Packers dominate Dallas Cowboys to become first No. 7 seed to win an NFL playoff game
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/14/sport/nfl-playoffs-packers-cowboys-spt-intl/index.html

The Stonk market is closed today.

Again, in things that made Meg laugh way harder than they should have…

Have a good day!

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27 Comments

  1. Last night I went to deposit some cash at the bank and saw a homeless guy sleeping in the corner.

    Probably the stupidest thing I could have done is be an asshole and try to kick the guy out of a warm kiosk and back into the outside which was around -11C/-20C wind chill (or gotten into some fight because of it.)

    Best to let the sleeping guy be.

  2. Another playoff game, another Cowboys choke job.

    Already imagining former coworkers all crying and moaning about Da ‘Boys and scumbag Jerry Jones. Throw in more fuel to a Ted Cruz curse (he was at the game.)

    Added bonus CoVIDiot Aaron Rogers former team won without him while the J-E-S-T! JEST! are doing the playoffs on the sidelines thing. Especially considering the owners of the JEST are the same shitheads who still own J&J and are trying to get out from billions of liablility for asbestos laced baby powder.

    • The best part is that McCarthy lost in his standard playoff choke pattern. This is what life is like with him as your head coach, Jerry. I called it the day you hired him.

    • I always take joy in watching “dem Cowboys” fall on their faces & Jerry Jones cry.  It is especially sweet that Green Bay did it against their old coach & without Aaron “the only 2 A’s I got in college were on the name line of my application” Rodgers.  They are already speculating Belicheat is going there which would only be fitting to make 2 old men miserable.  I just hope this taught the Seahawks that Dan Quinn is not the genius you think he is and we don’t want him as our head coach!

      • No way in hell Belichick goes to the Cowboys.  Jerry won’t give up being General Manager and Bill won’t take a head coaching job without also being General Manager.  No way either of them gives up control.

        • Jones wants to be coach too. You know every Monday he’s second guessing play calls and player substitutions. He probably does it in the middle of games.

          • No doubt but then he has nobody to blame which he won’t ever let happen.

  3. So, I told you all that Better Half went up to the tony Connecticut suburb for a brunch/cocktail hour yesterday. He came back with a bunch of chocolate chip cookies. “Oh, they brought out trays and trays of them. I didn’t want to look greedy, so I only grabbed these few for you.” Sadly none of them were frowny-faced.

    “These are obviously homemade. And delicious. Who’s the cook in that family?”

    “Are you kidding? I don’t think either one of them knows how to turn on a stove. It was all catered.”

    “Sorry I missed it.”

    While I was eating my dinner and then noshing on my chocolate chip cookies we watched another episode of “Hawaii 5-0.” I’m telling you, that series could not be more satisfying. In this one 5-0 and the FBI are teaming up to nail a criminal kingpin but someone is leaking info. They make a deal where the FBI will do background checks on the 5-0 and the 5-0 will do the same to the FBI agents. This is all very complicated, but Komo has left the show and has been replaced by another native Hawaiian. He and one of the FBI agents grew up together and they speak Hawaiian. Not pidgin English, pure Hawaiian. So that was interesting to hear. They also go through lots of microfiche images to determine everyone’s backgrounds and other activity. A frisson of excitement ran through me when I saw this.

    So you know where this is going. That FBI agent is in the employ of the kingpin. And who is the FBI agent? None other than George Chakiris, who played Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks, in “West Side Story.” Sporting this glorious circa-1972 head of hair and a tie that is probably three-feet-wide at its maximum.

    So he and the kingpin convene at an overlook, we’ve been there before, and McGarrett and my boyfriend Danno are on their trail. While they’re chatting a chopper shows up, but this time it’s not HPD but instead is in the employ of a very shady Swiss financial corporation (aren’t they all?) that has been behind this whole operation. They start taking pot shots and kill Bernardo and the kingpin and then Steve McGarrett pulls out a shotgun (!) and shoots it out of the sky. It bursts into flames and goes down into the harbor.

    Why, why don’t we make shows like this anymore?

    • Well, for one thing, Jack Lord is dead. He apparently was able to assume “ownership” of the show, more or less, after the previous executive producer died. Lord never took the executive producer title.

      He was widely known in Hollywood as a complete and utter asshole, and I think you’ll see as the series winds down a lot more cast changes. Reportedly, the cast HATED him. Mark Evanier, who, like you, found himself watching old episodes, but is a long-time Hollywood screenwriter, puts it thusly:

      Mr. Lord, rumor had it, ruled his show with an iron fist and the belief that he was its one and only S*T*A*R. Such was his mania to preserve this reality that word began to leak, even while the show was up and operating, that its cast and crew seriously disliked the man who played Supercop Steve McGarrett. Writers and producers complained — within earshot of reporters — that he was rejecting scripts because they even slightly showcased other members of McGarrett’s squad or didn’t properly portray his character as brilliant, flawless and loved by women everywhere. Other cast members, sometimes anonymously, suggested the S*T*A*R had come to believe he was all that and more in real life. (Here’s a link to an article that ran in TV Guide in 1971. For its time, it was surprisingly harsh about a major TV star.)

      Article here.

      Evanier encountered Lord back then and found him unpleasant, at best.

      Anyway, I’m not sure the conditions exist these days for one person to so completely control a major TV series. I’ll be interested to see if you find it less enjoyable as you work your way through it.

      • Captain Kirk syndrome.

        Knowing what I know now, it’s amusing as hell to see the Shat jump into a scene and push buttons that would be pushed in real life by those that the Shat shoved aside.

      • Roseanne Barr sure tried. Some ABC/Disney exec in 2018 who was too incompetent to develop an original show learned the hard way what happens when you hand over control to a nut. Although I think the only lesson they learned was keep control centralized, not work harder to develop new talent.

      • Oh, I learned long ago to separate the art from the artist. You’d be hard-pressed to find a male painter from the late 1800s/early 1900s who led a blameless life. Lots of my favorite male authors were incredibly abusive to their spouses, children, and fanbase. A shame, but I enjoyed “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” as much as anyone, despite his atrocious (and self-admitted) behavior toward his wife, Patricia Neal (whom I actually met once. Of course I did.)

    • I want to know who thought it was a good idea to take the skinny ties that George Chakiris and the rest of the Sharks wore so well and change the fashion to the three foot wide ties in the 70s.

      • I once read an interesting article about 70s fashion. It posited that we were careening from one crisis to another, so people went for maximalism. Does your tie cost three times what it would have cost five years earlier? Make it three times wider! Even the home décor harvest colors, the oranges and golds and avocados. This was all due somehow to Nixon’s impending impeachment and the upcoming Bicentennial. I should really try to find that article, it was really funny and enlightening, but it was so long ago I don’t even know if that website is still in existence, whatever it was.

  4. I saw an article from a Houston newspaper asking people not to drop their faucets in the cold because it will overload the pumping station infrastructure.

    Once again, Texas having shitty infrastructure fucking people over.

  5. I recently watched a B-movie that George Chakiris was in as well, along with Pamela Ludwig, the cute girl from that teenage wasteland/rebellion movie Over the Edge). It’s called Pale Blood, and he plays a benign vampire (biting his prey in their upper chest to keep them alive and relatively well, and contenting himself to travel by taxi and sleep in a modular coffin while he’s away on business), who comes to glam-metal-era Hollywood to help Pam, who plays a quasi-Goth private detective who works best at night, solve a series of strange murders in town.

    I forget who the culprit actually is, but the twist is that she‘s a vampire as well, so they end up together at the end. Plus, although the copyright date is 1990, it’s not too hard to pinpoint the shooting time to the fall of ’88 – probably around Halloween, given all the random shots of partygoers and other nightlife denizens that pad the movie’s running time. (Another thing that does so is this song by Agent Orange, which plays a good five or ten times in some form during the course of the film – don’t have the volume up too loud at first if you don’t know what you’re in for.) Oh, and the ADR is really distracting, too.

     

    • The question is not whether we will still have a planet.  The question is whether the planet will have us.

  7. This review of Tim Alberta’s book The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory about the evangelical movement appeared in print yesterday in the NY Times and went online last month. It’s worth a read.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/books/review/the-kingdom-the-power-and-the-glory-tim-alberta.html

    Alberta is a good reporter who has gotten a lot of mileage out of simply asking whether the facade presented by powerful people makes any sense. He’s the guy who broke Chris Licht at CNN, and his reporting on how the DC press became stenographers for Mark Meadows’ blatant lies is great stuff.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/06/cnn-ratings-chris-licht-trump/674255/

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/04/mark-meadows-trump-covid-425912

    Alberta is a genuine Christian and his father was an evangelical minister, and the review describes the origin of the book. After his father’s death, Alberta was approached by multiple people from his church not to express sympathy, but to accuse him of treason.

    The most belligerent culture warriors tend to shy away from talking about helping immigrants and the poor, since bashing the left tends to stimulate conservative passions more reliably than trying to teach Jesus’ example of good deeds and turning the other cheek. The dynamic turns out to be mutually reinforcing — or mutually destructive. One preacher, a “former Southern Baptist,” says that pastors are now “afraid of their own congregants.”

    It’s a situation that recalls Alberta’s account in “American Carnage,” in which establishment Republicans naïvely thought they could use Trumpism to their advantage while maintaining control over their party and constituents. “Those fabled gatekeepers who once kept crackpots away from positions of authority no longer existed,” Alberta writes in “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” Instead of issuing guidance, too many “so-called shepherds” resort to pandering — and their congregants end up even more wayward than before.

    One obvious conclusion from the book is that this isn’t a Christian or even religious movement, and it would be helpful to stop thinking of it that way. He describes not only how little connection to the Bible there is, but how little principle of any kind exists. Alberta documents how the standard media narrative of the movement being driven by faith is simply wrong.

    It’s about as meaningful as trying to attribute Rudy Giuliani’s actions to his being Italian American or a former husband of Regina Peruggi. The categorization is an impediment to understanding, and needs to be marginalized, not elevated.

    • It’s interesting that you found that because I found another article today that talks about Christianity and Trump that postulates that a lot of MAGAs are people that call themselves Christian but don’t actually attend church.

      Donald Trump is filling the God-shaped hole in Republicans’ lives

      Quote:

      These are people for whom “Christian” is a label. It doesn’t mean they have any interest in understanding the tenets of Christianity as a religion: It means they follow Trump. And it helps to explain why so many pastors are willing to trade Jesus for Trump when standing at the pulpit.

  9. uhhhhh…

    *scratches head*

    https://www.businessinsider.com/man-sues-dunkin-toilet-explosion-trauma-florida-2024?international=true&r=US&IR=T

    someones gonna need to explain this to me

    last i checked…. toilets do not explode……

    im going to assume he took a dump and then dropped a handgrenade in the toilet instead of flushing

    • You obviously have not been to high school in the US of A!  When I was in high school, guys put cherry bombs down the toilets and blew them up.  I know this happens all around our country and TikTok has probably made it 10x as bad.

      • oh i know toilets can be blown up

        but thats very different from it just exploded and im sueing no?

        tho…i very much suspect the dude blowed it up himself

        • THAT would definitely be the American way.

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