TGIF! [DOT 29/12/23]

29/12/23 MegMegMcGee 27

It’s Friday, apparently.

LULZ

Maine’s top election official removes Trump from 2024 primary ballot
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/28/politics/trump-maine-14th-amendment-ballot/index.html

Stonks!

updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/28/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

Sprots!

Detroit Pistons lose in overtime to Boston Celtics and tie NBA record with 28 straight losses
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/28/sport/detroit-pistons-losing-streak/index.html

That’s how you end up with all that’s left of you is a shoe.

No license to stroll: Pierce Brosnan cited for off-limits walk at Yellowstone park
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/28/pierce-brosnan-yellowstone-citation-national-park

It me.

Have a great day!

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27 Comments

  1. Meg, you are a gem. LULZ. Pierce Brosnan. Thank you for temporarily reversing my aging process by 30 years. But sadly now I must return to this disgusting present.

    Oh, speaking of living in the distant past, did you all hear that The Gilded Age has been renewed for a third season? The show has really grown on me. Most of you probably don’t know or have forgotten that Cynthia Nixon, Aunt Ada and some character from Sex and the City, a show I never watched, despite being assured that though the characters were women it was Darren Star’s thinly disguised attempt to portray the lives of gay men in Manhattan pre-9/11…primaried Andrew Cuomo. I voted for her, good Socialist that she is, but I was among a tiny minority.

    I once read a really good essay, I guess it was, written by a woman about SATC. She didn’t directly address the gay simulacra but she did talk about how the women didn’t seem to have family members. It was like they left them all behind, never to be seen again, to forge their way in glamorous New York. This is a very gay (male) thing. We have tons of gay male friends and I have never met any of their blood relatives. We’re all of a certain age so it’s possible their family members aren’t thrilled with their “lifestyle choices,” as people used to say. My family was always very supportive of me and they adore(d) Better Half so I was very lucky in that respect.

    The women on SATC all must have had parents, and siblings, and nieces and nephews, but on the show it’s like they were Venuses sprung from the head of Zeus or emerged from New York harbor, fully formed.

    • I didn’t realize that S&TC was about gay culture (other than the gay characters and scenes). Then again I watched it in my teens. There was a spinoff that attempted to give them origin stories that included families and not a giant clam shell. The Carrie Diaries was so lame that even I could not force myself to watch it all. Celebrity factoid: Austin Butler (whose rising star has been forced upon us by a heavy handed PR campaign, was a freeloading nobody who dumped his sugar mama when he became a somebody (Elvis) and then started dating a famous barely adult woman) starred in it as her love interest.

       

      I remember Cynthia Nixon campaigning and would have voted for her. The last time she popped up on my news feed was when she participated in a five day hunger strike outside the White House demanding a ceasefire.

      The character she plays in Guilded Age (S1, I haven’t watched S2) seems childlike and in a constant dream state. It’s fucking weird. I can’t stand her character almost as much as I can’t stand the inconsequential main character played by Meryl Streep’s other daughter. I feel like it is hard or not worth the effort for most people to separate an actor from the roles they play. Therefore her political career will not be taken seriously.

      • I only became aware of the Darren Star conversion of Candace Bushnell’s characters into gay men when I was at a party (I did used to have a corporate job; it wasn’t like SATC and I attended brunches and parties all my life) and someone asked me if I thought Will and Grace portrayed gay men accurately. I said, “No. Will is the least convincing gay man ever portrayed, and Jack is too gay to be believed. But you know on Sex and the City…”

        And then it dawned on me. The SATC started out as a column by Candace Bushnell in the old New York Observer. Don’t get me started on how terrific that paper was in the good old days, the 1990s. Then they did the TV version, and after the first season, I think, Bushnell was forced out and Darren Star slowly and subtly took it in a different direction.

        I remember women in my office saying, “I’m totally a Samantha!” or “Carrie is the way to go! I’m a Carrie.” And I remember thinking, “I don’t really know women like that. But there are plenty of gay men…”

        I can’t really describe this without engaging in gross stereotyping, but I have a lot of friends who are NYC women and none of them found much in common with the characters in SATC. Especially the vast apartments and the closets. But we all scrape by somehow.

        • I remember the obsession with “I’m such a Samantha” etc being a thing around the same time that the purses and tshirts with things like “Mrs. Kutcher” and other male celebrity last names were popular.

          I found both phenomena to be weird and unappealing.

  2. I went to bed early because I was like YAY I can sleep in and get extra rest!!

    Alas no, 5am, woke up completely and no luck getting back to sleep.

    I’m going to regret this immensely in a few hours.

  3. Did I ever tell you all about my obsession with “Call Me Maybe” videos? Not the original, although that’s superb. But this one, for example. The London Olympics were predicted to be a colossal failure and a bankrupting event for Britain, but it turned out really well. Except for that structure that the roof keeps blowing off from. And I think the surrounding structures have been turned into “social housing,” which is a euphemism for, “Don’t go anywhere near it, day or night. Stay away.” We’re a long way from Downton Abbey.

    Then there are the military videos. I love a man in uniform (I’ve posted that video before)

    There’s another one that I can’t find, for some reason.

    Enjoy. And happy weekend (“week-end”) everyone.

  4. I don’t expect the Maine decision to stand, either, but I do think that the publicity these lawsuits generate, essentially reminding people that Trump tried to overthrow our government, has a lot of PR value. There are still people who, while not Biden fans, will vote for him anyway just to keep Trump out of the White House again. I still think abortion is the main issue, but it doesn’t hurt to keep linking Trump with insurrection.

    • I think the big problem is, and this was discussed yesterday in @SplinterRIP ‘s post yesterday, quoting the Republican spox hack, that people remember the Trump era fondly. In his short tenure he got to appoint three Federalist Society/Constitutional Originalist Supreme Court justices, that must be some kind of a record, but otherwise, pre-pandemic, I remember things humming along. Pretty much full employment, negligible inflation, and unleashing our unexpressed xenophobia. What was not to love?

      Now, despite the trillions pumped into the economy, it’s kind of sluggish and dispirited. It’s probably more perception than reality, and living in New York in 2023 does not inspire confidence in the future. But I bet people are fed up and I wouldn’t be surprised by a return of Don and Mel to the White House (shudders.)

      But really. Joe Biden’s got one foot in the grave, let’s face it, and Kamala Harris is a car crash and a creature of Willie Brown’s criminal enterprise, and that will become more widely known if she tries to ascend to a more substantial and less ceremonial position.

      I would say to the DNC, “Do better.”

      This reminds me, though, that when Howard Dean was given the consolation prize of running the DNC (a poisoned chalice if ever there was one) he was caught on a mike shouting some kind of nonsense. One of my friends in the media immediately called me and said, “We’re calling this the ‘I Have a Scream’ speech.”

      It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

      Remember, vote! Every vote counts!

      • What most people fail to understand is that the President gets way too much credit/blame for the state of the economy.  Yes there are some things a President can do which will influence it, but they are by no means the major hand on the wheel.  Trump lucked out by coming into office after eight years of Democratic rule in which 6 of those years were spent cleaning up the Republican mess from 2000-2008.  Then, between the pandemic and Republican stupidity, Biden walked into another mess just four short years later.  Yet, witness the fact that unemployment is still below 4% (and 5% is considered “full employment”), inflation is nothing like it was when Biden took office, wages are generally up across the board, and the nation isn’t involved in two full scale wars anymore.  But, FOX still holds the narrative so everything sucks and Biden is to blame.

        • This. Trump inherited a stellar economy and fucked it up miserably, even before the pandemic began, by slashing taxes. It’s the same story over and over. Republicans destroy the economy and Democrats fix it.

    • It’s not just the insurrection, but the fraud and rape cases coming to conclusions next year.

      A lot of Biden’s soft support among Democrats and true independents is due to a feeling that nobody is standing up to Trump, and there may well be a huge change as judgments (even preliminary ones) come in and Biden’s campaign cranks up.

  6. One other thing people hear all the time that that makes them want Trump back is that we have a huge border crisis.  That is partially true but they don’t want to fix it, just complain about it and blame Biden.  They also say we have “open borders” as many times as possible to get the migrants to believe it and show up at the border.  Tom Hartmann had an interesting idea that might piss off some Democrats but would definitely fuck the Rethugs…

    https://hartmannreport.com/p/should-democrats-trade-the-southern-362

    The other is that violent crime (especially in Dem run cities) is through the roof!

    • Another source, noting that Detroit has the fewest murders since the 1960s, and big drops in Philadelphia, LA, and NYC.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/29/us/crime-data-fbi-homicides.html

      It’s true that Detroit’s population is 1/3 what it was in the ’60s, but the comparison still holds versus recent years.

      And despite what the whiny NY Times Opinion section set would have you believe, NYC’s population is growing as the crime rate is falling.

    • But the thing is, clowns like Eric Adams and unindicted co-conspirator Banks can claim that crime levels are about where there were in 2012, under Bloomberg. There’s only two problems with this.

      1. So many crimes go unreported. No one gets arrested, the cops’ hands are tied, that asshole Alvin Bragg (whom I voted for, by the way) downgrades everything to a misdemeanor and people just walk because he believes in decarceration. If it were up to me I’d give them the needle and be done with it.

      2. In the Bloomberg era, when crimes were investigated and prosecuted, it was confined to very specific neighborhoods. Blocks, even. Now, the homicidal lunatics, with several felonies on their rap sheets, roam free. It used to be unthinkable in the post-1980s era to be mugged in broad daylight near Columbus Circle or pushed onto the subway tracks downtown. But now, anything goes.

      As a coda, at the height of the 1970s/80s crime wave, toothpaste and cheap mascara weren’t locked up in chain pharmacies. Shoot on sight, officers! The life you save may be your own, or that of your wife or children. Or mine.

      My God. I’m turning into my worst nightmare. How do I access Tucker Carlson’s podcast, or whatever it is? I will say we do watch Fox. The local stuff is perfectly fine, and then the opinion stuff we laugh and point at. But who knows how long that will last.

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