These long weekends throw me off! My whole week is discombobulated.
Debt deal:
Debt limit deal clears 1st hurdle as McCarthy works to tamp down dissent
https://wapo.st/45H2fyb (gift article)
Umm, wut?
Tara Reade, who accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, defects to Russia
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/30/tara-reade-defects-russia-biden
Stonks!
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes reports to prison to begin sentence
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/30/elizabeth-holmes-set-to-report-to-prison-on-tuesday.html
For any Lost fans out there:
Lost Illusions: The Untold Story of the Hit Show’s Poisonous Culture
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/05/lost-tv-show-culture/amp
I would do less for cheese!
Woman is knocked unconscious in famous cheese-rolling race – and wins
https://wapo.st/3N3WrYk (gift article)
Awww!
‘Ball of fluff’: rare white bison born in Wyoming is first in park’s 32-year history
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/30/wyoming-white-bison-calf-rare
Have a great day!
The famous Gloucester roll! Yes. If you’re ever in Gloucestershire, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be, there’s tons of things to see and do, try to get your hands on some double Gloucester, or even triple Gloucester, which is a mild semi-hard cheese which, when served on a roll, a bun, not chasing it down a hill, makes for an excellent breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The Cotswolds are there, and the Forest of Dean, and all sorts of cozy inns and pubs and Gloucester’s Cathedral. In general it’s very tony and a last redoubt of what non-Brits think England would be like, when in reality a lot of the country has been redeveloped to look like America (I’m thinking of all the motorways and the suburbs and sub-divisions.) It also borders Wales, which is fun and very beautiful.
Oh, but anyway, I was distracted. It’s been a while since we have been house-hunting, so let’s take a look at Joan Didion’s pad, which is up for sale and just got a 7-figure price chop:
https://nypost.com/2023/05/30/joan-didions-nyc-apartment-gets-a-big-1m-price-cut/
I love Joan Didion, she’s one of my favorite writers. Her laconic, neurasthenic but bitingly incisive insights never ceased to delight. Delight me, anyway.
Why, then, would I take a pass on this?
On the plus side, it’s a 1928 building on East 71st Street, very nice, but “a little over a block away from Central Park.” One block would be Madison Avenue, excellent, but more than a block would put it in the rear of the building. Which would be fine, if the building took up the whole block, because that would put it on Park Avenue, even better. But apparently it doesn’t, as we see from the dispiriting views of Joan’s former residence. Look at the view from the kitchen. It’s like something from Rear Window.
Then, it’s a co-op. Those are the most prestigious places to live on the Upper East Side, because you have to get through the grueling Board approval process, but the Boards can be stocked with loonies with nothing better to do with their time, so I’m not sure I’d want to go through that. And who knows if they even allow Faithful Hounds. That’s one of the reasons why condominiums are more expensive than co-ops.
Being from 1928 that’s ultra-desirable, but the downside is the building is almost a century old and, if not properly managed, probably falling apart. The Post not only withheld the exact address of this listing, but declined to disclose the “monthlies” on this. I bet they run into the many thousands of dollars, with special assessments as far as the eye can see.
So, much as I would enjoy cooking in Joan Didion’s former kitchen and stocking those built-in bookshelves with my many volumes of her work, I’m afraid I will have take a pass on this and persevere in the Casa Encantada.
The whole Tara Reade saga was very strange, so her ending up “defecting” to Russia seems pretty on-brand, honestly.
House Republicans like Matt Gaetz were recently talking about how she was the most amazing witness ever. She’s like a long string of people they feed off of and throw away — the January 6 prosecutions are full of them. I really hope people stop pushing the Trump world rewards its collaborators. Even Giuliani is finding out how bad the bargain is.
Her statement about it was so strange too.
I accept that someone can be a giant garbage person and still be a victim of assault. I accept that legit anybody in life can be a rapist/attempted rapist.
But I don’t know that you can say yes this lady’s account is credible when she defects to Russia in 2023.
TV is a lot like politics and sausage.
Anyone who enjoys TV and sausage should never see how either gets made.
As for Lost… Part of me is not surprised as they kept trying to tell everyone that they invented the TV story arc where the story is told over individual episodes instead of standalone ones.
They didn’t. Babylon 5 didn’t either but was the show that made it work and started the trend in Hollywood.
Never really got into Lost.
Not surprised about the racism either.
I will tell you that I know a surprising number of people who work for the Fox Corporation and NewsCorp (none for Tucker Carlson). They do things like culture reviews and criticism for the WSJ (not culture war stuff; informed reviews of art openings and classical music offerings) and soft-feature content for the Tee-Vee. They assure me that their coworkers (or former coworkers, or they are former coworkers) do not deviate from the Manhattan mean when it comes to personal beliefs. It’s not a bad place to work, apparently. I’ve actually been in the building on Sixth Avenue, the Mother Ship, more than once, and the people are lovely, or they were to me. I never met any of the on-air talent, a lot of them don’t even live in or broadcast from New York, but the rest of them seemed A-OK.
The weird thing about the Tucker Carlson show was that the two guys who ran it, I forget their exact roles, are gay men. That’s more than a little unforgivable, but I’ve been assured that perpetually perplexed Tuck doesn’t believe half the crap he spews but ratings are ratings. Just ask Jeff Zucker when he was at CNN and had the network covering Donald Trump exhaustively and had Chris Cuomo doing those embarrassing bro-fests with his older brother, the Disgraced Former Governor Andrew Cuomo. So the whole Grand Guignol theater of the absurd was allowed to roll on and was tremendously successful.
I’m sure that Fox employees are mostly similar to CNN and NY Times employees, and I think that says a lot about how conservative a lot of those employees are too.
Not fire breathers, but definitely status quo defenders who find themselves nodding along when Tom Cotton comes along urging the military being sent to “clean up” cities with no quarter orders, as he put it.
A lot of them are ticket punchers who don’t care at all about the issues they cover, the same way sports networks are surprisingly full of people who don ‘t actualy care for sports, and the Food Network as a whole doesn’t seem to like food.
This is late but I just remembered:
The first time I met a Murdoch employee was at a party, a very gay party and he was gay. I said, “How could you work there?” This must have been at least thirty years ago.
And he said, “Except at the very top it’s a meritocracy. I went to Stony Brook. I didn’t join the right Ivy League frat or go to the right feeder school. You think the Times would hire me? NBC? CBS? I’m Black. We take what we can get. Your boyfriend’s very hot by the way.”
I forget what he did. He was like a booker/associate producer on some chat show…who can remember. This is why we should all be keeping diaries. But not save them our laptop that we, in our crack-induced fog, leave at a strip-mall repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware.
For years I worked on Music Row and I absolutely fucking despise Country music.
Thought it was pretty interesting how the two showrunners responded — Cuse straight up ignored it through a PR firm while Lindelof was like “I think I did bad and I’m fucked, huh?” Which is not ideal, but I’d much rather someone learn something than just float over mistakes.
Either way, Hollywood is still more racist and sexist than median America but thankfully, less so than it was even back during this era.
Some good news for my fellow plant lovers?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12135713/Simple-home-purchase-cut-risk-cancer.html
Pretty sad that the Ukraine knows how to deal with this better than us!
https://hartmannreport.com/p/can-little-ukraine-teach-big-america-ad5