A conclave and Nancy Grace will be in her glory

 Diddy trial to start any day now with jury selection still underway.  Don't know the questions the potential jurors get.  "Did you ever see the music video 'Hypnotize' with Biggie and Puffy?"  Got to thinking if I had even a fraction of Diddy's money uppermost for me would be major home improvement e.g. electric staircase going up into the attic with wifi and cupholders.  Telescope up there too.  Kitchen and bath remodel.  The backyard - Inground swimming pool, small Chinese garden/pond with exotic fish, some Greek statuary here and there.  It would never dawn on me to run a sex trafficking ring.  He ain't livin' right.

The Conclave - I don't follow the stuff.  Mainly older Italian guys with a few Africans thrown in the mix.  Keep getting videos in my YouTube feed about the last pope of the End Times but I don't get my theology from Mel Gibson.  You have your Catholics who are more into bingo and bake sales then you have your more eschatologically-minded Catholics who speculate about Antichrist stuff.  YouTube sends me things all the time I never searched for.  A gorilla fighting an alligator.  Clickbait.

So we got a couple of topics going.  A diversion from the usual Trump stuff.

Katy Perry in Space

 Could be a TV show.  The news is stranger by the day.  They just brought the dire wolf back from extinction.  What else can or might they resurrect?  Maybe they can bring back Cro-Magnon Man.  Upper management.   Maybe he can run for office.  I know we have that already.  My friend said once in the car they want to bring the Woolly Mammoth back.  I thought too much YouTube thought he was talking smack.  Maybe they can clone Homan.  Five Homans can get the job done five times faster.  Now when you google something you get an AI Overview.  How to make quiche.  AI the Chef.  AI the Carpenter.   AI the Plumber.  Does Trump plan on building some kind of vast prison system on Greenland?

I can't believe I'm living.

I pretty much don't watch SNL It's past my bedtime

 Everybody's still talking about Tom Hanks and his stupid spoof of a racist MAGA supporter on SNL's 50th Reunion Special.  This was stupid on so many levels.  It's a time-honored comedic tradition to go after the president but not the people who voted him into office.  Plenty of Bill Clinton jokes back in the day but no jokes about Bill Clinton supporters per se.  Tom Hanks' career is basically over at this point.  Other than that I just don't watch the show.  Hash it up if you want but SNL is well past its prime.

Taylor Swift and Kelce

 I don't give a rat's ass.

I'll always watch a good Nosferatu

 Don't go to the movies much anymore.  Most of the great movies have already been made.  Ever wonder how many movies are actually in existence?  Has to be astronomical.  Out of the sheer number of movies that have been made how many are actually worth watching?  For me a golden age was the 70s throw in the late 60s.  Do you have a favorite movie critic?  Rotten Tomatoes - BOTH Citizen Kane and Casablanca got 99% fresh scores.  So who was the 1% who didn't like them and why?  I wanna hear their thoughts.  Roger Ebert tended to overreact to movies he didn't like.  You can criticize the excessive violence in I Spit On Your Grave but I found it interesting as a cult classic.  Ebert thought it was the worst movie ever made.  More worthy candidates for that one.  How hard is it to be a movie critic anyway?  All you have to do is meet a deadline.  You ain't spitting chickens for a living.  Bruce Lee movies.  He actually made fighting off an army of fifty men believable that's how well the fight scenes were choreographed.  The only one to come close imo is Jet Li.

Thoughts on the movies?

A Room With A Liberal View

 Lots of people wondering how "The View" has been on the air for 30 years.  Basically a bunch of liberal chicks sitting around a table with one token conservative.   Sometimes they start yelling.  I thought "The View" was supposed to be a light and frothy show.  Instead you get Whoopi Goldberg's anti-Trump meltdowns.  The other one Sunny Hostin who I never heard of before says uneducated women voted for Trump meaning they never went to college.  So wait a minute your WHOLE education up to but not including college doesn't count?  Then she says racism and misogyny also were big factors that got Trump in.  The price of pet food had nothing to do with it?

Word on the street is "The View" might be on the chopping block along with Morning Joe.  Elon Musk might buy everything that's not nailed down.  Maybe buy Yonkers who knows?

50 Shades Of Diddy

 Not a whole lot to report on the culture front.  Actor Robert De Niro thinks Trump won't relinquish power if elected to a second term.  He needs to reacquaint himself with our system of government first.  84-year old actor Al Pacino now has a 1-year old son.  Don't play too rough and give Dad a hernia.  The T. Swift/Travis Kelce romance.  Pop star Sabrina Carpenter getting competition from upstart Chappell Roan.  I was driving to work this morning, stopped off and sent in my mail-in ballot for Trump/Vance then on the radio they were talking about the sad and tragic death of 31-year old One Direction member Liam Payne who jumped or fell from his room in a Buenos Aires hotel.  TMZ facing backlash over pics they posted of his. The Al Smith Dinner tonight.  Trump came but Kamala Harris didn't.  She sent in a pre-recorded video instead.  Who does this?  NY Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan disappointed.

Got anything? 

Cap'n Crunch causes cancer?

 RFK Jr. is making all kinds of claims about the food we eat.  This seems to have caught fire in conservative media which is usually wary of the potential for a nanny state.  Apparently the federal government is still after him for cutting the head off a dead whale back in the day.  Isn't there some kind of statute of limitations for whale head cutting?  Actress Cheryl Hines is reportedly looking to divorce him over an alleged affair he had.  Maybe it has more to do with the lack of junk food in the house.  Personally I will risk cancer for a chocolate Twinkie.  Meanwhile Melania Trump wrote some book and disagrees with her husband over abortion.  Couldn't this wait until after the election?  Hasn't she ever heard of put it in the 'fridge it'll keep?  Melania your husband is trying to run a campaign.  At least I think he's trying to run a campaign.  Raspberry Zingers are to die for.  Is that to be taken literally?

This is what you came for

 I honestly think Taylor Swift only goes out with well-known men for the sheer publicity of it all.  Nothing ever comes of it.  Conspiracy theorists say she hooked up with Travis Kelce because he's pimping for Pfizer.  I don't take it to that level it's simply par for the course for her.  She's 34 now and her biological clock is ticking.  I can't check out groceries at the store without seeing her on most magazine covers.  Dua Lipa or any other artist doesn't get this press.  She's a whole sub-economy now.  What are your Swifty thoughts?

& the award for Best New Political Artist goes to AOC

I get the feeling Trump wins reelection in 2020 because the Democratic field is so diluted from which a real powerhouse is unlikely to emerge.  What are there twenty candidates now?  Cardi B may as well run.  Impeachment seems not much worth it to quoth Nancy Pelosi.  My mind is tired.  I've moved onto other things.  It might be a good thing if Maroon 5 stopped churning out new songs.

The Dukes of Hazzard problem

To start off I don't think this old show was particularly great but it anchored my Friday night tv schedule when I was growing up.  I remember it well, Dad and Mom would come home from food shopping and Dad would give us a box of Devil Dogs but Mom would say go eat an orange.  So TV Land is yanking the show because of the whole Confederate flag controversy which wouldn't be that much of a controversy had that young Aryan racist not shot up that black prayer meeting.  Wondering does Katy Perry now have to tweak her hit song "California Gurls" because it includes a line about Daisy Duke bikinis?

Grammys

Now I know why I never really watch any of those major award show extravaganzas on Sunday nights at least not in their entirety. I skim and surf them at best but when it comes to the music awards shows like the Grammys it always inevitably devolves somehow into black/urban music aka rap/hip-hop which isn't really my thing and from what I saw somehow combining that with Imagine Dragons didn't work imo. Beyonce & Jay-Z, you know if we stopped helping celebrities trend on Yahoo everyday they might not be the massive ego-trippers they've turned into. Help them out will ya, google a major disease instead. Lots of parents and others are up in arms over Jay-Z and his wife's raunchy routine last night, what is it somehow classier when Beyonce twerks instead of Miley? and oh yeah there was some type of gay mass weddings going on although I must've missed that part. I've never liked the mixing of politics and any type of major awards show from LA but they all do it and that's usually when I change the channel to a NutriBullet infomercial or a Sanford and Son rerun. I honestly don't even know who won I was so turned off.

I need another TMI closet

Robin Thicke told Howard Stern he and his wife Paula Patton have done nearly everything. I know all about Sandra Fluke's monthly birth control expenses and how Michael Douglas got his cancer. Katie Couric once had her colonoscopy filmed and John Mayer has had coitus with Jennifer Aniston. There's older stuff like Bob Dole's erections, Bill Clinton's crooked member. Some quite dated Johnny Carson stuff and Frank Gifford has a thing for smelly women. I don't know where to keep all this stuff. Maybe I'll go to Home Depot and get one of them sheds.

I don't care what you do (but I also don't wanna know)

Call it libertarian respect, a kind of social compact/truce that has worked down through the years.  A few famous people these days seem to be applying the Angelina Jolie Template customized of course to their respective diseases/ailments (mainly cancer though) and we hear all about the nexus of their disease and their lifestyle choices.  Let's say in an interview a well-known person, some household name says "every time I hang upside down and someone sticks a thumb up my ass I get cancer,"  don't wanna know, not a public service imo.  Don't wanna hear PSAs about every sex act known to man.  IF Celebrity Q a woman likes to guzzle it down like a milkshake but then it gives her problems down the road, cancer of the stomach kind of deal DON'T WANNA KNOW.  Bob Dole was brave on the battlefield but I don't think he was brave about ED, he was just TMIing.  So I walk in the supermarket the other day and the newsstand is right there and I'm just standing there for about 15 or 20 seconds looking at the cover of one of the papers and the produce guy and I are talking about IT.  People call it heroic I call it TMI.  The Angelina Jolie Thing stands on its own don't try to use it, that's her you just like to share.  The orals the anals don't need it on the cover of TIME or Newsweek when I'm checking out.  Let's nip this one in the bud before it pops up all over the place.  Look I don't care but I also don't wanna know ok?

Another medical thread - Angelina Jolie

There's been an outpouring of public and celebrity support for her and the Twitterverse really cares.  Hollywood is really patting itself on the back but let's get one thing straight, Angelina Jolie is not coming across as your typical Hollywood airhead and not too many celebrities can even write a decent Op-Ed piece in the Ole Gray Lady.  Writing about her recent decision to get a preventative double mastectomy she's definitely adding substance to the discussion and I find her much more useful than K-Dash or even Madonna.  She's also hopefully helping us move past our national Hefnerized adolescence, a culture obsessed with boob jobs and longtime love interest Brad Pitt is coming across as noble, as being a good character.  I don't have a good knowledge of this area, BRCA 1&2 and the 87% chance of breast cancer and 50% chance for ovarian and all that so I'm rendering a nondecision here.  IMO breast cancer gets far more press and attention than say prostate cancer, that's another issue but having said that I find her quite articulate in her cause.  This ain't a case of Sean Penn writing down his deepest thoughts with crayons or Rodman palling around with the North Korean Psycho and so since we've been covering alot of medical ground here lately I've been thinking of starting the Z-man Foundation for the Research and Cure of Tinnitus.  I also never got the whole current conservative fixation with reading NY Times editorials, as an old Times ad used to say read what you like.

Facebook Follies

Let's face it Mark Zuckerberg was a genius and social-networking trailblazer but lately there was the FB IPO which sucked and now in business news AT&T has decided to sell the brand new Facebook Smartphone for just 99cents since that turned out to be a flop on all fronts including even the software and apps.  Facebook has also had troubles and controversy of late with some pedophiliac-themed pages which have popped up every now and then and well anyway now the next big kid on the block is Pinterest and while I don't think Facebook is gonna go the way of MySpace (MyWho?) anytime soon I really think he needs to give the big Ralph Kramden brainstorms a rest for now.  In other news Ariel Castro he of the infamous and bizarre Ohio kidnapping case now says he should have just stopped at two women as sex slaves.  Yeah you got greedy bro!  Also some big ABC News producer, the he became a she and walked on the wild side and the marriage is kaput with two kids in the mix.  Used to be you could practically go days on end in the news cycle and it was boring now it's offensive, strange for some reason but in an interesting way.  I used to like Pink but her songs are now like crabgrass on the radio, new songs every week and I've kinda had my fill and who is this Phillip Phillips guy?  They made a big deal over what Justin Bieber wrote in that Anne Frank guestbook over in the Netherlands but I categorize it probably as a brainfart, basically an expression of a thought you can't even explain or express properly and I thought what people write in the logs at museums and galleries is kinda private anyway.  Got a buck? I wanna go get me a new smartphone, maybe ten.

Here's hoping that 2013 sucks less than 2012

The Fiscal Cliff - what I want to know is why did everyone wait until the last minute to resolve the Crisis?  The only explanation I can get out of it is like the teen who deliberately masturbates right before his parents come home from food shopping.  The metal gate's clanging, oh here we go...must be the excitement of it all, some just like to look over the precipice.
Hillary has a blood clot near the brain - and no she didn't fake it to get out of Benghazi.
Can we go a whole year without a mass shooting?  I don't know, is that asking too much? maybe it is.  We just got these new uniforms at work, nice new black aprons with a big red bullseye-type dot with the company logo smack dab in the middle and the produce guy and I both agreed, with all the violence in society our new dress code is making us somewhat uncomfortable.
Which celebrities will be arrested in 2013? the same ones or some new surprises?  Why is Jessica Simpson famous?  Judge Judy annoys me.
50 Shades of Grey the Movie - at least Hunger Games had something to say, a point.  So the movie will come out and eventually the DVD version with 10 minutes or so of extra uncensored director's cut footage and you go out to the nearest FYE store and buy it 'cause you think someone's gonna be trussed up like a turkey with an apple in the mouth or someone goes to the bathroom in a litter box.  I mean you don't have to be psychic.
How many days out of the new year am I not going to get any? (get the marker out).  While we're on the subject Jefferson Valley Mall in Yorktown Hgts. has these new massage chairs with a whole anal routine.  Bad day at the office, hit the mall.  I'm just sayin'
Subway pushers - the new normal.  A-Train's a-comin'
A whole entire new year of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh complaining about Barack Obama, God help us!

Conservative post-election analysis

Now we get into the sheer entertainment spectacle of conservative cannibalism and zombie apocalypse, now they're working on Romney's leg.  The problem was outsourcing as if Made in Indonesia just happened yesterday, no but maybe Romney should have been from the Midwest instead of the Northeast.  Romney didn't reach across the cultural aisle to shake hands with Hispanics the fastest growing demographic in the country but if memory serves they were on prominent display at the RNC along with many prominent Republican women.  Other conservatives want Republicans to start killing fetuses and joyfully pass out Rear Entry silicon-based lubes to gay couples and maybe smoke a couple of doobies too while they're at it you unhip out-of-touch crowd.  Here's a thought though, what if Romney did nothing wrong? what if the country is simply more liberal or wishy-washy or whatever?  What if some people are simply stuck in some form of economic masochism, you know some young guy out of a job for quite some time now but who has simply gotten used to the Routine of sleeping in every day and then circle-jerking to the Price Is Right models and he can go out and buy at least the cheaper gas station porn with his government handout when the old stuff isn't fresh anymore?  HOW do you appeal to a populace in constant moral/social flux anyway who know more about the Kardashians than the national debt and deficit or Benghazi?  I think Mitt Romney was a strong candidate, strong enough in a bad economy to win and certainly stronger than McCain was so in 2016 what'll happen is maybe they'll throw up a Marco Rubio or a Chris Christie or put them in tandem somehow and when they lose too the conservative post-election analysis/post-mortem will begin all over again with ever fresh and creative deconstruction.  Obama got a strong storm bounce of that there is no doubt and I think Chris Matthews (free speech again) hit upon the truth here.  You know it's funny about Obama he seems to court every possible voting bloc except the white male vote and I totally agree with Bob Woodward who said on the last episode of Meet the Press that Obama has to start having a much broader message beyond his core constituencies.  You want Romney to go out and escort a woman to the nearest abortion clinic or offer his and Ann's bed for a gay romp while they go out shopping at Target? well if you think it'll help but I have to laugh over here in Westchester County practically every Democrat candidate for every conceivable office including dogcatcher touted I AM PRO-CHOICE and my brother goes most people don't care about that at least not right now, where are the JOBS?  One last thought, if the conservative pundits know what's best why don't they run?

The Hunger Games

I bought the DVD at a FYE store yesterday and wasn't sure I'd even like the movie due to its overly dark and disturbing material, kind of reminds me of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and then there was the matter of protagonist Katniss Everdeen, how can you make a heroine out of someone who participates in the madness and kills other people?  Once I started watching The Hunger Games though my views slowly changed.  It became obvious that those teens Katniss killed were at the root evil to begin with and she had to defend herself.  The Hunger Games based on the first book in a trilogy by American YA writer Suzanne Collins is a kind of prophetic hybrid of Lord of the Flies and 1984 with a healthy dose of Serling.  I've often thought of why don't we have literary classics anymore but with the themes here that hearken back to elements in those earlier works I can see the potential for a classic itself here, a future item on a high-schooler's reading list.  So what is the interpretation?  First off I agree with Beth who blogged about this once and I hope she takes time out to join the discussion here and so I do see it as a kind of cautionary tale against Big Government and in the comments section I'll delve more into that.  Yes of course it's a kind of satire of the reality TV craze and all.  When things in the 74th annual Hunger Games get a little boring for the viewers at home the staff at the central control panels first add a blazing forest fire to get Katniss closer to her adversaries and later on noontime eerily turns into nightfall and three large black and frightening attack dogs that look like a cross between a pitbull and a panther are added to the mix, so much for playing fair.  The president of Panem played by Donald Sutherland says to one of the younger bosses, not sure what his role is exactly and they all look weird but he says to him early on to watch this Katniss character as she represents hope and hope is stronger than fear and it may be a spark now but to contain it.  The Hunger Games as well can be Glenn Beck's worst nightmares come to fruition.  There is also the theme of the star-crossed lovers Katniss and Peeta the other teen chosen from her District 12 and the two are willing to die at the end by eating the poisonous nightberries until a Voice comes from the sky telling them to stop the Games are over and they're the victors.  Then there's the central enigma of the movie, WHY do the 24 teens chosen HAVE TO kill each other?  Did the Powers-That-Be mandate this?  I didn't catch that.  Of course they could have all just teemed together to survive so there's some powerful philosophical and theological observations going on here about human nature itself, about the nature of Good and Evil and you could say maybe it was all just one big vast social experiment besides being a form of perverse entertainment.  I have to say this is really a great and thought-provoking movie well-suited for the action/adventure format and there's so many political angles to this thing so let's get started...... 

50 Shades of Crap

It's kind of a slow blogging cycle at least for me, nothing I could latch onto of late.  I mean yeah Sandra Fluke introduced Obama at some political function, he still seems to be milking that one and I was reading in my Catholic New York that he and Romney are gonna speak at the annual Al Smith Dinner in NY and...but hey wait a minute didn't his HHS Dept. and Sebelius just cause endless grief for the RC Church and other religious institutions? yeah a few lame jokes will smooth that over.  Maybe he'll even tell a birth-control joke or two, who knows?  Then I see the guy I'm actually gonna vote for, Romney, is actually a murderer according to some Super-PAC and this is just the longest hottest most horrible miserable summer for me in a while.  Getting attacked by mosquitoes practically on a daily basis even in my sleep and then there's the Fishbowl of Work to deal with.  Look folks are bored at work, I get it and maybe you have a temporary health issue or whatever and it makes for fodder and no it's not your paranoid vibe at work again, they really are talking about you and everybody else for that matter.  If I were in charge I'd make sure everybody has enough work to do.  New manager has a habit of sometimes leaving old food in the showcase like pulled pork so I talked about it with a co-worker and his attitude was give the guy a chance (the fruit of liberalism?), didn't seem to get my point like I was being a meanie.  Now I'm all for giving people chances, God knows I wouldn't be perfect in that role either and I'm not a prick but at what point is giving somebody a chance a lowering of standards, defining deviancy down?  I see Costco won't carry Joan Rivers' new book so she chained herself to a shopping cart and bellowed into a bullhorn.  Kristen Stewart/Rob Pattinson...you see the material I got to work with? but I'll be honest I kinda follow this stuff and I'm definitely on his side.  There was a new massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, they're not Muslims but they look like them and their faith system is very googleable.  I checked my e-mail just now and see I got like a hundred fresh comments, dunno what everyone is talkin' about I gotta go see.  Time for a fresh post, carry it on over here if you like.  I'll put the coffee on and get the crullers rockin'.  Had a couple of Jamaican beef patties last night, they're good and all but left a kind of slight aftereffect.  It's definitely time to plan the next vacation:)