We are watching Pluribus. The premise is that everyone on earth has undergone a rapid, miraculous change in consciousness, and the show focuses on a single unpleasant, bitter alcoholic who was left behind. We are not exactly enjoying the show and yet we feel compelled to continue watching.
I really want to see what kind of world the transformed human race creates but instead we’re locked in on watching someone get drunk and binge-watch “Golden Girls.” That is literally what happens in the third episode. 🍿
Hamilton Nolan: Third parties on the U.S. national level are disastrous: “On the national level, and in particular concerning presidential elections, forming a third party tends to be counterproductive, because it has the effect of pulling votes away from the party closest to your beliefs and thereby helping the party most opposed to your own beliefs.” But a Labor Party can strike a crippling blow against Republicans in Red States that hate Democrats. How to Win Red States With a Labor Party
Michelin Honored the Cheesesteak. Not All Philadelphians Cheered. “In a Venn diagram of people deeply concerned about Michelin ratings and people deeply concerned about cheesesteaks, the overlap is not large.”
Why sex workers, kids and terrorists are the first to adopt new tech. “… these groups aren’t more (or less) temperamentally inclined to throw themselves into mastering new technologies. Rather, they have more reason to do so.” — Normie diffusion and technophilia, Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Heather Cox Richardson: The Trump government surrenders to the Russians, betrays our European allies, commits war crimes and Trump posts messages of hate and terror for Thanksgiving.
As Trump’s popularity continues to drop, the MAGA coalition shows signs of cracking, and Trump’s mental acuity slips, there is a frantic feel to the administration, as if Trump’s people are trying to grab all they can, while they can.
Joel Stein defends the em-dash in the face of attacks by AI-haters. “It’s the breath marks of Emily Dickinson, the stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf, the head-clogging maximalism of David Foster Wallace, the self-aggrandizing asides of Joel Stein.”
We Can’t Diet and Exercise Our Way Out of the Next Pandemic. ““In the event of a sudden pandemic, what should we do? This month, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, offered a remarkably blunt answer: nothing.” By David Wallace-Wells.
Our refrigerator is currently not keeping things cold. We have the refrigerator repair guy coming Monday, but there is the possibility it’s not just pining for the fjords and we now have an ex-refrigerator. If we need to replace the fridge, do you have a recommendation?
Roger Zelazny TV series I'd like to see
I’d like to see a good miniseries based on Roger Zelazny’s “Damnation Alley,” but I fear that the biker aesthetic might be seen as out-of-date. BIkers don’t have the same pop culture romance as they did in the 50s-80s. And people would think the show was a ripoff of “Escape From New York,” so the publicists would have to explain that the Zelazny came first.
There was a movie made of the story in the late 1970s, but it got terrible reviews and I have never seen it. The armored car in the movie lived on for years in a series of 1980s Amoco commercials.
I’d also like to see a miniseries based on Zelazny’s “Doorways in the Sand,” and of course a full-blown big-budget many-season series based on the “Chronicles of Amber.”
I’ve seen reports that George R.R. Martin is producing a series based on Zelazny’s “Roadmarks.” I’d love to see that, but I haven’t seen anything about it recently and I suspect it’s in limbo.
kthxbai
I thought this was a pretty cool show. I liked the idea of a sentient chimp as crew member, and I had a mad crush on the girl.
“The Little Movie That Couldn’t”: ‘Mallrats’ Turns 30
A look back at “Mallrats” on its 30th anniversary, including a big interview with Kevin Smith. By Katie Baker at The Ringer
“Mallrats” was Smith’s second movie, coming off “Clerks,” a low-budget indy which saw him hailed as a cinematic genius. “Mallrats” was a spectacular flop, and critics were now saying Smith was an idiot.
But “Mallrats” has lived on as a cult classic and fan favorite, and making the movie shaped both Smith’s career and his life. He met his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach-Smith, through a circuitous route as a result of making “Mallrats,” so (as he points out) their daughter owes her life to “Mallrats.”
Smith tells a story about how he had to flee his house during the recent Los Angeles wildfires:
Smith considers himself “a pack rat and a fuckin’ hoarder,” but on that day, he was holding only two things when he left the house with his wife and their dogs. The first was a small urn containing a portion of his father’s ashes.
“The other,” Smith says, “was my Silent Bob costume. Because I was like, Well, if everything burns down, I’m gonna have to work and shit.”
I wouldn’t say “Mallrats” is one of my favorite movies, but I have seen it two or three times and enjoyed it and — you know what? There aren’t many movies I’ve seen more than once so yeah I guess “Mallrats” is one of my favorite movies. I know the movie is loved by middle-schoolers, but if you’re reading this you’ve seen my posts and you know that a big piece of my sense of humor is stuck at age 13.
Jamelle Bouie: The White House Gold Rush Is On. “If Trump’s first term was marked by a level of graft and self-dealing that would have embarrassed a Tammany stalwart, then his second term seems to be an explicit effort to outpace his previous record and set a new high-water mark for political corruption in the United States…. By any and every measure, in other words, Trump is the most corrupt person to ever sit in the Oval Office.”
America is becoming Dallas. Hamilton Nolan visits a megachurch. “Could we not have the love without the accompanying hate? The community, without the accompanying need to make our community an army ready to destroy all others?
We’re going to war with Venezuela for the same reasons we went to war with Iraq. Oil, the president is legit a bad man, and handwaving about terrorism. We risk the same outcome.
A main argument of Trump’s 2015 Presidential campaign, which helped get him elected, that the Iraq war was a stupid, bipartisan blunder. And he was right! It left us with a mess that we didn’t clean up for nearly 20 years. We’re still paying hundreds of billions of dollars per year for that fiasco. And yet Trump, the stupidest and most incompetent man who ever occupied the White House, says, “That was great! Let’s do it again!”
I continued reading “Lord of the Rings” last night. Frodo and his hobbit scooby-gang have left Bree. We’re getting a lot more description of landscape and also talk of the Black Riders. That name did not age well. Strider recited an interminably long poem about an elf woman and human man who fell in love. She was immortal and she died. I think. I didn’t follow what I was reading too well; I was falling asleep by then. I started thinking that Carl Hiaasen had a new book out a few months ago and I would really like to read that. Then I decided to call it a night on LoTR and read something else, but I was too tired for that so we just watched a little TV and went to bed.