Category: television

News Letter 020925

Just to note

I found this in the paper today. A coach’s description of a new player in perfect sportsese. “He has the ability to make plays,” __ said. “He’s got good hands and can shoot the puck.”
Nice. 

February 28, 2025

Good people gotta get together. One great thing we can do that I’ve heard about is getting off social media and any media and spending no money anywhere on February 28, 2025. Especially online or large retailers. Money is one of the psychopaths’ two languages; this would send a very strong message that we are the ones with the real… Power is the other language they understand. Neanderthals.  
Let’s take it away for just one day.
To start.

From Harper’s Index

Estimated amount of energy, in kilowatt-hours, that was used to discover a new prime number last year: 3,100,000

Estimated number of U.S. households this amount of energy could power for a year: 287,000.

The world is full of these things that just slip by.

I love this

From: “The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art” by Dean Kissick in Harper’s December 2024. I love Harper’s. Can you tell?

SCIENCE!!

“In his 2022 book The Mind of a Bee, behavioral ecologist Lars Chittka chronicles his decades of work with honey bees, showing that bees can use sign language, recognize individual human faces, and remember and convey locations of far-flung flowers. They have good moods and bad, and they can be traumatized by near-death experiences such as being grabbed be an animatronic spider hidden in a flower. (Who wouldn’t be?)”

From “Minds Everywhere” by Rowan Jacobsen, in Scientific American February 2024; Illustrations by Natalya Balnova 

(Do I need to cite an artist when I’m just pulling a quote?)


Kendrick Lamar and the Super Bowl Halftime Show

The Super Bowl Halftime Show is an extravaganza of outrageousness. But it can be really cool. I just watched Kendrick Lamar – I have one of his albums – “To Pimp a Butterfly” – and I dig it and see his genius throughout his career and know how talented he is. But the extravaganza of outrageousness calls for a can-be-somewhat outrageous artist, an artist that can match that huge stage, in the middle of a boring (or exciting) football game, like Prince. Prince owned that huge stage.  And I think that is partly because the tempo of his music changed.  He could start slow and build up for the audience and then blow the doors off the place. Which he did. Rap songs mostly stay with one tempo which makes it harder for the artist to do what a Prince or Bruno Mars or Madonna can do. That is my theory of Kendrick Lamar and the Super Bowl Halftime Show

Luke Digs Deep to Discover How Tempo Affects Mostly Wealthy Listeners Clutching 24 Ounce 75 Dollar Beers in a Dark Stadium During the Halftime Break of an Athletic Contest

One Nation, Two Movies

A friend of mine had wanted to watch Idiocracy with me for years. It’s a Mike Judge film. Here’s how IMDB describes it:

Corporal Joe Bauers, a decidedly average American, is selected for a top-secret hibernation program but is forgotten and left to awaken to a future so incredibly moronic that he’s easily the most intelligent person alive.

I knew what the film was about a long time ago – the title gives it away I guess and I didn’t want to watch it all those years because I just knew that I would be struck by intense feelings of, we’re already halfway there! and it’s only funny because it’s becoming true! and blah, blah, blah. So after the election I figured now was the time, so I called said friend and we sat down and watched it.

Holy crap, Judge is a genius. Yes, it’s a little ham-handed, but that’s the funny and so are all the citizens living in our future; but the movie is also razor sharp in its skewering of the true and actual dumbing down of the nation, the thrill of violence on the stupid, the overconsumption of media and addiction to entertainment. Sound familiar? Idiocracy came out in 2006 – long before we slipped rather quickly into our own reenactment of it.

The other movie I happened to watch was Civil War, a 2024 movie by Alex Garland. IMDB again:

A journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House.

I didn’t plan to see this one either and for similar reasons as Idiocracy (we’re already halfway there) but had the opportunity and watched. Depressing. They do a very good job of not making it into a MAGA Republican versus American Progressives war movie and in fact have Texas and California in cahoots on one side of the civil war. But it’s hard to completely avoid the obvious when threats have come from mouths of people who will have a say in the new administration, so of course it’s depressing and frightening. That it’s so new and current makes it even harder to watch. It looks feasible right down to the folks in some towns they travel through who simply ignore the entire Civil War due to callousness or media misinformation – or both – ugh.

Too close to home, that one.

Funny how that works

The author, Edith Wharton, who has written ghost stories herself, once said: “No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.”

Right? I’ve seen enough ghost chaser shows to know that there probably ain’t no ghosts. No one’s been able to properly photograph or record any sort of ghost-like phenomena, even in the ghostiest places. One doesn’t read about people being murdered by ghosts, just other people. So all actual evidence must lead one to believe that there are no ghosts.

Then how come I get scared by weird unexplainable sounds in my house? Why do I get all goosebumpy when someone tells me their own ghost story? Why did a huge flash of beautiful golden light fill the room the night my friend buried her mother? Not that we were afraid of the golden light, mind you, but we definitely got the goosebumps.

I suppose that, like being scared watching a horror movie, where we suspend our disbelief, we just might suspend some disbelief with ghosts, too? At some level, fear must feel good, although we’d need to define good in that particular statement.

The “O” is for Oligarchy

They are the voice of the few, the proud, the billionaires.

The whole thing is fuckin’ brilliant. Rupert Murdoch emigrates to America from Australia, has a look around and realizes that there are a bunch of disaffected people who feel left out, have watched the great jobs they or their parents once had evaporate all around them, who are angry and looking for something to direct that anger, who are what he even refers to as “low information voters,” and who are ripe for the picking, and so Rupert picks away. Murdoch is at one level a genius and another P.T. Barnum.

Murdoch knew these things to be true:

  • If people want to be angry, it’s very easy to make them angrier.
  • Angry people are very easy to weaponize.
  • Enemies are necessary.
  • If you distract people, you can pick their pockets and those of their children and their children’s children.
  • Repetition, repetition, repetition is what many people will come to believe, truth or no truth.
  • Accuse the opposition of what you’re doing. It creates a dissonance that affects both sides. Think: “Fake News”.

Oh, and wrap it in a flag, keep underfunding education, and voila! The Oligarchs get richer and richer at the expense of regular American individuals and families, even those who’ve been weaponized (otherwise regular Americans) in their war against regular Americans. That’s the genius part.

FOX began with that “no bullshit,” “we tell it like it is” attitude right out of the gate. People liked that. And FOX dumbed everything down, simplified, spoke only in terms of black and white, and repeated beliefs, ideas, slogans, taglines, nicknames over and over.  And FOX had the incredible audacity to refer to itself as “fair and balanced.” Who knew a mostly biased news source could refer to itself as fair and balanced and people would buy into that? The genius, and the one-born-every-minute guy.

So instead of people watching the news to learn why we have new healthcare programs, how they work, who they help, how they are paid for and all the rest, they watch news that tells them that the new healthcare programs are made up by crazy liberals who are out to hurt them and give them worse care for more money, take away their choices, freedoms, guns, whatever. “Death Panels” was all they had to say, and like a flash of lightening, the viewership all turned and never turned back. Why not? That is so much easier to understand than the intricacies of the Affordable Care Act, and so the “low information voter” keeps it simple and remains low on information, but even better for FOX and the Oligarchs, now has “fake” information to replace it and a bucketload of anger and hate around the issue to hurl at their supposed enemies.

Vladimir Putin’s main aim in his work online here in the U.S. is to drive wedges between Americans, to create more anger, strife and misunderstanding, because a divided country is a weak country, and Russia wants nothing more than a weak America.

At FOX, everyone (other than themselves and their viewers) is the enemy – liberals, immigrants, black people, Chinese people, the media, scientists, teachers, George Soros, Hillary Clinton, queers, kneeling football players, gun law advocates and on and on. This keeps the FOX news watchers back on their heels. There is always another outrage to get pissed off about – an outrage that strikes to their very livelihood. These people are trying to take this away from you! FOX knows well enough to frame everything as an us versus them issue. People love having enemies.

Who’s the enemy du jour? Think of the recent Chloroquine issue as it relates to COVID 19.  FOX talks about this as if liberals and scientists want to keep it from FOX News viewers, whereas the real people who don’t want everyone taking this are, yes, scientists (they understand the dangers – this thing has not been tested) and the people who actually do need the drug for other reasons. They don’t need a run on a drug they truly depend on by a bunch of people fooled by FOX.

What the FOX viewer is expected to think is that, for some unfathomably vile reason, liberals and scientists want people to die unnecessarily – those people being the FOX viewers who want the Chloroquine. Liberals want to keep it from them so they die.

If this wasn’t something that happens on FOX every day, it would cause real outrage. Imagine, in a more rational world, one group of people in a nation (with a giant media corporation behind them) claiming another group would rather they die than allow them access to a drug that would save their lives, with fake and stupidly wrong information as proof. We would all be calling for, and receiving, a huge apology from the network. Editors would be fired.

Yeah, not here in the 21st Century with FOX News. They made that shit up, and they know it doesn’t matter if they did.

FOX is powerful stuff. Their viewers are in deep with their emotions; they are angry, appalled and righteous because FOX tells them over and over that they are right. That righteous anger is a huge buzz. The brain goes nuts, fight or flight is on high alert, the sense of entitlement ramps up and a good zinger against any of the many enemies releases a flood of serotonin that makes the FOX viewer feel even more righteous and satisfied and downright stoned. And so they come back for more and more and more. Like my twelfth trip to the liquor cabinet back in the day.

This is what toying with people’s emotions really means, plain manipulation. FOX tells the viewers what to think, but more importantly, they tell them what to feel.

I don’t have any answers. My discussions with FOX News watchers quickly devolve into FOX talking points, ergo, often bald-faced lies. When I point that out and show them absolute proof that they are wrong, they devolve further to: “Fake News,” “I don’t believe it,” “That’s not what I heard,” etc. Faced with being actually factually wrong, they punch their heads into the ground and basically just yell, “La La La La La!”

The left has some of this also with MSNBC, but if this is an arms race, MSNBC is firing a BB gun at FOX’s aircraft carrier.

There was a Simpson’s episode years back in which for some reason the televisions stopped working in the town and so there’s a scene where all the pale and weakly kids come out on their front stoops, shielding their eyes and are looking around as if they just landed on a different planet. Of course, they are soon having a blast together out in the street.

This could happen here if FOX news would just be kind enough to go off the air for a couple of weeks. Probably not. The Australians need to keep sucking money out of the United States and the FOX viewers, as does the Republican Party (who I’ve not mentioned so much but is the true beneficiary of FOX News) and also the Oligarchs (a lot of overlap there).

I’ve argued that the Australian multi-billionaire and owner of FOX News, Rupert Murdoch, is the most powerful man in American politics and I honestly still believe that is true. What FOX News has done through misinformation, manipulation, repetition, fake news, fake patriotism and all the rest has been a thousand times more detrimental to this Democracy than anything little Vladimir Putin can do from over there.

But they use the same game plan and want the same outcomes so does it really even matter? The billionaires, the oligarchs, the powerful republicans will ultimately make a shitload of money off the coronavirus and move more of the nation’s wealth to the very few.

More for them. Less for you. Think outside the FOX.

US_Wealth_Inequality_-_v2

CBO Chart, U.S. Holdings of Family Wealth 1989 to 2013. The top 10% of families held 76% of the wealth in 2013, while the bottom 50% of families held 1%. Inequality worsened from 1989 to 2013. Fox News started in 1996 and while we can’t claim a straight causation, the incredible redistribution of America’s wealth from the rest of us to the top 10% grows right along with FOX News viewership.

 

 

 

 

Jonny Pie’s Theory on Why there are so Many Hot Chicks in Edina

(And how it applies to the Winter Olympic Games)

My younger brother Daniel and I were talking on the phone last night and commenting on the Winter Olympic Games. He said, “The U.S. is kind of sucking this year.” And I said, “Yeah, but doesn’t it blow your mind how many of the athletes are such freaking Hotties?” And he said, “Yeah, and they’re all fucking each other all the time! As soon as they finish their events they go back to the Olympic Village and fuck each other over and over!” He’s right, by the way. I read about that years ago. If you don’t believe it, look it up.

Anyway, when he said that – PING! It popped right back into my head: Jonny Pie’s Theory on Why there are so Many Hot Chicks in Edina. I remember the exact day of its origin. Many years ago my two brothers, my sister and I were riding in the back of our parents van and passing through Edina. Edina is a very wealthy suburb of Minneapolis, and at the time, around 1976, it was the quintessential wealthy suburb of Minneapolis. So I looked out the window of the van at a group of girls standing in front of the Edina Theater and said, “Man! Why are there so many hot chicks in Edina?”

My other brother, Jonny Pie, looked up from whatever technical manual he was reading (for fun) and said:

“It’s really quite simple. The fathers in Edina are wealthy men and their wealth gives them certain advantages in picking a mate. One of those is in the looks of the women. In other words, they can choose more beautiful wives – whether they are handsome themselves, or a troll. So it follows that, over time, the prevalence of beautiful children will increase. And it follows then that if the families stay in Edina for generations, the genetic probability for good-looking children continues to increase. Therefore, ergo, you are absolutely right: there are ‘so many hot chicks in Edina’. Simple as that.”

Bam! He knocked that fucker right out of the park! His simple logic stunned my young mind. It was suddenly obvious. Rich men = hot wives = more hot chick babies! Simple as that.

“It’s not the same in Minneapolis where we live,” he added, and we all glanced up to see if Mom and Dad had heard that.

So now I see that Jonny Pie’s Theory can easily be applied to the prevalence of Hotties at the Olympic Games; and it’s not because they are all having sex in the Olympic Village like Daniel was quick to point out, as you might be thinking. That story was actually about all of the condoms that are provided by the US Olympic Committee for all that sex which would, hopefully, avoid any unwanted, albeit off-the-charts cute, babies.

It’s because the Olympic athletes in the winter games are all basically Edina kids. Every last one of them. Yeah, yeah, NBC likes to drag out the one story of the middle class kid from Indiana who mowed lawns to afford to become a snowboard sensation, but seriously, how many lower or middle class families can afford to send their kids to luge camp, or snowboarding school, find them a Romanian skating coach, or buy them a four-man bobsled? None. That’s how many. Most of those families couldn’t afford a day pass at one of the Utah ski areas these actual, and decidedly hirsute, snowboard sensations no doubt basically live in.

You don’t learn how to do a Triple Raspberry Flip Flop 1280 with a Double Sow Cow Inverted Twist, or whatever the hell they make up to call that shit, in a few runs. It takes hours, days, months and years, and ain’t no poor kid gonna get that opportunity. No, sir.

So, really, we have Jonny Pie’s Theory on Why there are so Many Hot Chicks in Edina, Postulate 1 (As it Applies to the Athletes at the Winter Olympic Games), and it really simply states: There are so many Hotties at the Winter Olympic Games because they are all the offspring of rich parents, therefore, rich kids, ergo genetically predisposed to be Hotties. Rich Parents = Rich Hottie Kids = Kids with the time, money and resources to spend a lifetime learning to do a Triple Raspberry Flip Flop 1280 with a Double Sow Cow Inverted Twist, or whatever.

Simple as that.

Good writing and all that good stuff

Writing. I have nothing to write about so I will write about writing. I wanted to be dramatic and say something like Writing is a lost art! Yes, I would just get it out there! But how stupid is that? There’s so much great writing happening right now that to make some ridiculous blanket statement like that is, well, ridiculous. How’s that for losing the art?

In fact, there are so many books of poetry, essays, fiction and nonfiction; movies, even television shows that showcase spectacular writing all of the time that one couldn’t possibly read, watch or otherwise experience in a decade that which is created in a single year. It’s truly astounding. I’ve read mostly unread blog posts that brought me to tears. How cool is that?

One of the things that I don’t necessarily cotton to is off-the-charts shockadelica writing. I remember a long time ago watching ER, which had great writing, but they were one to often go a bit over the top. A patient comes in, impaled by a tree! That was knocked down by a crazed killer’s car! Who had just abducted an innocent child! And the patient was a nun – who had AIDs! Sometimes it was all too much – like when the helicopter crashed! It’s like our threshold for shock had become so numbingly inflated that they had to raise the bar – constantly. Now we have/had serial killers who kill bad guys. Nice, that.

But, whatever, people love it – and the writing is still really, really good. I wonder if there’s an upper limit. Will simple love stories disappear lest they make certain they are vampires in love? Will we be bored unless the love includes one person who is not just a bad guy, but a flesh-eating bad guy?

Took the family to see Frozen today. Nice movie, kid-friendly, visually pretty stunning and all that good stuff. On the way out, my 9-year-old daughter said that it would be cool if it had real people in it, echoing a sentiment I felt throughout the movie. I’ve grown a little weary of the Disney/Pixar and the like cartoon characters. They’re just not all that expressive, although they certainly try, and those big ballooney eyes they like and particularly on the female characters, while once pretty compelling are a bit empty now. The reindeer was the most expressive character in the whole movie strangely.

But the writing was very good. Some of the song lyrics set the teeth on edge with a saccharine coating, but that’s a small complaint. Maybe they’ll bring it to the stage.

But I digress. We’re having a veritable renaissance of writing – and especially in the entertainment industry. That’s where the money is so that’s where a lot of great writers are going. It’s exciting. Let’s hope it inspires lots of young people to take writing seriously. I can’t imagine it won’t.

Fire and Flintstones

I was reading something about the ineffectiveness of various youth programs around the United States and was struck by a thought that rarely enters my mind: oh, t’were it we only had more fire and brimstone! Well-meaning liberals (and some conservatives surely) put their grand efforts into turning troubled and disadvantaged kids around at every corner. And they mostly fail, but that is not for lack of effort. There is such a giant stew of reasons – ranging from rap music to broken homes to lack of jobs to under-funded schools and missing parents – that something like after-school basketball just can’t make much of a difference. The kids spend a couple of hours a week in some well-planned utopia and then the other 165 in reality. And reality sucks for most of those we are trying to help.

But back in the day, see, religion had an iron grip on many kid’s minds. Yes, they were also more likely to be from two-parent homes, the union kept dad working, there was no such thing as thrash metal and Facebook, and watching too much Flintstones was what parents feared most about the effects of the media, but it was the Sunday sermon that often prevented the slide from good boy to juvenile delinquent. The real horror of burning in hell for lifting a pack of bubble gum held some sway back in those days. And while my own opinion is that it was (and is) tall tales long ago concocted by men wanting to control other men, women and children, Jesus man, it worked!

The Blue Light Flickers

Each night I wander
through streets mostly empty
and speak to the lights
at the tops of the poles
radiant and still
measured and steadfast
the voices that passed
reach to my present

How real is that nexus
trustworthy the voices?
Am I just a mad man
who’s made the wrong choices?
Who walks in the night
A ventriloquist of wishes
conjuring dead folk?
Highly suspicious!

Terrorized.
Superstitious.
I walk on.
I watch out.

And in every house
the blue light flickers
casting erratic shadows
broadcasting
transmissions
and jittery realities
belying the stillness
the stilted stiffness
of interest coupled with indifference.

To the history of the dead folk
Hubbard’s among them
first to connect us to
the sound and the vision
Like splitting the atom
breaking the silence
smashing the walls
Severing space.

A fine hocus pocus –
And all the world turned
and focused.

But they’re lonely, the dead folk
The ones that you know
They wish you would listen
Pay a little attention
They know that you’re busy, but, really?
You speak to your gods, you stare at your screens
but find not a moment to say what you mean
to the ones who know you
the ones who know now

if you listen, they will speak
if you speak, they will listen
take time. be quiet. talk. wait.
repeat.

And the other dead folk – the pioneers!
they broadcast the future
to eyes and to ears
like sneaky disease
slips in through the breathing
bypassing the mind
dissecting the meaning.
Red, Green and Blue
is plenty for you
native man
lotus eater.

And in every house the blue light flickers.

The sky is eclipsed
by a star machine
manufacturing gods, heroes and
heroines, heroin, mescaline,
vicodin, maryjane,
alcohol, cocaine,
fame,
ecstasy, baby,
you’ll be king!
A queen.
A pawn.

An old man stifles a yawn.

Beneath my feet the sidewalk retreats
the oncoming traffic of life in the seats
and the chairs and the sofas
the idle, bystanders,
loungers and loafers
(bumps on a log
lumps in a bog)
extinguishing stories
personal glories
and staring.

A fine hocus pocus –
And the world turned
and focused.

But the others, the headmost,
ahead of the curve
who colonized the minds
of the hoi polloi,
they were as surprised as you and I.
This technochimera
spearheading and primitive
could (high)jack right into
primordial you and I
inventing the gaping maw
and glassy eye.

And each night I wander
through streets mostly empty
surrounded by dead friends
and family just waiting
for us to discern
them from the gods,
the gods from them,
one is unknowable
one is at hand.

Meanwhile…

A man suddenly stands,
stretches and leaves the room

a woman leans back
and lifts her arm

a guy rubs his eye
and contorts his face

and I see in these moments
what they’ll never see
scenes in the movie
starring the man who stands,
the leaning lady and rubbing guy.

Watching and walking
I’m on to the next.

Please don’t shut your curtains
Please don’t look my way.