Two Thousand Seventeen

                                  "CNN still handling New Years Eve as if it has
                                   credibility to spare after this year."

                                  --J. Elvis Weinstein

When I hear war propaganda against Russia, I'm glad that Trump won the election, but my sense of relief won't last long. It will be a nightmare. But I'm sure we can sweat it out for four years.

The problem is that, by blaming their defeat on Russia, the morons in charge of the DNC have evaded responsibility for the most humiliating defeat imaginable. They'll stay in control of the Democratic Party and lead it into another disaster. If they manage to take back the White House in four years, it'll only be because Trump was worse than anyone ever dared imagine.

 It's 9:25 PM. It's been 2017 for almost half an hour on the east coast and I should go to bed. Anderson Cooper is on TV. He and Kathy Griffin are doing the new year's eve thing on CNN. Anderson Cooper laughing at Kathy Griffin sounds strangely painful. The mirthless laughter of the damned.

Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, RIP

I watched Season Two, Episode Four of 30 Rock last night, available on Netflix, an episode entitled "Rosemary's Baby" with Carrie Fisher as a comedy writer Liz Lemon idolized.

I was shocked by the news that her mother, Debbie Reynolds, died the next day.

Even I didn't like Cafe Society

I understand about Woody Allen doing that mini-series for Amazon, but it turns out Amazon bankrolled his movie, Cafe Society, too. It was supposed to cost $18 million. It went way over budget, cost $30 million.

Allen's first movie to be shot on digital video. He says something in the narration at the beginning about how things in Hollywood in the evening look like a Technicolor movie, and I suspect they were trying to make it look like Technicolor, but the lighting was wrong and it looked like crap to me.

The real Cafe Society was a New York nightclub in the 1930s that catered to a multi-racial clientele. It was reportedly the first integrated nightclub in the country (although I'm not aware of black-owned clubs excluding whites). Allen left that part out and made it all-white. He once said in an interview that he would cast black actors if there were a specific reason to. Well, here it was--he had a reason--and he still didn't do it, the Zionist swine.

It was one of his most realistically violent movies. Love and Death had a much higher death toll, of course,  and Bananas had a "funny" scene where a grenade explodes in his hand.

I saw video of a press conference in Cannes. An indignant lady reporter demanded to know if Allen was ever going to make a movie about a younger man with an older woman. Allen's hearing is bad so Jesse Eisenberg had to repeat the question. He toned it down. Allen said, sure, he might.

It was a strange question since the relationships in this movie seemed pretty much age-appropriate. I don't remember though. Who was Steve Carrell dating? I've seen movies about older women and younger men and they weren't exactly feminist screeds, but it sure wouldn't hurt to mix it up a little.

Free on Amazon Prime. Judge for yourself.

It's all over

The Electoral College has voted. It's all over. Trump will be president.

This happened several days ago, but I'm slow to react.

I figured that all the nonsense about "Russian hacking" was mainly to give them an excuse to install Clinton in the White House. The attacks on Russia did abruptly stop once the Electoral College voted.

We had two really terrible candidates for president and it was exactly what the DNC wanted. They conspired to undermine Sanders' campaign AND to get Donald Trump nominated. They thought he was the only candidate Clinton had a chance against. They were wrong. They're responsible for all this. And that was the other reason for the accusations against Russia---so the DNC wouldn't purge itself of these morons and would continue the same losing strategy.

They go on and on about the "free air time" they gave Donald Trump. Like Hillary Clinton couldn't get on TV. Not even Rachel Maddow could get an interview with her.

We could have had Sanders as president. Now. Now we have Trump. Horrible, horrible Donald Trump. How could anybody like that guy?

Need something to binge watch

Looking for something else to binge watch. I know it's wrong, but I can't help it. I could make another stab at Breaking Bad, but it's hard to get into a second time.

And I'll say this again---there are things Walter White did that people thought were just terrible, like killing Gale.Someone called Gale a "true innocent". How was he a true innocent? He was producing methamphetamine, working for a killer which he rationalized with the amoral ravings of Ayn Rand.

Another thing was killing that monster, Mike. We should have been proud of Walter. I know he's not real, but Mike should have died a slower, more agonizing death.

Walt's problem was that he kept wanting to kill people with science. When he simply shot someone or ran them over, I found it strangely admirable.

But now I need something new. Modern Family would be good but it's not on video. I haven't seen old episodes of Star Trek in years. The Sopranos doesn't interest me. I watched a couple of episodes of that Lena Dunham show and I'm not sure how I felt about it. I watched a couple of episodes of that zombie show and it didn't grab me.

Zsa Zsa Gabor, RIP

Zsa Zsa Gabor has died of a heart attack at age 99.

She was Hungarian and Jewish. She and her family escaped the Nazi occupation with the help of her mother's social connections. She and her two sisters each claimed to have been crowned "Miss Hungary". There's nothing to indicate that any of them were.

Related to Tom Lantos' wife and somehow related to Paris Hilton.

I was pro-Zsa Zsa during the police thing, when she was criminally charged with slapping an LA cop who attacked her.

But then I saw her on the Phil Donahue show talking about it. She was in her 70s but was worried that lesbians would hit on her in jail. When a lesbian in the audience objected, Zsa Zsa dismissed her saying "I am a mother, you are a lesbian!"

She shouldn't have been so proud of being a heterosexual. She had only one child, a daughter, when she was married to Conrad Hilton. She later claimed to have become pregnant when Hilton raped her, but Hilton doubted he was the father at all. She bragged that she slept with her step son, Nicky Hilton. She was married nine times. She cleverly quipped that she was a good housekeeper---whenever she got divorced, she kept the house. When asked how many husbands she had, she said, "Other than my own?"

She was multi-lingual, co-authored a novel and did pretty well for herself, really.

I think I saw her in Moulin Rouge, and she appeared for about five seconds in A Touch of Evil. I didn't think Cat Women of the Moon was that terrible. There were at least two remakes of it.

She was married to Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt. He became a "prince" when his father, a German cop, paid the elderly daughter of the deposed Kaiser Wilhelm II to legally adopt him as a teenager. She had adopted 35 other men in order to give them royal titles and Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt got into the same business. He had legally adopted at least ten men, one of them a strip club owner, for $2 million each so they could claim to be European royalty. He also sold dozens of "knighthoods" for $50,000 each. He once handcuffed himself naked in his car and called reporters to come talk to him so he could claim to have been robbed by a a gang of lesbians. 

Well. Poor thing. In terrible health at the end. Rest in peace.

Turns out Cindy Brady hates Muslims

The Victoria Jackson of The Brady Bunch

I'm a bit shocked about Susan Olsen, TV's Cindy Brady. She used to grow marijuana, and she was fired from her radio show, "Two Chicks Talkin' [sic] Politics" after a "homophibic rant" against gay actor Leon Acord-Whiting.

It turns out that Olsen was a Trump supporter, weirdly enough. She thinks Obama is a "Marxist", she hates Muslims and claims to have "studied Islam for a few years."

Yeah? Where did she study Islam? I think she's studied it the way Tom Cruise "studied" the history of psychology.

Susan worked with Robert Reed for years. She said she was aware that he was gay early on.

It all started with Al Franken's Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. Yes, Limbaugh was terribly overweight, and a drug addict. Should we attack him for these two medical conditions? Now some "artist" has been putting up "sculptures" of naked Donald Trump, "body shaming" a defenseless 70-year-old man as a political statement.

The Clinton campaign released photos of Bernie Sanders sunbathing. They thought it would be a blow to his campaign, but all they did was reveal he was in pretty good shape. Let's see Hillary Clinton out there.

But, you see, this is what it has led to--Cindy Brady attacking someone for an irrelevant personal attribute.

It is weird that she's a Muslim-hating Trump supporter, though. I never thought about it, but I guess I would have imagined that the cast of the Brady Bunch would be right of center but with no really strong political opinions. Pretty much the same with the Partridge Family except for Danny Bonaduce.

There have been a few occasions over the years--and I know other people this has happened to--when I've gotten into political arguments with strangers and slowly realized that they were mentally ill. It's always embarrassing. I look around hoping nobody had been listening.

I don't know who Leon Acord-Whiting is, but he should probably feel the same way when he realizes he was arguing with Cindy Brady.

CIA claims about Russian hacking

So, the CIA is claiming that Russia hacked the DNC and handed what they found over to Wikileaks. And they were trying to help Donald Trump get elected because they hacked the RNC emails, too, but didn't make them public.

Even if you believe that Russia did hack the DNC and handed what they found over to Wikileaks, the emails showed that the DNC sided with Hillary Clinton in the primaries, actively undermined Bernie Sanders' campaign, cheated in the debates and tried to promote Donald Trump's candidacy because they thought he was the only candidate Clinton could beat.

The only thing they might find in Republican emails was horror that Trump was winning the nomination. If they did anything improper to stop him, it would just show that he triumphed in spite of it. How would that hurt his campaign?

If the Russians did anything to undermine Clinton, it was because she made it as clear as she possibly could that she intended to start a war with Russia by declaring a "no fly zone" over Syria, something the United States has no right to do. If they prevented World War Three by embarrassing that idiot Podesta, good for them.

Andy Griffith, In the Heat of the Night

 "I do want to thank you for offering such a powerful piece of manpower as Virgil Tibbs."

Now I'm sitting here with The Andy Griffith Show on in the next room. Andy pulls over a speeder, gives her a ticket. She wants to pay the ticket and be on her way, so she goes before the Justice of the Peace who is also Andy Griffith. When she points out the obvious conflict of interest, the arresting officer serving as judge, he charges her with contempt of court and keeps increasing the fines as she objects then throws her in jail, all over a ten dollar speeding ticket. Sort of a sit-com version of Nightmare in Badham County. And, strangely, we're supposed to be on Andy Griffith's side.

There's a whole genre of movies about innocent Northerners venturing into the South and ending up in prison or on chain gangs, railroaded by corrupt law enforcement and courts or simply being hunted down by backward rednecks.

The fact is that Andy Griffith was good at playing evil characters. There was A Face in the Crowd, he played a con artist on an episode of Hawaii Five-O and played a wealthy lawyer who hunts an impoverished hippie for sport in Savages. But his evil side came through in this show, too.

In a recent post, I made what even I thought was a weak joke suggesting they could have made the police chief in In the Heat of the Night more Andy Griffith-like, but maybe I wasn't that far off.

"A hundred and sixty-two dollars and thirty-nine cents a week? Well boy! Barney, you take him outside but treat him nice, because a man that makes a hundred and sixty-two dollars and thirty-nine cents a week, we do not want to ruffle him."

Sharknado 3 star Anthony Weiner

There's nothing in the news about criminal charges against Anthony Weiner. They're reporting that he left sexting rehab because he ran out of money. Now he's looking for work apparently hoping for a job in a restaurant. I hope he has a food handler's card.

He has a degree in Political Science which is less useful than a law degree like most politicians have.

He played the head of NASA in a made-for-cable TV movie, Sharknado 3. I haven't seen it, but he's become such a punchline that he might be of some value to zero budget comedy.

The New York Times reported that no one could stand working for Weiner in Congress. He would yell at his staff, throw furniture and demanded they be in constant contact by "Blackberry". He had the highest staff turnover rate of any member of Congress. He had three chiefs of staff in 18 months. Who would want to work with him?

I don't want people to think I'm a Republican, so let me say here that Weiner would be so much better off in a Communist country. His rehab would be free, he would be guaranteed a job and a place to live. It's been 25 years since the Berlin Wall came down and the majority of East Germans still say they prefer socialism simply because money wasn't the focus of their lives. In the Soviet Union, rent was set at 10% of income and apartments were all pretty much the same. Weiner could get a job as a dishwasher and he'd be fine.

If he had any brains he'd be a Communist and not a stinkin' Zionist. And he'd stop sexting.

Mad Libs

I'll never forget the time we played Mad Libs in class in the 5th grade. I so wanted to contribute. So the teacher points to me and I blurted out the first noun that came to mind. A few expressed disappointment. My noun wasn't funny.

And when the teacher read the thing, when she came to my contribution, I heard the disdain in her voice. She was right. I ruined the Mad Lib.

Now, over 40 years later, I realize that there's nothing remotely funny about Mad Libs. I can't think of anything I could have said that would have been funny unless it was obscene or indecent, and even then it wouldn't have been that funny.

Was I was missing something? Like maybe I didn't pay close enough attention to the subject matter. Like I hadn't gotten into the spirit of the thing. Why was everyone better than me?

The time I was watching Flipper in the middle of the night

It was, like, 2 AM and Flipper was on the Animal Planet channel. The ranger and his two sons were kidnapped by criminals and left stranded on an island. His younger son clearly forgot his lines as well as the plot of the episode.

"Well, what about our boat?" he said.

"Our boat is at home," the ranger replies very patiently.

"Oh, yeah," the kid says.

"Oh, yeah," the ranger says back.

Weird that they left that in.

Ron Howard told the story on David Letterman about the time he appeared on a three-part episode of Lassie. They didn't shoot retakes on that show either.

I'm telling you, directing is an easy, easy gig.

Jill Stein again

Someone pointed out that, after the Green Party got a lousy 1% of the vote, Jill Stein is making a name for it by calling for re-counts. So it may not be such a bad idea. The neo-McCarthyites in the Democrat Party will stop calling her a Russian spy for the time being, but that won't last long.

Flag burning

 "Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows'-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?" --Thomas Carlyle

"No matter how sickening and abhorrent we all find it," MSNBC's Brian Williams said, flag burning is constitutionally protected.

I didn't know we all found it sickening or abhorrent. I've always been baffled that people get so worked up about it. I find it hard to believe that Donald Trump has any genuine feelings about it.

Most of the flags at Disneyland have the wrong number stars. That way, they're not REAL United States flags and they don't have to follow flag etiquette. They can leave them out in the rain, let them touch the ground and whatever else you're not supposed to do with a flag. If they make flag burning a crime, you just burn one with the wrong number of stars--it's called a "flag replica"--and it's perfectly legal.

Jesse Jackson calls for pardon for Hillary

Jesse Jackson has called for Obama to pardon Hillary Clinton.

I don't know if this would be a problem, but Obama just lied to Der Spiegel and claimed that he couldn't possibly pardon Edward Snowden because "I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves."

So how did Nixon get his pardon? Or Marc Rich?

If Hillary committed crimes, why shouldn't she be prosecuted? If anybody's a superpredator it's her and she should be brought to heel.

Anti-Castro scum

So, Fidel Castro survives literally hundreds of assassination attempts and dies peacefully at age 90. And THIS is the great triumph of the anti-Castro Cuban trash dancing in the streets in Miami?

"God is on our side!"

About Jill Stein demanding a recount...

From counterpunch.com. Jeffrey St Clair discusses how bad Trump will be judging from his cabinet picks. People like me who hoped that he would be less of a threat to the world than Clinton may have been horribly, horribly wrong.

Well, I didn't vote for Trump. I voted for Jill Stein. About her, St Clair writes:

What in the world is Jill Stein up to?  She is trying to raise more [than] $2 million for recounts in WI, Michigan & Penn, recounts that presumably aren’t about getting a bigger vote total for the Green Party, but trying to find “lost” votes for HRC. If HRC isn’t willing to stand up for her own voters (assuming there are lost votes) why the hell should the Greens? What’s the goal? To be able to say: “I didn’t cost Hillary the election, I tried to win it for her?”

This smells of Stein’s campaign manager David Cobb to me, who in 2004 really wanted the Greens to run a stealth campaign so as not to be tarnished by reelection of Bush. (Indeed, the Wisconsin recount has nothing to do with the Green Party itself. The executive committee voted 5-3 to reject Stein and Cobb’s request that they sponsor the recounts.) Shortly after the 2004, elections Cobb spear-headed an audit of the returns from Ohio, the state that sank John Kerry. Many of the Greens are simply disaffect liberals, who really want to be teleported back to the Democratic Party of the 70s and 80s.

Nearly 100 million eligible voters didn’t vote. Stein would be better served spending some of the $2 million turning them Green, organizing their own party, providing legal support for Standing Rock protesters, investing it in the Powerball lottery or almost anything other than auditing the vote for Hillary. But if, as with Sanders, Stein uses that $2 million (or even $200,000 or $20,000 or $2000 or $200) to help the candidate she rightly assailed as a threat to peace, the environment and working people during the campaign, then Stein will have defrauded the very people who supported her.

The end result, even if successful in revealing some hijinks in the voting machines, as in Ohio 2004, will be to make more “legitimate” the very electoral process that kept the Green Party off the ballot in many states and locked it out of the debates. I don’t see that as any kind of win for independent parties. It will only serve to improve and restore confidence in the two-party system that crushes every aspiration of the Green Party’s own members.

If Stein/Cobb recount initiative is really about preserving integrity of the democratic process, why only investigate states HRC narrowly lost and not the ones–NH, MN–she narrowly won?

My Thanksgiving

 
Had a lovely Thanksgiving. I didn't argue when my kin ranted against Russia.

But everyone was thrilled to hear that Jill Stein was raising money to pay for a recount in Wisconsin. They couldn't keep their McCarthyite slaverings straight----the Democrats had already denounced Stein as a Russian spy.

"I've seen a lot of evidence that the Russians hacked the voting machines," my brother-in-law said.

There's no evidence they were hacked at all.

The claim that the electronic voting machines were hacked was based on the fact that election results varied from county to county. Some counties had electronic voting, some had paper ballots. But they also had different demographics which explain different results. It's possible they were hacked, but there's no reason to think that they were.

Trump visited Wisconsin five times during the campaign. Clinton ignored the state completely. Could that have played some role in Trump winning there?

The problem is that my family has no actual political opinions---they just picked a politician to support and started worshiping. I find Trump less alarming in the short run because Clinton made it clear that she intended to start a war with Russia. Her campaign consisted mostly of war propaganda demonizing Putin.

Trump, Netanyahu

Here's my question.

"Bibi" Netanyahu is known for being incredibly arrogant and obnoxious. Bill Clinton couldn't stand him, Obama can't stand him. Obama's Chief of Staff didn't want him in the White House. Sarkozy of France talked with Obama about how obnoxious he was at the G-20 summit. A mic happened to be turned on and it made it into the press.

"You're tired of him! What about me?" Obama said. "I have to deal with him every day."

Not surprisingly, outraged Jewish groups declared that finding Netanyahu's personality not entirely appealing was anti-Semitic.

So, when Trump has to deal with "Bibi", will he be charmed by a fellow obnoxious loudmouth, or will he be as offended as everyone else but will happily say so loudly and publicly?

It's one thing to look forward to.

In the Heat of the Night

Do detectives really feel a guy's arms, find one arm is slightly more muscular that the other then declare them innocent because the killer must have been left handed? It seems like slim basis for clearing an otherwise obvious suspect, but I've seen them do this in more than one movie, starting with In the Heat of the Night.

The thing that bothered me about In The Heat of the Night was that Virgil Tibbs was a Philadelphia police detective. Philadelphia cops are well known for racism and brutality, but Virgil Tibbs is played as an effete intellectual among the thuggish White southerners. It could have been the other way around----Virgil Tibbs as a violent Coffin Ed Johnson/Grave Digger Jones-like big city detective among the bewildered Andy Griffith-like Southern Whites.

I also didn't know that police detectives performed their own autopsies.

In the novels, Virgil Tibbs had a black belt in karate and a brown belt in Aikido. Sidney Poitier karate chops a guy in the sequel, They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!  He did it wrong with his thumb sticking up, so it may be just as well that they didn't put him in a karate fight with the rednecks.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Binge watched Curb Your Enthusiasm on Amazon. It was pretty good. But there were things in it that were very bad. For example, there have been a number of TV shows over the years that have used the gag where a character's innocent comments are misconstrued as an admission of pedophilia. The first time I saw this was on an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-1982). But they did this on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and it went way too far. I won't go into it, but Larry David's "innocent comments" were things no person would ever say.

And I just re-watched another episode that I must have slept through the first time. No human being would ever say what Larry David said at a bat mitzvah or anywhere else.

Other than that it was pretty good. Just people walking around talking for the most part. They were all rich, half of them celebrities playing themselves---otherwise, a zero-budget filmmaker could conceivably pull off something like it with just a camcorder.

Look on the bright side

He obviously won't do this stuff, but Trump has said he wants to raise the minimum wage, wants family leave.

We probably won't die in a nuclear war with Russia or China now. Even if it didn't turn into a nuclear war, Clinton would have escalated the wars in Syria and Ukraine killing hundreds of thousands more human beings.

I'm relieved Clinton lost and sorry that Trump won.

My God. Trump wins. Probably.

You see why it was stupid for Democrats to act outraged when Trump said he might not accept the results of the election?

I'm sitting here with MSNBC on. They're completely pro-Clinton, but even they seem to have accepted the grim reality. They're still blaming Russia. Which will be weird. For the next four years, anyone who's pro-American will be denounced as a Russian stooge.

What a humiliating defeat for Clinton. Even if there are some recounts and it turns out she won, it would be pretty embarrassing.

Last month, the New York Post reported:

This could blow up in her face!

Hillary Clinton may have lit the fuse for her victory celebration a little too soon — by planning an Election Night explosion of fireworks over the Hudson River, The Post has learned.

Law enforcement officials and the FDNY have been told to prepare for a barge-launched pyrotechnic display off Manhattan’s Javits Center, where Clinton and running mate Tim Kaine will join their supporters for the Nov. 8 vote count, sources said.

The aerial detonations would last for two minutes, with the triumphal celebration permitted to start as early as 9:30 p.m. — a mere half-hour after the polls close in New York, sources said.

We'll see what they say in the morning.

My God. Could Trump win?

Holy crap. Clinton's only one point ahead in the polls. Trump may actually win. How do you like that.

When you nominate a corrupt candidate who nobody likes, you're bound to have serious problems. 

Trump, Clinton, Weiner

This might be a good time for Anthony Weiner to make "aliyah" and flee to Israel. The sinewy New York Zionist is under investigation and facing years in prison for sending obscene messages to a 15-year-old shiksa in North Carolina.

While examining Weiner's sexting computer, the FBI also found emails between his wife, Huma Abedin, and Hillary Clinton. Abedin was Clinton's deputy chief of staff to from 2009 to 2013 when she was Secretary of State. So this opened the Hillary Clinton email scandal back up again.

It could be that Trump's complaining about the undeniable press hatred of him has paid off. They've finally been forced to show some interest in Clinton's criminality.

Clinton is well aware of all the dirt that could come out about her. She's been urging people to vote early so they can't later change their minds in disgust. She's also started focusing on "down ballot" races, apparently realizing that she'll likely be impeached once she's elected anyway.

My blood will run cold when I hear the election results no matter which of those two wins. They're both monsters and neither one is terribly bright. The United States is powerful enough in the world that it can get away with having morons in charge of the place. It is amazing how much smarter other world leaders seem to be.

Crisis in Six Scenes

I watched that Woody Allen thing on Amazon, Crisis in Six Scenes. It wasn't very good, but my expectations had been lowered to the point that I was okay with it. Some of the jokes were really terrible and there was this anti-leftist thing.

Allen is 80. I imagine he probably has ten relatively good years left in him and at least five not so good years after that. His father was over 100 when he died and had a job as an office boy when he was 90. His mother lived to be almost 100. There are a handful of directors who kept working past 100. I don't know what that tells you about directing as a job, but Allen may turn out to be one of them.

We're doomed

When asked if he would accept the election results if he lost, Trump should have said, "I don't know. What difference would it make? What does that even mean?"

Clinton's campaign has claimed that Trump and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are Russian agents. They claim that Russians have hacked everything and will stop at nothing to put Trump in the White House, but, for some reason, couldn't possibly hack the electronic voting machines even though it's been proven it could be easily done. Would Clinton accept the election results if she lost? If so, why?

By the way, there is one poll which shows Trump ahead by one point. It claims to have a 3.6% margin of error. So, hell, maybe he has a 4.6% lead. How can he lose?

Whoever wins, it will be a nightmare. Even if they do nothing objectionable, just having to look at either one of them and listen to their voice for the next four years would be too much.

And it will only be four years. Neither one of them would have the slightest chance of winning if they weren't running against each other. Wikileaks revealed that Clinton's campaign was aware of this. They were trying to somehow coax Trump into running before he had entered the race. There's no way either one could win a second term.

If Clinton wins, she won't be running against Trump four years from now. We'll end up with Ted Cruz or someone even worse in the White House. If Trump wins, at least it will inoculate us against that horror.

Jimmy Carter said he'd prefer Trump to Cruz, so maybe it wouldn't be that bad a thing.

In fairness to Melania...

Jeffrey St. Clair wrote on Counterpunch.org:

* What’s all this about plagiarism? I’m with Melania. Can you really plagiarize platitudes and clichés? Dime’s worth of difference between the Obamas and Trumps?

* The Situationists would love the spectacle of Republican Ultras praising Melania’s recitation of the words of Michele Obama’s speechwriter and the Democrats who ridiculed the speech dull and banal. It’s the Daily Double!!

Melania Trump's speech

I was sitting here. News coverage of the Republican National Convention was on in the next room. I wasn't paying close attention, and I couldn't see the TV. I only heard it.

What the hell? I thought.

They were playing a clip of Melania Trump's speech. She would say a line in her heavily accented English, then someone with a standard American accent would repeat the same line. Like they were translating it because no one could understand her.

That must be embarrassing for her, I thought.

It was worse than that. Turns out they were showing clips of Melania's speech transposed with clips from Michelle Obama's 2008 speech that Melania's speech writers had clearly plagiarized.

Man, if you're a speech writer, it's so easy to sabotage these people.

Jeremy Clarkson and one of those other guys

The guy on top is 56 (he was 54 when that photo was taken.) The one on the bottom is 54.

These young scamps are Britain's most beloved celebrities.

I googled their names looking for any comments on their premature aging. It seems that the British consider this perfectly normal. They think anyone who looks any better than that must have had plastic surgery.

They're going to have a new car show on Amazon.

Clint Howard again

Poor Clint Howard. When I was a kid and Gentle Ben was on in syndication, I really disliked him. I watched the show because there were hardly any channels back then. It was either Gentle Ben or The New Zoo Revue, and I wasn't going to watch that.

I saw the show again as an adult and I still didn't like Clint Howard, but now I felt guilty for not liking him. And I didn't realize that bears were so stupid-looking.

I was reminded of the words of Werner Herzog in Grizzly Man:

And what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior.

It's frightening---a show about a boy and a bear that could turn on him at any moment. Jodie Foster was mauled by a lion on the set of a Disney movie. I don't know if Clint Howard had any close calls with the man-eating prehistoric monster he was forced to co-star with.

Clint Howard may be a perfectly nice fellow. But he's a Ted Cruz supporter. He looked at Ted Cruz the way he looked into the soulless, beady little eyes of his TV bear. To him, he was a friend, a savior.

Clint Howard, Ted Cruz

My God. Turns out Clint Howard was a Ted Cruz supporter.
Don't know why I'm shocked or interested.

Daratt, (Dry Season)

Made in Chad in 2006.

In order to bring a 40 year civil war to an end, the Chadian government declares an amnesty on war crimes. Outraged, a blind grandfather hands his fifteen-year-old grandson, Atim, a pistol and sends him to the city to murder the man who murdered his father. His father had been killed before he was born. The kid sets off to kill a man he doesn't know to avenge the murder of his father who he never met.

His intended target is now very religious. He operates a small bakery and hands bread out to children who gather outside. The kid becomes an apprentice at the bakery. He sullen and speaks very little. The man had his throat cut during the war and now has to hold an electrolarynx to his throat to speak, so there's not much conversation.

Interesting movie. A bit slow. Reminded in some respects of some of the movies from the Peoples Republic of China, like Er Dong. It looked great, filmed mostly static camera. Cost $1.7 million.

Available on Fandor.

Obama's daughter gets into Harvard

One of Barack Obama's daughters whose name I haven't bothered learning has been accepted into Harvard. What a shock.

When I was in high school, I began to wonder how Thurston Howell III managed to graduate from Harvard. I knew how he got in, but how could he keep up? Then, years later, I heard George W. Bush graduated from Yale and I started to have grave doubts about these colleges. In what way were elite universities elite?

Jodie Foster went to Yale, Jonathan Taylor Thomas went to Harvard, Brooke Shields went to Princeton, the girl who starred in Flashdance went to Yale. Natalie Portman went to Harvard. Are movie stars ALL geniuses? Do any of these people NOT go to elite schools?

James Franco completely destroyed the illusion by enrolling in several universities at once. If he really is some kind of Einstein, why is he wasting his super-intellect on creative writing and conceptual art? He's not good at either. He hasn't done one thing that, objectively, requires any brains. If he's that smart, let's see him learn French.

Bernie Tiede's going back to prison

 

Sociopath Bernie Tiede is on his way back to prison for murdering elderly widow Marjorie Nugent after stealing millions of dollars from her.

He was the subject of a movie, Bernie, directed by Richard Linklater, starring Jack Black in the title role as an effeminate assistant funeral director who befriended the wealthy widow, taking expensive vacations with her, hanging around with her, shooting her in the back four times and keeping her body in a freezer, pretending she was still alive as he continued to spend her money until her family convinced the police to search her house.

Tiede was sentenced to life in prison and served 16 years when he was released while his sentence was being appealed. He wasn't appealing his conviction, but he claimed that the jury should have taken into account his claim that he was once sexually abused by an uncle during sentencing. The state apparently intended to let him go free by simply not bothering to re-sentence him until the victim's family objected.

After the re-sentencing trial, the jury gave Tiede 99 years to life. The prosecutors used financial records to prove that he had embezzled millions of dollars from Nugent while telling her he was investing it in the stock market. In his confession, he said he had been thinking about clubbing her to death for some time before he shot her.

"I had thoughts of hitting Marjorie in the head with a bat or anything for a couple of months prior to November 19th, 1996," he said.

He had been staying at Richard Linklater's home during the appeal.

I saw the movie Bernie. Tiede might have been somewhat sympathetic if he had been a fictional character who murdered another fictional character, but, even then, I wouldn't sleep in the same house as him.

Tom Cruise "fascinatingly dumb"

A quote about Tom Cruise from Jean-Pierre Mocky, French director, screenwriter, and producer from his memoir,  Je vais encore me faire des amis! (I'm going to make some more friends!). I don't know if it's available in English. This is a translation found on line:

"[Stanley Kubrick] died in March 1999, two months before the release of Eyes Wide Shut, his last movie. I was invited to the preview screening in France, which was attended by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. She arrived on stage an hour late, and for this, just to set the mood for us, her then film partner and husband harshly reprimanded her in front of the audience in the UCG Normandie theater! The screening was followed by a dinner at the Man Ray, which used to be a very famous restaurant on the Champs-Élysées: Nicole Kidman chose to stay away (out of fear, no doubt, of prolonging the bickering), and I found myself at a table with Tom Cruise, with whom I spent two interminable hours. I learned at least that he's fascinatingly dumb. Not only did he speak exclusively about his own precious self, in more than glowing terms, of course, but after a logorrhea in which he sang me the praises of Scientology, this deluxe traveling salesman tried outright to convert me; the only thing that was missing was the membership application and my signature at the bottom right! When the time to leave finally came, I wondered how people with minds so flat can possibly lead such careers. And I'm still wondering."

Only (Canada, 2008), I'm a good person/I'm a bad person (Canada, 2011)

 

Watched a very nice movie on Fandor, Only, made in northern Ontario, Canada, in 2008 by Simon Reynolds and Ingrid Veninger. About a kid who lives with his parents at their motel.  The bulk of the movie is him hanging around with a girl staying there with her parents.

Reynolds and Veninger play the kid's parents. The kid is played by Veninger's son, Jacob Switzer.

Francois Truffaut noted in one of his interviews with Alfred Hitchcock that seeing kids in movies doing things they're not supposed to endears them to the audience. In this film, we see the kid sleeping in one of the rooms with potato chips he was eating in the bed. He walks through the halls in his underwear and goes swimming in the pool. His parents have trouble getting him to do the work he supposed to do but are still amused by him.

Saw another movie also starring and directed by Ingrid Veninger, I am a good person/I am a bad person, also available on Fandor. Her son appears in it, too, in a much smaller role.

Veninger plays an arthouse film director going to film festivals in Europe. She performs an oral act of love on her husband before she leaves and, later, there are a couple of scenes of her sitting on a toilet. I'm not even related to her and I don't want to see her doing that stuff. Imagine how her poor son must feel. The poor kid appeared in a movie he couldn't possibly want to see. His first scene is him calling his dad for something while his father and mother are committing their crime against nature.

The kid was in a movie but he can't even tell his friends for fear that they'd watch it. "Dude! That was your MOM?"

Movie was more interesting than I'm making it sound. I liked it. Filmed in Toronto, Paris, Berlin, and Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. At one point, her confidence is shaken by a rude question from the audience. Don't ask filmmakers rude questions!

I hope she doesn't google herself and read this.

They're always cheating the victims

 

We had a school shooting here years ago. A 15-year-old undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic killed his parents, spent the night in the house with their bodies, then went to school in the morning where he opened fire on students in the cafeteria. In jail, they pumped him full of anti-psychotic medication. But the district attorney insisted that he was perfectly sane. They convicted him of murder and the surviving victims celebrated outside the courthouse oblivious to the fact that they had just been cheated out of compensation. If the kid had been ruled insane, they could have filed claims and collected on his parents' home owner's insurance. Since insurance doesn't cover intentional acts, they got nothing.

And now we have Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker of the House, once second in line for the presidency.

It turns out that if you withdraw more than $10,000 at a time from the bank, the bank has to report you to the government. And, Hastert learned, if you withdraw $9,000 at a time, they'll report you for evading being reported by NOT withdrawing $10,000.

The FBI asked him what he needed all that cash for. He told them he didn't trust banks. The FBI arrested him for lying because he was actually using the money to pay off a young fellow he molested when he was a high school wrestling coach decades earlier.

The prosecutor wrote:

"He made them feel alone, ashamed, guilty and devoid of dignity. While defendant achieved great success, reaping all the benefits that went with it, these boys struggled, and all are still struggling now with what defendant did to them."

So how did the prosecutor help them? By revealing the crimes Hastert was paying to cover up, thus denying them any further compensation. The statute of limitations is long expired. They can't sue him now. The money he was paying them was all they were going to get and the prosecutor put a stop to that while pretending to sympathize with them.

They can't even sell their story to the Enquirer now that the prosecutors have revealed the details.

A brief anecdote within a brief anecdote

I was at the gas station. The attendant was on break and was "vaping". I didn't approve, but I told her it was nice that you can smoke in a gas station now. She got mad and said she didn't smoke, she vaped. Then she told me about the time she threw up trying to smoke a cigar.

Batman v Superman

I haven't seen the movie and I'm not going to see it. But isn't Batman just a middle aged guy in a Batman suit? What's he going to do to Superman?

Not surprisingly, Batman resorts to using kryptonite. Hell, I could defeat Superman if I had kryptonite. There's no trick to that. It could be absolutely ANYBODY vs. Superman.

Anyway, the movie will have to gross $800 million just to break even. The critics don't care for it. It doesn't look like it's going to lose money and it doesn't affect me in any way, but I hope it fails.