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.