Yep. Everyone else in the GOP is all, “As the father of daughters, and the husband of a wife I treasure...” like this doesn’t also set a HORRIBLE example for young men. I’m glad to see that someone is disgusted on behalf of men as well as women.

There is a huge problem right now with the Hollywood glorified  sexualization of teens. Of course, they are post puberty and often sexually active, but when we have adult actors portraying them in films we actually lose sight of how young and vulnerable teens are. Undoubtedly some of his supporters will think of Can’t…

Oh I had a Mennonite family next door to me one time, husband, wife and two little kids. He was out of work, and he sat on his ass all day while his wife did everything. One day his wife was out mowing the front yard with a push mower. Well, our 90 year old neighbor lady marched across the street and read him the…

After Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes was such a huge hit, there were droves of tourists going to Ireland and demanding to be taken to a real slum just like in the book. They were quite put out when told those areas had been razed decades ago and the poor weren’t left to die in heaps of cold/starvation/cholera quite so…

On the BBC, Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn have done several series where they relive a period of history for about a year in (reconstructed) historically accurate villages, etc. No reality show drama, just good clean history nerd fun. Quite a few episodes are on You Tube, so you might want to check those out.

LOVE The Supersizers! Well sort of. The guy in real life turned out to be a horrible troll and got caught up in some scandal. But SHE is Sue Perkins! Most recently of The Great British Bake Off! And she rocked. They’re available for streaming somewhere, I’ve rewatched a couple.

What about the BBC farm series documentaries I which a historian and 2 archaeologists attempt to reconstruct life during specific time periods ( Tudor, Victorian, Edwardian)?

You need to pitch that to bravo because that would be genius!!!

This one sounds like it’s doomed to failure—too much real squalor that can’t be replicated, and really, what sort of idiot romanticizes slum life? I like it when people think they’re going to breeze through and manage to puncture all of our romantic assumptions.

We have a culture of sexuality, and somehow, sexuality = sexual assault. It’s Simone Biles-level mental gymnastics.

I want them to set one of these in the 1970s, where there is enough technology and stuff for people to think “Oh, I can do this. Piece of cake.” But in reality it is way worse than you remember. Want to get some cash to go out for the weekend? You have to GO TO THE BANK during the hours of operation! Want to see a…

Okay, now the Trump campaign has made me like an E.L. James tweet. THAT’S ENOUGH!

I think its the schadenfreude. At least the BBC productions seem to be of the quality that makes the comeuppance of overly-privileged assholes both delicious and informative.

I watch and adore ALL these shows. And it’s really funny to see how the participants who are cast as rich, privileged people - regardless of how rich they are in ordinary life - pick up this obnoxious sense of noblesse oblige. At the end of “Manor House,” the lord of the manor is in tears, thanking his staff for this…

How boring! I would have done the same, probably.

If you like these, you should try the farm series. Tudor Monastery Farm, Edwardian Farm, Victorian Farm etc. Historians and anthropologists try living on a farm as if it were the past. They are pretty good. I watched them on YouTube.

I mean, if it takes them less than three days of full-time work to do the weekly load of laundry, then they are doing the Victoriana thing wrong.

Wait, he’s not?

I think everyone kind of wishes, deep down, that Obama was their dad.

Speaking of parents’ uncharacteristic reactions, my 73 year-old mother, who is almost universally loved in her town for being a kind, generous, sweet lady, called me up yesterday and called him “That God damn Donald Trump”.