“Fail Safe envisions a world in which the instruments of power actually feel the pain and suffering of others...”

98 means he lived through a bit under 1/5th of the West’s colonization of the Americas, lived through 44% of the U.S. as a nation state. His birth coincided with the invention of water skiing and the radial arm saw.

This just in. Twitch just suspended Trump’s account.
Because posts of his recent speeches contained language that, coming from any other mouth, would be straight-up slanderous hate speech. From Trump that’s just ‘Trump being Trump’. I guess that’s how used we’ve grown to Trump being a foul-mouthed hate-filled vulgarian…

Thirtysomething was the best show of the decade, an ‘HBO cable series’ before there were HBO cable series.

The ‘Nazi’ storyline bothers me on a conceptual level. Its telling us our societal problems are due to some nefarious outside source, not a product of our own natures. Its a cop out. I recently read a Japanese novel the placed the blame for Japanese atrocities in WWII on an external agent, a literal dark magical blob…

I have this mental image of the producers instructing the writer’s room ‘Make the story more ham-fisted. We’re writing for an American audience so nuance and subtlety won’t work!’

Ah, he’s talking behind the scenes. The veritable army of staff it takes to have two characters appear on screen. This isn’t about who got cast for Nick Fury.

I am rather old and was raised in a somewhat isolated rural northern Maine community. I was just old enough to catch the very last community ‘minstrel show’ that, yes, included skits in blackface. Even my youthful brain could discern just how grotesquely offensive and inappropriate the spectacle was. Its hard to…

I assume ‘essentially’ is a synonym for ‘not’.

By all rights they should’ve hired Amber Heard.

I got through maybe half of one of those awful pirates movies before abandoning it. Depp added nothing to the experience. 

To quote the renowned acting coach Geramima St. Frostfirst “Acting is the art of pretending you’re someone that you’re not.”

The only thing in 2020 that hasn’t been canceled or pushed back (to be canceled later) is Trump’s monstrous ego.

I can imagine that talent agency conversation. “...and in this photo shoot we want you only in your bras, okay girlies?’

This article would be good fodder for snark if we weren’t all currently teetering on the edge of the economic abyss. Trump’s gross mismanagement of the pandemic kicked the final leg out from under the remarkably long-lived, almost bullet-proof Obama recovery.

I recall seeing ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ in the theater and thinking it was an annoying bore. A genuine disappointment. That was when I first recognized Spielberg’s unfortunate habit of learning all the wrong lessons from his previous ‘blockbusters’ and doubling-down on precisely the bits he shouldn’t have…

1 million users equals less than one third of one percent of the US public. You would probably get more users in a HO gauge railway chat group.

The right wing is bipolar. In their worldview they represent the vast majority of the public AND are a besieged minority at the same time. Often in the same sentence. Its all ego driven while feeding off a free-floating sense of grievance.

Have you ever interacted with any of these... um... people? The first thing that you notice is just how fearful they are. They tremble in fear at the prospect of their neighbor having equal rights or equal pay, they tremble in fear that society will crumble and they’ll be on the bottom. Life to them is a zero sum…

I see a touch of ‘drag’ hidden in classical female icons adored by gay culture. Bea Arthur, (aging) Cher, Bette Davis, (aging) Judy Garland, Catherine Hepburn. Its not not much a mental leap to imagine these women (with their vaguely mannish mannerisms) as drag performers.