Reheated (128)
As I’m a little under the weather, some items from the archives:
Their Happiness Hurt My Feelings.
The intersectional perils of Zoom meetings. With mad people.
Other taboos include references to “simple activities like family dance parties,” which are apparently a thing, and “gardening with a spouse.”
Curiously, given the stated importance of “sensitivity” and being mindful of what things might mean, we aren’t invited to ponder the kind of person who would resent someone else’s wedding photo. And then complain about it. Or whether such neurotic affectations, these unhappy mental habits, are something to be actively encouraged. In the name of progress. At a university.
On ‘anti-capitalist’ lifestyles and a misremembered sitcom.
Practically every week the couple’s survival is dependent on the neighbours’ car, the neighbours’ phone, the neighbours’ unpaid labour, a convoluted favour of some kind. And of course they’re dependent on the “petty” bourgeois infrastructure maintained by all those people who haven’t adopted a similarly perilous ‘ecological’ lifestyle.
The Goods’ highly selective rejection of bourgeois life is only remotely possible because of their own previous bourgeois habits – a paid-off mortgage, a comfortable low-crime neighbourhood with lots of nearby greenery, and well-heeled neighbours who are forever on tap when crises loom, i.e., weekly.
To seize on The Good Life as an affirmation of eco-noodling and a “non-greedy alternative” to modern life is therefore unconvincing to say the least. The Goods only survive, and then just barely, because of their genuinely self-supporting neighbours – the use of Jerry’s car and chequebook being a running gag, along with convenient access to Margo’s social contacts and expensive possessions.
And insofar as the series has a feel-good tone, it has little to do with championing ‘green’ lifestyles or “self-sufficiency.” It’s much more about the fact that, despite Tom and Barbara’s dramas and continual mooching, and despite Margo’s imperious snobbery, on which so much of the comedy hinges, the neighbours remain friends.
If anything, the terribly bourgeois Margo and Jerry are the more plausible moral heroes, given all that they have to put up with and how often they, not Tom’s principles, save the day.
Literary World Unveils Doomsday Machine.
Underwhelming artists threaten to strike, world continues turning.
For those craving more, this is a pretty good place to start.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
This blog is powered by the buttons below.
[ Compiles Friday’s Ephemera, tries different flavour Lemsip, just for kicks. ]
Have you tried the Marmite flavoured Lemsip?
This is not the avalanche of sympathy I was hoping for.
[ Opens Amazon webpage. Rechecks estimated arrival of chicken-soup-laden swallows. ]
What? They haven’t moved at all?
[ Clicks “see all updates”. Blood pressure shoots up. ]
The little bastards decided flying is too much effort and have hitched a ride on a tramp freighter. Which is still sitting in port.
You could blame global warming if it makes you feel better.
[ Wheezing, feeble cough. ]
Look at it this way, you could be in Canada.
Class act.
Enough about Bonnie Blue.
Ooh, Clarkson’s Farm tonight. So there’s that.
[ Adds medicinal chocolate to shopping list. ]
[ Underlines. ]
[ Does Google search. Grimaces. ]
Audiences got to hate “Meathead” and his ‘woke’ lecturing of Archie. Archie turned out quite popular with the audience.
Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie, was a typical Hollywood liberal but also a great actor. All the characters in the show were caricatures but Archie was especially so: racist, bigot, misogynist, chauvinist, etc. etc. — but he could also be sympathetic at times. O’Connor gave his character a certain depth, I thought. (Though not very often.)
I remember sitting in a bar one evening and having a beer-fueled debate about the show. I thought the over-the-top portrayal of Archie, how absurd his attitudes were, was unfair to ordinary conservatives. “Archie Bunker doesn’t exist!” I yelled.
A guy at the next table leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder. “You haven’t met my father,” he said.
People keep saying this as if therapy professions are loaded with angels when it is very much the opposite. Therapy is responsible for producing most of this insanity. And not just at the edges. The mainstream.
So are the Henry Nowak protests still happening or did everyone decide that was enough and went home?
Heh. Give that man a non-sentient bar snack.
Right-o. Checking UK Amazon right now, this will get you right as rain in no time.
I can get this shabby treatment at home, you know.
And do.
Non-motile would be nice.
[ Scuttling. ]
Complaining with a loaf of bread under each arm, you did say medicinal.
Maybe you would prefer another time tested cure. Free shipping to UK for orders over 75 frogskins, if it was half as expensive it would be twice as cheap.
I plan to shovel in squares of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and squares of Galaxy Smooth Milk simultaneously, thereby experiencing full-spectrum chocolatiness.
Assuming I don’t first drown in an ocean of snot.
Remember, citizens, always respect the media.
Remember, citizens, always respect the media.
Looks like a man, acts like a man, has the strength of a man. And I’m supposed to believe it’s a woman?
Reminds me of that article posed here awhile back about an altercation reported as caused by a woman, who was at large. Later they caught the perpetrator because he left semen at the scene.
Ah, yes, the erotic shoe-thieving chap.
Reheated: liberal writers don’t know any conservatives and consider all conservative thought self-evidently risible. So when they write a conservative boogeyman, he speaks and acts like a mainstream conservative, thus accidentally creating a conservative everyman hero because they are allowed to speak and act in public as real conservatives would, were they allowed to.
Gamers hate it (because gamers hate everything) because it’s basically an interactive movie. You can finish the Big Chase Scene by just holding down a single button on the controller and otherwise not interacting with the game.
While I can see their complaint, especially given the $/hour is fairly high on this one, if you have a system that can run it it might be right up your alley. But wait for a sale.
She. She left semen at the scene. That is what we are told. Contradictory notions to the contrary.
We should frame some of these. Or print them on t-shirts.
Sold under the category of Things Our Betters Have Said.
I’m tempted to say band name.
Song title. Falls alphabetically between:
She Came In Through the Bathroom Window
and
Something In the Way She Moves
And yes I’m listening to Joe Cocker right now
Title track, third album.
Accompaniment to ‘medicinal chocolate’.
What the Democratic Party has become: Jacobin. Communist. Islamist. Terrorist.
Musical interlude.
If you need to remind someone that they care… they probably don’t?
I got nuthin ...
Just read that in Germany gay men are largely supporting the conservative party (AfD) because the moslem immigrants have become an obvious threat to them in particular. Just because you assume a particular group will be your allies does not mean they will agree with you.
Genius idea.
Fleshed-out proposal.
Hugh Laurie breaks my heart. So talented. So HOT (in his older years).
And yet he and his little friend Stephen Fry (also immensely talented) are stratospherically obnoxious leftists. Most of it manifesting as nauseating snobbery and arrogance.
Also, the scene in Jeeves & Wooster when Bertie got Jeeves to do the call-response for Minnie the Moocher was a scream.
Along similar lines:
Thomas is an associate professor of history and leftist in leaning. And so, fears of endless racial friction, the shrivelling of one’s culture, and minority status in one’s own country are to be dismissed with mouthings about “migratory patterns.”
The term often a euphemism for displacement, conquest and lots of raping.
Rock stars who left music and took up another profession.
Again, the goal seems to be to disdain and disallow any objection to one’s homeland being rapidly degraded – in real time – by a massive, unwanted influx of primitive, incompatible tribes.
The kinds of creatures who need to be told not to shit on the doorsteps of the indigenous, not to torture animals for amusement, and not to sexually assault children.
That kind of thing.
But hey, it’s just a “migratory pattern.” It’s just “shaping culture.”
One more time:
It’s the progressive way. In this and so much else.
Oh, and as it’s been at least a day since we’ve had a thing that never happens, here’s a thing that never happens.
But hey, it’s just a “migratory pattern.” It’s just “shaping culture.”
Heh. Quite.
And while some of our new barbarians do indeed have machetes, and show great vigour in their use, not least our new and immensely vibrant Congolese borra gangs, much of the degradation – sorry, cultural shaping – has taken other forms.
Some of which are vaguely surreal. I recall one video – long since purged by the previous owners of what was Twitter – in which a bewildered Brit watched his new “diverse” neighbour attempting to mow the lawn, on the instructions of her husband, seemingly unaware that electric lawn mowers require electricity.
It’s okay we won’t have electricity by the time they’re done.
I should add that the video – of a shrouded Muhammadan woman rubbing the lawn with an unplugged electric lawn mover – achieving nothing, for minutes on end – was reproduced on the website of one regional newspaper, with the alleged “faux pas” being pre-emptively excused as “an easy mistake to make.”
Our sympathies were clearly expected to be with the lawn-rubbing newcomer, at least ostensibly, and the bewildered native chap was scolded for his failure to rush next door, master a foreign language, and then explain to his new neighbour the concept of electricity.
The idea that one might not be entirely enthusiastic about one’s neighbourhood being transformed in this way, with the arrival of many people for whom the basics of modernity are seemingly unfathomable, was pointedly not addressed.
I still maintain that a great moment was missed when no one did a House/Doc Martin crossover episode. Hugh Laurie and Martin Clunes, in their respective characters, would have been comedy gold.
Poland in 1939 was a mere “migratory pattern”.
I got nuthin ...
The victory of bureaucracy over common sense.