Friday Ephemera (835)
Vertical filing solution, 1937. || You want one and you know it. || Hosing is hard. || Hello, children. || Shakespeare’s horror story. || Hitachi K-88 portable television, 1978. || Place in food chain negotiation. || A minimum of 30 seconds. Because keeping one eye on your watch is just what you want. || Bach in the rain. || In a bun. || Vibrancy and enrichment. || Value added. || The thrill of having kidneys. || Question asked. || Coquettish stance adopted. || A stroll around Castleton, not too far from here. || It’s all in the hips. Though I’m not sure about the colour. || On choosing a TV set, 1964. || His is bigger. || Keyboard configuration. || For those so inclined, only $13,000. || It says “Portland sports bra riot.” || This tale of a puppy’s encounters with human beings starts in a dark place, but it does get better.
And as this is fundraising week, which keeps this place here, do feel free to make use of the tip jar.
Because she’s a tender-hearted woman who just wanted to create a safe space for the most marginalized?
Well, OK, we can stipulate that, but we also need to recognize that her judgment is abysmal. She took out a loan for 50 large with two flaky people who left her holding the bag, she neglected to account for freeloading, and she also neglected to recognize that her chosen customer base included people who were more predatory and obnoxious than vulnerable.
Come to think of it, the world IS full of people like Jackie Matellian, and that’s exactly the problem.
Yes, interesting, that.
White guilt remains undefeated.
The thing with Shakespeare, though, is that there’s a long tradition of staging it with all manner of variants.
Setting it in Nazi Germany, during Prohibition, Samurai Japan, reversing the colors in Othello, etc.
The idea is that Shakespeare depicts such universal human themes that you can transpose the setting and actors to other times and places, and it still works.
Well, that and theater people are tired of the same old thing, so they want to shake things up a bit.
So historical verisimilitude isn’t a requirement for good Shakespeare any more than performing in the Globe theater is.
So I can’t be upset with Morgan Freeman in Macbeth, even if they’re preserving the Scottish setting.
However, doing a biopic on Ann Boleyn with a black actress is pretty jarring. Retconning English history to put more color in the casting is long-term damaging, because it creates the false impression that there was never any racial hierarchy in the past.
OTOH, the British passion for period pieces means fewer good roles for certain actors.
And then there’s the Guardian‘s Lucy Mangan praising Channel 5’s race-swapped Anne Boleyn, dismissing those who failed to enthuse as by implication racist, and somehow failing to notice the bizarre historical implications that viewers found distracting and alienating. To say nothing of the cack-handed rewriting of characters’ motives in order to match the weird casting choices.
Zinger
If you’re going to do stunt casting, you need to make sure the production hits on all cylinders such that the audience forgets the incongruity and falls in love with the artistic decision.
As we’ve seen, though, those who do the stunt casting don’t have the talent to sharpen up the entire project. An all-female Ghostbusters is going to work only if the producers have a brilliant vision of the story that fairly demands female casting.
Alas, no. They figure it’s enough to provoke controversy, hence interest, and the bucks will flow.
Morons.
A notable lack of ‘she’ and ‘her’.
On the plus side it does undercut the whole ‘woe is me, my umpty-ump grand-whosis was subject to withering remarks’ mummery.
Often the case. There’s a Māori version of Troilus and Cressida.
But if you don’t transpose the setting and era, and instead retain the period and location, then importing very modern “diversity” can be a little conspicuous. Another thing one has to not notice. Scotland is a real place, with real demographics. It didn’t, and doesn’t, look like modern-day London or L.A.
Again, I don’t want to overstate the thing. It wasn’t a huge issue. But noticing the incongruity is, contrary to rumour, okay to do.
Diversity in practice – aggravating becomes mitigating, if not exculpatory.
No substance, no autonomous mental activity, from this professor/priest, or evidently from the church whose imprimatur he has, just a skinsuit rebroadcasting statusful opinions from the powers that be.
An accredited RC theologian indifferent about the divinity of Jesus but preaching the state religion that your distinct peoplehood, homeland, culture is worth giving up for the kebabs the invaders sell you.
Remember the slimy professor of theology Adam Kotsko?
He has become a meme.
They all look like this: https://x.com/Girlpatriot1974/status/2103635709563465780
How do they all look like this? Weird chipmunk grin-face, eyebrows up, chubby, and giving off “your obnoxious friend who thinks she’s clever but instead is stultifyingly boring” vibes.
Psychosis should be a mitigating factor in crime ONLY if it was imposed on you against your will, such as by a natural brain disorder.
If you become psychotic from smoking pot (or using any other recreational drug), then no, you’re not off the hook.
Psychosis is a known risk of using today’s varieties of cannabis. Nobody “needs” to use those dosages, even for medical reasons.
Synthetic hormones + ice cream in half gallons.
@WTP
(via)
David and his desserts?
How to negotiate with “homeless” people.
Modern dance for morons.
Exiling them is the moderate solution.
Via here.
EDIT: Grok says that this is a parody video mimicking children’s educator Ms. Rachel’s upbeat style.
Musical interlude.
Musical interlude #2.
Arday was simply ahead of his time.
Had to fast forward through the quiet parts.
Hmm. As it happens, I possess maybe 10 kilos of used fasteners (not just screws, oh no!).
Perhaps I should open a pub…
The Beeb, worth every penny of your license fees bringing hard hitting journalism – Today In Racism: Plain Fingernails.
That, and being able to pick your nose without giving yourself a lobotomy.
Speaking of worthless journalists (BIRM), The Daily Mail engages in wholesale misgendering covering a thing that never happens.
The dancing might be a parody of Ms Rachel, but I think the message is in earnest.
Isn’t it?
They finally manage to say that “Julia [Grace Egler, 16] transitioned from male to female many years earlier as a young child, appearing as a girl on McCollom’s social media pages from at least 2015.”
That’s 11 years ago.
DID THAT WOMAN TRANSITION HER BOY AT AGE 5???
God Almighty, the Cluster Bs just don’t stop, do they?
That is, I think, the nub of it, why the broader issue, the ongoing trend, can feel provocative, ill-mannered. The anachronism and incongruity – and the assumption that the audience won’t dare say anything about it – is a kind of insult.
We’re at the stage where professionally ethnic Vogue journalists bemoan modern adaptations of Emily Brontë and Jane Austen casting white actors, as if this sneered-at “white perspective,” in stories by and about white people, were a scandal, a social gaffe, a basis for apology.
As if it were somehow unfair that the Yorkshire moors of the eighteenth century did not entirely resemble twenty-first century London, where the journalists who say these things happen to live.
There’s an implication, sometimes stated explicitly, that any historical art or drama, any cultural memory, that isn’t retconned to accommodate multi-racial modernity is somehow inadequate or invalid.
We even have museums and galleries issuing stern warnings to visitors about how depictions of the English countryside from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including those by John Constable, are insufficiently “inclusive” and therefore supposedly problematic, leaving, as they do, “very little room for representations of people of colour.” As if that were the important thing, the reason a museum exists.
As if they required retrospective racial correction.
Meanwhile in Toronto, if you think dubious jurisprudence is confined to Massachusetts,
Not guilty by reason of being high and a Muslim.
As has been said here before, being high should be an exacerbating factor, not a mitigating factor: “You knowingly consumed mind-altering substances, knowing the risks. The court sentences you to natural life cleaning out pig pens.”
GodDavid at His computerIt occurs to me that a TV show in which perversely lenient judges are horsewhipped until they repent would be a ratings hit.
We need better ‘betters’.
White guilt for past racial sins: Sowell in his great wisdom opined that if one could not personally have prevented an injustice or crime then one cannot be guilty of it. Such as slavery. Thus “racial guilt” is not a thing. One cannot be guilty of things one’s race did or even that one’s grandparents did. The claim that the wealth of the West is due to colonialism is long past diluted by time and to whatever extent true has been paid back several times over by the benefits colonialism left behind and all the foreign aid. In addition, if slavery was bad, the black slavers in Africa are also guilty, Arab slavery is bad and lasted longer, and slavery in Africa and the Arab world still go on. So the White neuroticism and guilt is so misplaced and without foundation.
Well, when museums bemoan the whiteness of their own visitors and have condescending signage warning those visitors that a liking for Constable landscapes can stir feelings of “pride towards a homeland” – and thus, in their minds, racism – this does suggest some dissonant priorities. And inapt employment.
As I said in one of the posts linked above, imagine upping sticks to, say, South Korea and expecting the locals to retool their historical dramas in order to flatter and affirm people who look like you or me. Or visiting Seoul’s Kansong Art Museum and then getting pissy and indignant that there aren’t many depictions of white Europeans striding about and radiating their racial gloriousness.
It would be an odd thing to expect, or indeed demand. And not entirely gracious.
“Homeless” woman in Seattle bites chunk out of random woman’s face, calls her “the inferior race” and a homophobic slur.
“Kamilia Chadli.” Chadli is an Arabic name, common in North Africa.
I marvel at how rarely I see the inside of the Correction Booth.
No thank you, socialism makes them too bitter…
Reheating leftover Chinese food counts as cooking, right?
Update.
Actually . . . forget it, it’s Sunday.
Sure, it counts.
Cook, cook, cook, cook, cook.
The Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.
At the deYoung museum in San Francisco (largest in SF) there was, among MANY other white-guilt prods, an enormous (10×5 meters) display showing a California work permit for a Mexican (?) woman, from the early 50s IIRC. She went on to become “important” but I forget what for. Anyway, the display was labeled to make it clear how degrading this was, and racist of California, to have issued such a “papieren” to this innocent. I was supposed to feel remorse, I guess.
What I actually felt was “how generous and gracious of my State, to have presented this foreigner with OFFICIAL RECOGNITION and OFFICIAL PERMISSION.”
But by that time I was sick of being lectured at, and went outside onto the park. Upon looking back at the (new) museum building, I was struck by how easily it would have fit in as a Armed Evil Headquarters prop for the Star Wars First Order bad guys. Seemed appropriate in a weird way.
Thanks. I’m afraid bigger numbers than that are needed even now. Finding hard data on this sort of thing gets harder every year as open primaries and party affiliation become harder to discern but looking at just my rural north Georgia county votes, Trump got 5383 votes out of 8608 registered voters in 2016, 62.5%. In 2018, Brian Kemp was the gop guy with the most votes that year with 5009 votes out of 9387 registered voters, 53.4%. Horribly rough math but using percentage of percentages that’s a 85%…kinda…for gop turnout relative to 2016. For 2020 Trump got about 61% of registered voters, Kemp (again) in 2022 did manage to pull a 58% share. Though Trump pulled a 67% share in 2024.
Now of course this county is significantly red (in spite of my recently being chastised by a wigger or two that true mountain people hate Trump) but turnout is turnout. I would be real curious to see other numbers but goosing broader information out of grok just wasn’t happening. I had to break it down to just one county to avoid a lot of BS qualifiers. But that’s an 85% gop turnout yet I’m not seeing anything close to the kind of supermajority to “pass everything”. And even this being a red county that’s a percentage of gop turnout. I could make an argument that gop turnout as a percentage of gop voters should actually be higher in the bluer areas.
On a broader concern, voting used to be a patriotic duty. People paid closer attention to these matters, perhaps because so many knew or even saw men killed fighting against fascism and communism. Now if one questions why the national anthem wasn’t played before a rural county football game, the locals gotta virtue signal about how they ain’t ignernt redneck flag wavers and why do you care? The brainwashing is thick.
Post your own Star Trek magazine cover
It was also seen as a privilege, something to be earned. Now? Pretty much anyone with a pulse is given the franchise as the ultimate participation trophy – ‘Yeah, you’re a useless lump of flesh that’s never done nobody no good, so here’s your voter registration, go forth and help steer the ship of state right onto the rocks’. Treat the franchise unseriously if you want unserious government.
No one could have foreseen this. [Rolls eyes.]
My anxiety about easy travel in the UK