Best description of Duran Duran was made by my old lead guitarist buddy Danny who said, “You know, their music sounds brilliant… but when you listen to it closely, you realize that there’s not much actually happening in there.”
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3 Things
…that were shocking back then, but aren’t nowadays:
1. Miniskirts
2. Women getting tattoos
(pic from 1940)
3. Interracial couples
And three things that weren’t shocking back then, but are nowadays:
1. Candy cigarettes
2. Fewer safety regulations
3. Letting kids play outside, unsupervised
Caption Competition #453
Your suggestions in Comments.
News Summary
...sadly, we may never know his motivation.
...okay, you can all stop that unseemly giggling now.
...and that’s excellent news. Now it’s off to the Senate for their approval… errrr why am I suddenly not optimistic?
...say what you like, but cyclosporiasis doesn’t happen when you eat Twinkies.
...cue this asshole:
...he sounds more and more like a Democratic Socialist every time he opens his big yap, dunnee?
...if they plan to do it by amending the Constitution, they’ll fail.
If they’re thinking of other ways to do it, however...
...followed shortly by:
...IOW, just do your fucking job and quit worrying about the handwringers and bedwetters.
...and in other news, scientists say that using children as chimney sweeps may harm their lungs.
And speaking of Venuses [sic], here’s some more Sydney Sweeney:
As Written
Finally, someone speaks up for what’s right (albeit on a fairly trivial issue):
James Bond casting director Debbie McWilliams has said 007 should remain white and male as auditions for Daniel Craig‘s replacement continue.
Amid speculation that the character could be reinvented as a woman or played by a black actor, McWilliams, who cast the previous 14 Bond films, said Ian Fleming ‘wrote a character, and that’s the character that stays’.
Well said, ma’am.
Unfortunately, that’s not chiseled in stone (although it should be). Why so?
McWilliams retired from her casting career prior to Amazon MGM Studios acquiring creative control of the James Bond franchise in 2025. The job of finding the next Bond now falls to casting director Nina Gold and director Denis Villeneuve.
Which means that James Bond may soon be Jamal Bond (a reformed teetotaler fresh from an AA meeting), or Jamie Bond (Lesbian Extraordinaire, with a license to munch).
Netflix has done worse, in the past.
I am so fucking sick of moviemakers turning beloved characters into something they were never intended to be. Netflix is the prime [sic] offender in this regard, having trampled all over traditional casting to be more “inclusive” and turning roles into travesties rather than just doing the simpler (and right) thing by sticking to the formula. But they’ve all done it in recent years, whether with Marvel characters or other such icons.
Hey, let’s hear it for Ian Of Green Gables, which tells the story of how a young boy has to make his way in the world after having been mistakenly put up for adoption with two lesbian Satanists.
What the hell: let’s have the whole story told in flashback (like Amadeus) after Ian is sent to a psychiatric ward for having murdered his adopted lesbian step-parents (because they molested him constantly), then blew up the offices of the government adoption agency which made the original screwup.
See how this plays out when you set out to be “creative” and change everything, just to make it more “eclectic”, more “relevant”, more “inclusive” or more “edgy”?
Never mind that you’ve just turned a beloved classic story into a near-parody.
I don’t know what the hell these people think they’re doing, or how they believe that they have the right to do this to our culture.
So let’s keep James Bond a white man, with sociopathic tendencies and a harsh, cynical outlook on life — just as Ian Fleming imagined him. It worked unbelievably well for the novel series (a.k.a. “franchise”, another word I’ve come to detest), and it worked for the Sean Connery-era of Bond movies (reflected in poll after poll, where Sir Sean continues to outrank all his successors — emphasis on “suck” — when it comes to the “ideal” James Bond).
And if The Usual Suspects don’t like that paradigm, they are free to come up with a new character and a new storyline outside the existing canon. It will fail, of course, just as the Bond “franchise” will fail when James is replaced with “alternative” versions.
You heard it here first.
Eschewing Technology
Well, if societal pressure and/or the Gummint all say that you can’t have air conditioning during one of the worst heatwaves in living memory, then you can always rely on !Science! to provide an alternative:
Scientists claim applying YOGHURT to the outside of your windows can cool your home by as much as 3.5°C
Oh wait…
The idea is that the yoghurt forms a thin film on the window, reflecting some of the incoming solar radiation, and preventing heat from passing through.
You know who’s really going to go for this idea?
[checks calendar] Nope, it isn’t April 1st.
FFS.