Just when you thought you’d heard everything… how about “Yoga With Lemurs”?
And no, I didn’t make it up: it’s a real thing. This, from the country struggling with Brexit.
Category: Entertainment
News Recap
…in which I summarize snippets of news that I couldn’t be bothered to spend more time over.
- Disney Corporation reinstates some director I’ve never heard of to make a movie I’m never going to see — yeah, whatever. Falling tree, meet forest.
- Gummint assholes make a guy park somewhere else and try to destroy his business because his bumper sticker hurt their feewings — actually, his bumper sticker (Black Rifles Matter) simultaneously satirizes an anarcho-racist movement and makes a pro-Constitutional freedom statement. Anyone know where I can get one?
- Piers Morgan talks a load of bullshit (again) — I know, not really news. [totally unnecessary warning: link contains Piers Morgan]
- Chelsea Clinton accused of helping incite New Zealand massacre — you couldn’t cut irony this thick with a chainsaw.
- Senator Elizabeth Warren (1/1024 part-Cherokee) has no sympathy for parents who attempted to corrupt the college admissions process — where can I get my chainsaw sharpened?
- The French are revolting (again) — there’s only one answer to all this for granny-grabbing FrogPM Macron: ban the weekend! And finally:
- Kids skip classes (but for a “good cause”) — creates two (largely rhetorical) questions: 1) given how totally shit the public school system is (regardless of country), was this absence actually a better thing for the kids? and 2) will this mass walkout actually achieve anything concrete in affecting “climate change”? (All those who attempted to answer “yes” to the latter question, put on the Dunce cap and go stand in the corner.)
Cartoon of the week (via Insty, thence Power Line):
Think of it as visual evidence of this thesis.
Picking My Spot
As promised yesterday, here’s my choice of WitSec relocation:
- Close to a large body of water
- Small town but not a small-town mentality
- Interesting downtown with lots of eclectic stores and restaurants
- Quite a cosmopolitan population, for a small Midwest town
- Four proper seasons — warm summers, cold-but-not-frigid winters with lots of snow, and glorious spring / fall weather
- Decent gun laws, and more importantly, local county sheriffs who have the right ideas about the Second Amendment
- Nice airport, with short hops to Chicago (for dinners, shows etc.)
- Short drive over to Canada, where I can buy cheap prescription drugs / drink coffee at Tim Horton’s
All that said, I was last there several years ago, so if any of you are locals / near-locals, feel free to educate me if the place is going / has gone down the shitter.
Old-Age Heroes
I have spoken of elderly zillionaire Duncan Bannatyne and his late-30s wife Nigora [sic] before, and I maintain that if a rich guy wants a sexy young wife, he should be able to buy one.
So it should come as little surprise that I should exult when he celebrates his age at a birthday party with a Roman theme:
But that’s not the only reason to rejoice. Because if one old guy can do it, so can another — and at the same party withal. Here’s Olde Pharte zillionaire John Caudwell showing up for the festivities, also in Roman duds:
…and he’s wearing the knee brace not because he slipped in the shower, but because of a skiing accident (DUDE!!!!!).
But it’s the pic of the two geriatric Lotharios with their not-so-blushing brides which takes the golden banana:
Here’s another look at Caudwell’s squeeze, the wonderfully-named Modesta Vzesniauskaite (35):
Why do I love situations like this so much?
Because it drives Teh Feministicals (most of whom are terminally ugly) batshit crazier.
Regrettable
Isla Fisher (the Amy Adams lookalike) has several strikes going against her, despite being a total hottie:
The strikes are:
- She’s Australian
- She married that asswipe provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen
- She’s an actress
…and now she’s dyed her gorgeous red hair blonde, thus making herself look like just another dockside totty:
Next up: multiple body piercings and facial tattoos, no doubt. And let’s not leave out gender reassignment, for the Trifecta Of Trendy.
Snowflake Warnings
One of my most treasured memories is watching the late Frank Zappa tearing into that foul scold Tipper Gore during Congressional hearings. Gore, you may remember, thought that rock music lyrics were eeeevil and caused kids to become mass murderers or Satanists or something, and Zappa just took her precious little thesis and trashed it with a wonderful mixture of scorn, opprobrium and educated analysis of her silly, nonsensical fears and creeping Puritanism.
I was taken back to those good times when reading this piece of utter bullshit:
Old favorites, outdated attitudes: Can entertainment expire?
They exist throughout society’s pop-culture canon, from movies to TV to music and beyond: pieces of work that have withstood time’s passage but that contain actions, words and depictions about race, gender and sexual orientation that we now find questionable at best.
Whether it’s blackface minstrel routines from Bing Crosby’s “Holiday Inn,” Apu’s accent in “The Simpsons,” bullying scenes in “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the arguably rapey coercion of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and “Sixteen Candles” or the simplistically clunky gender interactions of “Mr. Mom,” Americans have amassed a catalog of entertainment across the decades that now raises a series of contentious but never-more-relevant questions:
What, exactly, do we do with this stuff today? Do we simply discard it? Give it a free pass as the product of a less-enlightened age? Or is there some way to both acknowledge its value yet still view it with a more critical eye?
I have a better idea. Treat it all as entertainment. And in the manner of Tipper Gore and her ilk, feel free to pepper the covers with all sorts of “parental advisories” or better still, my favorite all-purpose warning that one’s childish sensibilities may be offended by the contents thereof (number to increase with the frightfulness of the content):
At least a “10-” warning will announce that I’m about to really enjoy myself.
But for the love of Jupiter’s throbbing headache, leave the classics alone for us grownups to enjoy for the fabulous bits of entertainment they are. Frankly, there’s absolutely fuck-all about the classics which should frighten anyone, whether it’s Mark Twain using the word “nigger” so freely in Huckleberry Finn (which novel, lest we forget, did more to change attitudes about race than a dozen Jesse Jacksons) or Gary Cooper taking Claudette Colbert in hand in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938):
At the end of the brilliant movie Thank You For Smoking (2006), there’s a scene where the foul Senator protagonist talks about going back into all the classic movies and digitally removing all traces of smoking, thereby “improving” them. The man’s unctuous smugness coupled with his utter conviction is so creepy it makes your skin crawl.
And that’s what these pricks are talking about now. And make no mistake, there’s absolutely no end to it. If a treasured classic like Baby, It’s Cold Outside can be interpreted to containing “rapey coercion”, then let me assure you all of one thing: nothing is safe.
I have a simple solution to this nonsense: every time some asshole indulges in some censorship dream like the above, the nearest person should horsewhip them. Literally. They get “triggered” by the suggestion of stalking in The Police’s Every Breath You Take ? Well, I get triggered by their wanting to change the whole fucking world to accommodate their tender sensibilities.
Just remember: this wonderful, sexy scene in Tom Jones is one day going to disappear forever because some fucking vegan got triggered.
I am getting so sick of people trying to tell me what I should or should not do, or what I may or may not eat, or what entertainment I may or may not enjoy, that there may well come a time when you’ll read about some snowflake getting flogged for trying to bowdlerize the lyrics of Run For Your Life.
And the flogger’s name will be mine. Which reminds me: I need to oil the old sjambok, just in case.
