Because for a couple more days, until the cement fully cures, I can't go gnaw on ribs — and then, the only worthwhile barbecue place around here will be closed for the day. So, now that the anesthetic has worn off and I have a convenient excuse for grouchiness (like I really need one):
- So H'wood is getting a holy slap this year, eh? Meanwhile, a bunch of arrogant undereducated narcissists are fighting to control Disney with no clear idea of how to make its financial results better. How's this for an idea: You can't serve everyone if you only serve the lowest common denominator, which is precisely what each of the major "Disney divisions" have done since, oh, the beginning of time (usually defined as "went public"); can you imagine being a fly on the wall at a preproduction meeting for a remake of Fantasia?
- A successful, non-career-oriented meeting like that would require competence in both math and reading (not to mention having actually read something outside said producers' safe zone). That's highly unlikely: You can take a teenaged mogul to the classroom, but you can't make him think, regardless of gender identity/fluidity/meaning. Or, on the evidence of what H'wood churns out, grow up (ever).
Which leads back to the problem with Ms Hyde's piece from the preceding sausage: She's not old enough to have been through the same process in 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1982; those four winners are essentially unwatchable dreck, and didn't belong on the same ballot as multiple other nominees each year. Not to mention other, even-more-worthy films that were shut out because they didn't appeal to the excrutiatingly whitebread (not even sourdough!) tastemakers of the time.
- Meanwhile, about half a century too late for me, libraries are becoming a hangout for kewl kids. Now, if they'll actually sit down and read something, for like the rest of their lives, maybe the lowest common denominator will no longer lead to a divide-by-zero error. They might even learn that they're wealthy (very much like in one of pro-socialism Orwell's letters in which he proposed proportionately limiting personal wealth to a degree that had never been achieved since the Domesday Book; was roundly criticized retrospectively in when those letters were published in the 1970s for ignorance and embracing inequality; and sort of got his "wish" around 2017 or so).
- And yet further meanwhile, the Department of Silly Self-Contradictory Spicings is serving up these mini-cocktail weenies:
- The tasty/reputation question of who invented butter chicken is due to be decided by a court in India. The decision will probably be a monument to bad taste, Westernized values in some distorted version of "intellectual property," and be just as definitive and helpful to potential diners as determining the true origin of chicken tikka masala (and believe me, that fight isn't over).
- The imponderable irony of Ring no longer cooperating with
Sarumanpolice warrantless video requests. But the Eye will still be there — just for data brokers, not cops. - Sometimes one has to stretch a bit to label a political candidate as "woke" and therefore unacceptable to the right-wing powerbrokers… in Iran. Why, oh why, does this remind me of GOP politics?
- Nothing under my signature will be at issue because a decade prior to DADT I had other priorities — like wrestling with repercussions of nonconsensual heterosexual conduct as teh wimmin were being brought into the military — that led me to essentially ignore ¶ 5–26(h) (the predecessor of DADT). I had no time or energy for witch hunts.
- Or we could just time-warp back to a century and a half ago, and see wealthy white powerbrokers being bigots and fomenting a secession movement — slavery then, marginally less overt national-origin-of-parents eugenics now. That statue in New York's harbor says that we welcome cheap immigrant labor, and these anti-immigrant fools — themselves descendants of immigrants — forget that the labor models taught in MBA and entrepreneurship courses demand minimizing labor expenses… It's still eugenics however cloaked in different labels: Three generations of willful ignorance is enough!