A broken blog

Huh.  If I am not mistaken, Sinclair Davidson's Ship for Old (and occasionally middle aged) Fools (Catallaxy) is broken.  It hasn't worked completely right for many weeks, actually.  

In any event, it's become pretty much unreadable since COVID struck - full of rage against Dan Andrews, continual denial of the seriousness of the disease, the most grovelling Trump admiration, and even internal fighting over whether some of the most hysterical commenters have really gone too hysterical this time.   Not to mention one younger nut who posts about his personal involvement in the "resistance" to the Victorian lockdown, but sounds half the time like he's on cocaine.   Didn't some anti lockdown protesters get arrested yesterday?  With any luck, he will be among them.

Sinclair doesn't make many appearances anymore so I don't get much fun from attacking his dubious takes.   The site now looks more like it's "CL and Friends", and the circle of commenters is narrower and more boring than ever.  I don't even read the posts by the other cranky, anonymous posters - they all sound like grey haired male retirees with too much time on their hands.  

So, the entertainment value is way down.

Donald will be annoyed

Viewing numbers for the American political conventions shouldn't matter much either way, except when you can take pleasure in knowing that the Narcissist in Chief will be telling his minions he doesn't want to see headlines like this again:

Democrats beat Republicans in first-night convention TV audience

Travel wishes

I have decided that Portugal seems well worth visiting.  I saw some ponderous young Vlogger on Youtube call it the most underrated country he has been to, but also Richard Ayoade's visit to Porto on Travel Man sparked my interest.

I also want to go to Norway, but that's a more long standing wish.  I should look up travel vloggers' trips through there on Youtube, too.

On calories

You know, it seems to me that Twisties (cheese flavour) have a lot more calories in them than the weight would suggest.  

Maybe it's in the cheese powder? 

Which has made me realise - how do they make cheese powder?   Here's an article in the New Yorker (of all places) about that.   It includes this bit of history:

While Marco Polo reportedly encountered a type of powdered milk in thirteenth-century Mongolia, and the first patent for commercial spray-drying was awarded to Samuel Percy in 1872, the first industrial spray-dried dairy products weren’t manufactured until shortly after Kraft’s development of processed cheese in the nineteen-twenties, according to “Food Powders: Physical Properties, Processing, and Functionality.”

Huh.

 

Uncle Roger power move

The most recent "Uncle Roger" bits on Youtube aren't really going anywhere much, but I'm still watching.  This amused me on Twitter, though, from some random person talking Chinese uncles:

Even unhappier than I knew

I see that it was waaaay back in 2011 that I posted about an interview in which the normally happy looking comedian Alan Davies explained that he had in fact been in psychotherapy for years as a result of an unhappy childhood, with the main problem being that his Mum died when he was 6, and his controlling father kept him from saying "goodbye", and the funeral, or even the grave. 

Now, it turns out, he says he was sexually assaulted by his Dad, who is still alive but with dementia.

I'm a bit surprised by this, because I have watched on TV some of a stand up show he was doing (as usual, I didn't like it much), and he did reference some boys at his boarding school and their enthusiasm for, um, demonstrative masturbation.  I find this a little hard to imagine in an Australian context, but yes, this is in England, where "boarding school" and "sexually inappropriate behaviour" go together in what seems to be a peculiarly national tradition.  So it's a bit  odd to me that he would be getting laughs out of that when sexually abused at home.   Not saying it didn't happen, just surprised.


But anyway, once again I ask:  what percentage of comedians actually come from a happy family background, no great disasters in personal relationships, and no addiction or bouts of depression?  Seems like it must like 2 or 3% of them.   (Jerry Seinfeld being the stellar example of "nope, everything's been pretty good for me, really.")

PS:  while I am having a day of just saying what I do and don't like - have I mentioned before that I can't stand English comedian Jimmy Carr, who turns up on SBS ads for his unfunny panel show all the time?   Don't find him funny, or likeable, at all.  


*  not referencing a technique.

Speaking of movies I didn't care for...

I don't think I have mentioned, sometime over the last year or so, having watched the American re-make of the Japanese ghost/curse story The Ring.   It was just OK-ish, my son and I thought; but we both found The Grudge (the English remake, but still set in Japan) much scarier.

Anyway, I saw on Google Play that the original Japanese Ring, or Ringu, was available, and thinking that the trailer looked sufficiently creepy, we decided to watch it.  

It was, shall we say, underwhelming.  At first, it was close to the American re-make, but then it veered off somewhat.   But it's really surprising watching a movie regarded (according to reviews) as being "the most disturbing since The Exorcist" and not being very scared at all. The creepy factor in some movies seems to really diminish quickly over time.

As it happens, I have never watched all of The Exorcist, but from bits I have seen, quite some time ago now, I have warned my son that it almost certainly looks more silly now than disturbing.  

Anyway, back to Japanese ghosts:  Netflix has recently put up a series from Japan (Ju-On Origns) which is the backstory to The Grudge movie.  Looks like the same house.   Oddly, though, it is only 30 minutes an episode, which is barely enough to get a good scare going.   We watched the first episode last night, and I thought it was worth continuing with.  Yet it has had some very bad reviews, and some good ones.  It was pretty dark in the first episode:  it apparently gets much worse.

I guess I will stick with it, for now...

An unpopular opinion

I don't care a bit for Shawshank Redemption.  Must be the Stephen King origin.

This movie routinely comes up in people's list of favourite, or feel good, or inspiring movies.

I can't remember when I watched it (it wasn't at the cinema), but it left nearly no imprint at all on my memory except for thinking at the time "why do so many people think this is so good?"

Just wanted to put that out there, for no particular reason.

Why is Sunrise so Right wing now?

I don't pay all that much attention to Sunrise, although I do usually see/hear about 20 mins of it between 6.30 and 7am.

What I want to know is this:  why has the show gone so thoroughly populist Rght wing?   The guest commentators I have seen a lot of in the last few months are social-conservative-failure-in-his-own-life Barnaby Joyce, now-hates-every-single-person-in-the-Labor-Party and Pauline-Hanson-sycophant Mark Latham, ex rampaging Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett, and from the purported Left, but wants to be part of the Right, Joel Fitzgibbon.

Sure, they dumped Pauline Hanson herself but Latham is there anyway.

This is the show that popularised Kevin Rudd to the Prime Ministership (another bad political call on their part, I reckon.)   Now we have Samantha Armytage (well, actually, I see that she is taking time off due to illness, apparently) who seems to me to very snidely Right wing populist in most of her quips. 

The internal dynamics between producers and hosts on that show would be good to know.

Never did trust Sailer

The deep state, QAnon administration

What an appalling administration:

Senior health officials in the Trump administration were taken aback last Monday when the president's trade adviser, Peter Navarro, accused them of being part of the "Deep State" during a meeting that was supposed to be about COVID-19 and the Strategic National Stockpile.

Why it matters: Five days after Navarro's private comments toward the FDA, the president echoed Navarro's sentiments with a pair of Saturday morning tweets and tagged Stephen Hahn, the head of the Food and Drug Administration.

• "The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics," the president tweeted. "Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!"
• Trump then attacked the FDA for revoking its emergency use authorization "of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for treating COVID-19 amid growing evidence that the drugs are 'unlikely to be effective' in treating the coronavirus."

Yet more reason to visit Singapore

The most surprising thing I saw on CNA on the weekend:  in Singapore, a man has a shop that sells ants for hobbyists:



"Just Ants" is the name of the shop. 

I used to enjoy brief stints of ant keeping as a child, but never knew how to get a queen.  If only I was a child in Singapore, now.

So, not a bad week for the Democrats...

Seems most mainstream commentary gives Biden's acceptance speech the thumbs up;  there were notable other highlights (none of which I have got around to watching yet);  we are going to get to see if Steve Bannon's visage deteriorates even further when he is in prison with no access to skincare  products.   (Or do we learn the secret of his homeless bum looks is that he has always used whatever the American equivalent of a bar of Solvol might be for his morning facewash?) 

All in all, not a bad week for the Democrats and the hope of putting the country back on some sort of more even keel.

Mind you, the real scandal should be that there is still, probably, support for Trump in the 40 something percent range.

And the scandal about that should be that no one is talking seriously about how to undo the Right wing media information bubble that has led  the Right to gas-lit itself into such idiocy that they would defend an outright authoritarian, corrupt, intensely dumb President because he's their authoritarian, corrupt, intensely dumb man who (they think) "owns the libs".  

The US is going to have to do something about that if they want to have hopes of pulling back from a the artificial and poisonous reality maybe a full third is fully living in, with another 15% or so half way in.

It is utterly, utterly ludicrous that Right wing culture war spivs are trying the "no, you're the ones dividing us" line in light of the appalling content of the Trump campaign, the likes of which the press - and any serious pundit - should never have helped "normalise" by not calling it out at the time.

How is Murdoch playing this one?

So, Fox News is running interviews now in which the latest White House spokes-liar is throwing out the quasi-deniability line for Trump re QAnon, while running on the split screen the actual beliefs of QAnon:

Is this an attempt by Fox News to message to Trump that, no, it would be best if he did actually disavow QAnon?   Or an attempt to gain more Trump base following for QAnon - because, let's face it, brainwashing the disenchanted-with-life-white-elderly is the raison d'etre for the network, and why stop at things like "Russiagate is a hoax"?

What will pathetic Trump Cultists like puzzled dog face Tucker Carlson and smarmlord Sean Hanitty do about this tricky problem?   Keep pushing that of course their ticket to riches doesn't know what QAnon is about, despite other parts of the network running stories like the above?

Time will tell.

 

New age category needed

I have a numerically significant birthday looming, and as I was saying to my daughter recently, I'm not happy with current age categories.

I think we can all agree that adolescence virtually extends to 25 now;  youth probably covers up to almost 35, maybe 40?   "Middle aged" is probably firmly set as 40 (or 45?) to 60.

But here's my key complaint:  what do you use for (say) 60 to 75?

"Old" probably starts at 75; maybe 80.   But there seems a serious gap in naming categories between 60 to 75.

"Seniors" benefits start being talked about from 55.   But the problem is, it extends from there to 115.  

I don't know - you would think those so keen on identity politics would spend more time on this issue.  :)