Category Archives: General

Tucker Carlson…

It was revealed today that Tucker Carlson, one of the more outrageous Fox “News” Hosts, has been fired. One assumes this is in part a result of the Dominion vs. Fox lawsuit which was settled for $787 million plus dollars.

I’ll give him this much credit: He’s been in the “news” business for a hell of a long time now. I first became aware of him when he was at CNN and one of the co-hosts of Crossfire, a left vs. right show which effectively cancelled the moment after John Stewart came on and called both hosts -and their left vs. right bullshit- out…

I don’t recall seeing all that much of Tucker for a while… that is, until he showed up at Fox “News” Network and over time became their #1 host. His show, even to the end, was very highly rated and his subject matters and his “take” on issues was… well, I’ll be kind and say it wasn’t for me.

On Friday of last week, April 21st, Tucker ended his show with a “We’ll see you Monday” type of statement (forgive me I don’t have the energy to look up an actual clip of his sign off) so it seemed even three days ago there was no indication he was about to be booted from the cable network.

But booted he was and today the revelation that he would not be back and that he wouldn’t even be afforded a “goodbye” episode to thank people for listening to his crap.

He’ll likely go to some other format that will take him and, likely, he’ll do decently. But I suspect his voice won’t be quite as amplified as it was on Fox. After all, there was a time Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly were top hosts on the network and the moment both were canned, you barely hear about them (I had to actually look up O’Reilly… his name had totally escaped me!).

Life goes on.

More pleasantly, I feel.

Still here….!

Ok, been another while since I last posted.

In that time, news came over that Al Jaffee had passed away at the age of 102…

Those familiar with Mad Magazine no doubt are familiar with that name. Mr. Jaffee had a very long career with the magazine and will likely be best remembered for his “Fold-Ins”, often found at the end of the magazine and which involved the reader folding in the final page and creating a new, humorous image. A before and after example:

He was a master of the comic book form and did other very humorous features for Mad Magazine and lived a very long and productive life.

I hope everyone has as long and productive life as he has!

*****

In other, far more depressing news, we seem to be having more and more shootings in this country and… I wonder when this will finally resonate with certain members of the Republican party.

Instead, they seem to be focused on “woke beer”. I wish I was kidding. Below is a couple of pictures taken from a YouTube video posted by illustrious musician Kid Rock wherein he mows down the ghastly beer and… sigh…

See, TikToker and trans activist Dylan Mulvaney became a source of controversy in the right-wing sphere when Bud Light announced she would be their latest spokesperson… or something.

Honestly, until this whole tempest in a teapot, I didn’t know Dylan Mulvaney. Here she is with the beer in question…

Seriously, that’s the reason to get all bent?

Sheesh.

Let me also say, for the record, that while I don’t consider myself a prude, I’m not into alcoholic beverages. I’ve tried plenty of different ones over my life but they don’t do much for me. If I’m honest, I don’t like the taste of beer at all, though I have found it can add a pleasant taste to some cooked meals.

Anyway, I suppose for those on the right it’s another reason to get incensed over something that in the long run doesn’t matter all that much at all.

But don’t worry.

Give it a week or so and they’ll find some fresh new hell to get worked up about.

*****

There have been plenty of other things going on, big and small, but I’ll conclude with this: The disastrous box office of Shazam! Fury of the Gods.

The sequel to the successful 2019 Shazam! film, there was a feeling this film simply didn’t have all that much demand. Early projections were very low and when the film was eventually released only three weeks ago, those projections proved accurate.

The film, which this week has become available to purchase digitally, likely won’t quite reach $60 million in the domestic box office.

What in the world happened?

The movie’s rottentomatoes.com ratings weren’t terrible. While professional critics to date offer a dead mediocre 50% positive rating on the movie, audiences were much kinder with a 86% positive.

Which made one wonder: With the also lackluster (but better) box office of Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, is it possible the whole superhero genre may be running out of gas?

It’s certainly possible, though word of mouth for Ant-Man was far more negative, I thought, than Shazam! The problem with Shazam! appeared to be that no one seemed to really care to see the film. Perhaps this has something to do with audiences feeling little need to see the “old” DC movies and having more anticipation for the new films James Gunn is producing.

I don’t know.

In time I suppose we’ll see.

The indictment…

It was, I felt, bound to happen eventually.

Oh, and yeah, POLITICS FOLLOW… BEWARE…!

Donald Trump, former President of the United States, yesterday was indicted by a New York grand jury.

While we don’t know the exact details of the indictment, we do know it revolves around hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, whom Trump supposedly had an affair with and which needed to be covered up during his run up to the previous election. (You can read more details about what is known about the indictment in this article by Devon Kale and presented on CNN.com).

While there are those in Trump’s camp and the Republican party who are today bemoaning this indictment as an abuse of power or some dark attempt at revenge from the “vicious” liberal cabal out there, the reality is that this is the culmination of years of perhaps too careful investigation and deference to Donald Trump.

The roots of this case go back years and Trump’s one-time chief lawyer, Michael Cohen, was found guilty of aiding in this cover up/use of hush money and served time for this crime.

Mr. Cohen would eventually turn on Trump and the irony of this entire situation is that it appears that had Trump paid off Stormy Daniels from a personal account to keep her “quiet” during the presidential election of 2016, none of this would have unfolded as it did.

My understanding of the situation -and I will readily admit to not being a lawyer… or playing one on TV- is that Trump tried to hide the payoff by having Mr. Cohen pay Stormy Daniels then reimbursing said payoff through the presidential campaign funds, which is a no-no.

But I suspect this indictment has more teeth than just this one payoff, if we are to believe the early reports that there may be over 30 alleged crimes listed in the indictment.

Here’s the thing, though: This is very likely only the first of several possible indictments Trump will very likely face in the near future.

Others far more invested in this than I have noted the hush money/Stormy Daniels affair isn’t nearly as “serious” as Trump’s attempts to subvert the election of 2020 or his hand in the January 6th storming of the Capitol or the discovery of Top Secret files at his Mar a Largo residence.

All three of these issues are currently in the hands of various prosecutors and it would not shock me if we start to see more indictments pop up in the coming months… if not earlier.

Which leads us to the upcoming presidential election.

You have Joe Biden already announcing, for all intents and purposes, his desire to seek re-election and, on the Republican side, it appears that Donald Trump is the favorite to be the candidate there.

Which must be making Republicans really nervous.

If more indictments pop up, at what point will Trump’s candidacy be viewed as fatally damaged? So far, the only candidate that seems to get any press outside of Donald Trump is Florida’s current governor Ron DeSantis and, though it hurts to admit I’m a Floridian, I feel like his fan base is very shallow and limited.

He may do reasonably well in my home state (another painful admission) but I wonder if his appeal extends anywhere past the state’s borders. Recent polls seem to attest to that…

Fox poll shows Trump’s lead over DeSantis growing

According to the above article:

Trump was the top pick for 54 percent of respondents, who were asked to choose from a list of potential 2024 Republican presidential nominees. DeSantis — who has yet to declare his candidacy, though he is widely expected to — came in as a distant second pick, with 24 percent of the vote. It’s a slight drop in support for the Florida governor, who nabbed 28 percent to Trump’s 43 percent in a Fox poll conducted late last month.

We’re still very early in the whole process but I’m old enough to remember other Governors who seemed strong possibilities to represent either the Democratic or Republican parties and their campaigns fizzled when they moved outside the borders of their state.

So too it might be with DeSantis.

I will say this much: If Trump does once again become the Republican candidate, I envision Biden beating him and likely more handily than before. If DeSantis becomes the candidate, I suspect it will be the same.

Why?

Perhaps I’m very off but it feels like the Republican “brand” has become very bruised -if not outright poisoned- by the events of the last near decade. We’ve lived through Trump’s candidacy and presidency, the events of January 6th, the conservative Supreme Court and its striking of Roe v Wade, the lack of any serious policy that people seem to stand by (notice how the term “woke” has become a catch all phrase to signify… what exactly?!), and figures -especially in the House of Representatives- that are either silly or scary or inept in equal measures.

We see in the Republicans a party that seems to not offer much except near constant hate and division. There are those that feed off those emotions but for others, it becomes nothing less than a drag.

So here we stand, with Trump perhaps finally facing what he’s avoided all his life: Responsibility for his words and actions.

What will come of it?

Stay tuned.

Scott Adams…

…oh my.

I couldn’t tell you the first time I read a Dilbert comic strip. I can tell you that I quickly grew to love them back then, likely in the 1990’s or early 2000’s and before the internet swallowed up any need for me to still purchase newspapers.

I probably have a collection book or two somewhere of Dilbert strips. I liked the characters. I enjoyed the witty and bewildering look at being an office drone. Writing such humorous things takes quite a bit of skill and making it look “easy” takes even more. Having enough material to continue doing the strip for some 30 years? That takes genius.

But it doesn’t mean one is smart.

Back in the 1940’s and through 1977, Al Capp was renowned for his Li’l Abner comic strip…

Though known to espouse certain liberal causes, Mr. Capp would, by the late 60’s and into the 1970’s, become very conservative in his ideologies. He would end his career in controversy, accused by multiple women of sexual harassment, including a 19 year old Goldie Hawn.

And so we have Scott Adams who, with the rise of Donald Trump years ago, started to espouse a sharp right wing philosophy as well. There’s nothing wrong with espousing certain right wing ideologies, I feel, but there does come a point where they can slip a person into unforgivable areas.

Don’t take my word for it. You can go to YouTube.com and see the entirety of Mr. Adams’ video (it runs nearly an hour long) but here you get a smaller length clip that explores what has exactly happened since the video, and shows what got him into hot water to begin with…

The bottom line is that newspapers no longer want to carry Mr. Adams’ Dilbert and… I can’t blame them. I don’t know what goes through the mind of some creators. As I mentioned, Al Capp had his issues… and they may well have been even worse than those in which Mr. Adams currently falls into.

I’m familiar with and could mention other creators who have also espoused strange, perhaps even bizarre ideals and philosophies. The difference seems to be that today these things can be recorded, whether by others or by the person themselves, and posted with seemingly no awareness of how bad saying certain things may make them look.

Mr. Adams, if he was smart, has a nice nest egg thanks to his Dilbert strip. Based on the reactions thus far, he may need it because his strip may not exist for too much longer.

And, ultimately, he will have no one to blame for his misfortunes but himself.

Superbowl LVII

Personally, I found it an entertaining game.

There was plenty of drama and, you have to give it to the Kansas City Chiefs, they looked at halftime and after QB Patrick Mahomes reinjured his leg… that they might be done.

But Mahomes wasn’t about to let that happen and further credit where its due, their coach, Andy Reid, made some adjustments and eventually the Chiefs prevailed, 38-35.

There was controversy toward the very end on a holding call that might have been a little weak but that seems to be par for the course nowadays.

The commercials were mostly …ok… I guess, nothing that I found terribly memorable. What was intriguing, at least to me, was that almost all the car commercials (unless I’m misremembering) were focused on electric vehicles. I believe there was one commercial for a SUV (Hyndai?!) that was an ICE vehicle but otherwise the focus seemed to be on electric.

There were movie trailers as well and I must say of all of them, this is the one that most impressed me…

For a film that I wondered if it would ever get made to one whose main actor, Ezra Miller, has had some incredible troubles (to his credit he’s been out of the news for a while now, but I’m sure they will be dealt with either in court or through other means and may well preclude any future Flash projects), I didn’t think I’d have such a positive reaction to the movie’s trailer.

Frankly, it looks like the movie’s makers really went at it. The trailer gives off some seriously fun vibes and visuals to die for.

And Michael Keaton back as Batman?!

Yeah, I’m there.

Of course, it is a trailer and there have been trailers which made a film look far better than what it turned out to be…

I remain, however, cautiously optimistic!

Turkey…

For the past two years, it has felt like I’m locked into a version of the movie Groundhog Day.

I truly hate bringing it up (a la Groundhog Day, no?) but back in June of 2021, nearing two years now, I lost my parents in the collapse of Champlain Towers South.

Since then and in one way or another, this has been one of the major focuses of my day to day life, each day of the week, each week of the month, and now going on a little over a year.

The sadness is but one of the elements. It’s tough to put into the words not only losing one parent, but both in such a horrendous, unexplainable manner but also having almost all their possessions being wiped out as well… as if they didn’t exist at all.

Which is why I feel so very badly for those in Turkey. My personal tragedy feels almost insignificant when I see images in the news about what’s happened in Turkey.

When it happened, and because of the proliferation of cell phones and their ability to film things, I’ve seen images of buildings coming down and…

…and it instantly brings me back to the horrors of Champlain Towers South.

I can’t watch that stuff. I shut those images/film clips whenever they pop up on my computer or phone. I simply cannot stomach seeing a structure collapse.

Not anymore.

My thoughts and sympathy goes out to those living through this tragedy.

Rust…

A little over a year ago cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot by Alec Baldwin on the set of the movie Rust.

It is my understanding they were filming a scene where Baldwin’s character aims his gun at the camera and fires. The gun Baldwin used had live ammunition in it and Ms. Hutchins, who was behind the camera, was shot and killed while the movie’s director, Joel Souza, was hit in the shoulder.

The event is an indisputable tragedy and, further, should never, never, never have happened.

It is abundantly clear someone on the movie’s staff was very careless with either checking the guns used on the set or HUGELY irresponsible in bringing live ammo there. Alec Baldwin was handed a gun that obviously did not have blanks in it and therefore the tragedy happened.

Yesterday, prosecutors decided to charge Alec Baldwin and Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the movie’s armorer, with involuntary manslaughter.

Though I don’t know the intimate details of the charges. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ guild, came out with a response to these charges against Alec Baldwin…

SAG-AFTRA Defends Alec Baldwin Over ‘Rust’ Charges, Calls Prosecutor ‘Wrong and Uninformed’ – IndieWire

They state:

The guidelines do not make it the performer’s responsibility to check any firearm. Performers train to perform, and they are not required or expected to be experts on guns or experienced in their use. The industry assigns that responsibility to qualified professionals who oversee their use and handling in every aspect. Anyone issued a firearm on set must be given training and guidance in its safe handling and use, but all activity with firearms on a set must be under the careful supervision and control of the professional armorer and the employer.

I agree with this.

However -and I could very well be wrong here- I believe Mr. Baldwin is being charged as the producer of the movie rather than the “actor” within. As a producer, he then may have some responsibility in making sure the set is safe. However, given the way credits are doled out in movies, his “producer” role may have been in name only.

The big question, unanswered to this point, is how live rounds made their way to this movie set. I suspect we may never get an answer to that.

Ms. Reed, the armorer, has stated she thought the ammunition within the gun was “dummy” rounds.

Either way, tragedy occurred and now we have charges brought forward.

I have to wonder, given today’s technology and the use of CGI effects, why any movie set has to have a “real” gun in it, even if it is watched and checked diligently.

Why, I wonder, aren’t there studios who have warehouses full of dummy guns which realistically “kick” when fired but cannot actually be loaded with real ammunition? In post-production studios can add sound effects and CGI flashes for the gunshots and at least that way everyone is far safer, no?

Who watches the watchmen?

Before I get into this, let me say: Sorry for the dearth of posts!

Sometimes it feels like I’m in some kind of acceleration chamber. My last post, made some 15 days ago shocked me. I’ve been busy, but surely I haven’t been away from here that long, have I?!

Welp, it appears I have and truthfully I find it hard to account for the lost time, even as busy as I have been.

Regardless… onwards!

So yesterday the people investigating the Supreme Court’s Alito opinion piece on Dobbs, the ruling which did away with Roe v Wade and which, IMHO, is going to have pretty severe repercussions for the next few election cycles, issued their report and they said…

…they couldn’t find who leaked Alito’s opinion. An article presented on CNN.com does a pretty good job explaining what this report stated:

Supreme Court issues report on Dobbs leak but says it hasn’t identified the leaker | CNN Politics

The bottom line from the report is that there were some 90 people interviewed and it seems like the Supreme Court’s records are kept in a rather… sloppy way and, bottom line, they couldn’t determine whodunnit.

However…

This article, also presented on CNN.com and written by Joan Biskupic, goes into how…

Supreme Court embarrassed by the opinion leak is embarrassed again | CNN Politics

The author notes that the investigation did not interview any of the Justices themselves or their spouses, a rather odd thing to do if one is bent on getting to the bottom of such things.

There are many who feel, based on examining the report and what’s gone on in this investigation, that perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts ultimately didn’t really want to know who leaked Alito’s draft.

One can speculate as to the why, but it seems somewhat obvious: It very well could have been someone quite high up, up to and including Justice Alito, Justice Thomas, or perhaps Thomas’ wife, who has -shall we be delicate here?- a seemingly very strong political agenda of her own.

I agree with the ultimate opinion of Ms. Biskupic’s article, though: By issuing this “non finding” the Supreme Court does itself no favors. If the original leak was such a huge embarrassment and a stunning breach of decorum and therefore an investigation into the source of this leak was something that had to be done…

…why hamper the investigation from the very beginning?

Mind you, I feel Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley, who conducted the investigation, likely did as well as could be done but the reality is that there are other Justice agencies it seems could have done a more thorough job… and are built to take on such cases.

And as was noted in Ms. Biskupic’s article, the final report is also damning in that it suggests the Court’s internal security is anything but, and further leaks are certainly possible.

Again: One can’t help but speculate as to whether this whole investigation might have been more of a PR move rather than a serious attempt at getting to “the truth” of the leak. One can’t help also speculate that maybe for Chief Justice Roberts, in a Supreme Court which seems to be having its share of problems, felt the need to do something for the purpose of looking like he was doing something… but may have ultimately hoped for this result.

The boat’s rocking enough without the revelation that perhaps a Supreme Court Justice -or a close confidant/spouse of one- is a leaker.

POSTSCRIPT:

Today a few more interesting opinion pieces have been published and are worth giving a read.

First up is Aredba Shah’s article from Salon.com:

Legal experts stunned SCOTUS leak investigators may not have interviewed any justices — or spouses | Salon.com

This article points out the fact that bothers many regarding this investigation: It seems like from the onset it was given certain parameters, including not talking to or interviewing any of the Justices or their spouses, which seems wrong considering the supposed “egregious” nature of this lead.

There is at least one really fascinating tweet referred to in this article and its by Elie Mystal, The Nation’s legal analyst:

I told everybody, from the very beginning, that if the Dobbs leaker turned out to be a Republican, the Supreme Court would somehow never find who did it. Welp, the report’s out and, what do you know, they don’t know who did it.

Yikes.

A second interesting article is by Katherine Fung and presented at Newsweek…

Supreme Court Report Sparks Suspicions About Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito (newsweek.com)

What I’m noticing from many of these articles is that the initial line of suspicion, that perhaps a more liberal minded clerk had possibly leaked the Alito Dobbs decision, seems to be less and less likely.

Sadly, that means that the Supreme Court and its conservative majority is looking increasingly like it has decided to “move on” from this because, let’s be clear here: They kinda know it was either a conservative clerk or someone much higher up responsible for this but simply don’t want to let things get messier than they are.

As I said before…

Yikes.

Hope everyone out there…

…has had a terrific holiday!

It’s been incredibly busy time for me, as should be obvious by the dearth of posts, what with visiting family and having my daughter over but now things are coming back to normal.

I’m deep into my next novel and have another project that likely will be started this year. I don’t want to say too much about it but it’s something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while with a very talented individual I’ve known for many years now.

Let’s see what happens!

On the road to normalcy…?

As we come closer to the end of 2022, it occurs to me this past year seems to have been the year when the COVID pandemic became less serious than before.

In large part, I suspect, is the amount of vaccines people have taken. As of October and according to bloomberg.com, 12.7 billion shots have been given to date worldwide. The same article notes 613 million doses have been distributed in the United States alone.

There’s also the fact that, unlike the early years of COVID, we now have a better understanding of treatments for those who are infected versus when precious little was known.

Nowadays, it is rare to see people with masks on in stores or out and about in general. I’ve had four shots, the two initial shots and two booster shots to date. I may have caught COVID during the very first wave of the pandemic and before we in the United States even knew it was here. We’re talking about very late January or early February of 2020.

My father, it turned out, caught COVID but didn’t know it… and why would he when it wasn’t yet thought to be in the U.S.? Anyway, people around him also got sick and that included me, though my illness was incredibly mild and amounted to feeling really fatigued. It wouldn’t be until nearly a year later when going to a yearly checkup that blood samples revealed he had COVID antibodies in his system and the only time he was sick was back then in early 2020.

Anyhow, by March of 2020 it was official that COVID was in the U.S. and it seemed the country and the world was in an upheaval.

And as I said above, it now appears the wave, now nearly three years later, has crested.

That’s not to say everything is what is was before. There are high rates of respiratory illnesses appearing in children and there are still those who are catching COVID. Hospitals, too, are seeing an influx of patients but, again, it seems like maybe the worst of it is over.

So are we approaching some return to normalcy?

I don’t think so. Not yet anyway.

I’m a big fan of movies but it seems like the movie industry in particular has taken some serious body shots from not only COVID but the internet and streaming services and I seriously wonder if it will every go back to what it was before.

When the COVID lockdowns began in earnest, there were several films the movie studios had hoped to release but were forced to hold back. Once they were released, it seemed like it was either too early or they wound up going to streaming and… I don’t know how “well” they did that way.

The bigger ones seem to be Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, Wonder Woman 84, and the last Daniel Craig Bond film, No Time To Die. Regardless of what one feels about these three films, and there were those who didn’t like them, they seemed to come and go and I can’t help but feel they didn’t do all that well at the box office.

Since then, there have been movies that have done extremely well. Top Gun: Maverick, for example, has been a box office juggernaut. The latest Spider-Man film also did very well. But they seem to be exceptions rather than the norm.

The streaming services from the various movie studios tried to step in where movie theaters were unable to and certain movies were released “simultaneously” in theaters and streaming or, in other cases, very shortly after the theatrical release and this, I feel, might have created unintended consequences.

Why bother going to a movie theater, especially during the time when doing so might be somewhat risky, when you can simply watch the same film in your home and via streaming?

In the past, when we had crappy television sets, there was a clear visual advantage to seeing films in theaters. Nowadays, with new technology and genuinely massive television screens available showing films in Ultra HD, there is less and less difference watching at home versus in theaters.

The purchase of Warner Brothers has also resulted in some really concerning news. Of course there was the infamous “cancellation” of several features, including the all but complete Batgirl film, and one wonders if maybe the new company might be having some genuine financial difficulties.

James Gunn, director of Guardian of the Galaxy and the second Suicide Squad film, has been put in charge of the DC comic book character properties and reportedly they are coming up with some kind of multi-year plan for the release of features more akin to what Marvel did in its early phases.

…but…

I can’t help wonder if maybe at this point the whole superhero genre is dangerously close to being done.

Mind you, box office receipts would say otherwise but even the many Marvel properties released of late don’t seem to be garnering the enthusiasm of before, even if they do still seem to be box-office gold. I suppose, in the end, if they keep making a profit they will continue being made but where before you hardly heard anyone say anything negative about the Marvel features, now you have many people noting they don’t feel these newer works are all that special.

I’m no psychic so I don’t know how things will turn out. Perhaps the movie industry will dust itself off and get back on its proverbial feet and we’ll once again look forward to new releases like before.

And as the movie industry goes, perhaps so too will the rest of our lives. The pandemic sure does feel like it is slowly fading from our lives versus what we faced before.

Can a new normalcy return?