Absolutely Fabulous, Season two, Episode five, “New Best Friend”.
SO, I am at that age when many of my friends think they can change their whole lives by trading in their cluttered apartments and houses for spare, modernist lofts. Their difficult, incomprehensible lives will somehow be streamlined and managed by stripping it all down. Oh how the weight of things holds us down, how it keeps us from happiness, and from succeeding! When we live, travel, work, explore, fall in and out of love, have things grow and die, we pick up these things along the way: it’s terrible, this detritus of our lives. This trash is putting enormous unseen pressures on us, imposing on us a sense of constant acceleration, of incoherence, of the imminent obsolescence of the individual. In short, History itself is a weight that we have to try to climb out from under.
Good thing it’s a NEW YEAR and we are in the eternal return of the common hostility to “clutter”, the collective paroxysm of guilt and anxiety about our “stuff,” the tyranny of the tidy. Books called things like Spark Joy! An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up or “The Life-Changing Magic of Japanese Art of Pants Folding”. Are shoved up our asses, inciting guilt and shame at our messy, undignified lives. Magazines offer formulas for how to rid yourself of your evil stuff (most of which involve buying new stuff). Entire companies have been built around the propaganda of divestment, on the backs of a neurosis that makes us believe that the process of shedding is necessary and complicated to the point of paralyzing.
My 2016 Guide to DeCluttering
One of the many assertions of stupid science is one that many of your otherwise reasonable, intelligent friends and co-workers are guilty of. I am talking about the banal assertion that antibiotics treat viruses.
For years, public health experts have been begging people to stop taking antibiotics for a fucking cold. Listen to me: Antibiotics treat bacterial infections. Colds and flu are caused by viruses. So shaking down your doctor for antibiotics for your cold, your bronchitis, sinusitis or your viral pneumonia. is an entirely futile and dangerous exercise. The more you gobble those antibiotics, the more you increase your chance of developing antibiotic-resistant bacteria…. Superbugs. Superbugs are a huge public health threat around the world, that is going to kill millions of humans in the next decade. And that is not only going to hurt you, you moron who doesn’t understand the simple science of bacterial. but me, and everyone else.
Viruses are as different from bacteria as frogs are from labradoodles.
“Why is it that the federal government owns 47% of western states, in our country?”
(Why come this was never really an issue until that colored fella occupied the white house)?
1. The Federal government is US – We, the People. The Federal government is of, by, and for the people. So “we” own it. The Federal government, despite the best efforts of Regressives, reactionaires and assorted (or just sordid) revanchists, is not a foreign corporation or other entity separate and distinct from ourselves.
2. In 1818 when Monroe signed the Treaty with Great Britain that created the Oregon Territory, all this land belonged to the Native Americans living on it.The only people who had land taken away by the Federal Government were those indians. Period, full stop. Not some rancher who bought property adjoining Federal Land who thinks that makes it his to burn down out of spite. If the Feds ever relinquish ownership of any of it, it shouldn’t be to ranchers, it should be to the Native Americans the original “owners” stole it from. Where you stooges get the idea you have entitlement to this land utterly baffles me.
3. The Federal government owns much of the land because it bought and paid for it. Remember “Purchase” in “The Louisiana Purchase.” Now, we did do our level best to give much of it away. To railroads, homesteaders, land grant colleges, et. al. Just not to First Americans.
4. Most of that 47% is basically uninhabitable – look at the scrubland in Nevada that the government owns and ask “Why do you want it? There’s no water, you can’t grow anything in the dirt, part of it was used for atomic bomb testing, another part is a bombing range, and it’s miles and miles from anything of consequence.” The climate of many western lands wasn’t really suitable for small private farms, and there was worry that America’s natural resources were being depleted by the private market.
I love this story, from NYTimes
By COREY KILGANNONDEC. 21, 2015
Last week, Peter Mattaliano, 66, an acting coach and screenwriter, put up Christmas decorations in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment and laid out presents for the children: Mary and Alfred.
These are not Mr. Mattaliano’s children, and they are no longer living. But a century ago they lived in what is now Mr. Mattaliano’s home.
He has honored Mary and Alfred every December for the past 15 years, ever since he learned of their existence when he renovated his fireplace. It had been sealed with brick for more than 60 years.
Reposted from 2010.
Christmas, as we all know, is a time of joy, goodfellowship, and political score settling, as well as some good old fashioned rioting for electronics. Four decades ago, televised Christmas specials were as integral to the celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus as trees, lights and presents. When we reference holiday specials on TV in the 1970’s, we immediately harken fondly back to Clarice’s big, batting eyelashes, The Grinch’s big heart, and Linus’ Jesus speech. We view the entire genre through rose colored glasses. The truth is, most holiday specials on TV in this era were actually crap, traumatizing even. Some really weird gravitas must have pervaded the teevvee writer’s rooms back then.
Unlock your repressed memories, old folks. There’s more to the history of the TV Christmas special than The Island Of Misfit Toys and The Gospel according to Peanuts. And I am going to tell you about it.
Frosty the Snowman – 1969 (warning: this review contains expletives and spoilers).
Nothing conveys the holiness of the Christmas season more than snowmen, because Jesus would have grown up around this great totem of spirituality. Whomever thought making an entire TV show around that horrible and annoying song is what we refer to as a “hack”. Put a hat on a fucking snowman and he begins to dance around. Once he’s done marching through town and melts – the villain being the sun – the story ends and “he has to “hurry on his way” (a quaint reference to the ephemeral nature of snowmen). “He’ll be back again someday”.
“THE END”. No, there is an entire Christmas Special squeezed out of this garbage. I mean, the “Rudolph” song at least tells a story – outcast losers bullied by both children and adults, who triumph by proving a greater worth. Not just our nasal-nosed hero, but Herbie, Cornelius, the entire fucking island of misfit toys.
The “Frosty” animation is atrocious, the story -telling lazy, the characters hateful. Old Frosty is not cute, not funny, he’s stupid (he can’t count), he is a total moron. His hiLARious go-to line is “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” Jackie Vernon’s VO is a retarded galoot. There is a verse in the very stupid song about the traffic cop, who hollers “STOP”! Said Cop shows up as a whole character in, an ethnic idiot, a drunken, Irish buffoon who is bamboozled by a fucking snowman. Frosty’s nemesis is a bumbling, huge- snouted amateur magician who spends all day fiddling with his cards and shit and practicing his awful magic act, when all along his fucking hat is actually magic. It’s not Magic “suddenly” when it lands on Frosty’s head, or when it’s touched by Christmas snow it is magic. [click to continue…]