Friday Grab Bag
Write your own headline
It’s almost the weekend and I don’t feel like writing a headline. You’ll be alright, friend.
No tedious long-winded rants today. Just a few odds and ends…
The new management at CNN is threatening to turn it back into a news channel, and not everybody in the building is happy about it:
Hey, I’m with Don on this one. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just look at the ratings:
New Day is drawing an astonishing 119,000 viewers in the 25-54 demographic. And Don’s primetime show is no slouch either, raking in 114,000 viewers in the demo. A veritable juggernaut. Only a few dozen cable news shows are faring better. Keep doin’ what you’re doin’, Don!
Libs love any excuse to be racist. They assume all black people must think a certain way, and they think they can say anything they want about anybody who steps off the Democratic Party plantation:
It’s not racist when libs say it. After all, they’re the good guys.
I haven’t really said much about the 10-year-old rape victim who got an abortion in my hometown of Indianapolis, because I just don’t know what to think. The story didn’t make much sense from the beginning, and it just keeps getting more confusing by the day.
What the hell is this about?
And then there’s this:
The rape victim’s mom is defending the rapist, and the abortionist who disposed of the evidence officially listed him as a minor. What the hell is going on there?
Everybody’s using this story to dunk on each other — “Oh, you want to force a 10-year-old to carry her rapist’s baby?” “Oh, you want illegal aliens to get away with raping 10-year-olds?” — but I just feel awful for that poor little girl. And the innocent baby she was carrying that didn’t ask for any of this. What a sick world.
Not to get too bogged down in legalese, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is dumb as hell.
She wants to force the Supreme Court to… do what they literally just did. They’ve returned control to the legislatures. That was the whole point of overturning Roe v. Wade. She already got what she claims to want.
This woman swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Isn’t it about time she read it?
Guess she’s too busy:
Usually I’d be okay with Elizabeth Warren shutting up and going away, but I actually want her to answer this question:
That sure looks like tacit approval of attacking Supreme Court justices in their own homes. And it makes sense that Warren would think it’s okay. After all, her ancestors were masters of the ambush.
Ivana Trump, R.I.P. She was 73.
Anybody who wasn’t in a coma during the ‘80s and ‘90s knew about the Trumps and Marla Maples and that whole mess. It’s still amazing to me that this ever happened:
The guy cheats on you and humiliates you in front of the whole world, and then the two of you do a national TV commercial where he jokes about your divorce? Now that’s a good sport. God rest her soul.
I’m glad Terrence Howard has been reading this newsletter. He just said the same thing I’ve been saying for years:
I know, right? Wake up, people!
Streaming pick: From on Epix.
Several people have recommended this show to me, so when Amazon Prime Video recently offered Epix for 99 cents a month, I had to check it out. And I’m glad I did. I think?
This is the best pilot I’ve seen since Lost, which also starred Harold Perrineau and had several of the same people behind the scenes. It’s an intriguing premise, and the way the script parcels out information on-the-fly is really well done. There’s not a lot of exposition, so you’re relying on the characters’ actions and contextual clues in their dialogue to fill you in as the plot unfolds. Show, don’t tell.
It’s very strange and eerie and scary. Terrifying. I actually had to sleep with a light on last night, like an itty-bitty baby!
The danger with this type of “mystery box” show is that you’ll never get any answers, or at least not any satisfying ones. Lost was the most disappointing example, especially toward the end, when it became clear that the writers had no idea how all that goofy stuff tied together. They were just making it up as they went, throwing out polar bears and smoke monsters and fragments of four-toed statues and other crazy crap to string us along week after week. Maybe From will do that too. Or maybe they learned from the many, many mistakes made on Lost. But either way, it’s a compelling sci-fi/horror story.
I’m just trying to figure out how a show this good ended up on a channel that almost nobody watches. The last time I signed up for Epix was to watch Perpetual Grace LTD three years ago, a great, off-kilter show that was cancelled after just one season. From has already been renewed, so maybe it won’t end on a cliffhanger that never gets resolved.
Just be warned, this show is really gory. Way too gross for network TV. There’s very little on-screen violence in the first two episodes, but we do see the horrific results of some monster attacks. It’s not pretty, but they show you what the stakes are in graphic detail.
From is basically Lost + COVID panic. It’s not a show for everybody, but it sure is for me.
I have no idea what made me think of this wonderful moment in TV history, but once it got stuck in my brain, I had to watch it again:
The Nairobi Trio was before my time, but PBS showed an Ernie Kovacs (not “Kovaks”) retrospective when I was a kid in the ‘70s, and I’ve never forgotten it. Kovacs was taken from the world far too soon. What an amazing weirdo.
That does it for another week. Thanks for reading.
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"She wants to force the Supreme Court to… do what they literally just did."
A Do-Nothing Congress is like a Do-Nothing Rapist.
So this one's a win for We the Little People *fist bumps all 'round*
Ernie Kovacs also did Percy Dovetonsils, the poet. He was a genius in a time when laughter and talent were honored -- fun times -- I was a teenager then, but knew good stuff when I saw it.