Archive for 2022

DaTechGuy’s 3rd Law of Media Outrage NBA Playoffs Mass shooting Edition

Posted: May 17, 2022 by datechguy in nba, Sports

The NBA has been very fortunate in their playoffs this year in a couple of respects.

Very exciting games (well except for the closeout game of Dallas vs Phoenix) , Very exciting storylines (The rise of the Celtics, the fall of Kyrie and Harden, the return of Golden State), and the two players most likely remind folks of the league’s dirty dealings with China (Lebron & Freedom) not in the picture, one because his team didn’t make the playoffs (itself an interesting story) and the other because he was immediately released after being traded and blacklisted.

All of this has been fortunate for them to keep the narrative on track but the thing that has really worked out the best for them has been DaTechGuy’s 3rd Law of Media Outrage which states:

The MSM’s elevation and continued classification of any story as Nationally Newsworthy rather than only of local interest is in direct correlation to said story’s current ability to affirm any current Democrat/Liberal/Media meme/talking point, particularly on the subject of race or sexuality.

Now unless you live under a rock you know that there was a mass shooting in Buffalo last week that the left has done it’s best to exploit politically to the point where Joe Biden (well whoever is running Joe Biden) has decided it’s worthwhile for the President to visit the city this week.

Now ask yourself this question.

Let’s say you have a national event , Say an NBA playoff closeout game, and lets say this event is of particular interest even beyond the fanbase of the two teams involved because:

  • It involves the defending champions (Milwaukee)
  • It involves one of the most storied franchises in the history of the game (Boston Celtics)
  • It’s a close out game, where Milwaukee can advance to the Conference Finals with a win & the Celtics need a win to force a game seven
  • It follows one of the most memorable last minute comebacks (Milwaukee’s game five win in Boston) in NBA playoff history

Now lets say just after the game ends with Boston winning on the road and forcing game seven there is a mass shooting at the arena where 17 people are wounded and fans leaving the stadium are literally running for their lives

You just might think that 17 people shot exiting an NBA stadium just might make the national news, that is if you were unaware of DaTechGuy’s 3rd law of media outrage. Because if you were then you would know that Fox would cover it:

“Everybody started running,” witness Brittany Bergstrom, who was at a nearby restaurant, told FOX 6 in Milwaukee. “There was a stampede, people running over the shrubs, hats shoes on the ground, drinks spilled everywhere.”

She said her boyfriend pulled her behind a brick wall, “and if he wouldn’t have this outcome would be a lot different. And that’s all I know and everybody took off running and I just kept running.” 

What I was really interested in wasn’t the lack of National News coverage which I expected to be non-existent, but the degree that NBA fans, who followed the series, were aware of it. Surely such fans would have heard about this on social media or on sports media coverage.

So when I went to work on Sunday I asked people who were following game seven about the shooting.

Not a single person I talked to had even heard of it!

Like I said the NBA has been very fortunate this year when it comes to their playoffs. They were most fortunate that the Celtics won game seven because with a curfew in effect it would have been impossible to hide the reason why in the coverage of a game 3 in Milwaukee vs the Heat

Closing thought: I wonder how much the idea of having to play the next series in a free fire zone affected the defending Champion Bucks, who had already won two games at the Garden in Boston in this series when they were playing game seven? It’s one thing for betting on sports to affect a series but having to bet your life, I suspect that’s bigger.

Closing thought Number 2. Not only did the last GOP mayor of Milwaukee leave office in 1908 but there have been three times as many Socialist mayors of Milwaukee in the 20th century (3) then there were Republican Mayors (1).

Report from Louisiana: In shocking news, canned curriculum doesn’t work

Posted: May 16, 2022 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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Photo by 2y.kang on Unsplash

By: Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – In shocking, absolutely SHOCKING news, the Baton Rouge Advocate reports that “Only 43% of kindergarten students read on grade level, 54% of first graders, 56% of second graders and 53% of third graders.”

(Insert sarcasm).

Seriously, who didn’t see that one coming?

After teaching ELA at the high school level for twenty-five years, I am not at all shocked by these numbers; in fact, I’m surprised they aren’t worse.

One of the main reasons I left the classroom when I did, rather than get my thirty years in, was because of the terrible Louisiana Believes ELA curriculum. When the program rolled out, I ranted and raved and went into fits of depression. There were tears shed over this curriculum at the time by gifted ELA teachers I worked with who knew this program was terrible yet were powerless to change anything. All reading for pleasure was removed from the curriculum. Most fiction was stripped out. And while I’m a nonfiction fan, the nonfiction pieces my 10th graders had to read were the dullest, driest, most soul crushing texts you can imagine.

I’m all for challenging a student. That wasn’t what was happening.

The word “rigor” became code for all we loathed about the reading materials. Teachers were expected to embrace the new “rigorous texts” and lead students through multiple, yes, multiple readings of them; and students were expected to read these eight page speeches or scientific articles multiple times while annotating, highlighting, examining, discussing, and writing.

No tenth grader I’ve ever met is going to get excited about reading Carrie Chapman Catt’s speech on women’s suffrage.

Teachers were given this curriculum and the accompanying prepared slides, and a script, and we were expected to follow it “with fidelity.”

Meanwhile, students mentally checked out.

When I tell you that there was ZERO fiction, I’m not kidding. And the ELA supervisor at the time told me that if kids want to read for pleasure, they will do it on their own.

That was about six years ago. Each year since then the curriculum has been loosened a bit, and a bit more each year. Teachers were given a little more flexibility but not much.

To combat the growing apathy toward English from my students, I brought in a classroom library and man was the excitement back in the classroom! Kids clamored for books they wanted to read.

But by then, my own future was sealed. I had to leave the classroom because I had lost faith in the program. Trust was broken. Teachers lost all voice, all input, all creativity and freedom over their classes. I could not in good conscience lead students through material that crushed their desire to read and learn; and for the record, the great test scores the admins were looking for never happened. They started to rise a bit once the bonds loosened, but this new curriculum did not solve the ills of literacy.

And, based on what I’m reading today, it still hasn’t.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and at Medium; she is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

The Cost of Living in Bubble World CNN+ Edition

Posted: May 16, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized

There has been a lot written about the rise (?) and fall of CNN+ but of all the words written the most interesting to me was this bit from the Wall Street Journal that I found via Insty

Interviews with more than a dozen people involved in CNN+ describe a culture where excitement over what one top producer described as CNN’s “Apollo Mission”—a reference to the program that successfully landed the first humans on the moon—gave way to the realization that failure was arriving swiftly and mercilessly. Many employees of the streaming service started in the past six months or even just a few weeks before the service launched. Several said they left stable jobs or freelancing gigs.

emphasis mine

Now anyone on the right knowing the CNN ratings numbers could see that there was no prayer that they would get people to pay for the damn thing, as Daniel Greenberg put it last year (again via insty)

CNN President Jeff Zucker billed CNN+ as being for “CNN superfans, news junkies and fans of quality non-fiction programming.”

The existence of CNN superfans is as improbable as Bigfoot and UFOs. No one has ever spotted a CNN superfan in the wild and not even the most exotic zoos have them in stock.

Those same ratings number were available to folks outside the right as well as inside them but to those people who live in the MSM bubble no information that reflects badly on the left is real unless some MSM outlet reports on it.

If you’re rich enough or connected enough as a lot of the high level network “talent” is that reality doesn’t matter. Like runaway inflation you shrug it off and wonder why the plebs aren’t still ecstatic over the departure of the Great Maga King.

But if you are a regular person in the real world that loss of job in a bad economy that you gave up a good position for is going to have consequences that will pop your bubble faster than you can say “Chris Wallace”.

And CNN+ on your resume is not going to look all that impressive either will it?

Mike Myers’ Netflix debacle, The Pentaverate, attacks good taste and conservatives

Posted: May 15, 2022 by John Ruberry in comedy, culture, doctor who, entertainment
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By John Ruberry

After a long day at work earlier this month I clicked on the “Surprise Me” feature on Netflix. What popped up was Mike Myers’ new vehicle, The Pentaverate.

“Well,” I said to myself, “this might be pretty good.” 

In fact, The Pentaverate doesn’t even measure up to “pretty bad.” The six episode limited series is one of the worst shows I’ve suffered through. Oh, somehow I managed to view a couple episodes of The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer. I know about awful.

Warning: There are numerous spoilers and some rather disgusting things that I will mention in my review of this Netflix series.

The origin of The Pentaverate dates back to a throwaway line from Myers’ second film, So I Married an Axe Murderer, where the father of Myers’ lead character, also played by Myers, claims that a secret society, the Pentaverate, a five-man cabal, which at one time included Colonel Sanders as a member, rules the world. In this series narrator Jeremy Irons tells us, the original members of the Pentaverate discovered in 1347, contrary to the belief of the Catholic Church, it was fleas that spread the bubonic plague. 

As the first episode begins, the newest member of the group of five, Dr. Hobart Clark (Keegan-Michael Key), a scientist, is accepted into the Pentaverate after he is kidnapped. Apparently, he is the first non-white fellow of the all-male group, replacing a member who mysteriously died. The other members are played by Myers. Lord Lordington, an elderly Englishman, Bruce Baldwin, an Australian media mogul, who of course is based on Rupert Murdoch, Shep Gordon, a manager of various rock acts, a real person who is the subject of a documentary directed by Myers, and Mishu Ivanov, a Russian oligarch and Vladimir Putin crony.

Warning! Not-safe-for-work language in the trailer.

But Myers isn’t done with his roles. The lead character of The Pentaverate is Ken Scarborough, a television reporter who wears plaid sportscoats; he is a quirky throwback from the 1970s who does man-on-the-street interviews of other oddballs, while overshadowing them. Scarborough works for, wait for it, Toronto-based CACA news. Yep, caca. 

The other four Pentaverate members manufacture a story that Dr. Clark, who was invited into the secret society because they believe he can reverse climate change, is dead. Clark’s phony passing occurs while attempting to mimic an internet video fad–kissing your own anus. Clark’s room at Pentaverate headquarters is guarded by a sasquatch, who immediately defecates outside the scientist’s door. 

In addition to a Shrek cameo, Myers plays two other characters, internet personality Rex Smith, a stand-in for Alex Jones, and Anthony Lansdowne, a conspiracy theorist from New Hampshire. 

Besides being an assault on good taste, The Pentaverate is an attack on right-wingers, with the implied message that all conservatives are conspiracy whackos like Lansdowne. He is a believer, or has been a believer, in QAnon, Pizzagate, and the Illuminati. His last words as he falls to his death is, “But what about her emails?” 

Lansdowne, in his bumper-sticker laden van, which not surprisingly has a malfunctioning portable toilet, drives Scarborough and his pre-woke Doctor Who-like young female companion, Reilly Clayton (Lydia West) to New York City, which looks nothing like today’s NYC, but more like your standard Doctor Who “future metropolis.” Scarborough, recently fired by CACA, is convinced by Clayton and Lansdowne to infiltrate Pentaverate headquarters, and he does so after a painful penis tug initiation. 

Clark, following an intimate evening with the Pentaverate’s executive assistant Patty Davis (Debi Mazar) in the Moon Room studio–did the Pentaverate fake the moon landings?–suddenly dies, this time for real. He is promptly replaced by casino billionaire Skip Cho (Ken Jeong). Oh, I have never thought Jeong was funny. Jeong recently showed his true political colors after childishly storming off the set of The Masked Singer after Rudy Giuliani was revealed as a contestant.

Myers seemingly hasn’t emotionally moved on from being an 11-year-old. Flatulence jokes are among the things that ruined his cinema take on Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat, a children’s film, by the way. Scatological so-called humor also undermined another Myers movie bomb, The Love Guru. 

Outside of Myers’ fading fame, why did Netflix greenlight this debacle? Could it be that woke Netflix executives fell in love with The Pentaverate’s snide attacks on conservatives, who they probably believe are personified by Smith and Lansdowne? I have liberal friends. Really, I do. And many of them insist that I take marching orders from Alex Jones.

Here’s a tip for Netflix and Myers: the first rule of comedy is that comedies need to be funny.

Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. Its stock value plummeted 35-percent last month. Yes, when you go woke you go broke. And I can’t think of a single Netflix dramatic series that is aimed at conservatives. Longmire was the closest show I can think of, but production of it ended in 2017, and Longmire was originally an A&E offering. And as I wrote in last week’s review of Ozark, that otherwise quite enjoyable show contorted itself to find ways to attack Republicans.

Over 70 million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020. That’s a lot of viewers, Netflix. We don’t live in vans with clogged toilets. We own televisions. 

Cloying use of easter eggs, that is, references to other works that do nothing to advance the story or add laughs–assuming of course there is even one laugh in The Pentaverate–is also another problem here. Winks to other Myers’ works, along with yet another tired replay of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as Game of Thrones, are simply annoying. Rob Lowe, a veteran of several Myers movies, makes an unnecessary appearance.

Myers’ acting, outside of his sympathetic portrayal of Scarborough, is subpar. In his review of The Cat in the Hat, Roger Ebert noticed that at times Myers sounded a bit like his Linda Richman “Coffee Talk” character from SNL. The use of convincing accents is supposed to be one of Myers’ strengths, but his Lansdowne character’s accent, rather than sounding like what you’ll hear from a rustic New Englander, varies from a Canadian to a New Yorker style of speech–that is, when Lansdowne isn’t coming across like Wayne Campbell from Wayne’s World.

Oh, when there is a crack within the five members of the Pentaverate, who do you think is behind it? Why of course! It’s the casino billionaire and the Murdoch stand-in. 

I hated The Pentaverate. Hated, hated, hated. If you have any sense of taste or decency, you will hate it too. 

You have been warned. 

Oh, if you think I am just a grumpy old man with a minority opinion on this actual sh*t show, as of May 15, the average critic score on Rotten Tomatoes is just 20 percent. Only once in the last week have I noticed The Pentaverate ranking as a top-ten most viewed program on Netflix. And based on the CGI and the A-List (to some people) cast, I imagine Netflix wasted a lot of money on this fiasco.

The Pentaverate is rated TV-MA for full frontal (possibly with use of prosthetics) nudity, animals engaged in sex, violence, suicide, adult situations, foul language, and scatological references. Well, at least no one smokes in it. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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