Here’s a list of great flops in recent times. Feel free to add your own in the comments section.
Here we go.
Trump impeachment. Battlefield Earth movie. The XFL. (Yes, a revival is planned.) Jussie Smollett’s hate crime. Joe Walsh’s Republican primary challenge against Trump, as well as those of William Weld and Mark Sanford. New Coke. Cop Rock TV show. Watermelon-flavored Oreos. Heaven’s Gate movie. Bernie Madoff. Jar Jar Binks. The Cleveland Browns firing Bill Belichick. ESPN becoming woke. Theresa May’s call for a snap parliamentary election in 2017. Cheetos lip balm. Paris Hilton. The Big Ten conference inviting Rutgers to join. Anything related to Anna Nicole Smith. Mars Needs Moms movie. Manimal TV show. Jeremy Corbin’s term as head of the Labour Party. Pontiac Aztek. The San Diego Chargers move to Los Angeles. Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, “I was born to be in it.” Google Glass. CNN’s decision to become the impeachment network. Rosie O’Donnell on The View. Michael Avenatti’s presidential run. Enron. Motorola Rokr phone. (I was given one of these by my employer at the time. It was truly a dreadful device.) Heinz purple ketchup.
Now some of these debacles can also double as hoaxes, such as the “racist assault on Smollett. And of course the impeachment of Trump, which of course is stumbling along despite the lack of evidence that a crime was committed.
Witch-hunter in chief in the House, Adam Schiff, dabbles in screenplay writing. Perhaps a Schiff-scripted movie might make it on a future list.
Apparently all the hope among fans that Doctor Who would adopt a course correction after a year off was false, the series is back next year with both Chibnall and Jodie Whitaker.
The realities on the ground do not matter. No amount of actual failure can compel the BBC to allow the 1st Woman Doctor and most woke Doctor in history to be seen as a failure, Sort of like Barack Obama.
Speaking of Obama & Doctor Who you might remember that in Russell T Davies last episode for Doctor Who his plot suggested that Barack Obama had a plan to fix the economy that was interrupted by the Master taking over the world. After the latest jobs report we now know that the plan apparently was to have Donald Trump follow him in office and fix it.
More TV apparently the L Word is back. I’m slightly surprised. The show’s primary draw was to provide a way for men to openly watch lesbian porn, even with their wives, while pretending they were not. But with porn and particularly lesbian porn now so mainstreamed that you can find it anywhere if you want it I don’t see the point.
I remember back in the Bush years the West Wing was liberals wet dream about having the White House when they couldn’t win it in real life. Madam Secretary was the modern counterpart where they could have a pretend Hillary Clinton who was honest and competent and now they have finished the series with their pretend Clinton being elected president.
Alas Madam Secretary never was embraced as the West Wing was. Perhaps is more of the left dived into that fantasy they would not be acting so insane now over Trump in real life.
Finally I was going to close with a bit about Clint Eastwood’s new Film Richard Jewell which opens this week but this trailer for the Ghostbusters Afterlife movie….
…a sequel to the Original Ghostbusters movies as opposed to the woke flop reboot, has got the woke brigades in an uproar. Here is a typical tweet and my response:
#rephrased How DARE anyone consider making the movie that the customer base wants to watch rather than pushing and supporting our movie that the customer base didn't!
Forty years ago Sunday I saw my first rock concert–and a great way to start out–it was my 18th birthday and it was the Who at the International Amphitheater in Chicago.
Sunday morning I was headed to another midwestern city on another birthday of course, this time headed for Milwaukee to run in the Santa Hustle 5K. And from my iPod I pressed “Play” to listen to the latest, and probably last, album by the Who, entitled, simply, Who.
The Who always had an attitude–and they still do. Lead singer Roger Daltrey, 75, now a baritone, barks out Pete Townshend’s lyrics on the opening track, “All This Music Must Fade.”
I don’t care.
I know you’re gonna hate this song.
And that’s it.
We never really got along.
It’s not new, not diverse.
It won’t light up your parade.
It’s just simple verse.
Townshend, 74, who wrote all but one of the songs for Who, the exception is “Break The News” by his brother Simon, looks back at the past, as is expected by any old man. Townshend once wrote on his iconic 1965 classic, “My Generation” this boast, “I hope I die before I get old.”
Chronologically only drummer Keith Moon,died young at 32, but years of drug and alcohol abuse aged him quickly–he was a physical wreck when he died in his sleep of a drug overdose. Drugs killed bassist John Entwistle at 58, also in his sleep, on the eve of a Who tour.
The Who have taken us from “The Music Must Change” on Who Are You, the last album with Moon, to “All This Music Must Fade.” Moon, who died a month after that album’s release, was unable to play drums on “The Music Must Change” because it was in the 6/8 time measure. He was once considered the worlds greatest rock drummer
The surviving Who members, aided on some tracks by unofficial bandmates Zak Starkey on drums and Pino Palladino on bass, don’t embarrass themselves. But they don’t exceed expectations. So if you’re looking for a septuagenarian anthem to match with “I Can See For Miles,” or “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” you will be disappointed. With few exceptions, the aforementioned “Break The News” is one, Who is formulaic, it’s got just enough synthesizers to recall Who Are You and the other Townshend/Daltrey Who album, Endless Wire, and the Townshend backup vocals seem scientifically placed. And that’s a problem as Townshend and Daltrey never appeared in the studio together for Who.
Other elements of the past on Who include the album artwork, designed by Peter Blake, who also created the Face Dances album cover, and the song “Detours.” Who scholars know that the earliest incarnation of the band was named the Detours.
“Ball and Chain” was the first song released from Who. It’s about the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Townshend opposes it, and that’s all you can extract from the pedestrian lyrics, that is, to reference “All This Music Must Fade,” only “just simple verse.”
As one ages death often becomes a common thought, and Townshend explores mortality in several songs here. If you are looking for intriguing albums about death, I recommend instead Magic and Loss by Lou Reed and the later albums of the American series by Johnny Cash. If you are prefer something less morbid from an older person looking back, the two Americana albums by Ray Davies, the Kinks mastermind, will provide a much better experience than Who for you.
Let me obscure. The most moving song about getting old and having regrets is “Ghosts” by Randy Newman, from his largely forgotten Born Again collection.
Back to the Who.
But does any of this discussion even matter to Daltrey and Townshend? I downloaded the deluxe version from Apple Music, which contains “Got Nothing To Prove.” An unexpected throwback to the mid-1960s, when the Who was a great singles band, it would have been one of the best tracks on the album, had it not been ruined by James Bond-theme styled orchestration.
#rephrased According to Bloomberg the foreign policy of the United States is not to be determined by the elected representatives of the people but by the permanent bureaucracy.
I was actually wasn’t all that surprised with what I saw when I saw the article above or watched the sample of yesterday’s impeachment hearings that I was willing to waste with.
That’s because the whole argument of the left against Trump was made on TV 33 years ago by two of the funniest men who ever wrote about politics in my favorite episode of the best sitcom ever about the political world:
Sir Humphrey: So what’s the foreign office worried about then Dick? Haven’t you got the Foreign secretary eating out of your hand?
Sir Richard:Oh yes completely house trained. Sir Humphrey: Heh, so what’s the problem?
Sir Richard:The Prime Minister’s the problem. He’s starting to mistrust our advice when the foreign secretary gives it to him.
Sir Humphrey:Ah.
Sir Richard:He’s every beginning to question foreign office policy.
Sir Humphrey: Surely not?
Sir Richard:We even see a danger of the cabinet pursuing it’s own foreign policy.
Sir Humphrey: But that’s absurd the country can’t have two foreign policies!
Yes Prime Minister A Victory for Democracy 1986
As far as the deep state is concerning the government is theirs to pursue the policies that enrich them and theirs and pols in general and particularly one like Donald Trump in particular have no business interfering. How such people are viewed are summed up breifly at the end of that scene.
Sir Humphrey:You know what happens when politicians get into Number 10; they want to take their place on the world stage. Sir Richard:People on stages are called actors. All they are required to do is look plausible, stay sober, and say the lines they’re given in the right order.
Donald Trump has this silly idea that he is not there to enrich him and his family, after all he was already damn rich to begin with. He has the idea that he is the president elected to do a job and intends to do it, with or without the help of the deep state.
Trump’s no fool, he has had to deal with these types all his life. That’s why they were always willing to praise him and he was always willing to grease them when they asked for decades. He knows who and what they are.
I suspect if the deep state kept their head down and even if they didn’t work with him simply allowed him to do his job then they would still be anonymously intact and nobody would know a thing about Hunter Biden & Co. or any of the other stuff that is going to come out when all of this is done. Their reputations would still be intact.
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