1/ Andrew Sullivan on the importance of Theresa May and Brexit.....his conclusion? Incredibly important.....
Good luck. Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
There was a priceless video this past week of Theresa May arriving to visit Angela Merkel in Berlin, in another soul-sucking trip to beg the E.U. to give her something — anything — to throw to the wolves at home. After her black town car stopped at the curb, and a flunky rushed to open the door, the lock jammed. He yanked and pulled for a painful length of time, and after some final wiggling, the door eventually yielded. And the prime minister emerged, all smiles with gritted teeth, and perkily shook hands with her German alter ego, Angela Merkel. Merkel subsequently insisted that the deal they had already negotiated was the final one.
It’s a metaphor for Theresa May’s task since the Brexit referendum.
2/ The SNL cold open from this weekend...a takeoff of "It's A Wonderful Life".....a pretty good seven minutes....
Saturday Night Live took an It’s a Wonderful Life approach to the Trump White House, imagining an alternate reality where Donald Trump didn’t become president.
“It’s awful. Everything’s falling apart. Sometimes I wish I’d never been president,” Alec Baldwin’s Trump tells Kenan Thompson’s heaven-sent Clarence, who then presents Trump, like the 1947 classic film, with a vision of what life would have been like had he lost the presidency.
“So Hillary is president?” Trump asks Clarence, who tells the mogul that “in this reality, all she had to do to win was visit Wisconsin once,” adding that her controversial emails were just Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons.
3/ David Wallace-Wells with a fairly depressing article about how a majority of Americans believe in climate change, but aren't ready to do anything about it....
A woman at a June 1, 2017, demonstration in New York protesting President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accords. Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
You, too, are in denial.
We all are, nearly every single one of us as individuals, even those of us who are following the bad news that suggests “the climate change problem is starting to look too big to solve”; every nation, almost none of them meeting their climate commitments, and most (not just the United States) publicly downplaying the threat; and even many of the alliances and organizations, like the IPCC, endeavoring to solve the crisis.
4/ Stephen Colbert on Trump's Twitter meltdown over the weekend.....seven amusing minutes....
Stephen Colbert broke down the latest developments in the myriad investigations facing President Donald Trump, as well as the president’s ridiculous attempts to keep tweeting through the news on The Late Show Monday.
As Colbert noted, Trump now faces over 17 known investigations, and over the weekend a Senate Intelligence Committee report leaked and offered an in-depth look at just how far Russia went to influence the 2016 election. While the walls seem to be closing in, the president and his surrogates have remained defiant, with Colbert playing a clip of Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, once again dismissing the notion that collusion is even a crime.
5/ The brilliant Thomas Frank with an essay on how the idea of Universities as institutions of higher learning has been corrupted and twisted by commercial pressure.....written four years ago, but even more relevant today with the Trump toady Betsy DeVos squeezing students even harder....
Excellent story....
This essay starts with utopia—the utopia known as the American university. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperity-bringing innovation, the university is more spiritually satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry.
The university deals in dreams. Like other utopias—like Walt Disney World, like the ambrosial lands shown in perfume advertisements, like the competitive Valhalla of the Olympics—the university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the four-year luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence.
It is not the university itself that tells us these things; everyone does.
6/ An SNL skit titled "Best Christmas Ever"....three minutes, and rare for comedy - it's really, really nice as well as funny....Matt Damon is great!
7/ Matt Taibbi on not believing anything to do with 2020 for a while yet - the accepted media narrative is BS.....
always very good insights....
The headline in the New York Times reads: “Sanders and Warren Meet and Agree: They Both Are Probably Running.”
At first, the story about Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont reads like standard election news. Dig deeper, though, and you find signs of negative media campaigns already beginning in earnest. Over the past few weeks, multiple outlets have published negative pieces about Warren in particular, deploying coverage gimmicks used to disparage candidates early in presidential campaigns before.
The gist of the new Times piece is that the Warren and Sanders, if they do run, “will not enjoy an easy path to the nomination.” Both are described as having political vulnerabilities that will force them to face questions or “concerns.” (This is code for, “they’ll get beat up by the media.”)
8/ This SNL Weekend Update upset Trump so much he called for the courts to intervene....four minutes, and very good indeed......
Saturday Night Live Weekend Update co-host Colin Jost came out swinging against embattled President Donald Trump,
starting an onslaught of spot-on jokes with: “This last week was a pretty bad year for Donald Trump.”
9/ You have heard of the yellow vest [gilet jaunes] riots in France - Matt Taibbi explains what is really going on.....
“What’s wrong with elitism?” asked Washington Post columnist Max Boot this week on Twitter. Boot posed this in a discussion about the merits of centrism, raised in the context of the “yellow vest” protests against the government of Emmanuel Macron in France.
American media seems to be confused by the protests. Few seem to understand what protesters want, or even who they are. Some outlets describe protesters as Trump-like nationalists aligned with Marine Le Pen, others as antifa-style leftists aligned with Jean-Luc Melenchon.
The marchers actually cut across all political lines, and if anything, both Le Pen and Melenchon are trying to attach themselves to something independent of them. Unifying factors seem to be hatred of Macron and a desire to express this in profane fashion (the New Yorker noted that many of the protest slogans are colorful variations on the theme of people being literally screwed by Macron).
10/ I guess I won't be buying a BMW any time soon.....
BMW is in trouble too, but not for those reasons. Its problems are brand drift and German engineering arrogance.
Tesla is showing BMW the way, but it’s a horse-water problem
There have been a string of car market comparisons with a Tesla focus published sites over the past year. Pulling them together into a unified story about BMW is an interesting exercise. The short version of that story is that Tesla is kicking all of the luxury car manufacturers’ butts up and down the categories they sell in. That’s true of all equivalent brands, but BMW is in the most trouble.
11/ Jimmy Kimmel with the scary Huckabee "elf on a shelf" equivalent....
If you’ve missed Sarah Huckabee Sanders since she’s started doing briefings on a lunar cycle, Jimmy Kimmel has the perfect Christmas gift to satisfy your bizarre craving, and to terrify your kids: the “Huckabee in a Tree.”
On Tuesday night’s edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live, the host introduced a commercial parody that advertises a substitute for the creepy, much-derided “Elf on the Shelf.”
12/ From SNL last week.....manly appliances....a funny two minutes....
https://www.facebook.com/
13/ The ten best horror movies of 2018....from Rolling Stone....
14/ Holy shit - a mashup of movie trailers from 2018, but fast! You will recognize some of these, but not many I'll bet....
Six supercharged minutes.....
15/ Movie Review - Mortal Engines....as of this week a box office failure, but if you like CGI it's apparently amazing....
It is way, way into the future. Following a cataclysmic event now called the “Sixty Minute War,” much of Earth’s population lives under a system called “Municipal Darwinism.” And man, it is bleak.
“Traction cities” on wheels roam most of the earth, consuming its resources and, for the larger ones at least, consuming smaller cities as well. One of the largest of these cities is London, where historians sift through debris collected from the “ancient ones” — that’s us! — as the rest of the population goes about their business, gathering on the city’s outer limits to cheer whenever it is about to capture another, smaller city.
Two minute trailer....
16/ Movie Review - Free Solo, about a guy free climbing El Capitan in Yosemite.....a wow..
Here’s a film that brought to my mind Mary Poppins’s famous order: “Close your mouth please Michael, we are not a codfish.” I spent most of this film with my jaw on the floor. It’s a visually staggering documentary from National Geographic about the climber Alex Honnold, who specialises in the most mind-boggling and gasp-inducing “free solo” climbs – without a rope, up sheer rock faces, the sort of thing usually undertaken by Tom Cruise or Spider-Man.
This film is about Honnold’s freakily dangerous free solo attempt in 2017 at El Capitan, the 3,000ft-high rock formation in Yosemite Valley, California.
Two minute trailer...
Todays music video - Miley Cyrus with Happy Christmas sung live on SNL....whatever you think of her, I think
you'll agree she has an amazing voice....
Todays video.....Oops....1 minute....
Todays Newfie joke [Newfoundlanders! - the Canadian equivalent to a Polish joke]....
Todays Christmas joke....
'In honor of this holy season' Saint Peter said, 'You must each possess something that symbolizes Christmas to get into heaven.'
The Englishman fumbled through his pockets and pulled out a lighter. He flicked it on. 'It's a candle', he said.
'You may pass through the pearly gates' Saint Peter said.
The Scotsman reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He shook them and said, 'They're bells.'
Saint Peter said 'You may pass through the pearly gates'.
The Irishman started searching desperately through his pockets and finally pulled out a pair of women's panties.
St. Peter looked at the man with a raised eyebrow and asked, 'And just what do those symbolize?'
The Irishman replied, 'These are Carols.'
And So The Christmas Season Begins
Todays blond jokes...
- A young brunette goes into the doctor's office and says that her body hurts wherever she touches it."Impossible," says the doctor. "Show me."
She takes her finger and pushes her elbow and screams in agony. She pushes her knee and screams, pushes her ankle and screams and so it goes on, everywhere she touches makes her scream.
The doctor says, "You're not really a brunette, are you?"
She says, "No, I'm really a blonde."
"I thought so," he says. "Your finger is broken."
- A Blonde was down on her luck. In order to raise some money, she decided to kidnap a kid and hold him for ransom.
She went to the playground, grabbed a kid, took him behind a tree, and told him, "I`ve kidnapped you."
She then wrote a note saying, "I`ve kidnapped your kid. Tomorrow morning, put $10,000 in a paper bag and put it under the pecan tree next to the slide on the north side of the playground. Signed, Blonde."
The Blonde then taped the note to the kid`s shirt and sent him home to show it to his parents.
The next morning the blonde checked, and sure enough, a paper bag was sitting beneath the pecan tree.
The blonde opened the bag and found the $10,000 with a note that said, "How could you do this to a fellow Blonde?"
- A blonde went to the appliance store sale and found a bargain. "I would like to buy this TV," she told the salesman.
"Sorry, we don't sell to blondes," he replied.
The blonde was very angry about this. She hurried home and dyed her hair, then came back and again told the salesman, "I would like to buy this TV."
"Sorry, we don't sell to blondes," he replied.
The blonde did not know how the salesman had recognized her. This time, she got a haircut and new color, a new outfit and big sunglasses. She then waited a few days before she approached the salesman.
"I would like to buy this TV."
"Sorry, we don't sell to blondes," he replied.
Frustrated, she exclaimed, "How do you know I'm a blonde?"
"Because that's a microwave," he replied.
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