TV TV Hey Look at Me

The folks over at The Ringer have listed their Top 10 Shows of the Year. I will now give my thoughts on each on, you;re welcome very much:

10. Foundation - never heard of it
9. Dickinson - LOVE THIS SHOW!!!!! Amazing cast, great mix of comedy/drama, willfully light & quirky in a great way and Jane Krakowski should win a bunch of damn awards.
8. Yellowjackets - never seen it
7. Reservation Dogs - never seen it but great title
6. For All Mankind - never seen it, not big on historical counterfactuals ("how would the world be different if Xmastime had never had sex in a Dairy Queen bathroom??!!")
5. Maid - FANTASTIC! The main actor should win all the awards, even if I was a tad disappointed it quickly went from being a show about the crushing way that the bureaucracy of being poor only makes you exponentially more poor every day and kind of just a show about her life, but it was still fantastic.
4. Evil - never heard of it
3. Hacks - watched it, mostly liked it, had some stuff to nitpick about it
2. Succession - my capacity for watching kazillionaires being miserable is taken up by the cartoon that is Yellowstone. Also - what's up with the folks over at The Ringer loving tv shows with one-word titles?
1. The White Lotus - incredible cast, rolled my eyes at a lot of it including the ending.

Off the top of my head, and I know I'll immediately regret this since I'll forget something, I'd say mine are, in no order:

Ted Lasso

The Great

Staged

Dickinson

Maid

Girls 5eva

Only Murders in the Building

What We Do in the Shadows

The Beatles: Get Back

Kevin Can F**k Himself /Ghosts (tied)

And while they're not "prestige" tv, I'm loving The Conners and the Wonder Years reboot.

Thoughts. I Have Them.

Imagine how many shit records you gotta get through to get the Rubber Soul gig.

Aother Movie Idea. I Have One.

Guy slowly learns his meek gardener is actually a mob hit-man who constantly protects him from would-be killers.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “isn't that like the guy in all those Pink Panther movies?"

Who cares, nobody remembers that old shit - let's print some money, people!!!

Irish JFK du Jour

Happy Birfday Larry Legend

Droppin' dimes baby!

Movie Ideas. I Have Them.

An American teenager obsessed with The Beatles dies minutes before they appear on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Looking for investors, people!

The Queen's Gambit

They're gonna make a movie about a teenage David Spade just so this guy can play him, right? Right?

Okay…

… now they’re just messing with me but seriously if one of these fuckers starts ringing I’m calling the damn cops.

Gat Back, Paul, BACK!

Here’s Paul McCartney as you try to ask him to please, please don’t sleep with your girlfriend. 

Dafuck du Jour

If I pick this up and it’s actually working then I am sprinting out of this doctor’s office and never returning.

Something I Learned Today

Last week I joked:

Some people make fun of Paul McCartney for writing a song about his damn dog and putting it on The White Album but based on the size of that fucker I’m guessing Paul didn’t have a goddam choice.

Just now I learned that Paul's sheepdog, Martha, outlived John Lennon, not dying herself until 1981 (age 15!). I love dogs but somehow that just seems depressing?

Happy 40TH!?!??! Birfday!

To an all-time Mrs. Xmastime, Britney Spears!

That's right, one of the Mrs. Xmastimes from 2007, she is now 40, which is fucked up. The first of many, MANY times I mentioned her on this blog was back in 2006:

Maybe you think God will forgive you if after you receive an award for such a video you remind everyone to go to church, I don't know. Either way relax, they’re just videos…until there’s one of the Beatles playing “I Melt with You” while Jessica Alba gets a rimjob from Britney, I’ll find it hard to believe God has that much of a hand in music videos. 

I have no real idea what any of that means but the point is we've kinda been a "thing" since she was still only 25, so...

Oh FFS, America

The other day I was asking why we reward people who have children with tax breaks instead of rewarding people who DON'T have children with tax breaks. After all, when you start shitting out kids you start shitting out people who are going to spend a lifetime sucking up resources, both natural and governmental - why are we rewarding this instead of the opposite?

And now Vox has article revealing that for some reason or another America just fucking hates people who live alone:

The refusal to build a real safety net for people who aren’t partnered means that some people may feel pressure to do anything to be and stay partnered, even if it means enduring psychological or physical abuse. It also means that single people deal with all the same things that anyone without a safety net deals with: They often stay in bad jobs, they take fewer entrepreneurial risks, they’re less likely to follow opportunities that people with a spousal safety net could. They simply don’t have the stability that makes it not just possible but also conceivable to do so much else. It seems clear, if we want to actually support “liberty” or lift people out of poverty, or even make it easier for people to have traditional (or nontraditional!) families, then we need to reconsider the way we organize tax policy and public benefits.

(European) Tweet du Jour

Not only is today's date a palindrome, it's also an ambigram. You can read it left to right, right to left, and also upside down #nerdalert pic.twitter.com/qX43dIUHoI

— Michelle Kessel (@MLKessel) December 2, 2021

Worlds (Sort of But Not Really) Colliding

One of the theses in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers is how some people benefit by the sheer luck of their being born during a certain time of the year, whether it means you're more mature/intellectually developed than your classmates in school or more physically developed than your fellow Pee-Wee hockey players. Just by being born at a certain time, you're at an increased advantage over others.

Meanwhile, one of the (several) reasons I walked out on the movie Dunkirk was how depressed I got looking at those thousands of teenage soldiers and the reason they were in the harrowing spot they were in. They weren't there because of their patriotic duty to defeat Hitler, or some other noble reason; they were there because they happened to be born within a small grouping of years. Humans have been on Earth for a coupla hundred thousand years, but because you just so happened to be born in the year 1920 the odds were high that you'd be slaughtered by Germans at age 20. Watching the screen, I could only be grateful I just happened to be born in a year that guaranteed I would never have to face such a thing.

"Wait...so we're NOT going to Arby's??!!"

I’m Sure He’s Thrilled.

Charlie Time!

The great It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is back for its 18,221st season which is a reminder that Charlie Kelly is in the pantheon of great sitcom characters 🤗

1) Archie Bunker

2) Del Boy Trotter

3) George Costanza

4) Charlie Kelly

OFAH du Jour

 

Questions. I Have Them.

Amidst the single biggest challenge to reverse Roe v Wade in decades currently happening, I wonder: wouldn't the GOP finally reversing Roe v. Wade be a bit like if Wile E. Coyote finally caught the Roadrunner? 🤔

My Year According to Spotify

 

Xmastime Memories! 🤣🤣🤣

 

X it's Xmas!

December 1 means we can finally start playing dome fucking Christmas music thank you very much!

Slice du Jour: John Lennon's classic Happy Xmas (War is Over), which was released in the United States 50 years ago today. It's holds the mark of a great Christmas song: would it be great if it wasn't pigeon-holed into being "Christmas music"? And the answer is a resounding YES, as it's just a flat-out amazing song. Both lyrics-wise (Christmas AND 'oh by the way you people should GTFO of Vietnam'? YES please!) and sonically, as it was Phil Spector being Phil Spector. The song's a painful reminder of what Lennon was capable of had he 1) not spent most of the decade doing therapy 2) not gotten shot in 1980.

Happy Christmas, peoples!!

Boomers Suck

The Baby Boomers are the worst generation in American history, they need to die off, and I pretty much agree with every single one of these People Are Sharing The Boomer Trends They're Ready To See Go Extinct, And I Don't Disagree from Buzzfeed: 

5. "Their politics that serve no one but the very wealthy. I don't know why they consistently vote against their own best interest out of spite." 

16. "The need to recant how when they were kids, they 'played outside in the dirt with sticks, because they didn't need electronics.' But if they had electronics when they were kids, I'm damn sure they would've rather played with those than head outside to play in dirt."

17. The 'We went through it, and so do you!' mentality."

All of them are dead on. Bye Boomers!

Still Working on Most of These

What's Up Docs?

Vogue has a list of the greatest documentaries of all time, and I'm so depressed because about 75% of them look fascinating but I've seen so few. Here's the only ones from the list I've seen, with an asterisk next to my faves.

Framing Britney Spears
Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) *
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
Grizzly Man*
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
Super Size Me
Bowling for Columbine
Hoop Dreams *
The War Room *
Dont Look Back*

Also kinda fun is seeing so many of them being the original docs that the fabulous series Documentary Now! are based on 😜🤣🤣🤣