Music Video Of the Week - June 19, 2020

"No More Auction Block" by Martha Redbone  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

2017: Winners and Losers

And so here it is, New Year's Eve, and it's time for me to choose the winners and losers of the year.  Normally, this is something I look forward to, but 2017 was a year where separating the wheat from the chaff was extremely difficult.  In fact, I think I spent more time separating chaff from a higher-quality grade of chaff.  It was a year that began with a black President who fulfilled the promise of the civil rights legislation pushed by Lyndon Johnson, replaced nineteen days into the year by the worst President for people of color since Andrew Johnson.  Not to mention the worst President of all time for everyone else, except his fellow nouveau-riche vulgarians and his vieux-riche enablers.  Women who'd thought we'd see a woman in the Oval Office come January 20 saw their rights eroded by January 21, and feminism was dead . . . until the trickle of news reports about Harvey Weinstein became a flood of sexual deviants that got flushed out of Hollywood and Washington, as well as the New York press.  Another destructive force named Harvey flooded Houston with water, a storm named Irma ravaged Florida, and Hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico in the dark for months (some of it is still without power) and dimmed the already low-wattage bulb in Trump's head.

How do you find winners in this loser of a year?  Well,  I actually found some.  As always, I try to pick winners and losers from a varied field of topics - music, TV, business . . . but the Hollywood sex scandals made my choices from the topic of movies problematic.  But I found a couple of choices.  And sports?  I seemed to lean too much on sports this time last year - the Olympics and all that - but this time I was able to keep my choices narrow, and the choice for the biggest sports loser was easy to make.  And surprisingly, it is not from the NFL.

So, without further ado, I give you my choices for the winners and losers of 2017.  First, the winners: 

Bette Midler. The divine Miss M's performance as Dolly Levi in the Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! was the biggest hit on the New York theater scene, with people rushing to the premiere the day after a snowstorm and continuing to rush to every show thereafter.  Ads for this production of Hello, Dolly! never feature scenes from the performance - only title cards and a voice-over.  The fact that it was a hit without the benefit of anyone seeing a sample of it is a testament to Midler's talent.  Bernadette Peters takes over from Bette in January.

the Houston Astros.  Baseball's Astros did more then win their first World Series ever. They won as the home team of a city still reeling from Hurricane Harvey's wrath and lifted up a lot of spirits.  It's the 2017 version of the Chicago Cubs' World Series win, the feel-good sports story of the year.

Gal Gadot.  The Israeli actress has played Wonder Woman thrice - and her solo movie Wonder Woman, while it may not make women who had a childhood in the seventies forget Lynda Carter, will certainly make a new generation of girls remember Gal Gadot. 

Greta Gerwig.  Her companion TV series for "How I Met Your Mother," "How I Met Your Dad," failed to get picked up, but everything does indeed happen for the best. Hollywood's hottest director-actress went back to making movies and raised the bar for female movie directors - and may have gotten her peers to be taken more seriously - when her movie Lady Bird, a coming-of-age story starring Saoirse Ronan, set a new record for the most consecutive "Fresh" reviews without any "Rotten" reviews against it on the Rotten Tomatoes movie Web site - 164 and counting.

Ralph Northam and Doug Jones.  Could it be that the Democratic Party will rise again in the South?  Northam was expected to barely win the Virginia governorship and won it handily.  Doug Jones barely won the U.S. Senate special election in Alabama after not being expected to win at all.  Beating the odds against the Trump juggernaut (Phil Murphy isn't included here because everyone knew he was going to win the governorship of New Jersey anyway), Democrats Northam and Jones stopped all that talk about the Democrats going full Whig and dying (okay, I was wrong).  The Democrats were merely playing possum.  

Emmanuel Macron.  Not only is France's new president as popular among is own people as Donald Trump is not, he is aiming to re-invigorate the country with his domestic reforms and is poised to become the new de facto leader of Europe . . . and become the world leader on fighting climate change.

Dan Fogelman.  The creator of "This Is Us" has every reason to smile.  He has the most intricate, most complex, and most satisfying family drama on American television.  

Journalism.  Thanks to Donald Trump, no friend of a free press, the news business is thriving.  More Web sites and print and broadcast media report on Trump's antics.  The New York Times and the Washington Post have seen their circulations and subscriptions go up. And people are learning how to spot fake news - they simply look at what Trump says are fake-news outlets and can trust those outlets as being legitimate. :-D 

Joe Biden.  Helped by name recognition, which Martin O'Malley lacked in 2016, the ability to talk to the working class, which Hillary Clinton certainly lacked in 2016, and a lifelong commitment to the Democratic Party, which Bernie Sanders has lacked for all time, Uncle Joe is now a major prospect for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination despite the fact that he will be 78 in 2020.  A Biden victory in 2020 would not just make him the oldest President ever; it would make him the first and likely only member of his generation (the Silent Generation, those Americans too old to have been at Woodstock and too young to have been at the Normandy landing) to win the White House.

New York rock radio.  After five years, the Greater New York area finally got another mainstream modern-rock radio station, filling a void left by the demise of WRXP-FM in 2012.  Classic rock of the past is all good and fine, but modern rock represents the present, and having Alt 92.3 is crucial to ensuring that rock has a future.

And now, the losers:  

Rock and roll.  Don't let the return of modern rock to commercial New York radio fool you; rock is still in pretty rough shape.  It's not just because of the deaths of John Wetton, Chuck Berry, Gregg Allman, Walter Becker, Pat DiNizio, Chris Cornell, Tom Petty, and Fats Domino this past year.  It's because rock keeps losing its audience to rap at an alarming clip.  Nothing demonstrates that more than Chance the Rapper winning the 2017 Best New Artist Grammy, rock being shut out of most of the major Grammy nominations for 2018 (rap dominates the Album of the Year nominees), and LL Cool J getting a Kennedy Center honor (and not for his acting).   

the U.S. men's soccer team.  When the Atlanta Falcons lost this year's Super Bowl to the Patriots by a narrow margin after leading by a wide one through the start of the fourth quarter, I didn't see how any team in any sport could choke worse in 2017.  Then the United States men's national soccer team - the team that never disappoints at being disappointing - blew a berth in the 2018 World Cup by losing a key match to Trinidad and Tobago, making their Gold Cup win earlier this year as meaningless at the Falcons' NFC championship.  We pay our men's soccer team too much - more than the women, who win as often as the men lose - and personally, I don't think we should pay them at all.  They're an even bigger embarrassment to America  than Donald Trump.      

the Internet.  The Federal Communications Commission's repeal of Net neutrality will result in higher costs and greater censorship for folks who use the Internet - that is, everyone - and reflects our government's view of media as a private business rather than a public service.  Pray for the success of pending lawsuits against the FCC for this.    

Harvey Weinstein and company.  I'm not going to make a list of the men whose careers were ended by sexual misconduct, because this post is long enough without one.  I will, however, mention Jeremy Piven, if only because his TV series "Wisdom Of the Crowd" would still be one of the biggest TV flops of the year even without the misconduct charges against him.

Tom Cruise.  The star of the new version of The Mummy had the biggest career meltdown of any actor not charged with sexual misconduct, thanks to The Mummy's meltdown at the box office. It's a wrap!  

Greta Van Sustren.  The Fox News commentator began 2017 as the host of a new MSNBC program in an effort by the left-leaning cable channel to diversify its points of view.  She ended it as ex-MSNBC commentator, her program "For the Record" having been cancelled after five months, and doing commentary for Voice of America, a radio station meant for folks outside America.  So much for "diversity."  Incidentally, I have a feeling that Megyn Kelly will be on my losers list for 2018.    

the environment.  The Trump Administration pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, began promoting coal as a fuel of the future, and is currently eviscerating the Environmental Protection Agency to keep it from protecting the environment.  Toxic sludge, anyone?   

the Republican National Committee.  One could argue that the Democratic National Committee had a bad year.  After all, its choice of Tom Perez as its chairman was not well-received by progressives, its messaging remains a joke, and it has a 0-4 record in winning U.S. House special elections for 2017.  And, it's broke.  But the DNC is seeing new-found energy after the November and December elections, and it was at least partially instrumental in Doug Jones' special Senate election win in in Alabama.  The Republican National Committee is on this list because it resumed backing Jones's GOP opponent Roy Moore despite believable pedophila charges aginst him and took a big hit to its integrity when Moore lost.  Also, at least Tom Perez - unlike the RNC's chairwoman, Ronna Romney McDaniel - is well-known. The only thing worse than being talked about is . . .

Barack Obama. Legacy?  What legacy?

And finally . . .

the United States of America.  We let Donald Trump become President, and as a result, we are the skunk of the earth.  We are an environmental outlaw, we are callous toward immigrants and toward our own poor people, we express hostility toward different minorities, we are culturally and intellectually impoverished, and we have bigotry and hatred as the cornerstones of our relations with the rest of the world.  And while we have always been a foolish people in many ways, this time it's different - because Trump, as President, has codified and sanctified our worst behavior.  What James Howard Kunstler said in 1996 is even more true today - we Americans are a wicked people who deserve to be punished.

I nominate Debbie Wasserman Schultz to be punished first.    

Primary the shrew!

Well, that's my list of winners and losers for 2017.  My inclusion of my own country on this list may be harsh, but I can come to no other conclusion that these United States lost big time. We lost our decency, we lost our credibility and we lost our minds.

Right.  Let's hope 2018 is - ahem - better.

While You Were Out . . .

While the mainstream media have been paying a great deal of attention to the sexual harassment charges against Roy Moore and against him - Al Franken - here are some news stories you might have missed:

The House voted 227-205 to pass a huge tax reform bill.  It gives most of its tax breaks to the wealthy, with permanent corporate tax decreases and temporary tax cuts for individuals.  The Senate has a tax reform bill that pretty much does all of that plus gets rid of the Affordable Care act's health-insurance mandate, undermining the health-care law.  The final bill could eliminate deductions for state and local taxes and throw budget plans in high-tax (and mostly Democratic) states in disarray. 

The Trump Administration decided to cancel an Obama rule that barred elephant heads and tusks acquired by hunters from being imported into the United States.  Trump himself doesn't like hunting, doesn't see the sense in it, and doesn't understand the appeal of it - but his grown sons love it!  (Trump has since put the regulation repeal on hold as a result of public outcry.)

The Federal Communications Commission just repealed a regulation limiting the number of television stations a broadcaster can own in any given market, and it's also cleared a path for a potential buyout of Tribune Media by the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, which means that Big Media will able to promote arch-conservative politics in every local broadcast market with few - if any - competing broadcast outlets to provide a counterpoint.

And the Koch brothers want to by Time magazine and Time Warner's other print-media outlets.  You think Sports Illustrated's annual swimsuit issue is vulgar now?  Just you wait!

An alliance of fifteen countries led by the United Kingdom and Canada - other countries in this alliance include Denmark, Finland, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, New Zealand, Ethiopia, and Mexico - has formed to oppose the proliferation of coal-based energy at the 23rd Conference of the Parties climate-change summit in Germany, which the American government and the American media have largely ignored.  I learned this news from the Web site of a British newspaper.

And, more than two hundred thousand gallons of oil from the Keystone Pipeline leaked in South Dakota. 

So the news is basically American greed, American stupidity, American arrogance, American suppression, and American ignorance.  Good night, and have a pleasant  tomorrow. >:-( 

Murphy's Law of Optics

Democrat Phil Murphy is comfortably ahead of Republican Kim Guadagno in the polls for the New Jersey gubernatorial campaign, and right now it's a better-than-even bet that he'll win.  But he's chancing it a bit. 

This past weekend Murphy, running as a populist, appeared with noted non-populist Hillary Clinton at an expensive fundraiser in the town of Harrison, just outside Newark.  Being seen with a Democratic presidential nominee who didn't win the White House but still won New Jersey handily may seem to make sense, but no one saw Phil and Hill together, as the fundraiser was closed to the press.  While that was going on, Guadagno was going to fall festivals to talk to voters - i.e., the people, whom the Republicans haven't represented very well in the past few decades.  But who do you think had the better optics?

Note to Murphy:  Don't coast!  Close the sale!  And get a good photographic opportunity while you're closing it!   

Ophelia Hitting Ireland!

Tropical cyclones aren't supposed to form from non-tropical low-pressure systems.

Tropical cyclones aren't supposed to form on the eastern side of 30 degrees longitude west.

If tropical cyclones do from there, they usually head west, not east . . . and certainly not northeast.

And any storm moving northeastward  from 35 degrees latitude north certainly isn't supposed to become a major hurricane - especially with the ocean water at a temperature of 72 degrees Fahrenheit - much cooler than the current 86 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures of the waters in the Caribbean.

Also, any such storm, after losing its tropical characteristics, would hardly be expected to maintain hurricane-force winds once it hits land.  

Yet all of this is true about Hurricane Ophelia, the tenth straight hurricane of the 2017 Atlantic season and the sixth major hurricane of the season overall, which is still a powerful storm today, having hit . . . Ireland.

Ireland!?

Levi Cowan's GFS map shows me what I can't believe is happening to my paternal ancestral homeland.  Five of the Republic of Ireland's 26 counties are under a "status red" warning, the highest warning for storms in the country.  This is the first hurricane to hit the island since Hurricane Debbie in 1961 and also the worst storm ever of any sort to hit the island since Debbie.

That's right, a hurricane hit Ireland back when its most famous member of the diaspora, John F. Kennedy, was President of the United States.  Hurricanes affecting Europe are rare; the Old Country is mostly affected by remnants of storms that have a greater effect on the Americas, and the few hurricanes that did make it intact to Europe formed close to Africa, not in the middle of the ocean out of non-tropical low.  (Hurricane Faith in 1966 hit northern Europe by way of Bermuda after forming from a wave that generated near the Cape Verde Islands.)   The fact that Ophelia is so unusual, though, in its genesis, its strengthening, and its track proves that something is not right here.  It's very much likely the result of . . .

I can't say it if I want a job with the Environmental Destruction (formerly Protection) Agency, but it rhymes with "primate range."

I'm really depressed now . . ..     

Eclipse Day

I'm not going to say any more than that the total solar eclipse over the United States that everyone has been waiting for today, so I'm going to be out to see it.  With the proper eyewear. 

I'll see you on the dark side of the moon. :-) 

Independence Day 2017

Happy Fourth! :-) 

Easter Greetings 2017

Come On, Get Razzie!

The Golden Raspberry Award Foundation blew its annual ironic kiss to Hollywood's worst this past Saturday, and the one of the biggest "winners" was Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.  Neither superhero, obviously, won the battle, as the movie received four booby prizes.

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice caused some controversy when it was announced that Ben Affleck would play Batman, with many Batman fans opposed to the casting.  This made "normal" people (i.e., people who don't care about comic-book movies) wonder why anyone would care about such a trivial issue.  Affleck was up for a Worst Actor award Saturday night; there's your answer.

Affleck didn't get the golden raspberry for Worst Actor, but he and Henry Cavill, who played Superman, did win for Worst Screen Combo.  Co-star Jesse Eisenberg got the Worst Supporting Actor award, while the movie itself got awards for Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel and Worst Screenplay.

The bigger "winner," however, was conservative activist Dinesh D'Souza, whose-anti-Hillary Clinton documentary, Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, got Worst Picture, Worst Actor (for D'Souza's own narration), Worst Director for D'Souza himself and co-director Bruce Schooley, and Worst Actress for the actress who played Hillary in the movie.  The film was an attempt to de-legitimize Hillary and destroy the Democrats going into the 2016 election, but the Democrats obviously didn't need anyone to do that for them.  Be that as it may, the movie makes some fallacious arguments about how the New Deal was used to manipulate and suppress blacks and argues how the Republicans were the true champions of civil rights legislation (Hubert Humphrey?  Lyndon Johnson?  Robert Kennedy? Never heard of them, eh, Dinesh?).

D'Souza dismissed the award "wins" as "petty revenge" against Donald Trump's election to the Presidency.  Paradoxically, Mel Gibson, no liberal, won the Razzie Redeemer award, an award given to a past Razzie winner for making a good movie . . . as a director - the war film Hacksaw Ridge, which got six Oscar nominations for 2017, including Gibson for Best Director.  (It won two Oscars, for best film editing and best sound mixing.)  As for Becky Turner, the actress who played Hillary, well, maybe one day she'll win an Oscar for a lead role in a movie about an historical event that hasn't happened yet, look back at this documentary and just have a chuckle over it, saying it was just another job.   

Oh yeah, one other thing: Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party was the highest-grossing documentary movie of 2016, making it more successful than Michael Moore's Where To Invade Next.

Maybe there should be a Razzie category for Worst Mass Audience. 

You can find the full list of Razzie winners and nominees for 2017 here.

Eclipse

A total solar eclipse is one of those big natural events that a) can be forecast decades in advance and b) is something people look board to, because it's so cool.  Twenty seventeen will mark the first solar eclipse over the continental United States since 1979.  I remember the 1979 occurrence, but I didn't actually see the eclipse itself - it was visible the most in the Pacific Northwest, and whether or not I'd be able to see it from the Northeast wasn't going to matter, because I wasn't going to risk hurting my eyes. It was on February 26, 1979, a Monday; I was in eighth grade, so I was in a classroom when it happened, and it was a cold and rainy day in the part of the Northeast where I was living, anyway.  Ironically, that was about the time I got expelled from science class because I was flunking it and not getting along with the other kids.

I've never been very scientifically literate.  That's why I trust the climatologists who say global warming is real.

Anyway, I saw the images on TV instead, and the weatherman on the station I was watching said there'd be "a rerun in 38 years."  Now here we are, 38 years later, and the total eclipse coming our way on August 21 - another Monday - should be visible to everyone in America, not just some of us.   This time I hope to find a way to see it without hurting my eyes . . . unless it rains.

I can't help but note a little bad karma, though,  when I realize that the last solar eclipse over the continental United States was followed by a multitude of cosmic bummers in 1979 - the Three Mile Island disaster (I was living in Pennsylvania at the time), the second gas shortage, the gasoline riots, Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech, the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that ended the détente period of the Cold War.  Also, "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" hit number one.  With Donald Trump about to move into the White House and Britain about to move out of the European Union, I wonder if more bad karma - worse karma - is at hand for after August.

Well, I'm going to try to not to get superstitious about the eclipse, though I will have some trepidation in attempting to see it myself rather than on video.

Information on the 2017 eclipse is available here. 

Slouching Toward 2017 . . .

Yeah, I'm ready to see the old year go.

This year started out badly, what with our kitchen taking forever to get done, and a new floor for our basement also took an eternity.  Both situations felt interminable, and the house was a wreck as a result of it all.  My mother and I are only beginning to recover from it.  But in the meantime, I've also had to deal with a lot of other problems that never seem to get resolved.  I keep saying out loud, even when no one's there, "This is never going to end," about . . . anything. :-(  

I'm not ending this year much better than how I started it.  This week I had a scare with my car when the radiator fluid got dangerously low and the engine developed cold-start problems, the latter problem I thought Volkswagen had purged from the Golf decades ago.  It turns out that the mechanic at the shop I went to for an oil change back in October forgot to add radiator fluid, as it tends to dissipate between oil changes, and he told me that my five-year old battery was just fine when in fact it needed replacement.  I had a local VW dealer - not my regular dealer, but I'll probably go back there for service next time - take care of all of that.

That's a relief.  Now, however, I have to figure out how to uninstall and re-install my pre-Windows-10 printer because the scanner function stopped working, and the new camera I got for Christmas doesn't have a USB cord and attempts to connect it to my PC via Wi-Fi have been unsuccessful.  It doesn't look like I'll be able to start the new year clean.

Ahh, I've had it.  As New Year's Day 2017 begins on a Sunday, I'd like to think I'll have a good year because the calendar gives me a total "fresh start" in the form of a new year, a new month, a new day and a new week as well, but  I can't remember a year beginning on a Sunday that turned out well.  The last one gave us Hurricane Sandy.

Happy new year.  Try not to let Trump spoil it. :-O