From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE
We'll Be Right Back After These Messages…
The Emmy nominations were announced last week, and among the categories is one for best commercial. Here are three powerful nominees, starting with Apple’s Earth---Shot on iPhone featuring the voice of Carl Sagan:
-
Procter and Gamble’s The Talk (My Black is Beautiful):
-
And In Real Life, a PSA for Monica Lewinsky’s anti-bullying campaign produced by BBDO:
-
All three poignantly convey a modern-day truth: love, tolerance and respect have a liberal bias.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...[Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, July 16, 2018
Note: Ha ha ha. You guys are so funny! ‘Scuse me… [BiPM throws lawn dart at giant diapered Bill in Portland Maine blimp hovering over kiddie pool] Yes. Truly hilarious.
-
By the Numbers:
Days 'til the midterm elections: 113
Days 'til the 9th annual Milwaukee Brewfest: 12
Percent of Russians surveyed who have a favorable and unfavorable opinion, respectively, of Trump, according to VCIOM: 10%, 71%
Percent of Russians who view Trump as “dangerous” and “trustworthy,” respectively: 58%, 16%
Estimate as of last week of when our earliest human-like ancestors trekked out of Africa: 1.8 million years ago
Current estimate, after new evidence Was discovered and published in Nature: 2.1 million years ago
Year the U.S. is expected to regain its status as the world’s #1 producer of crude oil, wresting it away from Saudi Arabia for the first time since 1976: 2019
Wimbledon Finals
Angelique Kerber (Ger) def. Serena Williams (USA) 6-3, 6-3
Novak Djokovic (Ser) def. Kevin Anderson (SA) 6-2, 6-2, 7-6
World Cup Soccuh Final
France 4 Croatia 2
-
Totally Random MLB Score
Red Sox 5 Blue Jays 2
-
Puppy Pic of the Day: Breakfast is served……
-
JEERS to fresh marching orders. Right about now, the head of the Trump Organization is starting his talks with the president of Russia. On the agenda during the closed-door meeting: how to best hack the 2018 elections in favor of Republicans, how to eliminate sanctions against Russia for helping rig the 2016 elections, the status of the Russia-Trump money-laundering operation, and a timetable for the peaceful annexation of the blue states by Moscow. Once the summit has concluded, an international team led by the Thai Navy SEALs will conduct a delicate and dangerous operation using ropes and specially-fitted oxygen tanks to guide Trump out of Putin’s twisty, partially-flooded colon. The most challenging part: preventing him from wriggling back in.
P.S. A final parting shot from Britain, whose people pestered, annoyed and trolled Lord Dampnut like pros (London’s protest was the largest against a foreign leader in the kingdom’s 311-year history), and didn’t even miss tea time:
See also: “Mangled apricot hellbeast,” “clueless numpty,” “bloviating flesh bag,” “weapons-grade plum,” “weasel headed fucknugget,” “witless fucking cocksplat” and “toupeed fucktrumpet.”
JEERS to making the naughty list. Over the weekend, Comrade Stable Genius told CBS News that his newest enemy is the European Union. The EU now joins the media, Democrats, and Robert Mueller on his list of enemies, along with immigrants, Obama, marital fidelity, stairs, fair compensation to employees, ethics, clean Trump restaurant kitchens, the rules of golf, reading material, nutrients, and Melania.
CHEERS to pleasant foreign-relations surprises. Forty-seven years ago today this week, in 1971, President Nixon caused astir when he announced he was leavin' on a jet plane to visit China wearing nothing but argyle socks and a cape. His mission: "To find the golden bedpan of the Yangtze and use it to smite my enemies." Fortunately Pat was there to postpone the trip until he sobered up.
JEERS to the end of an era. The launch pads---A and B---at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 17 tossed a lot of useful hardware---325 launches in all, including the 1959 satellite that was the first to send back photos of earth, and three Mars rovers---into space during their 54 years of service. Rarely have Americans gotten their tax dollars’ worth more than from the activity that swarmed over that complex. But all historic things must come to an end, and Saturday the pads came down in spectacular fashion:
-
Up next for that particular patch of terra firma: the testing of robotic lunar landers being developed by Moon Express, a private company that plans to import minerals and other harvestable goodies sitting on and below the surface of the moon. Hey, if you’re taking orders, guys, set me up for weekly delivery of half a pound of green cheese. It’ll go great with the green bread I have sitting in the back of the fridge with the 1987 expiration date.
CHEERS to today’s edition of No Shit, Sherlock. Courtesy of Christopher Ingraham at The Washington Post:
White Americans’negative attitudes toward immigrants are driven overwhelmingly by racial prejudices, not “economic anxiety,” according to a working paper by political scientist Steven V. Miller of Clemson University. […]
All told, the analyses were “unequivocal that racial resentment is reliably the largest and most precise predictor of attitudes toward immigration,” Miller found. … The effect of racial resentment has “nearly six times” the impact as a belief that the economy has gotten worse on respondents' propensity to favor less immigration.
This has been today’s edition of No Shit, Sherlock.
JEERS to Vatican vitriol. 813 years ago this week, in 1205, Pope Innocent III decreed that Jews would be doomed to perpetual servitude and subjugation because they killed Jesus. His pronouncement was immediately followed by: "Ow! Who threw that?!!"
-
Ten years ago in C&J: July 16, 2008
JEERS to Deputy Droopy drawers. Flint, Michigan police chief David Dicks (yep, that's his name)---apparently having nothing better to do in one of the most violent cities in America---has his super troopers using this handy chart to check citizens out for excessive ass crack exposure:
The maximum penalty is a year in jail. Which I guess explains the recent disappearance of all the city's plumbers.
-
And just one more…
CHEERS to good advice: towards a More Perfect Union edition. Our local newspaper publishes two advice columns every day: Dear Abby and The Washington Post’s Carolyn Hax. Recently the latter answered a note from a husband and father who notes that, while high-profile celebrities have gotten most of the ink regarding sexism and sexual harassment, it’s still pervasive among us regular schlubs:
Coaches still call boys “ladies” when they want to inflict an emotional barb, moms tell their boys to “man up” (no one ever says “woman up”). Adult men feel free to tell a teenage girl, “Why aren’t you a cheerleader? You’re too pretty to be an athlete.” I heard about that one yesterday.
Here’s the kicker: I’m a guy. I live in a state that is considered the anti-Alabama by the rest of the country. And yet all this stuff persists. My spouse and I talk about all this with our boys, who are similarly outraged, but I hear such ignorant stuff from their friends---who are growing up in supposedly “progressive” households---that I kinda despair for any real change.
Yeah. It does happen in progressive households sometimes. (Although the clear, and accurate, implication here is that conservatives are the most chronic offenders) I could sheepishly point, for example, to some stuff I’ve written in early C&Js that unthinkingly crossed the line. I grew up in that kind of an environment and old habits die hard. But I’ve gotten a lot better with time, and that’s why I respect Hax’s response, which basically says change is a’ comin’...
People are talking about this like never before, which means a level of awareness like never before, which means two things: backlash, yes, and then eventual progress. You’re talking about this with your sons! In a way I doubt you would have even 10 years ago. I’m talking to my kids, too.
Now take those individual conversations, add time, and imagine the impact on a national scale.
There will be people who scoff in response and, worse, act as if it’s a patriotic exercise to denigrate women. Trolls will be trolls. But decent, well-meaning people will flinch a little inside when they use a phrase they’ve always used only to realize now what its implications really are, and that it makes them complicit in an injustice of long standing. I see women in particular doing this flinching now---you rightly mention the current reckoning with men who’ve abused their power, but women have been some of our own worst enemies.
We have, for example, a b-word problem. It’s hard to see clearly when we’re standing so close that we ourselves can adopt language that vilifies or negates us. There’s waking up and there’s woke.
I think I see what you meant by your reference to “the anti-Alabama,” but it’s not enough for people to stop lumping others under gender stereotypes. Anyone in the culture who is calling for a cessation of stereotypes has to renounce them in full. Or at least be mindful of how many there are, how ingrained they are, and how complicated they (and their users) can be, before pointing fingers at anyone else.
Easier said than done. But we’ll keep trying, anyway, as long as we can agree on this one thing: Alabama started it!
Have a tolerable Monday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-
Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
"My presumption was, based on Bill in Portland Maine’s horrible, disgusting addiction to candy corn, that the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating that behavior to be lifeguard of the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool.”
---FBI Agent Peter Strzok
-