Author: Mark Alexander

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Project Much?

I think he’s a maniac. I think Adam Schiff is a deranged human being. I think he grew up with a complex for lots of reasons that are obvious. I think he’s a very sick man. And he lies.” ~ Donald J. Trump, 3 December 2019

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The Rise of Skywalker

I wanted to love it. I really did. After forty two years, the venerable STAR WARS saga wrapped up with The Rise of Skywalker. And yet, last night as I walked out of the theater, I was left with an ill-defined disappointment.

I will, however, give it a solid 7 out of 10. Maybe 7.5. It answered some long-standing questions and paid homage to pretty much every franchise trope ever created, but I—someone who stood in 100 degree Arizona heat for hours to see the first three movies in the 70s and 80s—honestly found myself struggling to give a crap about much of anything that was happening on screen. I appreciate how they paid homage to the late, great Carrie Fisher and were able to integrate her into the film (which was originally intended to be “her” film after featuring Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill’s characters in the previous two films) by utilizing existing footage shot for other films and not resorting to CGI, but not even that was able to reach in and grab the heartstrings the way those first three films did. Even seeing the opening crawl and hearing the familiar John Williams’ score failed to move me the way they had in times past.

And some of the storyline decisions…

From Jezebel (spoilers ahead; highlight to read):

The Rise of Skywalker is a return to history, but a sloppy one at that. It’s more fan service for the older movies than a fitting end for the characters introduced in The Force Awakens. Instead of propelling these characters forward, it yanks them back to the past in ways that truly do not make sense (How is Palpatine still alive and how did he have kids? How did young Leia have a vision that her son would be saved by someone else using her lightsaber in Skywalker, but then still be adamant about putting him through Jedi training in TLJ despite knowing he’d turn dark?). In addition to this baffling attempt to end storylines from ages ago—storylines believed to already have been ended—The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t even stick to its own creative choices. There are moments where the stakes are raised, like when Rey kills Chewie, C3PO’s memory is wiped, or when Hux is revealed to be the spy from the First Order, but then are immediately undone or resolved, with no lingering or greater thought. It’s as if this movie is meant to please without putting anyone at risk. No death feels real. No sacrifice or victory feels earned.

Let’s just leave it at that.

I am certainly not the same, naive nineteen year old I was in 1977. I’ve changed. The world has changed since those heady days. And that may be one of the reasons I was so emotionally unmoved by this last film.

I’m glad I lived to see it. To be honest, one of the things that played a big mental role in me beating cancer in 2003 was the thought that I couldn’t die yet…there were still four more movies coming out!

And FYI, I’m definitely Team FinnPoe. There was just such an…energy…between those two, especially during the first fifteen minutes or so of the film, that pinged my little homoerotic heart.

Should you see it? Yes. For completion if nothing else. Will I see it again? Undoubtedly. (But probably not until It appears on Netflix.)

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Cord Cutting

We did it. For months Ben has been advocating telling Cox to take a hike. It wasn’t that the service was unreliable or the choices in programming unacceptable; it was just too damned expensive. Even with our Premium package, we were paying over $200 a month for cable and internet service. I was reluctant to leave cable because—let’s face it—I’m an old fart and not as welcoming of change as I once was. Also, when we checked into this a few months ago, several of the channels we (okay, I) watched were on channels that the various streaming services did not provide at the time. Service A provided w, x, and y, but not z. Service B provided z, but not w or y. Service C provided x, y, and z, but not w. You get the idea. By the time you added up all the services we’d have to subscribe to, the difference in cost over what we were paying for cable was negligible.

All that changed two days ago. We got an Apple TV. I know, I know…one more cog in the ecosystem for me to eventually rant about. But lo and behold, the device was surprisingly useful beyond just providing a big screen experience of For All Mankind. It serves as a hub for our smart switches and outlets, as well as allowing me to cast my music library to the living room stereo as well as display my Mac’s laptop screen on the television when I want to. (Admittedly done rarely, but when needed it was a hassle to hook up.)

We’re now subscribers to Hulu and Philo. Those, coupled with Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube (which we were already subscribing to) provide everything we were getting through Cox—at slightly more than half the cost. Even when we add HBO and Showtime back in the mix (when the series we were watching there return next year) we’re still coming out way ahead.

So, as usual, I’m late to the party, but glad I finally arrived.

(The only thing I’m struggling with is the stupid Apple remote. Maybe it’s just a learning curve, I find none of that Apple intuitiveness about it, and I’ve wanted to hurl it across the room on several occasions.)

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It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature

From Salon:

Whatever word you want to use for it — fascism, authoritarianism, pick your poison — the grim reality is that Republicans, both politicians and voters, appear to be all in on this project. It’s painful to admit this, but Republicans have flat-out rejected democracy. As a group, they are pushing towards replacing democracy with a system where a powerful minority holds disproportionate and borderline tyrannical control over government and blocks the majority of Americans from having meaningful say over the direction of the country.

Republicans are not cowering in fear of Trump. On the contrary, they are exalting in his shamelessness. Watching Republicans at impeachment hearings, where they performed outrage for the cameras, lied with obvious glee and gloried in sharing conspiracy theories, it did not appear that they were intimidated by their president or anyone else.

No, Republicans clearly feel empowered by Trump. He frees them to reveal their darkest desire — which is to end democracy as we know it, and to cut any corners or break any laws necessary to get the job done.

No, the darker truth is that Republican voters, like Republican politicians, see clearly what Trump did — use the power of his office in an overt attempt to cheat in the 2020 election — and they love it. Like their leaders, Republican voters are feeling done with democracy and eager to follow Trump into a new world, where the majority of Americans who vote for Democrats are kept out of power, by any means necessary.

It’s a movement of white men and their wives who hold a narrow, racist, reactionary view of what being an “American” is. They believe that those of us who don’t fit into that view — because we’re not white or because we’re not Christian or because we’re pointy-headed intellectuals who believe in free thought or because we’re queer or because we’re feminists — are not legitimate Americans, therefore not legitimate voters. So Trump’s law-breaking to undermine the 2020 election is seen only as a necessary corrective to the “problem” of a pluralistic democracy.

That is why there’s such deep division in the U.S. over impeachment. It’s not that conservatives can’t see what Trump did when he used the power of his office to cheat in the 2020 election. They just don’t care. If anything, they’re glad he did it. This is the same party that repeatedly tried to shut down the government during Barack Obama’s presidency and was hugely successful in blocking his judicial appointments. This is the party that suppresses votes and gerrymanders districts into meaninglessness. They feel entitled to run the country and do not care if the voters disagree. Voters are just one more obstacle to be overcome in the Republican power grab.

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A Little Trip Down Memory Lane

Who else found one of these Guaranteed-3rd-Degree-Burn-Makers under the tree when you were a kid? Bonus points if you had parents who let you use it unattended! (Those open hot plates had to heat the molds to 390 °F (199 °C) in order for the Plastigoop to solidify.)

Creepy Crawlers was for…Christmas…1964, I think. It wasn’t wrapped, and I actually received it before Christmas because I remember my folks had to call a dozen stores to find one in stock and we went to pick it up immediately. My ThingMaker craze was continued with Mini Dragons a couple years later as an Easter gift. My buddy Greg had Fright Factory (which I adored but could never convince my folks to get for me) and his sister had Fun Flowers.

Seems you never had enough goop—or the colors you needed—to create the fantastic creatures featured on the box lids.

50 years later, I have none of the thousands of bugs or the creatures from Fright Factory that my friend and I made, but I do still have one Dragon:

And I’ve got to hand it to Mattel. The plastic is still as supple and flexible as it was the day I made that critter in 1967.

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So one million moms is off by a factor of 999,999

Hilarious. (And as we always suspected.)

From The WOW Report via Truthspew:

We all witnessed the yo-yo drama with The Hallmark Channel pulling their same-sex kiss Zola commercial (and then reversing their decision) temporarily buying into the threat of the scarily named, One Million Moms. But as many suspected over the years, their numbers were WAY exaggerated. Now we find out it’s really just One Meddling Mom with an agenda.

Her name is Monica Cole and according to GLAAD,

She is the one and only person who appears on their petitions, as well as the one and only person who speaks for them to the media. She is the mom. Her. Solo. One person, supposedly representing one million.

One Meddling Mom has issued so many calls and condemnations over the years, it’s become easy to tune them out. As GLAAD has arduously detailed, OMM has gone after everything from recent blockbuster Toy Story 4 for including a seconds-long clip of a supposed lesbian couple that quite literally no one but them noticed, to Chips Ahoy for a Twitter ad featuring a Rupaul’s Drag Race star. Basically if a company hires, recognizes, features, or in any way supports an LGBTQ person, One Meddling Mom will issue a petition, claim to have millions of supporters behind her, and then start cranking the AFA machine in hopes of getting some sort of press for her campaign-of-the-week. OMM even uses a conservative PR firm, Hamilton Strategies, to help spread this message to a wider public.

But, Ms. Cole and her tiny task force (masquerading as “millions”) does get people fired up.

Here’s some more evidence GLAAD compiled,

  • The Internet ranking site Alexa (not to be confused with your in-home listening device) gives OneMillionMoms.com a ranking of #1,133,944 in global internet engagement. That is extremely low. For comparison’s sake, GLAAD’s own page has a ranking that is ten times higher ranking than theirs.
  • One Million Moms has only 4,200 Twitter followers. Sure, not everyone uses social media, and it might even be fair to say that OMM’s target audience uses it at a lower rate. But 4,200 followers? For a squad of supposedly one million? That follow rate doesn’t add up.
  • Searching social media, it is really hard to find prominent voices speaking out in favor of OMM’s campaigns. You can find all kinds of pro-LGBTQ people pushing back against OMM, in ways ranging from funny to snarky to serious to whatever unclassifiable thing Cole Escola does. But even though Social Conservative Twitter is a reliably outspoken bunch, it’s pretty tough to find any sort of goodwill support for OMM. That would not be the case if they had anywhere near the support base they claim to have.
  • American Family Association petitions have been skewed for years. Regardless of how you fill out an AFA petition, they will count you as a supporter. So if you weigh in with pushback, thinking you are going to open their eyes and change their minds, you will simply get a “Thank you for supporting us!” and your reply will be counted as support. I still get emails addressed to “Mr. Stop Hating,” the name I used for an AFA petition that I “supported” (read: trolled) a full fifteen years ago. So whenever they say they have X number of signatures, you can be sure that a sizable percentage are people who wanted to deliver a message on a forum where the petition is the only open communication channel.

Because of these her “victories” here and there, Mommy Cole and her PR firm’s bark is bigger than their bite really. She’s able to make her teacup Poodle seem like a Great Dane.

So, it’s not an army of Karens who want to speak to the manager, it’s just one Monica.

“Sorry, Monica, the manager isn’t here. Can I help you…?”

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