IT ALL ENDED WITH A MEDIUM SIZE BANG: HBO’s Game of Thrones finale drew more viewers than The Bing Bang Theory’s finale, veteran sitcom writer Ken Levine notes on his blog. “Network television ratings continue to plummet. A glaring example was the audience for the final BIG BANG THEORY. They drew 18 million viewers and for that CBS was turning cartwheels. I’m sorry. That’s a low number…Bottom line, when long-running beloved shows don’t draw mega numbers that’s a sure sign that broadcast networks are on their way out. Their argument has always been they’re the easiest platform to access and all they need to get big numbers is a show people really want to watch. You’d think they’d want to see THE BIG BANG THEORY…The GAME OF THRONES finale, which is on HBO that only a percentage of the audience can get drew 19.3 million last night. Just sayin’.”
Archive for 2019
May 23, 2019
IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Construction workers find dinosaur fossils in Denver suburb.
SEXISM IS EVERYWHERE: ‘Battle of the Thermostat’: Cold Rooms May Hurt Women’s Productivity. Ladies, if you want to turn up the temperature, you’re going to have to put up with men wearing less. Do you really want that?
ISN’T THAT LOVELY?: British universities can force old professors to retire in order to boost diversity, tribunal ruling suggests.
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Geoffrey Rush Awarded $1.9 Million in #MeToo Defamation Case.
THE (RE-)RISE OF THE NATION-STATE: India election results 2019: Modi claims landslide victory. “The hugely popular BJP Hindu nationalist leader brushes aside economic woes to claim another term.”
NATALIE PORTMAN “CREEP-SHAMES” MOBY: “So… she did go out with him a few times and then she realized he was sexually attracted to her? And that makes him ‘creepy’… just because he was so much older. If she was 18, I think that means he was 34.”
To be fair, he wasn’t actually creepy at the time because he was a huge star. He’s creepy in retrospect because he’s not a huge star anymore. If he were still a huge star, he would never have been creepy at all. But it’s not Natalie Portman’s fault that he’s not a huge star now.
GOOD NEWS FOR JOHN BOLTON: Mustaches help guard against sun’s rays, prevent lip cancer.
PROCUREMENT: Putin orders 76 new Su-57 stealth fighters in a desperate attempt to rival the US.
Desperate is right. The Su-57 isn’t very stealthy, the engines are years out of date by Western standards, the order won’t be completed until 2028 (if ever), and Russian maintenance standards probably aren’t high enough to keep that many fifth-generation fighters flying. And even neighboring Poland is seeking to buy nearly three dozen superior F-35s starting in 2026.
GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS: Kamala Harris tells Stephen Colbert impeachment is a mixed bag, hammers Trump on infrastructure extortion.
President Trump said Wednesday he won’t work with Democrats on infrastructure or anything else until they end their investigations of him. “You’re on the Senate Intelligence Committee,” Stephen Colbert reminded Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) on Wednesday’s Late Show. “Are you guys going to end the investigation?” “No,” she said. “Let’s just talk for a moment about this.”
So Trump’s “going to hold America’s infrastructure hostage over the issue of the investigation,” Harris said, connecting some dots. Almost half of American families are about $400 of unexpected expenses away from “complete upheaval,” she said. The average set of tires for a car costs $400, she added, and “why do people need new tires? Because the roads are falling apart.”
She does know she’s the senator representing California, the state that has had some of the worst roads in America long before Trump took office, right? Besides, I thought Obama fixed infrastructure, early in his first term.
AT AMAZON, save in Pools, Hot Tubs, and Supplies.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The (Almost) Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier. “If China has made the carrier obsolete, then why is China embarked on a huge carrier-building program?”
GLOBAL BABY BUST UPDATE: French mayor offers free Viagra to boost local birth rates.
GOING TO THE SUPREME COURT? The Competitive Enterprise Institute and Rand Simberg file a Supreme Court petition versus Michael Mann’s long-running defamation suit.
YOU MAY NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: World’s oldest record store bans Morrissey sales over far-right support.
FLOPPING ACES: Bill Maher And The Democrats’ Anti-Catholic Bigotry.
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON AT VOA? VOA Fires Two More Reporters for Chinese Dissident Interview. “Critics say official U.S. radio caved to Chinese pressure.”
TORIES DROP TO 7% AND BREXIT PARTY SOARS TO 37% IN FINAL POLLING BEFORE EUROPEAN ELECTIONS.
Related: The Brexit Party Poses an Existential Threat to the Tories.
Watching MPs acting out these calculations, including maneuvers by about 20 Tory ministers, some quite obscure, to offer themselves as the next prime minister, I’m reminded of the 1970s movie poster for Jaws 2 showing a pretty bikini-clad water-skier blithely cresting the waves as, unseen behind her, a huge shark is erupting from the water and about to swallow her up. The shark in question is wearing a pinstriped suit and its name is Nigel Farage. The pretty young thing represents the mainstream parties, especially Labour and the Tories.
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With only two days to go before the polls open, Farage was given three boosts that most politicians can only daydream about: a milkshake was poured over him by a bearded Leftie; the prime minister obligingly broke a major promise not to hold a second referendum on Brexit, as if to remind the voters why they were opposing her and supporting him; and an establishment quango, the Electoral Commission, having given the Brexit party a clean bill of health on its financing the week before, responded to an evidence-free demand from former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown that the party’s finances should be investigated for illegal contributions by returning to its offices two days before the election and going through its books again for several hours and finding nothing wrong — almost as if there were, you know, an establishment conspiracy against Farage, Brexit, and the party bearing its name. In fact, there’s almost a conspiracy of events to help them.
In America, veteran leftwing talk radio host Bill Press is the latest to endorse splattering your opponents with chemicals and liquids: Bill Press on ‘Milkshaking’ of Farage — ‘I Love That Idea’ and Hope it Comes to US.
Yeah, but one doubts that Press and Ogburn would find the practice nearly so amusing had the attorney general getting assaulted been Eric Holder. And just imagine the faux outrage they’d summon if the target was Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or “Occasional-Cortex,” as stated by the great Andrew Klavan at The Daily Wire), or one of those poor defenseless Democrats running for president.
If heaving a milkshake at a politician is fair game, how about coffee? Or paint, as long as it’s watercolors. Surely a pebble or two couldn’t do much harm, providing that the recipient removes his glasses in time. And is there really much difference between pebbles and slightly larger stones, as long as they’re thrown from a distance? After all, these are hated politicians we’re talking about and this is just another form of dissent, albeit assaultive. Right? Right …?
Or as Ace of Spades warns the media, “The rules you make for me, you also make for yourself.”
YOU DON’T SAY: Lawmaker Who Helped Write Obamacare: ‘What We Have Now Is Not Working.’
The fix for a failed government program is always a bigger government program.
TORNADOS KILL THREE IN CENTRAL US, DAMAGE MISSOURI STATE CAPITAL: “Three people were killed in the small town of Golden City, Missouri, officials said, while the midwestern state’s capital Jefferson City was struck by what the National Weather Service called a ‘large and destructive’ tornado Wednesday night.”
LARRY ELDER: The Left’s Battle Against ‘Inequality’ Leaves Out One Critical Factor. “In his book Discrimination and Disparities, economist Thomas Sowell notes that a disproportionate percentage of first-born siblings become National Merit scholars compared to siblings born later, presumably because the first-born starts life with no sibling competition for parental attention. This, says Sowell, illustrates the absurdities of expecting equal results when equal results do not even occur within the same family among siblings raised under the same roof with the same parents.”