When Archie Bunker meets Meathead

Much has been written in tribute about Rob Reiner after the brutal murder of him and his wife Michele. Rob was the son of actor and writer Carl Reiner and became well known playing the liberal Michael Stivic as a counterpoint to the bigoted Archie Bunker in the groundbreaking TV series All in the Family, a show that broached many social issues and taboos.

Much to Archie’s displeasure, Stivic is the boyfriend (and later husband) of Bunker’s daughter Gloria. In this clip we see the first meeting of Stivic and Archie and Edith (his wife) and hear the first time that he is called ‘Meathead’, the name that stuck forever after.

Cory Doctorow on ‘enshittification’ and how to combat it

The writer and digital rights activist coined the term ‘enshittifcation’ to describe the deterioration of the internet and it caught on. I wrote about it a couple of times (see here and here). He now has a book with that title that I will get and read soon.

In this interview with Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show Doctorow explains succinctly how enshittification comes about and what can be done about it. It is an excellent informative interview.

Just when you think ICE and CBP brutality cannot get worse …

The stories of brutality and violations of people rights by the thugs that now make up the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) forces keep appearing daily. It is now apparently the case that those groups are attractive to violence-prone individuals who relish the chance to throw their weight around while wearing masks and assault anyone they dislike knowing that what normally would have landed them in prison is now fully protected by the Thug-in-Chief in the White House and his minions who occupy most of the high levels of government, including the attorney general Pam Bondi

(Non sequitur)

(Doonesbury)

But even through this dense mass of what would be criminal behavior if done by anyone else, some news stories still stick out, like this one where an attack dog was used to deliberately injure someone.
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Good riddance, Larry Summers

The insufferably pompous, arrogant, and sexist former president of Harvard University has been forced to withdraw from many of his public positions because of his tawdry email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein. However, he says that he plans to continue teaching at Harvard though it remains to be seen if that is possible given the outcry. It is a deserved comeuppance of someone who had a ‘kiss up and kick down’ attitude to people. When those peoplel get wounded, few will come to their defense.

You can read all the details of his rise and fall here.

On The Daily Show, Ronny Chieng discussed Summers and other Epstein files fallout.

The strange saga of the Epstein files

I have not written much about the Epstein files and the recently released trove of emails between Jeffrey Epstein and Trump and other various well-known people because it is being covered so extensively in the media. Susan Glasser writes in The New Yorker that the Epstein emails are becoming a chronic problem for Trump.

On Capitol Hill, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, kept the chamber in recess from mid-September to mid-November in what seemed to be a transparent effort to block a vote on releasing the Justice Department files. This, I’ve long thought, should have been more of a scandal in its own right—Congress closing for business for weeks and weeks because a Speaker was running interference on behalf of a President who didn’t want more details to emerge of his dealings with a sleazy dead rich guy who had sex with underage women on his private island? How was that not a bigger deal?

But, in order to end the longest-ever government shutdown, Johnson had to give in this week and order the House to return to work. That meant swearing in a new Democratic member who had won a special election in September; she quickly became the two-hundred-and-eighteenth signatory of the discharge petition that will now force Johnson to hold a floor vote on releasing the files.

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Republicans flailing in the aftermath of Tuesday’s losses

As usually happens, the hot takes by the losers following a bad election loss like what Trump and the Republicans suffered on Tuesday tend to be somewhat extreme. Although they lost everywhere, it is Mamdani’s win that seems to have struck a real nerve and it is not hard to see why. The defeats in the governors races in Virginia and New Jersey, though by much larger margins than anyone expected, were to largely centrist candidates who did, however, lean into the fact that running against Trump was a good idea, something that Mamdani demonstrated throughout his surprising race that took him from 1% in the polls a year ago to winning over 50% of the vote on Tuesday. For example, 71% of people who voted for Mikie Sherrill for governor of New York Jersey said that it was a vote against Trump.

What must bother them is that Mamdani did not at all shy away from all the attempts to ‘other’ him, to make him look like ‘not one of us’. Instead he embraced it. As he said defiantly in his victory speech, “I am young … I am Muslim. I am a Democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.” Republicans are making a big mistake if they think that Mamdani won because of those qualities. New Yorkers may be more progressive than the nation as a whole but they are not that progressive. I think he won despite those things being a handicap and if Republicans focus on those things and don’t look closely at what made Mamdani’s message such a winning one that it neutralized all those deficits, they will be making a big mistake. Mamdani’s achievement was in seizing upon the issues that New Yorkers cared about and refusing to be sidetracked by attacks on his biography. Others could have done what he did but he was the one who saw the opening and seized it. The fact that he is charismatic and energetic and presents a vision of youthful energy and change undoubtedly helped.
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The oddities of the English language

I like puns and other plays on words. This is why I like doing cryptic crosswords, which depend more upon linguistic puzzles than the recall of facts, far more that the standard type. For that reason, they are harder to construct. Cryptic ones are more popular in the UK and other non-US English speaking countries, where newspapers often offer them on a daily basis. In the US The New Yorker magazine at one point offered a good cryptic crossword puzzle every Sunday but stopped doing so a few months ago, I presume because not enough people were doing it.

Because of my liking for word play, I often find humor in interpreting things differently from what the writer or speaker intended. And for someone like me, English idioms can be endlessly fascinating.
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Film review: Bad Shabbos (2025)

In these days of relentlessly depressing news, a good comedy comes as a welcome relief and this is such a film.

It is about an observant Jewish family in New York who host a Sabbath dinner to meet the Midwestern Catholic parents of their son’s fiancée, when something happens that leads to the evening going completely awry.

The humor depends on some extent on the practices of observant Jews on the Sabbath, especially the many restrictions on what you can do, but I thought that it was not offensive. But then, I am not Jewish and hence not the best judge.

Here’s the trailer.