This one is more tortured than usual.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Politics in the UK seems to have become calmer these days, with just the usual low-level turbulence, such as the former Conservative health minister John Matt Hancock who thought it was a good idea to go on a reality TV show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!. That required him to fly to Australia and do some really disgusting things, leading him to either resign as MP or be forced out by the party, it is not clear which.
During his I’m a Celebrity stint – in which Hancock was repeatedly chosen by viewers to undertake tasks including rummaging for meal tokens underground surrounded by snakes and spiders, and eat food including a cow’s anus and a camel’s penis – officers from the West Suffolk Conservative Association suggested he should step down.
…Hancock, who was first elected as an MP in 2010, served as culture secretary before becoming health secretary under Theresa May, keeping the job with Boris Johnson and throughout the bulk of the Covid pandemic.
He resigned in June last year after footage emerged of him kissing a friend and work colleague, Gina Coladangelo, in his ministerial office, a breach of his own Covid-19 rules.
I find this action inexplicable but maybe Hancock thought that his future as a cabinet minister was over and that he could make more money this way than by being an MP .
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Although I like comedy, I find it hard to watch an entire program by stand-up comedians. After a while, I find it tiresome and have to switch off. I prefer to watch short clips. The performer I can watch for longest is British comedian Eddie Izzard. If you search on this blog for her name, you will find a ton of her clips that I have posted over the years. She is always fun to watch.
Today her one-person show of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations opens in New York. This is not a comedy but it shows her skills as a performer who can switch quickly between multiple characters. She appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show to talk about that and her running for political office in the UK and running of marathons.
Here is the interview.
Izzard’s signature stand up comedy style is where she conducts a dialogue between two people by making a quarter turn back and forth to signal the shift in speakers. She says that she copied that from Richard Pryor. Here is an example of that quarter-turn technique being used by Izzard to parody James Bond films.
The comic strip Pearls Before Swine took aim at the financial situation that Elon Musk faces after purchasing Twitter.
As I understand it, Musk paid $44 billion for the purchase. $27 billion was put up by him and $4 billion by other investors, while $13 billion was borrowed. This is what is known as a ‘leveraged buyout’ in that it is the company that is being bought that borrows the money, not the buyer. So if the loans go into default, it is Twitter that is on the hook, not Musk personally. This strikes me as a bit weird but what do I know about high finance? It appears that the banks seem to think that Musk will not drive the value of Twitter below the $13 billion valuation so that they can recoup their loan even if things go south.
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The backup vocalists of singers are often overlooked. The excellent 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom that I reviewed here some years ago focused on some of the people who provided the rich texture to many of the greatest pop songs but were largely anonymous.
I recently watched this documentary about the anonymous vocalists who sing backup for the featured musical stars, providing harmonies and visual excitement by dancing and swaying along with the music. In the 1950s and earlier, most of the backup singers were white women who sang more sedately and tended to follow the written music score.
But black women grew up singing in the gospel churches where improvising, harmonizing while dancing, and the ‘call and response’ form of preaching and singing provided a natural training for a more vibrant form of backup vocals. The people who utilized this most in the early days were the British rockers like the Rolling Stones and Joe Cocker who had discovered American blues music and found that these singers added an authenticity and energy to the music that they themselves did not have. They encouraged these women to let loose and give it all they got and they did, changing music forever. We then had backup singers being partially featured with groups like Diana Ross and the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Tony Orlando and Dawn, Martha Reeves and the Vandelas, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and so on.
Some cartoon strips require some fairly specific background knowledge to get the joke, like this one.
(Bizarro)
The collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX has been all over the news.
Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has filed for US bankruptcy court protection, said it owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1 billion.
The exchange owes about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors, it said in a court filing on Saturday, without naming them.
FTX and its affiliates filed for bankruptcy in Delaware on Nov. 11 in one of the highest-profile crypto blowups, leaving an estimated 1 million customers and other investors facing total losses in the billions of dollars.
What seems to have happened is a lot like an old-fashioned bank run where too many depositors wanted their money back at the same time, exhausting the cash reserves of the company. But in the case of actual banks, they are regulated by the government and there are systems in place to assist individual banks weather such runs and protect depositors. In the unregulated crypto-world where they prided themselves on being independent of government entanglements, there are no such safeguards
The company has filed for bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, has ben pushed out of the company and is now in the Bahamas.
The collapse of FTX has given a new lease of life for the ad the company aired during the last Super Bowl featuring Larry David.
On the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver takes a close look at the British royal family and takes apart the arguments given by those who think that the institution should continue. He also exposes the evasiveness and lack of responsibility taken by them for the horrors, including slavery, committed in their name over the centuries that enriched them and the UK so immensely. He walks us through the gruesome history of how the monarchy acquired their lands and wealth and then passed it down to their descendants. To add insult to injury, they also are exempt from paying most inheritance taxes, so that these layabouts can live a life of luxury on money that they have not worked for.
The general consensus about Trump’s speech announcing that he is running again was that it was long and boring. It did not help that he had telegraphed what he was going to say a long time ago. It also did not help that much of it was mostly a rehash of the speech he has been giving at rallies. The difference was that he was very low energy. This may have been deliberate in that he was trying to appear ‘presidential’ and reading from a teleprompter, which is not something that he does well. Or it may be because the audience was not the raucous crowds at his rallies that he seems to relish speaking to.
Even Fox News cut away from the speech and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post had at the bottom of its front page the single line “Florida man makes announcement”. That must sting.
In contrast, the late night talk shows reviewing the speech were pretty funny.
Here is Jimmy Kimmel.
Here is Seth Meyers.
It is so predictable. Whenever a major election draws near, the right wing media suddenly focuses heavily on crime as a major problem in the US. Jon Stewart and his guests talk about how the media coverage bends the political narrative and one of his guests Kasaun Wilson translates for us what ‘crime’ really means.