Choosing films to watch

This comic strip will strike a chord with many readers who have spent a long time idly skimming through the streaming options trying to find something to watch. It can be difficult even if one is alone and there are no competing views.

(Pearls Before Swine)

I have pretty much given up on searching through the catalog as a way of finding films. It is very rarely that I stumble across anything that I think is worthwhile to spend a couple of hours on. When I do find something, it is a title that I had heard about before and made a mental note of as possibly interesting and then forgotten about it. What I do now is maintain a list of films that I would like to see based on reviews or recommendations, and then wait until they become available in some format.
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John Oliver on the weirdness of the funeral coverage

Seth Meyers asked this anti-royalist for his reaction to the news coverage of the funeral. Oliver describes an innocuous but wry comment he made that was censored by Sky TV that broadcasts his show in the UK. He also says that a supermarket chain there muted the beeps that its scanners make as a mark of respect. He was pretty funny.

Incidentally, whenever I ridicule the absurd extent of the coverage and its hagiographic nature of non-news like Queen Elizabeth’s death and funeral, I inevitably get comments to the effect that by writing thus, I am contributing to the coverage, implying that I am being inconsistent. This puzzles me. Of course I am referring to the same event. That is obvious. But there is a difference between covering an event and making fun of that coverage. The point of making fun is to try and ridicule such coverage out of existence. It may or may not work but staying silent will definitely not bring about any change.

When confronted with pompous nonsense, the best thing to do is laugh at it.

One-liner jokes

The Edinburgh festival fringe has people vote for the best one-liner jokes and the winning ones feature puns aplenty. Here are the top 10.

  1. I tried to steal spaghetti from the shop, but the female guard saw me and I couldn’t get pasta – Masai Graham (52%)
  2. Did you know, if you get pregnant in the Amazon, it’s next day delivery? – Mark Simmons (37%)
  3. My attempts to combine nitrous oxide and Oxo cubes made me a laughing stock – Olaf Falafel (36%)
  4. By my age, my parents had a house and a family, and to be fair to me, so do I, but it is the same house and the same family – Hannah Fairweather (35%)
  5. I hate funerals. I’m not a mourning person – Will Mars (34%)
  6. I spent the whole morning building a time machine, so that’s four hours of my life that I’m definitely getting back – Olaf Falafel (33%)
  7. I sent a food parcel to my first wife. FedEx – Richard Pulsford (29%)
  8. I used to live hand to mouth. Do you know what changed my life? Cutlery – Tim Vine (28%)
  9. Don’t knock threesomes. Having a threesome is like hiring an intern to do all the jobs you hate – Sophie Duker (27%)
  10. I can’t even be bothered to be apathetic these days – Will Duggan (25%)

Why people in MAGAland still talk to Klepper

I mentioned recently my puzzlement that Trump’s MAGA followers still talk to Jordan Klepper even though his clips make them look ridiculous. In an interview, he answers that question, saying it it is not hard at all to find people willing to talk, even if they know of him and his work.

But at a Donald Trump rally in June, he looked genuinely flabbergasted when a couple of young women seemingly had no knowledge of what happened on January 6, 2021 (see clip below).

“There’s definitely a surprise to be found at every Trump event,” Klepper tells Deadline. “I wish I could say that we went to these places, and we were fishing for people, but that’s not the case, we only talk to anybody who would like to talk to us. More often than not, people want to come in and talk to us. But the fact that they had never heard of January 6, even the terminology around insurrection was new to them was frankly shocking to me. I knew there was a rock a lot of people lived underneath, I just had no idea it was so encompassing.”
…

One of the more curious elements of Klepper’s segments is why so many right-wing folk are willing to talk with him, given that he is essentially making fun of them. But he likens it to being a heel in wrestling, that Trump supporters see this as entertainment.

“I probably took 50 or 60 selfies with people who were excited to just see somebody involved in the narrative surrounding this Trump World,” he says. “There are even politicians at CPAC who would come up and ask if they could set up a time [to talk]. You become like a villain in the Trump universe. It’s always that the rallies are like a sporting event. There’s ideology, there’s pomp and circumstance, it is fun, it’s entertainment and that also speaks to why people talk to me.”

Still seems a bit strange to me. Maybe it is because I at least try not to look like an idiot, even if I do not always succeed.