Last Sunday, my favorite daily comic strip came out with one of its signature themes.
What creator Stephan Pastis manages to pull off is not easy, to elaborately set up a joke without telegraphing the (pun)chline. It was timely too, given the recent release of the Freddie Mercury and Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
The cartoonist has figured out how to combine what many Americans say they want in a leader with good policies.
The administration of Donald trump is so awash in scandals that there is a danger that people are becoming numb to them. But what about the scandals in the Democratic party among those running for the presidency? Trevor Noah has the lowdown.
Short and to the point.
I do not follow carefully all the stories about Donald Trump and the Mueller investigation and its many ramifications because the ratio of mindless speculation to facts is way too high. I tend to wait for the comedy shows to give me some idea of what transpired during those events. Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah oblige with these synopses of the nine hours of the Michael Cohen testimony before Congress.
Among other things, he looks at Ivanka Trump’s deep understanding of what Americans really want in their hearts and the South African resurrection miracle.
Making fun of psychics is easy and fun but the non-amusing aspect is not only that four in ten Americans believe in them but that they are promoted by mainstream TV shows. These people are not harmless. They scam people out of money with their fakery and give false hopes and unnecessary grief. John Oliver has a good show about how they fool people and the harm that they and their TV accomplices cause.
The Academy Awards show is on tonight and Amber Ruffin and Seth Meyers have prepared a trailer of the always-popular ‘white savior’ film.
Amber Ruffin and Jermaine Affonso of the ‘American Diversity Council’ tell Seth Meyers what the most diverse film of the year was.
I sometimes hear white-collar workers speak disparagingly about manual workers whom they see relaxing. They seem to think that such people should be working non-stop even though they are doing extremely difficult and tiring jobs, often in terrible conditions, while their critics push paper around in air-conditioned workplaces where a lot of time is spent in idleness. I, for example, have never really done a hard day’s work in my life and am aware that I am very fortunate and am grateful for being so lucky.
I was glad to see that the creators of the Blondie comic strip were taking a stand for manual labor against this unfair criticism.
I only got around to watching last Sunday’s show Patriot Act yesterday and it was another excellent one. This time he took on the high drug prices that people in the US pay, much higher than in other countries, that often results in people not being able to afford drugs to live. Rather than give a generalized critique, he used as a case study the price of insulin (a drug that so many people need to just stay alive) to show how three big drug companies Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi, that market drugs under a multiplicity of names, have formed essentially a drug cartel that keep raising prices together and also exploit patent laws (they own the majority of them) to prevent cheaper drugs entering the market.
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