Last night I watched the first episode of season 4 of the Sherlock series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. It seems to me that as the series progresses, the writers are becoming too clever by half, to the point where one can imagine them chuckling as they add one more improbable twist to the plot, saying gleefully, “This will blow people’s minds!”
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The differences between the way the language is used by the two countries provides an endless source of material for comedians. Here is British comedian Michael McIntyre on a TV show discussing some of the differences.
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Yesterday’s news was full of stories about the abrupt resignation of two top staffers from Ben Carson’s presidential campaign that resulted in 20 other members following them out the door. There had been rumblings for a while about dissention within the camp and Carson himself had at one point said that he was considering a shakeup in his team, which seems to have made things worse.
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I’d like extend best wishes for 2016 to all this blog’s readers.
Last year was a disturbing one in terms of American politics. We saw the unleashing of openly xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, militaristic, and anti-poor appeals to the public, and sufficient numbers of them were attracted to those calls that, although they are not the majority, they have created sufficient noise to have significantly influenced that direction of the Republican party primary race.
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Jerry Seinfeld has president Obama as his guest on his show Comedians in Cars getting Coffee. He usually picks his guests up in a vintage sports car and they go to a restaurant. In this episode, the first part went fine with Seinfeld driving a 1963 Corvette to the White House but the second part was thwarted because the security detail would not let them leave the grounds.
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Two evangelical preachers Kenneth Copeland and Jesse Duplantis explain that they had to ask their congregations to donate money so that they could fly in private luxury because it was not good for them to be cooped up in a ‘long tube’ surrounded by ‘dope-filled demons’. Besides, their god told them that they must have more than one of them in order for their faith to grow and who are they to defy god?
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As the first actual selection of delegates for the party nominations gets near with the Iowa caucuses on February 1 and the New Hampshire primary on February 9, the various candidates are moving their campaigns into top gear. On the Republican side, what seems to be shaping up are contests within two main subgroups, one claiming the outsider or insurgent mantle and the other the establishment mantle, though given the angry mood of the Republican electorate, even the establishment candidate has to wear at least a partial outsider veneer, to claim that they are not of the establishment even if they come from it.
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That is of course Donald Trump’s slogan though he does not say when he thinks it was great before. Below is a video that takes that slogan and parodies the Trump campaign. That such parodies exist is not surprising. But in this case, it was produced by a conservative Arizona group known as the Public Integrity Alliance that has also targeted other politicians whom they deemed were giving conservatism a bad name.
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It is well known that Eve was made out of one of the ribs of Adam. Or so the conventional wisdom goes as is found in the Bible in the book of Genesis 2:21. But a scholar has come up with an alternative theory that is pretty interesting.
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Bernie Sanders has said that he could win the backing of Donald Trump supporters.
Sanders told CBS’s Face the Nation that many of Trump’s supporters have legitimate fears stemming from income inequality that Sanders is best positioned to address.
“What Trump has done with some success is taken that anger, taken those fears, which are legitimate, and converted them into anger against Mexicans, anger against Muslims,” Sanders said.
“In my view, that is the not way we are going to address the problems facing this country,” he said.
Instead, Sanders supports a platform of bringing citizens together to push Congress to pass laws that address income inequality. He said that many of Trump supporters are “working class people and they are angry” because they are losing their jobs to overseas firms, cannot afford to send their children to college and are working longer hours for lower ages.
Sanders also sent out a release on Sunday saying that Trump is “getting nervous” about working families getting a better understanding of his policies.