Rush Limbaugh Dies at 70; Turned Talk Radio Into a Right-Wing Attack Machine
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Okay look. I’ve heard so many times how people are sick of the dark and gritty. These are superheroes.
And with Superman, Wonder Woman, etc, I fully agree.
But not with Batman. I can genuinely say that I hate a light, goofy Batman. If your Batman dances in clubs and runs around with cartoon bombs and keeps shark-repellant spray on his utility belt, I’m out.
See here’s the thing… Batman’s origins are dark. He watched his parents get murdered in front of him. Then he took that and decided to dress up as a bat to run around a city beating up criminals.
Now granted, there’s a lot of political talk to be had, here, and from a Socialist perspective, I’m definitely not a fan of Bruce Wayne. All this money, and what does he do with it? Larp as a superhero beating up poor homeless people. He could sink his basically infinite wealth into, I don’t know… giving homeless people homes, a universal basic income, universal health care… but no. He gets himself a “magic tech” Batsuit and beats them up, instead. From a Socialist perspective, Bruce Wayne is terrible.
But from the perspective of a comics fan who started with Batman… I can’t not love him. But yeah… I’m sorry… I want my Batman dark.
As has become rather customary on my blog, I’ve been very silent… at least until I uploaded that blog on horseradish a few days ago. You’d think, what with all this extra time on my hands, that I’d be blogging up a storm. And it’s not like there’s no shortage of topics to talk about. There’s COVID-19. There’s the fact that cops haven’t stopped murdering black people in cold blood in our streets (FTR… justice for George Floyd. Black Lives Matter. Fuck the police. ACAB). More trans men and woman are dying this year. Trump is still president, and an absurdly high number of Leftists still think he’s better than a Democrat, despite four years of evidence that he’s the worst thing to happen to this country since at least Bush Jr, and is absolutely the worst president of my (now 33-year) lifetime.
I genuinely didn’t think things could get worse than 2016. Holy shit was I wrong.
So. Fucking. Wrong.
And yet, despite all this, I stay silent. I’m not here talking about the pandemic, or the protests, or Trump.
Why is that?
Because I just don’t want to.
So, back on Sunday night (June 23rd), my brother and I prepped horseradish. I decided to start recording (via my phone), when we started to take it out of the food processor to put it in a container. Then I thought it’d be a good idea to share our recipe.
In the future, we want to do an actual instruction video on how to make it, while showing us actually making it. This video… isn’t that. The idea started out as a joke, but then I was like… hey! I want people to see this! Maybe I can teach them how to join us in this delicious pain! And this video was the result.
I don’t have a transcript as such, but I do have a recipe which I’ll post here, and the video has subtitles! So there’s that… it’s a bit too off the cuff for a true transcript. There’s no script to speak of. Hopefully the subtitles work, but if people want a transcript, I’ll convert the subtitles into one to copy/paste here, as well. The editing work is also super amateur. I haven’t done any actual video editing in years, so… yeah.
Anyways… here’s the video!
Hi! I’ve been sitting on this post for a bit. To be honest, I mostly finished writing it way back on October 14, 2019. This was not long after Game 5 of the 2019 NLDS division title game that the Braves lost to the Cardinals 13 to 1… and the Cardinals got 10 of those points at the top of the first fucking inning!
Holy shit I’m still mad about that.
Huh.
Anyways… you may be wondering if I’m writing anything about the Pandemic. The answer is no, I’m not. I don’t know what to write about. I’m still not interested in writing about the Lying Cheeto Muffin, ranting about conspiracy theorists and ignorant assholes seems counter-productive and a waste of time, and all the rest of it is just me shouting UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE NOW! RIGHT NOW! THIS FUCKING SECOND! $1200 ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH FUCKING MONEY! IT SHOULD BE $2400 A FUCKING MONTH FOR… EVER. UNIVERSAL HOUSING! WATER SHOULD BE FREE! DOWN WITH CAPITALISM! SEIZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION! UNIONIZE! RESIST!
SOCIALISM FOREVER!
So yeah… that’s really all I have to say about COVID-19.
And yes, I know it’s April 1st. “April Fool’s Day” is a thing that needs to die. I refuse to participate and I’d appreciate it if y’all left me out of it.
I don’t have that much interest in sports. Gridiron (US-American “Football”… in which feet are not used except in one instance), Basketball, Hockey, Golf, etc just hold no interest for me. I get them… I can follow them… I’m just bored by them, and don’t like playing them, either. There is one exception, however, and that’s Baseball. But even there, that exception is quite limited.
I grew up in Atlanta, GA. My family has always been a Baseball family, and the Atlanta Braves (along with the New York Yankees, but to a slightly lesser extent) has always been the family team. I even have a Braves batting jersey (I won it). I have always been a fan. And of course, as a fan, this past decade has been immensely infuriating. We couldn’t give Bobby Cox, Chipper Jones, or even, most recently, Brian McCann, a goddamn Pennant… let alone a World Series win. Our most recent loss to the Cardinals (13 to 1… and the Cardinals got 10 of those runs in the top of the first fucking inning) was so absolutely devastating that I didn’t even watch the post-season. I stopped caring.
I did care just enough to rant about the game in a Facebook group I belong to, though, and someone made a comment basically saying that as long as the team and its fans continue to be racist against Native Americans, they (the person who wrote the comment) will continue to gloat over the Braves’ losses anywhere and everywhere it’s even barely appropriate.
As much as I love the Atlanta Braves… that person is entirely correct. It’s time to end the Atlanta Braves as we know them.
Content note: this post talks about the abuse and murder of women. I have no intention of going into deep specifics about anything, but the links and quotes I use will. Just keep that in mind as you read this…
Also, I’ll be spoiling a couple specific story-lines of the first season of Mr. Robot… if you care about that.
You know… it takes a lot to make me not like a writer. I even enjoyed reading Dan Brown back when I did that (it’s been years), and a lot of people agree that he’s a crappy writer (even I do).
One thing I do enjoy is stumbling onto a show with excellent writing. It’s rare, honestly.
If you’re now officially questioning why I love Doctor Who, I should remind you that Doctor Who is not a series written by one person. Usually, the showrunner only writes three or four episodes of a season, while other writers write the other episodes. Sometimes there are amazing episodes, sometimes there are terrible episodes, and usually there are episodes that were written well enough to keep my attention and be enjoyable to me.
A while back, my brother and I started watching the first season of Mr. Robot. I found the writing to be quite good, so it kept my attention… sort of. We weren’t binging it, and I had zero desire to. I just didn’t care about seeing the next episode right away… I could wait until my brother wanted to see it. And yet, I was enjoying it.
But I was very worried about one particular character… specifically, Shayla Nico…
The main character, Elliot Alderson, is a very good hacker and a morphine-addict. Shayla served as his drug dealer and eventually became his girlfriend. We got to meet the man, Fernando Vera, who supplied her with the morphine she sold to Elliot…
And my guess is that y’all already know where this is going, don’t you? You don’t even have to see the show to know exactly where this is going…
(Content Note: I do talk a little bit about the torture and even killing of a child.
Also, you’ll notice that, in referring to the Doctor and Tecteun, I mix gender pro-nouns a lot. Due to the nature of them both, I use the pro-noun appropriate for the specific incarnation of them I’m talking about, and the generic pro-nouns when referring to the beings as a whole. It’s probably confusing… it got confusing for me. But it’s easiest this way.)
So I’ve been chewing on The Timeless Children for a while, now, and I’ve put together a sort of personal canon that I think fits with what we’ve been told. It’s a timeline of the Doctor’s life that also serves to theorize on several mysteries.
Because this will be spoilerific, I’m going to start with a short, generic review of The Timeless Children above the fold.
To be honest, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the episode itself in execution. It was basically an exposition dump broken up by rather anti-climactic fights with Cybermen. The acting was good (the only reason I won’t say that Jodie and Sacha both deserve awards for their performances here, even though I think they do, is because Peter Capaldi deserved every possible award in existence for his performance in Heaven Sent, but didn’t get a single one, so…) and I actually really like the concept of the episode and what it endeavored to do, but the execution fell pretty flat, especially for a finale as explosive as this was.
What I will say is that above is not a review of what was revealed about the Doctor in the episode. I’ll get to how I feel about it after the fold.
Finally, I’m going to make a request of commenters. Every single Doctor-Who-related forum has dissolved into cesspools of negativity and toxicity. At least one person has been driven away from Doctor Who fandom due to racism because they dared to actually enjoy this episode and what it revealed about the Doctor. As a result, I’m tired of it.
I’m not asking you to pretend you liked it. You are more than welcome to note that you didn’t like it and even say why. But I will not have negativity and toxicity in these comments. If someone comments who did and does enjoy it, then give them the space to do so. They are no more wrong than you are. That said, what I really want to discuss are the theories. Instead of attacking Chris Chibnall, the actors, fans, etc, and lamenting that “DOCTOR WHO IS DEAD!!!!”, I’d rather us work out and discuss the in-universe implications of what’s been revealed, and theorize about different aspects of it. And if you can’t do that without being an asshole about it and attacking the crew of the show and the fans, then please choose to not comment, instead.
So… let’s get to it…
Warning. I’m going to be spoiling the absolute piss out of the most recent episode of Doctor Who and then some. I will do my best not to spoil anything above the fold, however. I will also be doing a shallow dive into very deep and frankly confusing Doctor Who lore, so please keep that in mind. This is your warning. If you haven’t seen Fugitive of the Judoon, then please don’t read this post unless you’re like me and enjoy spoilers… in which case, read on fellow spoiler-junkie… but still see the episode.
I’ve talked about Doctor Who on this blog before. I’ve noted that it’s my all-time favorite show. And it’s weird, because it’s one of only two shows that I actually keeps my attention, the other being The Mandalorian (seriously… there was literally no TV show that kept me that engaged aside from Doctor Who before the Mandalorian dropped).
No… I don’t watch a lot of TV.
I’ve also discussed how I’ve considered Peter Capaldi’s Doctor to be my Doctor. I wasn’t super happy with every one of his episodes, and Moffat is not my favorite showrunner or head writer or whatever… that would actually be script editor Douglas Adams, who did script editing for the show for a time while Tom Baker was the Doctor (and before he [Adams] wrote the third Hitchhiker’s Guide book… which, BTW, started as a story for Doctor Who that was never shot). But I absolutely love Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. I think he was phenomenal, and was a welcome relief from the young, far-too-human (in my opinion) Doctors before him.
As for Jodie Whittaker… I think she’s absolutely phenomenal and is definitely in my top 5. Sadly, I wasn’t all that enamored with her first season (season 11, from 2018) over-all, but I have loved her characterization, her Fam, and where she’s going.
This season, only half-way through, has been a revelation, however. There was one bad episode (Orphan 55… sorry it wasn’t good) in a sea of good (so far) episodes (if you ignore a couple super problematic aspects of Spyfall Part 2 [i.e. the Doctor’s racism and wiping minds without consent… again]).
Then there’s the episode in question… Fugitive of the Judoon. Now, I do think it’s an amazing episode, but it’s also left me confused, speechless, and in desperate need of having a conversation about it.
So, starting now, I’m going to spoil the shit out of it…
Yeah it’s another recipe post. Since Superbowl Sunday’s on its way, and I told y’all how to make my favorite hummus last time, I thought I could give y’all one way to use said hummus and the tehina sauce you made with it…
I put “nachos” in quotes there because this is obviously neither Mexican nor Tex-Mex. I took the idea of nachos… that of chips loaded with ingredients… and went a completely different route with it.
The best part of this recipe is its customizability. The most important ingredients are the pita chips, the hummus, the tehina sauce, and the tzatziki sauce. Beyond those four things, you can add whatever you want… you can even skip everything else and just use those four ingredients. So feel free to play with this. And if you like it enough, maybe serve it at your Superbowl party… you know… if you’re having one…