The pool boy speaks!

The pool boy, Giancarlo Granda, who was entangled in a menage a trois with Jerry Falwell Jr. and Becki Falwell gives his side of the story to journalists. It’s sordid and depressing — everyone involved is self-centered and hypocritical and oblivious to their own unpleasantness. So, the Falwells picked up an attractive, well-built pool boy at a hotel for sexual encounters in which Jerry Jr. would watch Giancarlo have sex with Becki, and built it up into a many years long relationship with promises of helping Giancarlo get rich in real estate. Everyone is clueless. Jerry Jr. doesn’t think there’s anything peculiar about the head of an evangelical Christian “university” that strictly polices the sexual behavior of its students getting jinky in a three-way; the pool boy is shocked, shocked I tell you, that the Falwells just wanted him for sex.

More and more, Granda would not want to have sex with Becki. By 2013, he would call his sister and tell her that he “physically could not continue” having liaisons with the couple. But whenever he tried to pull away from Becki or tell her that he didn’t want to have sex, he recalls, Jerry would grow furious at her.

The moral majority scion would also threaten Granda, he says, telling him that he would send videos of them having sex to his family and girlfriend.

Becki, in turn, would beg Granda to sleep with her, reminding him of when “we went to bat for you” to buy him the hostel.

“I don’t want this to sound like I’m being forced,” Granda emphasizes to TPM, thinking back to how he felt at the time. “I want to take ownership: I’m gonna bang her.”

“But I always felt like if I stopped, I would be completely cut off,” he adds. “Not financially speaking — losing out on the family experience, which I cared more about than anything.”

It’s around here that Granda began to feel that his place in the Falwell family was conditioned on sex, a cold but persistent feeling that would nag at him throughout the year.

It’s fine with me if Jerry Jr. gets off on voyeurism and infidelity; I am unbothered if Becki enjoys the kind of open relationship that lets her get laid with multiple men; Granda is a willing, consenting participant in their activities. But man, I despise stupidity and dishonesty. Be open about it. Don’t do a wildly hedonistic thing while simultaneously bullying others out of doing likewise.

Also, it’s appalling how much money these people were throwing around. Did Granda seriously believe his penis was worth millions of dollars?

‘Tis the season for terrible Christmas movies

Kill it. Kill it with fire.

Sometimes I wonder if I just have bad taste, or if everyone else in the world does. My wife and I were beguiled by the advertising and reviews for this new movie on Netflix, Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, “An instant classic!”, one review crowed, so we watched it the other day.

It jingle-jangled my brain.

OH MY GOD IT WAS SO BAD. This is a movie that tries desperately hard to be cheerful holiday fare that it crosses right over the line into creepy, and I was appalled in the first five minutes. All the characters have these intense nonstop grins splitting their faces and are so enthusiastic about everything that I was confident that the entire stage had been doses with smilex gas, and the show was a race to reach a conclusion before everyone collapsed in cackling death. There was no acting. There was only grimacing.

The plot: it’s about a toymaker who is famous for his inventions, although we’re not really shown any talent, or even any comprehension of what a child would want. In the opening, he builds a tiny and hyperkinetic matador doll that talks…and proves to be so egotistical that he ought to run for president, but has no personality other than an overwhelming narcissism. This creation is supposed to be the great new toy that will make him even more famous, but really, it’s a toy so lacking in charm that you just want to smash it. It might be a fine example of the worst evils of AI you can imagine, but nothing more.

The toymaker’s apprentice steals the matador and the notebooks with all his designs. Then we skip forward in time to learn that the toymaker became a babbling failure, is estranged from his own daughter, and the apprentice has become a success with an empire of toys. Enter the toymaker’s granddaughter, Journey, with a manic smile pasted on and a disturbingly optimistic can-do attitude. The rest of the movie consists of Journey using her ability to visualize mathematics as a kind of magic spell to animate stuff, including an ugly and pointless robot called Buddy 3000 that can fly and somehow enable people around him to fly. He’s activated by — I knew this was coming — belief. You just have to believe, and you can do anything.

Then there are sewer tunnels and explosions. Eventually the apprentice is defeated, and the toymaker vindicated, and he can return to making bad toys like the stupid matador and the big-headed Buddy 3000, all of which will go flying off the shelves, I guess. The only good moment is when the annoying matador is caught, and the toymaker flips off his power switch and announces that he will be reprogramming it, which is also rather disquieting. The matador was stupidly obnoxious and irrelevant to the story, but he did have a personality, icky as it was, and desires and feelings, and the master could just erase and reprogram it all. I guess that’s our Christmas message: if you’re loud and annoying and overly-excited about Christmas, we can shut you down and silence you.

It was apparently intended to be a stage production translated to Netflix, and it shows. Those smiles are designed so that even the kids in the nosebleed seats at Jingle Jangle on Ice would be able to seem them, and everything was so broadly done that there was no need for nuance or subtlety in plot or character or atmosphere. It was just LOUD and JANGLY and RELENTLESS. It also looked EXPENSIVE, with lots of elaborate sets and intense CGI animation. I’m wondering how much money they had to spend to get all those good reviews, too.

Oh, I almost forgot. It’s also a musical. I guess it was understandable that I forgot, because I can’t remember a single tune from the thing.

What will the comedians do now?

I was just thinking…with Donald Trump out of office, are the comedians going into mourning? He is such an easy target! I suppose they could milk the aftermath of his failure for humor for a while, but honestly, I’m so tired of the Orange Twerp that I don’t want to see him as the butt of jokes anymore. I just want to see him and his crooked cronies in jail.

I think it’s time for all the internet comics to pivot and start making Biden jokes. He’s an easy target, too, and you know he’s so conservative at heart that he’ll be making all kinds of bad policy decisions that will deserve skewering. Start now, please. We’ll all know the election is settled when the satire swivels to aim at the Biden administration.

Dr Pangloss lives, and she is a creationist

I am speechless.

…we can look at the nasal bones right here. God designed humans very specifically with this nasal bone, because he knew because of sin we’d be wearing glasses and contacts, right, so this helps hold our glasses. Primates have no need to wear glasses, so they were not created with that bone there. Right? Distinct difference. And that’s how easy it is to look at a fossil and know right away whether it is a primate or whether it is a human.

That’s from Answers in Genesis, just today.

The Minnesota Nice version of collegiality

Or, in other words, ratfuckers gonna fuck rats.

A day after it was revealed that GOP state Sen. Dave Senjem tested positive for COVID-19 after attending a Nov. 5 party caucus, news broke that Republican senators and staffers were informed in a Tuesday memo that “a number of [GOP Senate] members and staff have been diagnosed with COVID-19.”

DFLers were not informed of the rash of cases on the other side of the aisle.

I wonder how many of the Republicans saw this as an opportunity to mingle with their Democratic colleagues and spread the virus before the fact that they were plague ratfuckers got out?

Resentment in the monkey brain

This monkey monkey got his banana, why should he share it with anyone else? It’s that selfish libertarian impulse, I’ve got mine, bugger the rest of you.

Damon Linker has a monkey brain.

We’ve seen the same phenomenon in our elections for a few hundred years. They’re all about keeping the privileged in their state of privilege. The chief isn’t going to share his banana with us peons, so all we can do is make sure those other monkeys over there are even less likely to get a scrap of banana than we are.

We’ve got to get out of that mindset. I worked off my college debt (which was tiny compared to what students face now), but I consider the deprivation of so many people to be a crime that needs correcting, and I want my students to succeed — I am overjoyed if the next generation surpasses mine. Please do grant them debt relief.

(Mr Linker has been featured on this blog a few times. I’ve never been impressed.)

Then there’s this guy:

Yes, please. Make college free. Why should you be unhappy if your fellow monkeys improve themselves and are able to make greater contributions to your society? Why should you be unhappy at seeing other people allowed to improve their situation?