Royal family feud

I have expressed many times my distaste for the British royal family, or for royalty anywhere in the world for that matter, seeing them as utter parasites who should go out and get jobs. I am puzzled by the fascination that people seem to have about the minutiae of their lives and studiously avoid such stories. But recently I have been inundated with headlines about some split that seems to be happening and finally my desire to be informed about popular culture won out and I caved in to listen to Trevor Noah explain what is going on.

Larry David on Bernie Sanders

The irascible Larry David who plays the irascible Larry David on the sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm also has a recurring guest role playing an irascible Bernie Sanders on Saturday Night Live. Appearing on Stephen Colbert’s show, he talked about what a Sanders presidency would mean for him. Colbert told him that Sanders would be coming on his show the next night and asked him if he had any message he wanted to give him.

“I would say, I would beg him to drop out so I don’t have to keep flying in from Los Angeles to do SNL,” David answered. “I thought when he had the heart attack that would be it, I wouldn’t have to fly in from Los Angeles. But, you know, he’s indestructible. Nothing stops this man!”

“If he wins, do you know what that’s going to do to my life?” he added. “Do you have any idea? I mean, it will be great for the country—great for the country. Terrible for me.”

Jonathan Pie interviews Prince Andrew

Well, not really. The British royal family would not let faux journalist Pie within a mile of them. What he does is interview a fictitious member of the British royal family (the ‘Duke of Chesterton’) who bears a resemblance to Andrew about his friendship with a known pedophile that involved sexual acts with underage people. It is of course a parody of the disastrous interview that Andrew gave to the BBC about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and the charge made by Virginia Giuffre that she was forced to have sex with him.


[Read more…]

Stephen Colbert visits Jacinda Ardern

New Zealand’s prime minister managed to quickly get a ban on assault rifles in her country after the horrific Christchurch shooting. Colbert accepts her invitation to visit the country to talk about this and other things and she picked him up at the airport, driving her own car. What impressed me is how the New Zealand prime minister drives a modest car herself without a massive security entourage, lives in a normal sized home, and acts like a normal person. That is as it should be with heads of states unlike the ridiculous circus surrounding the US head of state.

At the beginning in the car, Colbert was really annoying, finding her cell phone in the car and pulling the jerk move of repeatedly trying to get her to give the passcode to her phone, which she refused. He kept making guesses until, predictably, her phone got blocked. It was behavior that was more in keeping with Colbert’s former Comedy Central character than in his present role. The interview got better after that.

Who are the people in Star Wars?

Those who recall the first Superman film starring Christopher Reeve will I am sure remember the scene where he is heartbroken that he could not arrive in time to save Lois Lane from death when she falls into a crevasse, if I recall correctly. So what does he do? He flies around the world at high speed in a direction opposite to the Earth’s rotation and by doing so he reverses the flow of time so that events go backwards and Lois emerges from the depths and he can rescue her. This was laugh-out-loud funny bad science.
[Read more…]

How the US is exporting bad food and eating habits around the world

In his last episode of the season of his show Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj looks at how the US, through the World Trade Organization, bullies other countries to force them to open their markets to unhealthy foods exported by the US so that the problems associated with such foods that we are so familiar with in the US, like diabetes, are now increasing globally.

At the end of the show, he spends a few minutes giving advice on how to deal with all the problems that his show raises and he recommends that each person focus on just a few things to act and be activists on, so as to avoid being overwhelmed into a state of inaction on everything.