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It’s the end of the year, the eve of the debut of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and the start of the primary season. That means the men of GLoP must fire up their Skype and bring their punditry skills to bear.
This month, a mediation on what it means to be a member of the “establishment.” Suffice to say, it has a very different meaning than it did 40 years ago. Also, some thoughts about guns, predictions and hopes for The Force Awakens, choices for the best of 2015, and Rob’s medication of choice for the new year. Tune in, turn on, and drop out. See in 2016 for our live show in New Hampshire on February 6th.
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You guys have no idea how painful it is for me to save this episode and the latest Law Talk for our 12-hour drive at Christmas…
But it will be worth the wait.
I’m not heading out until New Year’s Eve. I don’t know if I’ll make it…
Warning: This may get deleted because it deals with a Ricochet advertiser, but my experience with Lear Financial: I sent $25,000 for gold somewhere around 2007…they charged me $5,000 for the privilege of buying it for them, so I technically got $20,000 of gold in rare coins (they told me that, if looking at the highest purchasing price for each piece, it would be worth $60,000.) While my American eagles had gone up between 20-60% in fluctuating worth since then (overall they have gone up about $400 per ounce, except for a dip right now when the gold market is way down, so it is actually a good time to buy), my Lear rare coins went down such that when I sold them last summer, they were worth less than $12,000 total. In the midst of realizing what a rip off the rare coins trade is (unless you are going to do a lot of work in buying and selling yourself), Lear called me and tried to tie the worth of their rare coins with the rise of the price of gold, which was manifestly dishonest because my gold from them had lost worth at the same time my American eagles were gaining. Before using Lear, please consider more ethical companies, and if you are going to use Lear, get bullion or American eagles (though it looks like they are overcharging on their website if I am reading it right).
um… I thought the “buy gold” stuff on GLoP was a joke. Haven’t listened to this episode, so maybe they picked one up, but it has been a running gag for quite a while.
I wonder if this is something specifically conservative. Is anyone selling gold to liberals?
How did Jonah land the old man character here in the cockpit of the Falcon? If anyone’s old and crotchety, well, wait a minute – you’re all crotchety.
I’m honestly still not sure whether it’s still a gag or not. Sure doesn’t sound like it.
Note: I normally listen to the podcasts on Stitcher and this episode plays for 6 seconds of Jonah saying he’s going to eat food over the sink.
I agree, but normally I do these on Saturdays for my (slow; hey, I’m a Senior Citizen) 5+ miler. A 12 hour trip requires lots and lots of things, so 80 minutes is not enough.
I love physical gold. However, I know where Bill Devane’s safe is, so I’m good.
Micro-dose? It’s 80min long!!
nOT IF yoU’rE ON lsd!
Star Wars was based on “Only Angels Have Wings” from 1939? Is that true? Has anyone seen this movie and compared the two? If so, what did you think?
I’m pretty sure it was based on The Hidden Fortress from 1958.
Complete hogwash. Only angels have wings is one of those manly American lives south of the border stories done in the age. Cary Grant plays a daring, hard-boiled flier running a small company–he is not the owner–of cargo fliers in the Andes in Venezuela, I guess. He’s got to make really dangerous missions–so do all the other fliers–in really bad weather, through mountain passes that barely compute with the low flight ceilings of the era. This is the Hemingway era of American story-telling. I love the movie far more than anything like Star Wars, & Howard Hawks is a far greater movie-makers than Mr. Lucas, but they have nothing in common either as to plot or as to character. (I suppose there is more than mere nothing in common with Han Solo, but it’s not worth the talk…) Apparently, Mr. Lucas spliced in flight images from that movie before he could get any of his own effects for Star Wars. That’s all.
Star Wars was written with the E.R. Burroughs–guy who wrote Tarzan, for short, so before the Hemingway era–A princess of Mars story in mind: A guy gets into a military situation where the Jeddah warrior aristocracy lives & has to save a princess.
The two companions & the fortress Mr. Lucas took from the Kurosawa movie, but what else?
Obi Wan is based on the Toshiro Mifune character. The princess in danger. the bad guy is essentially Darth Vader. Etc etc etc.
Get a copy of the Secret History of Star Wars. Most of Star Wars was ripped off from The Hidden Fortress then filtered through a Flash Gordon mindset since the latter is the movie Lucas actually wanted to make. Most of what Lucas has been peddling the last 20 years is based on a lie he’s told so often that he believes it himself.
I can buy some of that, at least because I want to watch that movie again, but I do not yet see that this is any more compelling an origin than the John Carter story-
John said in the podcast that letting Tashfeen Malik into the country was a colossal managerial failure on the part of the Homeland Security apparatus.
Andy McCarthy says
Sounds as though it may have been a colossal managerial success.
Lucas was actually trying to secure the rights to do Flash Gordon which he lost out on so he made a Flash Gordon-style movie based on Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. It’s heavily documented with original interview transcriptions and draft copies of the script in The Secret History of Star Wars. He borrowed ideas from Buck Rogers and John Carter among other period scifi/fantasy, too.
BTW – Donald Trump is in dire need of any of the Great Courses but he needs to be told that they have nothing to do with golf resorts.
Winning!
Yeti, this episode is only few seconds long on Stitcher.
Oy, OK, we’ll look into it. Stitcher takes our files and re-encodes them and we have no control over the final product. But I’ll ask them. Thanks for the heads up.
Perfect outro. Marshmallow pies and all.
And Rob came out as a Universalist?
oh, everything is based on Akira Kurosawa. :) Or, I’m sure that argument can be made. I do love most of his movies, though.
Macbeth…based on Throne of Blood. Shakespeare had no scruples.
And Hamlet on one of Kyd’s plays, The Spanish Tragedy, I think was the name.
But Hamlet is so much better than Kyd’s play.