Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Sing us a song, you’re the men of GLoP… from Margaritaville to Brandy… where everyone is gay and everyone is Jewish (There is a logical explanation here!) and where they dish on FDR, homophobic telescopes and the Dutch.
While we were recording we heard the news of Ivana Trump’s passing and that leads to an interesting vocabulary discussion, one that you might say is iconic for this program, especially if you’re even vaguely familiar with our canon.
Then we baffle the kids with stories of Dom DeLuise, Rodney Dangerfield, Jackie Gleason, Larry Storch and director James Burrows.
This whole episode smells terrific!
Subscribe to GLoP Culture in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.
I’ll never listen to Piano Man the same again.
What is the name of the book? Too much cross talk.
I think Rob has mentioned that theory before. Either here or on the flagship podcast.
Always thought that the part about “what are you doing here?” was saying that the pianist was too talented to be playing in a dive bar.
good episode in that it told me something I did not know. ( Rodney and the make him rich rewrite instructions. )
What bugs me is that few radio stations play the full version of the song, that and The Eagles’ “Lyin’ Eyes” is the other big example.
John is wrong about “person capable of becoming pregnant” being somehow descriptive, since the left now claims that men are also capable of becoming pregnant.
I thought the same thing when John described who Kevin McCarthy is. As for parody/satire/irony, there is always that one reader who doesn’t get it. I once wrote a column for my newspaper back in the day that mentioned “the 11 people who watch MSNBC.” A woman called and left me a lengthy voicemail, listing the most recent numbers for MSNBC: “On Monday, there were 456,000 viewers…”
Have Jonah and John seen the end of Obi Wan? Once you see the end you realize that the fight in the middle was for the sole purpose of making Jonah pound his high chair, cry, and fling his spaghettiOs across the room, while they intended to “resolve” the issue in the last episode. I assume Jonah was still rolling on the floor in a pool of spaghettiOs like Ann Margaret in baked beans and was unable to process this.
John, shame on you – Mary Richards’s original apartment had a conversation pit, of course it had levels! Gut Shabbos! 💐🍷🕯🕯🍰🥖🥖
Btw guys, nice mentioning Larry Storch. Was expecting a whole Jimmy Caan thing though. Next time?
It wasn’t a conversation pit, it was just a sunken living room.
Actually, thinking about it, I don’t think it was really even a sunken living room – the “lower[ed] level” was the majority of the apartment and included the kitchen – so it was more of a split-level apartment.
Edit: I watched the entire run of the series on DVD last year…
Mary only had a studio apartment, no bedroom? That’s off somehow. But I never really watched the show when it was first on either.
Yup. There were a few episodes where Lou or somebody would come by late at night and she’d have to unmake the bed.
The apartment she moved to in the last few seasons had a bedroom though.
The weird thing when I was watching the show on DVD last year – there were episodes that I had only seen maybe once or twice, and certainly not since the early 1980s at the latest. But I could anticipate certain scenes and even lines verbatim.
Memory is a very strange thing.
A lot of people never saw the first episode of Hogan’s Heroes or the whole first season of Gilligan’s Island because they were made in black-and-white and the syndicators wouldn’t pay for and show them.
I had to stop listening last night – but isnt it in poor taste to discuss the fetish life of someone who is recently deceased? CuckQuean isnt just the wife of an unfaithful husband – but she enjoys his adventures. (CuckQueen is a similar term) It just seemed a little sketchy to jump from the news of someone’s death to immediately discuss that…
Star Wars … LucasFilm is a nuclear train wreck dumpster fire in an open sewer… They take too much of their direction from twitter, not realizing that twitter is not representative of America in general – or of their own fan base. Blame Kathleen Kennedy for all of this.
Ironically your criticism of Obi Wan is off base. Obi Wan started off as a movie project but when Solo bombed Disney got scared and almost killed the project. The show with all the characters from Clone Wars is “The Mandalorian” which is actually good. Its not the Clone Wars characters that are killing Disney Star Wars TV Series.
Fans React to Mandalorian Episode “The Jedi”: :SPOILERS ALERT::
It does cost more to get good writers to make things good, The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan both suck – do you know who wrote it? nope… But the Mandalorian? Dave Filoni. I imagine Dave Filoni gets paid a lot more than the mooks who wrote The Book of Boba Fett or Obi Wan.
Well worth rewatching!
I thought you guys were on to something with the “monetize the nerds” theme, then you failed to realize that the real money in Star Wars has never been the movies. The movies are loss leaders, on a balance sheet.
The nerds spent more money on trading cards, kids pajamas, toys, books, and games than was ever spent on movie tickets.
50 year$ of sweet sweet lucre, based on making the nerds happy.
Then Disney overpaid for several “boy brands” to diversify away from over-saturation on princesses and they forgot where the money was coming from.
Ten years later failed Disney Star Wars toys are on clearance and hasbro is still collecting on a 40 years dead IP.
I cannot eat baked beans without thinking of Ann Margaret.
I grew up on Long Island in the ’70s and my neighbor was Billy Joel’s limo driver (“Nice people!”). The tribal knowledge was Piano Man was a result of his experience playing at My Father’s Place, a night club in Roslyn. My contemporaries did not view the lyrics as a gay anthem, but as a call to get the hell out of the suburbs.
Roslyn was/is a bedroom community “associated with Jews”, much as Ray Romano used to call his home town Massapequa “Motzo-Pizza”. With “word inflation”, GLOP could trademark a new progressive label: Jew Adjacent, for people like Rob Long. Shalom!
My favorite alternate theory
Die Hard- the whole Nakatomi Plaza incident is the dream McClane is having on the plane as he fantasizes about reconciling with his wife (this is one I made)
Panic Room- it’s all happening in Jodie Foster’s head as she wants to save her marriage.
The actual layout of Mary’s apartment. Ok you made my evening lol.👍🏻 Sunken / pit whatevz. My multiple levels comment stands. 😊
Trans men. Originally women can become pregnant. It’s hard to follow all their lunacy, we have to excuse John.
@roblongis correct about the word iconic. It is overused and meaningless.
Except according to the left, trans women ARE WOMEN.
According to the loonies’ logic, men can become pregnant, trans men, meaning men that used to be biological women (they wouldn’t use this last definition). So in their twisted logic, men can be pregnant. Trans women are women (according to the deranged) but this particular kind of woman can’t get pregnant. Makes sense?
Of course not. Because it’s the left.
Iconic, epic, awesome, hilarious, legendary, revolutionary, literally, …these are the examples that occur to me now. “blows my mind” is a sentence that lost all meaning it can refer now to mediocre parking skills or a so and so icecream. The “literally derangement syndrome” has contaminated my native language, Portuguese, my children use it the same way the numbnuts use it in America, it makes my blood boil.
Legend is the one that drives me nuts. For example, someone calling the guy who sang in Loverboy a legend. Who’s telling tall tales about that guy around the campfire?
Great episode! I, too, hate “iconic” as it is currently misused. “Iconic of what?” is my internal reply. I never ask out loud because, unlike the difference between “virtual” and “literal,” the explanation would take too long.
I have a question for possible treatment on a future episode. With profuse apologies to Rob, shouldn’t Amazon have known what it was getting itself into with Rings of Power? Its trailers are hugely underwater in terms of likes vs. dislikes on Facebook, to the point where Facebook has suppressed the dislike figure and is removing negative comments (according to the fanatics). Moreover, the trailers are completely uninformative as to what the show’s plot will be, and anyone who is a fan of Tolkien’s books or Peter Jackson’s movies seems to be in a steroidal rage about the whole project. With all of that money being thrown at it, a built-in fan base, and their reputation on the line, how could Amazon have apparently gotten it so wrong?
It is not as if Amazon is incapable of producing televised versions of books that will please fans of the original. The Jack Ryan series was pretty good and so was Bosch. They knocked The Expanse out of the park, in my opinion.
Full disclosure: I’m a pretty big fan of the books and thought Jackson’s movies were surprisingly good. I wasn’t much looking forward to an Amazon treatment of the material, so I don’t much care whether the series is good.
Rob is no doubt snoring already, but my question is really more general: Amazon isn’t stupid, so what is it about Rings of Power (and Circle of Light) that made the behemoth stumble so?
It may turn out that the series is really good, in which case Amazon is getting the roll-out and marketing completely wrong, which is another question in itself.