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This week on America’s most beloved pop culture podcast: ACTUAL pop culture! Yes faithful listener, the men of GLoP have heard the voice of the people (and read their comments), and they have listened. There is positively NO politics in this podcast (so alliterative!). Not even one mention of the T-Word (OK, there might be one — but it’s late and we’re not going to go back and bleep it out. Instead, a cacophony of topics ranging from doodling on TV (no, that’s not a metaphor), the loss of porno parody movie titles, Mythic Quest, Ninotchka, Tango & Cash, what are the best movie endings, Rob’s health care short film that never got made, the funniest woman on Tik Tok, and more! You’re welcome.
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Made all the better by the fact that – as the franchise and many of its fans seemed to forget – Rocky lost the fight.
But can there ever be a better ending than “Some Like it Hot?”
Update: Now that I’ve listened to the podcast, I found the ending to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to be satisfying.
Only 99% T***p-free. Call the FCC!
Reminds me of the late science fiction writer, Harlan Ellison, whose many feuds made him a great conversation starter.
What will we talk about, once he’s gone?
I vote for science, beauty and romance.
I am looking forward to the remake, “Orange Man”.
The hero must protect himself from hordes of louche culture critics, ponces, and milquetoasts.
Ponce de Leon just called, he’s offended.
Meant to post this a few days ago — some screen shots of taken during the recording of this episode:
And yes, we are aware of Rob’s frames (h/t @ejhill).
Well, Scott, at least you look pretty good there.
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And now back to our program, er, podcast.”
I think you’ve just settled the Georgetown cocktail party question. They look more like the homeless dudes that the cocktail party-goers call the cops to have removed from the sidewalk in front of the venue.
The slightly-orange tint on Rob’s glasses make it look like he was going for some sort of convergence look, between Harry Carey’s frames and Elton John’s lens colors…
Because they give ponces a bad name?
Exactly. He doesn’t want to be associated with those… ponces…
Bad News Bears: “Take your trophy and shove it up your ass, Yankees! Wait until next year!”
Probably is worth noting on Jonah’s explanation of the ending of “The Last American Virgin”, the crushing part was that the girl didn’t just reject the teen lead of the movie at the finish — he goes to a party and finds her there and back together with her jock boyfriend, who had abandoned her after he got her pregnant and was the reason the nerdy teen ended up paying for her abortion.
(I suppose you can make the argument that the nerdy teen didn’t deserve to be rewarded with sex after paying for an abortion, but the crushing part of the messaging was the sexually active guy who had tossed the girl aside when she got pregnant came running back to her when the fetus was dead, and she was perfectly happy to get back together with him again, once her little problem had been vacuumed away. So there’s no moral hero out of any of them, but the movie gives you the least moral outcome of all — which might be the ending most likely to occur in real-life, but it was still a miserable way to leave the movie theater.)
The protagonist may be said to grow in wisdom, to learn to not waste time on rotters, like the jock boyfriend and the pregnant girl. If he had read The Great Gatsby, he would have learned how a man can romanticize a mundane, unworthy woman into something she is not.
That the girl goes back to the jock boyfriend who had not stood by her strikes me as implausible. More likely she would look for another jock boyfriend, who has not (yet) been proven worthless.
In real life, I remember reading an account of a nerd who marries a pregnant girl way out of his class — this is before the eugenicists on the Supreme Court invented a Constitutional right to abortion — and they lived happily ever after.
The film was made 10 years after ‘Roe’, and apparently was based on an Israeli movie, where the girl comes off the worst here — she both has no major qualms about getting the abortion and is willing to go back to the hot guy who wouldn’t help raise the child or pay for the abortion, even if her stupid/evil combo is unrealistic. The end message was a combination of ‘Know Your Place, Peasant,” and “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” at a time when the moral concerns about abortion were actually less than now.
Stories of time travel gone wrong: I forget the author, but somebody wrote a short story where William Proxmire went back in time to give Robert Heinlein a shot to cure his tuberculosis so he would stay in the navy instead of becoming a science fiction author who would inspire people to advance the space program.
Proxmire returns to “The present” to find that Admiral Heinlein is in charge of the space force.
the story was written and presented to Heinlein shortly before his death.
I’d like to read that.
It’s by Larry Niven:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_William_Proxmire
“The Return of William Proxmire” is a short story by Larry Niven first published in 1989 in the anthology What Might Have Been? Volume 1: Alternate Empires, edited by Gregory Benford.
The short story was reprinted in Niven’s collection N-Space, as well as the Robert A. Heinlein retrospective Requiem.
I’ll skip the plot summary, but…
Reception[edit]
“Return” was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Short Story for 1990.[1] However, Strange Horizons described it “execrably toothless satire”, calling it “desperately unfunny, unsophisticated, self-congratulatory stuff” that “reeks (…) of crassness”,[2] while Brooks Landon considered that what was most remarkable about the story was “its faith that Robert Heinlein was such an exceptional individual that his life would have changed the future no matter what his occupation.”[3]
I’ve been reading science fiction for nore than half a century, and I’ve never heard of Brooks Landon. However, I surmise that he is a person lacking a sense of humor, and unfamiliar with the conventions of the alternative history genre.
Given that it was written as an homage to RAH shortly before he died, I think Brooks kinda missed the point.
I like most Niven stuff, except for the faaaantasy (said derisively) but I don’t remember ever hearing about that one before. I’ll have to look for it.
I love this podcast. I’ve been going back through the archives, it’s a great pod to have on while I’m puttering.
But there’s one thing that drives me crazy on this pod (and on the Commentary pod), and it seems to bother the co-hosts too, because they’re always making fun of him for it, but: John Podhoretz. Does. Not. Listen.
I’m not exaggerating. He seems literally incapable of it. The other hosts might as well be talking in a foreign language. He talks, then just seems to listen for the phonetic sounds coming out of the other person’s mouth to make the “I’m wrapping up” sounds so he can talk again. If they don’t make the “I’m wrapping up” sounds and instead make “And another thing” sounds, or if another person makes “That’s interesting what you just said” sounds, he panics and just starts loudly talking until everyone else stops.
Once you hear it you can’t unhear it. Nothing he says in response to anyone ever has anything to do with what the other person just said. Sometimes he’ll start in with, for example, “The thing about the Odd Couple is…” before someone says, “Actually, could I please respond to what the other person just said?” And John will grudgingly wait for those sounds to end and then say “Right. So the thing about the Odd Couple is…”
While I realize the odds of him actually ever reading this are vanishingly small: Mr. Podhoretz, for the duration of one podcast, please please please just TRY these three things:
1. Do not prepare your next thought. Do not prepare anything. Instead, try listening to the sounds the other person is making. Try to discern the point those sounds are making, decide whether you agree or disagree with that point, and then respond to what that person said. Imagine it like a giant tower that everyone is adding bricks to in turns. This is a conversation. Anytime you come to the end of a long point and you hear silence after, and you say “Anyone? No?” that means you have derailed this conversation.
2. You are in a podcast with at least two other humans. Statistically, that means you don’t actually have to talk every single time somebody else stops talking.
3. If you are co-hosting a podcast with a professional comedian, and that professional comedian is telling a story, please assume everything that comedian is saying is leading to something called a “punchline”, and everything the comedian is currently saying is in fact in direct aid of strengthening that punchline, so when it sounds like he’s wrapping up, you need to actually let him say the punchline before you steamroll over him with the anecdote about the Odd Couple you’ve been waiting to say for five minutes.
The “Indiana Jones plays no part in the outcome of the movie…” thing is claptrap, because the Ark did end up in the US warehouse instead of with the Nazis.
And regarding time-travel stories in general, by now everyone should know that going back in time to STOP Hitler, is always what CAUSES Hitler!
And regarding “Everybody’s Fine,” maybe I think about things too much – a curse of the highly intelligent, I suppose – but the premise falls flat to me. If the guy believes his wife’s spirit is in the afterlife and can receive information from the living world, wouldn’t her spirit already know how their kids are doing? And wouldn’t the dead one(s) already be there in the afterlife with her? Or is the conceit that the dead can only communicate with the living, or receive information etc, in the immediate vicinity of their grave? In that case, what if they were cremated? Or if their body was never found? Or was not intact for whatever reason?