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Yep. it’s another GLoP and this month, we’ve got some Rank Punditry® on a certain ex-President’s legal trouble (consider yourself warned, Spatial Dendrites), a GLoP tribute to the retiring Pat Sajak, bad English accents, another installment of the GLoP Book Nook, and more.
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Aside from some (sadly predictable) spite about Trump, not much here.
Ah, the sh**holiness of old San Francisco. Thanks for the memories.
But before the conversation reached that point, I had interrupted it to watch a few clips from Being There, one of which showed Chance the gardener leaving his comfortable nest and walking the sh**holy streets of Washington, DC during that same era of the late ‘70s. It’s as if any socioeconomic progress, made at great cost and effort in the last 45 years, has been completely transitory.
Nters need to read John Milton and what he said about Mammon. Mammon turned to Lucifer and said something like, “Let us abandon heaven and make hell as beautiful as it can be. Let us make hell so beautiful that we will not miss heaven.”
Instead Nters are like atheists who are so busy complaining about Christianity they cannot make anything of beauty or worth.
Check out line 249 to line 263.
A good example of why these guys shouldn’t be doing political commentary. Yes, it’s supposed to be a show talking about entertainment, but the country is turning into a banana republic and these guys are bored with it.
I watched the mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man, at least part of it, when it first came out, and when it became available on VHS video, I watched the whole thing about 10 years after it was first released.
It was only recently that I read Irwin Shaw’s novel. For context, it’s about a group of people who graduate from high school in 1945. The war ends as they come into adulthood. So it’s a novel about the post World War II generation. The Vietnam War is referenced quite a bit in Irwin’s sequel, Beggerman, Thief which also covers the children of the Rich Man characters.
What I found interesting about both the Rich Man television and novel versions is how much short shrift is given the Korean War, where male class of 1945 graduates would have been subject to. In the novel, maybe one paragraph mentions the conflict, and how Jordy gets out of the draft.
It’s called the forgotten war for a reason.
I watched part of a YouTube video where the subject was the difference in English between the States and the UK. The presenter, who is English and a linguist, said that the English are very knowledgable about American English in a way that Americans are not regarding England’s English.
He said that England’s children grow up watching American television shows, more so than Americans watch UK fare. It’s not that we don’t get some UK television and movies, but comparing the two countries, it is a bit lopsided.
I feel like I grew up watching both American and British TV. KERA the public television station in Dallas began playing British tv in the mid-70’s with Monty Python, Benny Hill, The Two Ronnies, and others. It was mostly on weekend evenings and I believe it has continued to this day.
I continued watching British shows because I have done a lot of international traveling for work. A lot of that was in former colonies that would have BBC International in the camps.
Lately I’ve been toying with the problem of how to detect a “fake” conservative, or RINO.
Listening to this podcast, it occurred to me that one possible criterion is “preferred Letterman to Leno”.
For decades, Leno beat Letterman in the ratings. The climax of their rivalry came during a writers’ strike, when Letterman got his writers back early — but Leno still won. Eventually Leno retired, so Letterman finally got to be #1 in the ratings for a short while, before he retired himself.
Americans have some trouble understanding British accents. I remember someone turning to me, while watching a courtroom scene in a Monty Python skit, and asking why the prosecutor was constantly addressing the judge as “my love”.
The worst “British American” accent I ever heard was Hard Days Night director Richard Lester, who sounded like an American doing a bad British accent, half the time, and the other half, like a Brit doing a bad American accent. In reality he was an American who had spent forty years in the U.K., at the time of the interview.
Dick Van Dyke has said the reason for his accent in Mary Poppins is that the dialect coach thought an exaggerated, “music hall cockney” accent was desired. After all, wasn’t it for a children’s film about a magical nanny? Van Dyke’s accent would have been perfect for, say, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
There’s a bit more now for children with the popularity of Peppa Pig. There’s been a few articles written about children speaking UK English because of the show. My daughter had a touch of it when she was deep into watch Peppa. She’d ask me when we were going on holiday and if she’d need her swimming costume. Now she talks about her swimsuit but will occasionally talk about going on holiday.
Some British television that made syndication when I grew up was The Avengers and where Diana Rigg was introduced to American audiences (and no this was not the Marvel comic book Avengers), The Prisoner, still a cult classic, and The Saint, which introduced Roger Moore to American audiences, long before he starred in the James Bond franchise. This was all before PBS existed, at least in my rural market. So they were commercially viable here.
I don’t seem to have trouble understanding the upper crust English accents, but middle class, not so much. I do have trouble with Scottish and Welsh accents. When I watch shows from those areas, I have subtitles on when possible.
It has little effect on them personally. At least so far.
Is this a claim that Leno was somehow more conservative?
For awhile, Pat Sajak was a regular on the flagship Ricochet podcast, and I enjoyed listening to him discussing politics. At some point he said he was taking a break from politics, and no longer made appearances. It was probably for the best. He would have been chased from Wheel of Fortune if he had continued.
Sajak is a pretty good example of just staying in your lane, and working towards day to day excellence. And it includes helping contestents have a good experience doing something they will remember for the rest of their lives.
Good thing he starred in that movie too.
Jonah’s new Democrat friends obviously weren’t around conservative circles during Obama’s time as President. I still haven’t watched Being There but a lot of comparisons were made between the simpleton Obama and Chauncey Gardner. I know the reference because of Ace and many others.
If Pat Sajak were a lefty it is likely he would never shut up and would not be punished for his insistent shilling. I agree that it is good if people don’t focus on politics and instead just live excellent lives. The problem is that the left will not stop politicizing everything.
My dad was tail-end WWII. He was on Active duty from 1944, but didn’t make it overseas (Clark Field, the Philippines) until November 1945. Discharged in 1946, he did ROTC, finished college, and married my mom in 1951. My mom said they were very worried about him being called back to active duty for Korea, but fortunately his name never came up.
My future wife and I walked in the Anita Bryant Halloween parade on Polk St described in the “Season of the Witch”, having arrived in town the day before. For two East Coast kids, we had never experienced anything like it. Who knew there were so many Gay people?
Jonestown and the Moscone assassination followed shortly after. My father called long distance and told me “Get your ass home, that place is crazy!”
People do not realize what a small provincial town San Francisco is. Reading the book, I started using a Sharpie to highlight names of people I’ve met personally or spoken to on the phone, like DiFi, Willie Brown, or Warren Hinckle. There were yellow marks on every 4th or 5th page.
Well all the Halloween craziness moved to Castro St in the 80’s. The City shut the parade down in 2006. You can’t have fun in San Francisco anymore. All the hotels and malls are closing. We are entering a Doom Loop, like what happened to Valyria in Game of Thrones.
Try Derry Girls, with the Irish accents.
Had an acquaintance who refused to watch the show Frasier because Daphne’s accent was “so fake”. Still refused even after I pointed out that the actress was British.
On Paul McCartney and fame, I saw a film clip once with George Harrison where somebody asked him what it was like to be a Beatle, and he responded, “I don’t know, what is it like to not be a Beatle?”.
My dad had a similar trajectory. Enlisting at 18 in 1944, he joined the Army Air Forces and started training as a bombardier. From my memory of what he told me, he went through several military schools but didn’t complete his coursework by the time the war ended. He used his GI Bill benefits to go to college, but did not continue his military career, and did not have to worry about deploying from reserve status. Yet he did end up working for the Army as a civilian, and I was born in Germany, and lived on an overseas American military base until I was 8 years old.
Also, my grandfather enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor at the age of 41, into the New Mexico National Guard. It took him a year or so to wrangle an active duty enlistment into the Army Air Forces. Though his enlistment was World War II only, and his service was modest, never going overseas, his gravestone had his name, and “Corporal U.S. Army.”
Modest though it was, he was proud of his service.
Why do I get the feeling that Jonah, Rob, and maybe John too wouldn’t mind living in gulags as long as they weren’t “boring?”
Most bathrooms don’t require a key to unlock so “picking” a bathroom lock is meaningless, but hotel bathrooms especially can be more secure. Also, just because a garage door is closed doesn’t mean it’s locked, and it’s also still easily accessed from inside the house by hookers, Chinese agents, and others who are visiting.
Why does John seem confident that Hillary lost in 2016 because so many people were aware of her email problems etc? A lot of people hated her guts, but I doubt most of them know much about her email problem etc.
Ha! Though the actor who played her brother managed his best attempt at a London cockney, despite supposedly coming from Manchester. I’m surprised they left out the true heir to Dick van Dyke, Don Cheadle in Ocean’s Eleven. Catastrophically awful, and a real surprise from an actor who comes over as so meticulous in his performances.
Everything about how small differences in distance and class background influence accents in England also apply to Ireland, incredibly fractured despite having a population a tenth of the size. This is a brilliant demonstration.
YouTube
Before Patrick McGoohan became The Prisoner, he was Secret Agent (Danger Man in the UK), one of the best espionage TV shows ever made. I recently watched the two seasons of half-hour shows which, as far as I know, were never broadcast in the United States. When CBS picked up the show, it was expanded to an hour, following the new standard for action-adventure shows.
The early, half-hour shows are a little primitive by today’s standards. But they’re fun to watch anyway, especially to see what soon-to-be-famous actors turn up in them. Like the tall, blonde actress who went on to appear as “Miss Moneypenny” in eighteen (18) James Bond movies: her appearance here probably served as her audition. Or the episode which featured: a future Doctor Who; and the shark hunter who was going to “need a bigger boat”; and Hollywood’s go-to Mom (Lois and Clark, My Three Sons, etc.).
When I was in the big convention center in Glasgow, I asked a security guard directions to the men’s room. His reply was completely incomprehensible. And still incomprehensible when I asked him to repeat — but this time he pointed.