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This week, something a little different: a totally free-form, no-topics-agreed-on-prior-to-the-show, take it where you will episode. Full disclosure: this is not the big deal it appears to be as even when we do agree on topics before the show, they are often abandoned, ignored, or disappear down a deep GLoP rabbit hole. Such is life in the GLoP Audio-phonic Universe®. So, in the spirit of improvisation, we’re not going to tell you in this show description what they discussed. You’ll just have to listen.
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1. The biggest technology deal in the last 50ish years is the Pill. As a member of the commentariat, ol’ George Bernard Shaw would be dumbstruck (one hopes) by the role of women that has become possible due to “safe” “reliable” contraception.
2. The reason John didn’t like Charlie’s Angels was because he wasn’t an 8-year-old girl. Charlie’s Angels was all we played at recess, when we weren’t pretending to be horses or the Bionic Woman or Nurse Dixie from Emergency!. I wrote Julie London a fan letter and got an autographed 8×10 back!
That’s not a joke, that’s just a fact.
But I’m sure it’s fine.
But he was a teenage boy.
Not so much about a failure to change position as a failure to offer anything other than a rehash that did not appear to be updated. They are starting to do that a lot. And I say that as someone who really likes all these guys and admires the hell out of Jonah’s books.
For example, I had been unaware of Trump’s initial overall reluctance to give aid at all. I was not aware of the cynical, corrupt interference by the Obama Administration to actually expressly direct that certain corrupt figures not be investigated. I was unaware that Trump/Giuliani did not ham-handedly disrupt some clockwork ‘normal process’ (as I initially thought) but felt the need to go ahead pompous, partisan and not terribly impressive permanent staff which had a lot to hide about partisan mischief of its own. So there is a lot of new context.
I don’t have a problem with NeverTrumpism until it becomes self-conscious and oddly self-congratulatory which undercuts its value as a presumptive honest broker about the latest sub-optimal Trumpian actions & tweets.
My husband and John are the same age. I’ll have to ask him if seeing Farrah Fawcett or Cheryl Ladd was worth the 30 minutes. I wonder what shows it competed with? If it was up against any other cop show or, God forbid, sports then I think I know the answer.
For being some kind of television/movie critic, John is pretty dumb when it comes to old television shows. Oh, and you can stop listing around 36 minutes in because he comes down with a major attack of TDS and he and Jonah start talking nonsense about the impeachment hearings. By the way, that crazy right-winger and Republican shill, Richard Epstein, agrees that the transcript was a smoking gun like the blue dress. Give me a break.
He says he watched it but not religiously because he was a teenager and off doing stuff. He added he was old enough that he didn’t like that the Angels always seemed to win via a fantastic turn of luck. So, dumb plot. <— @johnpodhoretz for the win.
One of my criticisms of the impeachment talk was not seeing the obvious: The Democrats are pushing impeachment because they are stuck with bad candidates ala Hillary Clinton in 2016. So far there’s no one who can beat President Trump so lets use impeachment to muddy the waters and hope against hope that a Democrat will win. Yes the Democrats have bad timing but this is all they have right now.
LEE MAJORS LIVES!
I have only the faintest recollection of watching the original show.
However, the picture of the original actresses suggests one reason why the new film was so much less successful: the original actresses were, simply, much better looking.
My favorite Robert Heinlein quote is: “An honest politician is one who stays bought.”
Trump is an honest politician.
Another good one: “The best place to defend your country is on somebody else’s real estate.”
Not sure what can beat the 1983 New York Post headline:
HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR
“Usually always” is an interesting construction, but not one that necessarily makes sense.
It’s been many years since I read Philip K. Dick‘s novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962). It won the Hugo Award as the best science fiction novel of the year, in an age when the voters would have read just about every SF novel published, and political correctness and gender equity were not yet factors.
Of the several subplots, the one I remember best concerns an officer in the Nazi-occupied Eastern United States, who intrigues with the saner Nazi bigwigs to keep the crazier ones from launching a nuclear war against Japan.
I always thought of this, with its limited goals, as the epitome of an adult story.
By contrast, the adolescent story is the one about the resistance movement that overthrows tyranny; which I gather is the direction in which the TV show is moving, for lack of any better ideas.
It was an hour.
There is a real apples to oranges comparison between the TV show Charlie’s Angels and the movies. The TV show was considered highly risqué. I recall an old TV exec type saying in an interview that the show had almost a formula for how many ‘jiggles’ etc were in each episode. I recall it being kind of lame but with more babeage than most TV content. (I was kinda partial to Jaclyn Smith, for the record.)
Short of being expressly porno, I don’t see how the movies could occupy the same intended edgy sexual niche.
The girl-power martial arts thing is also stale. I think it actually peaked with Diana Rigg as gifted amateur Emma Peel, easily the hottest woman on TV in her era.
And is only eighty, so could live a good many years to come.
If people in the Victorian times could came back to this time they would be shocked at how much sugar we have. Remember that the Colonialists fought wars to control the islands to get Caribbean islands for their sugar. While that wasn’t particularly moral, (it was particularly rough in Haiti) it made some economic sense. Sugar was known as white gold for a reason. That poor people have too much sugar would be shocking to them.
Modern farms would also shock them. One guy with some fancy technology can now do the work of twenty serfs or slaves and he can take a nice vacation in the Winter.
I understand that there were very important improvements in agricultural technology about the late 1700s but it was still equine or human muscle.
Am I the only then-teenage boy who watched the original Charlie’s Angels TV show for Kate Jackson (character Sabrina, the “smart” one)? I’ve always preferred the more normal looking actresses over the glamorous ones. I also preferred MaryAnn (Dawn Wells) over Ginger (Tina Louise) on Gilligan’s Island.
I suppose it could be that I was a very nerdy guy who recognized that I’d have no hope of getting anywhere with the glamorous people.
No.
Didn’t really watch “Charlies Angels” because the plots were dumb enough to sink to the center of the Earth, but was happy to be content with the late 70s sexual imagery of Jennifer and Bailey over at “WKRP In Cincinnati” (Fred Silverman really did dumb down ABC’s programming when he moved over from CBS, but it’s hard to deny he was really, really successful doing it, even though the same strategy bombed miserably at NBC. I think by the time he left ABC, “Barney Miller” and “Taxi” were the only two prime-time shows I was regularly watching, outside of “Monday Night Football”).
Jonah has a tendency to find a sound bite and repeat it – not just on this topic but on many. I find it to be a little much at times. On the other hand, almost every pundit does this, and I imagine most people only find it grating when they disagree with said pundit.
But in terms of the other two, I didn’t find it stale it all. For example, John (I think) mentioned how the Democrats were now shifting strategies from “Trump acted illegally” to “Trump was a mean boss”. So they’ve obviously been keeping abreast of the situation.
And I’m fine that they didn’t mention many other details, because a) it’s missing the forest for the trees and b) they were trying to keep it short. Their main point stands: Trump almost certainly made a threat (overtly or through clear insinuation) that we generally consider to be unethical. But the actual implementation did not rise anywhere close to the threshold required for either impeachment or removal from office. The details of how corrupt ground-level State or DOJ officials were or who said what when haven’t changed that underlying conclusion one bit. So why waste time on them?
Speaking of which, I’ve now spent about 3x as much time debating this snippet in the podcast than the snippet itself lasted. So I’ll bow out.
The Doordash Look… (Music under)
Late on this but if someone from a 100 years ago saw us today I think they would be so overwhelmed by our degeneracy they wouldn’t have much time to absorb the technology. Women aborting their own children, women choosing not to have children or very few so they can work, open celebration of fornication, homosexuality, and trans lifestyle. The tech wouldn’t even register.
But when it did its the little things we cannot imagine that would blow minds. Food is cheap and easy to get for everyone in the US. Eating out is not a luxury but a common good. The size of the average house and how we developed the wealth for that. They might understand wikipedia but Youtube would melt brains.
They would be comforted by the steady corruption of our politics from all sides of the aisle and politicians constant greed using the govt to get richer and richer.
I should have read your comment before posting- I agree this would be one of the most shocking unbelievable changes.
The BCR is not the first time black characters show up in The Man in the High Castle. Notably Lem Washington (Rick Worthy) is there in all four seasons, and he’s not alone in the Resistance.
“Wokey von Wokenstein” I give you, but the disturbing thing is that in the world where the Axis loses (our world), the BCR analogs were in fact pompous, pointless posers (Hoover shows up, a shame for Agnew not to have), and in Japanese Empire/American Reich world they are decent, effective, and not complete and total a–holes. Same deal with the pornographer. Maybe the idea is that when you have something worthy of opposition, you’re less of a pill. Or maybe the writers don’t find geriatrics in Mao hats as funny/sad as I do when they encounter them. Not sure. Jarring parallel.
Spanking: It’s not just for Brits, and other denizens of island nations!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEibnvQi7fE&t=1158
(Episode originally from 1995.)