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Everyone’s favorite prognosticators of pop culture and politics return. This week, the GLoP-sters opine all over Weiner (so to speak), Rob defends his allegedly racy TBS show (Ricochet member Adrian gets a GLoP shout-out), Jonah’s plan to keep the internet safe for our kids, RIP Helen Thomas, and suggestions for who should play Hillary Clinton in the upcoming NBC mini-series. Post your ideas in the comments.
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But I quit drinking coffee!
I have a new greatest fear.
I fear, after 17 episodes of GLoP, that one day I’ll attend a Happy Hour with my coworkers and, after knocking back a few beers, proceed to give a 20 minute dissertation on the porn industry.
The best way to let your kids watch TV and not have to worry about commercials?
Netflix streaming.
Best things I ever did for my kids.
If Wiener drops out, Huma drops Wiener.
Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.
Klingon Coffee is Raktajino -and it is The Sisko’s favorite drink.
Turn in your pop culture nerd cards at the desk on the way out.
Podhoretz got a major point wrong – Pat Robertson sold The Family Channel to FOX, not ABC. It was Fox Family Channel from 1998 t0 2001.
Disney purchased it, in part, to get back MLB’s Division Series for ESPN after it was shut out in its baseball contract. Fox demanded that the games remain on the new ABC Family for the first season after the sale.
Well… that was singuarly depressing. God clearly has more patience than me, because after that survey I’d start breaking seals, blowing trumpets, and emptying bowls. I mean, great podcast as usual, just… really depressing subject matter.
And a bookending Shame Shame Shame (imagine me doing the tsk tsk finger motion with my tongue firmly in my cheek).
After Jonah’s epic rant about sexualizing childhood you play the Oscar Meyer Weiner song.
True, but I think the larger point John was making still stands: The Walt Disney Company owns The Family Channel and programs risqué content on it.
Disney purchased it, in part, to get back MLB’s Division Series for ESPN after it was shut out in its baseball contract. Fox demanded that the games remain on the new ABC Familyfor the first season after the sale. ·1 hour ago
Couple of years ago I developed an academic interest in the porn industry after reading Susannah Breslin’s “They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They.” I wondered as I read -who was lying? Who was trying to look good? Who was trying to look like they didn’t care? Who really enjoyed it and who was just in it for the money? And then I wondered, how do you make money in this business (answer: apparently a lot of them don’t)?
I was also morbidly curious about what type of pairing sold the best and what that might tell us about humanity. Economists always want to put a price on things -well, here we have prices on anything you can think of.
Breslin reported on it for a couple of years. I never did find a research hook -though there is research out there (lot of psychology). What finally put me off it was when Newsweek hired a porn star to write lists of facts about the industry.
However disgusting you think it is -its worse. And in bubbly prose, nauseating.
Yeti – I also think that Disney was obligated to keep the “Family” name. Otherwise they probably would have rebranded it years ago. But Disney started down that path with Eisner and his “Touchstone” unit. I bet there’s a lot of things that would make Walt cringe that come out of Disney/ABC and maybe even, ESPN.
The story I’ve heard is that they planned to rename it “XYZ” but the contract with Robertson required it maintain the name family and leave a block of time for the 700 Club. Which they offset with blaring warning signs that the show does not represent the views of ABC.
I’ll give Robertson this much -man’s persistent. I’d’ve washed my hands of it years ago.
The foot in the door for acceptance of gay culture was Three’s Company. In our (conservative Christian) home, homosexuality went from something that was never talked about to a funny situation that the family laughed about while watching a TV show. It didn’t make us necessarily accept homosexuality, but it made it a topic we encountered in an enjoyable way each week.
Klingon Coffee is Raktajino -and it is The Sisko’s favorite drink.
Turn in your pop culture nerd cards at the desk on the way out. ·4 hours ago
So much THIS.
+1 to Jonah for finally getting back to it.
Great episode. Laughed my butt (better not say a**) off.
Pace John, Dian Lane is still hot:
http://www.eftekasat.net/pmg/pix_edadasastew/391/diane-lane-venice-05.jpg
So many quotable quotes and wonderful references but my favorite has to be John mentioning that he is the P in my GLoP. Just kind of rolls of the tongue.
ABCFamily just cancelled their only true “family” show, the critically acclaimed Bunheads.
Here is what the show creator said: “They already have 60 other shows in the works with hot teens ready to be knocked up or lying, so it doesn’t look like there’s room for us.”
Desubscribe cable. Disconnect the antenna. Nothing but DVDs which you select, and maybe Netflix streaming that you monitor.
You correctly observed you can be watching a family show which is then polluted by the commercials. The last straw for us was when a commercial for a slasher movie and Showgirls came on during Little House on the Prairie. Also, your kids won’t be exposed to 18 minutes of commercial messages per hour which also have a terribly deforming effect on their values.
Loved the Mad Max reference!
Klingon Coffee is Raktajino -and it is The Sisko’s favorite drink.
Turn in your pop culture nerd cards at the desk on the way out. ·17 hours ago
Raktajino is of Bajoran origin, I have it on good authority. Of course, the official narrative….that’s another story. And they discovered warp drive before the Vulcans….
Jonah’s suggestion of a gated internet for kids sort of exists in the form of http://www.playrific.com/which provides a user interface that allows safe browsing of curated internet content for kids.
Disclosure: I am an investor in the company.
on Klingon coffee the word you want is Raktajino. We start seeing references to it in DS9 http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Raktajino
Love you guys when I am drunk.
Rob’s suspicion that “family” programs want to corrupt your kids is almost certainly true, as is the whole Trojan Horse notion that they know exactly what they’re doing. And this is why “engaging the culture” is a worthless waste of time. The only answer may well be to drop out of the culture completely and live apart from it. We already do that politically. The difference is that culturally, we surrender a little bit every time we participate in an exercise that is completely controlled by the other side. And yes, they really do have your kids square in their sights. They talk about this in enterainment and academia.
I have to dispute the notion that the Internet is why cities cleaned up their porn shops. Pornographers ran to the Internet because they had no choice when people like Giuliani ran them out of town. This is a case where “censorship”, if you want to put it that way, works, and works well.
Hand over the keys…
I have to take exception to the hagiographic treatment of shows like Will and Grace or Modern Family. (Warning: I have never watched these shows in a systematic manner, being as the last network television I’ve watched was Fringe and before that Lost and I may or may not have watched The Following… tacky, I know.)
Far more than just being a trojan horse, these shows painted a beautiful lie as near as I can tell about the nature of the gay lifestyle. You never saw men in thongs dressed up as Carmen Miranda parading down the middle of a street in San Francisco, or Freddy Mercury in all of his flaming, libidinous glory.
They only show you the happy-clappy side of homosexuality – none of the ugly underbelly is ever seen.