Taking time off from my weekend hiatus to throw up an open thread for the Pens.
Archives for June 2016
Haiti v Peru Open Thread
Le Rouge et Bleu or La Blanquirroja?
Open Thread: It’s Official – Donald Trump Brings the Idiocracy
(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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Buzzfeed reports:
Early in the 2016 primary race, comedy screenwriter Etan Cohen began to notice some similarities between the Republican candidate, mendacious former reality star Donald Trump, and Cohen’s 2006 movie Idiocracy, which features fictional wrestling champ-turned-president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews). Ever since, those similarities have only grown, leading to Cohen and Mike Judge, who wrote and also directed Idiocracy, now working on a series of anti-Trump ads with Crews reprising his role.
The 2006 satire shows a semi-distant future in which the world has been overrun by dummies and, as a result, is falling apart. At first, the parallels to the real primary race were “just a general lizard brain kind of thing: The presidency is all about entertainment value,” Cohen, who also directed and wrote the 2015 comedy Get Hard and co-wrote the 2008 hit comedy Tropic Thunder, told BuzzFeed News over the phone. “Then it started to get, as the year went on, weirdly specific. People pointing out things like, ‘Oh, Camacho was a wrestler and Trump was a wrestler.’ … It’s like, the more things go on, the more it actually seems to be kind of merging in a very specific, eerie way.”…
Throughout the process, Cohen and Judge have struggled to satirize Trump because he is already so outrageous. “If you’re making Idiocracy 2, and you’re trying to write whoever’s the heir to Camacho, if you put in Trump, it would be too silly to be in a movie,” Cohen explained.
But they worked through it — Cohen felt a call to action, saying these ads are very important to him. “This is what satire is for … to be able to hold up a mirror and say, ‘This is crazy,’” he said. “Idiocracy was like that, but this all of a sudden felt like a very immediate need for the true meaning of satire and what it can actually do.”…
“The most dangerous contrast to Trump is that Camacho actually realizes he needs advice from other people, and knows that he’s not the smartest guy in the room,” Cohen continued, noting that he would “definitely” vote for Camacho over Trump. “Also, not a racist.”
I’m actually kinda looking forward to those ads. Will Baby Donald bitch about the totally inaccurate, very biased, very unfair comparisons? Or will he embrace it as another form of celebrity endorsement?
Open Thread: It’s Official – Donald Trump Brings the <em>Idiocracy</em>Post + Comments (268)
Costa Rica v Paraguay Open Thread
Which team usually wearing red, white and blue will win today?
Summer Travels and Reading
This summer, I’ll be in
Minneapolis (Wed, June 15 only)
Davidson, NC area (for a few days around July 4)
Denver (July 22-24) – I’ll be speaking at VegFest
and Japan (!) early August (Tokyo and Tohoku region)
Area Juicers – email me (see Quick Links menu at right) if you want to get together.
Also, anyone have any reading / listening plans for this summer? I can recommend:
The Long Ships by Frans Bengsston – a rollicking good read about the travels and travails of a Viking. Set in and around the Year 1000.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman – great book that I heard HBO is making into a miniseries. In particular, I reocmmend the ensemble audiobook.
As a bonus, both of these books feature road trips (or, in the case of Ships, the watery equivalent), and (for Betty) both put the Thor back in Thursday.
No Thor in this one, but otherwise fine: the audiobook of Goodwin’s Team of Rivals was a superb listening experience.
Anyone else have any summer plans or recommendations to share?
Failing at Obedience, Winning at Life
Good morning! This made me LOL so hard:
Just two questions, tho:
1) How many of us humans could pass the same test? And,
2) Is it really a test worth passing?
And what gauntlet gantlet (Thanks NotMax!) will YOU be running today?
Breaking: Muhammad Ali has Died
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NBC is reporting that Muhammad Ali has passed away at the age of 74.
My two favorite, as in I found them to be highly educational and enjoyable, documentaries about Muhammad Ali were done by HBO Films because they show just how complex an individual he was and the impact he made on America. They are below:
* Image found here.
