President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have entered into a multi-year agreement to produce films and series for Netflix, potentially including scripted series, unscripted series, docu-series, documentaries, and features.
— Netflix US (@netflix) May 21, 2018
so many toxic punisher fans are facing a dilemma rn https://t.co/XntFHKBGcz
— zeddy (@Zeddary) May 21, 2018
Don’t read the replies, of course, if you wanna keep your mood good.
***********
The replies / to&fro *here*, on the other hand, are a godsdamned joy:
name the muppet that was your favorite as a child and for the next 10 minutes I will tell you your weaknesses
— erin ryan (@morninggloria) May 18, 2018
you try to present your weirdness as an attribute; it isn't
— erin ryan (@morninggloria) May 18, 2018
you have been underestimated in your past. you take that out on new people you encounter. it manifests as defensiveness or sass.
— erin ryan (@morninggloria) May 18, 2018
Fozzy Bear..wacka wacka!
— Marshall (feat. Pit Bull) (@AlbinoRhino777) May 18, 2018
But you thought I was funny, right?
— Marshall (feat. Pit Bull) (@AlbinoRhino777) May 18, 2018
Grover: you suspect that people find you annoying; this drives you crazy and causes you to act more annoying
Rowlf: you have a lot of shithead friends and don’t stand up to them because you have low self esteem— erin ryan (@morninggloria) May 18, 2018
You don’t follow instructions and think it’s clever but it’s not; it’s annoying
— erin ryan (@morninggloria) May 18, 2018
Brachiator
Kinda missed the Sesame Street era. Watched “The Electric Company” with my younger brother.
If I had to pick a muppet, it would probably be Cookie Monster.
All blessings to the Obamas on their Netflix venture. Also, if Amazon picks up “The Expanse,” I will love them forever.
jeffreyw
Each day I’m getting better in every way.
MomSense
Has anyone read this Atlantic article on the new aristocracy? The Birth of the New American Aristocracy
Jerzy Russian
Yoda
MomSense
@Brachiator:
Grover is my fave.
jeffreyw
The Expanse: Amazon Eyes Season 4 Renewal of Cancelled Syfy Drama
Jerzy Russian
@MomSense: Do you remember when Grover performed [The Hills are Alive with] The Sound of Music? The hills really were alive!
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@jeffreyw: YESSSS!
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.)
These people are like the guy in Brokeback Mountain. They just can’t quit Obama. There are people on Twitter calling for his impeachment. It’s the same with Hillary Clinton. They’re never going to be over them. It’s funny and yet unutterably sad at the same time.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.)
I’ve said it before: The worst thing Hillary Clinton ever did to Donald Tяump and all his fans was lose and make him president. They’re never going to forgive her for that.
MomSense
@Jerzy Russian:
Ha! Of course, that was a classic Monsterpiece Theater with Alistair Cookie.
p.a.
Beaker. Too old to be a S St kid, but I watched the evening show at times. I was the Capt. Kangaroo generation.
My goddaughters were Barney/Teletubbies. Barney sucks. I found Teletubbies deeply disturbing; chose never to bring it up with my therapist. whatthefuckisthebabyheadinthesky!!!!!
chris
@jeffreyw: Yes yes!
Lymie
Second knee replacement tomorrow. Much more aggressive about getting you out the door than 10 years ago when I had the first one done. Might be home again tomorrow night! Hoping for quick return to function, I have been going to a great gym for 6 months to strengthen the rest of the bod..
Anne Laurie
@MomSense: Had that tagged for a (hahahaha) slow news day.
Been working on a post for *months* about marriage, specifically, having morphed into a luxury good. Of course in our current fvcked-up economy, for couples who want (or who, shall we say, accidentally acquire) kids, there’s strong disincentives to get married if the father doesn’t have a reliable income stream. But even for ‘normal’ middle-class couples, the idea of The Most Perfect Wedding in the World as a “reward” for putting together The PERFECT relationship seems to have (weirdly) discouraged “tying the knot” until the happy couple can save up the time & energy to stage something worthy of one of those cable reality shows. And, of course, having those kids makes it always harder to save the time & energy for that Destination: Luxury Wedding!
There seems to be an actual break somewhere in the age group between those who grew up in the 1980s (the earliest-born kids of my friendship cohort married serially, sometimes *after* the first baby, but they did marry) and those born even a few years after that (who may stay together for longer than many modern marriages, but never get the relationship state-sanctioned). I personally blame the GOP, specifically Reaganism…
raven
I can’t believe it
And people are strange
Our president’s crazy
Did you hear what he said
Business and pleasure
Lie right to your face
Divide it in sections
And then give it away
Anne Laurie
@Jerzy Russian: So… you’re annoying and cryptic!
JPL
Has anyone seen this
Chyron HR
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.):
And it’s even worse with their counterparts in the right wing.
Josie
I watched Sesame Street relentlessly with my oldest and always had a place in my heart for Cookie Monster. That twitter thread is hilarious. Thanks for posting it, Anne Laurie. We need more stuff like that.
Mike in NC
We saw “Deadpool 2” today in an empty theater and it was just insane. Now we want to see the original again. Another sequel is in the works, too.
Chip Daniels
@Anne Laurie:
So, sometime in 2021 when President Kamala Harris is vacationing, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Warren have adjourned for recess, then?
I’m looking forward to reading it then.
Peale
@Brachiator: I loved Cookie Monster until I met him…at some children’s band concert when I was four, they promised us Big Bird, Oscar and Cookie. Whoever was dressed as Cookie Monster thought it would be fun to run around trying to eat the children. Lol. I’m more for Oscar now.
ruemara
Hmm. I wonder what it means if my fave is Animal & Janice.
@Mike in NC: The original is hilarious. I think we go see it this weekend, but we have a Depeche Mode concert to see first!
raven
@Mike in NC: My goober neighbor told me he was going to see it and I had not fucking idea what he was talking about.
opiejeanne
@Josie: I watched it with all three kids who were spaced 13 years from oldest to youngest., so about 14-15 years total because I’m not counting the three years the oldest was too old before the middle one was born.
Cookie Monster and Oscar.
Peale
@Mike in NC: it’s like watching a very real looney tunes cartoon.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@p.a.:
I always thought the baby was cute and the least disturbing thing about the Teletubies.
MomSense
@Anne Laurie:
Reaganism was/is a cancer. I still hate him. I gave my Jane Wyman was right pin to my middle child.
ruemara
@MomSense: I’m both scared & amazed that something I’d noticed almost 10 years ago that people poo-pooed, is now being written about in the Atlantic. And I am very scared of the latest script I wrote, now.
Josie
@opiejeanne: I would have watched it with the two younger ones since I loved the show, but, for some reason, they did not. I was really disappointed. Now I watch it with my granddaughter when I can pull her away from Mickey Mouse (Ugh).
MomSense
@ruemara:
Happens to me all the time. Ugh.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@jeffreyw: Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease
Jerzy Russian
@Anne Laurie: Thanks, I was wondering if the form was broken.
Patricia Kayden
Jeff Sessions is implementing Trump’s anti-immigrant policy with gusto. It’s painful to see.
VeniceRiley
I was a complete dork for Fozzie Bear when I was a kid. I wanted a Studebaker.
Josie
@VeniceRiley: I actually drove a Studebaker as a teenager. A 1939, I believe.
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
There may be some global trends. A recent issue of The Economist touched on this. This issue also had some good stuff on the ramifications of the gender baby Gap in China and India and how it relates to marriages.
Jay
@raven:
Deadpool 1 opening titles:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2MjyGL0go60
It just keeps going. My current favorite superhero movie.
Fair Economist
@Anne Laurie: One of my son’s friends cohabits with his baby momma, and gets along with her pretty well, but doesn’t want to get married because he doesn’t want to be “tied down”. I’ve pointed out he’s already tied down by their toddler far more firmly than any marriage would and he might as well make it official for all the social and legal advantages, but it makes about as much difference as talking to my rabbit.
Old Dan and Little Anne
The current Sesame Street has amazingly clever writing. They did a Game of a Thrones parody that made me laugh.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Brachiator:
Haven’t scrolled all the way down so somebody may have mentioned this, but there are two distinct sets of Muppets. One group was on Sesame Street, but another was on The Muppet Show, Henson’s grown-up comedy show. Kermit the Frog was the only character on both, as far as I know.
By “missing the Sesame Street era” I’m guessing you meant you weren’t the target preschool audience by the time it came around in, IIRC, 1969. Me neither, but I watched it over my baby sister’s shoulder, and Electric Company as well. Muppet Show came along later and was, as I said, aimed at adults.
Yarrow
@Fair Economist: Some of these people are going to get wakeup calls if they’re ever in situations where they want to be the one to make decisions for their partner, like in hospitals, but aren’t allowed to because they’re not next of kin. You never know when or if that sort of situation might occur, and young people generally don’t think abut it, but it can and does happen. If they don’t get along with their partner’s family, things can get ugly quickly.
raven
@Jay: Homie don’t play dat. . .
Brachiator
@Mike in NC:
Yep!
Lots of craziness. Best to see it spoiler free if possible, and stay til the end.
Really liked the anarchic spirit. Still not for little kids, though some parents clearly don’t think this through. It’s not just violence, it’s tone.
Anyway, also loved Domino. And Brolin is very good. He is also Thanos. Can’t think of too many times when an actor is a villain in two top films.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Re the main subject: I love the Obama’s, I will watch the hell out of anything they produce. On an earlier thread I saw people sneering at Michelle’s “they go low, we go high” line and I’m sorry people feel that way. I still believe that’s the right way to go. It is not time to abandon morality, empathy and ethics just because the current power structure has. We need to be a shining beacon to remind Americans that there is another way, a higher ideal to aspire to.
Re: Pop culture. It is my role officially to be The Last Person In The World To Learn About Anything. On that score, I finally checked out the “Yanni/Laurel” thing last week. And we tried to see the Avengers movie this weekend. Unfortunately the theater was emptied out due to a shooter scare (false alarm: real crazy person, but not visibly violent) 45 minutes before the end. So I have lots of unanswered questions and a decision to make about rewatching the first 2/3 of the movie in the theater, or waiting for a DVD.
On Yanni/Laurel: I am very strongly in the Laurel camp. A NYT article had a tool with a slider to emphasize the high “Yanni” frequencies or the low “Laurel” frequencies, and even with the slider at about 8/10, I’m hearing “Laurel” or at best “Laurie”. Meanwhile in the room where I played it, everybody around me heard “Yanni” at every setting I was trying. I have a hypothesis that it’s connected somehow with your regional accent. I’m not a native of these parts.
satby
DVR alert, TCM has Grapes of Wrath starting in a minute, and Casablanca on at 10 pm.
Sab
@Anne Laurie: Hmm. I eloped in 1991. It failed about ten years later. Eloped about three years later. Still married. I cannot imagine starting a marriage with bridezilla levels of wedding expense. I bought my first wedding dress on sale a Talbots (it was an afternoon tea dress, but white.) I made my second wedding dress. My second wedding we had a small reception later. My small company’s annual Christmas party probably costs more, but the reception was fun and people still tell me what fun it was. Secret: no toasts or speeches. Just a party, with food.
Baud
https://goo.gl/images/7ygYZc
ETA: I see I’m in good company.
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
The Economist article I previously mentioned noted that the upper middle class waits longer to get married, and tend to bring more education and money to the relationship. This confers a big advantage, which is magnified by a tax system that greatly favors married people with children.
Omnes Omnibus
@ruemara: Animal is easily the greatest muppet ever. Elmo is the worst.
Shana
@Sab: I’m with you on the “have the wedding you can afford” front. I was in the position of being able to afford a nice sit down dinner for about 150 people in 1986 in suburban Chicago. Found the receipts while cleaning out my parents’ house a few years ago. Total cost $8,000. I know that was 32 years ago but even at the time it wasn’t extravagant.
I do hate-watch Say Yes To The Dress though. The mindset is stunning to me.
Brachiator
@satby:
Louie, this is the start of a beautiful dust bowl.
Fair Economist
@Yarrow: Yes, those are the kinds of things I brought up to no avail. He doesn’t actually get along well with his in-laws, who are upper middle class and (although I haven’t met them) probably don’t approve of the cohabitation or how the pregnancy disrupted their daughter’s education plans. He does not have an upwardly mobile job either.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Brachiator: One of my daughters and her husband were married in their mid-20s in NYC, where they were working and living at the time. She told me that co-workers treated her like a child bride. Apparently the norm in New York is much older.
A couple we knew in the early 80s had a couple of kids, a mortgage, joint checking, the works. But didn’t see the point of “a piece of paper”. I would describe them as aging hippies, and I think that attitude was fairly common among people who came of age as hippies.
My Finnish sister-in-law tells me that about half the marriages in Finland are common-law. But in Finland I think they have better protections than here, are more or less indistinguishable legally from the kind that have a cake and a bridal gown.
eemom
@MomSense:
Started to. Stopped when I realized I didn’t make the cut. ?
Struck me as a piece of pretentious crap though, like most things in the Atlantic these days.
Brachiator
@MomSense:
Actually bought a copy of the magazine, but just have not had time to get to it.
Fair Economist
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
As a gay man who had to wait over 20 years before marrying his husband, I am oh-so-aware of the importance of that piece of paper. I can see how straight people with the invincibility of youth might not realize it, though. IIRC the tax advantages were made sharper in the 80’s as well.
Anne Laurie
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
There’s at least three Sesame Street ‘generations’ — the kids who watched the two you list, then the next-gen Elmo / Muppet Babies watchers (& their parents, some of whom have VERY STRONG FEELINGS about Elmo). And there’s probably a fourth-even-fifth ‘generation’ after that, because the kids who grew up on Elmo-Era Sesame have kids who are watching the current show mostly online; I remember reading that the producers have had to retool for optimal viewing on tablets in smaller increments!
Anne Laurie
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
If you’re over 35, or in a profession that stresses your hearing, you may want to get your ears checked professionally. Cuz it really does seem to be a frequency thing — I hear ‘Yanni’ on my desktop speakers, but ‘Laurel’ on two different news reports on my television.
Brachiator
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Seems to me that one of the points of getting married is to create ties, ties that hopefully will be mutually beneficial.
But even having kids ties you down.
Sab
@Fair Economist: I used to be a tax accountant in San Francisco, and one of the biggest jobs was splitting up all the joint-with-right of survivorship assets so that the gay not-allowed-to-be married couples could report half income on each of their tax returns, so that the IRS, parents or siblings couldn’t challenge intended ownership later (also got them in the right tax bracket.)
Lots of work for us, and expensive for them. I used to growl as I worked. Shouldn’t have been necessary, but it really was.
Anne Laurie
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Yeah, as with so many other things, we Americans seem to have managed to adapt the worst of both economic trends: We make it harder / more expensive for two people to raise kids together, while simultaneously making it more expensive to get married “correctly” (by throwing a giant fantasy bash, complete with expensive destination-and/or-honeymoon). So couples who don’t already have enough money, or whose parents don’t, to throw the reality-tv-show Giant Luxury Party wedding just… never get around to filing the government paperwork. And while their offspring aren’t effectively stigmatized any longer — they’re just too much of their cohort! — they do *miss out* on a lot of government / local support that gets scrimped because, sniff, If Those People really cared about their kids, they wouldn’t have had them in the first place! It’s an ugly feedback loop…
TenguPhule
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
You can be moral and ethical and still be a combat pragmatist.
zzyzx
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Sounds like someone’s a Joni Mitchell fan.
WaterGirl
@p.a.: I love this from Beaker.
Mike in NC
@Brachiator: I can’t get enough of Josh Brolin since he’s given so many memorable performances: W, No Country for Old Men, Only the Brave, and a bunch of others.
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
@TenguPhule: I think a campaign needs different kinds of fighters. We need the people who go high, and we need the pragmatists, and the hard workers, and even the people who fight dirty. We need both Michelle Obama and Michael Avenatti.
Arclite
Favorite Muppet: Animal.
Did he cover that one?
Also, I loved the yip yip Martians.
Brachiator
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Fun Finland Family Facts
The average age at first marriage appears to be early 30s. The number of divorces each year seems to have levelled off somewhat.
Linky
https://www.stat.fi/til/ssaaty/2016/ssaaty_2016_2017-04-20_tie_001_en.html
kindness
I’m too old for Sesame Street. Wikipedia says it started in 69. I was 12 then so I wouldn’t have been watching it and in all truth, we only had one TV in the house in 69. A 19″ black & white. I have no doubt at the hour Sesame Street was on my mother ruled that tv. Age has it’s perks you know.
TenguPhule
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): Fair enough.
Omnes Omnibus
@Arclite: I am heartened by the number of Animal fans here.
Mike in NC
@Brachiator: We were in Helsinki four years ago and I frankly found it drab and a bit depressing. During the Cold War it usually stood in for Leningrad, in fact. We were there in June and our tour guide joked about us lucky to not be there in January.
schrodingers_cat
Speaking of pop culture, there is a new movie out called Raazi. Its a cerebral spy drama set in 1971 before the Indo-Pak war, that resulted in the formation of Bangladesh. The protagonist is a Kashmiri Muslim woman played by Alia Bhatt, who is an Indian intelligence operative. Her cover is her marriage, she is married into a prominent Pakistani military family. The intelligence she delivered helped prevent the sinking of India’s only air- craft carrier at that time.
Directed by Meghana Gulzar, whose father is the famous lyricist Gulzar, it has Alia Bhatt playing the spy Sehmat and Vicky Kaushal plays her husband. Meghana has focused on the personal toll spying takes.
It has become a big hit in India and it finished in the top 20 at the box office over here too, last week.
Trailer with subtitles in English
* Raazi == Agreed (Agreement)
Anne Laurie
@Brachiator:
As Frost said, ruefully: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
‘Traditional’ marriage doubled the chances that children would have a support network if their parents couldn’t handle the job. It also meant the partners doubled their options, in a pre-social-security world, should one partner die or be disabled prematurely. Modern late-stage capitalism, while it’s improved all our lives in many ways, has pretty much anatomized these support networks. It’s great for those of us who’ve been given so many chances we wouldn’t have otherwise had (if I were even 10 or 15 years older, I’d probably have lived & died a single ‘cat lady’ in the Bronx — and my Spousal Unit would’ve been an equally ‘sad single’ in Michigan) but it’s hard for the ones who *do* have kids, not to mention the kids!
Steeplejack
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I think people are hungering for some smiting of the evil ones by anyone with some power on our side. Righteous smiting, to be sure, but key word “smiting.”
It’s tough to remain patient waiting on the Mueller investigation, especially if you fear that when all is said and done it will end up with a few sentences for some of the lesser players but mostly yet another round of “Well, we couldn’t exactly convict them of anything” and “look forward, not back” under-rug sweeping.
I do think this is so monumentally huge that it will bring down Trump, and he’ll suck down some people in his wake, but look at how many Nixonistas came through Watergate unscathed—ditto Reaganauts after Iran/Contra—or look at how virtually no one paid a price for the Iraq debacle and the ensuing torture regime (except for Sgt. “I was a guard at Abu Ghraib”).
We always do a soft reboot and the Repub vermin come back. At some point we’re going to need to tent the house and deploy bug bombs.
/id rant off
scav
Not my generation either, but Beaker and the Swedish Chef.
schrodingers_cat
@Steeplejack: Agreed. Soft reboot is not enough, we need to wipe the hard drive clean.
daverave
This story left me wondering who the real “animals” are in our country:
“The Trump administration is moving to reverse Obama-era rules barring hunters on some public lands in Alaska from baiting brown bears with bacon and doughnuts and using spotlights to shoot mother black bears and cubs hibernating in their dens.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/interior-moves-lift-restrictions-hunting-bears-wolves-214244969–politics.html
Apologies if this has already been discussed. Of course if it is an Obama rule it must be exorcised.
Sab
@Anne Laurie: As a stepmother of a kid marrying into a fairly dysfunctional set of current and prior relationships, those family ties still hold and are important for the kids.
I am much closer to my stepchildren and their stepchildren, and these ties are more important to than my ties with my siblings. My siblings and I exchange Christmas cards and birthday greetings. The stepskids and step grandchildren often need us for advice or a car ride. That feels more like family to me.
Joyce H
This is downright poetic. If i thought the Obamas had a mean spirited bone in their bodies, I’d think they did this for the sole purpose of driving Trump even crazier than he already is.
Think about it. When Trump decided he needed to feud with Obama, Trump was a TV guy and Obama was a politics guy. So Trump decides to go into politics, which Obama made look so graceful and effortless. Heck, if THAT guy could do it, Trump asked himself, how hard could it be? So Trump goes into politics and man, he’s floundering and somewhere deep inside, he knows it and he’s miserable.
So now Obama is going to take a whack at TRUMP’s old line of work, and I suspect he will make that look graceful and effortless too, and probably scoop up the Emmys that Trump always wanted and never won.
Perhaps as a third act, Obama will build a skyscraper that is well-built and genuinely classy, while paying the workers a livable wage and without stiffing any contractors.
Joyce H
Do they get Netflix in prison, BTW? I’d hate it if none of the Trumps were able to watch the Obamas’ shows.
Sab
@Anne Laurie: As a stepmother of a kid marrying into a fairly dysfunctional set of current and prior relationships, those family ties still hold and are important for the kids.
I am much closer to my stepchildren and their stepchildren, and these ties are more important to than my ties with my siblings. My siblings and I exchange Christmas cards and birthday greetings. The stepskids and step grandchildren often need us for advice or a car ride. That feels more like family to me.
@Joyce H: Obama whacks at Trump, and I don’t think he even means to. He is just an Obama being Obama (sensible, intelligent and gracious), and it comes out as a whack. Sigh.
BruceFromOhio
Pretty much every annual review I’ve ever had. Somehow, I’ve remained employed.
Michelle Obama is a gift to humankind. Her hub ain’t half bad either. I look forward to them being a skewer through the internal organs of every shitbag two-bit ratfuck soulless criminal Republican forever, and ever, until Gaia says when.
WereBear
@daverave: What next, Hunger Games? What is wrong with a person who wants to shoot wolf pups and terrify caribou?
Of course, they are doing the same things to humans with ICE. So I am not surprised.
Anne Laurie
@Steeplejack:
It’s always the same Repub vermin, really — Dick Cheney, for instance, was a low-level CREEPster during Watergate, a mid-level Reagan hireling during IranContra, and head of the Dubya Regency for Operation Fustercluck in Iraq. Ditto Roger Stone, and a lot of other names.
Agree that, once Mueller and his team have laid out the fullest possible accounting of the Trump Occupancy crimes (we won’t get the full story for decades, I suspect), we need a proper Truth & Reconciliation Panel to root out the miscreants and get them properly ID’d, so we & our kids aren’t fighting the same backlash in the *next* generation!
Tazj
@MomSense: It struck me as really short on solutions. I guess the author’s main focus was to try and convince members of the 9.9% that they are a big part of the problem but I just found the article aggravating because I already know there’s tremendous inequality in the country but short of trying to elect people who aren’t Republicans I don’t have an answer to inequality either.
Anne Laurie
@Sab:
Oh, absolutely! Thank goddess, we human mammals are designed to build networks with each other… right now, I think, the generally accepted “format” for those networks are undergoing changes that the “government” (economy) hasn’t really caught up with.
Only one among my set of six siblings & my SO’s four siblings had kids — his youngest bro. Bro’s just married his third wife; he had three kids w/his first wife, raised them & the two kids his second wife brought to the marriage, and introduces another now-grown neighbor’s kid as ‘my son’ because that guy spent more time in their house than in either of his bio-parents. His own three bio-kids have half-sibs through their mother, and the step-kids have half-sibs of their own; the kids all introduce each other as ‘my bro / sis’ without being more specific, since they’ve all grown up in the same social groups. Me, and the Spousal Unit, are just grateful, as introverts, that we had the good fortune to choose not to have kids!
Anne Laurie
@Tazj:
The Atlantic‘s a small-l libertarian publication, now owned by a capital-L Libertarian. The Scandinavian solution to the disconnection between marriage and childraising has been for the government to take responsibility for child-raising (paid parental leave, generous school funding, income support for the disabled & elderly) to a degree that’s anathema to libertarian ‘freedumb’. Changing the no-longer-functional American-intermediate “you rely on your biological/marital family, or else on your immediate social/church network” system to something that works in a society where very few people (even the richest!) have the “new luxury” of staying in one community for the greater portion of their lives, much less moving from one two-parent family to another till-death two-person co-parenting family, is… complicated. Especially when one’s ideology forbids looking at the new models that are working.
J R in WV
@Josie:
My dad was a Studebaker man – I got to drive a ’64 convertible – red with a 289 V8 engine – it would smoke a GTO actually. I used it off and on all through high school, when dad didn’t need it.
Lucky or what?! Dad always had good taste in cars.
mainmata
@Brachiator: Yes, The Expanse has a big fan base, This is an easy pick for a smart company (network, other cable, Netflix, Amazon).
SgrAstar
@Lymie: oh! Please keep us updated on your progress. I’m looking down the barrel of a TKR, and I’m not liking the prospect. The poor knee has already had 2 major surgical interventions. :(
Tazj
@Anne Laurie: Yes, conservatives now love to complain about how few people are getting married and/or having kids, but they have purposely made it very difficult for people to do so, and heaven forbid you make any mistakes along the way. Very little or no help will be given to you by your employer or the government.
Ruckus
@Sab:
I’ve been to a few weddings over the years, none of them mine, I always remembered standing on the stairs, 11yrs old at around 11pm telling my parents to shut the fuck up and if it is that bad get a fucking divorce. They stopped yelling and swearing at each other and asked me what I was talking about. They didn’t set a good example for married life. It took me a while to figure out that I didn’t have to act like they did. Made life so much better. Anyway……. most of the weddings that I went to that weren’t a lot of pomp and circumstance seem to have lasted longer than the ones that were. It’s supposed to be a celebration of two people, not a rite of passage.
Omnes Omnibus
@J R in WV: Ian Fleming had Felix Leiter driving a “Studillac” in one of the books. It was a Caddy-powered Hawk.
Ruckus
@Anne Laurie:
My grandfather died during the middle of the depression, playing tennis with my mom. He was doing OK to well, even during the depression. But because there was no safety net whatsoever, all 5 of the kids had to go out and get jobs to support the family. And grandma raised chickens and all the back yard that wasn’t for the chickens was a garden for veg. And yes I got to see grandma wring a chickens neck for Sunday dinner on more than one occasion.
Anne Laurie
@Ruckus: And there’s still too damned many kids end up on the short shitty end of that stick, right here in our “prosperous” dis-United States. Got two acquaintances who work in local schools, one in a ‘working class’ urban area & one in a ‘nice’ suburban community — sometimes they trade notes about dealing with teenagers who are supporting themselves, couch-surfing, or effectively raising their younger siblings because both parents are gone or incapacitated. There’s more of them in the urban school, but there’s also better local-government support (community youth centers, public transit vouchers) than the suburban kids can get. As a society, too often, we suck.