Only one more episode to go! If you haven’t seen the latest episode and are trying to avoid spoilers, don’t read below the fold because there are massive spoilers in the original post, and there undoubtedly will be in comments too. Feel free to discuss other topics as well — open thread!
Television
Thursday Evening Open Thread: ‘Dumb’ vs. ‘Willfully Ignorant’
This question has a much greater partisan differential than I expected. pic.twitter.com/o4Y2PRpnlx
— Jennifer Wolak (@j_wolak_) May 6, 2019
The incredibly stupid secret to Trump’s success is lots of people don’t know that reality television isn’t real.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 8, 2019
I first read Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi when I was 9 or 10 (my English-teacher mother gave me a copy when I told her Tom Sawyer was a terrible book, and I was having doubts about Twain’s literary stature). That book made explicit one of the great ‘secrets’ of American life: There’s a considerable percentage of our fellow citizens who genuinely admire con artists, thugs, and those who ‘know how to get what they want, whatever it takes.’
The number of such secret fellow-felons has certainly grown no less, here in our second Gilded Age. It’s not necessarily that all Trump voters are stupid (although many of them *are* plenty stupid; look at the Fox talking heads!), but they choose to insist on being ignorant enough to believe the crap Fox / Trump / the entire GOP ladles into their gaping maws…
Always remember that what makes Trump's enablers so awful is that almost all of them, including at Fox, know better. They know Trump isn't a good businessman. But they're higher on the food chain than the rubes they're fleecing, and so they say what they know will work.
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 8, 2019
As another great American artist once said, You can’t cheat an honest man…
2/ "MISTER Trump us the richest man in America." "He's the most successful builder in New York!" "Trump is so rich, that no one could buy him!"
Even when you gave them the truth, the power of 15 years of reality TV indoctrination overcame it.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 8, 2019
Thursday Evening Open Thread: ‘Dumb’ vs. ‘Willfully Ignorant’Post + Comments (198)
Open Thread: Game of Thrones Spoilers
I’m not going to try a hidden thread this time – the backend setup makes it hard to access, and the main thread will inevitably contain spoilers anyway. So, if you haven’t seen episode four and are trying to avoid spoilers, keep on scrolling past this post — with my apologies. Otherwise, see below the fold…
Street Food & Thrones
Okay, I’m dying to discuss the latest episode of Game of Thrones, but I realize not everyone is watching it in real time and many folks aren’t watching it at all. For those of y’all with Netflix, may I suggest an alternative that got me through the stomach-churning wait for the latest Thrones?
I love this series so far, primarily because it focuses on the people and their stories, which are fascinating. It’s really good!
If you are all caught up on Thrones, maybe you can access a hidden spoilers thread by clicking on the photo below of Arya Stark in her street food days:
Don’t know that it’ll work across all platforms, but maybe? Anyhoo, open thread!
ETA: READ AT YOUR OWN RISK IF YOU WANT TO AVOID “GAME OF THRONES” SPOILERS! Not just the hidden thread; I can’t control what people say on the main thread either.
Friday Afternoon Open Thread
Game of Thrones returns Sunday at 9 PM Eastern. That calls for an “Every Fucking Chicken in the Room” Meal Deal.
I was late to the Thrones bandwagon — didn’t start watching it until a few years ago, and didn’t get really hooked on it until the wee dragons made their first appearance.
Among my favorite characters are Arya and the Hound. I read somewhere that George RR Martin’s wife said she’ll leave him if he kills off Arya, but is he even driving the plot of the TV version anymore?
Anyhoo, feel free to speculate about Thrones or discuss whatever. Open thread!
Design Challenge (Open Thread)
Have any of y’all seen The Great British Design Challenge on Netflix? I started watching it because I’m jonesing for new episodes of The Great British Bake-Off, and I figured maybe some low-key British humor and good-natured competition in the decorating sphere might fill that void.
As far as the show goes, I don’t like it nearly as much as GBBO. The judges aren’t funny (though the architecture expert is amusing and informative), and the competition isn’t as fair. These poor schnooks have an absurdly short amount of time to transform a room, and there’s a wild card for the contestants in the form of clients (the people whose rooms are being redecorated).
Although they’ve had a chance to indicate their tastes and goals in a brief prior to the designers coming up with a plan and presenting it, clients on that show can and do derail an imaginative decorating scheme on the day work is to begin with some random-ass decree, such as, “I don’t like blue, and I hate louvres.” (That’s an actual example.)
But despite the program’s flaws, as far as what I need to see at this point in my life, decorating is far more relevant than baking. As regular readers know, we took up residence late last October in a ramshackle money pit. It’s got a million-dollar view — honest to dog, I doubt Bill Gates has a better one — but the folks who lived here before waited until the place was falling apart before decamping.
I’ve enjoyed decorating on a budget ever since I got my first off-campus hovel, but that impulse was derailed by motherhood somehow. We undertook an ambitious DIY kitchen renovation at our old house, but aside from that, my efforts to create a welcoming and serene home environment during the nesting years were confined to mopping when the kitchen floor became adhesive enough to snatch off shoes.
Now that impulse has returned with a vengeance, sparked by necessity. Every wall in this house save the bedrooms was painted pale blue by the previous occupants, a color augmented by a sticky residue of nicotine from their 25 years of indoor smoking. The walls have been scrubbed, primed and repainted, so lately I’ve turned my attention to the furniture and decor.
Our old furniture doesn’t suit the new place. Like an idiot, I chose dark furniture when we lived in the old house because I thought it should match my husband’s piano. The piano is in a different room now, but even if it was still in the living room, the furniture is out of whack with the bohemian vacation-shack ambience of the new place.
I can’t afford to get new stuff, so I’m painting and re-purposing things and attempting to locate yard sale and thrift shop items. My mother-in-law is an invaluable ally in the latter. Here’s an example of the former — our crappy old black IKEA TV stand with a fresh coat of paint:
The difference is astonishing. Even my husband — who would eat dinner off an old mattress crate for 20 years without complaint — noticed how it brightened the room. And it cost less than $20 to fix it up.
My next project is going to be to decorating our bedroom. We’ve been married for nearly a quarter of a century and have never owned a headboard or set of drawers with a full set of knobs. I’m planning to make a retro-looking tufted headboard and re-do the dressers with paint and matching knobs for a change.
The main bathroom needs a new shower, and I’m going to let the professionals handle that because we would fuck it up. But it also has a hideous laminate-covered particle-board cabinet with a crappy sink. I’m thinking of replacing that with an antique (junk shop!) dresser and setting a sink in it. (Got the idea from a bathroom in a house we looked at before settling on this place.) There would be sawing and pipe-hooking involved, but I think we can handle it.
Anyhoo, my ultimate goal is to get this swampy shit-box into good enough shape to qualify as the BEFORE scene in a decorating show. Maybe the kids can achieve AFTER when we’re dead.
I know John has undertaken extensive renovations and nest-feathering, and I’m aware that some of y’all have too. Any tips, resources or cautionary tales would be greatly appreciated. Or feel free to discuss whatever — open thread!
State of the Rebellion (Open Thread)
Hubby and I opted to skip the SOTU in favor of continuing our Game of Thrones marathon. This morning, I watched WaPo’s three-minute highlight reel and read the transcript. Looks like our prediction yesterday — that the speech would be a discordant amalgam of white nationalist scaremongering and pseudo-loftiness — was on target.
As anticipated, it reflects its authorship, a committee comprising xenophobic incel goon Stephen Miller and Fox News-trained turd-polishers under the tutelage of network hack Bill Shine. But as many societies have discovered at great cost, when you give bigots a seat at the table, they consume the entire feast and then burn down the house with everyone in it.
I watched Stacey Abrams’ response in its entirety and am relieved that she escaped the SOTU rebuttal curse. She received scattered criticism for the staging, but the dim lighting, sharp focus on Abrams and soft focus on the crowd behind her appealed to me. It evoked a Star Wars rebel alliance leader’s speech on the eve of an attack on a Death Star. FWIW, I’d fly my X-wing up Trump’s bunghole on Abrams’ orders.
Still, for my money, Speaker Pelosi’s devastating exasperated participation-trophy clap was the highlight of the evening:
Wingnuts on Twitter are still sputtering with rage about her paper shuffling, impassive expressions during GOP applause lines, eye-widening as Trump unspooled particularly egregious whoppers, etc., so I gather she managed to strike exactly the right balance between decorum and disdain. Well done, Madam Speaker!
During our Game of Thrones marathon, I had an epiphany about which major character I find most relatable: Daenerys Targaryen. Like her, I recently returned to my ancestral homeland, where I am a stranger. I assembled a fleet (of canoes and a jon boat). And I am the mother of (snap)dragons.
Open thread!