I Saw The Sheep Detectives Last Night

I was impressed by the the movie.

The concept is kind of silly, sheep that can talk to each other but not to humans solve a murder, but it's well played and does not take itself too seriously.

Additionally, the CGI seemed to be understated and well executed.

It's smart, funny, I laughed out loud, and genuinely surprised when the murderer was exposed.

It was definitely worth the price of admission, though, full disclosure, my eldest bought the tickets as a Mother's Day gift for Sharon*.

Our local theater now has a bar in the lobby, so you could drink beer and watch the movie, which seems to be to be a bad thing.

One of the rites of passage in my day was teenage movie-goers smuggling food and booze in.

F%$#, I'm old. 

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Osama Take Me Now

Welp, this has never happened to me before but an artist has issued a takedown notice on my most recent video on YouTube in what is in my opinion a comically obvious case of fair use, and you will never guess which band it is.

[image or embed]

— Lindsay Ellis (@lindsayellis.bsky.social) May 1, 2026 at 2:42 PM

Seriously, the Grateful Dead Issued the Take-Down?

Look closely.

Yes, the Grateful Dead, the band who was so supportive of home tapers that they sometimes allowed people to plug their recorders into the mixing board at concerts, is issuing a copyright take-down for what is obviously fair use.

This is the biggest mind-f%$# that I have seen so far this year, and we are living under the Trump administration.

I'm pretty sure that the residents of Bizarro World are looking at us right now and saying, "They am so stupid."

Seriously, stop the world, I want to get off. 

YouTube Comment of the Day

They [The Beatles] weren't "going" prog, they were inventing it.

User @jamescox42317 d explaining to producer and composer Isaac Brown what the Beatles really did.

Brown has a series of videos of him reacting to hearing every Beatles album for the first time. (Thank you for making me feel old as f%$#, dude!)

While listening to, "Happiness is a Warm Gun," Brown says, "What the heck is this, Prog Rock? Hey, The Beatles are going Prog!" (about 27:10 of Part 1 below) 

Over the span of less than a decade, the Fab Four literally redefined rock and roll.

Part 1:

Part2:

FWIW, I do agree with Brown's basic thesis, which is that White Album is less an album than it is a collection of songs from 4 amazingly talented dudes.

It is a chaotic magnificent masterpiece, and my favorite Beatles album. 

The Joy of a Savage Book Review

Wendy Orent has a deliciously, and wholly justifiably, nasty review of David Zweig's new book on school lockdowns during the height of the Covid pandemic.

If you don't know who David Zweig is, he's not only a big supporter of the psychopathic Great Barrington Declaration, he was at the official rollout of the declaration because of his close ties to the principals behind that document. (He's an anti-vaxxer, hates masking, and thinks [STILL!!!] that children are immune as well)

​“I love research,” David Zweig says in the introduction to An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.” That love isn’t evident in his book. At a time when the so-called “legacy media” are chastised for trying for too much balance, for struggling to maintain an appearance of even-handedness, Zweig discards any pretense to objectivity. He detests school closings, so much so he’s devoted an entire book to it. This long and highly repetitive text ranges in tone from apparently sober discussion to a protracted wail. But evidence-free, light on statistics, absent any other viewpoints, and not infrequently wrong, all his arguments amount to the same thing: Zweig is angry that schools closed during the early months of the pandemic. And he wants to make sure you know it.

And we know how much psychological damage the school closures did, because among children, suicides, suicide attempts, and emergency treatment for mental health issues ……… Checks notes ……… fell precipitously during the lock-down, to the tune of 12-18%.

Middle school and high school are bad for your mental well-being?  Hoocoodanode?  

………

But what infuriates Zweig is that he thinks schools shouldn’t have been locked down in the first place, since other countries (read: European countries, mostly unnamed) didn’t lock down at all, and anyway lockdowns were pointless even from the beginning. How do we know? Because the arguments were based on models. The very notion of models has a strange effect on Zweig:  garbage in, garbage out, he intones, and he makes sure we know that all these models were wrong. They were based, for one thing, on pandemic influenza, which is all the modelers had to go on, as the 2003 outbreak of a related coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1 behaved in an entirely different fashion from Covid:  it spread sluggishly, late in the course of infection, and generally in hospital settings. But pandemic influenza is also not a perfect model for Covid. Unlike Covid, flu is often spread by surface contamination. Basing Covid response on influenza led to hygiene theater: the scrupulous hand-washing and sanitizing; the meticulous scrubbing of food packages; the disinfection of surfaces, including (when the lockdowns partially lifted) shopping carts. None of it mattered much. Covid’s chief manner of spread is airborne, as several aerosol scientists (including Kimberly Prather, an atmospheric chemist Zweig holds up to particular scorn, though it isn’t clear why), demonstrated quite early on.

​Still, the “experts” had to work with what they knew, and what they knew was influenza. At first, no one seemed to think the new disease could be worse than influenza, which, after all, has killed up to 80,000 Americans, mostly elderly, in recent years, according to the CDC. And no one knew if schools were going to drive transmission rates or not. Certainly, children in school settings sometimes drive influenza outbreaks. So, in “an abundance of caution,” state and local governments shut the schools down.

That decision enrages Zweig, who argues that influenza kills more children than Covid, but when you look at the actual figures you wonder what he’s smoking. According to Jonathan Howard, physician and author of We Want Them Infected, some 450 children had died of Covid by May of 2021. Zweig claims that in several given years, influenza claimed far more. For instance, according to Zweig, in the year 2012-2013 the CDC attributed 1160 children’s deaths to the flu. This contradicts the CDC’s report itself, which listed pediatric influenza deaths as “more than 170.” According to the American Hospital Association the highest pediatric death toll ever recorded was the year 2009-2010, when the novel Swine Flu pandemic took 288 children’s lives. Zweig’s “love of research” has failed him here. Is this carelessness, or inventiveness? There’s no way to know.

I'm going to try not to over-quote here, because the whole review is a thing of beauty. 

Assholes like Zweig should be exiled from polite society.  They literally have the blood of millions of people on their hands.

Maybe they could go to Mars with Elon. 

I Was an Idiot When I Was 16

Don't watch this.

When I was 16, I saw some ads for a movie called Laserblast, a film now best known forthe screen debut of Eddie Deezen and it's showing as the season 7 finale of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

It came out in the Summer of 1978, and I had just turned 16 at the time, and for some reason, I really wanted to see it.

It was clearly a B-Movie, but something appealed to me.

It was out of the only theater that it was playing at in Portland, Oregon in a week, so I never saw it, until now. 

I was stationary bicycling and I got motion sickness.

It is really, REALLY, bad.

It's not the production values, they are what is to be expected from a 1970s Sci-Fi exploitation film, and the acting, which, while not stellar, is again about what is to be expected from 1970s Sci-Fi exploitation film, but the scripting and plotting is the worst that I have ever seen, and I've seen Plan 9 From Outer Space.

The plot was completely incoherent and the dialog was laughable.

The fact that I spent over 40 years regretting not having seen it is pathetic. 

To quote Roger Ebert, ""I hated this movie, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie, hated it. Hated every simpering, stupid, vacant audience insulting moment of it."

Amazing

Just a strip mall


Hole in the wall

On our way up to Western Massachusetts to pick up the last of Nat's summer job, and in Allentown, we stopped for a late lunch in Allentown Psnnsylvania.

After searching for a while, we ended at an Indian place in a strip mall, Cumin N Eat, at 3333 Hamilton Blvd, Allentown, PA 18104 ph: (610) 351-0343. (Facebook page here)

It does not look like much, but it was excellent.

I had goat Chettinadu, , which the waiter recommended, which was exquisite, while Sharon* had the Paneer Majestic, which Sharon* said was the best Paneer she had ever tasted. (I had a bite, it was quite good)

It is highly recommended, though I would have to add, on your first time, order the mild.

Their food has some serious heat to it, and I just got the medium.

I think that my tuchas may resemble a Japanese war flag in the morning, but I have to say that it would be worth it.

This is a very pleasant surprise, and might be the best  Indian food that I have ever had.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Quote of the Day

Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.

—Cory Doctorow

It appears that Naomi Klein is sick and tired of being confused with Naomi Wolf, and has written a sort of a memoir, titled Doppelganger, to muse on the differences.

Klein should be sick and tired of being convulsed with Wolf.  At her best Naomi Wolf was little more than a platitude spewing hack, and now, she gone full Elon.

Another good quote from Doctorow's discussion, "But whenever real leftist transformation was possible, liberals threw in with conservatives: think of the smearing and defenestration of Corbyn by Labour's right, or of the LibDems coalition with David Cameron's Tories, or of the Democrats' dirty tricks to keep Bernie from appearing on the national ballot."

Another Daily Show Doing Standup at the White House Correspondents' Dinner

Meh

Roy Wood, Jr.

I was not impressed.

It wasn't bad, but it was rather anodyne.

When you have this level of pomposity and arrogance in one place, the crowd you play to should be the rest of the country.

I don't expect Stephen Colbert's legendary take-down, or Michelle Wolfe's, but something on the level of Trevor Noah last year.

I get that Wood got his start doing radio reporting, and that his dad was a journalistic icon, but there were too many lines that were playing to the White House problem drinkers correspondents.

The White House press corps(e) needs to be deflated a bit at such an event, and he did not.

Headline of the Day

The Washington Post Opinion Section Is a Sad, Toxic Wasteland

—Dan Froomkin

This is truer than taxes, and nothing is truer than them.

Even with the death of their toxic OP/ED editor Fred Hiatt, the Post opinion section remains horrible.

It is routine for front page stories to contradict the facts claimed in the opinion pieces.  It appears that they have taken the Daniel Patrick Moynihan adage, "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts," and the Post editors have added, "Unless it's published on the Washington Post editorial page."

Read the rest, including his take-down of the the most egregious writers, is well worth the read.

Today in Marvelously Bitchy Movie Reviews

'Fantastic Beasts' Forgot To Do The Thing That Made 'Harry Potter' Succeed | Cracked.com

A new Fantastic Beasts movie is upon us, which means it's time for Harry Potter fans to once again decide if it's worth it to go sit down in a dark room for 142 minutes just to bum themselves out (especially when they can get the same effect by just looking at J.K. Rowling's Twitter feed). This is now the dullest major movie franchise with the word "Fantastic" in the title, which is no small feat given the competition. It's like this series just sorta ... forgot what it was that made the Harry Potter movies work in the first place. Check out the trailer for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (or "Sorcerer's Stone" if the word "Philosopher" intimidates you as much as Scholastic thought it would).

That is just beautiful.

Pay Per View Review

Director…………Destin Daniel Cretton

Writers…………………Dave Callaham

Destin Daniel Cretton
Andrew Lanham

Cast
Simu Liu…………Shaun / Shang-Chi
Tony Chiu-Wai Leung ………Xu Wenwu
Awkwafina …………………………Katy
Ben Kingsley …………Trevor Slattery
Meng'er Zhang …………………Xialing
Fala Chen ……………………Li
Michelle Yeoh …………………Ying Nan
Wah Yuen …………Master Guang Bo
Florian Munteanu ……………Razor Fist
Andy Le …………………Death Dealer
Paul W. He ……………Chancellor Hui
Jayden Zhang …………Young Shang-Chi
Elodie Fong ……………Young Xialing
Arnold Sun ……………Teen Shang-Chi

Yesterday, we ordered Chinese takeout and watched Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on pay per view.

As I noted on Friday, we have no interest in being another Covid statistic, so we did not eat in and did not go to a movie theater.

After some back and forth, we decided on the Marvel film, largely because it is largely detached from the whole Infinity War/Endgame story-line, because it's just f%$#ing exhausting.

Thankfully, this proved to be true.  It was about as tied into the whole Marvel story arc as the original Black Panther.

There are a few references, but nothing major.

My spoiler-free review of the movie is that it's pretty good for what it is, and definitely in the top half of the Marvel films that I have seen, which is pretty good considering that it is an origin film, which means that a significant part of the film is devoted to non-plot history.

The reason that this is a good film is because of the stand-out performance by Awkawfina, who plays Shang-Chi's best friend and side-kick. 

She is comic relief, straight-woman, and active participant in Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey that is at the center of all super hero origin stories.

It's better than run of the mill Marvel fair, but not as good as the original Captain America.

I'd give it a solid 8 out of 10 in the context of the genre, largely on the performance of Awkawfina.

Some pictures after the break: (click for bigger picture)

George F%$#ing Will?

The man who briefed Ronald Reagan for the 1980 debates using Jimmy Carters' stolen briefing books, has just written an adulatory review of a Robert E. Lee biography that excoriates the general.

I am rather surprised that Will would do this for a book that calls Lee a dullard, a hypocrite, and a traitor:

In 1935, the year before Margaret Mitchell’s magnolia-scented novel “Gone With the Wind” began 21 months on bestseller lists, Douglas Southall Freeman, the son of a veteran of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s legions, published, to critical acclaim and commercial success, the final two volumes of his worshipful four-volume biography of Lee. Freeman called Lee “the Southern Arthur” who “accepted fame without vanity and defeat without repining.”

………

Lee was unambiguously a traitor, guilty of, in the Constitution’s language about treason, “levying war against” the United States. He also was a bore. His life coincided with extraordinarily complex controversies — about the nation’s nature, civic duty, the meaning of patriotism and the demands of honor. Remarkably, there is no record of his expressing a thought (here is a Lee sample: “Never exceed your means”) more interesting than Polonius’s bromides (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”).

Princeton’s Allen C. Guelzo, an eminent Civil War historian, has now published exactly what the nation needs as it reappraises important historical figures who lived in challenging times with assumptions radically unlike today’s. “Robert E. Lee: A Life,” Guelzo’s scrupulously measured assessment, is mercifully free of the grandstanding by which many moralists nowadays celebrate themselves by indignantly deploring the shortcomings of those whose behavior offends current sensibilities. But by casting a cool eye on Lee, Guelzo allows facts to validate today’s removals of Lee’s name and statues from public buildings and places.

Contemporaries gushed about Lee’s gentility, dignity, probity, manners, presence, composure, etc. If mid-19th-century America had been a debutante ball, Lee, who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at 22 without a single demerit, would have been a paragon. Life then was, however, a moral test. Lee flunked.

Lee, Guelzo writes, “raised his hand” against the nation that, as an Army officer, he had sworn to defend. He did so for an agenda that a much greater man, Ulysses S. Grant, called one of “the worst for which a people ever fought.” Lee thought slavery was a “greater evil” to White people than to Black people. He enveloped himself in what Guelzo calls a “cloud of pious wishes” and decided, as Guelzo tartly says, “it was up to the whites to decide when enough was enough.” Guelzo writes that to Lee, slavery’s victims were “invisible, despite their presence all around.” His indifference was “cruelty in self-disguised velvet.” Not well disguised, when he presided at the whipping of three recaptured runaways, ordering a constable to “lay it on well.”

George F. Will's gleeful take-down of Robert E. Lee is not something that I would have expected from one of the shock troops of the "Reagan Revolution."

It would be more readable if he didn't insist on using terms and references primarily chosen to impress upon the reader his "Staggering Genius."  

We use DuckDuckGo just as well as he can.

Best First Paragraph of a Book Review Ever

When you read this, you know that you are in for one hell of a ride:

I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are.

—Patricia Lockwood in London Review of Books

Just in case you are wondering, while many admire the author's prose, it also considered to be extremely misogynistic by many.

H/t Naked Capitalism for finding this 2019 gem.

Must Get This Book

I just read a review of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class, and the book sounds like a real barn-burner:

Who are the members of the professional managerial class? Neither capitalists nor workers, one strains to define them in purely economic terms. If you have ever dealt with members of the PMC, the first word that comes to mind is annoying. It might be part of a slightly larger summation of annoying and pretentious. But annoying is always going to make the cut because members of the PMC are not just managers by vocation, but also by personality. They love to regulate and micromanage: their subordinates, their children, and even themselves.

Is it due to nature or nature? Occupational hazard or innate insufferableness? No one really knows for sure. What is known is that these are the most annoying people on the planet. People who get positively aroused at the idea of telling you what to do, correcting you, and telling you that they just read an article in The New York Times about just that issue and now have something old to say in a new way. A day without them giving out a did you know factoid is like a day without sunshine. The type of people who can only have an orgasm if they see someone getting a parking ticket.

Catherine Liu lives among these people and seems rather fed up. Her new book Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class makes it crystal clear that she is having a lot of passive-aggressive lunch meetings with other members of the University of California, Irvine faculty.

(emphasis mine)

That line made me laugh.

………

However, Liu focuses on another way the PMC mask their will to power: moral preening. She claims the professional managerial class hoards virtue for itself as part of its war against the working class. Which is to say, Liu recognizes that the PMC and the working class are, in fact, class enemies.

Building on the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, she accepts that the PMC at one time played a positive role in society by challenging the barbarity of earlier iterations of capitalism; specifically when members of the PMC were advocates for creating professional standards in fields like medicine and social research, and were advocating for welfare state economic reforms. But as the post-World War 2 capitalist settlement soured and neoliberalism became ascendant, Liu claims “the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying favor with the capitalists it once despised.”

This was not a moral awakening, but an awokening. A power play by the PMC to secure their class position within the capitalist system using the lofty language of social justice to defend basic material interest.

I also call them Hillary Clinton voters.

………

The main argument of the book, or so it seems to me, is that the professional managerial class of present is actively working against building socialism in the United States. That the PMC could really be considered the prime obstacle to unifying the working class as they continually divide working people along the rigid lines of identity to serve their own class interests:

[The PMC] prefers obscurantism, balkanization, and management of interest groups to a transformative reimagining of the social order. It wants to play the virtuous social hero, but as a class, it is hopelessly reactionary. The interests of the PMC are now tied more than ever to its corporate overlords than to the struggles of the majority of Americans whose suffering is merely background decor for the PMC’s elite volunteerism. Members of the PMC soften the sharpness of their guilt about collective suffering by stroking their credentials and telling themselves that they are better and more qualified to lead and guide than other people.

Looks like someone just got herself uninvited to an 80s party.

What the review, and probably the book, do not address is how so much of this is driven by what the late Dave Graeber called Bullsh%$ Jobs.

I would argue that much of the dysfunction described in this review is an artifact of what Graeber described as the, "profound psychological violence," of having a career that one knows on some level has no value.

It's a Variant of a Russian Joke

During the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin was presiding over the rape of Russia by finance types, there was a joke going around:

Everything that they said about Communism was a LIE.

Unfortunately, everything that they said about Capitalism was the Truth.

Donald Trump hews fairly close to this.

Everything he said about himself was a lie, but much of what he said about the US elites was the truth, and this review of the book The Tyranny of Merit, provides an interesting primer on this idea.

The thesis of this book is that the "Meritocracy" sees itself as important, when it is really self-important, and that it is pervasively corrupt, where the efforts to benefit themselves are hypocritically sold as benefiting society as a whole:

In examining the 2016 populist revolt that gave rise to Donald Trump and Brexit, most observers have focused on two explanations. Some say the uprising was driven by economic dislocation: Voters were angry about rising inequality and felt they were losing out because of trade. Others argue that anger with the establishment stemmed from racist discomfort with immigration, demographic change, and growing religious diversity.

In his new book, the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel focuses on a third factor: elite smugness and self-dealing. To Sandel, 2016 represented a rebellion of voters lacking a college degree against a governing class that believes that its credentials, wealth, and power are the products of its merit. These leaders, Sandel argues, have condescended to blue-collar workers, “eroded the dignity of work and left many feeling disrespected and disempowered.”

Sandel focuses primarily on the left. For three decades, he writes, leading Democrats—including Bill Clinton (Yale Law ’73), Hillary Clinton (Yale Law ’73), and Barack Obama (Harvard Law ’91)—embodied personally, and touted rhetorically, a brand of meritocracy hopelessly oblivious to what he calls the “tyranny of merit.” Sometimes, this is implicit, as when Pete Buttigieg flexes on his ability to speak eight languages and his experience as a Rhodes Scholar. Other times, it’s explicit. Speaking in Mumbai in 2018, Hillary Clinton bragged that she “won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product”—that is, the places that had been successful in the era of globalization. This, Sandel writes, “displayed the meritocratic hubris that contributed to her defeat.” The Democratic Party “once stood for farmers and working people against the privileged. Now, in a meritocratic age, its defeated standard bearer boasted that the prosperous, enlightened parts of the country had voted for her.”

………

But Sandel is right to probe the dark things that can come from embracing meritocracy. Liberals have been overemphasizing their credentials and the economic success of their cosmopolitan metropolises. In doing so, they’ve forgotten that these markers are not good indicators of worth. The ability to obtain post-secondary degrees, particularly from elite institutions, is at least as much a reflection of one’s class and race as it is of one’s deservedness. The wealth and success of more liberal places has as much to do with an unequal system that allows existing wealth to concentrate as it does with the merit of those cities.

………

The term meritocracy, almost universally praised today, was coined in the 1950s by the British sociologist Michael Young to describe a dystopia. In contrast to an aristocracy, where people on top know they are just lucky and people on the bottom know they are merely unfortunate, in a meritocracy a small minority of winners feel enormous pride in their accomplishments and the majority feel humiliated by their low position. Young’s book predicted a revolt against meritocratic elites in 2034. “In 2016, as Britain voted for Brexit and America for Trump, that revolt arrived eighteen years ahead of schedule,” Sandel writes.

………

As a result, embracing meritocracy too tightly can be politically disastrous. In 2016, some working-class people were left with “the galling sense that those who stood astride the hierarchy of merit looked down with disdain on those they considered less accomplished than themselves.” The disdain was made explicit in 2016 when Hillary Clinton, speaking at fund-raisers in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard, labeled millions of working-class Americans as “deplorables.”

………

Trump brilliantly exploited the idea that well-educated progressives looked down on those with less education (and, sometimes relatedly, those who are deeply religious). He rarely spoke of opportunity and upward mobility. A candidate “keenly alive to the politics of humiliation,” Sandel says, Trump feigned respect for working-class people. “l love the poorly educated,” Trump famously said after one primary victory. The gambit worked. Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly won college-educated voters, but Trump won voters without a college degree—a larger share of the electorate—by seven percentage points.

Liberals, of course, tend to have policies that are far more helpful to those without college educations than do conservatives. But Democratic governments stacked with well-educated elites have little real understanding of working-class struggles, and, just like Republicans, they can cause problems for the poor. For example, the mostly Ivy League status of Obama’s cabinet helped inform “a Wall Street–friendly response to the financial crisis,” Sandel writes, one that failed to comprehend “seething public anger.” Instead, the too-big-to-jail philosophy seemed to exonerate well-educated Wall Street bankers who engaged in selfish behavior that did grave damage to the country. Timothy Geithner and Rahm Emanuel were happier to bail out financial executives—who shared their pedigrees (and in some cases their former jobs)—than they were to rescue average Americans. In other words, a belief that wealth and education equal merit helped lead to stunning inequality.

From this review, and the policy prescriptions in the book, it seems to me that they have missed the point:  Many of the problems of "Meritocracy" do not come from a disdain for those less educated, though this is clearly a problem, much of it comes from the replacement of actual merit with credentialism.

There is no reasons that jobs which a decade ago required nothing beyond a high-school diploma a generation (or 2) ago now require a college degree, and possibly a post graduate degree.

Teachers entering schools in the 1950s needed an associated degree in education, or a bachelors in some other subject, while now all teachers need a masters degree in education.

Unfortunately there has been a whole infrastructure of credentialed people doing the bullsh%$ job of creating credentials, verifying credentials, and ranking credentials for other people.

Interestingly enough it is not the US that has the most extremely credentialed society on earth, it is likely India, where credentials, they call it caste there, completely permeate their society.

Today in Savage Book Reviews

Matt Taibbi giving a savage book review is its own reward.

I cannot possibly due justice to it so I will leave you with just this quote:

It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.

Go read.

Even if you disagree with the thesis, you will be amused.

Review: Harley Quinn

Harley Quinn

Cast:
Kaley Cuoco … Harley Quinn
Lake Bell … Poison Ivy
Ron Funches … King Shark
Tony Hale … Doctor Psycho, Felix Faust
Jason Alexander … Sy Borgman
J. B. Smoove … Frank the Plant
Alan Tudyk … the Joker, Clayface, Calendar Man, Doctor Trap, Condiment King
Charlie Adler … Nick Quinzel, Grandpa Quinzel
James Adomian … Bane, Chaz, Ian, Ratcatcher
Diedrich Bader … Batman
Tisha Campbell-Martin … Tawny Young, M.O.N.I.C.A.
Briana Cuoco … Barbara Gordon
Andy Daly … Two-Face
Chris Diamantopoulos … Aquaman
Rachel Dratch … Nora Fries
Giancarlo Esposito … Lex Luthor
Susie Essman … Sharon Quinzel, Grandma Quinzel
Sean Giambrone … Joshua Cobblepot
Meryl Hathaway … Marcus
Tom Hollander … Alfred Pennyworth
Michael Ironside … Darkseid
Tom Kenny … Clayface's Hand
Wayne Knight … the Penguin
Rahul Kohli … the Scarecrow
Phil LaMarr … Jason Praxis, Black Manta, Lucius Fox, Brian
Sanaa Lathan … Catwoman
George Lopez … Himself
Howie Mandel … Himself
Vanessa Marshall … Wonder Woman, Giganta, Joey Day
Christopher Meloni … Commissioner James Gordon
Alfred Molina … Mr. Freeze
Natalie Morales … Lois Lane
Brad Morris … Victor Zsasz
Frankie Muniz … Himself
Matt Oberg … Kite Man, Killer Croc, KGBeast
Rhea Perlman … Golda
Jim Rash … the Riddler, Stan, Mr. Isley
Will Sasso … Maxie Zeus
Rory Scovel … Gus
Nicole Sullivan … Mrs. Cobblepot, Benjamin
Wanda Sykes … Queen of Fables
Talia Tabin … Debbie Day
Jacob Tremblay … Damian Wayne / Robin
Mark Whitten … Herman Cizko / The Cowled Critic
James Wolk … Superman

Directors:
Directors: Juan Meza-Leon, Matt Garofalo, Ben Jones, Frank Marino, Cecilia Aranovich Hamilton, Colin Heck, Colin Heck, Vinton Heuck, Brandon McKinney, Ben Jones

I will attempt to keep this this review as spoiler free as possible, but there will be a few inevitable spoilers, you have been warned.

This series is a telling of Harley Quinn's transition from sidekick to super-villain after her split with Joker.

You can (at least until June 1) stream it online at Syfy.com, at least if you have a cable account. (see the link)

I have enjoyed what I have seen this far, I am very impressed.

Kaley Cuoco, who plays Harley, gives what her is arguably her finest performance to date.

She puts the "fun" in dysfunction, and plays Quinn as a whip smart and thoroughly broken ingenue.

The best performance though, is Lake Bell as Poison Ivy, who completely steals the show as the self-described eco-terrorists.

She is deeply devoted to Harley (I ship them so much), and she has a remarkably clear view of reality, except for the whole insane toxic pheromone criminal plant lady thing.

Ron Funches as King Shark is an truly amusing combination of techno nerd and ravenous prehistoric deep sea predator.

Alan Tudyk as Clayface (and  the Joker, Calendar Man, Doctor Trap, Condiment King) is a revelation. (He is a leaf on the wind, watch as he soars)

His, and the writers' vision of Clayface as the ultimate theater dweeb overeager actor is truly inspired.

All of this is wrapped in witty, completely irreverent, and thoroughly profane (S-Bomb, and F-Bomb, though the (spoiler) C-Bomb is bleeped) plotting and dialogue.

There are some problematic bits in the scripts though, particularly the fact that they occasionally traffic in Jewish stereotypes, particularly during the (spoiler) Cobblepot bar-mitzvah, and the character of Sy Borgman, and (spoiler) Harley's parents.  (Who knew that Quinzel was a Jewish name?)

This is a joyous roasting of super-hero culture, while also being a profoundly feminist narrative.

I recommend this highly, and rate it 8⅔ out of 10.

Watching What Might Be the Best Police Procedural Movie Ever

The 1974 version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, directed by Joseph Sargent, screenplay by Peter Stone, and starring Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Héctor Elizondo, Martin Balsam, and Jerry Stiller.

In addition to being an excellent cop movie, it's also an excellent transit movie, and it has the most famous sneeze in cinema.

It is also a glorious snap-shot of the culture and weirdness of New York City in the 1970s.

It may be the most New York City movie ever.

After I saw the movie, I read the book, and was not impressed, but this movie was genius.

The 2 remakes that followed, not so much.

According to the Customs of My People

Today, we engaged in a Jewish tradition from time immemorial, we had Chinese food, and went to a movie.

Actually, we saw 2 movies.

What follows is a spoiler free, and hence vague, review.

Last night, we watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens (TFA) on pay-per-view, (we also had Chinese food), and tonite, we saw Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (RoS) in a movie theater.   (also Chinese food)

They were both decent movies, but I much preferred TFA to RoS.

I could consider TFA to be the 3rd best of the Star War movies, though I was never able to sit through the first two of the prequels.

TFA was self-aware, actually commenting the Star Wars mythology and conventions, and it was true to the characters, and the plot, while possessing some holes, was relatively coherent.

Also, there was what is arguably the least subtle anti-fascist message of any of the films in the series.  (Anti-fascism is IMHO a common throughout the series)

Rose (Kelly Marie Tran), who was introduced in TFA, was firmly relegated to the background in RoS, probably as a result of the Twitter sh%$-storm from alt-right fanboi after TFA.

Also, as befits J.J. Abrams, he directed the RoS but not TFA there was a big Chekhov's gun^* violation.

In both movies, the performances of Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac, and Adam Driver's performance was better, though I think, particularly in RoS that it served to highlight some of the shortcomings of the script.

Mark Hamill's performance in TFA, largely playing the role of sensei from many Japanese Samurai movies, is arguably his best performance in a Star Wars movie.

Carrie Fisher's performance in TFA was good, but that might be colored by her death following filming, and in RoS, her performance was a combination of archival footage and possibly CGI.

Of the supporting characters, the best performance was probably that of Kerri Russell in RoS, who did so either fully or partially masked, and the always entertaining Benicio Del Toro in TFA.

^*Chekhov's gun (Russian: Чеховское ружьё) is a dramatic principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed; elements should not appear to make "false promises" by never coming into play.

The Cats Movie Has a Positive Social Value

Because while the movie has generally been reviewed as an unalloyed disaster, it has produced outraged reviews with lines like, "Cats always feels like it’s two seconds away from turning into a furry orgy in a dumpster."

I enjoy reading outraged negative reviews, so it's all good.

I wait with baited breath for Rex Reed's review, because no one does a catty negative review like he does.