Wilbur Whateley

I hate to defend Elon in any way, shape, or form, but that one would actually be a softball for him to knock out of the park - Tesla is not only an EV company but also a battery and solar energy venture. So he could just tell you he is working seriously on Earth problems too, it's not an either/or situation, next question.

Well they could do the intros/outros out of their houses, as in COVID days, and it would all be fine as long as they gave out the same quality of info . . . Except we all know that’s not going to be the end of it. To maximize shareholder profit they are going to destroy the whole thing in stages. It’s a slow-motion car crash.

On this week’s Noir Alley, Eddie Mueller was in an Oakland bar and said that it was going to be his “headquarters for the foreseeable future.” Does anyone know what’s up with this? It’s hard not to be paranoid considering the ongoing corporate shenanigans trying to ruin and/or destroy TCM. Have they gotten rid of the Noir alley set as a “cost-saving” measure?

I thought the twist was going to be, not that the gift card would be empty, but that it would turn out only to have a few dollars left on it. Then the Belchers would have to pick just one of the items chosen. (Yeah, I know you can look online to see how much is on a card using its code. I'm assuming the Belchers would miss that.)

That Chuck E. Cheese episode was way funnier, minute for minute, than just about any regular LWT ep - not really surprising, since a regular ep is generally about a pretty serious topic and the humor is sometimes hard to scrape up; while this was just pure enjoyable ridiculousness from beginning to end (well, except for the stuff about the fighting, and even that wasn't too much of a downer). (I'm not trying to diss the regular eps by saying the above - I watch the show every week religiously and enjoy it and learn stuff from it. It's just that sometimes the subject matter is too much for the jokes to lift the show up much.)

I'm sorry, I'm just knocked for a loop that people are seriously claiming that promising and extremely effective treatments for alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health disorders are "not important," "obscure" and only of interest to a handful of people. I mean, what? This matters to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. It is objectively a big deal. It fully deserves coverage. You may not be interested in it personally, but I can't even comprehend the mindset that would claim this is not an important issue. It's been a segment on 60 Minutes and bestselling books have been written about it. I promise you, huge numbers of people care. This issue is completely in LWT's wheelhouse - it's pretty much ground zero of the type of topic the show was created to cover.

100% disagree! The Westminister parliamentary system is immensely superior to the US Presidential system. If we had Truss as President, we would have been stuck with her for at least four years; but with Westminister, they got rid of her ASAP. If they're not working, kick 'em to the curb - not absurd at all! Other good elements include immediate change of power after an election and much shorter campaigns. If I had a genie, I would use one of my wishes to switch the US over to a parliamentary system.

Everybody is mentioning Midsommar (which I haven't seen yet), but I think the reference to the failed apple harvest was a shout-out to the original Wicker Man, and the bees were a reference to the crappy remake (as someone mentioned above). Lots of folk horror vibes. Unless I missed it, the guy neglected to grumble and call out the corncob as culturally inauthentic.

I suspect there is a big episode coming up soon about The Great Replacement/Replacement Theory, and it will be mentioned there. That's a new angle and is worth discussing. But I don't think they have a lot of interest in just ticking off boxes and mentioning things just because they were in the news, so it doesn't surprise me they didn't cover it. Despite their broad name, they're really pretty selective in their topics and try to talk about more obscure issues if they can.

It's a Hary Potter reference. If you give a house elf (who are slaves) an article of clothing they are automatically freed. There's a famous scene where Potter tricks a bad guy into accidentally giving a sock to his elf.

If events had happened just slightly differently, I suspect Franklin would have remained a Loyalist. That parliamentary inquiry where he was humiliated swung the balance, IMO.

Oh they know where they stand on the only issue they care about: getting their business tax breaks and other goodies. The rest is just virtue-signaling to the naive in the public to keep them buying their products.

Bob and Linda both indulge Gene’s brattiness, which is something I feel that real working class parents with kids involved in their business just wouldn’t — couldn’t — do. We see Gene acting out to/in front of customers all the time, for example. In real life no way would they allow that (or if they did they wouldn’t be in business long).

I hope they’re going to recast for Jimmy Pesto, Sr.’s voice. He’s too important a character to the show to just drop him.

Sir Peter Jackson looks really sallow-eyed. Probably fine, but just saying, he looks bad around the eyes. Also I really didn’t like the way he answered questions - way too discursive for my tastes. Has he always been this way? I don’t recall watching many interviews with him back in the LOTR days.

I wish we had seen Linda in the end sequence with her arm in a sling, so we would know a) that she finally got it looked at and b) that it was just a sprain, not a break.

Why did they burn just about the entire season over these consecutive weeknights? I don't watch any other Adult Swim - is this common practice for them?

Anyone else notice that for the past three or four weeks now, they've dropped doing the news updates at the start of the show? I don't really miss them, but I do wonder why they're gone. Something to do with pandemic difficulties, I guess.

When Colbert first started on CBS, though, he had a different kind of roster of guests, at least on the evening's back end - he would have CEOs of tech companies (Elon Musk), more writers/thinkers, and quirky choices like the Night Vale podcast people. If any of you are old enough to remember, Johnny Carson had a similar setup in his day - writers like Mailer, Vidal, Capote and Updike would be frequent guests later on in the show. Colbert has said Carson was one of his inspirations, and I guess he was trying to emulate that at first. So I presume at least at first he had more of a say in the guest list. Then, after a year or so, along with all the other changes, the variety ceased. I guess CBS put its foot down and ordered more mainstream and less niche guests. (I've noticed by comparison that Seth Meyers has more of those kind of guests - theater actors and writers. Presumably since he's on later and has a smaller audience he has more leeway to be niche.)

It's a Noir Alley feature, which for the past few years has had double showings on that schedule. I think it's the only thing on TCM that gets that privilege (double showings) - I guess it's popular enough to justify it.

I guess I missed something, because I don't understand why it was so vital to the bit that the cookie be absolutely perfect. The top of at least the first one was fine, IIRC; couldn't he have just covered the broken bottom half with his hand and gone ahead? Unless maybe the bit was going to involve something with the lower half, but I can't imagine what that might have been.

I remember they've done this at least once before, when Skinner was showing the schoolkids the Rex Harrison Doctor Doolittle. Are there other examples?

Nixon's appointments were from a different age, when the judiciary was less partisan and the vetting was less rigorous and ideological. Kavanaugh was a Republican operative, he ruled in a highly right-wing way on the lower bench, and his outburst about the Democrats during the confirmation . . . I am 100% sure you are not going to get any 'fairly liberal' or even moderate rulings out of this guy. He's going to be like Clarence Thomas on steroids, aggrieved and ready to punch all the hippies/liberals he can.

The impression is, he pretty much owns the town. Don't basically all the town businesses we know about rent from him?

Just watched the episode "DNA Story" last night and was very surprised to see it has a scene set in the squad room's bathroom! (A woman has locked herself in and Harris comes in to talk her into coming out.) Amusingly, the shot's very carefully framed so that you don't see the commode. Is this the only time we see into the bathroom? I can't think of too many other circumstances where that would happen. Makes me wonder if we ever see downstairs, even for a moment.