Wax Lion

TDS used to be a go-to show for politicians, especially conservative ones because it was a show younger people who don't watch news programming watch. In the early interviews with Huckabee, he comes off as a nice guy with a different worldview and Jon never brings up his extremism. It worked for a while, I knew a few people who could see themselves voting for him if the alternative were a less charismatic Democrat (like, say, Hillary Clinton or John Kerry) based on how affable he was around Jon. There was no doubt he was conservative but he came off as someone who could have a reasonable discussion. Now, however, I suspect Jimmy Fallon has taken over Jon's spot as the guy politicians want to visit. Fallon's a lot more interested in having a good relationship with guests and being able to come up with a new viral video, so he rarely goes after them. And when he did a piece about the Chris Christie scandal, he called Christie in advance to apologize. The Tonight Show is a better place nowadays to reach those young viewers .

I think Journeyman lived up to its potential in the end but was one of those shows that started out with a promising pilot but had a bad handful of follow-up episodes. It's that "repeat the pilot for the second and third episode" rule, but it gets tiresome to see the protagonist explain the premise of the show, getting shriller every time, while everyone he knows thinks he's crazy. I never finished the Nowhere Man pilot because of that and the only reasons I worked through those early episodes is because I heard enough promises that it gets better. I wanted Torchwood to be good so badly. But in the end it didn't want to be the show it could have been, a more adult Doctor Who centered around a ridiculously fun character. The whimsy of Doctor Who was replace with grim dourness and the happy-go-lucky Captain Jack became a generic brooding scifi hero.

To get specific about inequality, in that infamous interview with Rachel Maddow, Rand Paul insisted the Civil Rights Act wasn't necessary because customers would get businesses to do the right thing eventually. I guess they would have pressured Woolworth's to integrate their lunch counters by threatening to take away their business and to eat a integrated lunch counters. Which... makes no sense if you've studied that era of American history.

Continuing from the current week's thread. I remember in 2008 (2007?) there were a couple appearances of McCain that had my husband and myself looking at each other and asking "Does Jon know about the stuff they've said about McCain on The Daily Show?" after skewering McCain for something, McCain would show up a few weeks later and Jon would act like that stuff never happened. It was a weird and infuriating time, though the last interview was a tough one. Similarly, TDS used to be safe ground for Huckabee, even though TDS would cover his religious intolerance. Huckabee would avoid all those topics when talking with Jon until the last couple of interviews where Jon insistently brought the interview back to Huckabee's theocratic comments.

For me, hatewatching isn't so much a guilty pleasure thing but usually a show that's so compellingly awful, no amount of fury can get me to stop watching. The example that comes to mind is The Big C. The first two seasons were so great, but the third season was a mess of increasingly-selfish behavior and plots that made little sense. The whiplash from season two to three was infuriating but I couldn't quit that show until the third season ended. Gilmore Girls falls into this category for a lot of my friends, I listened to their grumbling and stopped getting the DVDs from Netflix the first time Lorelei made a romantic choice that mixed stupid with cruel. For me, the problem was that the new characters never managed to be anything other than Substitute Susanne and Substitute Charlene.

Generally, the thing to know about Men's Rights Activists is that they mistake misogyny's effects on men as misandry. I used to listen to that crap when I was a teen, but I eventually came to realize that a lot of their complaints (things like family courts having a bias for giving custody to mothers, erasure of male rape or domestic violence victims) are a result of the same fucked-up views on gender. There' s also the screaming of "double standards" that ignore male privilege and societal context. For example, it's pretty common to see those guys show up where men are gazed sexually to scream about double standards. One recent MRA complaint I've run into is that Orphan Black is misandrist because it played Alison torturing her husband for laughs and you couldn't do the opposite. Oh, and doofus husband characters in sitcoms are far more damaging than those doofus husbands having a wife that's prettier, smarter, more competent and patient enough to deal with his bullshit because he remembers to do something sweet by the end of the episode.

I was thrilled to see Chris take on the "debunking" of the 74 school shooting stat. I heard some guy on The Blaze dispute that number and all I could get out of him before I tuned out was that the number was from a gun safety group so it couldn't be right. And again, much like when Politifact went after Martina Navratilova (discussed in the TRMS thread), we have a case of privileged fact checkers setting a high bar for which victims actually matter.

I know breakfast isn't exclusively savory and I like sweet breakfast items. But there's an IHoP commercial featuring pancakes that look like they have half a can of pie filling dumped on them. I get especially grumpy when on "customer" -- amid a bunch of 'These are soooo good' comments -- reacts to a pancake with "cannoli cream" and says "I don't know what cannoli is but it's good!" I always want to snap "It's a dessert not a breakfast topping." I don't know where the line is for me from danish to offensively-sweet but there's something about how ridicuously sweet everything looks in that ad that makes me grumpy.

Honestly, this doesn't sound much different from Totally Biased. Bell was the host but the show included the PoV of different underrepresented groups. It even dealt with intersectionality. I'm hoping the template is based on Totally Biased, I haven't heard anything to discourage that. The panel is a change but not a major one.

Her story is actually more complicated. The video she took in that bar conflicts with the story she keeps telling the media and, most damning, she had neighbors take out a restraining order against her a couple years ago because they caught her trying to use her cameraphone to spy on them. That's exactly the kind of person you want as a Google Glass advocate, someone who has already used a portable recording device to commit an invasion of privacy.

I've read about it before, the guy seemed odd in those articles. He really seems to take no pleasure in eating and finds it to be a needless hassle. From what I've read, nutritionists aren't sure about Soylent as a long-term food replacement, saying diets should have a variety of different foods to make sure we get various micronutrients. It's okay in the short term, but in the longer run we're supposed to have a more varied diet. Then again, some people who don't drink soylent have a diet lacking in variety, too.

My husband was yelling at the TV during the VA technology segment. Sure, it's funny to laugh at old tech but my husband wanted to hear Jon, at the least, turn that into a call for Congress to buy the VA modern computer systems... or, at least, connect it to his jokes about how ineffective the VA's systems are. Still shaking my head at the reporter who had to explain that a chili pepper meant hot as in good looking. Are news audiences that out of touch they need to have the definition of hot explained to them? Also shaking my head at Brat being deemed hot, he looks like the dad of a recurring friend in an 80s family sitcom.

There's something about Susan Park's role on Fargo that I found really powerful. Her character is pretty minor but there was something about seeing an Asian woman in a setting largely associated with a white population and speaking with a distinct American regional dialect that felt pretty boundary-challenging. It might be a small step but I appreciate that Fargo hasn't translated a mostly-white population into an all-white cast, for once. Actually, overall, how often do PoC actors get to play a role that calls for dialect that isn't a stereotype?

I'm trying to figure out what about Josh Barro looks a little different. Just a little.

Thanks. I still have a place in my heart for Wonderfalls and Jaye's wax lion. Martina Navratilova went on the Sunday morning talk shows to campaign for ENDA, saying that in 29 states a LGBT person can be fired for being gay. Politifact called that half true because some companies in those 29 states have anti-discrimination policies and some cities have a non-discrimination policy. That honestly struck me as saying that there's no discrimination, LGBT people who want to have protection should just find the right job.

Speaking of digging in, I loved seeing Rachel go after Politifact again. It's ridiculous the lengths that site will go to overlook context and miss the point. I'm not sure what they said this time and part of me is hesitant to look and give them traffic for the usual terrible behavior. And the Martina Navratilova thing really pissed me off when it happened, it basically amounted to victim blaming.

Disrupt with Karen Finney has been cancelled. I liked it when I watched, but it was like a weekday show. After the Up/MHP combo, I'm in the mood for something with more depth on the weekend.

Yep. He was on Totally Biased. Before that he was part of the X-Play team and then on Chelsea Lately.

Lexus does that kind of ad every year around the holidays... except a couple years ago they got really obnoxious and did a series of ads about people who surprise their loved ones by presenting them with a decoy gift. The one I remember was a music box and when the recipient opens it, the music box plays the Lexus jingle... at which point the recipient makes a thrilled "You got me a Lexus!" face. It's annoying enough to suggest giving a car as a gift (I knew a guy who did that once, unfortunately he wanted to surprise his wife at work and driving a car with a bow on top is very difficult) but to have people 1) know the Lexus jingle outside of watching TV ads 2) respond to hearing that jingle by thinking they must be getting a Lexus. I can understand being walked to a car with a ribbon and thinking it's your present, but you've got to be pretty entitled to think someone is giving you a luxury car because you got a gift that plays that car's jingle. Even worse, I think there was one ad where the couple is in an elevator and the muzak turns into that jingle, presuming that something in a public place like that is about you. This is the time of the year when I really appreciate my DVR. I record the morning hews just so that I can skip the commercials. Sure, I have to remind myself that when they say they're "live" at a location that was a half-hour ago but I love not seeing stupid political ads. We probably shouldn't talk politics in this forum, but if we could, I would have a lot to say about him. Having once worked in the back office for a food service chain, you don't have to get into politics to discuss why that guy is an asshat.

At the time, I thought Marco was a pretty well-done character. His stories weren't about all gay issues and he wasn't limited to being a fun sidekick to the straight characters. Today he might feel more like a character defined by his sexuality but he was an amazingly forward-thinking character at the time... at least until the show couldn't figure out what to do when its popular characters graduated.

You might need to be gay to hear it but there's a new kind of Bayer aspirin called Bayer Back & Body... except it sounds like "bareback" like having unprotected sex.

I would expect so. The show jokes about high end products with a "isn't it funny how far we'll go to guarantee quality?" tone.

I heard that Hollyoaks did a good job with bisexual characters in the past but the recent episodes on Hulu has a characters that feels like a biphobic stereotype. Danny is married to a woman but he keeps having affairs with men. He strikes me as the stereotype of bisexual people as not being happy unless they're having sex with people of both genders and are unable to be monogamous.

I thought this was overall a powerful reminder of the indifference and fear the AIDS crisis inspired. There were people who suggested that maybe if this disease was only affecting undesirable people, we should just let it take its course. Those people did not lose their respectability for saying such horrible things. As for Ruffalo's performance, I liked it though I did think he came off as too likable for a character that has a lot in common with Larry Kramer. (I saw a community theatre performance of The Normal Heart and when I saw an interview with Kramer I was amazed at how much more grating the real person was. He's really challenging to watch.) I thought his ostracization made sense in the movie, but it was less about how abrasive he was but because he was so impulsive and terrible at stopping to think about how his actions might hurt his friends and colleagues. It depended more on Ned's actions (the story) explaining why he was kicked out of GMHC but Ned's actions made sense under Ruffalo's performance.

Overall, I loved the Net Neutrality piece but one part that impressed me was that John took a swipe at hippie-punching. Jon Stewart had an annoying tendency to want to punch hippies and I loved hearing John basically say, 'Fuck off if you don't care about this issue because you think the people who already care are annoying."