S04.E28: National Flood Insurance Program

[Athena]

 

Quote

Other segments: Opioid epidemic, Roy Moore, Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey

 

Edited October 30, 2017 by Athena

[netlyon2]

[Annber03]

Interesting main segment tonight. Rather appropriate timing, too, considering the heavy rain the northeastern U.S. is getting right now. 

One other issue regarding the "just move" suggestion for coastal residents that wasn't brought up: even if people were to move away from the coast, I honestly don't know that there are many other places they could go in the U.S. where they wouldn't be at risk of getting flooded. I live in Iowa, and we can get some pretty nasty floods here, too, simply because we've got so many small rivers running through the state (and we also have the Missouri and Mississippi rivers to deal with as well). As can many other areas in the middle of the country. And mountain areas can flood sometimes, too, because of the runoff from the mountains themselves. 

There's also the fact that some homes and buildings weren't built to properly withstand flood waters, too. Better building quality wouldn't solve the problem completely, no, but it would obviously go a long way towards helping make the recovery and cleanup a little less expensive. 

As for other topics, okay, I need to nurse my ears after the Meat Loaf stuff, because what in the hell was THAT? And the gay marriage thing in Australia. Wow. Hearing the anti arguments was just...wow ("garage"???). Here's hoping the pro-gay marriage side wins out in the end. Also, Oliver's version of the Frost poem as he mocked Roy Moore was hysterical. Speaking of people I want to see lose....

Next week's episode could be quite fun, depending on how these latest developments in the Mueller investigation play out.

[Lantern7]

"Hey, guys! You know that bit we did with John and the creepy American Girl doll? What if we tied it directly into the main story?" And it worked. Loved John having to deal with the needy seagull throughout the episode.

Holy crap. How long has Meat Loaf sounded like that? He's not well, is he?

[dcalley]

1 hour ago, Annber03 said:

And the gay marriage thing in Australia. Wow. Hearing the anti arguments was just...wow ("garage"???). Here's hoping the pro-gay marriage side wins out in the end.

Gay+marriage=garriage, I think, though it did sound like how some people say garage.

[Annber03]

Ohhhhhh, okay, my mistake, then :p. Yeah, 'cause I was sitting here like, "The hell does a garage have to do with gay marriage?" LOL. 

[attica]

8 hours ago, Lantern7 said:

How long has Meat Loaf sounded like that?

You live by the ProTools, you die by the ProTools!  I was interested in how the girl singer in the first clip managed to avoid 1) laughing; 2) barfing at that monstrosity. Maybe she had her own earpieces on noise-cancel mode. Still: admirably stoic.

[peeayebee]

I was covering my eyes in embarrassment for Meat Loaf. Both times. And poor Mitt Romney. All he could do was laughing like, "Well, THIS guy is having a good time." Or maybe more like, "This is my special cousin. He so enjoys himself."

Good show. The segment on flood insurance was very informative. There are multiple issues here: 

1. It isn't right that insurance companies are making huge profits. Am I understanding this right: They sell policies (with a kick-in from the govt) but they don't pay out?
2. The govt paying for people to rebuild their houses flood after flood is stupid.
3. The govt needs to streamline and speed-up the process of buying people's houses (and then razing them to create sensible flood zones). 
4. There has to be a different process for insuring second homes.

I read that Houston actually planned for their highways to channel flood waters. Submerged semis on the freeways are just part of the process.

Loved the bit with the seagull. I cracked up every time John said, "No Tostitos! No Tostitos!"

Repubs responses to Roy Moore were sickening but, geez, the norm. They really need to be pressed on what the line is, though I'm not sure what good that would do.

dcalley, thanks for the clarification about "garriage." I had no idea what that woman was talking about. Even when John said two Gary's getting married were garried, it didn't click with me what that meant.

I liked John's shirt.

Edited October 30, 2017 by peeayebee

[purist]

That performance by Meat Loaf at the football final a few years ago has passed into infamy here in Australia. Every year it's brought up as the worst thing ever to happen at possibly our biggest annual sporting event. (Here is a newspaper article from this year, for example.)

Macklemore and Mary Lambert's performance of 'Same Love' at the National Rugby league final this year in Sydney was actually an amazing moment in Australian history. For the governing body of a sport known for being extremely 'macho' to invite a world-famous act to sing such a pointedly political song during the Postal Survey period (which, as John so ably pointed out, has been extremely divisive and painful for members of the LGBTIQ communities and their friends and families) was incredible, and very moving.

'John Oliver' was trending on Twitter in Australia earlier tonight.

[attica]

50 minutes ago, peeayebee said:

I cracked up every time John said, "No Tostitos! No Tostitos!"

Part of the charm is the accent., wherein it's Toss-teetos instead of Toez-teetos.

[dcalley]

I'm not always a fan of the repetition John uses, but I could have watched his Aussie "you cycle, you fuck" for a long time.

[Victor the Crab]

Hey Tucker "Dick" Carlson. We Canadians DO have something against you. Given your past intellectual sparring matches, as Foghorn Leghorn would say, you're about as sharp as a bowling ball.

Good God, Meat Loaf. You think maybe his appearance on Celebrity Apprentice fucked him up in ways unimaginable?

Loved Ollie fighting with the seagull. Anybody who's ever dealt with these winged rats knows they're noisy scavangers.

[mojoween]

See the problem isn’t so much that one seagull will follow you for the rest of your life, it’s that if you give one seagull a chip, he’ll call 600 of his friends.

However, the seagull at the end throwing up all of the chips cracked us up.

The Aussie guy who said he didn’t need marriage made me curious.  We need marriage equality here because we need loved ones to be allowed to have rights in the cases of illnesses and deaths.  Is that not a problem in Australia?

[Lantern7]

Anybody flash back to "Follow That Egg!" from South Park? That was the one about the legality of gay unions, and the governor of Colorado (not based on the real one, I imagine) offered a solution similar to "garraige." I would use the phrase, but I'm not comfortable posting it here.

[Hanahope]

What I don’t understand is that if the government is rebuilding that assholes house, why are people in Nee Jersey still bitching about Sandy damage?

[Corgi-ears]

4 hours ago, mojoween said:

The Aussie guy who said he didn’t need marriage made me curious.  We need marriage equality here because we need loved ones to be allowed to have rights in the cases of illnesses and deaths.  Is that not a problem in Australia?

See, I thought John was pretty sloppy during that segment, and went for easy shots and jokes. Some people oppose same-sex marriage because they're homophobic bigots, and there are people who do so because they take marriage to be heteronormative, to represent the mainstreaming and assimilation of life- and sexual styles that should be disruptive and destabilizing, etc. I had no clue which camp that gay male couple fell into (if they did at all), and John didn't seem interested in explaining or introducing some nuance into the issue. Disappointingly, he just settled for jokes about how one half of the couple deserved better. 

[purist]

Exactly, @Corgi-ears. I'm pretty sure that couple just don't believe in marriage as an institution.

[gatopretoNYC]

I think the thing was, one of the guys in the couple did want to get married, and the other didn't.

 

I laughed my ass off at the ongoing seagull bit.

[attica]

8 hours ago, Corgi-ears said:

I had no clue which camp that gay male couple fell into (if they did at all),

My take was that the bald guy just didn't want to get married; that cohabitating was just fine by him. Which is a sentiment more and more heterosexual couples have, if you look at statistics. I could be wrong, since that is my own personal confirmation bias, but that's how I read that bit. And yeah, if the dark-haired guy wants to be married, he def needs to split with bald guy and find someone better.

(aaannnd now I've got the "Worst that Could Happen" earworm. Damn. )

[biakbiak]

15 hours ago, gatopretoNYC said:

I think the thing was, one of the guys in the couple did want to get married, and the other didn't.

 

That's what I took from it, he just awkwardly phrased it that he used to be for same sex marriage and had proposed but bald dude said no. Bald dude clearly stated he would be happy for other gay people if they got married.

[ProudMary]

Can I just say that, political topics aside, this was one of the overall funniest episodes of the season.  I hadn't laughed that hard in a long time!