Saturday 4 August 2018

Dan

I sat and read a piece today that brought up Dan Rather's name.  I sat and pondered upon this.

To be honest....if you are over the age of fifty.....you probably know Dan.  If you are between 40 and 50.....you've seen Dan somewhat and at least know that he was once a journalist for one of the networks (but you can cite which one).

So then you come to the crowd who are between 16 and 40 years old.  You can quiz ten-thousand of them, and likely only ten folks know of Dan. 

It amazes me in some ways that journalists want to continue to bring Dan up...citing his quotes or hyping his wisdom.  Some of the younger folks think that Dan is some ex-Senator, or a former Commissioner of the NFL.  A handful might suspect that Dan was the US ambassador to Singapore for a couple of years.

Is it really necessary to cite Dan's opinion?  I've come to the point where Dan's analysis is about as important as some local barber or a Texas rancher.  Not that I want to hurt Dan's feelings but his day has come and gone.

My Brief Note on the Handmaid's Tale

I sat this week and watched one single episode of the Handmaid's Tale (series).  My observations:

1.  If you went and took '1984', 'Planet of the Apes', 'Logans Run', and 'Clash of the Eagles', and just blended them all into one....then hyped it with lusty stuff, women bickering, and society on the verge of.....well, more or less, nothing, then you'd have the basic story.

2.  The story seems to revolve around some big chaos where Washington DC got killed off, and people were suddenly whipped into some fake religious frenzy.

3.  Oddly, women are told not read or get smart....that guys can handle all that smart stuff.

4.  Women seem to be there mostly for domestic purposes, but about half of them have figured out some way to get other women to do the domestic work.

5.  The production guys seem to hype on some science fiction theme but on my scale of science fiction....it's about a '2' on a scale of 1 to 10.

6.  Jezebels seem popular.  The problem I see is that 90-percent of the public can't give you a simple 10-word explanation for what a Jezebel is.  My description is a loser-woman who has married up with up and coming lawyer guy who will become governor and president one day, and she has no other real talents in life other than being the wife of the guy.

7.  A whole lot of losers in the background who don't seem to be nothing more than 'snowflakes' and waiting on some Rambo-like character to arrive and solve things.

8.  Just on personal interpretation, it's kinda like an afternoon soap opera, except there's a lot of religious talk.

9.  By the end of the 45-odd minutes, I tried to imagine a reason to watch another episode, and finally just said 'no'.....it seemed to be developed on some intellectual level and wanted to convince me of a moral story in progress, with a bit of science fiction.

10.  People seem to desire to escape off to Canada, for whatever reason.  I never did get the understanding of this....why Canada was better except they didn't have all this religious stuff (maybe).  I had this image of snow, guys drinking beer, bacon, and ice hockey as they discussed the reasons to make way to Canada.

Not to insult anyone, but it'd be a lot easier to accept if you had two or three Zombies appear each day on the show, or if this were some cowboy western epic theme with the same characters.

What Is Putin's Secret Plan?

After a fair amount of pondering, I've come to five points:

1.  He wants to build a wall on the US border.

2.  He wants Americans working, as much as possible, and apparently paying state/federal taxes.

3.  He wants to destroy CNN.

4.  He wants to introduce a national ID required for voting, and apparently eliminate double-voters and dead-voters from the poll listings.

5.  He wants 'unbridled optimism' to exist again in the US.