Thursday 26 August 2021

If There Were Another 'Office' Show

 I've noted a lot of chatter over the past six months of this idea of something 'like' THE OFFICE being re-introduced.  Same people?  Well...no.  The idea is the production team would be brought back.

So these are my seven ideas for the new show.....if it were to be brought back into some new reality:

1.  Close the door on the paper industry, and make this a small strip mall (five shops in some small mall facility).  One steel building, and a parking lot with lamps that continually blink.  The building was originally a Dunder-Miffin paper store which went out of business, was remodeled by a Lebanese millionaire who married a former 'Bay of Thunder' TV show blonde gal. 

2.  Introduce in episode one a mall-cop, and at the end of the season....admit the fact that the mall management never hired a mall-cop, and this guy is an escapee from a mental institute...who sleeps in the maintenance back-closet.

3.  Allow one of the shops to be a zero-profit business, and admit it's more of a money-laundering operation than a legit business.

4.  Have four retirees to have rotating episodes where they make trouble for the mall.

5.  Allow one of the shops to fail every four episodes and a new business to arrive and fail four episodes later as well....over and over.

6.  Allow the coffee shop to be run by cannabis enthusiasts who secretly sell their product under special names.

7.  Act as if the whole thing is a reality show.  

News Topic

 I sat and read through a piece on Newsbusters today.

Topic.....when news is NOT news.

The Media Research Center went reviewed the top three cable news networks.  

What they found in the end....around a quarter of what you see on the air...would be simple old-fashioned regular news.  By that, I mean a regular story with five or six facts, and just a plain outline of the event.  

The rest?  Non-news.  It could be speculation, slanted news, biased opinion, or some moderator leading four folks to say 'something'.

Fox does it.  MSNBC does it.  BBC does it.  NBC, ABC and CBS do it.  PBS does it. 

For about twenty years, I've hyped on this issue...that news isn't really news anymore.  

It reached a point last year with CNN...where you got basically four minutes of news per hour, and the rest was talk-show format, biased slant, or taking four facts into a 30-minute long drawn out discussion.  

One of these networks will eventually wake up and realize they are losing viewers, and invent some new format....where they invent the term 'real news' and limit themselves to only 15-minutes of news per hour.  

Ten Observations Over Afghanistan

 1.  If you watch a good bit of footage, seems to be an awful lot of people walking around without a mask, in a Covid-rich atmosphere (I'd say 1-percent of folks appear to wear a mask).  These Taliban 'bosses'?  They are all over the age of fifty and prime-candidates for Covid (religious ideas forbid use of vaccination).  If you ask me....there's serious Covid times about to arrive on the landscape. 

2.  Once Biden's crew leave the airport, if you add up Americans and Europeans....I'll bet a minimum of 5,000 never get a 'rescue-deal'.  It'll be curious if the Taliban agree to regular airline use and allow them to leave.  Some idiot with the History Channel will probably start a reality series entitled 'Stuck in Kabul'.  

3.  Unlike the 1990s when the Taliban took over after the Soviets left.....there's a fair bit of Taliban propaganda that is generated daily by use of Twitter/Facebook in Afghanistan.  The general question I'd ask....who 'friended' up with Taliban on social media? What happens if you 'unfriend' them?

4.  Chatter started up yesterday that among the several thousand 'rescued' Afghans who were airlifted out....that a minimum of a hundred of them are on some watch list (either via the EU or the US).  You typically don't get on a watch-list for selling fake watches, or running a unhealthy grill establishment.  All of this leading to another catastrophic event in six months?

5.  White House Press Spokesman (Psaki) said that she just wasn't sure if the escaping Afghan President did arrive in Dubai with $169-million in cash.  It'd be more impressive if the guy had eight Hunter Biden oil paintings in his possession....that might be worth more at this stage.  

6.  If you opened up the doorway.....just to go anywhere (even Turkey)....out of the 39-million Afghans, I would suggest that a quarter of the population would just opt to leave the country.  In a economically downward spiral that you have in Afghanistan, maybe the Taliban ought to 'help' them leave.  Whatever economic progress they made over 20 years....it's not going to be much to discuss over the next twelve months.  The Taliban don't have any Harvard business degree members.

7.  At the conclusion of yesterday's WH press conference....some NBC reporter threw a question out there....as Biden was leaving....that triggered him to halt and attempt to answer (in a laughing sort of way).  WH technicians killed the mic system and so you never got the comment.  It's reaching the point where it'd be better on these WH Q-and-A episodes that they should just hire some actor to read what Biden would have said.  

8.  Taliban spokesperson said yesterday that there is NO proof that Ossama bin Laden was ever connected to 9-11.  I would imagine that the WH team will be impressed with this Taliban spokesperson and ask if he were interested in a new job (with them).

9.  In the midst of evacuation efforts yesterday....the Brit cargo plane took out some Afghans and Brits, but the last thing loaded on the plane was a Brit embassy SUV.  Naturally, this irked a ton of Brits.  

10.  If you believe the general propaganda of the Taliban.....they believe that they deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for 'saving' Afghanistan.  Somewhere in the nomination process....there's probably one single idiot who will nominate them.