How Big Government Ruined Parks and RecreationClickbait for sure, among a certain population! Spencer Klavan (Jesus, Andrew has a brother? I weep for the Republic) complains at PJ Media that the show "has devolved from incisive comedy into aggressively unfunny propaganda." See, once it was about "the morass of self-importance and illogic that results when people get together to plan other people’s lives for them" -- that's conservative for "small-town government," folks -- but then "the writers replaced it with a dogmatic fantasy world based on the unexamined conviction that everyone needs a hyper-attentive government mommy. That’s when Leslie Knope became a hero, and Parks and Rec became about as entertaining as a health code referendum."
Wow, so they beefed up the role of the star? And a cynical supporting character became more cuddly? Just like in nearly every sitcom that lasts more than three seasons? What a bunch of statists!
But courage, kulturkampfers -- it's not all liberal fascism on the TV; here's a show that Matthew Rousu of The Federalist says teaches a conservatarian message:
What TV’s ‘Suits’ Tells Us About The Job Market
...Ross and Spector form a great team. They trade witty rejoinders and provide incredible service for their clients. But in the United States, for the most part, it is illegal to practice law without passing the bar exam. That Ross is practicing law illegally — and what he must do to avoid being discovered – provides part of the show’s drama. While I find the show entertaining, it troubles me because these types of situations happen in real life. There are people who would be good at a job, but restrictions make it illegal for them to work...Yes, it's the old licensing-restriction rap, with which max-freedom fans sometimes get liberals to agree five minutes before they call them hypocrites for thinking polluters can't regulate themselves. Mentioned in essay: Uber. Not mentioned: State medical boards.
Meanwhile at Acculturated, Erin Vargo:
Drugs are ruining EDM...Which is like saying sugar is ruining cake, but go on:
...and not only as a matter of individual health and safety (a sobering topic in and of itself). Drugs at EDM festivals ensure that Calvin Harris is virtually indistinguishable from a remix DJ at a wedding party.[pause, suppressing laughter]
Sure, he showed everyone a good time, but the event wasn’t really about him or his skills and talents and creative capacity.[pause, stabbing myself in the thigh with a pen] For our reductio ad wingnut let's go to The Federalist's Rachel Lu:
Is it possible that Clueless Dad (that tired old television trope) is going into decline? He’s long since outworn his welcome. And General Mills seems to have gotten the message.
Their new commercial for Peanut Butter Cheerios...For some reason I'm reminded of the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man, though it's not so much the "closing of a gigantic circle" as a disappearance up one's own asshole.
For our reductio ad wingnut let's go to The Federalist's Rachel Lu:
ReplyDeleteOh, no. No you don't.
I don't care how enticing you make it sound. I'm not going into the mango forest.
See, once it was about "the morass of self-importance and illogic that
ReplyDeleteresults when people get together to plan other people’s lives for them"
No, it wasn't. From the beginning it was openly about how one cheerfully public-spirited public employee fought entrenched bureaucracy and low expectations to improve people's lives, even when it was a thankless task. The Season 1 DVD box even expressly mentions "the Obama era."
What Klavan is describing sounds more like a fan-fic show he scrawled: "Ron Swanson's One Right Way." The sweeps episode has Ron going on "Red Eye" and ranting for 45 minutes about takers and parasites.
Shit, I got out of the boat. Rachel Lu:
ReplyDeleteConservatives have a natural antipathy towards propping up things that don’t work.
Yeah, like a crumbling infrastructure.
The principal attraction of "Suits" to me is that it is comprised of supposedly very smart high-rollers who nevertheless manage to get themselves--out of either hubris, an overweening desire for vengeance over slights, or stupidity, or expediency, or all four--into some of the most godawful messes imaginable and the fun is in how they're going to extract themselves with the minimum of damage, which invariably leads to yet more stupidity--and more messes.
ReplyDeleteSo, yup, it's about conservatives, alright.
You know what would fix all that stuff? Tax cuts.
ReplyDeleteHey, that's why conservatives are clamoring to get us all the way out of Iraq.
ReplyDeleteBoy, it takes a couple of big brass clangers to make a statement like that, since that's just about all they do. As one example alone, we had to listen to interminable lies about how well things were going in Iraq, even as sundry civilians, soldiers and insurgents were regularly being blown into oblivion.
ReplyDeleteWe've been having to listen for three decades to how well trickle-on economics has worked and, boy, that banking deregulation went swell and, gee, any day now, if we just keep cutting taxes, revenues will exceed cuts, etc., etc., etc.
These fuckers excel at defending the indefensible.
Conservatives have a natural antipathy towards propping up things that don’t work.In unrelated news, when's the next NRO fundraiser?
ReplyDelete"the morass of self-importance and illogic that
ReplyDeleteresults when people get together to plan other people’s lives for them"
"My Big Conservative Daddy" now with more drug tests and vaginal wanding!
Glibertarian--someone who, as an example of how the free market is the solution to all problems foreign and domestic, writes 2,200 words supposedly about Peanut Butter Cheerio Clueless Dads and expects General Mills to pay them for it.
ReplyDeleteToo much to choose just one...Fine, four shorters, each under ten words for your snark on the go.
ReplyDeleteSpencer Klavan: The Parks Department Is The Gestapo Of Liberal Fascism
Matthew Rousu: Fictional Television Show Proves That Unlicensed Surgeons Are OK
Erin Vargo: Repetitive Music And Flashing Colored Lights Ruined By Ecstacy
Rachel Lu: TV Archetype Popular Ten Years Ago Still Sucks
"There are people who would be good at a job, but restrictions make it illegal for them to work..."Yeah, Matt, I feel the plight of undocumented immigrants, too.
ReplyDeleteMentioned in essay: Uber.
Indeed, techies with smartphones would be good at the job of destroying the livelihoods of those who drive others around for money, yet that sort of thing used to be illegal, if you can believe it.
Calvin Harris is virtually indistinguishable from a remix DJUm ... I'm just going to stop there.
For the life of me, I've never understood why libertarians are so fixated on Uber. It just seems like another toy to make hipsters grin while you clip them. Then again, it could always be worse - a few days ago, I say a glibertarian argue that Angie's List means that the civil court system is unnecessary.
ReplyDeleteMentioned in essay: Uber. Not mentioned: State medical boards.
ReplyDeletePaging Dr. Rand Paul! Dr. Rand Paul to the discourtesy phone, please!
"Yeah man! The government has no business demanding licenses for people to practice law, or be hair dressers, or like, anything, man!"
I invite all glibertarians who hold this view to climb aboard my new airline that has only unlicensed flight crews. No worries--each and every pilot has spent hours on MS Flight Simulator, which is good enough, right?
While you wait for your flight, enjoy a sandwich at the Camplobacter Café, located right in the terminal.
And I love how he thought the first season was the best and it was all down hill from there. Fans of the show and critics all seem to believe that the show didn't hit its stride until S2. Also, the show has never had strong ratings so I don't think the slide into socialism is the reason for its cancellation.
ReplyDeleteD'ya get the idea that there's an awful lot of libertarian slackers out there whining, "shit, I could do that," and thinking that they've been shut out of the big money leagues by intrusive government?
ReplyDeleteAnd that it's probably a very good thing to keep them away from all rotating machinery and sharp things like scalpels?
That one's a classic. "The only thing better than building a society on nothing but contracts and property rights is building a society on nothing but contracts and property rights that *can't be enforced*."
ReplyDelete"Shit, I could do that" is the rallying cry of the uneducated. When you watch someone who has really mastered their craft--be it music, flying an airplane, or performing surgery--they make it look so very easy. That ease comes from years of study, practice, passion, and a yearning to excel.
ReplyDeleteThe morons look at that ease and say, "Let me try! I could do that!"
Drugs are ruining EDM...
ReplyDeleteThe agony of the Ecstasy...
. . .like crumbling infrastructure.
ReplyDeleteThose falling bridges and leaking tunnels are features, not bugs. From the Guide to Conservative Governance, p. 27:
1.) Underfund or de-fund infrastructure maintenance.
2.) Whenever possible, reducing funding for infrastructure maintenance.
3.) When bridge collapses from lack of maintenance, point to said collapse as example of how government does not work.
4.) Pour tax dollars into repair/replacement of collapsed bridge.
5.) Pass legislation that gives bridge and toll rights to private entity while indemnifying said entity against any future maintenance expenses.
Ain't no amount of drugs in the world that would make Skrillex sound good to me. But that's just me.
ReplyDeleteAnd after the bad thing happens to you (crash, food-borne disease, whatever), you can hire my brother-in-law as your lawyer.
ReplyDeleteNo lawyers needed; we have Angie's List.
No, it isn't...
ReplyDeleteBack in the early years of the internet, an aeronautics professor created a bogus Web site about collegiate blimp competitions. The site reported on intramural competition results, and was highly detailed and extensive.
ReplyDeleteHe made the site just to see how many of his students would stumble on it and include it in their papers regarding lighter-than-air vehicles. Even back then (1997 or so), he had a worryingly large portion of every class that handed in papers listing the site as a reference and discussing blimp competitions as one modern example of how LTA vehicles are being used.
Wait, that site was bogus? No wonder those bets never paid off.
ReplyDeleteThere are people who would be good at a job, but restrictions make it illegal for them to work.
ReplyDeleteLike trained doctors who want to provide abortions?
And Yelp!
ReplyDeleteSure, you lost a leg due to ignorance, negligence, and incompetence. But writing a scathing review will make you whole.
Or, put another way...
ReplyDeleteThere are people who would be good completely incompetent at a job, but and restrictions make it illegal for them to work...
Hooray for laws informed by centuries of experience!
The burn from this comment will radiate out into the universe for eons to come.
ReplyDeleteDerelict's comment: NO STARS. He said writing a bad review would, AND I QUOTE, "make me whole" after my recent surgical mishap and yet STILL NO LEG.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately for them we removed all regulations for maximum poop levels in soup. OOPSIE.
ReplyDeleteAbstinence only infrastructure funding.
ReplyDeleteLook, once people find out who's been crapping the soup, they'll stop buying from those companies and the problem will fix itself. What's that? There's no way to tell? Well, the market will come up with a solution. And if not, rest assured that it's statistically unlikely that you or anyone you know will contract a cryptosporidium infection.
ReplyDeleteSo the sound of the feedback from a scratched electronic CD glitching out doesn't appeal to you?
ReplyDelete...Yeah, me neither.
Incisive conservative literary criticism: "The show used to be about [dogma I like], but now it's all about [dogma I don't like]."
ReplyDeleteNot only is the assertion wrong on its face (I highly doubt there are many TV shows as fanatically obsessed with dogma as Atlas Shrugged), it misses the entire aspect of entertainment being there to, you know, entertain. When Horace said the purpose of art was to Instruct and Delight, you'll notice he didn't leave out the "delight" part, and by "instruct" he didn't mean "beat your audience over the head with a blunt object because that's entertainment."
So basically this is a gussied-up argument saying nothing more than "I used to kinda like this show, but now I don't anymore." Wow. Somebody get Thorstein Veblen on the horn. We got ourselves a culture war, fellas.
Why all the hysteria over Listeria?
ReplyDeleteI can't wait for Erin Vargo's essay about money shots ruining porn.
ReplyDeleteDon't you mean mangrove forest?
ReplyDeleteAnd for all their bleating about the magic of the market, they always scream "Liberal bias!!!!" whenever the conservative [show/movie/art project] tanks. And they're equally ready to say "Fuck the market" if they <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/d-souza-movie-florida-students>can use the power of the state to make people watch a movie.</a>
ReplyDeleteNever mind the nonsensical assertion. The people who first started dancing their brains out to EDM are now old enough that they can watch their kids dance their brains out to EDM. Trust a conservative to miss a two-decade gap...
ReplyDeleteGot out of the boat looking for mangoes Molly in that Erin Vargo essay... she's blathering on about the recent popularity of EDM. Was the continual blaring of Gary Numan's "Cars" on the radio just a childhood delusion, like waiting for the Tooth Fairy to hand over dinero for dentine?
ReplyDeleteRachel Lu: TV Archetype Popular Ten Years Ago Still Sucks
ReplyDeleteThis goes back a lot further than 10 years. How's about to the dawn of TV? (And even further if you just want to look at plays.) A little Father Knows Best or Danny Thomas goes a long way.
Look, Rachel--there's a reason why this trope continues to be used: It works. People LOVE this thing, and shows based on it get lots of viewers, which means lots of advertisers, which means everyone gets rich. And isn't THAT what conservatives are all about?
Isn't the right intro "Hey, guys, how's it hangin'?"
ReplyDeleteWhat happened to Duck Dynasty? Didn't it whet people's taste for Conservative Daddy-Knows-Best?
ReplyDeleteLook: the very definition of Conservative from Burke on up is "people who like to prop things up so they stay the same--regardless of whether they work or not." Conservatives are against progress, exterminating kings, and every form of social change or engineering. They prefer the status quo. That is their whole slogan and raison d'être. Have they been so shy about it that Rachel Lu thinks that Conservative is another word for technocrat?
ReplyDeleteOh mee-ow!.
ReplyDeleteJust as surely excessive exposure to radiation bestows superpowers, so too will the melamine in your Enfamil enhance your immunity.
ReplyDeleteI hate how much I enjoy Suits. It works as a show because they pile Pelion on Ossa really, really, fast in each show and so you can't predict at the start just which way our crack team of assholes will fuck up each other's plans and counter plans within the next forty minutes. But they are (with the exception of Mike) universally amoral and pretty fucking stupidly arrogant and incompetently manipulative when just behaving like human beings or honestly communicating would probably solve most of their problems. Actually: that is one thing I like about the show. Jessica and Harvey are just awful as managers--awful--but they still have a lot of power and sexy success and I feel that its own way that is somewhat honest about how shitty human beings rise to the top in this world.
ReplyDeleteBut in both Father knows Best and Danny Thomas the father wasn't stupid or weak (although DT was a bit overexcitable).
ReplyDeleteSo--and correct me if I'm wrong--conservatism has eroded and degraded to the point where, while it used to be about standing athwart History and yelling "Stop!," now it's about bitching and moaning about every goddamn thing and feeling heroic about it.
ReplyDeleteI'd say more like "manchineel forest".
ReplyDelete"Conservative" means technocrat because liberals are (according to them) all wishy-washy Luddites and hippies, so therefore they are the opposite. Q.E.Derp.
ReplyDeleteIt was always about bitching and moaning- the precise moment of history they wanted to "stop" was the moment in which African-Americans and women started making genuine strides towards equality (not that that work is done, by a longshot).
ReplyDeleteLet's be blunt - when the wankers at places like Acculturated complain about "dumb dad," they're thinking about the crop of sitcoms that resulted from the inexplicable popularity of Everybody Loves Raymond.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure everyone here knows how television programming works - 90% of the shows on air at any given time are variants on classic show types that cycle in and out of popularity. Raymond brought back the family sitcom after Seinfeld replaced it in the 90's, then family sitcoms went out of fashion (along with multi-cam shows in general) in the early 2000s and medical and police dramas came in. Yet the social war idiots never stopped complaining, not for a second in the last decade when that archetype was almost nonexistent. Hell, the closest you can get now is Modern Family derived shows, but the point of those is that everyone's dumb.
Now they mostly complain about commercials. Criticizing advertising is valid, but when these guys do it they rarely make an argument. "Dumb dad commercials are destroying the American family" is just taken as a self-evident concept, mostly by theocons who adamantly refuse to accept that anything other than liberal social engineering is responsible for demographic shifts in this country.
They then get a certificate from Dunning-Kruger Technical Institute, and put it proudly on the basement wall.
ReplyDeleteQ.E.Derp is so very stolen by me.
ReplyDeleteStep 1) Get rid of corporate regulations, people who are harmed by a corp. can just sue like the Founder's intended. This will provide enough deterrence for them to do the right thing.
ReplyDeleteStep 2) Get rid of lawsuits against corporations.
Actually, I should amend this. There was a popular family sitcom that ran during the Seinfeld / Friends era - Home Improvement (which also fits the angry cultural warrior image a lot better than Raymond). I wonder why that one never spawned any imitators?
ReplyDeleteAnd why am I taking this so seriously?
I hestitate to question your time line but didn't Tool Time also exalt the "dumb dad" sterotype at the same time as Seinfeld? These things are always happening at the same time because you have a segmented market of people who are watching who want/or don't want to see their own lives reflected back to them.
ReplyDeleteYou basically have non family (single guy or single woman or ensemble) shows or "family with kids" shows which are always about suburban/householder problems. The crisis is always dating or hooking up vs. snowplowing/yard work/school night kinds of problems.
On the one hand you have
Mad About You
Seinfeld
Friends
Will and Grace
and on the other you have
Roseanne
Family Ties
That thing with Michael J. Fox?
Tool Time
Everybody Loves Raymond
For a brief time you had shows "about" women like the groundbreaking shows about divorced or single women none of whose names I can remember. But basically the real issue for all those shows is that they are star-comic-driven and written to the strengths and style of their leads (like Maude, ELR, Roseanne, Bonnie whatever her name was). If the comic talent lead likes to play straight man he'll play straight man, if he likes to play outrageous child fool he plays that and everyone revolves around him.
Great minds think alike--I think "Home Improvement" was the name of the real show and "Tool Time" was the name of Tim whatever his name is's fictional show.
ReplyDelete3) Get rid of people who have a problem with being poisoned or killed by unregulated carpentry and electrical work.
ReplyDeleteWho plays the role of the Democrat who has to clean up the mess?
ReplyDeleteThere is a "sexy working class mommy" who steps in to remind people of their human duties to one another.
ReplyDeleteI blame Al Bundy.
ReplyDeleteYeah, after flogging Step 1 for years, most American right-schmibertarians seem to have embraced "tort reform." Which, given that Step 1 hasn't quite been entirely accomplished, might be considered giving away the ending. Yet everybody hates lawyers, and plenty of the public are convinced that "frivolous lawsuits" are an out-of-control problem. So we might actually achieve Step 2 before Step 1. And right-schmibertarians will probably still be invoking medieval Iceland.
ReplyDeleteRalph Cramden begat Fred Flintstone. Fred Flintstone begat Al Bundy. Al Bundy begat Todd Palin.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there is one, which is why they lurch from one disaster to the next, with only brief interludes in which they congratulate themselves on their cleverness. There is one legal secretary with generally good advice, but is only listened to on intra-office interpersonal matters, and then not all that often.
ReplyDeleteI know I'm going out on a limb here, but NO STARS is a bit excessive for such a minor peccadillo. You need to think of Uber, in which case, four stars would be sufficient to get Derelict dropped from the alicurati.
ReplyDeleteAnd Moominpappa? Who begat Moominpappa? I would love to see the Moomin sitcom based on Moominpapa at Seat:
ReplyDeleteOne afternoon at the end of August, Moominpappa was walking about in his garden feeling at a loss. He had no idea what to do with himself, because it seemed everything there was to be done had already been done or was being done by somebody else.Moominpappa aimlessly puttered about in his garden, his tail dragging along the ground behind him in a melancholy way. Here, down in the Valley, the heat was scorching; everything was still and silent, and not a little dusty. It was the month when there could be great forest fires, the month for taking great care.
He had warned the family. Time and time again he had explained how necessary it was to be careful in August. He had described the burning valley, the roar of the flames, the white-hot tree trunks, and the fire creeping along the ground underneath the moss. Blinding columns of flame flung upward against the night sky! Waves of fire, rushing down the sides of the valley and on toward the sea …
“Sizzling, they throw themselves into the sea,” finished Moominpappa with gloomy satisfaction. “ Everything is black; everything has been burned up. A tremendous responsibility rests on the smallest creature who can lay his paws on matches.”
The family stopped what they were doing and said: “Yes. Of course. Yes, yes.” Then they took no more notice of him and got on with what they were doing.
They were always doing something. Quietly, without interruption, and with great concentration, they carried on with the hundred and one small things that made up their world. It was a world that was very private, and self-contained, and to which nothing could be added. Like a map where everything has been discovered, everywhere inhabited, and where there are no bare patches left any longer. And they said to each other: “He always talks about forest fires in August.”
I blame Ted Bundy, fine young Republican that he was.
ReplyDeleteAnd, as one might expect, many of the frivolous lawsuits are corporations suing each other, or suing individuals for copyright or trademark infringement. The National Trial Lawyers Association did a study of court usage during one tort reform assault, and found that sixty percent of all cases were corporations suing each other.
ReplyDeleteSo, it's actually corporations clogging up the dockets and "tort reform" is just a means of relieving corporate defendants of all those pesky personal injury and wrongful death suits, as we suspected all along.
The "dumb dad" archetype is useful in commercials because commercials are info-dumps. No normal person has a conversation about their breakfast cereals or laundry detergents. Someone in the ad has to set up the exposition. In most marriages, the wife does the shopping, it makes sense for advertisers to play up the smart wife, therefore it's inevitable that the "dad" is the one stuck setting up the ridiculous expository dialogue.
ReplyDeleteYou know one reason why some people like the idea of these things, like Uber and AirbnB is that they imagine the people who are doing them are white, like them, and struggling to stay in the middle class (like them) on the cheap without falling into the class of people who are protected by regulation and worker's rights. Because they don't identify as workers--they don't identify as taxi drivers or hotel maids--they identify as owners of cars and owners of apartments/houses. But in reality they know that their ownership of these assets is at risk because of the lousy economy so they are seeking to monetize these assets (once the sign of the value of the middle class managment type) without considering themselves to have fallen in class status.
ReplyDeleteThere is also a "daily diary of the American Dream" thing going on--that was briefly the slogan of the WSJ before they gave up pretending to appeal to impecunious but entrepreneurial immigrants--thing about it for some people. Like my father who loves Uber for some mysterious reason. I don't like it--
I mean: my great grandmother took in lodgers when her husband died and she had seven children to raise. She took in lodgers in a rented apartment. That wasn't a cool use of her assets that she preferred to have unregulated because she didn't want to think of herself as a landlady. It was sheer necessity.
Dumped from the alicurati?!?!?! Geez! I mean, I even mailed tigrismus's leg back and everything!
ReplyDeleteGood point: I'm betting also that in many cases "the dad" isn't even in evidence. People who see misandry everywhere really overvalue the salience of the bits of it they do see. But really advertisements, as you point out, are aimed at convincing the person who does the shopping for X that choice "brand name X" is better than something else and this can be done in a variety of ways through representative competition and exposition with neighbors, authorities, siblings, parents, children, and spouses.
ReplyDeleteThe "Doctor Mom" advertisements aren't opposed to any image of "bad dad" but simply exist in a vacuum--the "mother" is imagined to be choosing medicine herself and she is educated and compared to authorities like doctors and nurses because it is flattering to her.
In Beer commercials for reasons that escape me the buyer is thought to be a young or middle aged man who responds well to juvenile appeals to stupid sexist or moronic entertainment jokes. Its not the fault of women that this happens. The buyer basically demands it by responding to these kinds of advertisements.
I'll defer to your comment. I didn't like those shows when they were new (or relatively so), and age has not improved them.
ReplyDeleteThe commercial is question isn't a Clueless Dad commercial, according to her article, it features a competent possible-but-we-can't-be-sure-stay-at-home dad. Her article is trying to convince conservatives that THAT'S OK as long as we realize men staying at home doesn't mean they're worthless for doing what's traditionally considered women's work. Because hey, they're still men, and therefore have innate value. Or something.
ReplyDeleteApparently manchineels often grow in mangroves. Who knew? So you get the poison trees PLUS the baby barracuda, mosquitoes, and 80 million jellyfish!
ReplyDeleteYour point about it having an Office-vibe (not surprising given that Greg Daniels and Mike Schur moved from The Office to Parks and Rec) is why that first season feels different. They gave Leslie way too much of a Michael Scott feel which just didn't work. And, just as they toned back Michael Scott from the David Brent end of the spectrum in the second season of The Office, they dialed back Leslie's overbearingness in season 2. It certainly didn't have anything to do with their ideas about government.
ReplyDeleteIn Beer commercials for reasons that escape me the buyer is thought to
ReplyDeletebe a young or middle aged man who responds well to juvenile appeals to
stupid sexist or moronic entertainment jokes.
Because evidently beer needs to be sold mainly to screeching fratboy morons who stopped maturing at 14; c.f. the previous thread about enraged manchildren and their video games.
Sounds like a perfect place for the 2016 GOP convention.
ReplyDeleteRight. I'm sure I haven't seen either since I was a little girl and I'm sure that age has not improved them.
ReplyDeleteI think the cultural nature of Beer Advertisements is proved because (to my mind at least) the Stella Artois beer ads are positively impenetrable, aesthetically speaking. They are obviously ads that are made abroad, for a European audience, but who they are supposed to appeal to is beyond me. An ad that appeals to you --well, appeals to you. It sticks in your mind. If its a food ad it makes you want to eat. Drink? It makes you want to drink. The American Beer Ads are aimed at an audience that is specifically not me and it works for its intended audience. They could sell people like me Beer but the ads would be more like wine ads appealing to a different kind of class vanity, say, or a different idea of leisure and food associations.
ReplyDeleteTechnically they each take turns fucking up and cleaning up someone else's mess. I think that is what makes it interesting (ish).
ReplyDeleteThen how does she explain their support of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney?
ReplyDeleteI think you mean "faith based infrastructure." Like the Monty Python skit in which major public works projects are built by literary figures like Satan and the Angels in Paradise Lost or the characters in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. It works fine until some of the characters realize they are fictional and then the buildings start to fall down.
ReplyDeleteIt won't be long before we start reading reports about people sticking their tongues in light sockets to find out what electricity tastes like. That will definitely cut down the customer base for unregulated electrical work.
ReplyDeleteBad beer needs to be sold mainly to screeching fratboy morons who stopped maturing at 14
ReplyDeleteIt was sheer necessity.
ReplyDeleteAnd these are exactly the social conditions conservatives want to bring back. The good ol' days, ya know?
We can do both! Refuse to fund it AND have faith God will do it for us! IT CAN'T FAIL! Though apparently it can be failed.
ReplyDeleteGood point.
ReplyDeleteNot sure which of the Stella ads you're referring to here. The ones where the man behind the bar blows and new glass and hand-decorates it before filling it with SA beer is meant to imply that SA beer is hand crafted. Obviously, it ain't.
ReplyDeleteThe ones where the cyclists stop in the middle of the race to get a couple of glasses are based on a bit of actual history (Tour de France riders used to hit the pubs to stay hydrated), and the message seems to be that the beer is so good, you'll throw a race just to have a glass.
Admittedly not as forthright as "Won't you try Extra Dry Rheingold Beer," but they do stick in your head.
So, I've never really watched most of Suits, but isn't Ross's ability to be a good lawyer predicated on him having some sort of memorization superpower? Like, I know we like to say libertarians base their vision on comic books, but they don't usually make it that obvious.
ReplyDeleteUm ... I don't get it. I mean, this looks like (at worst) poor research. Was there something about the site that indicated to the reasonably alert person that it was bogus?
ReplyDeleteJust the fact that collegiate blimp competitions are utterly ridiculous, and even the most rudimentary knowledge of the actual world or of aviation would clue the reader in that the site was bogus.
ReplyDeleteThis goes back to a thread at Balloon Juice yesterday about the inability of college students to think critically or analyze the world around them because of their lack of general knowledge.
Wasn't there one where the bartender kept pouring some down the drain and repulling to make the glass look prettier? The message I got from that probably wasn't the one they intended.
ReplyDeletePfft, you bet on Equipoise instead of Schnickelfritz..
ReplyDeleteYeah--I get what they are saying but the commercials are drab and have terrible pacing and don't make me want to drink the beer.
ReplyDeleteBonnie Hunt? (But who's "ELR?")
ReplyDeleteWhat's more conservative/fundamentalist than dumb/masculine dad who must be controlled, nurtured, "civilized" yada by "complementary" mom? (Even as she's trying to do the same w/ the children.)
Dumb dad vs. clever/manipulative wife has also been popular for a long time because ad agencies think it appeals to women who do more shopping for household consumer "goods" & food.
Was thinking about the "sharing economy" (Isn't that how it's euphemised?) just the other day & "widow taking in boarders during the Depression" came to mind. (The American Dream, daily ...)
ReplyDeleteNow there's anecdata!
Epic Rap Battles of History: Skrillex vs. Mozart.
ReplyDeleteAl Bundy. My hero. I still have my NOMAAM membership card. (just kidding. just kidding)
ReplyDeleteAll I know from this SHrillex [legit typo] is the silly hair, but feedback from a scratched electronic CD glitching outintrigues me & I'll be subscribing to his newsletter pronto.
ReplyDeleteHeh... After doing medical transcription for 30 years I got pretty good. About 2 or 3 times a year someone in the office would ask me if I thought they could do it to. I used to ask them to spell "dacryocystorhinostomy" and use it in a sentence. [crickets]
ReplyDelete"the conflict between Leslie's effectiveness and genuine interest in good governance and the public's determined refusal of same"
ReplyDeleteSHORTER: What's the Matter w/ Kansas?
(Or fictional Indiana.)
I'll just "A-hem" myself.
ReplyDeleteUntil Wolfgang ended it by dropping the double bass.
ReplyDeleteGeneral MillsCheeriosWhichever agency's doing the Cheerios ads must be a bunch of smarty-pants humanities majors who swallowed the liberal line whole in college. Or can recognize & adapt to demographic & cultural change, rather than standing athwart it yelling.
ReplyDeleteChrist I swear I knew what I thought I meant when I typed out ELR but now I can't for the life of me remember. Oh: Everybody Loves Raymond.
ReplyDeleteIts also the plot of that movie with Sally Fields where she is a widow with a cotton farm to manage and she takes in the blind broomaker (John Malkovich). Taking in boarders used to be the last step downwards in respectability not a kicky new way to leverage the condo.
ReplyDeleteThe leg you mailed had a hoof. Also: postage due.
ReplyDeleteThe entire thing is like a animated couturier runway walk. It should really be called "dresses and handbags" because men's suiting gets only so interesting. The dresses the secretary and the lead female lawyer wear are both stunning and totally inappropriate and impossible (at least for the secretary). And my favorite pastime was watching the extras they employ to fill out the law firm stalk across the background--these guys are also dressed in fancy suits but the wardrobe guys can't be bothered to tailor the suits to the extras so their sleeves are often dangling over their hands. OK, I guess I've watched the show a little too closely.
ReplyDeleteYes, I think that was pretty puzzling. And the cyclist one also struck kind of a false note for me (perhaps qua American). Drink our beer because you are easily distracted? Drop out of the race of your life because you need a beer?
ReplyDeleteDerpstep
ReplyDeleteSo I guess you won't be shopping at Derelict's Surgery Mart and All-Nite Liquor Emporium again?
ReplyDeleteMagic of the market!
The building is held up by hypnosis!
ReplyDeletelike those Day by Day cartoons which have the wrong number of panels or
ReplyDeletelack a punchline or fail to build up to the punchline they think they
are having.
All of them?
So I guess you won't be shopping at Derelict's Surgery Mart and All-Nite Liquor Emporium again?Oh, ve will... ve just won't enjoy it.
ReplyDeleteLike the people at ACORN?
ReplyDeleteConservatives have a natural antipathy towards propping up things that don’t work.
ReplyDeleteRepublicans have a natural antipathy towards doing anything remotely helpful to anyone or anything that doesn't benefit them directly and immediately.
AND privatization!
ReplyDeleteThey prefer the status quo, so long as it is a type of white men ruled feudalism humorously referred to as "libertarian".
ReplyDeleteWhere does Archie Bunker fit into the cliche?
ReplyDeleteWell, I'll rest assured it's unlikely most people could *spell* one...
ReplyDeleteI think Archie Bunker started out as counter propaganda but the writers had a very, very, hard time preventing the viewers ultimately from slotting AB right back into the familiar model of the walter mitty/curmudgeon/hero protagonist. Even though the writers and Carol O'Connor himself saw AB as an object lesson in cruelty, sexism, and racism they found that the viewer softened towards him and even identified with him.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, electronic music peaked with Bebe and Louis Barron...
ReplyDelete4. Make sure the company in which you have a financial interest gets the bid and then pour tax dollars ...
ReplyDeleteOgawd. The terrifying things you could whisper in bed….
ReplyDeleteWhile you wait for your flight, enjoy a sandwich at the Camplobacter Café, located right in the terminal.
ReplyDeleteMain Concourse men's room, stalls 11-18...
That's gonna leave a mark.
ReplyDeleteSynchronized blimp-ing -
ReplyDeleteIn unrelated news, when's the next NRO fundraiser?
ReplyDeleteWouldn't that imply that the last NRO fundraiser ended at some point?
It's the same as with Al Bundy. He was designed as a caricature, as was the entire Bundy family, and they were supposed to be unlikeable people. NO MAAM was a satire of anti-feminists. However, a lot of dumb viewers instead identified with Al as a curmudgeonly hero.
ReplyDeleteStep 3 is still Profit! Step 2, though, is no longer ????, and profit actually arrives if you're in the club.
ReplyDeleteYeah, in season 1 Leslie was, in fact, deluded and doomed, but she was always the hero of the show. She was just presented as blind to how many of the people around her were idiots and assholes. What changed over the course of a couple of seasons was that she was portrayed as being more savvy and the characters working most closely with her evolved into more sympathetic characters, including her ideological opposite Ron. Other people in Pawnee can still be pretty awful, though. The show's become more optimistic, not more liberal.
ReplyDeleteShe already thinks money is ruining the poor. Lexically speaking it's only a short step.
ReplyDeleteThe sitcoms Lu et al. are forever bitching about are in fact part of an unbroken chain stretching back through radio (Life of Riley, the original version of Father Knows Best) and comic strips (Bringing Up Father, Blondie) to vaudeville and commedia dell'arte to -- as already mentioned -- Aristophanes and Euripides, and that in one form or other was probably already old when Og was laughing at campfire stories about that pompous jerk Grunk being taken down a peg or two. It was always funny and always will be funny because making fun of authority figures is a comedy perennial. Conservatives never get this because they see punching up rather that down as disrespectful. It's also both why they're always complaining about stuff normal people find funny an why they're incapable of producing anything funny themselves.
ReplyDeleteNo wonder my attempts to start a career as an airship pirate have gone nowhere. Well, that and my crippling fear of heights, that is ...
ReplyDeleteI do not rate for structural engineering based on don't-look-down Roadrunner Physics.
ReplyDeleteOr like ordained ministers who want to marry loving same-sex couples?
ReplyDeleteTo your first question - Considering these are the same people who firmly believe they would have been admitted to Harvard or hired for that job for which they had no qualifications if it weren't for affirmative action - Absolutely.
ReplyDeleteTwo your second - I don't know. Locking a bunch of libertarians in a room full of sharp objects has a certain appeal.
Pot is ruining reggae.
ReplyDeleteE.g., Social Security.
ReplyDeleteSounds like the same people, or maybe their kids, who haven't figured out that The Colbert Report is a schtick.
ReplyDeleteCheck your map--that's the Larry Craig Lounge.
ReplyDelete"I had a dacryocystorhinostomy once. I had the surgery done, some idiot who said he did all the fucking surgery games on AGame, and he cut my fucking nose off! Said he had to do it to find the piece of my pants leg that had got stuck up there! I wanted to sue him but my lawyer . . . well, he said he was a lawyer 'cause he was a big fan of Law & Order--like, who isn't?--well, he said I could only sue him for two thousand dollars because of tort reform. So I fired the sonofabitch and represented myself, but the but the judge said, 'Well, you had a contract.' What the fuck!"
ReplyDeleteFor a brief time you had shows "about" women like the groundbreaking shows about divorced or single women none of whose names I can remember.
ReplyDeleteMary Tyler Moore?
I would argue that Home Improvement doesn't all the way fit the mold. Tim Taylor is an oaf and a klutz, but he's got enough self-awareness to know when he's gone over the line, even if sometimes he has to work that out with Wilson. But he at least knows he doesn't know everything, which I'd say differs him from most dumb dad protagonists.
ReplyDeleteAlso, that was back when ABC was sort of holding itself out as the last redoubt of family programming amid a sea of 'singles in the city' shows, and if you look at some of those other shows, the Carl Winslows and Alan Matthewses of the world fit much less into the dumb dad mold than Taylor.
Also, let's be honest about what's going on here. 'Dumb dad' is literally the only thing they have in the 'see, men are portrayed negatively in the media, too' quiver and they're gonna milk it for all its worth.
ReplyDeleteIt was basically only a sensation for two seasons and it's been shedding viewers for a minute now. Season six premiered with 4.6 million viewers/1.8 in the key demographic which is still pretty good for a cable show in its sixth season but not an earthshattering phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteLet's not forget the last time the right got het up over a Cheerios commercial (jesus, what a said thing to type) it was because it featured an interracial couple and their daughter.
ReplyDeleteGeneral Mills spoke out against an SSM ban in their home state of Minnesota and has previously released special edition Lucky Charms with extra rainbows for pride month. They are not on the wingnuts' side.
I mentioned that ad above, but from what I understand the order probably comes direct from General Mills, who have gone pretty all in on promoting diversity as part of the their corporate image.
ReplyDeleteBTW - can't believe I didn't go for this low-hanging fruit before, but:
ReplyDeletethe show "has devolved from incisive comedy into aggressively unfunny propaganda."
aaaaand if there's anything wingnuts know all about, it's aggressively unfunny propaganda!
BADUM-TING.
See, I love Ron, but from the first glimpse I got of him I just knew that there would be a certain segment of the viewership that would take him dead seriously, even if Nick Offerman started winking directly at the camera and holding up a little sign saying "lol j/k".
ReplyDeleteJust because I never, ever get tired of this:
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/2YGTW555Gu4
"The visiting surgeon was asked to leave the hospital after sticking his nose into the resident's most recent dacryocystorhinostomy."
ReplyDeleteOh, those Dos XX ads are for the middle aged frat boy beer drinker, so he can imagine he's a suave older man with babes hanging off his arms, instead of, well, what he actually is.
ReplyDeleteI mean, Jesus With Glowsticks, did she completely miss the term Acid House? Well, she calls it EDM so that explains a lot.
ReplyDelete(Yes I know that the acid house label seems to come down to a transcontinental misunderstanding and the drug of choice was MDMA and not LSD and so on...)
Shitty beer at punk rock shows ensure that the Ramones are virtually indistinguishable from a local three-chord garage band.
ReplyDeleteDrugs at EDM festivals ensure that Calvin Harris is virtually indistinguishable from a remix DJ at a wedding party.
ReplyDeleteWhat the fuck is a "remix dj"?
And the drugs must be pretty good these days if you can drop "The Chicken Dance" at a EDM festival and nobody notices.
We should pipe it to their apartments basements, corral them all in a backwater bight of the Intertoobz, and check in from time to time for the LOLz...
ReplyDeleteWell technically it did inspire an imitator- Last Man Standing starring... Tim Allen, which is much heavier on the culture warrior bullshit.
ReplyDeletehave the wrong number of panels or lack a punchline or fail to build up to the punchline they think they are having
ReplyDeleteJudging by Ed's VV columns, that's basically the entire righwing catrooniverse...
BTW, I'm still laughing. Joan Rivers, RIP.
ReplyDeleteHave you ever had a discussion with your daughter about feeling fresh while strolling on a beach?
ReplyDeleteI like EDM. I've listened to enough of it that I can legitimately tell what Skrillex is trying to do with some of his stuff (I've actually laughed out loud while listening to some of his tracks, as his sense of humourous juxtaposition is really top-notch -- some of the music he splats together has no right being in the same time zone as each other, let alone the same track), but I really don't like his aesthetic sense. He picks crappy music and he doesn't seem to like melody at all.
ReplyDeleteDeadmau5 and Infected Mushroom are more my speed, and if you want to go old-school, Orbital and Aphex Twin (the wigged-out stuff he did in the late 80s and early 90s mostly).
Designing Women, The Golden Girls, Murder She Wrote?
ReplyDeleteNot to mention that a lot of the supposedly frivolous lawsuits these people kvetch about all the time turn out, with a minimal amount of digging, usually to be anything but frivolous.
ReplyDelete"Haw, haw, that lady went to McDonald's and sued because she didn't know coffee was supposed to be hot!"
"Actually, the coffee was so hot, much hotter than coffee should be, it pretty much cooked her crotch off. Are you volunteering to be next?"
"Parents sued because their daughter got hurt while swimming! Don't they know that pools can be dangerous?"
"Actually, the little girl had most of her intestines sucked out of her ass by the uncovered pool filter pump suction and now has to be fed through a tube for the rest of her life -- and so did 12 other children. Do you somehow think that's a normal swimming pool hazard?"
It never freaking ends with these people.
Lack of drugs has completely ruined straight-edge.
ReplyDelete“All professions are conspiracies against the laity.”
ReplyDeleteMinnesota Nice!
ReplyDeleteCorporate GM (Genetically Modified? Gasp!) does control the branding (Ouch!) I just like assigning credit &/or blame for the adverts to the advertising agency minds.
Beaver: Well, gee, Dad, Nixon’s been bombing North Vietnam from day one and they’re still just as
ReplyDeletestrong as they were when we started. What’s the plan? Why are we killing all those innocent people?
Ward: Son, I’m sure the president knows exactly what he’s doing. After all, he's the president; he knows a lot of things that we citizens don’t.
Wally: Wow, dad, you’re a fucking idiot!
Oops. Missed this BTVS reference. Well played.
ReplyDeleteYes: That Girl and MTM were the originals. But later you had Bonnie Hunt's show whose name I still can't remember about life for her and her daughters after divorce.
ReplyDelete"One Day at a Time"?
ReplyDeleteAs far as old school glitchy feedback goes, Oval and Matmos are both worth a listen.
ReplyDeleteThat would be Bonnie Franklin, not Hunt. She died lady year.
ReplyDeleteVote Al Franken 2014
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK7gI5lMB7M
Yes, but there weren't any drugs at discos!
ReplyDeleteAnd are always preferable to the approach taken by, well, every ad I've ever seen for a Kellogg's product. They're pretty much all about families fighting each other for food.
ReplyDeleteAlmost as creepy as a Burger King ad. Almost.
Dacryocystorhinostomy is the saddest surgery, as it usually ends in tears.
ReplyDeleteI instinctively grok Skrillex. Not so much for Twitter. I'm guessing my inner age averages out to about 35 or 40.
ReplyDeleteAl who, now?
ReplyDeleteThe name seems familiar, but I can't quite place it...
"Locking a bunch of libertarians in a room full of sharp objects has a certain appeal."
ReplyDeleteFunny you should mention that...
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/fox-rolls-dice-new-utopia-reality-article-1.1928311
You mean the "Wake Up With The King" ad?
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine why anyone thought that would be a good idea.
The pool-intake case in particular points up the major contributor to outsize damage awards. The manufacturer KNEW this was a problem, and yet refused to do anything about it until it lost that last case.
ReplyDeleteThis is a bizarrely common chain of events. Company X designs and sells Product A. Within a year of its introduction, it becomes apparent that Product A has a design defect that can injure or kill the user. In a rational world, Company X would recall all of the Product A it had already sold and either fix the defect or replace the product with an improved design. The short-term costs tend to be a bit high (depending on the product), but it becomes a one-shot expense.
Instead, what happens is that Company X receives notice of the problem, and then spends several million fighting the first law suit. And then another few million fighting the next law suit. And millions more on the third, and many millions more on the fourth--all the while selling products the company KNOWS have a problem. Finally, some smart plaintiff's lawyer stands in front of a jury and says, "Look, Company X has known that Product A is dangerously defective for at least 5 years--and yet refuses to do anything about it. Company X has lost a dozen suits from people injured by Product A exactly the way my client was injured. It's time to send Company X a message they might understand!" And out comes some HUGE punitive damages award that "tort reform" advocates latch onto as an example of "abuse of the system."
I've watched this happen in aviation for 40 years were manufacturers have lost dozens and dozens of lawsuits over a known fatal defect that could have been fixed by a $5 chunk of aluminum in one case, or a 50-cent piece of plywood in another. The manufacturers refused to do anything because it "might be an admission that there's a problem." For some reason, it just never occurs to these companies or their crack legal teams that you could settle the first suit, fix all the defective airplanes while there's only a few dozen in existence, and incorporate the fix in all future manufacturing. Instead, they wait until the defect has been built into thousands of airplanes and they've lost a few dozen multi-million dollar judgments--and only finally cave in when that smart plaintiff's attorney lands a $79 million judgment.
[end rant]
They're still selling lots of merch at WalMart, I think.
ReplyDeleteThere's a corollary to Poe's Law in there somewhere.
ReplyDelete