Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Mike “Race” Pence

The shocking, yet not surprising, stories from the final months of Trump’s term in office continue to surface.

Being able to paste in a YouTube URL and have a Colbert video appear is quite a change from 15 years ago. Back then I had analog cable TV being captured by an ATI TV Wonder card.

I edited using a very old version of Pinnacle, then had to convert to FLV, because Flash was the only available streaming video format. The process was labor intensive and extremely time consuming, and it ended in a 320×240 video that was uploaded to the site via FTP. Painful!

What hasn’t improved since then? Dealing with WordPress problems.

Boston After 9/11

The Frontline documentary “America After 9/11” paints a justifiably grim picture of the failures over the past 20 years of American policies and actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The series is produced in Boston, which played an outsized role in the 9/11 attacks, due to lax airport security. The documentary doesn’t mention that, nor does it mention the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013 by the Tsarnaev brothers.

Adolescent Sexual Fantasies in the Adult Suburban Male

The 1962 farce Boys’ Night Out is on Watch TCM for a couple more days. It seems to have been inspired by 1960’s The Apartment, but without Billy Wilder’s sardonic edge.

The premise is of its time, peak Mad Men era. Four men split the cost of a Manhattan apartment for a beautiful young woman to live there, so they can take turns sleeping with her. Being the early 60’s, nothing actually happens, of course.

When I first saw Boys’ Night Out on TV, I was just old enough to be interested in the implications of the arrangement between the four business buddies and the girl. Living in Norwalk, Connecticut, I liked the references to places I knew, like Stamford. There was also this screen credit that filled the family’s 23″ RCA color console, thanks to the need for panning-and-scanning.

Did women think this movie was all in good fun? Or did they consider the idea behind it offensive, but said it only in the company of their girlfriends? Many women were married to men who had served overseas in WWII, and perhaps that made them more tolerant of the male mindset.

P.S. According to TCM, Kim Novak herself was behind the production.