Snakes and other adventures in media

I may be horribly old-fashioned, and I do realize that there are good many people who will roll their eyes at the idea that I might be old-fashioned and say, no, you are not old-fashioned, stupid, you are completely behind the times and would you please hurry up and catch up with the Zeitgeist before you embarrass yourself completely, but I cannot fathom why anyone would think that watching an anaconda swallow a grown man is in any way entertaining.  But it seems that someone does, because I have seen a commercial for this…actually, I am not sure what to call it.  I do not know if this qualifies as a reality show, a wildlife documentary, or a cooking show. I realize that the advent of cable and satellite television, and the subsequent need for ever more content to fill the hours, has led inevitably to a diminution in the quality of the programming available for broadcast, but frankly, watching a giant snake swallow a grown man is more than a little ridiculous.  This is not entertainment; it barely qualifies as bread and circuses.

First, a spoiler alert: our intrepid hero, who has gone boldly where no man has gone before, survives his encounter with the anaconda. I know this because our intrepid hero is in all the ads for this program and appears to narrate the program as well, two bits of showmanship that more or less preclude the snake’s having digested him. That’s a dead giveaway there, if you ask me. There is no suspense involved in watching a snake swallow a man if you already know that the man survives the encounter, only a vaguely annoyed feeling with yourself for watching such rubbish in the first place. If you must feel annoyed with yourself, you may as well watch the further adventures of the Kardashian sisters; whatever else you can say about them, they are certainly better looking than a giant anaconda.

Second, what is the point of this particular exercise, other than to deny a snake its dinner?  If we must learn about the digestive processes of snakes, wouldn’t it be easier to have the snake swallow a camera the same way I do when my GI guy insists that I have a colonoscopy. Snakes have no trouble swallowing anything; their jaws uncouple, as we all learned in eighth grade biology, so that they can swallow animals bigger than their own heads.  It’s what they do.  Therefore, it should not be wildly difficult to induce an anaconda to gulp down a camera, even if there isn’t a grown man attached to it.  But why do it in the first place?  I am clearly missing something here.

Finally, swallowing is not interesting. Everyone does it every day. Our intrepid hero would be better off if he skipped being an appetizer and did something constructive like campaigning to end such violent spectacles as bullfighting, high school football, and the Miss America pageant, and replacing them with wholesome entertainment like giraffe swatting, wherein teams of drunken dwarves armed with fly swatters and equipped with pogo sticks try to swat the most flies away from the heads of giraffes running around a track before the time clock or the whiskey run out. Now, that is something I would pay good money to see and I would pay it knowing that no one was about to offend my sensibilities.

Last Night's Ukase from the Tsar.

Unbridled arrogance, wrapped in the usual sanctimonious K-Y jelly to make the shoving of the Constitution up the American people's collective backside that much easier to take. The former junior senator from Illinois has decided that the Constitution does not apply to him, so he will do as he pleases, thank you very much. "A republic, if you can keep it," said Benjamin Franklin in 1787, when a Philadelphia woman asked him after the Constitutional Convention what the new government would be. Well, 227 years later, we have arrived at the monarchy the Founding Fathers feared; this our Great Republic was nice while it lasted.

My way or the highway

This remark from the former junior senator from Illinois intrigues me. He made it the day after his party suffered a wallopingly bad defeat at the polls: “To everyone who voted, I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you too.”  Now, as a proud scion of the Cook County Democratic machine, our prairie solon is familiar with the idea of representing people who are not really there. After all, dying in Cook County presents the deceased with the choice between heaven, hell, and purgatory—this last does not apply if you are not Roman Catholic—and mandatory induction into the Democratic Party; you may avoid two out of the three previous fates, although you can get to heaven from purgatory eventually, but that last one, I fear, is unavoidable.   The dead are a solidly Democratic voting bloc. 

So it is with this in mind that the Seigneur de Bourbon made his announcement. Since the two-thirds that didn’t vote clearly outnumber the one-third that did, he must champion the causes of the majority non-voters as opposed to the minority voters, who are clearly too stupid to understand what is good for them.  In short, his fingers are in his ears and he’s not listening to anything he don’t wanna listen to and you can’t make him, even if you go home and tell your mother. So there, take that, you Republican racist snotwads!

Braxton Bragg on the wave

It seems to me that the best comment on the 2014 mid-term elections came from General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A., who made the comment in 1863.  Reviewing the outcome of the Battle of Missionary Ridge, a battle in which the Confederate Army of Tennessee got its clock cleaned by the Union Army of the Cumberland, General Bragg wrote to Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States that “the disaster admits of no palliation and is justly disparaging to me as a commander.”  He then spent the rest of the letter explaining why the disaster wasn’t entirely his fault.  I thought of this while watching the former junior senator from Illinois trying to explain why the Democratic unpleasantness that occurred on Tuesday had nothing really to do with him. He may actually believe this, although he may still be trying to process what just happened.  I have often thought that our Illinois Incitatus appears to think of his current office as being akin to being the Mayor of Chicago, except with better golf courses and nuclear weapons.  For any Mayor of Chicago, the Republicans are something of an abstraction; you know that such people exist somewhere, but they are not anyone you have to deal with and they are certainly not people whose opinions you have to give any consideration.  For our prairie solon, the first two years of his term must have seemed like a golden age, a time when He was the master of all he surveyed, but all such ages must come to an end, and now his enemies surround him like paparazzi on a red carpet.  I think that it’s going to be an interesting two years, yes I do.

The wave

Yes, my mood has improved greatly over the course of the past twenty-four hours, although I’m not sure why that is, he said lying through his teeth, and thank you for asking.  It’s as if a great wave has washed over me and swept away a multitude of things that annoyed the hell out of me and now I feel clean and refreshed.  Of course, the biggest annoyance of all is still with us and will be until winter of 2017, at which I am seriously considering throwing a humongous party complete with liquor and strippers to celebrate the glorious occasion.  I think it’s a wonderful idea, although my brother tells me that I should make the celebration contingent on no one pretending to come from Westchester coming by to cast a pall on the whole affair.  This strikes me as very sound advice and so I will hold off the actual planning of the annoyance’s retirement until such time that I know it can’t continue to annoy me