Says one comment in a Reddit thread about the HBO series "Rooster," after a line of dialogue in the first season finale episode that suggested a new narrative for one of the secondary characters.
Somebody else says: "Wouldn’t be the first time a studio monitored fan reactions on Reddit and took them into consideration while working on future seasons."
Stop doing it? Ridiculous! If there's one thing people instinctively do with any new material that comes their way, it's try to predict the future. If we weren't designed to do that, we wouldn't be drawn into stories with plots in the first place.
Here's a neuroscientist talking to Joe Rogan about her study of the capacity of the human mind to predict the future, which she seems to believe in:
"And so if funny things happen around this character, then the movie or the show is a comedy. But if it's tragic or scary or whatever, it leans towards drama. Sometimes it's a mixture of both. But I think if you can tell a character knows they're in a comedy, it's intrinsically less funny. I like somebody like Alan Arkin or Peter Sellers—they always seem very true to their characters. You couldn't tell whether Alan Arkin was doing something intensely dramatic or something crazily funny. He'd play different characters but he was equally committed to both of them and never letting on. He was never winking like, 'I'm in a comedy. Here we go. Watch this joke. You're going to laugh.'"
There are ads that make you want to drink soda but don't make you want to drink the soda the ad is for. It may even drive you toward a competing brand....
Okay? So when The Washington Post offers this lofty paean to journalism at its most courageous and noble, I am touched...
... but it's with sadness and longing for something I don't believe I can ever have. And indeed, the ad itself exemplifies the problem because it puffs and deceives and lures and titillates. It deals in sentimentality and sensationalism. It's biased... in favor of itself — of course, like any ad. It has something to sell and it wants to bind us to the brand at an irrational level.
"There's someone to gather the facts, to bring you the story, no matter the costs. Because knowing empowers us. Knowing helps us decide, Knowing keeps us free." I love the ideal of journalism, and you don't have to help me deeply value it. You need to convince me that what you present in your paper is "the facts" and that reading it will help me "know."
It makes me think of that old quote from Mark Twain...
What gets us into trouble
is not what we don’t know
It’s what we know for sure
that just ain’t so
You may remember seeing that on screen in that Al Gore movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," which gathered the facts and empowered us with knowledge about climate change.
ADDED: About that Pepsi ad. I only vaguely saw it last night, but I'm watching it now on my computer screen. My vision is so poor that I had no idea that pudgy man in a beard was Steve Carell. But that ad has a race problem. Are people talking about that this morning?
A white woman orders a Coke and the white male waiter asks "Is Pepsi okay?" and Carell jumps up to berate him because he said "Is Pepsi okay?" in a bland, dull way. According to Carell, the waiter needs to say "okay" differently. We are then shown 2 black pop stars — Lil Jon and Cardi B — and they say "okay" with intense enthusiasm. Carell then yells at the 2 white people, insisting that they express themselves in the style of Lil Jon and Cardi B.
I'm thinking, blackface.
The Pepsi ad also has a sexual harassment problem, and I guess we're not supposed to notice or care because the victim is a white male. Carell snaps his fingers, says "Let's role play," and instantly the young man is wearing nothing but his underpants. Even in the bad old days, was there ever an ad that sold a major product by showing a woman stripped down to her underwear at the snap of the fingers? That was sexual humiliation.
Williams is suspended for 6 months. I guess they want to see if we'll forget why he left and start wondering why he's gone, so they can bring him back. That's all very lame and pathetic, and I don't watch the nightly news, so there's a limit to my outrage about NBC's wan interest in the truth.
Mr. Stewart, whose contract with Comedy Central ends in September, disclosed his plans during a taping of the program on Tuesday.
Saying that “in my heart, I know it is time for someone else” to have the opportunity he had, Mr. Stewart told his audience that he was still working out the details of his departure, which “might be December, might be July.”
“I don’t have any specific plans,” Mr. Stewart said, addressing the camera at the end of his show, at times seeming close to tears. “Got a lot of ideas. I got a lot of things in my head. I’m going to have dinner on a school night with my family, who I have heard from multiple sources are lovely people.”
Reading that, I feel a tad skeptical. The man is in contract negotiations! Comedy Central just lost Stephen Colbert, and Stewart must believe they really need continuity on "The Daily Show." Stewart has stayed in his place there for 16 years, while his subordinate comedians — Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver — have moved on to bigger things. They owe him. His departure might be December, might be July? Might be years from now! Throw more money at Mr. Stewart, Comedy Central, you cheap bastards! Show some respect! Show some gratitude!
He said he wants to spend more time with his family. That's code for: I didn't want to have to leave. Isn't it?
["Believer: My Forty Years in Politics"] recounts... his parents’ divorce and his father’s subsequent suicide; and his guilty conscience over his own role as an often-absent parent, working on out-of-town campaigns while his wife, Susan, kept the family together as they confronted the challenge of raising a daughter seriously disabled by epileptic seizures.
“It was painful to write some of that,” Axelrod says, noting that he as he put together the family chapters, he sent them to his eldest son, Michael, as a cautionary note: “Don’t do to your kids what I did to you.”
The NYT seems to be celebrating the man for using his position in the workplace to harass underlings about their private lives:
Cupid’s arrow lands where it will, but many of the couples say that Mr. Schumer, a New York Democrat, has an unusual knack for guiding its journey. He keeps close track of office romances, quotes marriage-friendly Scripture (“God to man: be fruitful and multiply”), and is known to cajole, nag, and outright pester his staff (at least those he perceives as receptive to such pestering) toward connubial bliss.
Religion too! He sounds like the Steve Carrell character in "The Office" — the inappropriate boss, who doesn't know the normal boundaries.
Forget Master of the Senate. This is the Yenta of the Senate.
“What’s the holdup?” the senator asks couples who are dillydallying on an engagement. “Did you get a ring yet?” Other could-be-marrieds receive a simple instruction: “Get moving!”
The NYT thinks this is cute, but you know damned well that if a conservative politician were doing this he would be accused of making the workplace a hostile environment.
[H]is focus, like many a politician’s, never strays far from his legacy: first comes Schumer Marriage, then come Schumer Babies.
“Have kids; have a lot of kids,” Mr. Schumer, who has two daughters, is known to intone. “Start early and keep having them.”
Jeez, he's appropriating their marriages and their babies.
Sometimes, Mr. Schumer greets a former staff member, “So, is your wife pregnant again?” Other times, he does not even bother with the question. One former aide, who asked not to be named, recalled seeing the senator bump into a recently married couple, both Schumer alumni. “He just stared down at her midsection and said, ‘Well?’ ”
Staring at a woman's belly as a way to convey the desire that she get pregnant? War-on-women warriors would be calling for his head if he were a Republican.
“Our staff is a family,” Mr. Schumer said, his voice often taking a paternal tone. “I want them to be happy. I get worried that they’ll be lonely. So I encourage them. If I think it’s a good match, I try to gently — as gently as I can — nudge it.”
Picture Steve Carrell saying that directly into the camera.
“It brings him joy,” said Risa Heller, a former communications director, one of more than a dozen former aides who recounted his sayings, often while imitating his voice. “He picks good people to work for him, and when they pick each other, it’s even better.”
You want to get ahead in the Democratic Party power structure? Submit to the matchmaking... and make some babies. I'd like to know more about how this picking of "good people" is carried out. Are good looking women chosen to provide wives for the men? Do the women continue climbing in the party hierarchy or do they retreat into babymaking and husband supporting?
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