The Grouchy Editor

Quote of the Week, courtesy of Big Brother’s Cody 

Julie Chen:  “Congratulations Cody! You’re America’s favorite houseguest and you’re going home with $25,000! Anything to say, Cody?”

Cody:  (pauses and shakes head) “It doesn’t make sense.”

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Poor Weiner and Bush. Weiner and Bush should get together to commiserate. I mean, Weiner and Bush would make a good team. I mean … oh, never mind.

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James Clapper might have lied again? Say it ain’t so!

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In case you missed it, here’s a link to Lawrence O’Donnell’s stirring rant about hammers, Labor Day, and things that go bump in the night.

Lawrence now joins Peter Finch and Bill O’Reilly in the canon of hilarious temper tantrums forever preserved on YouTube.

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In these Days of Trump, everyone has an opinion about the media. If you’re interested in watching a movie about the press at its best – and at its worst – check out a largely forgotten gem from 2003 called Shattered Glass.

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Can it be? After what feels like 25 years of nonstop zombie shows from Hollywood, it seems the walking dead are finally being usurped.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that now we can expect 25 years of nonstop killer clowns.

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TV Updates

Fall season disappointments:

The Sinner was disappointing. Top of the Lake: China Girl was disappointing. American Horror Story: Cult is disappointing (so far).

And The Deuce, after just one episode, is awfully dour, cynical and humorless.

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I’m sorry, but listening to Beth Mowins and Rex Ryan (above) call a Monday Night Football game was like listening to Alvin and the Chipmunk.

For the first 15 minutes of the game I thought it must be Take Your Son to Work Day, and I was hearing some announcer’s 12-year-old boy do his first voice work.

Oh … that would be a reference to both of them.

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We keep seeing commercials for a “Noah’s Ark” tourist attraction in Kentucky, pictured above.

Now might be a good time for Floridians, who know a thing or two about tourist attractions (and floods), to check it out.

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Hollywood’s Revenge

It takes a while to write and produce a TV series, but it’s now been ten months since the election, and so ….

American Horror Story: Cult is probably just the beginning of an onslaught of anti-Trump shows headed our way.

Sarah Paulson exults over Trump’s election triumph in American Horror Story … just kidding.

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Kate Middleton scored a legal victory against a French magazine that published her nude photos.

That’s our excuse for posting, one more time, these photos of the Royal Fanny.

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Bummer. Because everyone goes to James Bond movies for the plot.

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Nice of Kevin Hart to donate $25,000 to Houston flood victims. Let’s do the math.

According to one source, Hart was worth $128 million in 2016.

$25,000 is .02 percent of $128,000,000.

If you earned $50,000 per year and gave .02 percent of your income, that’s ten bucks.

So Mr. Munificent donated the equivalent of … ten bucks.

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George Romero died in July, and now Tobe Hooper has passed. I saw Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in a theater a few years after it premiered, and I saw Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre not long after that.

Which was better? I liked Night of the Living Dead, but Chain Saw scared the piss out of me.

 Scary

Scarier

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So let me get this straight: The creepy My Pillow guy shows up in a couple’s bedroom, uninvited and unexpected, and, instead of calling the police, the couple is happy to see him?

Kinky.

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Long-Simmering Complaint:

And the “t” in “often” should be silent — like this. 

This week on Outnumbered, Kennedy was hell-bent on displaying her ignorance:

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Thank you, Harvey, for being a wonderful play by Mary Chase.

Thank you, Harvey, for being one of James Stewart’s best movies.

And thank you, Harvey, for being such a nasty-ass hurricane that you’ve forced the media to give all of us a respite from obsessive Donald Trump coverage.

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 An eclipse over Glasgow

Damn science nerds. Whenever they try to get the rest of us excited about some rare event – usually a comet or asteroid flying past Earth – The Big Show turns into a disappointment.

It’s like the fanatics who keep telling us Trump is just like Hitler. When it turns out that Trump doesn’t have any gas ovens, we get bored and stop listening to them.

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By all means, let’s pass tax cuts for the rich. That will heal the country.

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When Trump canned Steve Bannon, was he selling out to The Swamp? Has Trump always been in league with The Swamp?

The Swamp doesn’t care.

The Swamp lives on, licking its chops and seeking new victims.

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If the point of electing Donald Trump was to shake things up in Washington, then I don’t see how anyone can dispute that his presidency has been an unqualified success.

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I guess this is why Stephen King was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters:

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The problem with cable news is that it attracts the most detestable partisans imaginable.

If I happen to lean toward support of, let’s call it “Issue A,” there is little doubt that I will then witness some obnoxious, odious, self-satisfied buffoon advocating for “Issue A” on cable news.

I will then no longer be able to stomach the idea of supporting Issue A.

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Poor little Guam. It gets no respect or recognition – until now.

Its name sounds like something you might say when your dentist asks you a question while your jaws are pried open.

You never hear of anyone planning a tropical vacation to the beautiful beaches of Guam. (Does Guam have beautiful beaches?)

But the people of Guam seem awfully cool. Journalists interviewed some Guam residents, one of whom had this gem of a comment about why Kim Jong-un should aim his nukes at … Guam:

Seems like reasonable logic to us.

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Fox News is rapidly running out of male personalities who aren’t getting the boot for sexual harassment. They might as well just can the rest of the males – save Shepard Smith, of course – and change their name to Foxy Babe News.

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Meanwhile, at Anybody-But-Trump Rolling Stone:

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CNN was unhappy when this meme of Trump pummeling “CNN Logo Head” went viral:

In the interest of fairness, during his West Virginia speech Trump pummeled “Fox News Logo Head”:

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Sure, because Clapper is intimately acquainted with “untruthful statements.”

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Fox is apparently hiring Viagra spokeswomen for its panel shows:

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New White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci has been busy rewriting the lyrics to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”:

Is this the real life?

Is this just fantasy?

Caught in a landslide

They will all be fired by me.

Open your eyes

Look up to the skies and see

I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy

I’m not trying to suck my own cock

They’ll all be fired by me.

I see a little silhouetto of a man

Scaramucci, Scaramucci, will you do the fucking tango?

Nothing really matters

Anyone can see

Nothing really matters

They’ll all be fired by me.

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TV Update

Netflix subscribers might want to check out either of the following shows:

Detectorists

Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook play small-town Brits who take up metal detecting as a hobby. The comedy is a bit Laurel and Hardy, a bit Doc Martin, and a bit The Andy Griffith Show. The tone is slow-burn charming, but several episodes from the first season had me laughing out loud. Normally, sitcoms do not inspire me to laugh out loud.

Ozark

Jason Bateman and Laura Linney play parents forced to relocate their family to the Missouri boonies when they fall into disfavor, to put it mildly, with a Mexican drug cartel. It’s not Breaking Bad, but it’s entertaining and a refreshing change of locale from the usual haunts of dramas like this, i.e., New York or L.A.

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I’m trying to picture what a new American civil war might look like. Should the red states and blue states declare open hostilities, I’m thinking it will bear little resemblance to our conflict in the 1860s.

We are much too fat and lazy to do battle in the fields of Virginia. No, I’m thinking this war will have to be fought from the comfort of easy chairs in our living rooms. It will likely be some sort of video-game war.

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People look back at the hair and fashion of the 1970s and they can’t stop laughing.

But you can’t tell me that in 40 years, maybe less, they’ll be able to stop laughing at hair like this:

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Bad news, worse news for Saturday Night Live fans.

The bad news is that we won’t get any more Melissa McCarthy spoofs of dearly departed Sean Spicer.

The worse news is that we’ll still get Alec Baldwin’s tired Trump impersonation.

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Critics love the term “peak TV.” I think they might be misspelling it.

“Peek TV” means you spend four or five minutes taking a peek at the latest piece of crap, then change the channel.

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Awkward Conversations with Mom and Dad:

“Hi mom and dad. Guess what? I’m starring in a movie!”

(pause)

“No … I play the meat.”

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