Hope they put him on a seven second delay...

Yup, metaphor checks out.

Wow, I do not envy them this. What this? This this. Today the major news networks and whatever Fox is-news entertainment? Like the WWE of journalism. Anyway, the news networks all spent the day deliberating whether or not they were going to carry he President's Oval Office address tomorrow. It looks like they're all going to carry it, but not without a lot of soul searching (again, probably not Fox) and what I'm sure is bracing for the inevitable backlash.

I'm confused, is America great again?
'Cause it kind of seems like it's worse.

The former host of The Apprentice's speech will purportedly be about border security. I think we can safely say that the President is going to lay out what he sees as a legitimate threat to American security and then offer rational, well-thought out options for improving our southern border-nawww...just kidding. He's going to go in front of the cameras and froth at the mouth about how the Democrats won't give him his border wall and that's why federal workers are going unpaid and why the national parks are full of garbage.

The common wisdom here is that he's going to declare border security a national emergency and then claim that this gives him the authority to build his dumb racist wall he promised to dumb racists in exchange for their votes.

Pictured: the aforementioned dumb racists.
Huh? No, I don't think I'm being unfair. 

Remember when our President wasn't
a sociopath? That was the best.

Hence the soul-searching on the behalf of the media. News outlets are under no obligation to air a Presidential address and in fact, a lot is being made of the networks declining to air a 2014 address Barack Obama made on the subject of immigration, because they were afraid that it would be too political. Which makes today's acquiescence even more baffling. But then again, the likelihood of Obama pounding his fists on the podium and referring to latin America as a collection of shithole countries was exactly nil.

See, when a congresswoman says 'fuck' she's
being rude and disrespectful. When a rich white
guy says it he's just being folksy and relatable.

Which, I get it. If his Presidency wasn't literally killing people, disgracing America on the international stage and ruining the world forever, we could probably enjoy it as some kind of dark comedy. And you can see why the networks don't want to miss this. Any time Trump opens his big popular vote losing mouth, you know there's a decent chance he's going to say 'fuck' on TV or start talking about Hitler having had some good ideas. It's just always on the table with him and you do not want to be the President of the network that decided not to carry that speech.

I suppose the question is whether or not the xenophobic nonsense he's inevitably going to spout is going to be challenged or fact checked by the news outlets or if they're just giving America's favorite racist free airtime.

"What the President meant when he said Hitler had some great fucking ideas was, uh,
not that Hitler had great-look, I'm sick of you people twisting the President's words!"

-Press Secretary Huckabee-Sanders,

about 36 hours from now

A vicious, delicious fishes cycle!

This may surprise you, but I'm not a professional sushi chef. I mention this because I think I need to be upfront about my level of understanding before I start throwing around my ill-informed opinions. That said, holy shit, three million dollars for a fish? Like, one fish. Three million dollars. Of money. Well, really 333 million yen which, thanks to how exchange rates work, sounds even more preposterous. 

Pictured: Several hundred thousand yen, or about nine dollars American.

Above: the Tokyo fish market, where
chefs traditionally pay top dollar for raw
 fish that's just lying around on the floor.

This particular example of the kind of conspicuous consumption that's pushing the world ever closer to violent class wars, happened at the first auction of the New Year at the also new location of the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. This market has been a thing for almost a hundred years and it's where Japanese restauranteurs bid on freshly caught seafood in the wee hours of the morning while tourists take pictures and marvel at something they can see in any other port city on Earth. Crazy expensive fish aren't a new thing for the market but three million goddamn dollars is a new record.

Pictured: Kimura, posing with his tuna and
 the sword he used to discourage rival bids. Yeah,
this auction is basically Thunderdome with fish.

The winner winner of this fish dinner is Kyoshi Kimura, the owner of a chain of sushi restaurants who also calls himself the Tuna King. This year he doubled the previous record set by him in 2013. He had this to say to the Associated Foreign Press:

"The price was higher than originally thought, but I hope our customers will eat this excellent tuna."

-His Majesty Kyoshi Kimura, 

King of Tuna and Lord High 

Chancellor of understatement

In the wild they're a unitary state
with a bicameral legislature. 

So first of all, I'm pretty sure tuna are fish and don't actually have a king. And even if they did, I'm not sure they'd recognize the sovereign authority of someone who serves them as sashimi. Secondly, of course he'd better hope someone will eat the tuna he just paid three million dollars for. According to my extensive research (yes, I googled it), raw tuna is good for about a day or two, so not only does he need sushi fans to eat his excellent tuna, he needs them to do it soon. Like today. Before it starts to stink up the place. 

Although unlike America, in Japan, one
probably doesn't have to put up with white
dudes explaining the proper way to eat sushi.

According to this, the six hundred and twelve pound bluefin worked out to something like five thousand dollars per pound and will yield twelve thousand pieces of sushi. Which, if I'm doing my math right is like two hundred and fifty dollars per piece. And that's assuming sushi chefs work for free. Which, they probably don't, but I have no idea what the mark up on sushi is. Anyway I assume Japan is just like America in that there are enough rich idiots willing to pay that much for something just because they can, but still. Goddamn.

"Replenish their what? Sorry, I couln't
hear you over the sound of gutting this
incredibly valuable and endangered fish"

But scarcity and the value that comes along with it is at the very heart of capitalism, right? And this is like, super scarce. That blue fin Kimura just over paid for is on the threatened species list and regulations put into place last year set maximums on how may can be caught. The idea being that the bluefin needs time to replenish its numbers. And that makes sense right? And it follows that the more rare a fish is the more it's going to cost so that explains why King Tuna just dropped three million-with an 'm'-dollars on one.

What I want to know is how is anything short of a ban is not going to just like, encourage more fishing? Like the fine for exceeding the quota is two million yen, which is like twenty thousand dollars. But if a single bluefin could potentially go for millions why not, you know, risk the fine and hope you strike it big? The fewer the fish the more the money so the fewer the fish. It's a cycle. A vicious, delicious fishes cycle.

"Let's see, that's one fish, two fish, red fish-wait, that's just
a shoe. Looks like we're down to just the two fish..."

-Some fisherman 

in the near future

Today in movies I didn't hate:

Yeah, I don't know why I
leave the house either. 

So I don't usually talk about movies on this thing but-ok, that's not true, I talk about movies a lot, guess what I mean is that I don't usually review movies. I don't know what you like, so why should I try and tell you what to go see? But like I said, I don't usually review movies, but I have seen a few movies recently and I want to discuss. You know, one-sidedly. Which is how blogs work. Anyway, I actually saw three movies this past week and in an unusual treat, I didn't hate them. Which is weird because I hate everything.

First, Into the Spider-verse was great. Not just because of what it was; a smart, visually interesting comic book adaptation with something to say about family, and believing in yourself or whatever. But because of what it wasn't: a three hour bloated, jump-cut addled cookie-cutter MCU movie that ends in a protracted Lord of the Rings-ish battle scene.

I'll stop ragging on Infinity Wars when Marvel stops
ripping off their own movies. Yeah. Shots fired.

Above: a typical scene from any of
Bay's Transformers movies. And no, I
don't know what we're looking at either.

Then, and brace yourself for this one, I saw Bumblebee which I'm going to say was not terrible. Not great mind you, but as a fan of movies about robots that turn into things I was pleasantly surprised. Having foolishly sat through each of Micheal Bay's five-yeah, five. Compared to his five incoherent, dumb explosion fests that were similar to, but in no way, not tonally or visually, the Transformers toys were were tricked into loving by the animated toy commercials of the 1980's, Travis Knight's Bumblebee was goddamn Citizen Kane.

It was the 80's nostalgia-drenched Tab to the Bay quintet's Monster Energy Drink. By no means healthy, but it's not going to give you diabetes and an irregular heartbeat either.

It's a super-relatable story about a teen who learns to deal with grief
by befriending a Volkswagen from space. Also John Cena is there.

Above: The murder of Rizzio, captured
on palace security oil painting.

And the last movie I saw over the holidays was Mary Queen of Scots. Because I'm eclectic. The reviews have been kind of mixed, but I liked it for the most part. I say for the most part because I was digging its kind of off-beat, theatrical vibe-the director, Josie Rourke is a theatre director for whom this is her first movie, so it has a cool, kind of stage play feel to it. Anyway, I was digging it when suddenly David Rizzio, one of the Queen's courtiers is brutally and graphically murdered. Ok, so Rizzio's assassination is is a thing that happened in real life, that's not so much my issue.

...you know, uh, yeah, it felt
like that. Thanks Discovery. 

Historically, well, Wikipedia historically, Rizzio was murdered by Mary's husband and some Scottish lords on the grounds that he was having an affair with her, but in the movie Rizzio is the King's lover. Which, ok, but then there's an assassination attempt on the King which fails to kill him, but does manage to kill his new male lover. Then the King is strangled. So of the four named characters to die in this movie (spoiler alert, it doesn't end well for Mary Queen of Scotts either), three are queer. And that felt a little...

This is the culture Shakespeare
based MacBeth on. Macbeth.

According to this, there's historical evidence to back up the queer subplot in the film so I guess this isn't a bury your gays thing. But still, I don't know, maybe I'm a bit sensitive about this after Dr. Culber on Discovery and then that random security guard on Doctor Who the other night who announced how gay he was only to be murdered thirty seconds later. It just seems like this movie could have thrown in a couple non-queer murders just to balance things out a little. Seriously, this was sixteen century Scotland, it's not like they needed to go far to find one.

Anyway, Queen Mary, played by Saoirse Ronan and Elizabeth I, played by Margo Suicide Squad Robbie, were great. In fact, I really want to see Rourke direct a spin off or something where Robbie plays Elizabeth in her own movie. Better yet, how about a whole bunch of interconnected period pieces like that? Like a Tudor Cinematic Universe.

I would watch the shit out of that.

Let's create derivative works!

Hey, has this ever happened to you? You're eulogizing someone and start quoting Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. You're almost up to miles to go before I sleep when out of nowhere armed copyright enforcement officers break down the door, kick over grandma's casket and serve you a cease and desist order?

"Freeze! One more stanza and I will blow your fucking head off!"

-Some Copyright Enforcement agent

And since when has general terribleness
ever been a barrier to musicians?

Well good news, because Frost's classic poem about the conflict between beauty and obligation has now, along with fifty thousand other works of literature, art and film just slipped into the public domain meaning they're up for grabs. You can now screen Cecil B. DeMille's silent movie The Ten Commandments, stage George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan, or record any piece of music written in 1923. You know that song Yes! We Have No Bananas? It's yours to cover as you please. The only thing stopping you is its general terribleness as a song. All without paying the original artist's grandkids a dime thanks to the expiration of their copyrights. Go nuts.

"I've got a million layers and own
Florida, so bring it asshole! Ho-ho!"

-Mickey  Mouse

Works published before 1978 were originally protected for seventy five years, but the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act-yes, that Sonny Bono-added another twenty years to that. Anything published after 1978 is protected for the life of the author plus seventy years (one hundred and twenty if the author is a corporation), meaning that assuming George Lucas lives to be say, a hundred, you won't be able to film your own Star Wars Episode 1 remake until the year 2114. And that's assuming Disney doesn't manage to get the copyright extended even further. Disney was hugely influential in getting the Bono act passed in the first place in order to keep Mickey Mouse from slipping into public domain, so I'm sure they'll work something out before the twenty-second century. But for now we can content ourselves with stealing from the fifty-thousand other works just freed from copyright.

Cool, right? So I was never really a Napster person, I mean, the whole rationale with that was basically 'music should be free, man...' And that sounds pretty bullshit to me. Of course an artist should be able to control and reap the benefit of their work. 

Ok, I may have done a little rom emulating back
in college, but in many ways I was the victim. A
victim of wanting to play video games...for free.

Yeah, I know he he'd it first, but Hitler.
Hitler. There's just no going back.

Just because some DJ wants to sample something for their EMD track without paying the artist doesn't mean they should be able to. But these artists are long, long dead, so you don't even have to feel weird about it. Agatha Christie: totally dead. M. C. Escher: also dead. G. B. Shaw: he be dead. Charlie Chaplin: dead and had a Hitler 'stache. Whose afraid of Virginia Woolf? No one, because she's dead. Felix the Cat? Ok, he's not dead because he's a cartoon cat, but he's rights free now. So are a couple of H.P. Lovecraft's stories and an Agatha Christie novel called The Murder on the Links.

Up until now the people collecting the royalties are these artists grandkids or whatever. And what have they ever done? Nothing that's what. Well, ok, they've probably done something with their lives, but none of them wrote The Charleston. And I'm just not sure being Todd Hemingway or Diane Lovecraft should really entitle someone to a century's worth of checks for creating exactly nothing.

Huh? Yeah, my attitude would probably be different if I were Robert
 Frost's great, great grandnephew. I didn't say I wasn't a hypocrite. 

And like magic, it somehow got worse.

Welp, the end of another year is upon us and it's time to take stock, evaluate our lives and most importantly tally up our dead and see where we stand in this futile contest with the inevitability of death.

"Ok...lets see, that's fifty million six hundred twenty four thousand to zero.
So...uh...best hundred and one million two hundred, forty eight thousand out
of one hundred fifty one million, eight hundred seventy two thousand?"

-Humans

See these randos in the background
of a movie? That's all of us. Enjoy.

And by 'our dead' I am of course referring to people of note. The rest of us are the nameless, faces masses whose sole purpose is to lift up the exceptional among us. To provide a contrast of anonymity for the famous. We are, essentially, background. Extras in the crowd scene of the movie that is the saga of the human race. Sure, we tell ourselves that our lives have meaning, but have you starred in a reality show, leaked a sex tape or come up with a dumb phone app? No? Me neither. Welcome to the background.

Above: sportsman playing hockey,
which is known internationally as
fútbol American. (source: me).

So, on to a by no means comprehensive list of dead famous people. Let's start with music. Obviously tons of famous musicians die every year, but I'm incredibly out of touch when it comes to music. Not like sports out of touch, but when I searched for lists of musicians who died this year I recognized like three names. So sorry this is kind of perfunctory, guess you'll just have to look up one of the other thousand or so lists of "2018: Those we lost..." Anyway, music lost Delores O'Riordan from The Cranberries, Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit, and Aretha Franklin of Aretha Franklin.

TV, movies and books are a little more my jam, so let's move on to some of the people who died in the non-music part of arts and entertainment. You know, the arts you don't have to get up to enjoy.

Let's hear it for sedentary pursuits!

Oh, and I looked it up: a schlemiel is
 incompetent, a schlimazel is unlucky.

Just a couple weeks ago the world lost actor/director and 50% shareholder in Hasenpfeffer Incorporated, Penny Marshall. The entertainment industry also lost John Mahony, the dad from Frasier, playwright Neil Simon, noted writer and white suit enthusiast Tom Wolfe, noted actor and mustache enthusiast Burt Reynolds as well as actors Tab Hunter, Charlotte Rae, Verne Troyer, and Harry Anderson. Spongebob Squarepants creator Stephen Hillenburg and writer, food critic and professional curmudgeon Andrew Bourdain.

Just the other day British actor Dame June Whitfield, whom you might remember as Gran from Absolutely Fabulous and Doctor Who and pretty much anything British from the last sixty years died peacefully in her sleep. And yeah, Dame means that she was a knight. In Britain you can get knighted for acting. How about that?

Yes, of course she was on Doctor Who. She's
British. They only have like twenty actors. 

No, really.

On the topic of nerd things, we lost sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin whose works included A Wizard of Earthsea, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. Also gone is the less literary, more litigious Harlan Ellison whose contribution to the nerd cannon included tons of sci-fi short stories, novels and screen plays, numerous lawsuits, assaults and oh, and one time he groped a fellow writer on stage while she was presenting him with a Hugo award. Class act. Oh, and he also wrote a Star Trek episode where Kirk saves the future by shoving Joan Collins into traffic.

Comic book fans lost writers Steve Ditko and Stan 'Frequently Confused for Hugh Hefner' Lee. Louis Lane actor Margot Kidder. And most shocking of course, half of the Marvel universe who were wished to death by Thanos in what was no way a cheap cliffhanger soon to be reversed by next year's Avengers sequel.

Pictured: The tragic death of Peter Parker...whose totally dead now you guys.
Yup, not coming back. Ever. Yeah, I'm like a dog with a bone with this.

Don't worry Wilson Cruz fans, a
combination of time travel and fan
backlash means he'll be in season 2.

Speaking of fictional losses, and yes, spoilers. Like, don't read this if you don't want me to ruin things for you. Still there? Great, we suffered the off-camera death of Rosanne from who passed away from a tragic combination of opiates and the real life Rosanne saying horrible, racist shit. Aunt May died in-wait for it-Spider Man the video game. Which, while not cannon, for a video game actually has a pretty solid story. And finally Doctor Culber from Star Trek: Discovery. And I mean, who on that writing staff thought killing off half of Star Trek's first gay couple was a good idea?

Yeah, the party of Dave Lincoln of Macon,
Georgia...who'd you think they meant?

It was a particularly difficult year for conservatives loosing former President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush, columnist Charles Krauthammer, Senator John McCain and, of course, whatever semblance of decency the GOP had left. Gerrymandering, voter irregularities and and tantrum-prone man-child who's under investigation for pretty much everything he's ever touched and who's recently shut the government down over a preposterous and racist border wall. But still, party of Lincoln, right guys?

Of course, by 'future historians' I'm
referring to evolved apes that will sift
 though the remains of our civilizations. 

Welp, here's to another year over and another step down the long, dark path towards societal collapse. But we should probably take a moment to let future historians know that 2018 wasn't all bad. I mean, sure, we're mired in nationalism, there's massive wealth inequity, half a million Americans are homeless, and we're probably past the point of reversing climate change but...what were we talking about? Oh right, the things about 2018 that we're horrible and depressing...um, let's see...is it telling that I really have to think about this?

Well, ok, I guess HD TV's are fairly affordable, and streaming television means we never have to leave our homes or contemplate the world around us and...uh, oh! You can rent bikes and scooters with your phone. So I guess there's that.

And then we abandon them in ridiculous places, which,
goddamnit, this is why we can't have anything nice.

Today in the pot calling the kettle delusional:

Pictured: people who would have voted
for rectal polyps if rectal polyps promised
jobs and to lock up Hillary Clinton.

In some ways Donald Trump being President is the gift that keeps on giving. In many more ways he's a symptom of what happens when one party convinces white conservatives that gay Mexican Muslims are going to steal their jobs, impose Sharia law and outlaw Starbucks cups that say 'Merry Christmas' on them, but in the sense that the President has been an inexhaustible supply of morbid entertainment, he's a treasure. A treasure that likely heralds the balkanization of the United States, but a treasure.

"Um...General? This whole tracking Santa
thing is cute and all, but...are we getting paid?"

-Some Air Force person

Since it's Christmas, I'll keep this brief: because Trump can't do anything, anything, without making an absolute shitheel out of himself, this happened. And again because this is Christmas, I'll just explain what the link links to. It's a story about how when a child spoke to the President about Santa-which, yes, since the Eisenhower Administration, there's been a tradition of children calling NORAD on Christmas to see where Santa Claus is and some of them get to talk to the President.

"Hey kid, since I've got you on the line,
is your mom hot? Huh? She's right there?
 Ask her if she's in to leathery old rich guys." 

Look, I don't know, let's just say ours is an insane country and leave it at that. Anyway, the seven year old whose parent inexplicably allowed her to call the hotline and speak to a man famous for bragging about sexual assault to Billy Bush, got this response from Trump:

"Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at seven, it's marginal, right?"

-Donald Trump, taking a break from tanking 

the stock market to crush a child's dreams

Above: The magical man who seems
to bring better toys to kids whose
parents have more money. 

I'll be the first to agree that lying to kids about Santa Clause is a dumb tradition and we should probably knock it off but part of being a functioning adult is knowing that you don't question a kid's belief in him. And moreover, should a man who routinely holds rallies for himself just so people will applaud him, and who recently gave himself an A+ as President, should such a man really, really be questioning the delusions of others? Like, he can't even handle a phone call with a seven year old without outing Santa Clause as a fraud.

Oh well, I suppose I shouldn't be so hard on him, after all, he's trying. Did you know that he had to give up his bi-weekly at-tax-payers-expense Mar a Lago trip because he had to shut down the government because the Democrats won't give him what he wants? That's right, he's going to have to spend Christmas in that dump, the White House. Which is also at our expense, but still, so unfair right?

I hope someone let the ghosts of Christmas past, present
and future know that there was a change of plans...

The Metaphorical Fudd

It's sort of like a Kabuki of
blogger/reader futility.

I'm not a Twitter person. Like, I set up an account once, but I've never actually sent a tweet and I don't think the app is even installed on my phone anymore. But this might be the thing that gets me to use it...did you click on the link? No? That's fine, I'll just explain it anyway. It's been eight years of me linking to articles and eight years of no one clicking on them, and then eight years of me explaining what they're about. It's a little dance we do and besides, like fourteen point font on a middle school english paper, it pads out my blog posts.

Apologies to actual TV clowns.

So according to this, the cool new hashtag everyone's hashtagging is #TrumpResign. It's come in response to this nonsense about the TV clown who, despite losing the popular vote and then being personally responsible for the GOP getting its collective ass handed to it in the midterms, is petulantly folding his arms and stomping his foot and insisting that either he gets his five billion dollars for his racist border wall or else government employees won't get paid.

Because leverage I guess? I mean, I know those of us on the left just love crime and hate America, but shouldn't one be in a position of power before making demands? Sure, there's no reasoning with the unreasonable, but holy shit:

Citation needed. Like, for everything he says.

Well, since he seems to spend half his time
holding rallies for himself in stadiums full of
supporters, maybe he can be that deluded?

The greatest election of all time? Should we be worried that he believes his own press? Also, convincing a minority of Americans who happen to live in electorally valuable parts of the country that you're going to create more coal mining jobs and throw your political rivals in jail isn't the same thing as winning an election. It's more like he was foisted upon us by Facebook, Russia and a broken voting system. He can't possibly be so deluded as to think that his inability to accomplish his agenda is due to anything other than his unpopularity and incompetence, can he?

Of course, people who are bad
at their jobs don't get cookies.

Oh, and then, and then, he went on to brag about how he's giving up his vacation to deal with the shutdown that he caused:

"I will not be going to Florida because of the Shutdown - Staying in the White House! #MAGA"

-The President, apparently 

angling for a cookie.

Did you hear that Democrats? The President won't be going on his sixteen day vacation because of the shutdown. I hope you're happy. But back to the hashtag thing. So yeah, I love the idea that the President's precious social media space is full of calls for him to resign, but I don't think it's going to work. 

Because again, this horseshit.

"Wait, what? I mean, what?"

-The Press 

He has something of a track record for active aggression towards public opinion. We say he's the cause of the shutdown, he says Democrats are the cause of the shutdown because they won't give him what he wants. We say that climate change poses a clear and inarguable threat to the future of life on Earth and that we have to act now to avoid further catastrophe. He says "No. No. I have a strong opinion: I want a great climate, we're going to have that." The point is #ResignTrump is the right idea, but the wrong approach.

We have to use reverse psychology: instead of hashtags about how he should resign, we should fuck with him by making all our hashtags positive. Like, we still tweet at him about what a terrible job he's doing, but then we end with #DoingSuper! or #NotaColossalFailureasaHuman. Even if it doesn't work, we'll have the satisfaction of pushing him to ever increasing, vein-throbbing heights of frustration.

I call it the Duck Season/Rabbit Season approach,
and Trump of course would be the metaphorical Fudd.