Wednesday Night Open Thread

Some artists only have one really big hit. This former porn star finally broke into music in 1976 and had a massive hit. She had a few top ten dance/disco hits, but nothing anywhere near as big on the Hot 100 as this one.

Medical issues ended her music career and turning 40 halted her porn career. She worked as a psychic and a drug counselor. Andrea True (nee Truden) continued to earn royalties from the song for years until her death at age 68 in 2011.

[The YouTube]

What’s been on your mind? Got something you’d like to share? A topic to discuss? It’s Wednesday Night Open Thread.

Who wants to start?

IMAO Time Machine: Fun Facts About the 50 States: Virginia

This is a reposting of one of Harvey’s classics. There’s a link to the book in the sidebar. — The Editors


Welcome to Fun Facts About the 50 States, where – week by week – I’ll be taking you on a tour around this great nation of ours, providing you with interesting, yet completely useless and probably untrue, information about each of the 50 states.

This week, we’ll be scammed into buying a “genuine” George Washington cherry-tree-choppin’ ax as we visit Virginia. So let’s get started…


Virginia state flag
The flag of Virginia celebrates the proper method of humiliating tyrants – having them get beaten up by a girl.
  • The state motto of Virginia is “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” which is Latin for “No, seriously, the Waltons were fictional. Stop asking about them.”
  • George Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia in 1732. He’s famous for being the first President, the father of his country, and the first white man to rap under the name Vanilla Ice.
  • Thomas Jefferson was born in Shadwell, Virginia in 1743. His first draft of the Declaration of Independence was blunt but concise: “King George – You suck. We’re outta here. – The Colonies.”
  • Considering they used the letter “f” instead of “s” back in those days, it’s probably better that he went with the longer version.
  • 28th President Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia in 1856. Despite the fact that his administration brought income taxes, WWI, Prohibition, and the horrors of women’s suffrage, history still remembers him kindly. Probably because he never violated the Constitutional separation of intern and cigar.
  • Being the largest of the colonies, Virginia was named in honor of England’s “Virgin Queen,” Elizabeth I. The tiny state to the north was named for her slutty cousin, Mary.
  • The state song of Virginia is “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia,” which was chosen by one vote over “Like A Virgin.”
  • Virginia’s early settlers got the idea to plant tobacco after they were first welcomed ashore by Indians holding up signs saying “You’ve come a long way, baby!”
  • The colony of Jamestown, Virginia, was founded for the purpose of producing silk, which was shipped to England to help King James indulge his not-as-secret-as-he-thought fetish for women’s underwear.
  • The first peanuts grown in the US were grown in Virginia. Trust me, you DON’T want to know what King James did with THOSE.
  • Three of the first four US presidents were born in Virginia. They were the original Patriots’ Dynasty.
  • The state capital of Virginia – Richmond – was also the capital of the Confederacy. Most of the people in Virginia wish it still were.
  • The Dogwood is Virginia’s state tree, state flower, and state euphemism for a canine erection.
  • The American Revolution ended with the surrender of Cornwallis in Yorktown, Virginia. The terms of the surrender included having Cornwallis stand in the town square naked and shout “I stink! I am a senile, bucktoothed old mummy, with bony girl arms and I smell like an elephant’s butt!”
  • Some historians cite this as the root cause of the war of 1812.
  • Two iron-clad ships, the Monitor and the Virginia (called “Merrimack” by dirty stinkin’ Yankees), fought for 12 hours at Hampton Roads, Virginia on March 9th, 1862. The battle was inconclusive, but proved one thing: getting a cannonball through metal armor was like trying to get a tax cut through a Democratic congress.
  • 2000 of the Civil War’s battles were fought in Virginia…. 3000, if you count the times Robert E. Lee’s wife whacked him with a rolling pin.
  • In Virginia, more people work for the US government than any other industry.
  • Um… well… leastwise they have more people listed on their payroll.
  • The world’s largest shipyard is in Newport News, Virginia. Their dry-dock facility alone is large enough to hold 3 aircraft carriers, or a week’s supply of donuts for Michael Moore.
  • The Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia is the largest office building in the world. It has over 5000 fax machines, all which are destined to someday be taken out into a field and smashed with a baseball bat as angry hip-hop music plays in the background.
  • Contrary to the popular story, the first Thanksgiving was actually held in Virginia’s Berkley Plantation colony in 1619. 90 Indian braves were invited to the feast as thanks for their help during the previous year’s harsh winter. Those 90 later burned the village to the ground as revenge for being made to sit at the kiddie table.
  • The Great Dismal Swamp is a wasteland of foul muck located near Virginia’s border with North Carolina, and is NOT a nickname for Washington, D.C.
  • Don’t feel bad. A LOT of people make that mistake.
  • Thomas Jefferson designed the home where he spent his final years – Monticello – which can be seen on the back of the nickel. If you look closely, you can see Jefferson yelling at some kids to get off his lawn.
  • George Washington’s home – Mount Vernon – is NOT shown on the back of the quarter since all the pink flamingos on his lawn were deemed “too un-presidential.”
  • The world’s only oyster museum is located on Chincoteague Island, Virginia. It celebrates history’s greatest oysters, including playwright Oyster Wilde and Supreme Court Justice Oyster Wendell Holmes.
  • On April 9, 1865, at the Appomattox Court House, Virginia, the Civil War ended when General Robert E. Lee was forced to surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant after Lee foolishly chose rock to Grant’s paper.
  • St. John’s church in Richmond, Virginia, was where Patrick Henry famously said “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Some historians consider this story a mere legend, however, and insist that what he actually said was “Give me freedom, or give me severe nasal congestion with a headache and slight fever!”
  • The Atlantic headquarters of NATO is located in Norfolk, Virginia. For those who don’t know, NATO is sorta like the UN, except with weapons and testicles.

That wraps up the Virginia edition of Fun Facts About the 50 States. Next week we’ll be paying 35 dollars for one stinking martini at the top of the Space Needle as we visit Washington.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go… Hey! Look!… Dogwood!.


[The complete e-book version of “Fun Facts About the 50 States” is now available at Amazon.com. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can download free Kindle apps for your web browser, smartphone, computer, or tablet from Amazon.com]

Straight Line of the Day: There’s a New “Dr. Doolittle” Out. What Might Animals Say To Us?

Straight Line of the Day: There’s a new “Dr. Doolittle” out. What might animals say to us?


Caption This! Baby it’s you

That time of the week to once again test your captioning super powers.

Caption This! 

Random Thoughts: Rise of the Skywalker and Iran

President Trump being removed from office is fine. Him being re-elected and serving another term is also fine. I’m not pretending either one will lead to great change in our ailing political system.

Here’s some of my favorite lines from Rise of the Skywalker:

“This new Death Star will be twice as big as the one that was twice as big making it DOUBLE TWICE AS BIG!”

“Looks like we got ourselves some wars up here in the stars… some real STAR WARS.”

“That’s how we’re gonna win. Not by fighting what we hate. But saving what we love.”
“Stop saying that or I’ll fight you because I hate you.”

“Why are you tweeting trollish things as Luke?”
“I’m trying to get a RISE OF THE SKYWALKER.”
“But he’s dead.”

“He took everything from us! Our hopes! Our dreams!”
“Emperor Palpatine?”
“No, Rian Johnson.”

“I’m Poe Dameron, cocky, hot shot pilot. Anyone have anything for me to do? No? I’ll just stand around and wait, then.”

“What are you going to do now, General Leia?”
“I have to go now. My planet needs me.”
“But your planet was blown up.”
NOTE: Leia died on the way back to her home planet

“Okay, Bernie. Here’s a marshmallow. If you can resist eating it now, you’ll get a second one in 10 minutes.”
immediately scarfs up the marshmallow
“I want another one.”
“You can’t because you ate that one now.”
shakes fist in the air
“Billionaires!”

The Last Jedi fixed Star Wars like Obamacare fixed health care.

Trump’s been impeached. Hopefully that will motivate him to take a hard look at himself and figure out why he’s just so awesome that everyone can’t stop hating on him.

So much of the cultural stuff now is people running around yelling “Two plus two equals five!” and regular people deciding whether it’s worth the headache to say, “No. That’s stupid.”

“As long as they’re not teaching my kids math, whatever.”

Biological sex is something religious fundamentalists made up in the 1950s.

Maybe I don’t understand impeachment but when does Merrick Garland become president?

Nothing I love more than hearing millionaires complain about billionaires.

One of the important thing billionaires do is get useless people to obsess about them instead of some other dumb thing.

If I were a billionaire, I’d tweet that biological sex is a real thing and watch the world tear itself apart.

As terrible as Trump is, you’d think it would be easy to be a critic of his and not be worse than him, but apparently that’s very hard.

goes to cancel Humble Monthly subscription
“I literally have 300 unplayed Steam games and about an hour of game playing time a week.”
“We’ll give you $3 off if you stay.”
“Well, I’d be stupid not to.”

Star Wars Episode VII: Here’s a Bunch of New Plot Threads
Star Wars Episode VIII: Those Plot Threads Are Dumb
Star Wars Episode IX: No, You’re Dumb

A version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” where the threats about figgy pudding become increasingly detailed and violent.

“The cops won’t be in time to save you!
The cops won’t be in time to save you!
The cops won’t be in time to save you!
So do as we say!”

John says “God is love.”
It’s interesting to think that God’s central power is one accessible to us.

I think it was a good idea for Disney to do Star Wars stand-alone movies, but the problem was they accidentally labeled one “Episode VIII.”

Disney+ should add an “Are you sure?” prompt when anyone attempts to play one of the Star Wars prequels.

“Rose, are you going to come with us?”
“No, General Leia says I need to stay here to study Star Destroyer specs and I have to wear a soundproof bag over my head so I can be neither seen nor heard.”
“Yeah, that’s probably for the best.”

Rose had way too much screen time in Rise of the Skywalker. They should have killed her off in the opening crawl. Should have just added to the end: “BTW, Tico Rose fell down the stairs and died. It was a while ago, so no one is going to mention it.”

I was actually rather indifferent to Rose in TLJ except for that last part where she rams Finn and gives a speech about love. That was one of the worst things in all of Star Wars. It was like a rejected line from the Holiday Special.

To be honest, even when I thought Little Women was part of the “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” universe, I still wasn’t that interested in seeing it.

Watched Ford v Ferrari which is about the rivalry of Henry Ford and Enzo Ferrari and how they decided to settle who was the best car maker with a no-holds-barred cage match. Essentially, it’s the story of the invention of the piledriver.

“It’s like the plot from Cats, but instead of being about cats, it’s about little women.” -pitch for Little Women

“Market research for our Women movie is really positive. The main complaint is that regular-sized women are kind of intimidating. If we can find a fix for that, I think we have a hit on our hands.” -brainstorm that eventually led to the movie Little Women

Palpatine is always saying “Give into your hatred and strike me down!” which is a total trap. Me, I’d kill Palpatine with my lightsaber, but I’d kind of shrug as I did it. See, I’m not giving into my hatred; I don’t even really care.

Nice how The Mandalorian has given us two ways to abruptly end a conversation: “I have spoken” and “This is the way.” The second seems more polite as it involves an implicit agreement between both sides.

I assume season 2 of The Mandalorian will introduce Baby Yoda’s arch-nemesis, Baby Palpatine.
“The attempt to make me take a nap has left me scarred and deformed.”
“Spank me, and your journey to the dark side will be complete.”
“UNLIMITED CANDY!”

The most intellectually rigorous writers on the other side are the ones who most agree with me.

spends a century in conflict so your kids don’t have to deal with nazism or communism
KIDS: “Look at these brand new ideas we’ve never heard of, nazism and communism!”

If people want to defend themselves with guns, it’s extremely tyrannical to threaten government force to prevent that.

Everyone believes a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun and it’s dumb anyone pretends that’s controversial. If anyone disbelieved it, anti-gun people would start by trying to disarm the government.

Anyone who get scared about you having a gun will get scared at you exercising your other rights as well.

It’s extremely dumb to ban guns from a place unless you’re going to enforce that ban with metal detectors and armed security.

I had completely forgotten about the part of Benghazi where the Obama administration lied to us and told us it was because of some YouTube video no one saw.

The 00’s and 10’s don’t seem to me like distinct decades in the ways the 80’s and 90’s are.

I saw Little Women. It was well done, but I got confused by the time jumps and just a bit bored by the — I don’t know how you say this — lack of Die Hard-ness… if you get my meaning.
I mean, the Civil War was going on, but there wasn’t one action sequence. Who wrote that?

Democrats say they want to stop people from shooting up a church but they’ll settle for disarming Jack Wilson.

If Iranians don’t want to lose their supreme commanders, maybe keep them in Irania.

I remember seeing the pilot to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and thinking “Wow! How is she going to start her stand up comedian career while being a single mother taking care of two kids?” Ends up, step one was forget she has kids.

It’s kinda funny thinking of a bunch of Millennials getting drafted to fight a war.
That’s another comedy premise, like Donald Trump being elected president.

I didn’t know Soleimani and he didn’t owe me money so I’m kind of neutral on this whole thing.

The problem with chanting “Death to America!” every day is how do you up the ante when America blows up your general? “Death to America… and we mean it this time! Totally not perfunctory!”

So on the scale of “millions will die,” is Trump blowing up that general as bad as ending Net Neutrality or is it as bad as the tax cuts?

I’m reading this parenting book that’s all about validating your kids’ feelings and I’m like if this is what it takes to get kids to behave, it ain’t even worth it.
“Here’s a little life lesson, boy: Ain’t nobody care bout your feelings, so learn to get over yourself.”

My national security doubts about the Soleimani killing are failing to persuade. So as a farm boy let me offer a different analogy. Growing up, we’d catch badgers in a sack. I hated them but I learned that sticking my face in the sack and yelling at them makes the problems worse.
Now, I wasn’t a very good farmer. I could never help with the crops because of all my badger related injuries.
The others would say to me, “Can’t you just leave the badgers alone?”
And I’d say, “No. Because they started this. They started this by being badgers.”
So I decided to try something new and got a sledgehammer. It’s not easy to hit a squirming sack full of badgers, though. I accidentally just tore the bag and they got out. And they were mad.
Long story short, the farm went bankrupt and I had to learn to code. Anyway, I hope this all clarifies how we should handle Iran.

Little baby Winchester has learned to fake laugh and does it all the time now. It feels like I’m part of some really early Joker origin story.

Star Wars Episode I is so bizarre. The humor seems like it’s aimed at 4 year olds, but the prominent words in the first paragraph of the opening crawl are “taxation” and “trade routes.”

I hope Hollywood can survive being told exactly what everyone thinks of them.

I liked the Mr. Rogers movie, but it was distracting that I kept seeing shades of David S. Pumpkins in Tom Hanks’s portrayal of Fred Rogers.

But no WWIII means Trump wins.

As an important influencer with a blue check mark, I think one of the most important services Twitter can provide is protecting us from the opinions of people without blue check marks.

I know Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg are unlikely to win, but the most hilarious outcome of the Democratic primary would be Bernie Sanders losing to a billionaire.

Did Paul Krugman really win a Nobel Prize? He just seems like the sort of guy who regularly gets tricked by squirrels.

Oh, he won a Nobel Memorial Prize.

I’ve watched 3 seasons of The Crown and I still don’t understand in the slightest what’s going on with this whole Meghan Markle business.

I think delaying the impeachment really taught Trump a lesson. He’ll probably be a very good president from here on.

It’s good to get a living wage. The worst is a kill-you-instantly wage. As soon as you get your paycheck, you drop dead.

I think Democrats can ride “It’s Trump fault Iran accidentally shot down an airplane since Trump killed that terrorist” all the way to the White House in 2020.

My 6yo son’s commentary on Jar Jar: “That frog never helps anyone.”

My 6yo son’s commentary on The Last Jedi: “Luke is mean.”

I think the best acted parts of The Irishman were the parts where they were acting like they were very old. Quite convincing.

My favorite part of The Two Popes where was the one guy exclaimed, “I’m seeing double… four popes!”

The Two Popes is the sort of movie that can only get made with a company like Netflix who gives directors a lot of freedom. All the major studios wanted at least eight popes.

Oscars

By Source, Fair use, Link

It took me a couple of days to look over the list of Oscar nominations. I care only because I actually do like movies. Well, if I can find a good one.

Some time back, I took on a project of watching all the Oscar winning movies (Best Picture) and even went so far as to obtain copies of all of them. Of the Best Picture winners in the 91 Academy Award presentations to date, I own 92 of the winners.

How does that math work? Well, some of you movie trivia people know that there were actually two winners that first year: Wings, and Sunrise. Sunrise is the better of the two. There were two separate (but equal) awards given. Wings won Outstanding Picture, while Sunrise won Best Unique and Artistic Picture. The Academy considered them equal awards. The next year, they did away with the Best Unique and Artistic Picture category, and retroactively declared Wings to be the top film. Changing history isn’t a new thing for Hollywood, as you can see.

Anyway, whatever film wins the award for Best Picture will get added to my collection, because I’ve continued to build my Best Picture library. Because movies, I suppose.

I looked over the list of films nominated for Best Picture, and noticed that of the nine films nominated, I’ve seen exactly zero of them:

  • Ford v Ferrari
  • The Irishman
  • Jojo Rabbit
  • Joker
  • Little Women
  • Marriage Story
  • 1917
  • Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
  • Parasite

I have two previous versions of Little Women: the 1933 version with Katherine Hepburn and Joan Bennett, as well as the 1949 version with Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret O’Brien, June Allyson, and Janet Leigh. I don’t know why I’d need another version. I suppose someone thought they could improve upon a film starring those nobodies, huh?

I might take a look at 1917, and possibly Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Or not.

So, what about other nominees? That is, films nominated in other categories? Have I seen any of them? Turns out I have. I’ve seen Best Animated Feature Film nominee Toy Story 4.

And that’s it. Of all the movies nominated for any Academy Award, I’ve only seen Toy Story 4. And, yes, I’m including the Best Score category in which John Williams’ score from The Rise of Skywalker is nominated. I haven’t seen a new Star Wars film since The Force Awakens. And I haven’t seen that Marvel comic book movie, Avengers: Endgame which was nominated for Best Visual Effects.

As I said, I’ll get the winners of the major categories (Picture, Animated Feature, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Screenplays), like I do every year. But, as is often the case, the winners aren’t really the best movies.

Here’s where you come in. Of the movies nominated for any Oscar, which are actually worth seeing, or even owning? Help me spend my money.