Hot Young Comedians

Hot young Daniel Sloss

I discovered who Scottish comedian Daniel Sloss is today by way of The Atlantic story Daniel Sloss Shows How Comedians Should Talk About Rape.

It was an intriguing premise for an article but also, to be honest, there was a photo of Sloss in the article and I thought he was very cute.

And then I found images of him when he was ten years younger. WOW. He's like a cross between  young Malcolm McDowell and young Ewan McGregor. But funnier.

His hair is much shorter now. Why don't more men wear their hair long? They usually look so much sexier.

It made me think of Stewart Lee, one of the most brilliant comedians around.

Lee, whose biological father is Scottish, is 51 and is OK looking, for his age, but when he was in his 20s, he was very hot. 

I also thought of Sloss and Lee together because Sloss gave a mostly-serious TED talk in 2012 in which he defends comedians being offensive by using the standard  "just a joke" defense. 

Hot young Stewart Lee

One of the reasons why I think Stewart Lee is so brilliant is because he was able to critique that defense while being incredibly funny doing it, in his infamous Top Gear bit.

Lee introduces himself as a "frustrated, bitter, politically-correct middle-aged liberal" and I think Lee, more than anybody, demonstrates that you can be hysterically funny and politically correct.

But I am looking forward to seeing Sloss talk about rape.

It's hard to believe now, but even Louis CK was once fairly hot. When he had hair.

It's not all comedians who go so precipitously downhill - Jon Stewart is still handsome - it helps he still has an almost full head of hair.

Watergate & me

I came to awareness of the adult world during the age of Watergate.

My parents never spoke about politics to us kids, being fairly apolitical, if generally right-leaning, but my best friend Laura's mother was a fervent Democrat and I had been recruited by her to come along with her and Laura, putting George McGovern flyers in mailboxes around the neighborhood. My very first introduction to politics.

While I was attending Our Lady of Fatima school we had a school assembly with a lawyer, I have no idea why. But during the Q and A I took the opportunity to raise my hand and ask: "can you explain Watergate?"

As I remember it, this brought the house down - or at least the nuns and the lawyer laughed and shook their heads. I forgot what the lawyer said in response, but he did not explain Watergate. Looking back now, they were probably all Republicans and it was probably a distasteful subject to them.

One of my most enduring memories of Laura's mother was her spending hours every day on her sofa watching the Watergate hearings.

My family moved away from that neighborhood, to Pennsauken New Jersey, as the Watergate train rolled along and my adolescence kicked in. The book "All the President's Men" was release and the woman I babysat for had a copy so I read it. Then when I went on my first date with my first real boyfriend, I chose the film we would see - the movie version of "All the President's Men." I've watched that film several times since and went to an event - is it really almost eight years ago? - at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Redford, Woodward and Bernstein.

So now we have the Trump administration which seems will inevitably end in resignation or impeachment. Or given Trump's age and bad personal health habits, possibly a heart attack.

Although I wouldn't completely rule out the Trump presidency ending with Trump, one step ahead of treason proceedings, being granted asylum in Russia, while other people, including Jared and Ivanka, are left holding the bag.

MSNBC showed a video this weekend, "All the President's Men, Revisited." This was originally released in 2013 during the notably scandal-free second term of Barack Obama. And yet in spite of that, a recurring observation made by the interviewees (including Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart) is "this could happen again." And James Carville goes so far as to say:
"One thing about Watergate, it was going to change the culture of Washington. It did no such thing. Of course this kind of thing is going to happen again and it's going to happen on a much much bigger scale."

This was four years ago, when the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was still a punchline.

I belong to the blank generation

Richard Hell. He is now 67 years old.
It's just too hard to believe.

I followed a random train of internet links to this video of Johnny Thunders, whom you've probably not ever heard of. I only know who he is because an ex-boyfriend of mine was fascinated by the man, whose actual name was John Anthony Genzale Jr. and who died in 1991, which is pretty amazing, him living to be 39 when he was a notorious junkie. Although strangely enough he appears to have died of leukemia, rather than a drug overdose.

He was at one time in a band with Richard Hell but they clashed and Mr. Hell went onto record the immortal Blank Generation with The Voidoids.

Anyway, Thunders uses the term "douchebag" in the video which was recorded in 1984 and that prompted me to wonder when the term came into use as an insult. If I had to guess I would have said some time in the 1970s, but apparently it's been around for awhile, according to this article:

In the 1960s. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang traces the epithet douche to a 1968 collection of college slang compiled at Brown University, which defined the word as “a person who always does the wrong thing.” The insult douchebag is somewhat older. The 1939 novel Ninety Times Guilty includes a pimp named Jimmy Douchebag, and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang traces the epithetical usage to a 1946 journal article about military slang, which offered the definition “a military misfit.”

I think Jon Stewart probably did most to popularize it though. The term has always been hugely popular in New Jersey.

Colbert's homage to Jon Stewart

On June 14, Stephen Colbert did a bit about Donald Trump that recalled Jon Stewart's immortal parody of Glenn Beck.

 Jon Stewart's parody: 

Good enough to eat WTF?

There is a restaurant nearby called Good Enough to Eat and Jesus Christ there is always a line outside of this place. Is it that good? I will have to watch out for the next time I go by, and if there is no line go in and see what the big deal is.

I'm very tempted to go on April 22 for their special Passover menu. I haven't been to a Passover dinner since I broke up with my ex-husband which is a loooong time ago. But as I was perusing their menu I was getting nostalgic. I mean latkes - I can't remember the last time I had a latke but now I don't know why I haven't had one for so long - they were so good. I don't know if my ex-mother-in-law may she rest in peace was a great cook - she was better than my mother but that's not saying much. But I loved her latkes and blintzloaf and kugel - all kinds of kugel but I remember broccoli and apple the most. Damn that was some good stuff.  Ah memories. *sigh*

I wasn't crazy about the wine though. My parents weren't big drinkers and we never had wine around the house so literally my first experience drinking wine was at a Baranoff family Passover seder. Thanks to Mogen David it took me years to realize that wine could actually be delicious. But I'd gladly drink Mad Dog 20/20 again if I could have another one of those Passover meals.

Well Zabars is not too far away and I bet they have all that good stuff. Maybe I'll throw my own Passover dinner.

According to Jon Stewart, Zabars is "the second holiest site in Jewish religion."

Misogyny and the Hillary-hating Left

NEW FOR 2017: THE DIRTBAG LEFT

I was onto Doug Henwood's misogyny over a year ago when I tangled with him via a friend of a Facebook friend, but it's very gratifying to see others making public statements about his utter derangement on the subject of Hillary Clinton.

Henwood is the leading leftist Hillary hater - he hates Clinton so much he's willing to dig up the debunked Whitewater charges to do it, while insulting any of his critics who call him out for being an unethical crank as Gene Lyons found out:

Because he finds her too close to Wall Street and too hawkish on foreign policy, Henwood evidently feels it his moral duty to blacken Hillary Clinton's character. It's not enough to say she voted for the Iraq War and favored bombing Syria. Henwood had to dig up "Whitewater" to prove her a liar and a cheat. 

Then, after I wrote a column pointing out that almost everything he'd written about that phony scandal was nonsense, Henwood began calling me bad names on social media. "Clinton towel boy" was one. 

So I posted the following on his Facebook page:
"I find it interesting that when confronted with several quite basic factual errors in his description of the great Whitewater scandal of legend and song, Doug Henwood's response is name-calling. That tells me pretty much all I need to know about him. 

"However, it's false to say that the late Jim McDougal's savings and loan financed the Clintons' Whitewater investment. He didn't buy it until five years later. Another bank made the loan, for which both Clintons were jointly and severally responsible — meaning they'd have to pay it off regardless of what happened to McDougal or his other investments. Which they did. Whitewater cost the S&L nothing.

Henwood, like many men on the far Left - and their enablers like Henwood's wife Liza Featherstone and their good buddy Amber A'Lee Frost - just don't like feminists generally, unless they are, I guess, members of the proletariat and/or Marxists.

I first heard of Doug Henwood when he attacked the Fawcett Society as "bourgeois feminists"  on Facebook.

Doug HenwoodYesterday at 8:47am ·
Man, isn't this bourgeois feminism for you? T-shirts cost a nickel apiece (presumably that's printing cost, not the entire t-shirt), sell for $70.
http://gawker.com/women-making-70-feminist-shirts-in-factory-paid-under-1653799400

The Society has been around since 1866 fighting for women's rights. And apparently the story was wrong anyway:

UPDATE: Much to our relief, The Fawcett Society has confirmed that the “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” tee was not produced in a factory with unethical work conditions, as reported by Dazed Digital. “We have been particularly pleased to receive evidence that 100% of workers are paid above the government-mandated minimum wage and all workers are paid according to their skills and years of service,” said Fawcett’s Eva Neitzert to Dazed of the factory in which the garments were made. “The standard working week is 45 hours, and workers are compensated (at a higher rate of pay) for any overtime worked."

If Henwood has apologized for smearing this venerable organization I have yet to discover any evidence. 

Henwood's attitude is described pretty well by this passage in Michelle Goldberg's piece in Slate, Men Explain Hillary to Me:

Of course, people of good faith are going to disagree about individual examples of sexism. What’s immensely frustrating, however, is to realize how many ostensibly enlightened men think that gender can ever be totally disaggregated from Clinton’s efforts to become the first female president. They seem to believe that their class politics exempt them from taking sexism seriously. They certainly don’t care about female leadership.

I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise; as long as feminism has existed, left-wing men have dismissed it as a bourgeois triviality. Now we know how little things have changed. For that, at least, we can thank these men for educating us.

Goldberg  doesn't mention Henwood by name, but Sady Doyle (whom I've admired for a long time) does in her piece in  Global Comment Hating Hillary: The One Thing Left and Right Men Can Agree On:

You know Hillary-hate. You’ve seen it before: It’s Tucker Carlson proclaiming that “when she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” It’s Chris Matthews scolding Clinton, when she criticized Bush’s homeland security spending in 2005, by saying that “you look more witchy when you’re doing it like this.” It is sainted progressive icon Jon Stewart getting huge laughs, off a shot of Clinton smiling politely, with the line “that look is where boners go to die.”
And it goes on, and gets worse, until Hillary is not just portrayed as an ugly, mean old lady these dudes don’t want to fuck, but as an actual monster. Hillary-hate is the fact that, while Clinton was grieving the suicide of her friend Vince Foster, Republicans spread rumors that she had seduced and murdered him. Hillary-hate is Maureen Dowd calling Clinton “Godzilla” and “Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.” Hillary-hate is the not-remotely-subtle implication that Clinton abuses her husband, spread by the New York Post; next to a photo of Clinton with her mouth wide open at a Benghazi hearing, they ran the headline “NO WONDER BILL’S AFRAID.” Hillary-hate is the persistent, bizarre need for major media outlets to go along with Dowd’s calling Clinton the “50-Foot Woman” and to make Clinton look scary by portraying her as superhumanly huge: On the cover of TIME as a rampaging, pantsuited giantess the size of a skyscraper (photographed in the act of stepping on a powerless man, of course) or on the cover of the New York Times Magazine as some sort of Lovecraftian elder God the size of a planet.
Hillary-hate is Nation contributing editor Doug Henwood, greeting Clinton’s candidacy, this time around, with a book cover in which she is portrayed as a murderer aiming a gunat either (a) you, the reader, (b) the Democratic party, or quite possibly (c) Democracy itself.
Henwood turned out to be my breaking point, for this particular hate-wave. He provided the moment when I found out what happens on the other side of dread; when the anxiety of my internal monologue (they’re going to do it to her again; they’re going to do it to her again; they’re doing it to her again) broke, and clarified.
I don’t care if I have to end my career, end my friendships, or end my life with a Twitter-fight-induced heart attack, is what I thought, on the other side of fear. If there is anything I can do about this, they will not get away with doing it again.

Doug Henwood, as thin-skinned as they come, of course  has to jump on to attack Doyle:

She has no idea what Henwood thinks of Clinton if she's incapable of Googling "Henwood" and "Hillary" and finding the article in Harpers, mentioned by Lyons, entitled: Stop Hillary!

Amber A'Lee Frost also attacked Doyle in the Baffler in a piece meant primarily to hype the forthcoming hate-Hillary books of her good friends Henwood and Featherstone:

That so many established feminists appear to favor one exceptionally rich and powerful woman over the millions of women in dire need—many struggling as a direct result of horrifying policies of Bill’s that Hillary still supports to this day—is alarming to me. Sady Doyle, a self­-identified socialist who supports Clinton nonetheless, says that “the gendered nastiness coming unilaterally from Sanders’s camp doesn’t make me feel I can vote for him in any scenario.”

Established feminists are favoring Clinton as a presidential candidate. And I'm sure you could easily dig up objectionable actions on any other candidate, even Saint Bernie Sanders. 

Happy Blogger-versary!

Wow, here it is, 10 years since my first blog post on November 2, 2005. 

Since that date:

My former partner and I won against Edward Einhorn and his copyright scheme ~ I wrote an article for the Dramatists Guild here. I got to know playwright David Ives a little since he was editing the Guild magazine at time. And I got an anecdote about David Ives and the bullwhip out of that one.

I did lots of self-productions which can be seen at my Mergatroyd site. One of them, Jane Eyre, nearly drove me into bankruptcy. And I became an award-winning playwright.

I turned NYCPlaywrights into a money-making venture instead of a money-losing venture. Of course it is not a lot of money. But it's still better than losing money.

I wrote sonnets because I was in unrequited love with a complete mediocrity. You're never too old to be a fool for love. But I did enjoy writing the sonnets. And some of them are not bad.

I got my first booty call, and from the son of a movie star yet. I did not take him up on it.

Obama became president Oh, yeah, that. Kind of a big deal. I was very excited when it happened, although I had been rooting for Hillary during the primaries. But I liked Obama too, and I think he's proven to be an unusually effective president, in spite of the hideousness of the Republican party.

I often expressed my love for Jon Stewart. And Paul Krugman. And my contempt for Ayn Rand, New Atheists and Social Justice Warriors.

I lived through unemployment and cancer, as well as being personally lied about and smeared by identitarian bully Mikki Kendall and famously bad movie director/producer Andrew Bellware.

I have received responses to this blog from the dread Daphne Merkin and from the cool yet somewhat out-there Cindy Gallop, as well as Santa Claus.

My proudest moment for this blog was when I contributed to preventing the greater mainstreaming of professional bio-racist Razib Khan.


Some blog statistics from blogger - unfortunately they only go back to 2010 so they're not entirely accurate over the last 10 years.

My 10 most popular posts of all time. #4, about Schopenhauer, is pretty surprising.

Damn my accursed principles!!!! Jun 3, 2008	3395
Stupid shit that Social Justice Warriors say, Flav... Mar 4, 2014, 2 comments	2080
Intact Gallery Aug 28, 2010	1994
Six Questions for Arthur Schopenhauer Nov 13, 2011	1773
Razib Khan and his continuing successful quest for... Jan 9, 2013, 6 comments	1476
Social Justice Warrior smear campaign: Sarah Kendz... Jun 12, 2014, 8 comments	1376
Don't Let Me Down Oct 18, 2011	1175
On being smeared by the Mad Gastronomer and Karny... Jun 30, 2012, 4 comments	957
miffed at the New Yorker, Steven Pinker calls for ... Nov 30, 2011, 15 comments	858
more confirmation that Richard Dawkins is a gigant... Jul 6, 2011, 2 comments	818

Top Countries by Pageview

United States

200239

France

15618

United Kingdom

15403

Russia

13245

Germany

12107

Ukraine

9676

Canada

8978

Australia

3231

China

2486

India

1874

Surprising that a French-speaking country is ahead of the UK.

Number of blog posts per year according to my archives. Clearly 2011 was my big blogging year so far. And since 2008 I have been averaging over one blog post per day.

• ►  2015 (297)

• ►  2014 (371)

• ►  2013 (372)

• ►  2012 (377)

• ►  2011 (427)

• ►  2010 (398)

• ►  2009 (347)

• ►  2008 (400)

• ►  2007 (136)

• ►  2006 (218)

• ►  2005 (49)