Joe Walsh

And Skippy the Wonder Dog, who can ride a bicycle!  Tune in at 11 to see it!
 
(They seem to throw in that one positive story, usually at the tail end of the news broadcast.)

Welcome back, HM!  I'm glad you're feeling better and able to do a little more now. It'll be nice seeing you around the 'net again.

Sometimes I think that the picking and choosing of what makes it into the news and how prominently it does so, is more dangerous than the fabricated stuff. If I look at, say, reuters.com (which I consider a reasonably straight news site), and then look at, say, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, the Huffington Post, and Breitbart, I see that each is often projecting its own worldview in which stories they choose to put where. Something that's a screaming headline on one will be a minor item on another...or go ignore completely. So even if the stories behind them were told in a completely straight way, readers would get a completely different picture of the world just from reading one site or the other.  And then of course the stories often are slanted one way or another, with one aspect or another of them emphasized over another. Or take local news.  If yours is anything like mine, it's all about car crashes, fires, violent deaths...the dangers lurking in the sponge on your kitchen sink...black mold in your bathroom is going to kill you...and so on. Fear, fear, death, death! (Aside from celebrity news, sports, and weather, of course.)
 
I think we end up being affected by this daily emphasizing of certain aspects of the world much more so than the blatantly false stores. Not that the wild stories have no effect. In the short term, they can have a tremendous effect. But in the long term, I suspect it's the distorted views of the world shown by our media that have the greatest effect on us.

Thanks for the kind words of encouragement everyone. Today is the first chance I have had to be in front of a full size keyboard in over a week and it feels good!
 
I had a reoccurance of Melanoma cancer... this time in my brain. Probably a lucky break since the symptoms presented like a stroke. They've cut out the big/easy piece and have just done a hires/3d MRI of my brain stem so they can target with radiation next week. The next big hurdle is the results a PET scan of eveything else in a couple of weeks.
 
I am much better than just few days ago. The fine motor dexterity and strength of my right hand is the biggest issue right now. Typing this was good exercise.
 
I know I am not a frequent contributor to this part of the forum but you guys always put a smile on my face.
 
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Be sure to have yourselves checked for skin cancer!!!
 

HM
 

In my ideal world, as many districts as possible would be gerrymandered to become competitive for both parties. I hate safe districts, right or left. They just distort the process.

Partly, yes, there are the bigots and racists. But isn't there also a broader group of people who have watched the rest of the world pulling away from them economically and feel like no one cares that they're slipping into poverty from the working or middle class backgrounds they grew up with? I get the sense that those are the people who are the broad base of the Trump coalition.

Partly, yes, there are the bigots and racists. But isn't there also a broader group of people who have watched the rest of the world pulling away from them economically and feel like no one cares that they're slipping into poverty from the working or middle class backgrounds they grew up with? I get the sense that those are the people who are the broad base of the Trump coalition.

Partly, yes, there are the bigots and racists. But isn't there also a broader group of people who have watched the rest of the world pulling away from them economically and feel like no one cares that they're slipping into poverty from the working or middle class backgrounds they grew up with? I get the sense that those are the people who are the broad base of the Trump coalition.

So, populist xenophobe Geert Wilders had a bad day today. I'm hoping that France and Germany will similarly reject nationalism, and restore some sanity to at least one continent.

Yeah, it is unfortunate that we must so often grade on a curve when it comes to superhero-oriented tv shows.

I think a twelve-site national BBQ tour, sampling different regions' styles, would be an event to consider.

Maybe so, but this is Jed and Maurissa's baby, other than the pilot episode.

Ugh...surgery is one of the things you least want to have at all, let alone as a surprise!  I'm glad he's doing better and hope he recovers fully very soon.

There's probably some principle of moving goalposts here, though: "Working 27 hours a day so you can pay for healthcare is unhealthy, so we're going to push your premiums up so you need to eat cheap process-recovered food padded out with carcinogens to keep your food bills down enough to be able to afford the cost of health insurance. But eating that crap is even more unhealthy, so we're going to increase your premium so you have to scrimp on the heating/aircon, which increases your chance of sickness, so we're going to up your contribution again..."

Yeah, it's pretty clear Snyder's approach is that if X isn't working, the solution is to add more X but dialed up to 11.
 
I can't disagree with this statement, but I think the problems go much deeper than that. Loyalty to the source material aside, the DC/WB movies just aren't very good. They're overstuffed and confusing, full of uninteresting characters that lack motivation, relatability, or narrative agency who don't change in any meaningful way and are overshadowed by empty spectacle and Big Emotional Moments that haven't been earned. You could theoretically make a decent movie where Superman is an entitled douche; us fanboys would've cried that it's not the real Superman, but the broader moviegoing audience wouldn't necessarily care. It's not just that they aren't making good Superman movies - they're just not making good movies period.

Four episodes in, I'm really enjoying Legion. Blows away all the other supers shows on traditional TV.

...aaaand done! The Hawaiian Mythology chapter of Mythic Hero is now complete. Clocking in at 28,000 words, it features five gods with character sheets, dozens of others without, a whole mess of heroes, several monsters, and a complete system of Hawaiian magic.


 


Well, OK, to be fair, I have three or four more books I want to read -- but for some damn fool reason I didn't bring them out to the RV along with all the others. So I'll take care of that this summer after I'm back in the house.


 


On to the next chapter: Canaanite Mythology! A somewhat broad and sometimes vague topic, but I think I can handle it. That oughtta be enough to hold me until I'm back in the house, but if not I have books on Incan and Inuit mythology out here too.

Four episodes in, I'm really enjoying Legion. Blows away all the other supers shows on traditional TV.

Four episodes in, I'm really enjoying Legion. Blows away all the other supers shows on traditional TV.

Even if you've never heard of the Punisher...it's still a skull.  If your headquarters is shaped like a skull,if you wear skull masks, if there are skulls insignia on your uniform, if you have skulls on your vehicles...
 

Aside from weepy tweets, I don't think he's doing much these days so he has time.

Luke, Misty, Shades, and of course Claire Temple were all great.

After watching the documentary Cocaine Cowboys about Miami in the late 70s and 80s, I got a yen to watch Miami Vice again and its surprising how well it holds up.  One of the things they noted in Cocaine Cowboys is that the Miami Vice production team would take some crappy run down building and turn it into one of those deco spots, then leave it fixed up.  They changed Miami, how it looks and feels.