Friday, April 29, 2016

Prince, RIP

Another icon from my high school days is gone. Not that I'm all torn up and taking a week off work to deal or anything. I (sorta) liked a few of his songs, never saw him perform, never saw the movie Purple Rain, and pretty much never knowingly listened to any music he recorded after 1984. Jeff Kay had a nice bit on the new fake-grieving-for-celebrities-we've-never-met phenomenon:

I blame Facebook. In fact, I blame Facebook for a lot of things. I believe it’s ruined the world in certain ways. Everybody’s a show-off now, doing some kind of weird and pathetic performance art. The same thing happened when David Bowie died. Everybody was in a race to out-grieve each other:

“When I heard Bowie died, I couldn’t stop crying for a solid hour…”

“That’s nothing. When I heard Bowie died I cried for three days.”

“Well, you must not be as big a fan as I am. ‘Cause when I heard Bowie died I had to take a leave of absence from my job, and check into a mental institution in upstate New York.”

Heh. Even without having been on FB for over six months, I could probably come up with a list of people who are, even as I type this, boohoo-ing all over the place about losing a genius like Prince and who are unable to name a single song he recorded other than Purple Rain.

Anyway.

The political farce of our presidential "election season" continues on its merry way. It now looks like Bernie is up in smoke. Anyone with a greater-than-room-temperature IQ knew that was the preordained outcome. Really, it's quite remarkable that he hung on as long as he did. There's probably a message in there for the Democratic Party establishment, but I doubt very much that they are listening. Meanwhile, the Queen of Toads is busy putting the finishing touches on her inauguration speech, confident she can sweep past whoever ends up as the Republican Party candidate.

Meanwhile, the country club Republicans are openly stating they would rather destroy what's left of the Republican Party than have The Donald as their candidate. Not that Trump really needs the Republican Party to run a presidential campaign, but he can't run a winning presidential campaign without it. Personally, I figured he would have died in some sort of "accident" by now. The country clubbers likely already tried that and botched it like they've screw up everything else they touch.

Whatever happens, nothing substantive is going to change. The oligarchs will continue to strip the place to the bare walls. If we're real lucky, we'll get someone like Putin to really shake things up in 2020 or 2024, but I ain't holding my breath.

I don't know who is in charge over at Hulu, but they need to be fired. ASAP. They took a relatively simple, straight-forward website and turned it into a complete piece of crap. As usual. Ya know what would be nice, Hulu? Instead of spending wads of money on geeks who do nothing but wreck your site and frustrate customers who have stuck by you since day one, why don't you use some of that money to free 20-year-old shows from behind your iron curtain? If I'm going to pay to watch old TV shows, I certainly won't be paying someone who is going to force me to watch commercials as well. Screw that.

Better yet, I'll just read a book.

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