One long weekend.

As befits a weekend with too much rich food and drink, I probably spent too much time thinking about Wonder Woman. The oddly named “WW84” is streaming on HBO, so I watched it, and while it wasn’t totally terrible, I had many nits to pick with it, mostly about the production design, but that’s just picky me:

I didn’t mention my questions about the WW armor that Diana Prince puts on for the climax. It’s special armor, we’re told, made centuries ago to protect their fiercest warrior, and all I could think was: Good thing those two had the same cup size, because otherwise? Whoa, problems for the armor-fitters.

These thoughts probably arrived because I’ve been following Cora Harrington, who writes about lingerie. She had some thoughts about Bridgerton, the Shonda Rimes series on Netflix:

Cora has some thoughts about “tightlacing,” i.e., the yank-and-pull technique of forcing women’s waists to insane smallness, essentially that the corsets of the “Bridgerton” era wouldn’t have allowed it because they didn’t have metal grommets yet. It’s that sort of attention to detail that Twitter makes room for, and I love it.

So, the hoooollllliday. It’s half over. Lots of people have the week between off, and in journalism, traditionally these are the days for year-in-review features, Those We Lost roundups, and all the rest of the space-fillers. Not this year! It’s all about President Shit-for-Brains and whether he might a) make a run for this martial-law thing; or b) play golf through the Covid relief package, etc. Also, a huge explosion that destroyed a huge chunk of historic Nashville center city. Nothing like a giant-explosion suicide on Christmas morning to get the nation’s attention. Talk about an exit.

If it turns out this dude was terrified of 5G technology and thought it was a cause of Covid, look for the “let’s not politicize this tragic act of violence” to start in 3,2,1.

This is a week we should all be off — from paying attention, from blowing up RVs, from doing anything other than cooking.

I wish I had more to report, but that was the weekend: Calories + movies + occasional glimpses at the news.

Equals: Glad it’s over. Let’s head into the interregnum.

Posted at 9:05 pm in Current events |
 

41 responses to “One long weekend.”

  1. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on December 27, 2020 at 9:32 pm

    I’m watching the original “Ocean’s 11” on TCM, and amazed at how . . . slowwwww it is.

    Haven’t seen the new one, either. I bet it moves faster, though. Could be wrong!

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  2. basset said on December 27, 2020 at 9:57 pm

    Got the nation’s attention, but not our President’s. Friday was what, the 309th or something time he’s hit the golf course during his term?

    Watching Canadian tow truck drivers on the Weather Channel.

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  3. Deborah said on December 27, 2020 at 10:02 pm

    Speaking of movies, I watched a good one tonight on Amazon Prime. Someone on Twitter that I follow recommended it today and I think I may have seen it back in the mid-90s when it was made, I don’t know why but I didn’t remember much of it, It’s called “Smoke”, with Harvey Keitel, Forrest Whitacre, William Hurt, Stockard Channing and a young black actor I don’t recall his name. It was excellent, I highly recommend it. It’s kind of a Christmas movie, at least the very end is. An early endie film, well worth it.

    Edit: Oh and Ashley Judd has a bit part and she’s very, very good.

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  4. A. Riley said on December 27, 2020 at 10:12 pm

    We watched the new Pixar movie, “Soul,” on Disney+ last night — it was *terrific.* Four stars. Make a point of seeing it!

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  5. Deborah said on December 27, 2020 at 10:28 pm

    Well, well, well, this sheds some light on Trump’s recent toddler tantrums https://fortune.com/2020/12/26/ndaa-2021-shell-companies-corporate-transparency-act/amp/?__twitter_impression=true.

    Edit: maybe they should be called tanTrumps.

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  6. Dexter Friend said on December 28, 2020 at 4:58 am

    I watched “In Harm’s Way”, a Chinese movie made in 2017, English and much Chinese with subtitles. It stars Emile Hirsch as a bomber pilot who crashes in China after bombing Tokyo in 1941. It is really good, easy to get into straightaway, and the 91 minutes or whatever just fly by. It’s intense; so many movies on Netflix and Prime are mediocre or poor, but I never quit, I always watch to the end. And yeah, “The Midnight Sky” was a boring as hell film which I did stick with…a waste of time.
    Warmer weather made dog walking joyous . It looked like Mad River Mountain had made plenty of snow to top off Thursday’s storm-snow and I assume the skiers were on the slopes. Carla Lee’s first day in the new/different place was upsetting to her as nothing went properly; Sunday was A-OK. No, I don’t like her being 175 miles away but the last place was really pissing her off, generally. With Covid19 strengthening, no way can anyone visit a nursing home resident/patient these last many months. Facetime is a wonderful thing.

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  7. ROGirl said on December 28, 2020 at 5:02 am

    I watched WW84 on Saturday and it was…meh, way too long, started out more promisingly than it ended. I wanted to know why it was set in 1984, whether there was some explanatory backstory that I missed. Why not 1964 or 1974? The next sequels in the series?

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  8. David C said on December 28, 2020 at 6:09 am

    tRump being tRump, it’s hard to say if he vetoed the NDAA because the anti-corruption part or because he really wanted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act repealed as he said. Is he more corrupt bidnessman, or narcissistic shit-poster? Who knows.

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  9. LarrytheRed said on December 28, 2020 at 7:53 am

    I’ve always thought we should basically shut down, except for retailers who want/need to cash in, between Thanksgiving and New Years. All we want to do then is eat, drink, and shop, anyway. Maybe some nookie, to go with the drinking.

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  10. Deborah said on December 28, 2020 at 8:13 am

    She was hired for one day to clean the glass on machines and other menial tasks https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/dominion-attorneys-send-brutal-letter-to-trump-campaigns-so-called-star-witness-mellissa-carone/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

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  11. David C said on December 28, 2020 at 8:22 am

    I hope Dominion bleeds them all dry. Making money off of ridiculous Republican conspiracy theory slanders could be a lucrative new field.

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  12. Suzanne said on December 28, 2020 at 9:03 am

    We watched National Lampoon’s Vacation on Sunday night. We’d never seen it. Maybe because it’s quite dated, it seemed really pretty lame and I was sorry to have wasted the time to watch it.

    I was also disheartened to take a few glimpses at Facebook over the weekend and see all the lovely photos of family get togethers. Did people follow the medical experts’ advice to stay home? No, not at all.

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  13. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on December 28, 2020 at 9:38 am

    I can live with spoilers: do they kill Steve Trevor off again?

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  14. Julie Robinson said on December 28, 2020 at 10:55 am

    Another movie that doesn’t hold up–Home Alone. Mom wanted to watch it so I sat through it with her. It’s pretty bad. And since I didn’t see the first WW I held to my record and skipped this one too. I’ve been over comic book movies for several years.

    When I heard about the Bridgerton series I grabbed a couple of the books and found them to be romance novels, ho hum. The series is a bit of fluff in a time when we need a bit of fluff. For some people I know that’s a comic book movie, so I guess I shouldn’t be so harsh on them, eh?

    It didn’t take long after the Nashville bombing before a (not my side of the family) relative reposted a screed that started with the Dominion voting machines supposedly being sent there for storage and worked its way up to include Joe Biden, both Clintons, and just for good measure, George Soros. It was as predictable as it was pathetic.

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  15. Suzanne said on December 28, 2020 at 11:28 am

    Julie, I saw that same screed or a similar one, pre-packaged meme type, with a mention of Parler, but misspelled as Parlor.
    I hope Dominion sues anybody and everybody associated with this ridiculousness.

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  16. Sherri said on December 28, 2020 at 12:54 pm

    Jeff(tmmo), yes.

    WW84 was way too long, there was no particular reason for setting it in 1984, everything just felt off. I liked the first movie, but this one was just not very good.

    I did enjoy Bridgerton as fun fluff, a twist on regency romances.

    I also watched and enjoyed Away, the Netflix series about the first manned mission to Mars. It got mediocre reviews, but I liked the way it dealt with the family stories of who the astronauts were leaving behind.

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  17. Jeff Borden said on December 28, 2020 at 12:54 pm

    We saw two films over the weekend, which I highly recommend though with reservations in one case.

    If you have enjoyed Rachel Brosnahan’s work in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” you will be impressed with her performance in “I’m Your Woman.” She’s in a childless marriage to a violent crook in Pittsburgh, which means they can’t adopt. So, one day he brings home a baby and says, “He’s yours.” Next thing you know, another criminal shows up, helps her load $200K into a bag and sends her and the baby away with a cool black guy named Cal and the cat-and-mouse game begins. A very unglamorous role and, man, is she good. So is the supporting case.

    “His House” is a horror/ghost story about two Sudanese refugees who are relocated to a grim, grimy public housing project in London. It appears a supernatural force has made the journey with them –a night witch called an Apeth in Sudan– but the movie is more than jump scares, of which there are a few. It’s also about what these poor people seeking a better life in the West must do and the humiliations they must endure to start a new life. Those bothered by spooky happenings will probably want to take a pass, but it is beautifully acted by two unknown leads.

    BTW, anyone else read “The Bees” by Laline Paull? Johanna recommended it to me after she finished and I’ve found myself thoroughly engrossed in the life and death stories of the beehive. The author must’ve spent years on her research, though the story is a fictional narrative about a lowly sanitation worker and her place in the hive. It’s fascinating.

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  18. Jenine said on December 28, 2020 at 12:59 pm

    @jtmmo: I hope you get to watch the new version of Oceans 11 at some point. I like it a lot but not as much as my two daughters who watched it over and over again. Great soundtrack too.

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  19. Sherri said on December 28, 2020 at 4:12 pm

    Good news from the epicenter of the pandemic in the US.

    https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/coronavirus-vaccinations-begin-at-life-care-center-of-kirkland-original-epicenter-of-seattle-area-covid-19-outbreak/

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  20. FDChief said on December 28, 2020 at 6:41 pm

    There was waaaayyyyy too much English soccer over the holiday so I limited myself to Newcastle v City and, of course, the Lads got thumped 2-nil. Ugh. Death, taxes, and Newcastle-are-crap…

    Did screen a film from a couple of decades ago; Greenfingers, an odd little British slice-of-life/romcom VERY loosely based on an actual gardening thing that happened in H.M. Prison Leyhill. The rom is sweet, the com is gentle and unforced, but Helen Mirren steals the picture (can you imagine..?) as the veddy British gardening pundit who gets pulled into the whole macguffin. A trifle, but a very sweet, entertaining trifle.

    And what the hell to say about the ridiculous COVID relief bill farce? Orange Foolius couldn’t have signed the damn thing last week and saved a bunch of people their unemployment? And I can’t help but wonder who the anonymous genius was who convinced the idiot that he could “red-line” the thing AFTER he signed it. I know he’s dumber than a bag of fucking hammers, but…seriously? You’ve had the damn job four years, you’d think you’d have learned something about how it works.

    But that’s be a life form with a functioning hindbrain so, no.

    Twenty-four days. Seems like forever, donnit?

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  21. beb said on December 28, 2020 at 9:07 pm

    The other day Digby wrote a column, well maybe quoted at length a column about Trump that rang true. It steps off with an incident in 2016. Chris Christie was going to see Trump with 30 binders full of transition plans. He’s met at the door by a guard who tells him “your fired” and tosses all those transition plans straight into a dumpster, apparently because nobody tells The Donald what to do. So to the weekend. He won’t sign the NDAA bill because everyone told him he had to! And he didn’t sign the CARES bill until after the unemployment provisions of the last expired because nobody was listening to him.

    The tl;dr is that Trump isn’t merely incompetent but he’s deliberately malicious.

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  22. LAMary said on December 28, 2020 at 10:04 pm

    FD Chief. Waaaay too much soccer. There’s an English person in my household so it started, here on the left coast, at 4 am-ish. I think even the brit got tired of the fixtures.

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  23. Dexter Friend said on December 29, 2020 at 2:32 am

    I watched all the Premier League fixtures and BHA equalizing Liverpool at Anfield ruined the day. Jurgen Klopp left the pitch sideline mouth-open aghast. A horrid second half.
    My old army pal sent me some of his old DVDs he was tired of and I spun “The Magnificent Seven” tonight. I think it was tagged 1960…I don’t think I had ever seen it. And oddly, as I search titles for a movie, Amber Heard has been in the last 3 I selected, not for her, it just happened that way. I wonder if last summer’s story of her leaving dooty on her Johnny Depp marriage bed was true. I guess I don’t wanna know at all…I am not searching for an answer. Oh alright then! https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2550229/pictures-of-the-alleged-poop-amber-heard-took-in-johnny-depps-bed-have-emerged

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  24. Deborah said on December 29, 2020 at 7:07 am

    We watched the movie “Mank” last night, about the screenwriter for the movie “Citizen Kane”. I slept through most of it. It seemed like an ok movie, I was just very tired I guess.

    Later this morning we will head out to the cabin for our last 3 day stay this trip. Then it’s LB’s birthday and after that the drive back to Chicago. We’re driving the southern route to avoid bad weather but that means we go through Oklahoma one of the major virus hot spot states.

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  25. LAMary said on December 29, 2020 at 10:08 am

    Dexter, agreed on the Liverpool match. Jurgen has been a little edgy lately. The schedule was killer the last few months.

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  26. Bob (not Greene) said on December 29, 2020 at 11:07 am

    Haha, WBA coming back to tie Liverpool was the highlight of my weekend. Of course, my Spurs fouled it up by failing to try and score more than one goal — AGAIN — against Wolves. Mourihno ball is the worst ball in the world, and I wish Spurs would figure out you need to possess the ball in order to put it in the back of the net on occasion.

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  27. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on December 29, 2020 at 1:35 pm

    I recall Hank’s “promotion” was discussed here earlier, but I’m feeling old remembering how we talked here about how exciting it was when he got the TV critic position in the first place . . . anyhow, he’s giving us all a great overview of the explosion in scripted television programs & platforms he’s had a box seat for. This has been a confusing expansion to live through, and I’m thankful for guides like him through the wider and weirder landscape. And very glad he will still be writing in Style with I trust a wider brief than television.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/tv-critic-goodbye-favorite-shows/2020/12/28/102170aa-4883-11eb-839a-cf4ba7b7c48c_story.html

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  28. LAMary said on December 29, 2020 at 2:30 pm

    Jose Maurinho is toxic.

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  29. Heather said on December 29, 2020 at 2:36 pm

    WW84–extremely disappointing. As a palate cleanser, I watched The Midnight Sky. Beautiful production design and cinematography and pretty good storytelling, but marred by a tired trope that is revealed at the end. And you get to see what George Clooney will look like as an old man (still pretty good).

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  30. LAMary said on December 29, 2020 at 2:55 pm

    Is it possible to read anything about the pandemic and not get pissed off by the comments? Article today about LA hospitals possibly having to start triaging patients. First comment: we can send money to other countries but we don’t have the supplies to care for our own people? If that dimwit read the article she would have known it was staff that was lacking, not supplies. About eight people informed her of the staff shortage, including one who had an MDiv after her name, and then another person wrote basically the same thing about sending money to other countries. The MDiv woman started writing in all caps mentioned the staff issue and btw wear a mask and stay home for God’s sake.

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  31. JodiP said on December 29, 2020 at 4:08 pm

    Did anyone watch Never Have I ever on Netflix? Mindy Kaling produced it and it’s about a teenage Indian-American girl and her trials and tribulations. I found it delightful.

    It’s snowing here–I am hoping enough for skiing this weekend. Just chatted with a friend and we plan to meet up to XC over the weekend if conditions are good!

    In late 2007 we travelled to Montreal to get married. We were there over New Year’s. On January 1st, we took a bus to Mont Royal to see the city. As we rode, it began snowing more and more heavily. It was a whiteout by the time we got there, so nothing to see. The buses stopped running so we walked down with a woman from Norway who’d been XC skiing there that day. My poor wife had a knee that chose that day to act up, so it was slow. Even so, I love the memories of that day, newly married, the snow, the company.

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  32. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on December 29, 2020 at 5:20 pm

    From another friend of nn.c on Twitter – the full thread is worth your time:

    https://twitter.com/aodespair/status/1344038322776240134?s=21

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  33. Julie Robinson said on December 29, 2020 at 5:21 pm

    Foreign aid must be the trope of the day; I’ve had to block five or six posts today. It’s Whack-a-Mole.

    Happy Anniversary, Jodi & wife, and may you celebrate many more!

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  34. David C said on December 29, 2020 at 5:21 pm

    We’re expecting six inches of snow tonight so we’re planning on going snowshoeing tomorrow. I used to XC ski but it was in the days before waxless skis. I spent as much time waxing as I did skiing. Mostly because I wasn’t very good at glide waxing, or choosing the right kick wax, or really anything related to ski waxing. So snowshoes solved that problem.

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  35. FDChief said on December 29, 2020 at 6:07 pm

    The look on Mourinho’s face when Liverpool scored in the 90th minute made me happy all the rest of the day and, yes, I’m just that petty.

    What was sad is that I have two dear friends who a massive Spurs fans, and I had to tell them regretfully that now that their club is under the sway of the Prince of Darkness that I would relish every time someone punked El Mourinho the way Liverpool (and now Wolves) did.

    Still doesn’t make Newcastle any less crap. But it’s something to look forward to…

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  36. FDChief said on December 29, 2020 at 6:12 pm

    Moscow Mitch is torpedoing the $2K payout by bundling it with the Section 230 and Il Douche’s ridiculous “election fraud” nonsense so the Democrats will have to back away from it. And, of course, Yertle will pay nothing for his slimy act of pure assholery.

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  37. Jeff Borden said on December 29, 2020 at 6:28 pm

    Moscow Mitch McTreason is the ultimate villain of our times. tRump is a dangerous clown. Moscow Mitch knows exactly what he’s doing. I hate him with the heat of a billion suns.

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  38. David C said on December 29, 2020 at 6:37 pm

    As far as I’m concerned, kill section 230 and let the next Congress sort it out when the tech lobbyists come calling. It’ll never come to that anyway because whatever the might Dems agree to, Mitch will move the goal posts.

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  39. LAMary said on December 29, 2020 at 7:15 pm

    Maurinho always looks like he’s painfully constipated whether he wins or loses. The MU game was good. Rashford scored a brilliant goal in overtime and Ole Gunnar looked very happy. Saiss not so much, but he had a brilliant header goal the other day. It’s all good.

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  40. Sherri said on December 29, 2020 at 7:22 pm

    Pretty much everything about internet law needs to be torn down and rewritten by people who have a clue, which is not a Senate with a median age of 62. So, sure, call Mitch’s bluff on 230, but yes, he’ll come up with something else.

    I read somewhere, I can’t remember where now, that the whole system of the majority leader determining what gets a vote is just a norm, and is not even in Senate rules, and has only been the norm since the 30s, and that the VP, as the presiding officer of the Senate, could actually take back that power if she wanted…

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  41. Dexter Friend said on December 30, 2020 at 1:16 am

    I can see how some of us colonists who are not geographically bound to cheer for any particular team can root for Tottenham Hotspur. When they get it going they are a joy to watch. Of course, mostly for Son and Harry Kane. https://img.bleacherreport.net/img/images/photos/003/782/841/hi-res-15c016b6564ac3769ae6638c2be26b07_crop_north.jpg?1546035179&w=3072&h=2048

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