Category Archives: Popular Culture

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Chappaquiddick

4 Comments

Half a century later, still covering for the Kennedy’s.

The media cover up was aided by the fact that it happened during the moon landing.

[Update mid-afternoon]

Fifty years later, the media continues to whitewash Chappaqiddick.

“[The Lion of the Senate] was Kennedy’s nickname. He was like a lion, in the sense that he mated without limit and killed without remorse.”

Heh.

I disagree though, on one of his movie recommendations. There are many better documentaries of how we got to the moon than First Man, which was about Neil Armstrong, not Apollo per se. The best I’ve seen (and I saw it in IMAX at the NASM a few weeks ago) is Apollo 11. The most surprising thing about it, considering how good it is, is that it was produced by CNN. I recorded it a few days ago to watch tomorrow with friends.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

The Gray Lady

19 Comments

Continues to diminish the achievement of Apollo 11.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Related: Apollo Shrugs.

[Late-afternoon update]

Treacher: Yeah, well, the Soviets sent women and minorities into space first.

[Friday-morning update]

More thoughts from Karol Markowicz (who was born in the Soviet Union):

Sure, Communists tortured and executed dissidents, starved their own people by the millions and operated gulags — but have you heard about their amazing space feminism and space intersectionality?

“Cosmonaut diversity was key for the Soviet message to the rest of the globe,” the writer, Sophie Pinkham, wrote. Her piece reads like something from an old issue of the Soviet newspaper Pravda boasting of the achievements of the Soviet space program.

It’s not like this is anything new from the paper.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

Education, Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Kate McKinnon’s Impressions Of Democrat Candidates

46 Comments

These are actually pretty good, but it feeds a pet peeve: “…if you think we’re going to beat Donald Trump by just having all these plans, you’ve got another thing coming.”

That’s the transcript, and to my ear, it sounds accurate (in that it was what McKinnon actually said, and isn’t a bad transcript). Maybe she was saying that Williamson would have said that, but I suspect that it’s what she thinks the expression is.

No, sorry, people, it’s “…another think coming.” “Another thing coming” makes no sense at all. Note the word that starts the sentence.

The people who say that do it because they think that’s the proper expression, regardless of how little sense it makes, because when they’ve heard it, they munge the ending “k” of “think” with the beginning “c” of “coming” in their ears and therefore thingthink that people are saying “thing.”