EppsNet Archive: Television

EppsNet at the Movies: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

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When you are young, your potential is infinite. You might do anything, really. You might be Einstein. You might be DiMaggio. Then you get to an age where what you might be gives way to what you have been. You weren’t Einstein. You weren’t anything. That’s a bad moment. Chuck Barris was way ahead of his time in recognizing how many Americans are willing to make an ass of themselves on television. The tone of the movie is inconsistent — is it a comedy? a thriller? a tragedy? — but it’s entertaining. Thus: Recommended! Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Director: George Clooney Cast: Sam Rockwell (Chuck Barris), Drew Barrymore (Penny), George Clooney (Jim Byrd), Julia Roberts (Patricia Watson) IMDb rating: ( votes) Read more →

Dog Eat Dog

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Land of snap decisions Land of short attention spans Nothing is savored Long enough to really understand In every culture in decline The watchful ones among the slaves Know all that is genuine will be Scorned and conned and cast away — Joni Mitchell, “Dog Eat Dog” Read more →

You’re Gonna Like the Way You Look

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I know George Zimmerman has had a lot on his plate lately, but when is he going to get back to doing those Mens Wearhouse commercials? Read more →

Jane Lynch, Gay Divorcee

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Jane Lynch and her wife of nearly three years, Lara Embry, are planning to divorce. “Lara and I have decided to end our marriage. This has been a difficult decision for us as we care very deeply about one another. We ask for privacy as we deal with this family matter,” Lynch told ABC News in a statement. — ABC News This is a great time to be a divorce lawyer. Legalizing gay marriage means more marriages, which means more divorces. Also, emotion equals money in divorce cases. More emotion means more money for lawyers, and gay people are very emotional. In keeping with a stupid but time-honored custom, the couple announces the divorce, then asks for privacy, which they’d be more likely to get if they just skipped the announcement. Read more →

James Gandolfini Will See You in Hell

by  on Satan
 

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] James Gandolfini is in Hell now. He says hi, and thanks for all the kind words. I’ve been at this gig a long time now but it still amazes me the hyperbole that surrounds the death of actors. Every one of them who dies is one of the great thespians of all time, if you buy into the post-mortem hype. Most lines of work have objective standards. When Joe Shlabotnik bites the dust, you can’t eulogize him as one of the great ballplayers of all time. But acting is something anyone can do well. You learn the script, say your lines and pick up your check. “He died too soon,” people say. When was he supposed to die? Like we can’t find another fat Italian guy to learn a script, say his lines and pick up… Read more →

You Say Anarchy, Sir, Like It’s a Bad Thing

by  on Thomas Jefferson
 

Frankly, one of our political parties is insane, and we all know which one it is. They have descended from the realm of reasonableness that was the mark of conservatism. They dream of anarchy, of ending government. — Bruce Bartlett My fellow Americans — I’ll tell you who’s insane: anyone who’s not dreaming of anarchy at this moment in history is insane. People forget that this great nation was founded by anarchists, born out of an armed revolution against a corrupt government. As I said at the time, “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” I assure you, though, that regrettably neither current political party dreams of anarchy. They both dream of exactly the same things: self-aggrandizement and rewarding their most powerful supporters with political spoils. The well-known liberal cartoonist Ted Rall wrote a book a couple… Read more →

We Know What You Like: Cox

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A commercial for Cox Communications comes on the TV, the gist of which is that no one knows what the young woman in the ad likes. A sushi chef, for example, serves her an oddball concoction that she doesn’t like, and I forget the rest, but you get the idea. “But here at Cox,” the ad goes on to say, “we know what you like.” I say, “She likes Cox.” My kid gives me a look. “C-O-X. Cox. Come on, man.” Read more →

See You in Hell, Game of Thrones Fans

by  on Satan
 

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles had a telescope pointed at Saturn this week. Anyone who wanted to could stop by and have a look. “It looks like I thought it would look,” one observer remarked. HA! He wasn’t impressed AT ALL by the fact that better men than himself built a device that lets him see things a BILLION miles away. This same idiot later pronounced himself “blown away” by the deaths of several make-believe characters on a TV show called Game of Thrones. If your Facebook and Twitter feeds look anything like mine this morning, you know that unfortunately this is just one idiot out of many. One of the reasons America is circling the drain is people’s inability to distinguish fantasy from reality until reality hits them like a pitchfork in the guts.… Read more →

More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of: Diversity Flacks

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A new study from the American Council on Education shows that the percentages of black, Asian and Hispanic provosts have declined over the past five years. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this story under the headline “Falling Diversity of Provosts Signals Challenge for Presidential Pipeline, Study Finds.” FALLING DIVERSITY! LOOK OUT BELOW! Ha ha . . . but seriously, who even knows what a provost is? I don’t. I’ve vaguely heard of it as an academic job title but that’s about it. I know that Jon Provost played little Timmy on the Lassie TV series. I know that Marie Prevost was a one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty and leading lady in the 1920s whose screen glory had faded by the time she died of acute alcoholism in a small Hollywood apartment at the age of 38. By the way, I notice that Asian students are continuing to excel, even… Read more →

Thomas Jefferson on Why Your Health Insurance Premium is Going Up

by  on Thomas Jefferson
 

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers. — Despite New Health Law, Some See Sharp Rise in Premiums – NYTimes.com That headline should not read “DESPITE new health law,” it should read “BECAUSE OF new health law.” But we were going to get things for free! We were promised better things at a lower cost! In my day, most of the citizens were farmers or merchants or tradesmen. They lived by their hands and their wits. They had horse sense and they knew when they were being sold a bill of goods. Of course, that was before television. Americans today are unfortunately rather stupid. Most of them don’t know anything about economics, science, history, government… Read more →

It’s Not Just the Guns

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Within a week or so, we’ve had Jovan Belcher, the mall shooting in Oregon and 26 people killed at a school in Connecticut. I’m hearing that maybe we should do something about guns. But we’ve always had guns. Since the country was founded July 4, 1776, Americans have had guns, and for most of that time, we’ve managed to live with each other without a mass murder a week. It can’t be just the guns. One of the most appalling things to me about modern American society is the way increasingly graphic violence is peddled as entertainment. Turn on the TV: mass murder is entertainment. Grotesque, violent death is “great television.” Serial killers in movies are the heroes. They can’t be killed off because they’ve got to come back and kill more people in the next sequel. I know John Wayne used to kill people in movies, but when the… Read more →

DOGTV

by  on Lightning
 

I’ve got good news and bad news . . . The good news is there’s a new TV network just for dogs called DOGTV! The bad news is the only thing I like to watch on TV is hockey and DOGTV doesn’t have hockey. 🙁 — Lightning Read more →

Don Grady, 1944-2012

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R.I.P. Don Grady, aka Robbie Douglas Related Links Mouseketeer, My Three Sons Star Don Grady Dies Read more →

The Person Who Says It Can’t Be Done Is Interrupted By The Person Doing It

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In his latest book, The Price of Inequality, Columbia Professor and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz examines the causes of income inequality and offers some remedies. In between, he reaches some startling conclusions, including that America is “no longer the land of opportunity” and “the ‘American dream’ is a myth.” — The ‘American Dream’ Is a Myth: Joseph Stiglitz on ‘The Price of Inequality’ “If there is anybody at all who has a dream, then they can definitely make it happen,” she told WBTV. “There are no excuses. It depends on you and no one else.” — Dawn Loggins: Homeless, Abandoned Teen Heads to Harvard – Yahoo! Shine The second link above goes to a story about Dawn Loggins, an 18-year-old girl from Lawndale, NC, who, after her mother and stepfather left the state without her and she was dropped by her grandmother at a local homeless shelter, “just made a… Read more →

Jim Parsons

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‘Big Bang Theory’s’ Jim Parsons comes out as gay — latimes.com Never heard of him, never seen the show, but do you really expect me to believe that the guy in this photo is gay? Read more →

Television

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Not once during those months did there emanate from the screen a genuine idea or emotion, and I came to understand the medium as subversive. In its deceit, its outright lies, its spinelessness, its weak-mindedness, its pointless violence, in the disgusting personalities it holds up to our youth to emulate, in its endless and groveling deference to our fantasies, television undermines strength of character, saps vigor, and irreparably perverts notions of reality. But it is a tender, loving medium; and when it has done its savage job completely and reduced one to a prattling, salivating infant, like a buxom mother it stands always poised to take one back to the shelter of its brown-nippled bosom. — Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes Read more →

People I Thought Were Dead

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Norman Lear – television producer Updates Norman Lear, died 12/5/2023, age 101 Read more →

We Need Better Parents

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Kids can’t do well in school unless their family has a lot of money, according to an op-ed in the New York Times, which goes on to argue that massive intervention by “policy makers” is needed to confront this issue head-on. The authors, Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske, are a husband-and-wife team of academic researchers. Education reform in a nutshell: First thing, let’s kill all the academic researchers. Helen and Ed cherry-picked the results of a Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study to show that students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts. But they didn’t actually link to the PISA results, because if they had, people would see that Helen and Ed just ignored the three main findings, which are: Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher… Read more →

Harry Morgan, 1915-2011

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Harry Morgan dies at 96; star of TV’s ‘MASH’ — latimes.com I would have bet you a dollar to a dog biscuit this guy was already dead . . . R.I.P. Harry Morgan Read more →

What Would People Say?

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‘Spartacus’ star Andy Whitfield dies of lymphoma at 39 Whitfield’s wife, Vashti, in a statement called her husband a “beautiful young warrior” who died on a “sunny Sydney morning” in the “arms of his loving wife.” — msn.com Never heard of him. Also, his wife’s remarks are a tad self-serving, but they did get me to thinking what people would say in the event of my own untimely demise. Best case: “He was a pain in the ass but at least he was interesting.” More likely: “He was a pain in the ass. Once in a great while, he said something interesting. You had to wait for it.” Read more →

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