Extra Cheese
Oh. Yeah.
Are you in? Like Flynn I’m in. With a big ol’ grin, drinkin’ a tonic and gin, I’m in.
by Burt Likko · October 22, 2013
Oh. Yeah.
Are you in? Like Flynn I’m in. With a big ol’ grin, drinkin’ a tonic and gin, I’m in.
Tags: Big Ass Spider
Burt Likko
Pseudonymous Portlander. Homebrewer. Atheist. Recovering Republican. Recovering Catholic. Recovering divorcé. Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Ordinary Times. Relapsed Lawyer, admitted to practice law (under his real name) in California and Oregon. On Twitter, to his frequent regret, at @burtlikko. House Likko's Words: Scite Verum. Colite Iusticia. Vivere Con Gaudium.
January 2, 2018
July 19, 2015
Erik Kain has started his own Substack:
diabolical is a newsletter/blog hybrid about entertainment and culture with devilishly brilliant commentary by Erik Kain. It’s also a conversation! We’ll discuss movies, TV shows, music, video games, politics and art and whatever else we fancy.
Freddie deBoer has started his own Substack:
Comment →I’m Freddie deBoer, and if you’re reading this you likely already have an idea of whether you like me and my work or not. I’m a blogger who has always tried to remain at a distance from the cultures of the internet, media, and politics. I’d like to think I've mostly succeeded.
I am an overeducated Xennial who started a peculiar kind of media career when I launched a Blogspot blog at the public library in 2008. From there I built up a cult following and a reputation as something of an asshole. I switched to a Wordpress at my own URL in (I think) 2012, then flamed out in spectacular fashion in 2017. Now I’m trying paid blogging for the first time thanks to Substack reaching out. Along the way I started producing freelance pieces for various publications, eventually writing for some of the bigger newspapers and magazines in the world. You can check out some highlights here. In 2020 St. Martin’s Press put out my first book, The Cult of Smart. New York magazine named it one of the 10 best books of 2020.
Thomas Frank (author of What's the Matter with Kansas?) writes in Le Monde diplomatique:
It is the ‘duty’ of American citizens, President Joe Biden announced in his inaugural address last week, to ‘defend the truth and to defeat the lies’. Much of Biden’s speech was an unremarkable stringing-together of patriotic platitudes, but this call for a great truth crusade stood out for its audacity. America is, after all, the homeland of the public relations industry, of televangelism, of Madison Avenue, of PT Barnum. Our leading scholars worship at the shrine of post-structuralism; our brightest college graduates go on to work for the CIA; our best newspapers dynamite the barrier between reporting and opinion; our greatest political practitioners are consultants who ‘spin’ the facts this way or that.
In declaring a national quest for truth, of course, Biden was referring to none of these things. His target was a single man: Donald Trump, the most energetic shit-shoveler ever to occupy the Oval Office.
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This essay is not a brief for free speech absolutism or an effort to rationalise conspiracy theory or an attack on higher learning. It is about the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the left, and here is the suggestion I mean to make: the form of liberalism I have described here is inherently despicable. A democratic society is naturally going to gag when it is told again and again in countless ways, both subtle and gross, that our great national problem is our failure to heed the authority of traditional elites.
Worse, when those traditional elites come together with unprecedented unanimity to insist their high rank proves their correctness and justifies their privilege ... when they say we are in a new cold war against falsehood ... when the news media dumps its neutrality and likens itself to superheroes and declares it is mystically attuned to truth and legitimacy ... when they do those things and then get the biggest news story of the decade fabulously wrong, a society like ours is going to spot the hypocrisy. And we are going to resent it.
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But when they look at liberals, they will shake their heads with disbelief. How could they have thought it was wise to try to enlist the great economic and cultural powers of our time — the masters of Silicon Valley — to try to censor our opponents? Ira Glasser, the old ACLU chief, relates how liberal academics embraced speech codes because they ‘imagined themselves as controlling who the codes would be used against’. What these well-meaning liberals didn’t understand, he continued, was that ‘speech restrictions are like poison gas. It seems like it’s a great weapon to have when you’ve got the poison gas in your hands and a target in sight, but the wind has a way of shifting — especially politically — and suddenly that poison gas is being blown back on you.’
As Glasser’s metaphor suggests, this cannot end well. The mob attack on the Capitol frightened us all. But for Democrats to choose censorship (via the monopolists of Silicon Valley) as the solution to the problem is a shocking breach of faith. There are many words one might use to describe a party that, over the last 30 years, has shown itself contemptuous of working-class grievances while protective of the authority of the respected... but ‘liberal’ isn’t one of them.
Read the whole thing.
Comment →The Rock The Bells family is heartbroken to learn of the passing of Mark “Prince Markie Dee” Morales earlier today. That voice and his presence can never be replaced. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his loved ones. 🙏🏾🕊 pic.twitter.com/Tn6wSJ6soq
— Rock The Bells (@RockTheBells) February 18, 2021
PRINCE MARKIE DEE GOD BLESS YOU FOREVER YOU WERE THE REAL BUBBA
— The Iron Sheik (@the_ironsheik) February 19, 2021
Requiescat in pace.
Comment →Who’s Afraid of Cancel Culture?
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Citizenship at Leisure In The Ball Pit Republic
February 24, 2021
Thursday Throughput: Texas Power Outages Edition
February 18, 2021
Trump, CPAC, and The Elephant In The Room
March 1, 2021
Why Doesn’t the US Get to Have High Speed Rail?
February 15, 2021
And Thus, The Hydrogen Economy Is (Probably) Born
February 3, 2021
All should be well. Please report any problems you might see.
That’s… just… WOW!
So damn creepy! [SHUDDER!]Report
I know, right? So much awesome there.Report
All it would need for perfection is the hero to build some kind of junkyard mecha to go toe to toe with the beastie.Report
Brought to you by Toyota.
http://jalopnik.com/toyota-recalls-870-000-cars-because-of-freaking-spiders-1447758469Report
Here’s a post Burt or someone else should do:
Why is it that once an actor/actress has been in any sci-fi/horror TV show or movie – no matter how bad it was or how dreadful they were – they are granted a career in sci-fi/horror movies for the rest of their lives? Not only a career, but one in which DVD boxes will say things like, “Featuring Walter Koenig of STAR TREK!” even if they have, like, 2 lines?Report
Typecasting and fan love.Report
Walter Koenig? The guy who played Bester on B5 was in Star Trek too!?!!1! Awesome! Literally space awesome!Report
You really didn’t know that? He played Chekov, the Navigator, sat next to Sulu on the bridge. Spoke with a doofusy fake Russian accent.Report
(I knew that. Just being silly. “Where are your nuclear wessels?”)Report
And did you know Wings wasn’t Paul McCartney’s first band?Report
@mike-schilling that would be the Kingsmen, wouldn’t it?Report
Wings? You mean that crappy sitcom? Buffalo style? Wings Hauser ( only noted for crappy movie fans)? Was there another Wings?Report
And did you know Wings wasn’t Paul McCartney’s first band?
Who is Paul McCartney?Report
Ringo Starr’s bass player.Report
I never understood the appeal of this kind of entertainment and probably never well.
Keep in mind “so bad its good” has always gone over my head. Same with Camp and Kitsch.Report
It can be a fun social activity. It’s simple enough that you can talk to people while you’re watching it without missing much. You can make fun of it together.Report
I care about art too much. Life is too short and there is too much good art out there. I can’t imaging wasting time on the campy/kitschy stuff.
Though I also don’t quite get passive entertainment either. Perhaps my brain is just hyper active.Report
Life is too short for humor?Report
James,
There is plenty of intentional comedy that I can watch and laugh with and at while still avoiding this stuff 🙂 Stuff with actual wit and intelligence.Report
Oh just ignore NewDealer, he plain doesn’t get it.
Let him have his high-brow artsy-fartsy “humor”, we can all enjoy this excellent beer & pizza movie without his belly-aching the death of wit.
😉Report
MRS,
The Philadelphia Story isn’t funny?Report
MRS was a Navy man. There’s nothing “funny” about covert invisibility experiments resulting in time-traveling destroyers. 😉Report
The time-travelling part is fine by this Navy man. It’s the sailors embedded in bulkheads that give me the williies.Report
@newdealer
Not compared to Bringing Up Baby.Report
NewDealer,
Surely you’d laugh at folks reading the stage directions??
I’ll quote:
“This is quite homoerotic”
You’ve done theatre, surely you can laugh at people doing it wrong?
(Note: additional hilarity ensues when someone tries to make a bad
show, and instead makes a /good/ one).Report
I agree with Rod, the whole “sailors in the bulkheads” bit was unfunny, the rest was pretty cool.Report
“I never understood the appeal of this kind of entertainment and probably never well.”
what is this…emotion…you humans call…fun?Report
Cute. I have fun.Report
This reminds me of “8 legged freaks”.Report
Another classic!Report