Month: February 2020

Russia opens a faux-Disneyland

UncleScoopy

The coldest, grayest place on Earth?

Russians have long been in training for their first theme parks … no other nationality has more experience standing in long lines.

My favorite part of the park? Tundraland!

(Although Anna Karenina’s Runaway Train Ride is a close second, and I also enjoy the Haunted Communal Apartment!)

One complaint: I had a hard time finding my car to go home. I thought it was in Pogrom 16, and it was actually Gulag 16.

That’s really on me, though. I should have been able to figure it out since mine was the only car in the lot.

And after I found it, I abandoned it anyway. I was afraid to approach it because of the wolves.

No malarkey: Biden wins South Carolina by a country mile; Steyer quits.

UncleScoopy

Sleepy Joe seems to have engineered a landslide win.

and

Tom Steyer has had enough. He put the most money and time into SC of any candidate, but couldn’t do better than 11 or 12%.

==========

Based on the exit polls, it appears that the results will be (approximately) Biden 50, Bernie 20, with Biden winning every county.

South Carolina has open primaries, so those gross results include non-Democratic voters. Among Democratic voters only, Biden did even better, winning by nearly 40 points, about 57-18.

Operation Chaos was a failure. Biden even won a plurality among non-Democratic voters because the would-be Bringers of Chaos split their votes between Bernie, Buttigieg and Klobuchar.

Except for those scattered votes from non-Democrats, Klobuchar’s campaign was a total bust. She pulled only 1% of the Democrats who voted, and a perfect 0% of the black vote!

The USA is leaving Afghanistan

UncleScoopy

I know a brother and sister who fled Afghanistan. Unlike many refugees from most other countries, they have absolutely zero nostalgia for their homeland. If they could get that memory-erasing procedure from “Eternal Sunshine,” they would erase all memory of Afghanistan. America would probably like to do the same thing, because the “graveyard of empires” will now add another prominent tombstone to the many already there. The Afghanis have been invaded and/or terrorized by just about every famous conqueror you can name.

Darius the Great King? Check.
Alexander the Great? Check.
Tamerlane? Check.
Genghis Khan? Check.
Al-Qaeda? Check.
The Soviet Union? Several checks.
The British Empire? Several checks.

Only the Romans managed to avoid it. (They stopped near the modern Iran/Iraq border.)

Sooner or later, all those invaders were gone, often with many regrets for having ever been there in the first place. We now join them. About 2000 American military personnel died there, and approximately another 2000 civilian contractors.

30 Rock’s Wonderful Leap Day Episode

UncleScoopy

I have watched the full Leap Day episode of 30 Rock at least a dozen times. It is one of the greatest sitcom episodes in TV history. The “Leap Dave Williams” inset seen above, essentially a parody of The Santa Clause, is wonderful, but my favorite part of the episode is the parody of A Christmas Carol, with the Republican plutocrat Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) as Scrooge. The episode also riffs on many other films – even Indecent Proposal! On top of all that, Tracy Morgan is at the peak of his game as his absurdly funny self.

The writer of this episode, Luke Del Tredici, is now a producer and one of the lead writers on Brooklyn Nine-Nine – and he may be the single most talented and accomplished person without a Wikipedia page. (Present company excepted, of course.)

Sounds reasonable …

UncleScoopy

Ladies and gentlemen – your candidate for congress