November 2023
During this past summer, reading through the local real estate listings online became my morning pastime, a form of Monopoly — without the board game. Ideally, four players are needed for optimal dynamics at Monopoly; I presently lack the adequate number of players at this game.
Games, in particular, are a dire commodity in the USA.
The Boob Tube dismally dissolved into the Woke Wide-Screen, thereby depriving millions and millions of Americans of what used to be known as Entertainment and Sports. It’s been a rough six or seven years for patriotic Americans having to reject (sometimes in a celebratory but raging ball of fire) their cherished televisual traditions of childhood.
I, and my household, were years (many years) late in installing cable in our Mid-Century-Not-Modern domicile in Newcastle, CA. The occasion took place sometime around the year 2000, or at the turn of the current century. Four or five years later, we “advanced” to satellite, which, for us, turned out to be a highly underused, and boring, merriment medium.
Cutting the cord circa 2017 was painless for me as I exited my life in Newcastle and moved on to newer vistas and visions, all of them without The Dish.
The Cord-Cutting Craze has since progressed into a fascinating and fun facet of American life, the type of free-market-driven stampede that always throws the Corporation for a loopy loop!
The latest way for the Corporate Pigs to try to co-opt a consumer reality — they completely missed — is to cough up a Sponsored Award for the customer phenomenon that not only blew by them, but blew them away.
The “We Had the Conversation” phony-baloney-We-Care multi-national gimmick of 2020 has been parlayed by the PR Idiots into “We Took the Questionnaire.”
Except only certain select customers were not asked any questions!
There’s an old story about a question being asked of a mathematician, an engineer, and a lawyer. The query is:
What is the answer to 1 + 1 = ?.
The reply from the mathematician was: The solution requires a highly complex set of numerical theories, but we can simply this equation by applying advanced algebraic theorems.
The response from the engineer was: We cannot, with a reliable level of confidence, determine the exact quantity; but I can apply the latest, most advanced computer model to provide an approximate result.
The hushed whisper from the lawyer, after he looks around and over his shoulder (a person, especially the shyster, is entitled to confidentiality) was: “What do you want the answer to be?”
That last tactic, the bamboozling brainchild of the ambulance chaser is, my fellow shoppers and suckers, the method of marketing utilized by the cons in charge of peddling crap and formerly reputable services to a populace that’s more than fed up with the Fraud&Deception proffered to them by the major industries of the USA.
The cadres of CEO’s know they’ve been found out for what they always were; and their knee-jerk response is to figure out a better way to fool the masses next time!
The weasel who ran the Global Frozen Foods Division, located in Beijing, of the Discount-Retailer-of-Hypermarkets, headquartered in Arkansas, is now the Chief of Image Management (Hyper-Hype & Hornswoggle) of BigGarments, or BigFurniture, or BigMed, or GlobalDigitalCinema that produces only cinemuck.
Once upon a long time ago, the motion picture industry offered ripe and rich pickings for role models for children and adults. I’ve my personal favorites. Among them is Doc Holliday, as portrayed by the late Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the OK Corral. The facts therein are fudged, or ignored, or fused together into the type of movie-mythology that had made Hollywood great.
Making Hollywood Great Again is an impossibility, so my celluloid games always involve the flicks from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I don’t watch my chosen flicks in bed, don’t have a wide-screen mounted on the bedroom wall (or any wall). I reserve the private sanctum for privacy, most of which involves sleeping. I don’t even read there, and I ban any books, or bookcases, from my master bedroom.
The Guest Room, however, does contain a bookcase. I am busily working on sprucing up the autumn-bedding in this spare room. The bed linens from Redland Cotton are phenomenally wonderful; but I need a decent bedspread. I’ve not the time at the moment, or anytime soon, to create a quilt large enough to serve that purpose, and I seriously contemplate the false economy of purchasing even more yardages of cotton and cotton batting at the current confiscatory price.
I let my digital fingers do the walking.
That online shopping for a bedcover granted to me a Case in Point regarding the ruses by BigRetail to pull yet another fast-one on the consumer.
I search-engined for a high-quality, all-cotton product, made in Portugal, or India, or, the elusive dream, the USA — but not “Imported”. And I spotted a Seal of Approval for a clear loser, a blanket, made in Chinah.
THE PICK for WIRECUTTER of 2023
was selected by none other than The New York Times for a hideously overpriced Poly-Fleece blanket that’s Imported.
I guess the idea is for the Wirecutter to wrap herself, or himself, up in this synthetic Commie Plush and feel good about the cold, dark world that’s never been better.
I try not to think it’s a conspiracy. Obviously, though, They’re all in on it, the whole lot of them.
Online World morphed, quickly, at warp speed, factor 4, into One-World of Preposterous-Propaganda. Even the search engine for Images of Nature has de-generated into a macabre matrix of creepy algorithms to display Unnatural Rubrics.
Worse to solve than the Rubik’s Cube.
The Media Maze in America has forced me to restrict myself to checking online news Over There, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland because, well, they do it so blatantly poorly over there that I find it an amusement.
Not that the American media attain anything other than sponsored content disguised as the Reportage of Publick Occurrences. But. whereas on the US snews-site, I can still recognize a few names, on the John Bull blast of headlines, I don’t have a clue as to who those bloody blokes are, aside from Nigel.
And Nigel is always working his way toward a better gig.
I like his style!!
The Newsies Over Three have begun to post the Category upon which to feast the bored-to-stark-ravers-eyes.
Personally, and professionally, I’m a huge champion of organization and classification. I just re-arranged the furniture in my sewing room to accommodate my future work on L’AUBE. As I informed Dear Husband, while he was moving the former computer-table-turned Writing Desk, from one side of the room to the other:
The key to any success, financial or otherwise, is organization!
The Categories for Official Public Information are as follows:
NEWS
POLITICS
CELEBRITY
SPORTS
TRAVEL
WORLD NEWS
MONEY
US NEWS
ROYAL NEWS
HEALTH
WEATHER
And the Kicker:
OPINION.
There’s also a category entitled LIVE!
As opposed to . . . NOT LIVE?
The funny thing, which really isn’t funny, is that I can’t tell the difference between the “content” of one title and any other. The poorly written fable could be plugged in below any of the headings. Which does not indicate that the shallow buzz, or gossip, is cross-referenced. It’s merely . . .vacuous, as in, thin as turnip soup.
I also cannot claim to know the names of the news-makers, but since it’s not actually News, and none of the characters are truly Making it, I wonder if familiarity with the characters involved is a necessity. Perhaps the “story” is the game, and the players (or performers) are plugged into the plot after the “action,” or “phony fact”.
If so, this latest approach to writing the fiction of news is truly bollocks.
The scribblers of this hogwash need to take some proper creative writing classes, and focus on the fact that character drives plot, not the other way around. They’ve got the classical rules of unity, as put forth by Aristotle, all messed up. I highly doubt any of those shills have any knowledge or awareness of the classical unities, or The Classics! Truly tragic, IMO.
As for me, I’m taking up an oldie-but-goodie, the classic card game called Solitaire!
