Was out of town for a wedding this weekend and time got away from me, so I'm playing catch-up right now. Here's last week's News Satire Roundup, and I'll post the Sunday Who Review later today.
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Sunday, July 24
· Recap of the Week – Boris Johnson resignation, January 6th hearings
o John enjoyed the January 6th hearing footage of Josh Hawley fleeing the Capitol after previously raising his fist in support of the soon-to-be insurrectionists – “This is painfully embarrassing. That is the gait of a man who has either gassed up an insurrection that is now bearing down on top of him or just drank a large iced coffee 45 minutes ago. Either way, those legs scream, ‘I’ve made a huge mistake.’”
· Main Story – Inflation
o The crux of the matter – wages in the U.S. are up by 5.1%, but when adjusted for inflation, they in essence fell by 3.6%.
o John noted that, among politicians and pundits, “there has been a flurry of finger-pointing, with many tending to place the blame on whatever they were already mad at” – He acknowledged that all of them were partly right, because most of the things they’re blaming are contributing to inflation, but it’s not being caused by any one thing like politicians are asserting.
o I loved John’s reaction to footage of penguins at a Japanese aquarium refusing to eat the cheaper mackerel their keepers have been trying to feed them due to inflation – “I love everything about that. My new favorite genre of news segment is ‘footage of what appears to be a large, flightless bird being a massive bitch,’ which, now that I say it out loud, would be a pretty accurate title for this show.”
o Supply chain issues continue to be a major factor. As an example, John cited bikes, which rose in price 43% in 2020 when many factories in China were shut down and people were wanting bikes to stay active while gyms were closed – “Which means essentially one thing: if you are the sort of person who stayed active and exercised during lockdown, inflation is your fault and you’re a terrible, terrible person.”
o This was valid – “It is absolutely true that some companies are taking advantage of this environment to drive up prices and they’re getting record profits in return, and that is infuriating. But most economists will tell you, that’s not what caused inflation in the first place. After all, it’s not like corporations only just got greedy in the last two years. Companies will shamelessly profiteer the exact same way that a dog will make an absolute meal out of its own ball sack: if left to its own devices, that’s unfortunately just what it’s going to do.”
o John pointed out that the Fed was too slow to get involved here, while also acknowledging that they didn’t have an appropriate roadmap to follow in this situation – “He’s right. The standard textbook of economics says that if there is a supply shock, you let it resolve itself organically. Unfortunately, and in fairness to the Fed, the pandemic was totally unprecedented, so the standard textbook just didn’t apply. In fact, the only textbook applicable to the situation was Oh Fuck Fuck Fuck, the Whole World Shut Down, What Do We Do, Oh God, Oh Fuck Fuck Fuck!”
o I laughed when John described a clip of Jim Cramer as “speaking at an intensity level there best described as ‘Patti LuPone Admonishing a Rude Audience Member.’”
o Good bit – “Look, I don’t know where things are going to go from here exactly. I am not a monetary policy wonk, even though my clothing, glasses, haircut, and general vibe would strongly beg to differ.”
· And Now This – Local news discusses heat wave
o In which local news anchors responded to record temperatures with corny, and sometimes weirdly sexist, jokes – Case in point, the weatherman who answered, “How hot is it?” with, “I almost called my ex-girlfriend, just so I could be around something shady.”
o One anchor, though, wasn’t in on the joke, leading to this great moment – “London is so hot—” “How hot is it?” “—they’re cancelling flights today….”
· Finally – Creepy dolls washing up on South Texas beaches
o This was an update on a story the show reported on over the break, which is exactly what it sounds like – Creepy dolls are washing up on beaches in South Texas, and in the original piece, John advised that the only suitable course of action was to burn the evil dolls.
o Local leaders agreed to send the dolls to John, with the show donating $10,000 to their sea turtle rehab – John said, “I like sea turtles. I think they’re fun, round little guys. But is that my main objective here? No, of course it fucking wasn’t! This is mainly about saving the planet from the heinous scourge of these plastic beach demons.”
o The story came back around to another offer John had previously put out, to acquire a giant banana statue from Melbourne in exchange for $15,000 in local donations and a statue of an alligator giving the finger.
o The mayor of the town wasn’t willing to part with the banana, but she offered to name the city’s polystyrene machine after John – His new request? He wants to send her the dolls, to be turned into gloop by the machine.
Monday, July 25
· Headlines – WHO declares monkeypox a global health emergency, heat waves in the U.S., chess-playing robot breaks opponent’s finger
o We started with quick jokes about a few different news topics, like Vince McMahon being forced to step down from the WWE over sexual harassment settlements – “You know something is out of line when pro wrestling catches it, because those refs never see anything.”
o Another quick bit was the trailer for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – “Black people were celebrating that trailer the same way white people celebrate when Trader Joe’s drops a brand-new frozen meal. They’re like, ‘Pumpkin ravioli—what?!’”
o Trevor’s reaction to the WHO’s announcement about monkeypox was very relatable – “Another global health emergency: no! We just got done with ignoring this pandemic. I don’t know if I can handle another one.”
o Trevor had powerful words denouncing the misinformation that monkeypox is a “gay disease,” comparing to associating COVID with Asians or AIDS with Africans – “No matter where a disease starts, if you don’t stomp it out, it could spread out to the larger population.”
o Trevor’s reaction to severe heat waves and droughts as consequences of climate change – “Yeah, it looks like the world’s on fire and all our drinking water will soon be gone. So joke’s on you, monkeypox. Yeah, you can’t kill us if we’re already killing ourselves first, bitch!”
o I appreciate Trevor’s ongoing healthy apprehension towards advances in robotics – “So that robot tried to kill that child, and everyone just went back the next day like nothing happened?”
o Valid – “Also, who is programming a chess robot with enough strength to break a human hand? This is chess, not UFC. What is this, rook to choke hold, bitch?”
· Main Story – January 6th hearings
o Great line – “Wow. Trump watched everything that happened on January 6, and his biggest problem is that Mike Pence let him down? By, I guess, not being hanged? ‘He said he was my ride-or-die, but when I asked him to die, he wouldn’t do it. What a loser.’”
o I liked Trevor’s response to Trump still refusing to concede the election after January 6th – “Say what you want about the man, he does not give up. If he was a football coach, he’d be in the locker room, like, ‘Okay, team, we lost by 30 points and the other team has already gone home, which means the end zone is completely unguarded. Time to run the board, fellas!’”
o Trevor said the January 6th committee should be “ashamed” for showing the clip of Josh Hawley running out of the Capitol after rooting for the protesters earlier, but his entire “defense” of Hawley was accompanied by a gif of the running clip in slow-motion – You love to see it.
· Interview – Actor Daniel Kaluuya
o In talking about Nope, I loved the comments Trevor made to Kaluuya about Jordan Peele – “He feels like you’re the greatest actor that he’s ever worked with. He says, in many ways you’re his De Niro.”
o Interesting remarks from Kaluuya about the difficulty of shaking off a character after filming wraps – “That’s why I’ll usually, like, go away for a week by myself, and you have to kind of get back to yourself. And go, ‘What were my habits?’ Because you’re doing his habits. And you are your habits.”
o I also liked what he said about getting to know people through acting with them, in response to a question about his relationship with costar Keke Palmer – “You see a person’s character when you’re, like, going up against them. You see how generous they are, you see how much they lack, see how much they’re there for themselves or they’re there for the script. You see who they’re serving, ‘cause sometimes they’re just serving themselves, or sometimes they’re serving the director, sometimes they’re serving the script.”
Tuesday, July 26
· Headlines – Pope Francis apologizes for the church’s treatment of indigenous people, Russia’s retaliation against the West
o Good intro – “Let’s start off with the Catholic church, the world’s number-one manufacturer of atheists.”
o I liked Trevor’s enthusiasm here – “Apparently in addition to the apology, the church has also agreed to pay a settlement for what they did, which I think is fantastic. Especially on the tribe for actually insisting on it. You know, because so many people’s lives have been destroyed, and a generation was thrust into poverty. So ‘sorry’ is nice, but money goes a long way, yeah.”
o Europe’s gas supply from Russia has been cut off – “Now Russia is saying this is just mechanical issues, but I’m sure this is ‘mechanical issues’ the same way someone breaks up with you because you ‘deserve better,’ you know? Just be honest and say you can’t be with someone who wears Crocs to nice restaurants, Debbie!”
o Loved this – “Wow. Russia is officially pulling out of the International Space Station, which nobody asked them to do. We said, ‘Pull out of Ukraine,’ not the space station! Is it a Google Translate issue? What’s going on here?”
o Roy was the headline correspondent, and he was concerned about the Russia-ISS situation – “We sold our space shuttles, so we ain’t got no ride home! Russia was our ride home. How you gonna talk shit to your ride home? And now they gone? Just gonna be a bunch of Americans sitting on the front porch of that space station, just waiting on Jeff Bezos to come pick ‘em up in that dick rocket or something.”
· Interview – Influencer Molly Burke
o Trevor succinctly summed up Burke’s ethos as a YouTuber/TikToker who’s blind – “You have a disability. And, you know, you go into the world not just living your live but thinking, ‘How do I basically educate idiots?’”
o Burke’s own experiences infuriatingly demonstrate how confidently wrong people are in their misinformed opinions about disability – “There’s whole Reddit threads devoted to dispelling that I’m blind. Somebody said I know too much about blindness to have never been blind, but that I must have gotten better, like it’s the flu or something.”
o However, she understood where these people were coming from, to a point – “The reality is, most people will never meet a blind person in their lifetime. And so, the only way we access things like blindness or disability in general is often through the media. And historically, we’ve had very little representation, and when we do, it’s a lot of misrepresentation, because it’s written, directed, and played by able-bodied people who are changing the narrative.”
o Trevor related to this ignorance a lot – He said, “To your point, I’ve watched movies my whole life. I go like, ‘Oh, I know blind people.’ And it’s like, no, I don’t, I just watch movies. That’s all I basically did, right?”
o When asked where able-bodied people should go to learn more, Burke said, “Social media is, like, the greatest place to turn to, because there are so many disabled people on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook, making content, sharing our life experiences, sharing our day-to-day, how we do things, to show that, like, we can still do what you do, just in a different way.”
· Interview – Actor Brian Cox
o Trevor explained the pitch he got from friends to watch Succession as, “You’re gonna hate everybody, but you won’t be able to stop watching.”
o Cox said that he too finds his character to be a pretty terrible person – At the same time, while he excused none of his character’s behavior, he said, “I have a lot of sympathy with him. I mean, we—both he and I are disappointed in the human experiment. We, you know, we think that humans really screwed the whole f**king thing up, quite frankly.”
o This bit, about differences between American and British actors, cracked me up – “Sometimes a lot of American actors, they kind of treat it like a religious experience. ‘Oh, this, you know, it’s so hard what I’m doing. You know, I know I got to… I’m gonna have to… I’m gonna have to remove these teeth. If I’m gonna plays this role, I got to have these teeth taken out, and it’s gonna be so difficult.’ And you go, ‘Pretend!’ Just pretend.”
Wednesday, July 27
· Headlines – Nancy Pelosi plans to visit Taiwan, criticism of Instagram changes
o Clear explanation of the Fed raising interest rates a second time to try and combat inflation – “So your ability to buy a house has gone from ‘no chance’ to ‘what part of “no chance” don’t you understand?!’”
o This cracked me up – “This still is a big headache for Joe Biden. Right? Between inflation, Ukraine, gas prices, and the midterms, the man does not have time to get into a war with China. I mean, that’s probably the reason COVID left him so quickly. The virus was like, ‘My man, you’re dealing with a bunch of shit right now. I’m-a bounce, but I’ll be back in a few weeks. I can do that now. You got to handle yourself.’”
o This was a good bit, about Instagram switching more to an algorithm model of “suggested content” over personal follows – “Yeah, that’s right, people. You thought Instagram was for pictures of your friends. Well, that’s over! Yeah. You were always bitching about brunch pics. Now you’re gonna be begging to see them.”
o Dulcé the headline correspondent, didn’t like that the Mega Millions lotto is now up to a billion dollars – “Winning a billion dollars is too much money. That’s supervillain money. You hold a country ransom and ask for a billion dollars. That’s the kind of money that could ruin your life.”
· Correspondent Piece (Ronny) – Movement to adjust Oregon’s border
o Basically, a movement of conservatives in Eastern Oregon wants to shift the border west, so they can leave the Portland area behind and become part of Idaho.
o When Ronny asked the movement’s leader why he didn’t just, you know, move to Idaho – The guy explained, “By moving the border, we change who governs us without having to pull up our stakes.”
o Ronny summed it up thusly – “You want the Idaho without having to be in Idaho.”
o Ronny was skeptical of the guy’s insistence that all the complicated details could be hashed out by the state legislatures – “So leave it to these politicians. The same politicians you want to secede from? Just let those guys handle this?”
o The finger
· Interview – Crime researcher Rafael A. Mangual
o Trevor did a nice job with this interview, speaking with a researcher/analyst who’s written a book on policing and incarceration – I’ve mainly (solely) got quotes from Trevor here, because he was on fire.
o First, Trevor challenged Mangual’s defense of stop-and-frisk, even though it resulted in a huge amount of stops for young Black and brown men who didn’t have any contraband – “The issue I have with this argument is in many ways it sounds like what you are saying is that the way of being is what people should change, because the way of being is what determines whether you are perceived as a criminal or not, right? But, like, listen to what you just said. You just said, ‘I had the cornrows and all kinds—I was in the thugging.’ What does cornrows have to do with being a criminal or not?”
o Mangual tried to compare police profiling to past remarks from Nipsey Hussle about how he identified potential customers back when he was in a gang – “There is a key element that is missing here, and you’re neglecting the fact that people are able to understand within their communities who the us is and who the us isn’t. Black people can walk through a community, see a bunch of Black people, and go, like, ‘Oh, that person, I know they might be shifty or not,’ but it’s not because they’re Black. It’s not because their pants are sagging. It’s not because—you understand how someone may be moving in your hood, right? So it's different when Nipsey Hussle says ‘us.’ What you’re talking about is a police going, ‘Them. They are criminals. They are all suspicious because they are not the us.’”
o Mangual’s whole book is about arguing against the Defund the Police movement, pointing to studies that show reduced crime with increased police presence – Trevor agreed to a point but countered that continually adding police and taking more and more people off the street was unsustainable. He said Mangual’s theses “seems to ignore the fact that crime comes from somewhere.”
o To wit – “What I find interesting in this conversation—people always bring up, ‘Oh, Chicago,’ and they bring up these places, the South Side, and they bring up…. But they don’t bring up the correlation of spending in these places. They don’t bring up how much the government puts into these places, the parks that are in these places, the schools that are in these places, the aftercare programs that are in these places, the money that is put into these places.”
o Mangual brought up an example where school funding increased in Chicago over a two-year period, but they didn’t see a corresponding reduction in crime – Trevor said, “What I feel like happens in America is, every program that comes in, people go, ‘Oh, we raised…. We got schools two years ago, and look—crimes went up.’ However, they don’t use that same argument for police. We gave police money two years ago. How are crimes still up? People go, ‘Then we go to give more to the police.’ But they don’t say, ‘We got to give more to the schools.’ How come that doesn’t happen?”
Thursday, July 28
· Headlines – Is America in a recession?
o I laughed at Trevor’s reaction to the news that the new Grand Theft Auto will continually expand/evolve – “So whatever job you have right now, finish it up, because once that game comes out, you’re never leaving your bedroom.”
o Solid definition of a recession – “What people in suits blame for why they can’t pay you.”
o Ronny was the headline correspondent today. I do enjoy his withering disdain for his assigned piece of discussing social media trends – “Is anything trending? Are you kidding me? Are people still dumb? Yeah, yeah. And yes, things are trending, all right?”
o Ronny was in fact rooting for a recession, if only to take down the crypto bros – “They have so much money they made up a thing to lose money on. They deserve a recession.”
o This cracked me up – “When Beyoncé trends, everything stops, okay? No one trends harder than Beyoncé. In fact, if you’re a celebrity planning to die, wait until tomorrow, because no one’s gonna care today.”
o Ronny wasn’t concerned about Beyoncés new album leaking before its release, figuring that the publicity frenzy was worth way more than album purchases – “It’s not about albums, okay? No one buys albums anymore. Even JetBlue would rather buy Spirit Airlines than an album. Right?”
· Main Story – Senate Democrats reach deal
o Relatable – “I can’t believe it. Joe Manchin agreed to vote for a bill? Which means Democrats might actually get something done?”
o Of course, any Sen. Manchin-approved bill is going to be watered-down and both-sidesy – “That’s right. Tons of money to fight climate change, but also some fossil fuel stuff, too. You know, just to keep Mother Nature on her toes.”
· Interview – Poet/author Leila Mottley
o I loved Mottley’s explanation of her motivations for writing her first novel, Nightcrawling – “Really, I think it started with wanting to tell a story of teenage Black girls and give it the validity and respect I think our culture doesn’t often give teenage Black girls. I wanted Kiara’s internal world to be this rich, nuanced place, and to have the complexity that I think a lot of people don’t expect out of young people.”
o Yes to all of this – “I think we dehumanize Black characters if we don’t see them in their entirety, which means we have to see them in moments of joy, in moments of grief, in moments of, you know, mundane things like making pancakes or taking a nap. Like, we have to be able to see that in order to see someone as human and invest in them and their world, really.”
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