A Brief Blogging Break 'Til July 1

Please pardon me whilest I taketh a brief blogging interlude until Friday, July 1, when I shall return in all my pop culture and politics blogging glory and explaineth my absence.

Cheerio!

In Light of Federally Mandated Graphic Cigarette Pack Images, Here Are a Bunch of Cool Ideas

Starting in the fall of 2012, the FDA is going to require that cigarette manufacturers cover the top half of their cigarette packages with one of nine graphic, anti-smoking images. Those images range from a depiction of the post-autopsy corpse of a former smoker, smoke-blackened lungs, smoke emerging from a tracheotomy hole in a man’s neck and a grisly mouth with a gross sore on the lower lip and mottled or outright missing teeth.

Image credit: FDA/USA Today


The stated goal of the graphicness is shock people and hopefully reduce the number of smokers, maybe prevent some kids from picking up the habit. “These labels are frank, honest and powerful depictions of the health risks of smoking,” Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary told USA Today.

This got me to thinking about other things we citizens do, eat and see in everyday life that a variety of experts and governmental types of folks are constantly saying are either bad for us or are things about which we need to be very, very careful because we’re none too bright as a whole and need more guidance from the Health and Human Services secretary. If we applied the same rationale that’s being used here with these cigarette images – taxing the heck out of cigarettes and making us all look at disgusting images of what could happen to a person if he or she smokes every time we enter gas stations and convenience stores – to other products, think of how much good similarly graphic warnings could do to help our fellow Americans make “wiser” lifestyle and health choices?

Motor Vehicles

How often do we hear that one of the most dangerous places to be is behind the wheel of a car? There are 1.4 million traffic accidents every year, the Washington Post reported. Since it’s in our interest as an overall society to cut down on injuries and deaths sustained in motor vehicle accidents, perhaps the government should require that the front half of motor vehicles themselves feature one of a handful of graphic images of car crash victims, mangled vehicles and dying polar bears (because of the pollution emitted by cars)? As with the corpse on the cigarette packs, the explicit car images – maybe someone who’s lost a limb from a car crash, a cell phone on the ground amid broken glass and spattered with blood -- could encourage people to drive more carefully and think about what they’re doing when they take to the roads. Maybe it'd get them to stop texting and driving.

Cheeses, Cheesecakes & Ice Cream
We’ve been hearing repeatedly from health officials and the First Lady about how fat we are as a society. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 34 percent of Americans over 20 are overweight and 34 percent are obese. Among children, 18 percent of 12-19-year-olds are obese and 20 percent of 6-11-year-olds are obese. The well meaning folks working with the federal government and many state governments want you to eat more broccoli, damn it, and less of the fatty stuff which’ll clog your arteries, cause heart problems and cost the United States a bundle in terms of health care costs.

So why not try to dissuade people from eating some of the fattiest stuff on the market like dairy products such as cheese, cheesecakes and ice cream? Imagine graphic images of fat – both in the human form (say, people with rolls of fat) and fat that's been sucked out from under the skin by liposuction machines and dumped into a bucket – being plastered on half of the packages of ice cream, blocks of cheese, boxes of cream cheese and cheesecakes? Maybe, as with the smoke-blackened lungs, images of overstressed and enlarged hearts could appear on packages as well. Hmm, what else? Overweight people lying on a gurney – a la the corpse in the cigarette image – killed by too much Ben & Jerry’s?

Red meats, junk food and fast food could be next on the food hit list. Think of the graphic, grotesque visual possibilities that could be employed to socially engineer a society where we’re made sick to our stomach simply by looking at packages of food that are deemed “unhealthy” for us to consume!

Beer, Wine & Liquor Bottles

How could I forget the other big “sin” product category which goes hand-in-hand with cigarettes? The National Institutes for Health says that 17.6 million Americans are either full blown alcoholics or have “alcohol problems.” Not only could the government borrow some vomit-inducing images from the safe driving campaign featuring motor vehicle accidents (mentioned above), they could focus on vivid images of car crashes caused by drunk drivers, as well as hideous pictures of livers destroyed by drinking. The government could also feature unattractive, severe close-ups of red, bulbous noses next to a giant snifter of scotch. And, in keeping with the corpse theme, there could be a corpse on a gurney with a beer bottle tucked under one arm after a "not so-Happy Hour."

Sexting

Didn’t we all learn some important lessons from former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner on the dangers of texting sexually oriented (and naked) images of oneself to others on the internet and how quickly one loses control over those images?

Well some young and impressionable teens might not yet have gotten that message and may very well destroy their reputations by making unwise choices by sending images of themselves partially clothed or nude to others. The latest statistics I could find on teens sexting came from CNN which, citing a national survey of American teens, found that 15 percent of those teens with cell phones received nude or semi-nude pictures via text message and 4 percent admitted sending them.

A possible way to address this problem? Have the federal government step in and protect the teens from themselves (and from their negligent parents) by mandating that all cell phones, BlackBerries, iPhones and even iPads bear images of some of Rep. Weiner’s salacious Twitter photos next to the photo of him giving his resignation speech to remind the young and impressionable that sexting isn’t good and can have unanticipated consequences. The caption could saying something like, “Sexting isn’t sexy and it costs a lot more than you think.”

Pretzels

Our former president, George W. Bush almost met his maker in 2002 when he “fell off a sofa after passing out briefly from having choked on a pretzel while watching a National Football League playoff game on TV,” according to news reports.
Clearly, pretzels are dangerous and the government needs to do something to let us know just how dangerous they can be. If a president, protected by the Secret Service, could choke on one and be at risk, surely lowly civilians could too. Therefore I suggest the government folks consider putting photos of George W. Bush and, perhaps a photo of a gnawed pretzel on all pretzel bags while urging American consumers that we need to thoroughly chew the snacks before swallowing and that we should strictly avoid eating if we’re drowsy.

Got any more suggestions? We could be a world filled with graphic photos warning us about every danger around every corner with only the helpful, gross-out images, courtesy of the government, to guide us down the correct path.

Image credit: FDA via USA Today.

'The Killing' Did What?!

The season finale of the once promising AMC show The Killing seriously ticked me off. I can’t decide which was worse, the fact that we didn’t really find out who killed Rosie Larsen during the season finale, or that they incongruously had Holder appear as though he’s been bought off or corrupted (or manipulated) by someone in order to obtain dummied up photos to use in order to arrest Darren Richmond, the upstart, good government mayoral candidate/sad sack widower/serial lover boy/escort service patron.

In my CliqueClack TV review I said I found the last second twisteroo which turned Richmond's apparent guilt on its head annoying, “not at all clever or intriguing.” I’m certainly not the only TV critic who feels this way:

Of the people who were left “cross-eyed and panting with rage,” the Los Angeles Times said: “Their words all but quivering in cancel-my-subscription frustration, critics, fan bloggers and tweeters could not believe that after all the show had demanded of them (13 whole episodes), after all the ‘red herrings’ and shots of Seattle looking like a rain-soaked ghetto instead of the hipster birthplace of Starbucks and Nirvana, we didn’t even get to find out who the real bad guy was.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman wrote, “. . . [A]s someone who has defended The Killing, if for no other reason than a story like this needs to be fully told before the final judgment is passed, there really is no defending the show after the finale . . . But ultimately a series comes down to its storytelling and, given the conclusion (or lack thereof) in the season finale, it’s just impossible to prop up the weaknesses if there was no final saving grace. And there wasn’t.”

The Boston Globe’s Matthew Gilbert, invoking a Saturday Night Live/Seth Meyers’ bit, wrote: “Really, The Killing? REALLY? . . . I have been a solid defender of The Killing, despite its flaws. But the finale was almost indefensible . . . [W]e really should know who killed Rosie.”

The show’s executive producer, Veena Sud, told Entertainment Weekly: “We wanted to do what we think is right and surprising. Maybe some people will be disappointed in it, just as some were disappointed in the series finales of Sopranos and Lost, and other people were absolutely thrilled.”

But when a critic said to her (before the finale aired) that many fans were expecting closure on the Larsen case and might not like the last few minutes of what turned out to be a three-card-Monte of a finale, Sud got defensive telling HitFix: “We never said you’ll get closure at the end of season one. We said from the very beginning this is the anti-cop cop show. It’s a show where nothing is what it seems, so throw out expectations. We will not tie up this show in a bow.”

I’m not asking for a shiny bow in the finale for the show that was aggressively promoted with the question, “Who killed Rosie Larsen?,” just something that doesn’t insult my intelligence and doesn't resort to yet another in a long line of fake-outs.

Image credit: AMC via the Los Angeles Times.

A Made-for-TV Moment: Four Minutes of Phony Contrition, a Heckler & Flashing Cameras

So Congressman Weiner resigned. Solo. No spouse in sight which was good because there were so many camera flashes going off that it looked like Weiner was standing in the middle of a lightning storm. “Yay! Bye-bye pervert,” an ebullient heckler shouted after Weiner announced he was resigning his post.

I didn’t buy that Weiner genuinely believed what he was saying, all that business about wanting to “heal,” that he was sorry for what he’d done (he was sorry he’d been caught is more like it) and that he was proud of the “values” his parents had instilled in him. (His poor parents! I’m sure they don’t want to be anywhere near their son and linked to his so-called “values.”)

When Weiner said he was there to “again apologize,” he sounded like a chastened schoolboy who’d been forced to apologize for behaving in way that the grown-ups did not approve of because he originally had no intention of resigning. That was before many members of the Democratic party, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the chairwoman of the party and even the president said that they thought he should go. (In the president’s case he said if he were Weiner he’d resign.)

At least Huma wasn’t in the picture. At least there’s that.

Now we can focus on "fun" political stories . . . like the astronomical federal debt dovetailed by the ominous news out of Greece, members of Congress suing the president over U.S. actions in Libya and the steady, dismal U.S. unemployment rates.

Dear Rep. Weiner: Don't Reenact Opening Scene from 'The Good Wife'

Now that news has broken that lewdly sexting wildman, New York Congressman Anthony Weiner is set this afternoon to announce that he’s resigning his seat (as he should’ve done well before this), I have one request: Please don’t have your pregnant wife, who’s been married to you for less than a year, stand beside you and endure more humiliation because of the stupid things that you’ve done.



It’s extraordinarily painful to watch these women -- Silda Spitzer, Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Edwards immediately come to mind -- stand beside their skunk husbands who couldn’t keep it in their pants and not only shamed themselves, but their spouses and children. (The fallout from your politician husband and/or father's indiscretions is the entire premise of the fabulous drama The Good Wife.) These guys don’t deserve to have the innocence and agony etched in the faces and eyes of their wives take the edge off of their disingenuous apologies for their scandalous behavior.

If it’s the only noble thing you do this week, don’t use your wife as a sympathetic prop.

Notes on Politics: With the First REAL GOP Debate, Election 2012 Kicks Off

In my house, the first well attended Republican debate on CNN got short shrift because we were all watching the Boston Bruins playoff game, though I watched highlights of the debate later. (It did indeed pain this political junkie to miss watching the debate live.)

Didn't think this was CNN's John King's most shining moment, but with the debate I think we can safely say that the 2012 presidential election is finally under way. Which of course means that The Daily Show's Jon Stewart has to take aim and satirize the crap out of it. And man, did he have some fat targets. This is going to be one weird election.

Notes on Politics: Jon Stewart, Anthony Weiner & Bill Clinton; Plus Local News on Decline

'The Wangover’

How is it possible to laugh at this sad, sad Weinter-Gate situation that's so patently and bizarrely insane?

Watch The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart take a stab at what his staff is calling, “The Wangover,” and place the hullabaloo into its surreal context. (Note: Stewart was once a quasi-roommate of Rep. Anthony Weiner's, actually Stewart shared an apartment with Weiner’s then-girlfriend.)

Measly Local News Coverage = More Gov’t Power, Potential Abuses

On a more serious note . . . When I was but a mere cub newspaper reporter and was assigned to cover a small town, I was given this advice: Get to know the people who work in the various departments in the town, particularly the administrative assistants, back then called secretaries. So I routinely checked in with departments and chatted folks up. I made sure to find out what happened at all the public meetings the boards/departments had if I hadn’t been able to attend them in person. In essence, I covered any given town to which I had been assigned, like the proverbial blanket.

That’s no longer the case for newspaper reporters as their staffs shrink and resources are pulled away from local newsgathering. Plus, many local newspapers have shied away from having their reporters write stories about government meetings because they don’t think it makes for interesting reading in a hyper-competitive, 24/7 media landscape.

The result? People don’t necessarily know what the heck is going on inside Town Hall any more. Local elections get barely any coverage and information about candidates for elected offices is sparse while local newspapers’ space for news stories contracts. We, the voters, are left largely in the dark as to what our local elected officials are doing. Think about what happened in the city of Bell, California where, until a Los Angeles Times story last year, its city officials were receiving oversized salaries, like $100,000/year for part-time City Council positions and nearly $800,000 for the city manager. And this was in “one of the poorest cities in Los Angeles County,” the Times reported. If a local news reporter had been covering that city on a regular basis -- scouring proposed municipal budgets and attending budget hearings like reporters used to do -- the public outrage about what officials were proposing would've likely prevented those salaries from being approved in the first place.

Which brings us to a new study from the Federal Communications Commission which found, “Coverage of state governments and municipalities has receded at such an alarming pace that it has left government with more power than ever to set the agenda and have assertions unchallenged,” the New York Times reported.
The paper quoted the study’s author as saying, “The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism – going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy – is in some cases at risk at the local level.” The FCC report cited the Bell, California case as an example of what happens when regular local reporting is cut.

I heartily concur that the dearth of local reporting will result in an ill-informed electorate and unchecked government power. Maybe folks like a local blogger I know -- who covers her hometown much more thoroughly and in depth than the local newspapers -- will step in and do the job that trained journalists used to do: Providing updates on what’s transpiring at Town Hall.

Weiner-Gate: Color Me Disgusted

This whole Weiner-Gate thing is gross, immature and disgusting. A 46-year-old CONGRESSMAN who is considered a firebrand liberal member of his party – therefore he garners lots of media attention for his partisan antics – should know better then to take and send lewd photos of himself to people he’s never met on the internet. (New X-rated photos are now making the rounds.) New York U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner certainly shouldn’t be engaging in that kind of thing now that he’s a married man. He only got married last July for God’s sake, it’s not like there’s been time for the romance to fade from the marriage.

But now we learn, courtesy of the New York Times, that his 35-year-old wife is pregnant. If this was a TV drama, we'd be calling BS right about now.

While Weiner claims he never “physically” cheated on his wife, he has cheated on her emotionally and has thoroughly humiliated her while she is carrying his child. To me, the fact that his wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, is pregnant makes this whole stew of ugly even uglier. Seriously. You’d think that a man who goes on television for a living as a politician who's pushing an agenda, who’s still a newlywed, who is expecting his first child with his new bride would know better than this.



What a cad, a cad who won’t resign his office like other well known politician cads (*cough* Bill Clinton, John Edwards *cough*) who had no shame and who humiliated their spouses and families.


Speaking of a cad who actually DID resign . . . former New York Governor Eliot “Client Number 9” Spitzer had the temerity to express sympathy for what Weiner’s going through, saying it’s a “torment like virtually no other.” Dude, try being married to the source of that torment, the one who brought the torment raining down upon the house. For the perp who created the situation, who created the reason for said "torment," no sympathy. Zip.

Which brings me to this pet peeve of mine as a journalist: Eliot Spitzer has no business anchoring a news program on CNN. But since CNN apparently has no problem with putting this guy on the air, perhaps Weiner could resign his office and join Spitzer as a co-host . . .

Another Volley in the Alec Baldwin/John Krasinski Yankees/Red Sox Rivalry

As the Red Sox and Yankees duke it out over the top rung of the American League East, Alec Baldwin and John Krasinski are starring in the third installment of the baseball rivalry ads.

My question: Wonder if my dog Max would tolerate being spray-painted, with pet-safe coloring, in the shape of a Red Sox B . . .

Notes on Pop Culture/Politics: 'Breaking Dawn' Trailer, 'The Killing' & Weiner-Gate

Tags: Movie Trailers, Movies Blog

I Got Your Breaking Dawn Trailer Right Here

My resident Twilight fan – my 12-year-old daughter – was thrilled to watch this brand, spankin’ new promo for the first part of Breaking Dawn. Wonder how graphic the brutal pregnancy and birth will be . . . Wonder if she can handle watching this movie . . .



The Killing Confounds

Did ya catch the recent episode of The Killing? The one that spent the entire time focused on Sarah Linden looking for her temporarily missing 13-year-old/wanna-be delinquent son while being carted around Seattle by her partner Stephen Holder? Strange and out of the norm for this series, eh?

Well let me tell you, I wasn’t a big fan of this installment. I wanted more in the way of clues to the murder’s identity, seeing as though there are now only two more episodes left, not an episode on a tangent. I reviewed it for CliqueClack TV.


Weiner-Gate

I hardly know what to say about this pathetic, ridiculous story about the married, fortysomething New York Congressman who was stupid enough to take and send lewd photos of himself to various women, then lied about it only to have to face the press and issue a mea culpa in front of a bank of news cameras just like the many horny male politicians who were caught with their pants down before him, like (just to name a few) Bill Clinton, Elliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford and John Edwards. Have none of these men learned anything?

It’s just preposterous that, in this age of 24/7 media, U.S. Rep. Weiner would even think that these images would never go public.

Among the interesting post-mortems, this one from Jezebel saying things like this from male pols are “rooted in male narcissism.” I think that goes without saying.

Can't wait to see what the late night comedians do with this . . .

Julie Taylor Pulls a Rory Gilmore

Image credit: NBC

The Gilmore Girls’ Rory Gilmore was the consummate “good girl.” She was smart and became the valedictorian of her academically rigorous private school’s senior class. She dated a nice boy and then a bad boy but never let her behavior veer off into wild gal territory. She was respectful to her mother and her grandparents.But when she began attending Yale, things started going off the rails and Rory started acting distinctly unRory-like.


For example, she had an affair with Dean, her married ex-boyfriend which led to the breakup of his marriage.

Her next boyfriend, Logan, was an affluent, spoiled albeit very smart party boy. She was in his company when she suggested that they “borrow” (i.e. – steal) someone else’s boat at a marina for a joy ride. (Just before the joy ride, she had been told in no uncertain terms by Logan’s media magnate of a father that she had no future in her chosen profession: Journalism.) Following her arrest and probation, she withdrew from Yale, became estranged from her mother and went to live at her grandparents’ home, missing out on a semester of college as she tried to figure out what she was going to make of her life.


Now Friday Night Lights’ Julie Taylor is not Rory Gilmore. She got a tattoo when she was in high school. Her dad, her high school’s football coach, walked in on her when she was having sex with her boyfriend, the team quarterback. She went through a rebellious period, including the time when she went away overnight with her boyfriend in direct violation of her parents’ wishes, and she frequently clashed with them.

But by the time she was ready to head off to college, Julie and her parents were at peace with one another. Her parents were tearful as she pulled out of the driveway.


That was before Julie met Derek, a charming and handsome teaching assistant who took a shining to the college freshman. Derek showered her with attention and flirted until the flirting turned into a full fledged affair. Problem is, Derek was married. And Julie knew it but proceeded to screw around with him anyway.

Julie’s stealing-the-boat moment occurred when Derek’s wife slapped her across the face and screamed, “Julie Taylor is a slut!” in front of a whole bunch of her fellow students. In her shame, Julie fled school and headed home, even went so far as to intentionally smash her car into a brick post so she couldn’t drive herself back to school.

When Julie’s parents Eric and Tami finally learned why she was hiding out at home, why she intentionally totaled her car, they tried to make her return to school, like Rory’s mother Lorelai unsuccessfully tried to make Rory go back to school after Rory was busted. Eric became so irritated, that he tried to physically get her to walk to the door. That was a no-go. Frustrated, Tami drove up to the college to pick up her daughter’s books and assignments so Julie wouldn’t fail out of her first semester of college.


What does this mean for Julie Taylor’s future as a college student? Will she turn it around like Rory eventually did?

Image credit: NBC.

Who'd Win: Sydney Bristow vs Voldemort? Voldemort vs Yoda? Dumbledore vs the Emperor?

My 9-year-old son and I had just finished dinner last week and were doing the dishes when he uttered this odd question, “Who do you think would win in a fight, Voldemort or Sydney Bristow?”

The kid knows that I have a soft spot for the fictional, super-CIA spy Sydney Bristow from the TV show Alias. We’ve also, along with my husband, been reading the Harry Potter series together out loud, so his mentioning Voldemort wasn’t out of the blue.

But to combine Sydney Bristow with Voldemort in the same breath, well that took me by surprise.

I told him I thought that in a battle, Sydney would prevail, but I don’t really think she could beat Voldemort as he wouldn’t allow her to lay hands, or one of her vicious kicks, on him.

My 9-year-old then added a twist, “Who’d win if it was Voldemort vs Yoda?”

I'm not sure about this one. Yoda’s pretty quick for a little guy and he is pretty smart, smarter than Voldemort, I’d venture to guess. This one had me stumped but my choice would have to be Yoda.

His final question: What if the battle were between Dumbledore and the Emperor? Who’d win then? I said Dumbledore would but only because I like Dumbledore and want to root for the good guys. (Saying The Emperor would win is like rooting for Arvin Sloane or Bellatrix Lestrange.)

Who do you think would prevail in these battles?

(FYI – Speaking of Sydney Bristow, the AV Club is reviewing the entire Alias series, starting with its amazing pilot with Sydney Bristow’s crazy red hair.)

Image credits: ABC via USA Today, Warner Brothers via MTV.