Senator's Selects 2024/09/25
36 days 'til Halloween, Silver Shamrock
From the Desk of…
Folks, we’re in a natural disaster of a drought. Driest summer on record here in Columbus since 1933. We’re talking Dust Bowl-levels of dry. The United States Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency is giving emergency loan assistance out. That’s the kind of dry I’m talking about. And hot. My God, has it been hot. Autumn is here now, so maybe that’ll change at last. I won’t hold my breath, but I’ll cross my fingers.
Thankfully, the news has been very slow. We are going to have a second moon though, for a little while.
Wait, I’m sorry. This just came in across my desk. Mark Robinson, Republican nominee for the governor of North Carolina, was found to be a prolific poster on the message boards of pornographic website Nude Africa, saying things like “I’m a black NAZI!” and “I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join” and… no, some of this isn’t fit to print. Well, not fit for me to print anyway. Robinson’s refutation, claiming that it was AI and that he totally didn’t do it, has resulted in both an exodus of his campaign staff and the revelation that an IP address in his area has been tied to the account that made the posts, taking it from a logical leap to pretty concrete.
The same IP address was also listed in breached user data for an account registered to Robinson’s email address on the dating website Fling, POLITICO found. Leaked database files from other website breaches show that Robinson’s email address was registered on the dating websites Adult Friend Finder and Mate 1, and the now-defunct website Lords Of Porno. There is no evidence that Robinson was recently active on any of these websites. The leaked data from Adult Friend Finder listed his last visit as December 31, 2013.
Some hay has been made about his use of the phrase “frogs fat ass/behind,” employing the same sort of linguistic forensics that let them catch the Unabomber. That’s why it’s important to eat your cake and have it too, and to keep inventing new strange things to say!
It remains to be seen how this will affect the presidential race in North Carolina.
Oh, and Cheryl Hines’s husband Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (70) was revealed to be having an affair with Olivia Nuzzi (31), a New York magazine reporter who had been assigned to cover his campaign. She has since been placed on leave. She claims “the relationship was never physical;” his team claims “she was obsessed with him.” One thing’s for certain: this can’t be good for ethics in political journalism.
…oh, and Matt Gaetz was revealed in court filings to have attended a “drug-fueled sex party” in 2017 with a 17-year-old sex trafficking victim. Despite his team’s denials of any such relationship, his ex-girlfriend was there and has testified that he was there, that these things did happen. We’ll see if this actually makes the House Ethics Committee do something, I guess.
The Brain Dump
if they made The Amityville Horror today, James Brolin would spend all his time worried about BIDENOMICS and the house would be haunted by WOKE
one thing i like to do is read misled as mɪzəld instead of mɪsˈlɛd, like it rhymes with grizzled
HAMBURGER HELPER CALL ME I HAVE AN AWARD WINNING MARKETING CAMPAIGN FOR YOU ITS CALLED LIVE LAUGH GLOVE HAHAHA DO YOU GET IT HAMBURGER HELPER IT'S LIKE THE WALL VINYL HAHA IT'S LIKE THAT OR WHAT ABOUT EAT PRAY GLOVE HAMBURGER HELPER CALL ME PLEASE MY WIFE LEFT ME HAHHA THIS IS ALL I HAVE PLEASE HAMBURGER HELPER HAHA I AM BEGGING YOU I WOULD BE SUCH A GOOD MARKETING DIREXTOR PLEASE HAHA HOW ABOUT I GLOBE YOI THAT COULD WORK AT VALENTINES OR WHENEVER OR IF YOU MARKET TO PEOPLE ON LOVE I DONT KNOW MAYBE IT COULD BE A NEW MARKET FOR YOU TO TAP HAHA I HAVENT SEEN THE MARKET RESEARCH SO I DONT K OW IF MARRIED PEOPLE OR PEOLLE ON LOVE EAT HAMBURGER HRLPERS BUT I DO HAHA PLEASE ITS ALL I HARV PLEASE GOD HAMBURGER HELP ME
getting a brainworm and pulling a 31-year-old journalist (emotionally and digitally only)
i know a micro center employee hate to see me coming when i've got money in my pocket
At the Movies
Scott Woods wrote a nice piece on the late James Earl Jones, which you can read here. In film news, Baz Luhrmann has set up his next film, a Joan of Arc biopic he’s calling “the ultimate teenage girl coming of age story,” at Warner Brothers, and Emerald Fennell has announced Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi for her Wuthering Heights adaptation, much to the chagrin of a lot of people.
Nightmare Alley (2021), dir. Guillermo del Toro ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ❤️
You know, I ultimately think I prefer the concision of the original. Punchier. Think I like Power better than Cooper too, even though Bradley does a fine job.
That said, this cast... that production design... the meandering of its first act to show off all those bits and bobs Del Toro loves... I'm an easy mark. Nice too to put a little more of the edge on it that it couldn't have in the original.
Diary of the Dead (2007), dir. George Romero ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Boy, this is tough, but I'm going with the heart on this one. First things first, this is a godawful found footage film. Like, it fails on almost every front for me as found footage. You compare something like this to [REC], which came out the same year, and it's miles of difference.
The ideas that underpin the film, however, are some of Romero's best in twenty years. The ideas are good enough that the film is damn near prescient in how it handles some of the topics. Of course people would be livestreaming the damn zombie apocalypse! Of course people would be uploading footage and talking about how many views they were getting! The ideas of this movie are effectively the same ideas that underpin Civil War, how humans have created this media environment that demands spectacle at all costs.
It is not scary in the slightest, and there's a lot of on-the-nose dialogue, and it's probably got me thinking more than any movie he's done since Day of the Dead (which, let's be real, is a low bar - it's not like Monkey Shines or Bruiser were thinkers [if you have any idea what Bruiser was trying to say, DM me]).
The Substance (2024), dir. Coralie Fargeat ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ❤️
Folks, I do not say this lightly: that was probably the best body horror movie I've seen since The Fly and probably the best movie about Hollywood I've seen since Mulholland Drive. My mouth was hanging agape for probably the last thirty minutes. That's probably one of the best horror films I've seen in a decade.
Margaret Qualley could crack me open like a cold can of Diet Coke.
One Picture
Alright, here’s how we’re opening. Pre-show will start 9/30 at 12PM EDT. It will continue likewise in this fashion until the next broadcast day. Tune into the standard channels for regular updates through the month.
In closing,
I know last week we talked about novelty, but I also want to recognize that a lot of people will use external changes as window dressing to try and mask internal stagnation. External changes won’t solve deeper, personal issues if you don’t first confront and understand them. True growth comes from self-awareness of these issues and, yes, hard and dedicated work on them. You are always the constant in your own life, and changes cannot happen without changing the constant. Your thoughts, your emotions, your habits, they follow you from place to place and from time to time. After all, as a friend once told me, "no matter where you go, there you are."
Until next time, stock up on candy, apples, scarves, whatever it is you might need to have a ghoulishly good October.
Well, I've got The Substance on my to-see list now.
Excited for your Nightmare rewatch. I went through all those for the first time with a girlfriend a couple years ago, and I loved them. New Nightmare in particular is so precisely my shit (but the first one and Dream Warriors also rule IMO).