UTUSN
UTUSN's Journal
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Gender: Male
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 67,839
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 67,839
Journal Archives
All I understand is (my interpretation of) what I see.
It dates to 2012 in Vanity Fair (article I haven't read). The date is pertinent to the timeline of the relationship, but I digress. Back to what I see: Her (being posed) pose is titilating, salacious (my definitions), she/directly addressing him, he/engaging the viewer with a conspiratorial intimation. Since the title of the article is "Hot Ticket" the overt sexuality is a "joking" excuse to pose them that way.
*** I was an early viewer of MSNBC - monitored especially Tweety (that's Chris MATTHEWS for those too young here) - and was drawn by the Microsoft and NBC appeal to Libs in its supposed concept. I liked the afternoon program of three young women, especially Ashleigh BANFIELD (who later was hounded out by I-think the "Savage" WEINER), but don't remember that Mika was one of the three as Wiki says, made no impression on me. So Tweety hosted SCABS a lot and I guess shepherded him into his own show, where Mika became the sort of unequal news reader. All I knew was that she had been some kind of junior (intern?) for Dan RATHER, and she was definitely treated as a junior here. My observation was that SCABS verbally and emotionally abused her, but also the poor weatherman who was just a working pro, but also Andrea MITCHELL. But it was way worse on Mika, who always seemed to be on the verge of tears as she tried to do the readings while he shut her down and talked down contemptuously. And yet she was pleading for simple respect, which led me to start calling her "Mika Mouse." Things sort of toned down and then gossip happened that something was "up" between them. There was a long period when it was unspoken but acknowledged, with all the other regulars sort of alluding. Then it was out in the open as a relationship, then "engagement" and marriage. SCABS had turned into a solicitous, deferential "partner" to her, turning from treating her as a subordinate. So all that happened and with the marriage came her self-proclaimed persona as a champion for empowered women, her books about women being assertive in demanding equal status and pay, with my Irony radar dinging that she had gotten where she got by putting herself on the block. *** So now seeing the Wiki for the first time, the timeline is that the affair started way back in 2010 and seems to have been a factor in her divorce. So back to the picture, the date of 2012 is during the affair and before the divorce. What else is not to be understood? *********QUOTE****** https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/joe-scarborough-mika-presidential-run MSNBC's Hot Ticket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mika_Brzezinski .... ... In 2001, Brzezinski began a short hiatus from CBS News, during which she worked for rival MSNBC on the weekday afternoon show, HomePage, with co-anchors Gina Gaston and Ashleigh Banfield.[6] Entertainment Weekly described the trio as "the Powerpuff Girls of journalism".[6] .... ... "Mika, the 'hot anchor' was born. The producers slowly encouraged my participation in news reader segments that I was more at ease with. Geist and Joe slowly found me a capable news reader and the expansion of my role was a process. I was not pleased with the reference to being the 'hot anchor'."[7] .... On October 23, 1993, Brzezinski married TV news reporter James Patrick Hoffer, now of WABC-TV.[34] They met when both worked at WTIC-TV. They have two daughters, Emilie and Carlie Hoffer. Hoffer and Brzezinski divorced in 2016 amidst allegations of an affair that started years prior in 2010, between Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.[35] In early 2017, Brzezinski became engaged to her co-host Joe Scarborough, and they were married on November 24, 2018, in Washington, D.C., with Rep. Elijah Cummings serving as the officiant.[36][37][38] .... *******UNQUOTE***** |
Posted by UTUSN | Tue May 9, 2023, 12:12 PM (1 replies)
A lack of - *fading* of? - ATTENTION. "Losing" stuff, not lost, just placed automatically.
ON EDIT: I guess this also applies to posting in the wrong/GD forum!
*** So I could blame it on aging. But sort of increasingly over the past year, have had little episodes of "losing" personal or household items, spent significant 15-20 minutes looking for them, sometimes very necessary items whose loss is troubling. A recent one the other day was the missing partials, very troubling and resulting in an overnight worrying and then resigning to a solution of having a new set remade. And always with the Lapsed Catholic supplication to St Anthony, who finds lost things. The next morning, after having gone through prolonged searching of the likeliest places I had been, searching through pockets and repositories, *there* they were, on the floor beneath and under the laptop work station where I had sat the night before. So this morning, getting the electric mower ready - installing the battery, getting a paper towel for sweating in the shirt pocket, putting on the work hat - almost fully ready, could *NOT* find the electric starter button. It was NOWHERE, not in its storage place, not in the mower. The searching verged on getting increasingly frenetic - like, without it I'll be stuck, ordering the part will take a week, WHAT to do. And St Anthony ON CALL. Finally, *there* it was: In my shirt pocket under where I had stuffed the paper towel. I had NO/ZERO memory of having retrieved it from its place or put it in my pocket. All done automatically, without ATTENTION. I'm sure that deteriorating mental faculty might be obvious to some, and 76 years is not totally relevant since it can happen earlier. The wild variation in the quality of my DU posts will appeal to some, who will focus on my ridiculous ones and not on my cogent ones. At a training delivered by a clinical social worker from the Mayo clinic, the trainer cited how a person was observed for (dementia?) yet was said by persons knowing her well to be an EXCELLENT driver. The trainer said that so long as the driver was traveling on streets that were totally familiar over many years, the driving might well be excellent, but if something UNEXPECTED happened, it would all go out the window. *** Just throwing this out there for my own whim. Also, have been biting my tongue over my anti-"royal" feelings of the past days, just letting it fester, unless my hornet's nest gets kicked. |
Posted by UTUSN | Sun May 7, 2023, 01:30 PM (11 replies)
Local radio wingnut's predictable take on Drumpf's indictment: "Petty. VERY petty."
This fellow's family used to own the station. I started listening to talk radio as a college student and when I came back here in my late 20s, this was and still is the only one, and it was the standard line-up of syndicated doctors, psychologists, and general topics, with only 3-minutes of wingnut rants from this guy in the mornings. Then came LIMBAUGH, who was a shock even to the wingnut owners to the point of only running an hour of him and keeping the local farm report, until they got the nerve to run his full three hours and then, over years, replacing the doctors with the full lineup of Faux yakkers, finally replacing ABC news with Faux, everything all Faux.
I started replying to this host with single spaced letters and he replied, all this way before computers/emails. He harbored hopes of converting me, to the point of making nice with socializing with his wife and friends at the Country Club (I never went). He is of the Old Repuke faction of the Repukes. After the first few years he figured out no conversion was going to happen and took a break saying, "I'm tired of being your Right Wing whipping boy." But then resumed, and emailing made it all zoom with immediacy. They had sold the company to a conglomerate that let their several stations keep their separate formats (country, rock, sports, this one wingnut yakking) for cash diversification's sake, and he continued with a solo yak show, then retired, then came back. So the sparring has gone on for some 30 years. He's got co-hosts who are younger and there is only one actual Lib/newsreader in the whole place. Sometimes he refers to my email in terms of "a friend of mine says... " *** So his take on the Drumpf indictment ("petty. very petty" ) got this email (to him and others) from me:
As usual, opinions are opinions, but quality varies. And (wingnut’s) comprise a long rapsheet of wrongness, too bad there’s not a spreadsheet for instant substantiating - all wingnut world view for starters, Iraq, before Iraq, everything ever after. And his are never original or surprising, just parrot points of the conventional wingnut variety. So his take on Drumpf’s indictment is just that it is “petty” and even more emphatically “VERY PETTY” along with the other wingnut assertions that everything is just Dem vindictive plotting to get rid of Drumpf and that it will all backfire and motivate Drumpf’s flying monkeys. Couldn’t be that Drumpf has brought everything on himself, all his life. (Wingnut) is beyond conventional, he is for the status quo power structure of yore (America great AGAIN, the OLD childhood way). The way things WERE, with the people in power being the ones that WERE. I would say he is an institutionalist, but that’s a tricky word because it can mean NORMS, but norms can vary since all structures have their own institutions. And when Drumpf is involved, his whole m.o. is to rip down all norms, being just an authoritarian a-hole out only for himself – brute power for his own benefit. (Wingnut) believes there is a class of leaders who deserve to be, should not be questioned, sort of Divine Right. (Wingnut) supports anybody (minority tokens) who/tools will accommodate his wingnut power structure. Just as he said he didn’t agree with “EVERYTHING” Limbaugh said, when Drumpf DESCENDED the escalator he immediately jumped onto the descent, minimizing all of Drumpf’s atrocities, pooh-poohing all red flags, finding cover in The Atlantic’s article about not taking Drumpf LITERALLY, claiming that Drumpf is a POPULIST, saying that Drumpf would be all right if he would JUST SHUT UP – excuse, excuse, apologist-ing, apologist-ing, minimizing, slippery sloping – the question being, when he wakes up one morning in a Fascist system, will he pinpoint when he could have said, “Enough, too much, no more”? So in the context of (wingnut's) lifelong wingnuttiness, no expectation that he will ever think outside that box, but Drumpf left wingnuts bare about their utter lack of principles, completely cynical about anything-goes for the sake of their own POWER, stripped of any pretense to higher moral ground of any kind. He and his ilk wingnuts never hesitated one little beat about dropping all of what they had professed: Tear down democracy, personal freedoms, institutions, law enforcement, veterans, DECENCY ITSELF. Why wasn’t any of Drumpf’s obnoxiousness - quite apart from his concrete criminal activities - in denigrating Gold Star families, military service (“losers”), disabled people, actually any stripe of disadvantaged people – enough? As George W. Shrub said, “It (the Constitution) is just a piece of paper.” So, I can list at length things that need to be changed about the Constitution, but nihilism is something else. Like how WASPs claim to be good Christians because they socialize on Sunday mornings for business networking. The Acts of the Apostles is all MARKETING, fundraising, recruitment, reaping material rewards via surface “virtues.” Seems like wingnuts wink-wink don't really believe in the Constitution or their religion (Heaven, Hell), are really in some sort of nihilistic mindset, opportunistic, self-survival. So (Wingnut) and his ilk having exposed themselves as selling out their professed values, which we Libs always suspected were FALSE to begin with, all he can do in defending Drumpf is to IMPUGN MOTIVES projected on Dems. They used to harp on “personal responsibility”. Yet they don’t credit Drumpf for having done everything TO himself. Just Mr Victim. |
Posted by UTUSN | Sat Apr 1, 2023, 09:39 PM (0 replies)
Making Time (magazine) Great Again - cover thanks to Just A Box of Rain & El Supremo
Thanks to El Supremo for the proto-mugshots.
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Posted by UTUSN | Fri Mar 31, 2023, 10:46 AM (1 replies)
Willie GEIST seems nice, can explain CARLSON, birds of a feather, was his ex-producer
I remember CARLSON on MSNBC, bubbly, always putting GEIST on camera gushingly. Same background, fathers in the business, fittingly CARLSON's sperm donor in Propaganda (Voice of America). In recent years GEIST has cultivated a nice/objective image.
Willie Geist and Tucker Carlson Trash Rosie O'Donnell and Praise Trump, (January - June 2007)
Let's not forget the type of behaviour that Willie made a name for himself with: disrespecting women and elevating awful men. https://thehill.com/media/316072-morning-joe-team-praises-tucker-carlsons-success-on-fox/ ‘Morning Joe’ team praises Tucker Carlson’s success on Fox 01/25/17 .... “He’s doing really well. His numbers are up. Tucker’s doing well,” said co-host Willie Geist, who started out at MSNBC as a producer for Carlson’s program on the network, which ran from 2005 to 2008. .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Geist#External_links .... Geist was born in Evanston, Illinois, the son of newspaper columnist and broadcast journalist Bill Geist and social worker Jody Geist.[2] Geist is the older brother of Libby Geist Wildes, the Academy Award-winning documentary film producer of O.J.: Made in America and The Last Dance.[5] He is the great-grandson of former Detroit Red Wings star and Hockey Hall of Fame player Herbie Lewis.[6] .... |
Posted by UTUSN | Thu Mar 9, 2023, 12:52 PM (4 replies)
Have been clicked and baited annoyingly even from *our* side, case in point:
I've been enrolled at The University of YouTube for a couple of years - hooked on Egyptian-Greco-Roman and "modern" historical gossip. YouTube has been the answer to the main grievance against my previous 30 years of being tied down to satellite packages (hundreds of UNwatched channels) - CARTE BLANCHE, free from networks. Freedom to SKIP PAST anything unwanted and complete availability of WANTED things.
Not only at YouTube, but here at DU and with cable/internet commentators, fantastic to be able to SKIP PAST things and persons that are unsuitable for whatever reasons - unreliability, quarrelsomeness, pandering, lack of originality, saying what we all know, lack of liveliness/humor, whatever - and readily find things that are the opposite, not having to squabble. Sometimes, there is CLICK BAIT, occasionally the radar failing by an enticing title, and the fellow below has been a prime example - daily posting scandalous titles, everything in the anti-Drumpf and anti-MAGA category (fine), but after the first few times sitting/waiting to the end of the 15 minutes with *NOTHING* of the enticing Subject showing up, his videos fell to the wayside. Even so, a technique for trying to find the Subject in his videos was to fast forward past his PADDINGs of clips from cable yak shows, only still not finding the scandalous Subject. Some of his paraphrased enticing Titles: (Drumpf) Suffers a Major Seizure. Jared KUSHNER in Major Legal Trouble. Kevin McCARTHY *Arrested* Last Night. The one about Drumpf's "seizure" turned out to be mainly about his usual verbal bluster (yes, including threatening "retribution" ) - but was that a SEIZURE? And McCARTHY's "arrest" turned out to be not taking legal actions against SANTOS thereby potentially exposing himself to Legal consequences. And when I tried to find background on this fellow, even two YouTubes titled "Christo Aivalis EXPOSED" turned out to be wildly *favorable* and sycophantic, all about his fantastic PhD and Left credentials, married and with a cat, Canadian, and worth high millions. Even if the clickbaiting is just exaggerated, figurative language for the purpose of calling attention to the inner "real" content, it ends up being a turnoff. ********QUOTE******* https://www.youtube.com/@ChristoAivalisNews/featured CHRISTO AIVALIS
Left Politics, Culture, and History Description Commentator, writer, and PhD in History Christo Aivalis discussing all matters that interest him in regards to left politics, history, and culture. There will be a focus on Canadian content, but not to an extent that ignores events happening around the globe, especially in places like the United States and United Kingdom *******UNQUOTE******** |
Posted by UTUSN | Sun Mar 5, 2023, 03:48 PM (14 replies)
Another sorta pome: Ya coulda luvd me/us
But who cares.
Was it/whatever, "love"? (As "prince" Charles said, "Whatever 'love' is" ) Whome my tawking to? M i too old to find "love" (whatever "love" is)? When all that "shared" thing is done, we're supposed to find ourselves who we really are. By ourselves. I don't like it. |
Posted by UTUSN | Sat Feb 18, 2023, 12:22 AM (2 replies)
Is this a pome?
PREFACE: Did you ever have a childhood relative or friend that was so special and gone adulthood, but sticking?!
Cousin, from infancy – Yeah, we were close Not in that way, In some other intimate way And we went through the Generational and the times, Our elders judging what was Just the crap we didn’t know either. So, ugly and separate life things happened Living our lives, everybody, And I judged you rightly so, While hating mine, not so bad as yours. Yet here and there we kept in touch Until you accused and called me liar Which you didn’t know the severity of, And I’ll never forgive. But it was too much your wingnut ways, And when you anti-vaxxed to a hospital And refused treatment, I broke down And called and said: I love you, do it. And I said, I/your sister/our cousins love you, And you said, “Yeah, and all of you Are driving me crazy.” Fine. So you recovered your wingnut way. So you recovered and our childhood is over. |
Posted by UTUSN | Tue Feb 14, 2023, 12:44 AM (8 replies)
Yea, I don't get into the weeds of just about anything - just let the impact of whatever hit me.
And whenever somebody asks me what genre or performer I like they assume that everybody is *immersed* in the whole catalog of the genre or artist. I don't analyze influences - intellectualize - am a generalist, on the surface, superficial as some will say. I don't seek out, I let the various levels of filters and happenstance block things out and when (in the case of music) something seeps through all the layers and filters and finds its way to my level - and I *like* it - all good.
So I like one song (in this case) by TayTay, but know nothing about her other stuff, and am not boxed into whatever her genre is (she dips into Country, too, no?). Probably I like 3 or 4 Willie NELSON songs, but am not "Country." Etc. Although I'm stronger in what I *don't* like - detest Jazz and most Alternative stuff. I don't expect anybody to know, but I repeatedly say that *MELODY* is absolutely PRIMARY, that lyrics are way next to nothing for me. Music is IT. After a piece has grabbed me with the melody and have heard it hundreds of times I might make the effort to see what the lyrics say, but for many of the songs I like I have ZERO idea what the lyrics are or are about. As Lenny BERSTEIN demonstrated in one of the Young People's Concerts, you can take any lyrics off a song and substitute lyrics saying the opposite or just plain nonsense words or grunts. The Ave Maria can be divested of its religious lyrics and be inserted with obscenities and the MUSIC/MELODY is what counts. One time here I admired "Chandelier" by Sia, which had pierced through my filters via a (Dior?) commercial, and I was told here that what made the song fantastic was that it was about drugs and suicide. Nope, not for me. I had ZERO idea what the lyrics said and ZERO idea about Sia beyond that she inexplicably draped her face with hair (wig?). It was the MELODY/MUSIC that grabbed me. Same said about "Imagine". While I appreciate the sentiments of the lyrics, THOSE (like the Ave Maria) can be ditched and have whatever substituted. That said, after a song has gotten past my jumping-through-hoops and I've allowed the lyrics to be checked out, I'm willing to play along and let the piece be mine in its totality. Obviously, whenever there's a great melody, the makers of it would usually want lyrics that would do it justice. This is one of the few times I quote a Republican, when EISENHOWER was asked what music he liked, he said TCHAIKOVSKY, "because it's *TUNEFUL." And Lenny said that (in Lenny's vast expertise), Pyotr is unmatched in his melodic genius. What I like has to be "tuneful" of the showstopper stripe. I can appreciate a soulful, stripped down performance like TayTay at this piano, would not seek out a whole big production in a video. I'm bracing for the Oscars because, in this vein, I've looked at brief descriptions of the nominees and all I see are explosions and extraterrestrials and "superheroes." Nope, nup, nada. Would way prefer a couple of characters interacting, like TayTay at the piano. *** ON EDIT: A *perfect* example of my primacy of melody/music over lyrics, the glorious Queen of the Night aria, besides that it's in a language I am ignorant of making the meaning of the words that much more incomprehensible:: When I looked up the lyrics, I was floored at the BIZARRE NUTCASE content. Yet, it's a glorious piece, both in composition and in performance, and perhaps the incomprehensible (to me) words make it that much more so. |
Posted by UTUSN | Wed Jan 25, 2023, 01:05 PM (0 replies)
Navy "art" - tourist knickknacks from ports of call
![]() So on Liberty in Japan - like, 50 years ago - was instantly attracted to the souvenir of this figurine of an old man reading a book with a load on his back, snapped it up, and at home my mother said it fit me perfectly - aspiration (the book) with a load on the back. So years later a cousin told me she was attracted to Japan and wanted to learn Japanese, and I gave it to her. Regretted it ever since and sporadically looked for it on eBay and Etsy, no luck for 50 years. The other is a voodoo priestess from my second ship and a stop in Haiti. We went to a brandy factory, free samples, and to a demonstration of 7 young males and 7 young females, all dressed in white with red sashes, procession single file leading a goat on a leash, at the end of which they mimed sacrificing the goat. It was explained that whatever negative vibes had been transferred to the goat and expunged by the slaughter. *** This week *FOUND* the man/book! |
Posted by UTUSN | Sat Jan 14, 2023, 02:22 AM (5 replies)