Netflix stars upstaged by sexy ‘superyacht’

Posted on October 29, 2025 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I were discussing the steady stream of mediocre movies that Netflix cranks out for subscribers.

“I saw a new one last week called The Woman in Cabin 10,” I said. “It’s about an ace reporter who solves a murder mystery involving a bunch of billionaires sailing on a luxury yacht to some charity event.”

Swamp Rabbit brightened up. “A whodunit, right? Is it any good?”

I told him that Keira Knightley, as the annoying reporter, should have been thrown overboard. That the storyline, which depends on the old doppelganger gimmick, was too predictable.

Swamp Rabbit frowned when I said “predictable.” He told me there are only six or seven basic story categories and they all use formulas that writers created thousands of years ago. He asked why I kept watching the movie if I didn’t like it.

“It was late and I was too tired to write or read,” I explained. That’s what Netflix movies are for. They lull you to sleep when you don’t have the energy for anything else. The more predictable the story, the more likely you are to doze off.

“The peeps like predictable,” he said. “Human nature don’t change, so why should stories?”

“Let me put it this way,” I said. “The most interesting character in The Woman in Cabin 10 is the yacht.”

It’s true; the real star is the 274-foot-long Savannah, shiny and streamlined, with video walls, an underwater viewing area and cabins that look more like staterooms. This “superyacht” reportedly was built for about $150M and costs $1M a week to rent.

Big money, but well worth it if you know your viewers want to fantasize about the lifestyles of the rich and fatuous. As Swamp Rabbit noted, human nature doesn’t change. The Woman in Cabin 10 would have been popular in the Great Depression, when audiences preferred movies where the actors wore tuxedoes and evening gowns and drank martinis and flounced around in Art Deco penthouses that shimmered in heavenly light.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with fantasizing,” Swamp Rabbit said. “”Real life is way overrated, especially if you’re poor.”

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No kings, no dictators, no bike pump

Posted on October 21, 2025 by oddmanout215

I had to work Sunday but figured there would be time to catch the tail end of the No Kings march. I finished work, drove home to South Philadelphia and jumped on my bicycle. But my back tire went flat as I was riding to Independence Mall, so I didn’t get to rub shoulders with the inflatable chicken woman and thousands of others who turned out to protest the ongoing misdeeds of the orange blob who would be king.

“I couldn’t find a gas station with a working air pump,” I told my neighbor Swamp Rabbit when he asked why I didn’t get the tire re-inflated.

“Don’t blame them gas stations,” he said. “It ain’t their fault you’re too dumb to carry an air pump.”

The Philly march was one of more than 2,700 No Kings demonstrations that took place on the same day all over the country to protest the Trump administration’s efforts to dispense with the norms — not to mention the laws — of America’s 249-year-old democracy. A bunch of local politicians were among the protesters, as well as ex-Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who was in town to perform at Met Philadelphia and was happy to pose for selfies with some of the protestors who recognized him.

Byrne brought his bike (!) and marched with it. Swamp Rabbit was amused to learn this and said, “I bet he had plenty of air in his tires.”

It seems a good time was had by all, which drove home the main point of the marches. Sane people — especially sane city people — are fed up with the evil buffoon in the White House and his goons, who will end all protests, along with free and fair elections, if they can get away with it. But this isn’t Germany in the 1930s, right?

“We’ll see about that,” Swamp Rabbit said.

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Why Trump’s favorite mean girl loves SNL

Posted on October 16, 2025 by oddmanout215

Two weeks ago, I noted that most satirists don’t seem to be up to the task of effectively ridiculing our criminal president and his eager accomplices.

A case in point: the sketch on last week’s Saturday Night Live in which cast member Amy Poehler spoofs the corrosive Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the same sketch, Tina Fey plays Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security. Afterwards, instead of firing back at SNL for lampooning her, the real-life Bondi posted a photo of Poehler and Fey taken from the sketch and the message “Loving Any Poehler!”

Bondi felt flattered by the sketch.

SNL’s audience deserves better than a cute little skit that makes light of Bondi’s evasions and lies regarding Trump’s undermining of the Department of Justice’s prosecutorial independence. Cute doesn’t cut it if you’re supposedly in the business of satirizing public figures whose conduct is — no exaggeration — hastening the decline of democracy in America.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit disagreed with me. “What you want SNL to do? Joke about where Bondi’s hiding Jeffrey Epstein’s client list? Re-enact Noem’s execution of her dog? If shit’s too nasty, it ain’t funny.”

“Ever read Swift’s A Modest Proposal?” I said. “Like I said last time, the best satire is nasty and funny. Stephen Colbert would have skewered those Republican bimbos.”

“Yeah, but look what’s happening to Colbert,” my mangy neighbor said. “SNL would rather be cute than get kicked off TV, don’t ya think?”

Footnote: Credit Poehler as Bondi with at least one funny line: “I’m not even going to dignify that question with a lie.”

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Jane Goodall, scientist and humanist

Posted on October 13, 2025 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit was asking if I’d listened to the year-old podcast featuring environmentalist Jane Goodall that was aired again on public radio not long after she died on Oct. 1 at age 91.

Of course I’d listened. Goodall helped overturn conventional wisdom regarding how humans should treat the rest of the animal kingdom and nature in general. Early on she conducted breakthrough field research about the behavior of chimpanzees. Throughout her career she used humor and empathy to spark support for animal and human rights, and for sustainability, a concept that was still fairly obscure when she first made a name for herself.

“Well, how about that,” Swamp Rabbit said. “It’s about time you wrote about a good person instead of Donald Trump and Pam Bondi and them other degenerates.”

In the podcast Goodall describes what happened after her mentor, anthropologist Louis Leakey, talked her into pursuing a PhD at Cambridge in the 1960s:

I was told [by instructors] I’d done everything wrong. You shouldn’t have given the chimpanzees names. They’re just animals. They should have numbers. And you can’t talk about their personality, their mind, or their emotion. Those are characteristics unique to us. Nor must you have empathy, because to be a good scientist, you must be coldly objective. So, fortunately, I had this wonderful teacher when I was a child, who taught me that in this respect, those professors were totally, completely different. Talking rubbish. And, um, that teacher was my dog, Rusty. You, you can’t have an animal and not know that of course we’re not the only beings on this planet with personalities, minds, and emotions.

Not your standard stuffy academic. She got her PhD in ethology and went on with her life’s work. People everywhere liked her because she was a down-to-earth believer in the power of good. A humanist, in other words.

“You sure you want to call her a humanist?” Swamp Rabbit said. “I ain’t heard that word in a long time.”

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Satire is no match for a mad king and his minions

Posted on October 6, 2025 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit and I were debating the usefulness of satire in a country whose democratic traditions are being subverted by authoritarian forces. Will poking fun at those forces help? Can satirists wake sane Americans to the fact that the norms they took for granted – rule of law, free speech, free and fair elections, peaceful transfer of power, etc. – are being flushed away by a deranged president and his fanatically loyal underlings?

Swamp Rabbit rolled his bloodshot eyes. “What you mean by waking and poking fun? Fascists got no sense of humor. They don’t take kindly to being poked.”

“I’m talking about waking the public, not the fascists,” I said. “Satire only works if it’s caustic and ridiculous enough to spark a backlash against the powers that be. It has to be absurd but fundamentally true. It doesn’t just poke, it punctures. I’m working on a good satire right now.”

I told him I was writing a skit that opens with a secretary of defense – secretary of war, he calls himself – telling hundreds of generals and admirals at a military base that they’d better get with the program. No more “beardos” or queers. No “fat generals or admirals.” No more foreign wars, just wars against American cities. The secretary tries to talk tough like George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove — a great satire — but he seems to be nothing more than a pompous blowhard in a sharp suit. Then the draft-dodging president appears – his nickname is Bone Spurs – and promises to bring back battleships and use American cities as “training grounds” for the military. Afterwards the generals and admirals file out and one of them says, “I can’t believe I had to travel six thousand miles to hear that bullshit.”

At first Swamp Rabbit didn’t critique my skit idea. “I know it sounds farfetched,” I said, “but do you think it might get people fired up enough to start a backlash?”

He frowned and opened a cold beer. “The peeps will think it sounds like that skit about Pete Hegseth on Saturday Night Live last week. It didn’t fire them up. They laughed a little and then they went to sleep.”

I must have looked disappointed. He said, “Face it, Odd Man. Satire ain’t worth shit these days. Reality will upstage it every time.”

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An escalator is [not] just an escalator

Posted on September 25, 2025 by oddmanout215

Donald and Melania Trump were standing on the “up” escalator, which had stopped moving as soon as they stepped on to it. Pretty funny, but Trump wasn’t laughing.

“He’s one of them sociopaths,” said my neighbor Swamp Rabbit as we watched the video. “He don’t laugh at nothing except when somebody he don’t like breaks their neck or something.”

The escalator malfunction was at the United Nations, not long before Trump started to make a Hitlerian speech and found his teleprompter wasn’t working. Later, predictably, he insisted the escalator and teleprompter failed because of “sabotage” and ordered an “immediate investigation.”

“This was symbolism, not sabotage,” I said. “The gods are trying to tell Trump he’s just an evil clown who won power because Americans were too angry and confused to understand that electing him for a second time might be the kiss of death for the American experiment.”

Swamp Rabbit shook his head and reached for his beer. “Okay, but what you mean by symbolism? Sometimes an escalator is just an escalator.”

I sighed. “An escalator is a symbol. Remember when Trump rode the escalator at Trump Tower with Melania ten years ago? It was the gods signaling that the time was right for him to become a major threat to civilization. But this time the gods used an escalator to tell him he’s an irredeemable jackass, the world has had enough. The escalators are like bookends.”

Swamp Rabbit scowled. “You must have been one of them English majors. Symbols don’t mean nothing. What you’re saying is just wishful thinking.”

“You’re probably right,” I replied. “But it doesn’t hurt to make a wish.”

Footnote: The escalator and teleprompter malfunctions turned out the be the fault of Trump’s lackeys. Predictably.

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Kimmel is returning, but on how many stations?

Posted on September 23, 2025 by oddmanout215

So Disney boss Bob Iger gave in to public opinion. He caved. He apparently told ABC to put comedian Jimmy Kimmel back on TV a few days after he axed him for speaking his mind about the Charlie Kirk murder. Even though Brendan Carr, Donald Trump’s FCC lapdog, threatened to take action against Disney and the other corporate entities if they didn’t muzzle Kimmel.

“I guess you mean Sinclair and Nexstar and them other corporates that own most of the stations that air Kimmel’s show,” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said. “I never even heard of them before this. Can Disney really make them put Kimmel back on the air?”

l shrugged. All I know is what I wrote last time — a very small group of weasels are in charge of the big decisions regarding what us commoners can view or read in mainstream media, and they care about money, not free speech.

One thing’s for sure: Disney is an octopus with tentacles everywhere. Money was on Iger’s mind when he reconsidered axing Kimmel. He must have realized that the backlash from celebrities and the general public was hurting Disney’s bottom line worse than defying Carr would.

But the Trump-loving weasels at Sinclair are saying they still intend to keep Kimmel off their stations, probably because they think most of their viewers are Trumpers and won’t object. And what about Nexstar? It needs an OK from the FCC before it can go ahead with a merger that would make it the king of TV station owners. Is Nexstar counting on Iger to smooth things over with Carr? Meanwhile, an even bigger problem with the FCC looms for the Disney octopus, this one involving ESPN, one of its main tentacles.

Another thing that’s for sure: We’re not likely to learn the inside story about any of these attempted power grabs from Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post or other corporate media entities.

Swamp Rabbit zipped open a beer and said he’s decided to stop being pissed off. “Ain’t none of us can do a damn thing about them weasels, we’re out of the loop. Might as well just watch TV all the time.”

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Corporate quislings are glad Kimmel got axed

Posted on September 19, 2025 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was in a fighting mood after hearing that Jimmy Kimmel had been booted off late-night TV. It seems Donald Trump and his MAGA goons are using the murder of rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk to silence their critics and advance Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

“I ain’t surprised,” Swamp Rabbit said, “but what’s pissing me off is them weasels that run the media. They’re firing peeps left and right. They’re falling all over each other to kiss Trump’s ass.”

No surprise there either, I told him. “The “quislings of corporate media” — Andy Borowitz’s phrase — have been showcasing their cowardice and greed since before Trump’s second term began. This time a media company called Nexstar, which owns more than 200 TV stations around the country, wants to gobble up a rival company in a $6.2 billion deal that would make Nexstar the largest provider of local TV in the country.

But there’s a catch: The merger won’t happen unless it’s approved by the FCC, which is supposed to be independent but actually answers to our criminal president.

Swamp Rabbit tugged his feeble goatee. “So what do you call this — bribery? Extortion?”

“Call it what you want. I call it fascism.”

I spelled it out for him: ABC-TV — owned by the Disney Company, more weasels — carries Kimmel’s show, and Nexstar owns 32 ABC stations. Pressured by Nexstar and anticipating the wrath of FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, Disney/ABC axed Kimmel.

“Okay, I get it. The Kirk thing was just an excuse. Kimmel got pretty much the same treatment as Stephen Colbert got from CBS.”

Bottom line: Corporate media execs will be quick to censor programming in the wake of Trump’s assertion that the FCC should consider revoking the licenses of TV broadcasters that “give him too much bad publicity.”

This calls to mind historian Timothy Snyder’s prophetic warning — “Do not obey in advance” — issued last year after the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post killed its endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. His point being that compliant media make it much easier for demagogues like Trump to take power.

Swamp Rabbit reached for his whisky bottle. “You’re pulling me too far into the weeds, Odd Man. I still don’t know anything about them corporate weasels that own everything. Not even their names.”

“We’re not supposed to know,” I said. “How do you think they got to own everything?”

Footnote: Here are the words that got Jimmy Kimmel “suspended indefinitely“: “We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it.”

Not exactly incendiary, are they? What used to be called free speech might cost you a lot these days.

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Obama belatedly sees the light

Posted on September 16, 2025 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I were discussing Barack Obama. We miss his charm, eloquence, intelligence and so on, but we can’t forget how badly he seemed to misjudge the changing mood of the country in 2004 when he declared that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.”

A lofty pronouncement that proved to be dead wrong. There are two Americas now, just like there were in the 1850s. Which is why Obama recently endorsed a Democratic plan to redraw congressional districts in California, a move meant to counter Republican redistricting in Texas. He has decided to help Democrats fight back after belatedly realizing that Trump and his henchmen are trying to eliminate democracy in America.

Swamp Rabbit said Obama would have been come closer to the mark in 2004 if he’d quoted from the speech Arthur Jensen gave to Howard Beale in Network (1976):

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

“Don’t be such a cynic,” I said. “Obama was already gearing up to run for president in 2008, so he had to say something grand. He had to preach unity.”

Swamp Rabbit groaned. “Yeah, but look what happened after he got elected, after the economy under George W. Bush blew up. He used taxpayer money to bail out the Wall Street crooks while ten million peeps were losing their houses. Without knowing, he helped the MAGA disease get started.”

I said that’s not fair, the 2008 financial crisis wasn’t Obama’s fault and he later did some good things, including the Affordable Care Act that Republicans are dismantling.

But Swamp Rabbit was adamant. “He got dazzled by Summers and Geithner and them other advisers who were friends of the crooks. He blew the Democrats’ last chance to win over the peeps who are too nasty and ignorant to care about protecting their own rights.”

He added, “Trump is a low-life Arthur Jensen. He don’t care about America. His whole life he spent being a greedy fraud. He don’t answer to nobody except billionaires, and even the billionaires know better than to cross him now that he owns the gov’mint.”

I told him to get over it, the Democrats have to focus on winning back the Senate and House in the midterms. Obama was naive or worse, but it’s good that he finally seems to understand how close the would-be dictator is to crossing the goal line.

My swampy friend laughed. “Where you been, Odd Man? He’s already standing in the end zone.”

Footnote: “The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.” — Edward R. Murrow.

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No winds of change in MAGA country

Posted on August 29, 2025 by oddmanout215

I shared with my neighbor Swamp Rabbit the news that Donald Trump’s lackeys had halted construction of a nearly completed $4 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. Inquiring minds want to know: Why is Trump so hot to prop up fossil fuel peddlers instead of helping the country transition to cleaner energy?

“He’s giving his people what they want,” Swamp Rabbit said. “The MAGATs, that is. They want to burn fossil fuels.”

Swamp Rabbit was still angry about Jersey Shore residents — right-wingers, mostly — who supported the Trump administration’s successful effort to discourage installation of offshore wind turbines that could power hundreds of thousands of homes. They complained that turbines would spoil their view of the horizon.

“And that wind turbines kill whales,” I said. “It’s hard to tell how many of them are stupid enough to really believe that lie, but they ran with it. They told their pro-wind governor to f#%* off.”

Swamp Rabbit ruminated for a minute. “Maybe we’re too angry,” he said. “Even them MAGAts must know by now that fossil fuels are fouling up the air and water and making the climate go crazy. Maybe they could talk sense to their boss man.”

I scowled at him and kicked one of his empty beer cans. “Talk sense? This guy is a convicted rapist who sucks up to dictators. He tried to pull off a coup d’etat, was impeached twice, betrayed our closest allies and took steps to convert the White House into another Mar-a-logo, except even more tacky.”

I told him the MAGAts have even less sense than their grifter-in-chief, otherwise they wouldn’t have elected him. They might not know that Trump’s hatred of wind turbines (he called them “stupid and ugly windmills”) dates to when authorities refused to take down turbines that obstructed the view at his golf course in Scotland. But they know he behaves like a 12-year-old bully in an old man’s body, and they love him for it.

It’s worth noting that MAGAts at the Jersey Shore were strongly encouraged to drink the Kool-Ade by fossil fuel influencers and Republican stooges like Congressman Jeff Van Drew, a former wind power advocate — he was co-chair of the offshore wind caucus in Congress — who became a rabid foe of offshore wind farms around the same time he started bowing to Trump.

Swamp Rabbit paused to ruminate again. “I bet them seashore MAGAts are gonna regret being so close-minded later on when their electricity rates go through the roof and they ain’t got renewable energy to fall back on.”

“MAGAts always follow Trump’s lead,” I replied. “When the shit hits the fan, they blame the libs.”

Footnote: The war between offshore wind advocates and dirty-fuel fans keeps heating up. This week a high-powered right-wing law firm pressured Brown University to “retract research that details links between the fossil fuel industry and anti-wind groups.” The firm represents Green Oceans, a group that’s trying to kill the Rhode Island project mentioned above. Researchers at Brown have called Green Oceans part of “a fossil-fuel-funded disinformation network.”

“I don’t know, maybe the Brownies got it all wrong,” Swamp Rabbit joked. “Maybe them MAGAts just want to save the whales.”

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