Monday, September 16, 2019

Monday, September 16, 2019

 You know, I would be listening to the Monday Night Football game if the greedheads who run ESPN were just satisfied with chunking ads at me every 10 minutes. Instead, in honor of steel guitar great Ralph Mooney (who would've been 63 today), I'm listening to Waylon Live, which is an excellent album to listen to for whatever reason.



 I've said it elsewhere, & I'll say it here: a honky-tonk band ain't a honky-tonk band unless there's a steel guitar involved. Indeed, it is the defining sound of country music beyond anything else, & Nashville has moved away from that noble truth to its detriment. Very few people can pull it off & most do well to not try. That's what's "wrong" with country music, if indeed anything is: a lack of originality in beats, the death of close brother harmonies, & nobody putting steel guitars in their songs.

 And speaking of football, I may've said this elsewhere, while I don't have a team (beyond an affection for the New Orleans Saints & the University of Alabama Crimson Tide), I do enjoy football. And I do like to watch a good game, I prefer listening to it on the radio. Living in New Orleans & working in some damn kitchen every night, I got used to listening to the Saints on WWL. I have a general distaste for sports broadcasters, a strong one. I hate watching baseball because you're average baseball announcer's banality is matched only by the color man, & that's just because he's usually an ex-ball player & I'm amazed those guys could lace up their cleats every day.

 But I do like listening to football games on the radio. Maybe it's connected to a childhood spent listening to Jack Cristil call Mississippi State Bulldog games because you couldn't always find the game on television. The best thing about listening to the Saints, of course, is hearing Bobby Hebert lose control of the Cajun in 'em if the Saints are having a bad game. During the game, New Orleans is always pretty dead, especially the French Quarter, so we'd listen to the Cajun Cannon & Big Chief Deke Bellavia tell us how Da Boys were doing.

 Now, though, I can't listen to the Browns & the Jets play a game I probably don't care anything about because MNF is now on ESPN & that channel sucks. I hate ESPN, mainly because they keep the single most useless participants in American journalism from starving in the street like rabid dogs. I am, of course, referring to sports analysts. I won't lie, I started my career in journalism as a sports reporter, but that was so long ago that ESPN was having to show collegiate water polo to fill up its 24-hour broadcast day.

 Now there's 47 different iteration of ESPN for SEC football alone, every half-bright dipstick with access to a microphone has a radio show or (god forgive us) a podcast, & we live in a world where Skip Bayless, instead of doing something useful like bagging groceries somewhere, is paid an obscene amount of money to yammer on about the cesspool that is professional sports, & he always manages to be a dickbag about it. That Stephen Smith hasn't clocked him one is a strike against him, frankly.

 Ok, that's good. There's no sense in getting wound up & jacking the blood pressure on something I honestly don't give two tugs of a dead dog's ding-a-ling about. We're about Serious Business here, right? Pro sports is a con that uses athletes like dog food & every owner should be run out of town with flaming curtains tied around their neck just on general purposes.

 Sorry. Had to go get my medication for the week squared away. I take four for my blood pressure, three for my depression/anxiety, & three vitamin supplements. Three times a day, & none of them are any fun whatsoever. It's like if Elvis was a Mormon.

 Hey! Pay attention, you clown. It's time for Work, so stop screwing around. Now, a little addition to yesterday's jeremiad on U.S. Supreme Court Justice & Thuggish No-Account Brett Kavanaugh. This is important - may be one of the most important aspects of the whole deal - so we'll take a little bit to talk about it. It's probably going to cause less of a stir that the credible accusations of sexual harassment against Kavanaugh, but here we go.

 First, the only reason he has the seat is that he was filling the space Anthony Kennedy left. A Reagan appointee known as a dependable "swing vote" in court, Kennedy shocked everyone last June when he said he'd retire at the end of the following month. It's not unprecedented that a Supreme Court Justice leaves the job in anything but a pine box, but it was certainly unusual.

 Got all that? Here's where it gets interesting. Kennedy's son Justin works for Deutche Bank, a multinational investment bank & financial services company with headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. To call Deutsch "scandal plagued" is understating the situation a bit. All the weird lamentations you'll hear about banks - the ones that aren't antisemitic wankery - pertains to some of the shit Deutsch has pulled. Furthermore, Justin is the "global head of real-estate capital markets division," whatever the hell that really means.

 Into the home stretch now. By the turn of the millennium, Donald Trump was consider just a little bit better than how Superman sees kryptonite because, frankly, he was shit at what he was supposed to be good at. Seriously, if it weren't for the fact that, one, his dad was richer than Croesus &, two, said paterfamilias made his money via real estate, indeed being a goddamn thief & bastard in the process. Hell, the only reason we've known about Trump since the early '80s is because someone told him to remain with the lifestyle he was accustomed to he should become a celebrity.

 One of the results of all this is that Deutche fronted Trump two billion dollars, mostly recycled funds from Russian oligarchs & former KGB bastards, because no one in the Western world would touch the shady fuck with a 10-foot pole. Arguably, this why we might invade Iran for Saudi Arabia's sake because they, as the president has said, "pay in cash".

 So. Kennedy retires & his son is a high mucky-muck in a company that'd give the future President of the United States of America a loan when no one else wanted to be in the same room as him. Tying it all back to what's going on right now, before the nomination process kicked in, someone paid off Kavanaugh's $200,000 credit card debt, his $1.2 million mortgage, & $92,000 in country club fees. That is a solid chunk of change, I don't care who you are, & I for one think it's safe to ask just who bought them a Supreme Court seat.

 Okay, it's getting late, so let's wrap this up. I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't care much for the rich. I'm not talking about people who've made a lot of money creating something or performing a service or what have you. I'm talking about inherited wealth or that sort of money that's really impossible to wrap your head around.

 Like Jeff Bezos. That asshole did nothing but make a website - & it was apparently his then-wife's idea - & he's worth hundreds of billions of dollars. When they divorced, his erstwhile wife got tens of billions & it was no sweat off Jeff's nose. He complains about not knowing what to do with all that money while at the same time working his Amazon people to death & taking insurance away from (underpaid, trust me) Whole Foods workers.

 Another one I have absolutely no use for is Elon Musk. Remember last year when that soccer team got stuck in a cave in Thailand & Musk offered this tiny submarine that'd probably make things worse so he was told to pound sand? A semi-professional spelunker named Vern Unsworth helped save them kids & basically told Musk that not only was his help not needed (yet anyway), his submarine probably wouldn't work & he was getting in the way.

 Well, no one talks to Elon Musk like that, of course, especially not some plebe like Unsworth, how dare he. So Musk called him a pedophile on social media. Twice. Not only that, he hired a detective to the tune of 50 grand to dig up dirt on the caver, especially since the caver in question is suing him for defamation of character. Musk is trying to get the case thrown out, quoted in the Los Angeles Times:


 "By refering to Mr. Unsworth as 'pedo guy,' I did not intend to convey any facts or imply that Mr. Unsworth had engaged in acts of pedophilia. 'Pedo guy' was a common insult used in South Africa when I was growing up. It is synonymous with 'creepy old man' & is used to insult a person's appearance & demeanor, not accuse a person of pedophilia."

 I don't know how he thinks that makes anything better, & in any event, he called the plainiff a "child rapist" in an interview with BuzzFeed. Unsworth is suing for $75,000 & despite his best efforts, Musk's pleas to get the case thrown out have fallen on deaf ears. And proving W.C. Fields was on to something, Mr. Supergenius Electric Car Spaceship Guy is claiming the aforementioned private dick took him for a ride.

 And yet, there are still people who'll defend this chucklefuck. I don't get that, I really don't. You can call it jealousy if you want & maybe my stance would change if he dropped a cool million in my lap, but right now I simply do not understand why so many people want to lick this guy's boots. And they'll get pissed off if you disparage him. Do they think if they kiss up enough, he'll see it & give them money or let them ride on his space ship. Look, if the Earth's is screwed & Musk launches into space with the remnants of humanity, he ain't taking you & me along, hoss.

 Whew! Glad I got that out of my system. Let's call it a night, huh? And let's hope it cools off some tomorrow, 'cause it is too goddamn hot outside.

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are moderated, & may be discarded & ignored if so chose. Cry more & die, man.