“A lie keeps growing and growing until it’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
― spoken by The Blue Fairy in the 1940 Disney film Pinocchio.
This coming Monday at 5pm, Supreme Leader has promised to announce the winners of the Fake News awards, according to him. Media personalities are lining up for the most prestigious of the Fakies awards, because to be called a liar by the biggest liar of them all is quite an honor. Stephen Colbert of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) talk program The Late Show has taken out an ad in New York City’s Times Square to promote himself and his show for Supreme Leader’s top honors. This is becoming a big deal.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend – that’s the operating principle here. To be called out for Fake News by the biggest liar in the country is not only praise of a kind, but an endorsement. And now Supreme Liar will be bestowing awards of some sort on the highest honorees, though what that might be he has not made clear yet. Suffice to say that any news organization would be satisfied with the honor alone because of the boost to their ratings or readership, never mind the additional prestige. This must have been what Supreme Egotist meant in his recent New York Times interview when he suggested the media needs him around for the re-election campaign in 2020 to boost their income.
Awards and trophies have been a part of western civilization for millennia, at least since the ancient Greeks gave out laurel wreaths and cash gifts to winning Olympic athletes. In the twentieth century, the awards and trophies business really took off since entertainment businesses in particular found out giving them away in publicized ceremonies was a great way to let the tasteless public know what publications, movies, television shows, what have you, had the imprimatur of good taste from supposed authorities within the business, raising more revenue from the public, who now knew how to impress their friends and neighbors when they bought culture.
The Big Brother Award from the United Kingdom based organization Privacy International. Near the end of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the representative of state power, O’Brien, says to the protagonist, Winston, “‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.'”
The Fakies, as proposed by Supreme Dotard, promise something a little off kilter from the usual awards bestowing because they will be more in line with the Razzies, an anti-award for bad movie making. But since the Razzies awarders do not take themselves or their task too seriously, there will still be a difference in solemnity between the granting of Razzies and that of Fakies, because the awarder of the latter prizes takes himself all too seriously, as do many of his more die hard supporters. There are the cynical supporters among the upper classes who were only interested in seeing through the enactment of things like the recent tax cut package for themselves and their rich friends, and then there are the true believers among the lower classes who are mainly in it to spite leftists, with their definition of leftist being anyone to the other side of Dwight Eisenhower, who if he were alive today would himself be suspect.
The great Spike Milligan accepted a lifetime achievement award in 1994.
One important point that needs addressing here is that this very website has been first and foremost in denouncing the regime of Der Lügner since it started, and should therefore be in line to receive a Fakie as a promulgator of Fake News by light of how the regime judges these things. If this website receives a Fakie on Monday, rest assured the glow of its bestowal will shower contributors and readers alike with a penumbra of honor from an unimpeachable source – or an impeachable one, as may be the case.
― Vita
Air conditioning and movies – or movie theaters – go together so well that it’s hard to imagine a time without the benefits of both together. In 1902, just as movies were getting started, Willis Carrier (whose company made the political news in 2016), a mechanical engineer, invented the first modern air conditioning plant to help a Brooklyn, New York, printing company solve a paper wrinkling problem at its facility. It wasn’t until 1925 that Carrier got together with a movie theater owner to install air conditioning at the Rivoli Theater on New York City’s Times Square. It was a match meant to be, and from then on the summer, which had been the poorest season for movie theaters, became the richest as people attended movies as much for the air conditioning as for the entertainment.
When The Seven Year Itch, starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, appeared in theaters in 1955, most houses and apartments did not have air conditioning. In the scene before this one, they leave an air conditioned movie theater after viewing Creature from the Black Lagoon, a 3D monster movie the appeal of which, for them, was probably not as great as the cool comfort of the theater itself.
Home air conditioners were still unusual in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the 1970s most homes had some form of air conditioning, whether central or window units. Movie fans no longer flocked to theaters in summer only for the sweet relief of a few hours respite from summer’s heat and humidity. People continued going to see movies in theaters in summer on account of children being out of school, and how air conditioning in theaters since the 1920s had established summer as movie season. Watching movies at home was still unsatisfactory because of small television screen sizes, low picture resolution and poor sound, and a lag of one or more years before Hollywood would release movies to television.
Meredith Willson, when he appeared on the Texaco Star Theater television program in 1967. Willson, who was born in 1902, coincidentally the same year that Willis Carrier invented modern air conditioning, had a long career spanning Broadway theater, Hollywood movies, radio, and television.
All that has changed in the past forty years, of course, starting with home video technology and the ability to either buy or rent movies for home viewing. Theaters felt the pinch, and old style movie palaces shut down, relegating the movie theater experience for the most part to shoe box multiplexes at suburban malls. Drive-in theaters, another summertime movie going experience from a bygone era, shut down along with the air conditioned movie palaces. Now in the last ten years the home theater experience, for people who can afford it (and it becomes more affordable all the time), has progressed to the point that a fair portion of movie fans feel little pulling them toward returning to theaters. Their homes are air conditioned, their televisions and sound systems have gotten bigger and better, and Hollywood releases movies for home viewing so quickly that only the most impatient fans aren’t happy to wait a little while.
The old movie palace experience was something special that can’t be matched by watching a movie at home, no matter how comfortable and technologically sophisticated circumstances at home have become. Comedies and big, crowd pleasing musicals in particular seemed to take on a frisson of excitement when viewed in a well appointed theater among other patrons who were similarly enthralled. Now that theater owners around the country have finally gotten the message and are starting to move away from the nothing special, cookie cutter mall multiplex and toward building theaters that reestablish the grandeur that is only possible outside the home theater, it is questionable whether movie fans will return.
Meredith Willson’s most famous entertainment, The Music Man. Robert Preston, shown in this scene with Buddy Hackett, starred in the long running Broadway show before doing the movie version in 1962.
Some people have had time to drop the movie going habit, for one thing, and for another there is a relatively recent technology that has come into the equation which affects their enjoyment of movies – cell phones. In the theater, cell phone users interfere with the other patrons’ enjoyment of the movie, but at home, for those people who simply can’t do without their phone for even two or three hours, then at least they’re not annoying other paying customers, and for their own enjoyment of non-stop cellular connectivity there is always the pause button on their home theater remote control. Might as well stay home then to enjoy summertime movies, and keep your cool.
― Techly
