Disenchantment

 I had planned on doing a blog about “Modern Family”, the eleventh and final season of which I recently finished, only to check and see that I already blogged about the show – ten years ago.  So I simply updated it as necessary.  That left me looking for another topic.  Well, “Disenchantment” Season 3 just wrapped up – as most streaming shows these days, all at once – and I watched it.  In fact, there was such a gap between Season 2 ending and Season 3 coming out that I had to watch Season 1 and 2 again to refresh my memory about who everyone was and what was going on.  So here it is.

Done by the same gang who give us “The Simpsons”, although this is on Netflix and not on FOX.  It’s animated, of course, but the setting is a fantasy world, Dreamland, and the central character, Beanie, is the princess.  Her mother Dagmar disappeared – we find out later – and her stepmother Oona proves to be more likable than you might expect.  Her father, King Zog, is a bit of a sourpuss and by season 3 is borderline psychotic.  Her stepbrother Derek is not too bright, but still not a bad kid.  He looks remarkably like his mother Oona.

Characters.

Beanie (Abbie Jacobson).  She’s cute and average intelligence, somewhat sympathetic and likable.  Basically a generic young woman, in that regard.  By the end of Season 3 she has to take over as queen, so we’ll see what happens there.

Elfo (Nat Faxon).   He’s an elf.  Elves are prominent but very short.  Each seems to have a name describing their particular distinction, with Elfo alone being just a regular elf.

Luci (Eric Andre).  Short for “Lucifer”, he’s a small demon often mistaken for a cat.  Leave it to him to be the most cynical character of the lot, though his ultimate fate is somewhat surprising.

King Zog (John DiMaggio).   I grew a mustache for Lent and have put on pounds, so I inadvertently turned into a live-action cosplay version of him, though somewhat less grumpy.  Zog really doesn’t seem to do much except be grumpy and condemn various jesters to trap door banishment. 

Queen Oona (Tress MacNeille).  All the humans on the show are white, with the exception of Oona and her race, who have light blue skin and are amphibious.  My subjective suspicion is that her race is intended to be this universe’s equivalent of Asians, though she doesn’t display any behavior we’d normally attribute to Asians – whatever that might be.  Initially she’s marginally untrustworthy but eventually proves to be more likable than Dagmar.  She became queen after Dagmar disappeared. 

Queen Dagmar (Sharon Horgan).  At some point we learn what happened to her – and what she’s up to…and it’s not good.  It reached the point where Beanie has to impersonate her (!). 

Overall, the show brings the same cynical humor we could expect from “Futurama”, albeit in a fantasy context rather than science fiction.  Since so much of fantasy, whether live action or animated, takes itself so seriously, this element in itself sets “Disenchantment” apart and makes it so fun to watch. 

In fact, not only is there magic, but remarkably, in season 3, Beanie finds a steampunk world where science reigns – so in this world, magic and science appear to coexist, which is itself an intriguing premise.   Heaven and Hell are also in here, so that adds – irreverently – some religion.  Again, all highly recommended.  

Autograph

 Over the years I’ve been a music fan, and as such attended various concerts.  At a very small minority of those shows, I had the pleasure of meeting the musicians themselves and getting them to autograph various items.  However, I’m not in the habit of seeking out autographs, so the instances of doing so are so few and far between that I have little trouble in describing each of them in a brief, Friday blog entry.

RONNIE WOOD.  From 1979-1982 I attended Marymount, a Catholic school in Neuilly, just outside Paris, in that European country commonly referred to as “France”.  The school had an annual fair in the spring.  At the one in 1984 we acquired Judas Priest, Defenders of the Faith on cassette, and the Y&T albums Mean Streak and Black Tiger on vinyl.  At another one I had occasion to briefly meet Ronnie Wood, the second guitarist of the Rolling Stones.  One of his children was attending school.   By this time I was in high school at the American School of Paris, so his kid was not a classmate of mine.  I happened to be wearing a denim jacket which also – by coincidence – had the Rolling Stones lip & tongue patch on it.  Mr. Wood was nice enough to sign the patch itself.  Sadly, by now the signature has faded to the point I can no longer see it.  But he was cool.   As a side note, to date I have not seen the Rolling Stones in concert, nor have I seen Ronnie Wood in concert in any way, shape or form. 

FAITH NO MORE.   In November 1989 we attended the Faith No More concert at the old 930 Club, in Washington, DC, when it was still back on 930 F Street.  This was the band’s The Real Thing tour, when it had Mike Patton on vocals and Jim Martin on guitar.   I managed to persuade Jim Martin to sign my The Real Thing CD insert, and drummer Mike Bordin did so as well.  I wasn’t able to meet or talk to the other band members.  I still have that CD.

WISHBONE ASH.   This English band was at its peak in the 1970s, headlining larger venues like Merriweather Post Pavilion.  By the time I managed to see them, guitarist Andy Powell was the sole remaining original member, and they were playing small clubs instead of armpit heaters.  Of course, had they been playing an armpit heater, I would not be able to talk to Andy Powell in person and get him to sign my Wishbone Ash CD inserts.  Oddly, even years after the vinyl renaissance, those early albums are still not reissued.    

TESLA.   In 2007 the band released a CD of covers, Real to Reel, ostensibly a two disc set.  The second disc you picked up from the band itself on its tour.  I saw the tour at the Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore, Maryland.  Oddly enough, lead guitarist Frank Hannon was actually running the concession stand.  In addition to handing over my copy of the second disc, he also autographed the case.  Thanks, man!

BLUE CHEER.   Actually, I didn't come away from the BC encounter with any autographs, per se.  This is a band which had its initial peak of fame in the late 1960's, coming from San Francisco like the Grateful Dead, and even loosely associated with Owsley, the premiere source of LSD back then - even down to naming themselves after one of his strains.   Fast forward to modern times, and bassist/singer Dickie Peterson got the band back together with guitarist "Duck" MacDonald.  While this lineup did play classic material - exclusively of the Leigh Stephens era, it seems - Dickie put out new material that was heavier and more modern - and just as enjoyable. The band played a show at Krug's Place in Frederick, Maryland, in December 2005, and my college comrade Ken invited me along.  I managed to get my picture taken with Dickie, which is the primary picture for my Facebook profile.  

MEET & GREETS.   As noted, my own experience meeting rock stars has been rather limited.  My brother Matt, on the other hand, has been to several meet & greets and thus had a chance to hang out with, and talk at length with, various rock stars.  These include Doro (from Warlock), Ace Frehley (of KISS), and Biff Byford of Saxon.  He spoke with Pete Trewavas of Marillion.  He was also at the Faith No More show mentioned above.  

One last name drop: back when we were living in Paris, our parents met up with Martin Sheen.   This wound up with my sister, Sarah, visiting the Sheens in California and hanging out with Emilio Estevez.  I don't think Charlie was around the household back then.  

America's Homegrown Fascism

Yet again, Facebook proves an ample supply of various yahoos with their bizarre delusions.  I’d like to address many of these issues.

TRUMP = HITLER?  I addressed this before and will do so briefly here.  We managed to avoid descending into a fascist dictatorship under Trump.  Partly this was because Trump himself is far too lazy to be an effective dictator; the man has never worked a day in his life and doesn’t plan on doing so anytime soon.  Partly this is because, fortunately, most Americans don’t want a dictatorship.

LEFT-WING SUPPORT for DICTATORSHIP.   Somewhere along the line, the American Right Wing (ARW) decided that the Democrats and their fellow travelers were determined to give America a communist dictatorship.  Nowhere close to the truth and of course no evidence to support this.   What most Democrats would like is universal health care and a social safety net, and they don’t care how high the taxes would have to be to pay for it: they expect Mr. Amazon and Mr. Facebook to pay for it.  I can’t say I support that agenda, but it falls well short of Castro’s Cuba or Mao’s China. 

I can imagine a very tiny percentage of the far left wing who would be happy under a communist dictatorship provided they were the ones running it.  As a rank and file worker or peasant – or a prisoner in a gulag – they would be much less satisfied. 

RIGHT-WING SUPPORT FOR DICTATORSHIP.   Provided the dictatorship was nationalist and gave us all the trappings of traditional American patriotism, much of the ARW would be perfectly happy with a fascist dictatorship.   Presumably this dictatorship would enslave or eliminate Jews, blacks, Hispanics, gays, Asians, etc. any undesirable non-white people.  And these people would be content being rank and file workers and peasants under such a regime – so long as the regime got rid of all those aforementioned undesirables.   These people are far too stupid to recognize the irony of an “American dictatorship”.  The Founding Fathers worked their butts off in 1787 to make sure we didn’t wind up with another despot, which is what the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are all about.  “Right to be white” seems to be the only one these people recognize. 

BIDEN STOLE THE ELECTION.   Please.  Hillary Clinton was much more divisive and less popular than Joe Biden, so there was no reason for a Hillary voter to switch to Trump.  That being the case, Biden could expect to get at least as many votes and states as Hillary did.  Moreover, all the “battleground” states in 2020 were states that Trump won in 2016, so he’d have to win ALL of them to win his 270 electoral votes, and of course he didn’t.  And high profile Republicans endorsing Biden – and no Democrats endorsing Trump – likewise didn’t hint that Trump would win this time around.  Also, if the Democrats could steal the White House, they would also have arranged to flip close races in the Senate and take control of Congress.  But idiotic conspiracy theories are the basic bread & butter of the ARW.    

TDS.   Trump encouraged his Yahoo Army to storm the Capitol on January 6 to prevent Congress from certifying Biden as the next President.  He refused to concede the election to Biden and made various idiotic noises about the election being stolen – and 50+ frivolous lawsuits alleging theft with no support behind them.  Even his own attorney general, Bill Barr, told him these claims had no merit and he had lost the election. 

To the extent Trump has committed federal or state crimes he needs to face prosecution.   Bringing him to justice thereon is no more “Trump Derangement Syndrome” than the Nuremburg Trials were “Hitler Derangement Syndrome”. 

TRUMP & PUTIN.  I’m hearing some Trump supporters complain that Biden isn’t taken seriously by Putin and other leaders whereas Trump could deal with them as equals.  More idiocy.  Trump didn’t “deal” with Putin – in between blasting our own allies, proposing ending NATO, and other foreign policy missteps, Trump essentially gave Putin whatever the Russian leader might possibly hope to be a US foreign policy ideally calculated to favor Russian interests.   We should count ourselves lucky he didn’t turn over the “football” and CIA control to Putin. 

Trump epitomizes every vice and character flaw which Americans could possibly have and hold the office of President.  He embarrassed us in Europe and overseas to the point where foreigners actually felt sorry for us.  Trump was the Ugliest American.  You’ll notice that to the extent foreigners did love Trump, these were foreigners also loved Boris Johnson (UK), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), and other similar foreign leaders at the far right of the spectrum.  We think of the Ku Klux Klan as being a Southern institution in former Confederate states, but the Klan exists in former Union states as well, and even in Canada.  That being the case, I wasn’t surprised to learn that some Canadians love Trump too.  Whenever you have people willing to support quasi-fascists due to a misplaced concern about a nonexistent communist conspiracy, you’ll find enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump.  The smarter ones know and understand the difference between the North Korea which the dumber ones claim the Democrats want and the Sweden and Denmark the smarter ones know is the Democrats’ ideal for America, but still see fit to cynically support Trump anyway. 

There were cynics in the 1930s convinced that Stalin was bad enough to justify supporting Hitler.  In the US it was Charles Lindbergh, who pissed away the goodwill he earned as an aviator by jumping in bed with Hitler; and no one took him seriously after WWII, rightfully so.  How morally corrupt to do you have to be in 2021 – long after the Holocaust is common knowledge – to support a fascist agenda?  After US troops liberated Buchenwald in 1945, Eisenhower made it a point to bring local German civilians to the camps to see for themselves what was going on – and what these people disingenuously claimed they had no idea was happening.  Where did all the Jews go?  Hmm?  Looks like we found what’s left of them.  And even today you have people either denying this happened or even more provocatively, bark and bray that “six million wasn’t enough.”  These are your Trump supporters.  

CANCEL CULTURE.  Various private entities, like the Seuss estate and Disney, determined that some of their earlier work had some less palatable elements, and voluntarily withdrew these materials from public sale and domain.  This wasn’t the US government or state governments banning the items in question, but voluntary acts by private parties.  Naturally, the same yahoos who can’t recognize the inherent incompatibility of American patriotism with Confederate and Nazi flags, also don’t understand that “censorship” and the First Amendment only applies to government actions, not private parties or boycotts. 

MAINSTREAM MEDIA.  ABC, CBS and NBC are obviously slanted in the liberal direction, but there’s a limit to which they can portray the news to fit their agenda.  Moreover, we’ve had FOX for some time – and the Washington Times, here in the DC area – balancing out with a more conservative slant.  But even FOX isn’t inclined to abdicate wholesale to a President who summarily dismisses anything remotely unfavorable as “fake news”.  Once it became apparent that Trump expected everyone to make him look good, even news agencies such as FOX which might have been sympathetic to him found there was a limit to what they could tolerate.  That doesn’t mean FOX is lying to us if it reports anything unfavorable to Trump.  Dismissing the “mainstream media” as outright lies and fiction to be completely ignored altogether is yet another example of the consistent idiocy of the ARW.    

BLUE LIVES MATTER.  As I write this, the trial of Officer Derek Chauvin, accused of holding down George Floyd to the point where he died, is going on in Minnesota.  Chauvin has his defenders, remarkably enough.  Yes, there are people in the US who believe that no matter how egregious the police misconduct, the cops are always right.  Not more often than not or most of the time, but literally always.  Most of us remember in 1992 when a jury in Simi Valley, California, presented with videotape evidence of four LAPD officers beating Rodney King as he was on the ground and not resisting, acquitted them.  Mind you, both California and Minnesota were Union states during the Civil War, so former CSA states hold no monopoly on racism or this misguided worship of the police as infallible and completely unaccountable.  If you believe the police are right 100% of the time, bravo: you're a fascist.  

Fortunately for America, actual support for a fascist dictatorship is at the margin and not widespread.  Our latest candidate for dictator -  himself a fan of Russia’s dictator and contemptuous and rude to any foreign leader with any decency - was a lazy moron who couldn’t be bothered to leave the golf course long enough to be an effective despot.  We’ll see what criminal and civil actions emerge to bring him to account for his 4+ years of crimes, corruption and incompetence.  Stay tuned.  

Quarantine 2.0

 It’s now been a year since my first COVID blog post.  On Tuesday I had my first vaccine shot (Moderna), with the second scheduled for April 27.  Many people I know have already had both shots or at least the first one. 

Sadly, the COVID did have an enormous impact on my Mom.   Last April, she was lucid and talking, and I was able to take her around places.  In July she went to the hospital for an operation which wound up having complications.  From then  until December, she bounced back and forth from local hospitals to local assisted living facilities.  She caught the COVID around December 17, and on December 27 she died.  Her death certificate marks COVID as the cause of death.   That death was especially hard because I was by her bedside with my brother when she actually passed away.  Every other relative, including my father (who died in 2004 of a stroke) took place outside my actual presence.

In January and March 2021 I went to CVS for COVID tests, not having sufficient priority to merit a vaccine yet.  Both tests were negative.  I had purchased a digital thermometer (oral) and have been using that to monitor my temperature, which appears to remain normal.

In March 2020, Gold’s Gym closed down for quarantine.  In June it reopened, albeit with masks mandated and enforced, temperature checks at the entrance, and every other cardio machine turned off for social distancing.   I checked my weight at both times, and weighed no more in June despite having no gym access during that time than I did in March.  About the only thing I could do at home were situps, pushups, and walking up the stairs.   I used to be able to climb all 20 stories at once, but at 52 I’m running out of breath after 5 floors, so 10 floors seems to be my current max. 

By now Trump is gone and his replacement appears to be doing what he can as President to fix the problem instead of writing it off as a “hoax”.  Not that Biden can create and distribute the vaccine himself, but at least he’s doing something.  Moreover, Trump’s own behavior and public statements encouraged his own inbred army of yahoos to refuse to wear masks or social distance – so to that extent, he did make the problem much worse by his own incompetence. 

My other concern was that the virus would mutate into variants which would resist the vaccine.  From what I’ve read, the vaccine appears to be effective against all current variants and probably will.  The cumulative death rate in the US is 2%, meaning of ever 100 people to catch COVID, 2 will die even with medical attention. 

I will continue the masking and social distancing thing.  My subjective impression is that this thing will only end when a substantial majority of the world’s population is vaccinated and we see NO new cases for days on end.  Then and only then can we take off the masks and get back to normal.  And I would hope that we’d learn something for the next virus that comes by.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the “COVID is a hoax” morons, or the anti-vaxxers.  Moreover, holding views which are not only not supported by science but outright dangerous to everyone else is not harmless or simply someone’s difference of opinion, but could have fatal consequences.  If you refuse to wear a mask, and infect 100 people with COVID, two of whom die, I’d say we’re talking about two cases of manslaughter (causing someone’s death without an express intent to kill).  When this is over, I’d suggest the police and prosecutors get to work on prosecuting anyone who can be proven to have caused COVID deaths by this means.  For their part, anti-vaxxers should be socially ostracized and treated as lepers.  Here ends the rant.