Jeff Stahler (AMS) raises a question that Hollywood has got to be pondering, because it’s not just about being old.
Sportscaster Lindsay Rhodes brought up the same topic and she’s younger than my kids, though, mind you, she is married and has kids of her own, which could be part of the answer.
But only a very small part. Nothing keeps married people from going to movies except not wanting to.
It may be that, as Norma Desmond said, “I’m big. It’s the pictures that got small.”
That’s literal, in that VCRs, disks and streaming got us accustomed to seeing movies on our TV screens instead of on the big screen, but we also got used to seeing them when we wanted to see them.
Movies used to be you-snooze-you-lose events, and not simply at the theaters. There was a time, O Best Beloved, when we waited for the one time a year that movies like “The Wizard of Oz” were on television and we gathered around the electric hearth to watch. If you spaced out or had a conflict, you waited 364 days for a second chance.
Once we had the ability to watch whenever we wanted, we also had the ability to not watch at all. There’s a reason advertisers bark “This offer cannot be repeated!” and “If you answer in the next 10 minutes …”
There’s something in sales known as “Call Backs,” the people who can’t make up their minds now but invite you to call back after they’ve thought it over. Only rookies bother, because it ain’t gonna happen.
Hollywood has turned us all into Call Backs.
This morning, of course, we’re all sorry we didn’t watch, not because we wanted to see if our favorite movie won — we didn’t have a favorite movie and, if we did, it wasn’t nominated — but because we would have liked to have seen Will Smith slap the crap out of Chris Rock.
Though we can watch it on YouTube, over and over, whenever we want.
Hooray for Hollywood!
Speaking of “if you order in the next ten minutes,” Non Sequitur (AMS) not only captures that, but also picks up on the key word “adorable” — or, in the original, “adowable” — an emotional term that worked so well for St. Jude’s Hospital that it’s become a part of every panhandler’s pitch.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s anybody dumb enough to think that the boiler room operators at that 800-number even know when their public service announcements are running, much less give a rat’s patootie whether you called within the requisite 10 minutes.
It’s like the Nigerian spam swindlers: They don’t need to fool everybody. Just enough people to make the effort worthwhile.
As for the specific cause, I have very mixed feelings about neutering and releasing feral cats, since it will keep them from reproducing but will not keep them from slaughtering songbirds.
Thus the concept of feral lawyers writes its own jokes.
Juxtaposition of the Day
There’s a massive epidemic of Not Getting It going around, and, as this juxtaposition suggests, it comes from both sides of the aisle.
Arctic Circle is somewhat more forgivable, but only if we assume people to be shortsighted and self-centered, since it’s one thing to stand tall against environmental destruction, or, for that matter, human rights violations, and quite another to actually give up anything to drive home the point.
If we ever did get into a serious contretemps with China and they cut off our imports, I can picture a sort of Fahrenheit 451 underground of people wandering in the forest, texting each other on old, taped-together remnants of telephones in order to preserve their culture.
Rabbits Against Magic is less theoretical, because “socialism” and “communism” are such meaningless buzzwords that it doesn’t matter whether people understand them or not. They mean “I hate you,” which handles the emotional/partisan factor adequately but gets in the way of solutions.
Which would matter if anybody were really looking for solutions.
Paresh Nash (CartoonArts) makes a more vital point, because self-righteous people have been declaring that we should switch to alternative fuels, which is a perfectly valid bit of long term advice, and he does show people moving in that direction.
He’s also correct that the petro companies are fools if they think they can hold their grip forever, though they seem to be shifting towards alternative sources themselves, so at least some of them get it.
It’s the timing I question: Those old dinosaurs are fools to think they won’t have to step aside for alternatives, but to bring it up at the moment is like saying a burning building should have had more fire escapes.
You can’t deny the logic, but we should focus on getting the children out.
Amory Lovens, who has been warning about this sort of stuff for decades, has the common sense to hope that the Ukraine crisis will get people’s attention and move things forward, and he may be right.
That is, he’s right that we need to do it.
I’m not sure he’s right that this — even combined with this — will motivate us.
I got a bit of nostalgic PTSD over this Between Friends (KFS).
Maeve has, once more , screwed up a relationship, and you would think that Susan would be used to it, if she wanted to be.
At least Maeve has the common sense to know whose problem it is.
Back in my college days, I broke up with two pretty nice girls because they were surrounded by buttinskis and I couldn’t take it anymore. Granted, if I thought either of them was “The One,” I’d have probably toughed it out, but their inability to say “Whoa – Calm down there, girl” to their nosy girlfriends was a substantial part of why I didn’t think either of them was “The One.”
Come to think of it, I broke up with one or two others because they wouldn’t say it to me.
I think I was looking for someone who, if Chris Rock trashed her in public, would step up on the stage and slap the crap out of him herself.
Or would put a hand on my arm and say, “Be cool.”