February 22nd, 2013
Look, I get it. The site hasn’t been this monomaniacal since the run-up to The Dark Knight Rises. And this just isn’t a whole lot of fun anymore for either of us. But give me another couple weeks and we’ll be back to normal(ish).
In the meantime, I got you some stuff to make it up to you.
* From Peggy Noonan today:
The other day I was in a Wal-Mart in southern Florida. It was Sunday afternoon on a holiday weekend but even accounting for that the mood and look of the place was different from what it was two and five years ago. Then, things seemed dynamic—what buys, what an array of products, what bustle in the aisles. This time it seemed tired, frayed, with fewer families and scarcer employees. It looked like a diorama of the Great Recession.
Just savor it: Peggy Noonan. In a Wal-Mart. It’s like Lucille Bluth at Klimpy’s. Only awesomer.
But my favorite part is imagining her interior monologue from her Wal-Mart excursions two and five years ago as she observed the Mittle Americanus in their natural habitat, joyfully bustling around as they bought toilet paper and one-gallon pickle jars.
* Which brings us to: Kristen Wiig. Joining the revamped Arrested Development. As young Lucille. I’m not much for stunt casting, but this kind of feels right.
* Meanwhile, over at the Free Beacon Editor’s Blog, the Truth Monkey has the inside scoop on The All-American American. Don’t miss it.
* The big payoff in watching Bunheads these days comes from seeing the endless stream of Disney house ads for a show called Pretty Little Liars. The ads are fantastically over the top, with a Don LaFontaine-style voice always intoning about how “THIS WEEK . . . THE LIARS’ WORLD WILL BE TURNED UPSIDE . . . DOWN!!!!”
I’ve never seen the actual show, but the ads are so camptastic that I was convinced it might be kind of fun–TUNE IN THIS WEEK TO FIND OUT THAT THE LIARS AREN’T SO PRETTY ANYMORE. . . . AND THEY’RE GETTING . . . BIGGER!”
But then Entertainment Weekly had to ruin it for me by putting Pretty Little Liars on the cover and deeming the show a breakout success–in the world of social media.
Oh sure, PLL only gets 3.8M viewers per week (which for a cable show is pretty awesome)–but EW doesn’t care about that. They’re psyched that the show has 10 million Facebook Likes! And that the show’s stars have a combined 5.5 million Twitter followers.
A rational writer might look at those social media numbers, and then the show’s actual viewership, and see the story as an illustration of the limited power of social media to move consumers to action but . . . nevermind.
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If I still hadmoney, I’d buy a Klimpy’s just to burn it to the ground.
Judith February 24, 2013 at 11:21 am
Seems to me you’ve been posting more often, so, there’s that. I don’t know…I don’t mind the “monomania” and it’s certainly not surprising.