U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.
What the... The default font in Microsoft Word is WOKE?
The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.
Anything positive for disabled people apparently triggers the Far Right...
Some studies suggest that sans-serif fonts, such as Calibri, are easier to read for those with certain visual disabilities.
Trump, a Republican, moved quickly after taking office in January to eradicate federal DEI programs and discourage them in the private sector and education, including by directing the firing of diversity officers at federal agencies and pulling grant funding for a wide range of programs.
DEI policies became more widespread after nationwide protests in 2020 against police killings of unarmed Black people, spurring a conservative backlash. Trump and other critics of diversity initiatives say they are discriminatory against white people and men and have eroded merit-based decision making.
All of the things that should matter in these dark times - ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine, ending Israel's devastation of both Gaza and the West Bank, stopping the war in Sudan, pulling back on trump's hostility towards Venezuela and most of Central/South America - Rubio is going after font usage because certain fonts offends the Far Right Male sensibilities.
You can just picture poor Marco suffering the way Ryan Gosling did:
Yeah. He just highlighted Avatar, he clicked the drop down menu and then he randomly selected Papyrus. Like a thoughtless child, just wandering by a garden yanking leaves along the way...
He just got away with it. This man, this professional graphic designer. Was it laziness? Was it cruelty...?
And now, here I am doing what I vowed to never do again, sitting outside his house, hoping to catch a glimpse of him to see him doing his little things, live his insane little life...
Ryan: Do you remember the Avatar logo?
Heidi: Um, yeah. It was tribal, yet futuristic.
Ryan: Papyrus!!!
(He sees the graphic designer glaring at him through a window)
Ryan: I know what you did! I... KNOW... WHAT... YOU... DID!!!
Seriously, if the Alpha Male Wannabes in the trump inner circle are obsessed with manliness, they should have gone with Trajan, a more accurate Roman based font.
Just one more thing that makes us THINK ABOUT ROME!!!
The Iggles of Philadelphia said some brutal things about Captain Brady falling off a cliff, but I'm pretty sure the British changed their tune when Brady won more battles over the Ramhorns of Los Angeles and the Chieftains of Kansas City.
We fought for the right to root for Tampa Bay to have some of the best winning teams of recent memory! GO BOLTS! GO RAYS! GO BUCS!!! CHAMPA BAY!
I've written before aboutSaturday Night Live, a long-running weekly skit / music show and its' impact on our nation's cultural norms and political views.
It's a show that has the occasional bad night, due to a weak guest host - usually a hot marquee name coming off a blockbuster hit movie or TV show that turns out to be too one-note or bad at comedic timing - or just a bad time of current events where there's not much to make mockery of. It's been running for a loooooong time, which has brought up accusations that the show is outdated, out-of-touch, unnecessary... usually by people who wonder why Adam Sandler or Bill Murray still aren't on the show.
If you hadn't noticed, SNL goes through a rotation of core cast members - due to most acting contracts set between three to five years - which adds to the uneven nature of the show's history (some cast groups like the original Not-Ready guys from 1975-1979 or the late 80s-early 90s were epic crews that loom large over all the ones who follow them). You might remember them through the actors/actresses who were/are clearly the "glue" character-types keeping up with the A-list caliber types holding everyone's attention (Eddie Murphy in the early 80s, although his fellow castmates of that era weren't slouches and still occasionally annoyed how Eddie sucked up all the attention and glory).
For the current tenure, the main Players were inarguably Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Aidy Bryant, and Kenan Thompson (who had honestly been there so long he's a core player to three different eras). That the four of them stood together for the Cold Open as seen above on that YouTube clip signals big time that those four are ready to move on.
Granted, this comes up EVERY season finale - the OMG online chatter of who's gonna stay and who's gonna move on to their own TV show or three-movie contract with Paramount - but this year it seems like it might finally happen with the core crew... because in the Real World, things have finally changed.
In that I mean, trump is out of office.
If we go back to the craziness of the 2015-2016 SNL Season (Number 42, oh ye Gods Douglas Adams knew!) the show's mandate to skewer current events went into hyperdrive (no, worse, LUDICROUS SPEED) as the trump campaign hurtled our nation (no, the entire world) down the Darkest Timeline ("Stop me before I subreference again!" - Dennis Miller before he went mad). The SNL cast was game enough to try and document all of the atrocities that the 2016 election year was throwing at us, save for the moment when the show's producers decided to let trump himself host an episode - a moment the show has been apologizing for ever since - but when the Electoral College results meant goddamned donald trump was going to the White House everything suddenly imploded.
McKinnon's Cold Open tribute to Leonard Cohen - who had died earlier that week - wasn't just a memorial to a passing musician, it was a funeral dirge for half of a nation - and for most of the planet - sideswiped by an unwanted and fear-driven "victory" for one of the worst human beings in modern history. McKinnon was doing it dressed as Hillary Clinton - whom she had effectively parodied on the show - but this time was all serious and reflective, realizing that we were all going into at least four years' worth of madness, corruption, and anger. "I'm not giving up, and neither should you," McKinnon said - as herself as much as faux-Hillary - and that's pretty much what she did.
And so for four years, SNL has skewered, mocked, belittled the trump regime with a darker, more strident tone than any previous Presidential era that preceded this. Saturday Night - notoriously Liberal most often, at best Center-Left - had been hard on Presidents - even Liberal-leaning ones like Carter, Clinton, and Obama - from time to time, but often displayed a side of empathy that allowed for pathos to underline their criticisms of the Commander-in-Chiefs. Dana Carvey's turn as Bush the Elder is a perfect example of that empathic display. Not so with trump, Loser of the Popular Vote, whose ignorant, greedy, bullying habits were on full display every time guest-star Alec Baldwin had to put on the wig and fake nose (Baldwin himself was begging by 2017 (!) to stop playing him because even pretending to be trump was soul-draining).
For four years, roughly the same SNL crew had to carry the psyche of a battered United States through this Darkest Timeline, dreading every possibility that somehow trump and the Republicans could make it worse (see the following YouTube clip):
There have been notable departures - Leslie Jones in particular left in 2019 - but it felt as though most of the cast who came in at the turn of the decade were sticking around longer than expected because in some respects the job - Surviving trump - hadn't been finished.
And then the COVID-19 Pandemic hit. All of sudden, everything was put on hold. Oh, the show kept running - using home recordings, Zoom chats, long-distance connections - but as the world went into lockdown so too did SNL, reflecting the anxiety, sorrow, and yearning we all carried with us through 2020 to now.
There were a lot of tears watching this one because it felt like this was a farewell episode for too many of the cast at the end of Season 45:
It was actually a surprise that the entire 2019-2020 cast returned for this season. Again, probably due to the sense of "unfinished business." But now it's Biden in the White House, the vaccination of America has half the nation safe to unwind again, and there's this tiny sliver of relief letting us all know we can go back into the world now. So now, we're finally going to say farewell.
I'm mentioning how emotional a farewell can be to watch SNL cast members go, especially for the eras you can just tell are going to end, mostly because these actors - and often the characters they portray - become beloved during their tenures.
But this one - if this is indeed the farewell for many of the Players who kept us laughing and crying since 2016 - is going to hit harder than before.
These Players were the comedians and performers who did their best to keep most everyone else sane during the craziest years of our lives. The combination of trumpian madness and pandemic anxiety has hit a lot of us hard emotionally. Watching SNL was like trauma therapy, helping us through crisis after crisis as we crawled into 2020-21 and onto the shores of a calmer, happier future...
(Michael Gaetz does something ridiculous and criminal off-stage)
OH GODDAMMIT, COLIN JOST GET BACK OVER HERE YOU'RE GONNA NEED TO MAKE MORE JOKES ABOUT HOW YOU LOOK LIKE GAETZ.
Alas, he may be gone next year (unless they have him do a cameo Cold Open standing in a jail cell whining "Attica! Attica!" with Kate McKinnon as a jailed Rudy asking "You talking about the prison?" with Jost/Gaetz replying back "Nah, it's this high schooler I was gonna hook up with for the Halloween dance!")
His was the Presidency of my college years, and the first election I voted in. So there's a lot of significance in this for me looking back at what I recall (more than the Character review I made about five years ago).
I voted for Bush as President. Yes, in hindsight voting for ANY Republican feels blasphemous. But in 1988 as a college freshman I couldn't really recognize the damage - on social issues and public health issues like the AIDS crisis and the Drug War - being done. And a lot of the REALLY BAD stuff the Republicans would get into came during the 1990s under darker leadership by Newt Gingrich and others.
Bush on foreign policy was one of the more competent Presidents we had, overseeing a serious transitional moment with the collapse of Communism, the opening of Eastern Europe, and political power shifts across every continent.
Bush did attempt bipartisan dealing with a Democratic-controlled Congress... by agreeing to tax hikes that went against the Supply-Side dogma of many Republicans who came to power during the Reagan years. It actually triggered an intraparty revolt by Newt that drove out moderates (RINOs) and led to the current monstrous party leadership running the GOP now.
As a political campaigner, Bush was a nasty piece of work, relying on slander and mudslinging even in the 1960s as a Texas Congressman. The Willie Horton attack ads of the 1988 Presidential campaign was a new low - even compared to the harsh "Daisy" ad LBJ ran against Goldwater in 1964 - and essentially opened up a new era of dirty campaigning that has darkened our electorate since (and it's a tactic his own sons Dubya and Jeb rely on far too often themselves).
Bush *did* preside over major achievements such as the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a major Immigration Reform act (something the modern GOP would never touch), a key Civil Rights Act protecting workers from discrimination, overall reductions in nuclear weapons across the globe...
Oh, and he gave Dana Carvey good reason to earn a paycheck on Saturday Night Live for 4 straight years.
This weekend's SNL midterm ad is pretty much how I'm feeling about this Tuesday.
After the nightmare that was the 2016 results, and given the sad history of Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, I'm not going to feel any semblance of relief until after watching the results Wednesday morning and making GODDAMN CERTAIN DEMS AT LEAST TAKE THE US HOUSE, GILLUM WINS THE GOVERNOR'S RACE AND NELSON CREAMS SCOTT FOR THE SENATE SEAT! PLEASE VOTERS! DON'T F-CK US UP NOW! PLEASE!
As the sketch with guest host Jessica Chastain reveals, the last two weeks - of trump dumping on non-Eurowhite nations as "shitholes", of trump getting caught paying off a porn star he had an affair with less than a year after his third wife Melania gave birth to their son, of trump destabilizing government to where nobody in Congress could avoid the #trumpShutdown of 2018 - would otherwise have devastated any other Presidency, shamed the political party of that President into action to rein in such abuses and scandal, or driven most of the nation into rioting in the streets.
But nope. Nada. As Chastain rightly points out, the crazier and reckless trump behaves and the worse he does at the job as Commander-in-Chief, the more his rabid voting base will approve of him.
And the rest of us are stuck because the Rule of Law is relying on the other half of government - the Legislative branch - to do something about it. But the Republicans control the Legislative branch and they are not going to do anything that threatens their chances of getting re-elected by that rabid pro-trump base they rely on as well.
We've entered into the realm of political nihilism, where nothing matters because the ones in power don't fucking care what ethics or rules really mean. The ghosts of 19th Century Anarchists must be roiling in their graves in sheer envy.
And when Chastain raised that bottle of wine to drink it straight, I sympathized. I know that sentiment. Alas, I am unable to drink hard cider as I had hoped. I am stone cold sober. I am so depressed.
When my parents bought a VCR back in 1978... or was it 1979?... one of the first things we did was tape a lot of PBS Masterpiece Theater shows, because MOM had control of the house dammit and nothing was getting in the way of her All Creatures Great and Small.
But we sons had the option to get Saturday Night Live recorded to our amusement, and that helped keep up appraised of the wild and crazy skits until we were old enough - about 12ish - to stay up late on our own to watch.
It's slightly amazing that the show is still chugging along 40 years after its debut in 1975. Part of the reason is that the show works as an ensemble, it is not tied to one person, although one person or duo can tie everybody together to an era like no other. Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Phil Hartman, Darrell Hammond, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey... Eddie Murphy in particular became a superstar straight out of SNL, unlike any of the others. Like Bill Simmons notes in his Grantland article about Murphy, I too watched the bit where Eddie mocks Stevie Wonder, and felt the same way about watching LIVE a classic moment that millions of others were seeing.
Over on the Salon site, that sharing among fellow viewers is argued as the main reason SNL remains on the air even decades after so many other skit shows - In Living Color, MAD TV, various others that barely lasted a season - faded into history. Mostly because those shows encircled a key player or team - Living Color in particular revolved around the Wayans family - and when those players left, the shows couldn't continue. SNL was one of the firsts to exist without revolving around a singular talent (even though a singular talent would rise to dominance over a 3-5 year period), taking from the variety act shows of Ed Sullivan and merging it with the improv and satire of underground stage comedy, and people keep tuning in because, God help us, we want to be there watching when something brilliant - More Cowbell! Lazy Sunday! - happens. As Sonia Saraiya writes:
Saturday Night Live’s finest moments have a way of becoming instant history, meaning that we’re instantly nostalgic for them. And that’s because when we witness them, we sort of all feel like we were there for it, that we witnessed it firsthand. It doesn't have to be good, honestly, because the point is that we showed up—the bad moments sometimes just give you more to talk about.
I’m of the opinion—as is Gary Susman at MovieFone—that SNL has gotten way, way too safe as it’s aged, mostly because its star showrunner, talent scout and occasional on-screen presence Lorne Michaels has aged along with it. That’s left the show vulnerable to other shows that also rely on our sense of togetherness—The Daily Show with Jon Stewart being the best example. I’d love to see Saturday Night Live take a lot more risks, to get not-safe-for-work, to take advantage of its timeslot and its storied history to say something really provocative...
...Live television is so fundamentally exciting to watch—it’s a thrill knowing that it is happening now, and that you, as an audience member, are a part of it. But sports are a competition played on a field; awards shows are glorified industry events. It’s only stuff like Saturday Night Live that really talks back to its audience, that looks into the cameras and literally says “goodnight.” As it is now, “SNL” squanders something very precious—the opportunity to be on everyone’s TV, unvarnished, unedited and in a bad wig, making the rest of us laugh. Its very presence. If the show isn’t careful, even though it is the last/only live variety show we have, it may find itself replaced.
But I do hope that we are never without some version of Saturday Night Live—of the closest thing we have to all of America attending the same play. We have fascination and disdain for SNL, yes—at its inconsistency, its former glory, its cast members breaking character to start snickering during a bit. But at least we have it, together, and that is something.
There are a lot of memories for me watching SNL back when I could - when I was young enough to stay up late and not suffer for it. I remember turning on the show one night in 2005, just no reason why, did it not realizing it was a new episode that night, and happened to turn it on just as "Lazy Sunday" started playing on the show.
By the end of the clip, I knew I had watched one of those Big Moments, when Saturday Night Live hit the home run, making a cultural and historical milestone around which the show could stagger on for another five years. It reminded me of the times back in 1992, during the Presidential primaries and campaigns, when Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman teamed up for some of the greatest political satire I've ever seen (and this is with SNL bringing in solid satire nearly every 4 year Presidential cycle).
(dammit the link broke, BRING IT BACK SNL BRING IT BACK)
