by John Walters
Starting Five
“Filmed Before A Live Studio Audience”*
*The judges will also accept “Bowl-Oriented”
The paid attendance for Monday’s Miami Beach Bowl was announced as 15,262. If you say so, Norby. I guess Christian McCaffrey isn’t the only one who does not want to participate in a bowl this season. Oh yeah, Tulsa crushed Central Michigan, 55-10.
There are 42 bowl games this season. They’ve already played seven. Did you realize that? I did not realize that. Fifty years ago there were nine bowls: Orange, Rose, Sugar, Cotton, Sun, Liberty, Gator, Bluebonnet and Tangerine. Nine. Neither of the top two teams in the country that season, Notre Dame and Michigan, played in a bowl. The Fighting Irish did not because they had a policy dating back to the mid-Twenties that they would not, while the Spartans didn’t because the Big Ten had a policy that you could not repeat in the Rose Bowl (Can you imagine the nuclear takes such a policy would draw today? Still, it was better than being sent to fight the Vietcong, no?).
Besides, the only game from 1966 that anyone remembers is the one that Notre Dame and Michigan State played against one another…that ended in a tie. NO!
2. Cold-Blooded
One shooter captures another
Merriam-Webster chose its word of the year yesterday and that word was “surreal,” and if 2016 didn’t already have a surfeit of evidence, yesterday’s assassination of Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey in Ankara provided more proof. As bizarre and tragic as all of it was, imagine being a photographer who has just witnessed a murder, the gunmen is still armed, and you are taking photos of the scene with little regard for your own welfare.
Karlov, and behind him, his 22 year-old killer
At the time of the attack, Turkey’s foreign minister was on a flight to Moscow to discuss Syria. Turkey backs the rebels while Russia backs Assad. That should be a tense meeting.
3. Mayhem in Berlin
Another European incident involving a truck used as a weapon of mass destruction. This time 12 people were killed at a Christmas bazaar in a touristy part of Berlin. These are the tactics of Islamic jihadis, though no one has yet claimed responsibility. Sick world we live in.
4. More Like a Landfill
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
In addition to that tweet from November 27, Donald Trump’s team sent out a press release after yesterday’s official Electoral College vote (which my colleague Alexander Nazaryan notes is “a classic safety school”) reaffirming that he won the election in a landslide.
He did win the election. The rest of it is false.
Trump captured 304 electoral votes. In 2012 Barack Obama captured 332 electoral votes. In 2008 Barry from Kenya captured 365 electoral votes. 304 of a possible 538 electoral votes is 57%, which The New York Times accurately reports ranks 48th out of the 56 elections in terms of “landslidyness.” Of course, that’s not the way Breitbart reported it, but numbers are hard. Propaganda is easy.
Stevie Nicks is NOT cool with this
This is Trump world. If 48 of 56 electoral college wins are all “landslides,” if six of seven (see, I divided 48 and 56 by eight) wins are landslides, then the term landslide no longer has any quantitative meaning, only a qualitative meaning. This is what demagogues and tyrants do. Every day is a sunny day, not because the sun is shining, but because it confers the quality of sunshine. Truth is fiction. Fiction is truth. George Orwell supplied the playbook decades ago.
5. NatGeo’s Best Photos of 2016
We’ll save “Why isn’t it International Geographic?” for some other time and for now just beckon you to gaze on these spectacular shots from the magazine’s “Best of 2016” gallery.
The photo above looks like a diorama from the Museum of Natural History, but it was shot at Yellowstone National Park by Charlie Hamilton James. Below, Tim Laman captures an orangutan in Borneo climbing 100 feet up for a tempting piece of fruit. I’ll never complain about the four-block walk to West Side Market again.
Word Up
Meretricious (adj): characteristic of a prostitute; apparently attractive but lacking in any integrity or value
There’s a meretricious aspect of planting two .500 teams in south Florida in late December to play a bowl game.
Music 101
Tainted Love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYWGvQQX7Kw
Soft Cell appeared on The Merv Griffin Show? That alone is enough to post it here. Stick around for the awkward conversation at the conclusion of the performance. I cannot explain why this song was such a big hit in 1982 other than that it was peak synth-pop times, but it spent a record-breaking 43 weeks in the Billboard 100 (peaking at No. 8) stateside, and was the top-selling single in the U.K. the year before. Really.
It’s actually not even an Soft Cell original. The tune was originally recorded in 1965 by American artist Gloria Jones but it was a flop, failing to chart. But our hard-working MH music researchers have unearthed a copy for you…
Remote Patrol
Showboat
TCM 6 p.m.
You’ve got “Ol’ Man River” and Ava Gardner in the same 1951 film. Any questions?
Ava Gardner. She brings the “va va,” and you supply the “voom.”