For those of you Beatles fans out there…
I’ll be a guest speaker at the 50th Fest for Beatles Fans, and will have a table where I will be selling both my nonfiction book THE BEATLES ON THE CHARTS as well as the fiction anthology ACROSS THE UNIVERSE. Look, they even have my name on the poster!
In a sense, this election will be between two incumbents. When an incumbent runs in a primary, it’s rare any real challenges pop up. Biden has a few minor opponents, both of whom are struggling to get more than a few points in the polls.
Compare that to Trump. As an “incumbent,” he should be getting 98% of the vote in his primaries. Instead, last night at the Iowa caucus, he got 51%.
His party is not behind him as much as he thinks it is. And that’s good for us. Maybe some of the people in his party who don’t support him won’t show up at the polls in November.
Have you seen memes like this, always posted by old white people, longing for a time that never existed?
Seriously, I was a kid in the 60s, too young to remember most of it, but here’s what I do recall:
Women were pretty much second-class citizens who couldn’t have their own bank account or buy a house on their own. Abortion was illegal in most of the country, and in many places, a husband could not be found guilty of raping his wife since she was basically seen as property. God forbid you were a woman who wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or politician.
Simply being gay was illegal. You could go to jail for loving someone. And the idea of getting married was laughed at.
If you were black, you spent a large portion of the 60s in segregated schools with separate drinking fountains, and voter suppression kept you away from the polls (okay, that part hasn’t changed as much).
Don’t get me started on police abuses — you had very few rights back then when you were arrested, and there was a reason there were lots of riots and protests over police brutality, because it existed.
And smoking! Everyone smoked everywhere. In busses, planes, supermarkets, movie theaters — couldn’t get away from it.
Cars were huge and very unsafe and there were many more fatal accidents per vehicles on the road than there are today. Food was quite unsafe, and the idea of eating healthy was laughed at.
Medical science wasn’t as advanced. My appendix burst when I was 8 and I spent weeks in the hospital recovering for something that could easily be treated today. If you were diagnosed with cancer, then you’d just start preparing your will. There were no MRI machines or other technological devices to help doctors diagnose and treat illnesses and injuries. The average life expectancy in 1965 was 66 years old.
Pollution was rampant. Cities were constantly covered in smog. Rivers caught on fire from the crap dumped in them.
And, of course, we had the Vietnam war, protests, and assassinations of political leaders happening often.
Why this meme longs for a day before computers and cell phones is a mystery to me — I think those things have improved my quality of life tremendously and made all sorts of projects easier.
Okay, in some ways things were better in those days. The NRA was not as corrupt as today, agreed with reasonable gun controls, and there weren’t as many mass shootings. Unions were still pretty strong and someone could buy a house and send the kids to college with just one job. And the music was pretty good.
But when someone longs for the “good old days” they’re almost always remembering a time that didn’t exist. They’re remembering the good parts and ignoring the bad parts.
I have no desire whatsoever to go back to those days.
In the 80s, I started a magazine called “Animato!” that later grew quite large and popular. I got to meet and interview great animators like Chuck Jones and Ralph Bakshi but later sold the magazine, and it went on to even bigger successes until the internet killed all magazines.
So I’m still an animation fan, but it’s basically impossible to see all the films and all the animated TV shows these days unless you’re a full-time animator or animation historian, I guess.
These days, with so much CGI, we can debate what an “animated film” even is, but generally the accepted definition is that the main characters must be animated — not just the monsters or effects. (And “motion capture” doesn’t count.)
So here’s my annual end-of-the-year list of best and worst animated films (based on their Rotten Tomatoes score). Ties are broken by number of reviews, and you have to have at least 10 reviews to make my list.
Interesting year: No one film dominated, and most received at least 50% (unlike previous years where a lot of films got very low scores). And look what’s at the bottom: Disney’s latest “Wish,” which was the poorest reviewed Disney film since 2005’s “Chicken Little.”
Republicans: “Those protestors blocking the road and kneeling during football games while saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ are unAmerican and should be arrested!”
Also Republicans: “Look at those tourists entering the Capitol on January 6th to express their views to Congress! What patriots!”
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