Category Archives: Muddled Musings

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: democracy simply doesn’t work.”

Ozersk  

hyetographically As if this were breaking news, suddenly people have discovered The Simpsons is the most brilliant show in TV history.

The show’s creators are making an unexpected press circuit after one of its 2010 shows  became politically prescient.

Entitled “Boy Meets Curl,” the series, now in its 29th season, predicted that the U.S. would beat Sweden at the Olympics in curling — which is exactly what happened Saturday.

It’s a great episode, but Simpson prophesy is nothing new.  The Simpsons predicted three different 1990s Super Bowl victories; the fact that Disney would acquire Fox; and a Trump presidency, among other things.

The bigger question now is: What will The Simpsons do with the latest acclaim? In all likelihood, skewer the hell out of everyone caught in the publicity blast radius: Olympic committees and commentators, fans of obscure sports, North-South Korean political tensions, yaddy.

But perhaps the easiest targets are the heroes themselves, the first American curling team to take Olympic gold.

The victory was as poetic and inspiring as any well told Olympic obscurity-to-celebrity story (now that it’s become such a ratings cash cow, how long before Disney spins off a Training for the Games channel on one of ESPN’s innumerable networks?).

Still, there’s no way that writers won’t tease the, er, athletic build of our medal champions. The Olympics are testimony to the marvels of the human body. But there’s not much to marvel at — at least if you’re keen on physiques — in our proud boys. They look as if they’d be just as at home playing for Homer’s bowling league team, The Pin Pals. Hell, they look like they could form the USA Beer Pong team.

 

 

I have an idea: an episode about Marge discovering that her housecleaning skills have made her an Olympic-level athlete…

D’oh!

 

There’s No Need to Fear, Underdogs and Factslaps are Here!

In honor of the national holiday, a pigskin-led Factslap edition:

  • According to a Wall Street Journal study in 2010 based on four broadcasts, a standard NFL game features just 10 minutes and 43 seconds of action. Commercials account for nearly 60 minutes of the three hour affairs. When the networks are showing the game, the bulk of the time is spent either on replays or shots of players huddling.
  • According to a 2009 Sports Illustrated article, about 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress, after just two years of retirement.
  • Larry Izzo of New England Patriots once had a bowel movement on the sideline and got the game ball for his trouble because he did it without anybody noticing.
  • NFL cheerleaders are only paid $50 a game.
  • The actress who plays Phyllis in The Office was once an NFL cheerleader.
  • About 9 out of 10 people with lupus are women.
  • Scientists discovered in 2015 that there are 8 times more trees on earth than previously thought (three trillion).
  • The speed of the wind has fallen by 60% in the last 30 years.
  • Despite spending half his career in the saddle, actor Clint Eastwood is allergic to horses.
  • People’s body temperature drops when they watch videos of other people putting their hands into cold water.
  • Instead of a Foreign Office, the Roman Empire had a “Bureau of Barbarians.”
  • A dozen camels were disqualified in 2018 from a Saudi beauty pageant for receiving Botox injections to make them more attractive.
  • President Trump asked the Guggenheim Museum to lend him a Van Gogh for the White House. Their counter-offer: a solid gold toilet.

But I’m No Super Genius…or Are I?

 

Watching cable news lately is a bit like walking into the home of parents with third graders. There’s gonna be crap on the fridge.

Similarly, you’d think Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson had just spawned  a pre-teen after Donald Trump’s fitness “test” at the White House. You can almost see them jostling for fridge real estate, so Junior can see who posted his latest masterwork.

First, try to get that image out of your head. Sorry about that. No one should have to picture either of those fleshy men copulating.

Now, though, consider the awkward position in which that doctor must have found himself, as do all people caught in the orbit of Trump: Utter the ridiculous, or pack. Do even the most ardent Trump supporters believe that, with a few fewer Big Mac and Filet of Fish sandwiches a day, he could live to 200?

For some reason, that sounded particularly absurd, if there’s a way to distinguish one utterance from another. We expect a press lackey to proclaim the Earth’s largest inauguration. We expect a toadie to hail Trump as the force to “revolutionize reality TV.” We’d even expect neo Nazis and the religious right (sorry for the redundancy) to, well, vote for him. You expect crazy shit.

But this doc probably has friends. Maybe doctor friends. What do they say when he comes to poker night? Do they tease him for a Biblical diagnosis? Raise the nickel-a-hand game to $5,000 a card? SeanTuck either didn’t know or didn’t care, so proud were they with Donnie’s perfect score.

Just for kicks, I looked up the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), a test usually given to Parkinson’s patients. While lots of folks have reprinted the image above, what’s interesting is the stuff below: the rest of the test. So here it is. All of it. Try NOT to get a perfect score: 

Now, for some factslaps our baboon-in-chief could likely not read, let alone know:

  • In the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen, it is illegal to die.
  • In a study following the lives of 19,000 kids for 10 years, video games had no negative social behavior effects on the children.
  • In 2010, a group of 15 monkeys escaped a research institute in Japan by using trees to catapult themselves over a 17 ft high electric fence.
  • Stifling a sneeze by clamping your nose and mouth shut can rupture your throat.
  • During the Columbine massacre, two 20 pound propane bombs were planted in the school cafeteria right before lunch. Had the bombs not fail to detonate, it’s estimated that 488 students would have been killed or severely injured.
  • A sophomaniac is a person who’s under the delusion that they are extremely intelligent.
  • In 2015, a man sued Red Bull stating that after 10 years of consuming the product, he received no wings, enhanced physical nor intellectual performance.

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