April 30
April 30. Facebook Friends, The Jourmudgeon begins this week’s screed soberly, noting the passing of Phillip Kives, 87, the marketing genius who for decades blessed us with K-tel and its iconic TV commercials for indispensable products including the Veg-O-Matic, Popiel’s Pocket Fisherman and “Hit Machine: 20 Original Hits, 20 Original Stars.” http://www.nytimes.com/…/philip-kives-k-tel-pitchman-who-pe… Practically no one of The Jourmudgeon’s generation would recognize Mr. Kives by name, but K-tel was as much a cultural lodestar for us as “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “The Monkees” and Ginger and Mary Ann. Here’s hoping Mr. Kives’ company will note his passing and honor his legacy by developing and marketing The Coffin-O-Matic (“Not Sold in Any Stores! Be the First on Your Block to Be Cremated and Buried All in One!”). And so to the news:
1. Several hundred thousand people with nothing better to do began taking aim at big box retailer Target (taking aim at Target – get it? The Jourmudgeon promises that that is the last wisecrack he will direct toward the store’s name) with a planned boycott after the company announced a tolerant bathroom policy for transgendered people. Company officials say they expect sales of crayons, Cheez Whiz and Skoal to plummet as a result of the boycott. By the way, Target says it still won’t allow shoppers to take merchandise that fits their gender identity into the bathroom that fits their gender identity. Meanwhile, the North Carolina legislature’s recent obsession with who uses public restrooms prompted a cogent monologue from Stephen Colbert: http://www.vox.com/…/stephen-colbert-bathrooms-transgender-….
2. After sweeping another five Republican primaries on Tuesday, Donald Trump delivered a speech by Teleprompter intended to a) convince party leaders that he is a Serious Presidential Candidate Who Is Not Just Horsing Around, and b) demonstrate that he has a foreign policy. By the end of the week, bipartisan analysts of the speech had just about identified Trump’s policy: 1) The United States under President Trump will support any nation that acts just like Trump voters; 2) As long as they don’t try to move to the United States and become Trump voters.
3. Trump’s remaining Republican fodder, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, responded to their latest drubbing by agreeing, sort of, to cede a couple of remaining primaries to each other in a final effort to stop Trump. Their strategy is to keep from continuing to split the anti-Trump vote. In adopting it, they managed to give credence to Trump’s claim that other Republicans are conspiring against him. In another cunning move, Cruz reacted to his fast-waning chances by naming as his running mate former rival Carly Fiorina, whose candidacy got obliterated by Trump even faster than Cruz’s. But at the end of the week, Cruz’s ongoing attempt to paint himself as a Washington outsider got an unexpected boost from former House Speaker John Boehner, the ultimate insider. Boehner publicly described Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh,” and said “I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.” Honest to God. The former speaker also said he would vote for Trump but not for Cruz for president.
4. A federal judge in North Carolina upheld the state’s new law that places tight restrictions on voting. Taking his cue from the recent Supreme Court decision that threw out a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Judge Thomas D. Schroeder wrote: “There is significant, shameful past discrimination [in North Carolina]. In [the state’s] recent history, however, certainly for the last quarter century, there is little official discrimination to consider.” In other words, after 150 years of extending the vote to African Americans, women and 18-year-olds, it’s high time the state began disenfranchising people again, particularly the poor, minorities, the old and the young.
5. As the threat from the Zika virus spread – including higher incidence of microcephaly in children whose mothers contracted the virus — a surprisingly bipartisan Senate agreed to provide up to $1.1 billion to combat the threat. But House Republicans promised to put a stop to such fiscal foolishness. “Look at us,” one said. “We all got small heads, and it ain’t bothered us none.”
6. In a development that should settle for all time the debate over the effectiveness of technology in the classroom, it was revealed that a senior Volkswagen engineer in 2006 created a PowerPoint that shows how to cheat vehicle emissions tests. VW insiders said practically nobody fell asleep during the presentations.
7. In pop culture news, the world somehow managed not to end when Kelly Ripa, the small auxiliary backup version of either Kathy Lee Gifford or Regis Philbin, walked out of her morning show on ABC for several days. Ripa was upset that ABC had not told her that her co-host Michael Strahan would be moving to another of the most important programs in the history of the world, “Good Morning America.” Strahan, a former NFL star who has a gap between his front teeth that is bigger than Ripa, was scheduled to make the move in early fall. But at the end of the week ABC announced that Strahan would leave his current gig by mid-May, to keep Ripa from killing him.
8. Finally, in There Will Always Be an England news, a British official indicated he intended to ignore the will of more than 124,000 of his countrymen who voted online to name a new $300 million research vessel Boaty McBoatface. According to The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/…/boaty-mcboatface-brita…/479088/ and other sources, the choice got three times as many votes as any other. Still, “The new royal research ship will be sailing into the world’s iciest waters to address global challenges that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, including global warming, the melting of polar ice, and rising sea levels,” Science Minister Jo Johnson sniffed. “That’s why we want a name that lasts longer than a social-media news cycle and reflects the serious nature of the science it will be doing.” Clearly, the populace of a nation that fought Nazism and gave us the Magna Carta, Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Churchill, The Beatles and Downton Abbey is too flighty to be trusted with matters as grave as naming a floating science lab.
