Running of the Quotes - How Bout Right Now Edition Part Deux

Continuing the roll....

Quote of the Day I

But Barris achieved his schlock icon status with The Gong Show in 1976. He was both producer and host. It was awful. But like driving past a car wreck, you just couldn't turn away. 

That pretty much sums up television in the 1970s. It wasn't a show filled with Beautiful People. The talent, the host, and the judges were closer to eye sores than eye candy (except the time judge Jaye P. Morgan briefly flashed the audience during a "Gene, Gene, The Dancing Machine" segment). Again, this was the '70s. 

Now we have America's Got Talent, X Factor, and The Voice. Everyone looks beautiful. And everything sounds beautiful. But I bet Barris and his wacky cast still had more fun. 

-- Victorino Matus remembering Chuck Barris

Quote of the Day II

If you want to know what a pro-Russia policy would look like, Chris, here are some elements of it. You’d slash defense spending. You’d slow down our nuclear modernization. You’d roll back missile defense systems. You would enter a one-sided nuclear control arms agreement. And you’d try to do everything you could to stop oil and gas production. That was Barack Obama’s policy for eight years. That’s not Donald Trump’s policy. 

-- Senator Tom Cotton refuting Chris Wallace's suggestion that Trump is colluding with Vladimir Putin

Quote of the Day III

We are living in a very bizarre era, in which large numbers of otherwise-respectable people consider it a point of moral superiority to commit, or aid in the commission of, federal crimes. This largely explains why Donald Trump is now our president. 

-- PowerLine's John Hinderaker

Quote of the Day IV

Whenever I would tell the missus that I was headed downstairs to play "Resident Evil VII: Biohazard" it felt as if I was sneaking away to watch Skinemax or some other self-indulgent, worthless endeavor. I can morally and aesthetically justify checking out of family time to read Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature, but pretending to be a guy killing zombies for an hour seems quite callow. 

In large part this is because, frankly, I'm not that good at video games? I know there are some who think that it's far more pathetic to pour hundreds, thousands of hours into video games yearly—but, I'll be honest, I kind of respect that dedication, that effort to make oneself good, better, the best at something. As a casual gamer—as the sort who gets seasick for the first few hours of a first person shooter after a long layoff, the sort who takes 15 hours to finish a 10 hour game, the sort who frequently relies on internet-based walkthroughs to get past very basic challenges—I'm not really excelling at anything. I'm just stumbling along, a n00b like any other. 

Nobody likes a n00b. More to the point: nobody likes feeling like a n00b. No one likes the self-awareness that comes along with being a n00b. We all want to believe we're great at whatever it is we're doing. Or, at the very least, we want to believe we're competent. The curse of the casual gamer is to know, with very real certainty, that you are bad at the thing you're doing. That you aren't excelling, that any 15-year-old punk with a PS4 and the interest to play the game you're playing would, almost instantly, be better than you. 

This is the shame I live with. I pray it's a pain you never have to feel. 

-- Sonny Bunch in Confessions of a Casual Gamer

Quote of the Day V

If there’s any lesson to take from 2016, it’s that voters love uncharismatic members of stale Democratic dynasties. Then again, this is New York, a state that handed Hillary Clinton the only two meaningful electoral wins she ever notched and which sent Caroline Kennedy’s uncle to the Senate a few decades before. A slugfest between two A-list nepotists hailing from the two most famous Democratic dynasties of the last 60 years would be a golden age for political media, especially in NYC. 

...If Clinton or Kennedy want a foot in the door in Washington, they may be stuck with — alas — the indignity of a House seat in New York somewhere. So very unglamorous, but at least it’ll put them in line for a Senate slot when one eventually opens up. 

-- Allahpundit snarking on the predicted 2020 Chelsea Clinton vs. Caroline Kennedy NY congressional race

Quote of the Day VI

A woman with a business is subject to special rules. Political rules. And if she does not hew to them, she must be destroyed. By a gang of women. You know how women help women? They don’t. 

-- Ann Althouse on the jihad against Ivanka Trump

Quote of the Day VII

The Economist in the last six months published a series of interesting articles on the challenges of anti-submarine warfare. 

As long time readers may have figured out, I love - from a professional perspective - ASW. Neglected and unloved by most, but to me a passion. Though few really cared outside fellow fetishists, I was actually damn good at it - for an officer. 

...As a side note, why does The Economist keep putting stuff out about ASW? One has to remember, the island nation was twice in the last hundred years almost starved to death by submarines. 

She knows. 

-- CDR Salamander

Quote of the Day VIII

Dressed in my favorite pair of non-existent pajamas, I leapt from my bed and pulled the drapes aside. There, not three feet in front of me, was a camera, dangling from the underside of a drone. The red light was on, and the camera was rolling. 

...Seconds later I’d pulled the Mossburg 12-guage from under my bed and grabbed the cellphone from the bedside table. In no time, I was out on the deck downstairs, about fifteen feet below the electronic Peeping Tom. The drone had moved even closer to my window. I could see the camera panning left to right, and I could hear my dog unleashing a level of indignation usually reserved for raccoons and feral cats. Somewhere, in the logical part of my brain, it occurred to me that nothing good can come from an angry B-list celebrity standing on his deck with no clothes and a loaded shotgun, but I was not really in touch at that moment with the logical part of my brain. 

...I had a clear shot – nothing but blue sky above – and more than enough umbrage to justify the destruction I was about to unleash. But then, as I was literally squeezing the trigger, I saw the camera tilt down. It was pointed directly at me, and in that moment – I froze. 

I’d like to tell you I stopped because I realized that discharging my weapon in such a fashion would be frowned on by the local constabulary. But really, what stopped me was the realization that somewhere nearby, a drone operator was staring at his monitor, pondering the image of a very naked guy with a very familiar face, pointing a shotgun into the lens of his Go Pro and looking every bit as crazy as Gary Busey and Nick Nolte at the nadir of their careers. I froze, because I could see the video that might very well appear on the local news, (with considerable blurring, naturally.) The same video that might soon appear on my mother’s computer screen, along with the headline – “Dirty Jobs Guy Totally Loses It – Gets Naked and Shoots Drone From San Francisco Skies.”
When the moment passed I put the shotgun down and reached for my phone instead, just as the wicked contrivance bugged out for the Wild Blue Yonder. 

-- Dirty Jobs guy Mike Rowe recounting how he totally lost it, got naked, and almost shot down a peeping drone with a shotgun

Quote of the Day IX

A millennial member of a focus group has angrily objected to the contents of a television programme because it portrayed millennials as coddled, easily offended and thin-skinned. 

-- from an Independent UK article

Quote of the Day X

Speaking of time, the death of Kurt Cobain is almost as far in the past now as the death of Jim Morrison was when Smells Like Teen Spirit hit the shelves in what were still called "record stores". 

-- Tam from View From The Porch