The Daily Dose/February 8, 2020
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy
Leading Off
Notes from around the human experience…
HUT, HUT HIKE: We slept through most of the recent Super Bowl, so we missed the halftime show, but we watched it recently after reading assorted reactions to it. Reactions ran the gamut from empowering and joyful to vulgar and disgusting so we were somewhat curious and after visual inspection of photos of the two headliners, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, we came away determined to find out for ourselves.
Get Your Official Daily Dose Policy Right Here: If you like hot, scantily clad women jumping up and down – and we do – it was a hell of a show. I’ve left Visa numbers for less. Now, if you’re the type who gets your shorts in a knot over stuff like this, you probably didn’t. We could see where people found the show joyful, vulgar and disgusting.
Fly In The Ointment: But in no way was this empowering to anyone, except males who decide the best way to allow talented women like Shakira and Ms Lopez to earn a living is to oblige them to dress up and prance around like harlots.
Life 101: At least the girls and young women watching were given accurate lessons in how to get ahead in this world: it helps to have nice legs and a nice ass and for heaven’s sake don’t be shy about deploying these critical assets. If you do not have these critical assets pity, because cows will otherwise have their work cut out for them trying to make a go of it.
Dry, Technical Matter: No one, of course, forces anyone to appear on the Super Bowl halftime show and Shakira and Lopez could have chosen something else to wear…It’s their careers, and if they want to prance around like that, more power to them. And while the NFL doesn’t actually pay their Super Bowl headliners, they make enough off their appearance to make it worth their while.
Bottom Line: The talented and beautiful, and even the untalented and beautiful, have always been exploited and Shakira and Lopez are merely the latest to get dolled up for our entertainment so some can make a pile of cash. It’s the way the world is built.
Today At The Site
Writing worth reading. More or less.
The Diary of a Nobody: Sparrow has still more snow to move. Today’s Diary.
The boys at our small-town public works office were hard at it early, too, so there was a nice berm at the end of the driveway, hardly the siege fortress they’d delivered yesterday, but still a pretty good one…
Click here to get in on the laffs: Sparrow, The Bottom Ten, the funniest books you’ve ever read. We offer 4Ever and Ever access, or cheapskates can purchase books and columns individually.
On This Date
Great moments in us.
In 1924 – The United States executes someone in a gas chamber for the first time, when Nevada gasses Gee Jon to death at a state prison in Carson City. Jon was executed in a hastily built gas chamber after an earlier attempt to gas him in his cell while he slept failed because the gas leaked out. Jon, born in China, had emigrated to the US in 1907 or 1908 and had been condemned for a 1921 murder. The last execution in the US in a gas chamber occurred in Arizona in 1999.
In 1998 – Women’s ice hockey debuts at the Winter Olympics as Finland defeats Sweden 6-0 at the Nagano Winter Games. The United States, Canada, China and Japan also participated, with the US defeating China and Canada defeating Japan later in the day. The US won the gold medal, defeating Canada 3-1 in the championship game and Finland defeated China 4-1 for the bronze medal. Canada would win the next four gold medals and the Americans won in 2018.
In 1992 – Right Said Fred is at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first of three consecutive weeks with I’m Too Sexy. The song also went to #1 in four other countries, including Australia and Ireland and spent six weeks at #2 in Great Britain, tying the record for time spent in the runner-up spot on the British chart. Though the group would continue to chart in Europe, only a #76 hit later in the year prevented Right Said Fred from being an ultimate one-hit wonder in the United States, a group whose only chart single went to #1.
Quotebook
The wisdom of the ages. Whatever.
It would seem to bear out Franklin’s contention that spies, in the long run, caused as much mischief to their masters as to their victims, and should not be taken too seriously. – David Schoenbrun, Triumph in Paris: The Exploits of Benjamin Franklin
Answer To The Last Trivia Question
It’s not who you know, but what you know.
The first song on the Hot 100 to go to #1 for two different artists was Go Away Little Girl, first by Steve Lawerence in 1963 and then by Donny Osmond in 1971.
Today’s Stumper
Cheaper than Trivia Night at the bar.
What is the only country besides Canada and the US to play in the gold medal game of the women’s Olympic hockey tournament? – Answer next time!
