Based On Facts That Meet Fiction

A Random Randomnesses column. 

Image by Magic Creative from Pixabay 

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device

"We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail." -Dave Berry 

Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,

The title of this column is a phrase that was displayed on the screen at the beginning of a TV show I watched relatively recently. I'd give credit where credit is due but I can't remember which show it was. 

{The old gray horse's short-term memory, it ain't what he used to be.} 

Harumph, gray stallion is more like it.

{I was going to say gray gelding given the state of your sex life, or the lack thereof.}

Double harumph, As it happens I'm a vcel thank you very much, Dana. Unlike incels, vcels are voluntarily celibate H. sapiens who have chosen this path for a variety of reasons. 

{My bad. I just assumed it was because in your case that...}

Could we move on, please? 

{You're the one writing this stuff.}

The phrase in question caught my attention because I also relatively recently encountered the term representationally accurate at the beginning of a different TV show — it may have been a movie — that also caught my attention. 

Both phrases are as disingenuous as the classic based on a true story but both sound way cooler. The same translation will suffice for all three.

The content you're about to consume is an allegedly more or less sorta/kinda accurate depiction that has been sliced, diced, tweaked, sexed-up, dumbed-down, and/or altered in any number of ways to make it more entertaining and hopefully more likely to make some money. It's based on a true story, is representationally accurate, and is based on facts that meet fiction.

I read... well, intensely and purposefully skim, a carefully chosen gaggle of websites dedicated to news and opinion in the course of the day to satisfy my addiction to current events and provide grist for my columnist's mill.

{Grist?}

Cool, huh? I've never written that word and I've been more or less literate for better than 60 years. Anyway, it occurs to me that the phrase based on facts that meet fiction might be a useful addition to the definition of purple journalism in my website's glossary.

Purple Journalism: Journalism as currently perpetrated by many news outlets that claim to be professional, unbiased, and factual. In reality, they are partisan, prone to sensationalism, and motivated primarily by the bottom line — and are based on facts that meet fiction. 

ln case you missed it.., The IRS is going after those rich sons o' bitches that haven't been paying their fair share of taxes. Empowered by a provision of the American Rescue Plan, passed last year by the Depublicans (the party of social justice) without a single Republicrat vote, the IRS is bringing the hammer down.

Americans that received electronic payments for goods or services provided to their fellow citizens via companies like PayPal, Venmo, etc. in 2022 will be receiving some unwelcome mail next month, an IRS form called a 1099-K.

Say you sold off your late aunt Thelma's collection of collector plates this year and used an electronic payment service to get paid. The service will be sending you a form 1099-K to helpfully remind you that this is income that must be reported to The Fedrl Gummit.

They also must report this information to the IRS.

See, the reporting threshold has dropped from $20,000 to $600. Surprise! Now all of those evil, thousandaire blackguards who have been making as much as an extra unreported $19,999 a year (or $601) via the black market will be forced to pay up.  

In case you missed it 2... Last May, the Black Lives Matter organization shared an IRS form 990 with the Associated Press news service. The form in question publicly disclosed BLM finances for the first time. I confess I missed the resulting AP report. 

According to the AP, of the $90,000,000 in donations that were received in 2020 (when all the mostly peaceful protests were on the news every day), $32,000,000 was invested in stocks, "which is expected to become an endowment to ensure the foundation’s work continues in the future, organizers say."

BLMs 2021 fiscal year ended with $42,000,000 in net assets on the books.

My favorite phrase from the AP story is, "...the tax filing shows the foundation paid nearly $970,000 to Trap Heals LLC, a company founded by Damon Turner, who fathered a child with Cullors; and $840,000 to Cullors Protection LLC, a security firm run by Paul Cullors, Patrisse’s brother."

Patrisse Cullors is one of the founders of BLM and a well-known real estate speculator. Follow the link for a, um... highly informative analysis of the BLM organization by the Daily Beast. 

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

THIS JUST IN! BREAKING NEWS!

{Oh c'mon!}

No, seriously, just today (12/23), Congress has postponed dropping the minimum threshold of 20,000 whopping damn dollars to $600 (In case you missed it...) for a year because we the people have been raising hell. Based on facts that meet fiction, I may or may not have had something to do with this.

Scroll down to share this column or access my golden(?) oldies. You too can be a patron of the arts! Click here.    

Feel free to love, hate, or troll me on my Facebook page. I post my latest columns on Saturdays; other things other days. Cranky don't tweet, but in light of recent events, I'm considering it... Go Elon, go! 

  

  

Welcome to Pottersville

It's a wonderful life.  

                                                         CC0 Public Domain

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device  

"It's a grand life, if you don't weaken." -Thomas Carter (and my mum)

Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,

Yes, Virginia, there is a Pottersville (are Pottersvilles?), several in fact. Also, there's a movie... but it's probably not the one you're thinking of, particularly if you're of a certain age.

{Huh... Well, this is interesting, a pair of dated cultural references and a much newer, but obscure one squeezed into the same opening sentence.}   

Oh... Perhaps I'd better explain. Yes, Virginia, there is (a Santa Claus) is from a famous newspaper editorial written in 1897, Dana.

{Man, you are old!} 

There's a Pottersville in the highly-regarded classic movie It's a Wonderful Life, a movie in which, as hard as it is to believe, no one gets naked "because it's necessary to the story" or gets their head blown off. More on that Pottersville anon. 

Now the 2017 movie Pottersville, which has nothing to do with It's a Wonderful Life, is about what happens when "Maynard, a beloved local businessman, is mistaken for the legendary Bigfoot during an inebriated romp through town in a makeshift gorilla costume." 

It demonstrates that occasionally the preview accurately portrays just how awful the movie actually is and what happens when world-class actors need (or just want) a payday. 

One can easily make a case that America seems to be devolving into a country that embodies the zeitgeist of the Pottersville portrayed in It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

{Pottersville syndrome is ravaging the Republic?}

My research assistant, Dabney, assures me that It's a Wonderful Life is still a very popular movie and...

{How many times are you going to repeat the title? You're a click-slut, aren't you?}

Please! This is, more or less, a family-friendly column. Anyone familiar with... the movie, knows that the town of Frostbite Falls would've become Pottersville — a place that made both Sodom and Gomorrah seem tame and dull by comparison, at least by 1946 standards — if Jimmy Stewart had never been born. 

{That's not... You're... Never mind.}  

However, if the angel Clarance had revealed to Jimmy Stewart what America would be like by the turn of the millennium, Jimmy might've decided the hell with it and tortured Mr. Potter till he gave up the bank deposit that he stole from Uncle Billy and subsequently framed Jimmy for. 

Next, he'd clean out any remaining money in the safe at the "wonderful old building and loan," blow Mr. Potters's head off, tell Clanance to kiss his arse, and then run off with Violet Bick. They would then become a late 40s version of Bonnie and Clyde and have lots of sex... till they eventually got their heads blown off.

Geezers and geezerettes, well, many of them, tend to bang on about the good ol' days, it's almost a rule, droning on about how life in America, when they were young, was so much better than life in the current version of America. 

But any discussion, by almost anybody, about the current quality of life in America (pretty much everywhere I suspect), includes elements of what one (not necessarily accurately) has been told, taught, or remembers that it was in the past.

Sexy senior citizens, grups, callowyutes, and kids are all in the same large boat but living on different decks. Many geezers and geezerettes fondly remember a past that they actually weren't particularly pleased to be living in when they were living in it. 

Many of the grups currently charged with getting out of bed every morning to make sure the lights stay turned and the kids get fed wonder how it was once possible for one adult with a full-time job to support a family and still have a day or two off every week.

Some deluded Wokies, wackadoos, and callowyutes claim America is rotten to the core and run around tipping over statues, "canceling" heretics, and claiming racism is fine as long as you hate the right race. 

Many people, I suspect most (the muted majority?), wonder why everything has been politicized and who it was that decided that everything that was once considered deviant, antisocial behavior — not just behavior the culture at large should, and has, learned to accept  — is not only acceptable but should be taught to the kids A.S.A.P.  

Merry Christmas, and welcome to Pottersville. 

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

Scroll down to share this column or access my golden(?) oldies. You too can be a patron of the arts! Click here.    

Feel free to love, hate, or troll me on my Facebook page. I post my latest columns on Saturdays; other things other days. Cranky don't tweet, but in light of recent events, I'm considering it... Go Elon, go!

 

Welcome to the Golden Age

Everyone's right... about everything. 

Image by Chaos07 from Pixabay

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device 

"An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia." -Macaulay 

Dear Grandstickies and Gentlereaders,

I have to admit, I never saw it coming, this golden age we now find ourselves in I mean. In fact, I didn't even know we were living in a golden age till Scott Adams, the Dilbert dude, mentioned it in one of his daily video blogs.

{Dilbert dude?}

Mr. Adams created the Dilbert comic strip in 1989 and has been cranking 'em out 24x7x365 ever since. Nowadays he also does a Facebook live stream, 24x7x365, that features his take on current events. He even cranks it out when he's traveling or on vacation.

{Perhaps that's why he's rich and you're not.}

Perhaps, but I think that it's because of my carefully crafted work/life balance, myriad interests that have nothing to do with work, and the fact that I know how to relax and smell the bayberry candle. 

{You mean coffee? I don't get...}

I'd like to get back to that golden age thing I mentioned, please. 

{Well! far be it from me!}

Mr. Adam's pointed out that there's an upside in dealing with the daily deluge of information; there's an upside in the struggle to keep from drowning in the Information Ocean.

Everyone's right - about everything. 

It matters not what the alleged fact is, it's easy to find someone, perhaps several someones, willing to posit a yeahbut, or a maybebut, and confirm what you know to be true in your heart of hearts. 

{Wait-wait-wait. Didn't some famous dead pasty patriarch say, "Facts are stubborn things?"} 

Yup, John Adams, America's second president. “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

In his defense, the internet didn't come along till about 175 years after he was deleted; he just didn't know any better. Nowadays, virtually unlimited access to virtually unlimited information posted by (potentially) 8,000,000,000 or so Earthlings has made it possible to prove just about anything. 

If you know for certain that the World Trade Center was brought down by a covert cabal that included the CIA, the Olsen twins, the Council on Foreign Relations, Mark Zuckerberg, Dr. Fauci, and a handful of members of Skull and Bones to be named later — you'll have no problem proving it. 

Not only will you have no problem proving it you'll also have no problem establishing contact and forging alliances with like-minded H. sapiens via various websites and social media platforms and "calling out" said covert cabal to your heart's content.   

I'm so old that I have vivid memories of when television shows were only shown on televisions and traditional theory (a.k.a. critical thinking) was revered, was one of the reasons Western Civilization was revered, for having made it possible for life to be considerably less "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" than it had been for millennia for the average Joe, Joan, or J. Bagadonuts.  

Wikipedia: Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to form a judgment. 

That is to say, we trousered apes attempt to use rational thought to overcome our frequently irrational natures and to discover what is objectively true (or at least close enough) to cure disease, perfect indoor plumbing, etc. 

That's all well and good, but traditional theory is focused on understanding/explaining society, that is to say, how things are, not necessarily how things should be. The next step is to try and work out what should be based on what we know, in conjunction with our fellow H. sapiens.

But this is the Golden Age, remember?  Critical Theory is in full flower, and certain of our intellectual betters have figured out how things should be for us. Marxist utopianism never died, nor has it faded away, it's alive and well and has morphed into (trumpets sound) Critical Theory.

Why should we mere individuals waste time laboriously working out what actually works and what doesn't when it's now widely known that our "social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals?" 

It's time to wipe the slate clean...

{What's a slate?}

...and start over again. Myriad academics/activists/etceterists are busy working out the details via various versions of Critical Theories that have been invented, many seemingly out of thin air. 

Social theory

Literary theory

Race theory

Queer theory

Thing theory

Critical theory of technology

Critical theory of legal studies

Critical pottery theory

Gender theory

Etcetera theory

Utopia is just around the corner, welcome to the golden age.  

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

{Wait-wait-wait, Thing theory is a thing?}  

Absabalutely, but I agree with Dr. Severin Fowles of Columbia. "Fowles describes a blind spot in Thing Theory, which he attributes to a post-human, post-colonialist attention to physical presence. It fails to address the influence of 'non-things, negative spaces, lost or forsaken objects, voids or gaps – absences, in other words, that also stand before us as entity-like presences with which we must contend.'"

Scroll down to share this column or access my golden(?) oldies. You too can be a patron of the arts! Click here.    

Feel free to love, hate, or troll me on my Facebook page. I post my latest columns on Saturdays; other things other days. Cranky don't tweet, but in light of recent events, I'm considering it... Go Elon, go.