I decided to take my life into my own hands and removed the obnoxious ginormous poster “Hate has no home here” from the entrance to my department. I don’t know who thought it’s a good idea to greet visitors with the word “hate” and the tacky message, but the poster is gone. Instead, I put up flags of friendly countries.

“My sister and her kids came over from Canada and have been staying with us for the past 6 weeks”, I explain to a working-class friend. “Her little boy has been going to Klara’s summer camp”.

“Why is he at camp?” the friend asks.

“Because my sister works all day”.

“She got hired even though she doesn’t have papers?” the friend wonders.

A woman comes to work late 47 times in 10 months.

Gets fired for this.

Sues.

Gets awarded $11 million for her pain and suffering.

Check it out.

I have become so Midwestern that I now order chicken at restaurants. I used to wonder, “who are these bizarre individuals who could ask for steak, cod, salmon, duck but they order grilled chicken breast instead”?

I now know. These people are me. And the strangest part is, nobody’s making me. I feel compelled to eat chicken. I mean, I actually enjoy it.

Only a few years ago I was making fun of the Midwestern chicken-eating compulsion, and now look at me.

What people don’t get in these debates is that different women and different men have very different experiences. There are women and men who sprout suitors wherever they go. And there are men and women who are friend-zoned into eternity with the regularity of a metronome. And there are all of the people in between the two extremes.

You just can’t generalize.

Well, naming the post “movie notes” is a tad too optimistic. As my sister said, it’s not a movie. It’s a two-hour-long infomercial that you pay to watch. As an infomercial, it’s genius. Budweiser should learn from Mattel how to rebrand. Barbie hits exactly the age group it wants in the very spot it needs.

I never played with Barbies. The USSR ended when I was 15. It was way too late for Barbies. This is why the current Mattel infomercial awakened nothing in me. But I can see how it would in women my age who did play and who have lived their whole lives in a culture of lip-trembling, self-righteous grievance.

So as an infomercial Barbie is an astounding, sensational success.

As a movie, it’s… simply not one. There’s no plot, no ideas, and no acting aside from the talented Ryan Gosling. The writing is weak, garbled, and impotent. The movie was either written by the AI or by somebody doing an excellent imitation of the chatbot. Barbie looks too old. The ending is directionless, rambling and boring. The tween acts like a daughter of a trailer park junkie and an abusive stepdad when in reality she’s from a nice middle-class family. There’s no consistency in anything and no internal logic.

People have been projecting their ideology onto this very long commercial. Some think it’s feminist, others say it’s conservative. What makes this confusion possible is that the movie has no ideology. There is no consistent message beyond “buy this toy and its cute outfits”.

Barbie lets people feel vaguely aggrieved and they are grateful for it. Why they enjoy that I can’t say, so to me the movie was very boring.

Ryan Gosling was very good, though. I kept wishing that everybody else would go away and he’d act whatever he feels like. It’s a huge casting mistake to put a serious actor against a large cast of nothing-specials because this creates a gaping imbalance at the heart of the show. But it’s all like that. Everything that’s not pure, hardcore, severe marketing in this movie is vague, confused, and unnecessary.

On the positive side, I saw a preview for the prequel to Hunger Games, and I’m psyched. I don’t like Hunger Games (books or movies) but I dug the prequel (snakes and songbirds, or whatever), and I’m very excited about the movie.

After observing the outfits my sister and I are wearing for Barbie, Klara announced that auntie looks like a real Barbie and mommy looks like Barbie dressed by her friend Grace.

She has an excellent discernment. Grace is a black girl, and I’m dressed from a fashion store for African American women.

My sister and I are going to be walking clichés today: two women in their forties on their way to see Barbie. Of course, we are doing it as a lark but it’s not like you can carry a sign “Here for Purposes of Sarcasm”.

An absolute mystery:

In the year ending April 30, 2023 – 14 months after the last of several pandemic waves in the United States – at least 104,000 more Americans died than expected, according to Our World in Data. In the U.K., 52,427 excess deaths were reported in that period; in Germany, 81,028; France, 17,731; Netherlands, 10,418; and Ireland, 2,640… “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference in January 2022. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/08/11/more-americans-dying-than-before-pandemic-covid-deaths/70542423007/

Absolutely incomprehensible. I’m sure nobody can venture any guess whatsoever.

Some people can literally sell anything: