I love Eddie Murphy's movies. Trading Places was the first Eddie Murphy movie I ever saw, and also my first rated R movie, and it left a deep impression on my young consciousness. I sought out all of his movies after that. Some were really good, others not so much.
My friends liked his movies too and one of them had Raw on VHS. We must've watched it a hundred times. It too left a deep impression.
One of Murphy's not-so-good movies is The Distinguished Gentleman (not to be confused with Perfect Gentleman) in which he plays a con man from Florida named Jeff Johnson who runs for Congress when his representative, also named Jeff Johnson, dies shortly before the election. Murphy wins solely due to name recognition and he goes on to grift while in office. Along the way he falls in love with a do-good attorney, and when some bad politicians discover and publicize his criminal past, exposes their corruption. He then, naturally, decides to run for president.
This seemed ridiculous in 1992 but in 2026 it holds up. We currently have a convicted felon in the White House and I'm confident that George W. Bush got some votes from people who thought they were voting for Reagan's Vice President.
In Alaska, incumbent Republican senator Dan S. Sullivan faces a primary challenge from Dan J. Sullivan, a former teacher. The incumbent decries this situation, natch, alleging that his doppelgänger is in cahoots with Democratic nominee Deb Haaland (no relation to Erling, she's running on a platform of "fish, family, and freedom") in an attempt to confuse voters and divert votes to the fugazi Sullivan. The Alaska Supreme Court said both Sullys can stay on the ballot though, and Alaska has some weird Russian-influenced election process where the top four vote-getters from the primary advance to the general, so it's possible the Dans will face off a second time. Democracy!
This confirms that we are indeed living in the dumbest possible timeline. And I'm going to change my name to Dexter St. Jacques in advance of the 2028 presidential election so that I can run against Donald Trump Jr. when he pursues his father's third term.
I went zwoman's cousin's wedding on Saturday. I don't like weddings but Robbie is a nice kid so I minimized my pissing and moaning. I first met the bride a few years ago at a different cousin's wedding and I thought she was a stripper. Her dress wasn't so much a dress as it was a collage of filmy fabrics of varying degrees of transparency. There was sufficient opacity over the key bits and pieces to avoid causing an uproar but she was remarkably open about what she's working with.
Apparently this is how the bride's distaff friends and family all dress for weddings regardless of their age. I saw a few things I cannot unsee. It was as if all the mannequins from Dorothy's came to life. There were more clear-heeled stilettos than Centerfold's and The Glass Slipper combined.
No one wore a mask. NJ's mask mandate ended on Friday so if you're vaccinated you don't have to wear a face covering indoors. There were about 200 people at this wedding and maybe two were masked. Even if 95% of the attendees were vaccinated there were still about 10 who weren't, and I'm willing to wager the number is more like 75%. Hopefully this won't turn out to be a superspreader event. The venue staff were masked but it was still really weird at first. zwoman's elderly aunt insisted on hugging and kissing me so I went with the flow--her grandson was getting married and I didn't want to cause a commotion.
My concerns soon faded as I leaned in on my trust in Pfizer's mRNA technology. A not insignificant proportion of the bride's family is Italian and they're from central NJ. This is a great combo for wedding food. The ceremony was relatively brief and we hastily retreated to the open bar area which was surrounded by the classic NJ Italian over-the-top appetizer spread. There was a massive fish from which servers pulled meat to form fish tacos. There was a small pig from which servers pulled meat to form pulled pork. There was a cured meat display complete with the obligatory prosciutto meat curtains. There was sausage bread (zwoman's family is originally from Jersey City and sausage bread is a regional delicacy). There was duck breast and a mac and cheese bar and tons of passed hors d'oeuvres in case you got hungry walking from one face-stuffing station to the next. Everyone chomped openly and notoriously within inches of each other. It was just like every Jerzy style wedding I went to before the plague. It was eminently normal.
The bride and groom did the required first dance, as did the bride and her dad, and then the groom with his mother and each of his grandmothers. Right on cue, the bridesmaids cried and dabbed at their tears between their massive fake eyelashes and the black rivers of mascara. The groomsmen were surprisingly toolish and I found one puking in the men's room around 10:30 pm. So it goes.
At some point the bride changed out of her dress into something more comfortable. It was minimally slutty--it reminded me of the dress Katanga gave Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I guess this costume change was the DJ's cue to get grimy. This provoked the bride and her homegirls to shake it on the dance floor, which is fine with me as a general matter. At one point though I heard a familiar strain of music, and the sound of a woman having sex, and then "Real hot girl shit" and then "And if the beat live you know Lil Ju made it." My eyes snapped to the dance floor and I saw the look of elation on all the young women's faces. They recognized this song too. An instant later, the speakers blared "Body-ody-ody-ody" over and over again. The bride, in her satiny white Marion Ravenwood dress, bent over in front of the entire assemblage of friends and family, and made her ass clap. For an eternity.
I'm no prude. I welcome this stuff under normal conditions. But I just watched this woman forsake all others for Robbie. She's a wife now! She can't be clapping her ass at the front of the room like that. Her father was there! Robbie just danced with his Grandma Carol and his Grandma Stella on that dance floor! It wasn't right.
On the bright side, this gave cover to all the other twenty-somethings to make their asses clap too. And as I already established many of them were questionably attired so it was something else. Everyone knew the words so there was a lot of singing along. Every single man under 35 wound up on the dance floor too, working their way behind a receptive clapping ass. Love in the time of covid, I guess.
So even those youngsters were vaccinated, it could've been a superspreader event of a different sort.
It's nice to see everyone getting back out there again even if it results in incurable venereal disease.
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