If there is such thing as must-see-TV for pissed-off people (POPeeps) like you and me than John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight would be it. I can rattle off a hand full of topics on which Oliver & Co. Swiftian lampooning point of view vivisected conventional wisdom and apathy (drones. sex education, food waste, Edward Snowden interview, Chicken farming). The lastest sacred bovine to feel the sharp blade of Oliverian wit — Televangelism.
The Daily Beast‘s Marlow Stern updates:
In order to prove how ridiculously easy it is to establish a tax-free “church” that pads its coffers with donations for “blessings,” Oliver established his own church—Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption—and asked his viewers to send cash donations to a P.O. Box that he’d then donate to charity….It turns out that, aside from the bags of seeds, beef jerky, and foreign currency, Oliver and Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption received a boatload of money from viewers….
How great it would be if Oliver targeted the exemption Scientology received after strong-arming the IRS with the threat of a 1000 lawsuits (as stated in the documentary Going Clear )
I guess if the New York Times is going to publish silly shit like this it makes up for it by good stuff like this
BiLL MAHER TELLS a SHORT FINGERED VULGARIAN JOKE
Nobody brings this up about the SHORT FINGERED VULGARIAN, who is always on about, ‘We can’t have foreigners coming into this country!’” said Maher. “His first wife is from Czechoslovakia. His current wife is from Slovenia. So, if you think crawling under a wall is the most disgusting way to become an American, somewhere there is a Panamanian woman hiding in a truck full of chickens with ten pounds of heroin-filled condoms in her stomach who’s thinking, ‘Well, at least I didn’t have to blow the SHORT FINGERED VULGARIAN.’
Speaking of “the short fingered vulgarian”, who is now the leading tag for click-baiting media, SFV weighed in on the other popular click bait tag, Deflategate (talk about a massive failure if imagination, 42 years later ‘gate’ is still the suffix of choice for mindless journalists)
Streaming video is coming close to taking over my life (a subject I expect to elaborate on in the fullness of time). In any case I chanced upon a baffling but compelling film entitle Upstream Color
Celebrities doing senseless and silly things
I had not known of actress Olivia Munn (which does highlight my pop cultural illiteracy)until The Newsroom featured her as a nerdy financial news reporter. Turns out she is a hysterically bawdy and quick witted lady
Book publisher Europa Editions deserves this attention
Will Cuba take over Major League Baseball?
NFL thug James Harrison made news by rejecting “showing up trophies for his adolescent boys. And what do you know, the usual know-nothing trolls lined behind him…
Good 70’s by Mike Mandel
As it is in limited edition, Good 70’s (and thus I don’t have firsthand, hands on knowledge of it, I can’t properly say much about) seems to be a special thing.
This boxed collection contains facsimiles of Mandel’s original publications, long out of print, including the Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, Myself: Timed Exposures, Seven Never Before Seen Portraits of Edward Weston, plus previously unpublished work such as Motel Postcards, People in Cars and Mrs. Kilpatric, and ephemera from the projects, including selected facsimile contact sheets from the baseball photo shoots, a letter to Mandel from Charis Wilson regarding Edward Weston and a pack of ten of the original 1975 baseball cards.
Do Men In Blue (baseball umpires)make boo boos? A long as I am talking umps, baseball has a long memory
Move over Cuba and Dominican Republic, Uganda — the next baseball powerhouse?
ourmaninboston 
Where John Stewart was “The News”, John Oliver is “60 Minutes”…and his rants might actually result in action against his specific targets…
Amen
How long before our god friend Mr Fussy berates you for the novel spelling of Stewart’s name