All I knew about The Good Place was that it was about people who died and went to heaven only it turned out to be hell. Ted Danson, I thought was the devil until that last scene where he walks through a door and there is somebody much eviler who might be Old Nick or a higher demon at any rate. I couldn't place Janet and Derek at all, nor could I figure out what was going on between Jason and Tahini. I liked the idea of having a moral philosopher, so few sitcoms include a philosopher in their casts. I kind of liked the Eleanor character. I picked up the vibe that she might have been an original character along with Michael, and the others came later. It had snappy patter. I like snappy patter. How did I do?
Trump's whole tirade was of course stupid. The ideas was I guess that the rent-a-trucker would receive more brutal treatment there. But civil courts have done a better job of prosecuting these guys, and they know they will probably get killed at the end of their deeds so a grim future will not deter them. Guantanamo has been a black eye for the US for years, but anymore we look like such assholes that it's hardly noticeable.
The Chinese never wanted to conquer the world. They were the middle kingdom and the best and the brightest and they had no interest in dimming their light by dealing with big nosed foreigners.
I would have liked to have a discussion of Martin Luther especially since one of the Beaglestonians was educated in their system, though not much seems to have rubbed off on him. As I recall from Sunday School at Elsdon Methodist, we thought of him as a great man. Since then I have done a lot of reading on the Reformation and I am not sure that we prots were the good ones in that fight. The Catholic Church was corrupt and powerful, but if you played your cards right you could make a deal with them, sort of like the Mafia. The prots on the other hand were like the Taliban, if they didn't like you they would kill you no matter what because they had God on their side, standing right next to them, practically on their toes.
There was a good review of a biography of him in the New Yorker lately. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/how-martin-luther-changed-the-world I would love to participate in a discussion of the man and his religion in these ivied halls.
Yar, I don't think Cheeto is much of a gourmander of the foods of many nations. I would think just to do as the Romans he might pack a few cans of Chun King but wiki tells me that their days are over. And thank God. We used to have cans of that crap for supper every now and then and I grew up thinking I hated Chinese food until I ate at a Chinese restaurant. Of course that's not the food that the Chinese eat either.
Yar most of our fentanyl comes from China, but you know, they already have a wall. Because I didn't want to watch half a show from the murder channel and not see the culprits brought to justice, I tuned into NBC a half hour earlier and there was this show, Super Store, which was, well, moronical, the way I expect most tv is. It was in extremely bad taste, a lot of talk about penises, even a blurred out organ itself. Ugh. And they had some pharmacist character dispensing some kind of opioid as some kind of joke. It was appalling. I wonder if this is the sort of show that the Trumpists in the hinterands are watching.
We all know that the Chinese are great with math. One book I read lately claimed part of the reason was that their words for the digits were all similar, and I think they had a better s system of numbering after that. Why isn't it oneteen and twoteen instead of eleven and twelve? It seems like a small difference, but mathematical notation goes a long way towards making math understandable. I had a hell of a time writing about math lately without exponentiation and square root radicals and that awful X instead of the elegant dot on my keyboard. The Indian/Arabic numerals were a great step forward, and especially that zero, (Why don't we discuss zero more often?) but it still took us awhile to develop and standardize the operation signs. Did you ever look up how the Sumerians and Egyptians used to represent mathematical statements? Pitiful.
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