The inveterate Chris Dunn sent me a link to an interview that the recently-fired Curt Schilling gave to Newsday. (If you haven't followed the story, I discuss it here.)  I don't have the heart to post passages from the heart-rending article, but you can read his ramblings here.  However, for those who don't wish to subject themselves to more of Curt Schilling directly telling you about the ways of the world, you can probably hazard a pretty good guess what most of what his victim-whining was about.

A few takeaways from the piece, though, which should be clear even without reading it.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that according to Curt Schilling most everyone -- or at least most liberals -- are racist but him.  But of course, that's a given.  Curt Schilling is the Last Good Man.
 
When he quotes ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith saying something racist (that the Washington Redskins didn't play Robert Griffin at quarterback because he's black), what Smith said might be stupid, really bad commentary or thoughtless -- or have some validity -- but what it is not is “racist.”  Clearly, Curt Schilling doesn't understand what racism is.  But then, that's obvious given his spewing of public racist posts on social media, which he insists are not racist.
 
Also, others at ESPN might be horribly racist, as he insists (though we've established that Curt Schilling doesn't seem to understand what racism is), but even, for the sake of argument, IF they actually are...they at least have the good sense to keep it private and not post their racism across the Internet.  A concept that Curt Schilling didn't grasp.
 
And despite his belief that he was fired because what he pasted was “conservative” -- he wasn't.  Curt Schilling was fired because what he posted was racist and homophobic and cruelly mean-spirited and vile, and also because he’d been reprimanded for it all once before by ESPN, admitted publicly that he was wrong, and then went out and did it again.

And yes, our heart goes out to poor, victimized Curt Schilling, everyone in the world is racist but him.  A man who doesn’t have a hurtful bone in his head…

It's been a while since I posted a Bad Lip Reading video from those fine folks who make them.  This is their latest, released a few days ago, from a recent two-person debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.  It's more one-sided than most, but still they are just really clever.

So, you may recall a couple weeks ago, I wrote here about how the online series, The Skinny -- written, directed by and starring Jessie Kahnweiler -- was nominated for a Webby Award as Best Drama Long Form series.  I've written about extensively on the pages about Jessie, and she's a very talented all-around filmmaker, but this was an uphill category, given that one of the competitors was a meticulous Star Trek fan faction show, and another was an NBC-produced show about their program, Heroes Reborn.

Well, the winners have been announced.

And...The Skinny won!  

I'm not quite sure how it works, because the Star Trek thing also won as "People's Voice", but I'm not a-lying about The Skinny being the Webby Award winner.  Here.  Proof --

​And further proof.  So, I can't be misinterpreting anything --

I embedded the premiere episode in the link above, so for thems interested, you can get to it there.  Please note, as I said before, that the show is decidedly crude and not to everyone's taste.  But it's also now a Webby Awards winner.

Congrats and huzzah.

I don't try to steers ya wrong.

This article here by Stephanie Marcus for the Huffington Post is a charming -- and much too short -- interview with Samantha Bee, mostly about her new show on TBS, Full Frontal.  She talks about why she lives for wearing blazers (because she rocks in them...), that she goes out of her way not to ambush the people she interviews, and how great Jon Stewart was to be totally unconcerned having her on camera the three times she was pregnant during her run on The Daily Show.

And you can see below a terrific piece she did last week on how much more difficult it was to track down an official Eddie Eagle mascot costume for the gun manufacturer-owned NRA than it was to actually buy guns.
​

Aw, gee, if only I'd made the point sooner...

On Monday, I wrote a piece about how, despite what the GOP Establishment was trying to sell, Donald Trump was not going to "change" and become "presidential."  And anyone who actually thought he would "change" and become "presidential" was living in a fool's paradise and had given up the concept of thinking.

It only took one day.

Yesterday, Politico had an article here by Kenneth P. Vogel and Eli Stokels headlined, "Trump rejects new adviser's push to make him 'presidential'"

Ha!  Go figure.  Who'd have thought...??!!

One day.

He didn't even make it to his name-calling victory speech last night.  Not just childish, bullying name-calling, but explaining why he didn't have to be presidential.  That it was easy to be presidential, and he could be presidential any ol' time.  Sure he could, though seeing him do so just once might be an amusing sidelight.  He came across sounding like the alcoholic saying he could stop drinking any time he wants -- after all, he's stopped dozens of times.

Anyway, the Politico article begins, "Donald Trump is bristling at efforts to implement a more conventional presidential campaign strategy, and has expressed misgivings about the political guru behind them, Paul Manafort, for overstepping his bounds, multiple sources close to the campaign tell POLITICO."  It adds that Trump is now "taking steps to return some authority to Manafort’s chief internal rival, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski" -- the guy arrested for assault on a reporter.

And anyone who doubts the article -- long before even having to read it, I saw the news the night before and watched the "changed" Donald Trump go on a meltdown rant against Ted Cruz and John Kasich, and I thought, "Oh, my, yes, how presidential."  About nine hours after I posted my article.

Much to my amazement, I still get a lot of comments and reaction to a piece I wrote three years ago.  (Almost literally, to the day, just one month off -- March 26, 2013!!)  It was "The Worst Song Ever," about Terry Jacks horrifyingly awful 1974 version of Jacques Brel's great song, "Le Moribond" (The Dying Man), translated pathetically by Rod McKuen as "Seasons in the Sun."  

Before going further, if you don't know the Brel original, you should listen to it here. Even if you don't read the whole article, it will help at the very least to hear how the song is supposed to sound.

Among other things, I've learned over time that, fascinatingly, there was another version of the Brel song but with different English lyrics that the Kingston Trio had recorded 11 years earlier, in 1963.  The thing is (and this is what's odd), not only -- remarkably -- was it also translated by the very same Rod McKuen who later would adapt the Terry Jacks version of "Seasons in the Sun," but it too was called "Seasons in the Sun."  And though it has lyric similarities in the Jacks version, it's much closer to the Brel original and, while not right, it's reasonably passable and not soul-crushing treacly.  Here it is --

​But here's the deal -- that wasn't the biggest discovery about the song. Just this morning, I got a terrific note from  Magnus Kesselmark, who wrote from Sweden.  Here's what he had to say.  (I tweaked a few small things for clarity's sake) --

As I wrote to Magnus, I great admired his perseverance tracking down his nagging fear.  And having now listened to the recording by Vikingarna, and I think it's one of the few times it pays not to speak the good fellow's native tongue...  

Not speaking Swedish, the recording just comes off like a bland, pleasant, sing-songy number.  Understanding the words, though, is another matter entirely.  And not speaking Swedish doesn't completely help when one knows what the original song is and supposed to be.  Yes, I assume it's pretty awful -- but then, it comes from the Terry Jacks version which must bear most of the responsibility.

What's intriguing is that Magnus says that the album was released in 1972 -- which means that it was released two years before Terry Jack's came out, which doesn't make enough sense to me.  The video says 1974, though, so I have to believe that that's more accurate.  It would seem almost a requirement that the Terry Jacks version came first -- because I can't see someone putting this out on their own, without a substantive reason...  Like being forced to by blackmail.  Only if you saw it was a hit elsewhere first, like in America, would that push one to attempt this.

The good news is that in the YouTube video he linked to, the dansband is wearing light blue leisure suits, and happily not the ghastly pink he suggested.  In the end, if this is what the Vikings are, I understand why they are now extinct, defeated by disco...

So, tack så mycket to Magnus.  And apologies for North America for foisting such a recording on an unsuspecting nation that deserved far better.  (The good news though is that Terry Jacks is Canadian.  Perhaps that's why the song is so overly-polite and treacly. Though we must at least take some responsibility in the affair for Rod McKuen.)  Here it is, all the way from Sweden --