The Wednesday Pop Culture Rant1 finds it highly amusing that all of D.C. threw a party at the White House because Congress passed legislation and the President signed it. Which is of course their jobs, so woop-dee-do Beltway. The Rant manages to do our job everyday so we should probably get a pony and a Tesla and barrel of Cristal for our achievements2.
The bill in question reformed Medicare payments which Congress had been trying to solve since 1997. Eighteen years. Slow clap. You’re a marvel of efficiency and hard work. The Rant proposes no bathroom breaks until Congress passes a piece of legislation each day to speed the plow. Although Ted Cruz would probably just hook himself up to a catheter and then claim the Founding Fathers wanted it that way. Because the Constitution guarantees the freedom of bodily fluids without taxation. Or something like that. This portion of The Rant sponsored by Depends: when it’s time to filibuster, it’s time for Depends3. Good luck getting that image of Harry Reid out of your head.
Let’s Rant: After extolling the virtues of binge watching your favorite television shows, the intertubes are now having second thoughts because if the intertubes could figure out a way to generate praise and backlash for something simultaneously, they could create an app with $8.2 billion in venture funding. So The Rant wasn’t surprised to find Adam Sternbergh over on Vulture and Slate trying out the term Purge Watching. Sternbergh, after a gambling analogy that made us want to fold, defined Purge Watching as continuing to view episodes of a series you weren’t really enjoying because you had already committed so much time to the enterprise. We will soon see 17,000 variations on this theme, all of them claiming to be original, until a Reddit poster snobbily proclaims he watches only one episode of Breaking Bad a year to appreciate all its nuances.
Lighten up Adam. After the polio vaccine4, binge watching is humanity’s greatest gift to itself. The Rant’s first VCR came in two parts; one played the tape and the other contained a series of switches to program the VCR to record a show. Figuring it out was slightly more complicated than cracking the Enigma code. Over the course of two years, not one show recorded correctly. So if you missed an installment of your favorite series, it was all over. Good luck trying to catch the re-run using the labyrinthine TV Guide.
The Rant says more not less binging. Instead of releasing an entire season of their original shows, Netflix should release five seasons at a time so our jobs and relationships are in peril. There’s nothing more satisfying than knowing that cliffhanger will find resolution in thirty seconds instead of three months. Patience has its virtues in the proper context, but when it comes to entertainment gimme, gimme, gimme.
Besides, The Rant would rather figure out in a couple of hours instead of several weeks that a show can’t engage us. We just move on to the next binge. Knock that program out of the queue and regroup. The wonderful bingey world awaits.
- Look kids, notes! An entire new platform for inane chatter and obscure references! And superfluous exclamation points! Everywhere!
- Then we will head to The Club to party like it’s our birthday with 50 Cent
- Now with extra-absorbent Freedom Fiber technology
- Did you know Jonas Salk was Paloma Picasso’s stepfather? Father: world’s most famous artist. Stepfather: world’s most famous scientist. And you thought you had daddy issues
