Look at the last handful of democratic presidential losses to see this in action:
Gore gets nominated due to familiarity. He has the charisma of a warm sponge. He loses (barely, and not the popular vote; by the way, FUCK the electoral college) to George W. "I'd have a beer with him and hey wasn't his dad president?" Bush.
Kerry somehow rises to the top of the next democratic primary, a fact that I will never understand, because he also has the charisma of a warm sponge. Bush is familiar and a wartime president. He is re-elected in defiance of God and nature.
Obama comes along and is a once in a generation political talent. Things are pretty good for a while.
Hillary enters the primary and wins mainly based on name recognition. She presents herself as having the charisma of a warm sponge, when we all know full well that she has the charisma of a wood chipper, and since we're pretty good at detecting artifice she loses.
In 2019 we've got a pretty good set of primary choices, but Biden gets into the ring and that's pretty much fucking it, because, again, he has name recognition, so he blows past some better, younger choices and manages to leverage his name and Trump's fuck-ups enough to win.
The pattern is that name recognition will get you a real long way, especially with low information voters, and that is a real goddamn problem when there are objectively better options who aren't as famous.
So anyway, I think we need a constitutional amendment forbidding members of one's immediate family from running for president after one has been president. No sons, daughters, husbands, wives, etc. Fuck dynasties. Fucking fundamentally un-American.
It's a re-imagining and not a film of the play, but Scotland, PA is a very good dark comedy about Joe “Mac” McBeth taking over a fast food restaurant through less than ethical means. Christopher Walken appears as McDuff, an investigator looking into the goings on.
I was trying to watch the original Nosferatu but the version I was watching had dogshit Casio keyboard accompaniment. I muted it and had Spotify put on a playlist based on "Danse Macabre." Much better. That said, a proper silent movie with live accompaniment is fucking fantastic. I saw Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall that way and loved it.
Say, for example, Kubrick and The Shining or Ridley Scott and Blade Runner or Jackson and The Lord of the Rings, as opposed to Shyamalan and The Last Airbender or Jackson and The Hobbit.
Honestly, if Jesse Eisenberg had just been doing a version of his Zuckerberg from The Social Network, it would have been fine. His whole twitchy routine was weird as fuck.
I have real love for TNG S1E16, "Too Short a Season."
The Enterprise is dealing with a hostage crisis on a planet where the local government wants this old admiral who had negotiated a truce there decades before to come back. He shows up and it turns out he's taking experimental de-aging drugs to grow younger. It turns out that when he had negotiated the original truce before, he had violated the prime directive and given weapons to some rebels, but he told himself that he made it even by giving the same weapons to the other side, which led to decades of bloodshed.
The writing is just okay, and the old guy / young guy makeup is pretty bad, but the scene where the admiral dies while looking into his wife's eyes gets me. I also like to imagine that the ep might have originally been written with Kirk in mind as the old guy, because the whole "Well I made it fair by giving weapons to both sides" seems like the kind of cowboy insane shit that Kirk would pull and then never consider the consequences. The episode feels a little bit like it's revisiting some of the times when Kirk would do his thing and then warp off into the sunset while definitely leaving some loose threads behind.
With as many problems as the Hobbit movie trilogy had, I can say one thing for sure: Martin Freeman was a perfect Bilbo. Him being constantly irritated that he wasn't able to sit comfortably and have a meal, all the way from the Shire to the Battle of Five Armies, was flawless. Freeman was a very good John Watson in the BBC Sherlock, but if The Hobbit movies had been better then his Bilbo would have been up there with RDJ as Tony Stark and Patrick Stewart as Professor X as greatest casting decisions of all time.
Laser thermometer. It makes cooking things at really specific temperatures a lot easier.
Some long-handle sundae spoons. They're incredibly useful for getting to the bottom of a deep jar or yogurt tub.
Collapsible screw-together travel chopsticks. They take up virtually no space, come with their own holder so they stay clean, and you've always got some nice chopsticks to eat with.
Blue painter's tape. You can label anything (especially stuff that's going into the freezer), and it'll peel off again without leaving any residue.
Beaded reusable cable ties. It's always nice to be able to tie up a power cord.
A nice headlamp. It's really nice to be able to put on a headlamp and have your hands free when you're doing stuff outside at night. Fair warning: you may fall down a nice flashlight rabbit hole.
I got a Zojirushi at the thrift store and I love it, but then I realized that the pot has a nonstick coating inside, and there doesn't seem to be a replacement that doesn't have nonstick. No more rice cooker for me. :(
Quark: I think I figured out why Humans don't like Ferengi.
Sisko: Not now, Quark.
Quark: The way I see it, Humans used to be a lot like Ferengi: greedy, acquisitive, interested only in profit. We're a constant reminder of a part of your past you'd like to forget.
Sisko: Quark, we don't have time for this.
Quark: You're overlooking something. Humans used to be a lot worse than the Ferengi: slavery, concentration camps, interstellar wars. We have nothing in our past that approaches that kind of barbarism. You see? We're nothing like you... we're better.