1 ODA’S OUT The Hon. Minister of $16 Orange Juice announced today on her website that she’d be leaving politics, possibly (read: hopefully!) forever, and the story is predictably all over the news. Oda, who seemingly never gave a single shit about either her performance or the public’s perception of her performance, leaves behind a legacy of dirty, dirty pool. Good riddance!
2 SPEAKING OF OUT As you surely read yesterday, Anderson Cooper outed himself this past weekend. In response, Entertainment Weekly posted one of the must-see long reads of the week, an essay on the quiet revolution in coming out:
[Big Bang Theory star Jim] Parsons did not seek out any magazine covers; in fact, he turned down several offers. Instead, the ”big reveal” about his sexuality came in the 33rd paragraph of a Times profile about his return to Broadway this summer in Harvey. Nor did he address it in any quoted remarks within that story. The writer simply noted that Parsons’ 2011 Broadway appearance in The Normal Heart as a gay activist during the early years of the AIDS pandemic ”resonated with him on a few levels: Mr. Parsons is gay and in a 10-year relationship, and working with an ensemble again onstage was like nourishment, he said.” The phrasing made it clear that not only was the news that Parsons was gay not the most important thing in the article, it might not even be the most important thing in that sentence.
3 THE WORDS “DEATH SPIRAL” ARE NEVER GREAT TO SEE When your company’s president has to deny that the company is in essentially an all-out tailspin, it is probably not a good sign. And so the Research In Motion deathwatch continues.
4 MAYBE BEING UTTERLY HEARTLESS IS POLITICALLY UNPOPULAR The federal Tories have apparently decided to slightly scale back their recent cuts to refugee health care. Plenty of refugees will still be screwed by the new changes – Fun Fact 1: Your Dog Blogger’s mom was part of a church group that once helped a family of Kosovar refugees escape the brutal, ugly war there in 1999. Fun Fact 2: It is not exactly clear whether this refugee family, who had an infant child with Down’s Syndrome, would get the health care they likely need under the new rules, if they came over today, a lack of clarity I don’t think it’s unfair to call “humanitarianism-challenged” – but at least that number will go down ever so slightly. Hope the money saved will go to good – hahaha, oh, wait, we’re saving a grand total of $20 million on this. That is like .1% of our deficit from this year. We are a nation of Scrooges, now.
5 SPEAKING OF HISTORICAL REFUGEE GROUPS WHO OFTEN FOUND THEMSELVES ON THE RECEIVING END OF AN ESSENTIALLY CRUEL LACK OF CHARITY The Telegraph reports that the first ever Miss Holocaust Survivor was crowned in Israel this weekend and reactions are roughly what you would expect them to be.
6 WHISTLE HIM OUT Andy Griffith died today at age 86. He had a pretty diverse c.v., but was most known for his numerous television roles – everything from his eponymous show that also featured Don Knotts and a young Ron Howard to his stint as Matlock, with guest appearances and critically acclaimed TV movie roles in between. Whitworth – who’s sitting behind me right now, as I’m whipping this post together in the prairie dog offices this morning – has reminded me that those “in between” roles included some pretty wild and ambitious things, like the below clip for the fun-looking Salvage 1, in which Griffith played a junkyard operator who dreamed of building a junkyard spaceship to visit the moon for salvage. RIP.