Tag: Tina Turner

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How low will you go?

 

From pixabay.com / © Geralt

 

When The Simpsons was the greatest thing on television a long – a very long – time ago, I remember a 1999 episode, They Saved Lisa’s Brain, that began with a contest being held in Springfield and broadcast live on TV called How Low Will You Go?  According to the entry about it on the WikiSimpsons site, How Low Will You Go? was ‘sponsored by Grandma Plopwell’s Pudding’ and its winner ‘would be the person who did the stupidest thing on the stage.’  Contestants included Bart Simpson eating ‘everything that was thrown at him’, Homer Simpson wearing ‘a suit made of popcorn kernels’ and singing a song called Kernel Knowledge, and Moe Szyslak ‘dressed in a sailor suit with a giant lollipop.’

 

When I saw the episode more than a quarter-century ago, I remember reacting to this indictment of how people are humiliated and degraded by TV and its promises of instant celebrity by thinking: Wow, that is pretty low!  Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but I hadn’t seen anything yet.  In the decades since, TV – often of the ‘reality’ variety – has induced folk do far worse things and make far bigger dicks of themselves on camera, to the point where cavorting around in a suit made of popcorn kernels actually seems quite highbrow in comparison.

 

Anyway, I feel like How Low Will You Go? has now become a TV series that’s in the middle of its second season.  Each season lasts for four years and takes place in the White House whenever Donald Trump is the US president.  Season one lasted from 2016 to 2020.  Season two began in 2024 and is due to end in 2028.  That is, if the USA still exists by 2028.  Come to think of it, if the world still exists by 2028.

 

In season one, Trump proved that yes, he could go pretty low.  He shamelessly sucked up to Putin.  He belittled a war veteran, John McCain, who’d served his country in Vietnam and spent more than five years as a prisoner of war there.  (“I like people who weren’t captured!”)  He skipped attending an event in honour of American soldiers killed in World War One at France’s Aisne-Marne American Cemetery on the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day because he couldn’t handle the fact it was raining.  He mocked a reporter suffering from congenital joint condition in front of a rally by doing an impersonation of him that an obnoxious kid would do of someone with cerebral palsy.

 

He suggested injecting bleach as a cure for Covid-19.   He describing developing-world nations as ‘shithole countries’.  He leched after his own daughter, talking about her ‘breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her.’  He told 30,573 lies, according to the Washington Post.  Oh, and when he lost the presidential election in 2020, he claimed, baselessly, it’d been ‘rigged’ and incited a mob of his dingbat supporters to attack the US Capitol, where they chanted about hanging Trump’s own vice-president and tried to prevent Joe Biden’s victory in the election being formalised.

 

The Trump version of How Will You Go?, season one, was a ratings hit.  In fact, a sufficient number of Americans thought it was so wonderful that they voted Trump back into the White House in 2024 for a second season.  And, so far, season two hasn’t disappointed.  How far can the man go this time?  Why, far, far lower!

 

He’s threatened to annex the USA’s next-door neighbour and important ally and trading partner Canada, so that now everyone in Canada hates his guts, won’t visit his country and spend money there, and won’t buy American products like American bourbon.  He’s threatened to annex Greenland, which belongs to a country in a military alliance the USA is in, an alliance whose basic doctrine would require all the other member countries to go to war with the USA if he attempted to annex it.  Makes sense, yes?

 

From wikipedia.org / © The White House

 

He’s shamelessly sucked up to Putin, again.  He’s insulted reporters, often female ones – intelligent and independent-minded women are obviously a group he has serious issues with – calling them ‘piggie’ and ‘crooked or stupid’ and ‘corrupt’ with ‘hatred in her eyes’.  He’s whinged like a spoilt brat about not receiving a Nobel Peace Prize.  He’s fallen asleep in meetings and press conferences after he sneeringly dubbed his presidential predecessor ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden.  He’s relentlessly posted AI crap on his Truth Social platform, including footage of him in a plane dropping gigantic turds on ‘No Kings’ protestors, pictures of himself as Jesus, and images depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

 

He’s also allowed himself to be bounced into a war against Iran by Benjamin Netanyahu, with the result that the Strait of Hormuz, and the maritime route carrying 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, are now blocked.  The other day, he claimed his administration and the Iranians were on the brink of agreeing on a peace deal…  But as he’s already claimed this about 40 times since the conflict started in February, I’m not going to hold my breath.  At least for Trump, it takes folk’s minds off his sizeable presence in the Epstein Files.

 

To spice things up even further, the producers of season two of How Low Will You Go? have brought in additional cast-members to give Trump a run for his money in going low.  Thus, we’ve had Vice President J. D. Vance insulting single women who keep cats and being a malicious prick towards the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a leader with more courage in his little finger than Vance and Trump have in their entire, make-up-enhanced bodies.

 

They’ve also introduced the ultra-ridiculous Pete Hegseth, who was Trump’s Secretary of Defence until Hegseth persuaded him to change the title to the more manly and harder-sounding ‘Secretary of War’, and who pees his pants in rage when press photographers take pictures of him from what he considers unflattering angles.  At a recent gathering in France commemorating the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings, Hegseth gave a speech condemning European nations for allowing their beaches to be “stormed by different, dangerous ideologies”, i.e., people he considers not sufficiently white enough and Christian enough to be let in.  I really don’t know why Hegseth turned up at this event.  After all, 82 years ago, his side lost.

 

Today, June 14th, we get another episode in How Low Will You Go?  It’s Trump’s 80th birthday and he’s marking it by staging Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bouts on the South Lawn of the White House.  The Las Vegas-based UFC organises ‘mixed martial-arts’ combat – basically, violent ‘anything-goes’ scraps – inside cages.  So, the seat of the American presidency is about to host cage fights.  That really resonates with the dignity of the place and those who’ve lived there in the past, one-time holders of the USA’s highest office like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.  If Honest Abe, FDR, JFK and the rest are watching this from the clouds, they’ll be doing so between their fingers.

 

What’s been installed for those UFC bouts consists of an enclosed octagonal ring with a huge, claw-like superstructure built over it with clusters of lights and big TV screens attached.  The ring is emblazoned with the names of sponsors like Bud Light, Toyo Tires and Pit Boss Grills.  And, inevitably, the web address crypto.com features prominently too.

 

It makes me think of the 1986 movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and the hemispherical gladiatorial arena where Max and Blaster had to fight it out with chainsaws and sledgehammers.  Trump’s spectacle at the White House sounds just as dystopian – though at least in the Mad Max movie, the dictator presiding over things was played by Tina Turner.  I’d have her as my dystopian overlord rather than the revolting, decaying Trump any day of the week.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Warner Bros / Kennedy Miller Productions

 

Oh well, I suppose there’s one silver lining to this.  Trump’s crass preoccupation with having UFC fighters slug it out on his lawn has at least diverted his attention from the Football World Cup, which kicked off in Canada, Mexico and the USA a few days ago.  He hasn’t tried to insert himself into that, so far.  I was particularly worried he’d turn up at yesterday’s match between Scotland and Haiti in Boston, since he loves talking about his Scottish roots – his mother hailed from the Isle of Lewis – and since he hates Haitians.  (During the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, both he and Vance yet again showed how low they’d go by lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating people’s domestic pets.)  If he’d shown his orange face at the match, I think I would have found myself wanting Haiti to win, just to sicken him.*

 

*Trump didn’t appear, I was able to support Scotland as normal and Scotland won, just about.  Phew.       

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Under the dome: the Flower Dome

 

 

A while ago, I described a visit my partner and I made to one of Singapore’s leading tourist attractions, the Gardens by the Bay.  Well, I described half of the visit, because I wrote only about our experiences at the Cloud Forest, a vegetation-draped artificial mountain in the controlled environment of one of the Bays’ two enormous domes.  So, here’s an account of our time in the other dome – the Flower Dome.

 

Having spent the late morning exploring the Cloud Forest, and before spending the early afternoon in the Flower Dome, we had lunch in a Gardens-by-the-Bay food-court called the Jurassic Nest.  (The place lived up to its name by having a pair of animatronic dinosaurs on the premises, a brontosaurus and a T-rex, that during our meal came to life, rather feebly, and growled a bit and wagged their heads at one another.)  It was here that the Internet coverage on my smartphone suddenly conked out, for the first time in the year since I’d bought it.  No amount of fiddling with the settings would get it back online.  This was a great nuisance, as I’d paid for entry into the Gardens’ two domes the night before and our e-tickets were in my Googlemail account, which I couldn’t access now.  When I tried to access the account on my partner’s phone, I wasn’t allowed in for ‘security’ reasons.  Then, just as we were leaving the food-court, and just as I’d resigned myself to having to buy a new pair of tickets for the Flower Dome, my phone’s Internet coverage suddenly and inexplicably returned.  We were able to show the original e-tickets at the entrance after all.

 

That outage was a mystery.  I even wondered if the copious water vapour inside the Cloud Forest had affected my phone and temporarily disrupted its online functions.  Anyway, on to the Flower Dome…

 

As domes go, the name ‘Flower Dome’ hardly conjures up the same excitement as, say, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s (and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s) ‘Pleasure Dome’, or Public Enemy’s ‘Terrordome’, or the third Mad Max movie’s ‘Thunderdome’ (which was presided over by the great, and now sadly late, Tina Turner).  And it certainly feels a wee bit less dramatic than the Cloud Forest, which as I said contained its own mini-mountain.  The terrain here is relatively flat, though there’s a sunken area in the middle.  Spread over this is a host of not only flowers, but also shrubs, trees and other plants assembled from across the world, organised in sections representing ‘gardens’ from South Africa, South America, Australia, California and the Mediterranean.

 

 

The first part we explored after going in, up and along to the right of the entrance, was for me the most botanically interesting.  This was home to an array of baobabs, a tree I’ve always found fascinating because of its ungainly, bottom-heavy shape – well, I guess that’s why it’s also known as the ‘bottle tree’.  This part also featured the oddly named ‘Succulent Garden’, which was full of cacti, plants that hardly seem succulent.  The specimens were formidably spiky, thorny and quilled. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM TOUCHING THE FLOWERS said a sign here, unnecessarily.

 

 

As with the first dome, a variety of wooden statues and carvings, some of them traditional items from indigenous Asian cultures, others more modern in design, were occasionally positioned amid the vegetation.  I particularly like the Game–of–Thrones-style dragon perched on top of the knob of a truncated tree-trunk.  Later, after I’d descended to the lower level, this dragon looked very impressive seen at a distance and in silhouette.

 

 

At the time, the Cloud Forest had been hosting an exhibition relating to the 2022 movie Avatar: The Way of Water, which mainly featured life-sized fibreglass statues of characters and creatures from the movie plonked here and there in the foliage.  We were spared the Avatar stuff in the Flower Dome, although another exhibition was in progress – Sakura, which capitalised on Japan’s famous cherry-blossom season, typically occurring between late March and early April.  A mock-up of a traditional railway station in the Japanese countryside, with wooden platforms and buildings, had been installed in the lower level and was festooned with pink cherry blossoms.  Its ambience would have been charming if the site hadn’t been thronged with people snapping endless selfies of themselves in front of the pretty blossoms.  The majority of the culprits, I should add, weren’t members of the usually selfie-daft younger generation.  No, the crazed snappers were mostly senior citizens.  A few newly-married couples were also using the display as a backdrop for their wedding photos.

 

 

Though topographically less spectacular than the Cloud Forest, the Flower Dome’s flatter contours at least allow you to admire the dome itself, curving up over everything like a sky of multi-panelled glass.  According to the dome’s webpage, it actually contains 3332 glass panes.  It gives an impression of breathtaking spaciousness and it’s no surprise that it’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s biggest greenhouse.