Blogging The Bach: The Corinne Show

I have some thoughts about the current state of The Bachelor, AKA The Corinne Show, that I'll share later but first look at these tweets, all of which refer to tonight's announcement of the president's SCOTUS pick. The Bachelor may be silly, vacuous, manipulative and empty-headed (and it is all of those things,) but the producers have been brilliant in the way they've infiltrated pop culture, even among people who have (probably) never actually watched the show.

So, both SCOTUS candidates show up tonight, and Trump will give one of them a rose?  That certainly adds a hint of class to the last 10 days

— ANNE LAMOTT (@ANNELAMOTT) January 31, 2017

The feed of the two judges waiting in Blue Room for a rose will be ratings gold. @davidaxelrod https://t.co/KAQeM6voqr

— Erik Smith (@ErikSmithDC) January 31, 2017

Trump's Supreme Court nomination is starting to feel like 'The Bachelor'https://t.co/2B55qnJgBg

— Mashable (@mashable) January 31, 2017

Who will get the final rose? https://t.co/XCjbch6nCt

— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) January 31, 2017

Registered In Two States?

I just realized it's possible I'm registered to vote in two states. I've lived in Illinois for over 25 years and I've been registered to vote here the whole time. Before that I was registered in Oregon and even after moving out-of-state, it never occurred to me to proactively cancel my voter registration. It's possible there's some kind of inactivity clause, where you get deleted if you don't vote for some number of years, but if not, then yup. I'm double registered.

What It Looks Like/Let Them Eat Cake

Wednesday morning update: I could spend a good chunk of every day cutting and pasting funny, scary and/or outrageous tweets about the POTUS. (Note that although I'm using "president trump" as a tag, I find that I can't bring myself to type "President Trump" in my actual posts. So it'll be POTUS or "the president" from here on out.)

Anyway, I am sharing this tweet because I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one who is snarking about the 'do.

When I'm feeling despondent I close my eyes, imagine what @POTUS's hair will look like after a month in prison & I feel better. Try it!

— Danny Zuker (@DannyZuker) February 1, 2017

Original post:


Confession: I debated whether or not to post this picture. It's not very dignified for a president and I worried, for a moment, if I was possibly enjoying it a bit too much. My focus is on the hairdo, as I'm always amused when The Donald's Carefully Constructed Coiffure goes astray. Some meanies on Twitter wondered if the president was wearing elevator shoes; others decided that yes, that suit does make his butt look fat. So much fun.

Still, it's just a picture of a man walking up the steps to a helicopter. If the engines are running and the rotors are turning, kicking up wind and messing with his "look," well, what's a POTUS to do? He's got to get into the helicopter. (As I've pointed out on here before, Trump usually wears his red cap to prevent this kind of "blowing in the wind" hairdo moment, but presumably he felt that wouldn't be appropriate for his first presidential trip.)

Previous presidents have had to go out in the wind too, of course, and I don't recall seeing this kind of picture of any of them. Based on what I found on Google Images, President Obama occasionally struggled with his tie:



and George W. Bush struggled with an umbrella:



but neither of them was at risk of this kind of hairdo malfunction, and if there are any unflattering pictures of Obama or Bush taken from behind, they didn't show up on Google Images.

So what is it with the 45th president? Specifically, why does he look like that? In some areas of his life, he's very conscious of appearances. The women in his life are expected to maintain the appearance of a "hot piece of ass." It's been reported that more than one potential cabinet secretary or senior staff member was passed over because they didn't look the part. He's known to complain if news coverage features a picture of him that he considers unflattering. (No word so far of what he thinks about this one.) All indications that he does care about what things look like.

Except, that is, for himself. His hair, at his current age of 70, is obviously, blindingly, what-is-he-thinking not natural. It looks that way on purpose. Whatever it is that he's had done to it, he clearly believes that this long, blonde combover/dye job is more flattering than whatever he would look like if he let his 70-year-old hair do its own thing. And compared to the pristine, immaculate stylishness of Melania and Ivanka, Donald is frequently a sloppy sartorial disaster. Never fear, however, because help is on the way. In despair over Trump's "comically large red tie," his "JNCO-capacity baggy pants" and of course, his "unbearably bad haircut," the editors at GQ have given POTUS a makeover. Check it out here.

Finally, the two women closest to the president each had "Let them eat cake" moments recently. Melania is pictured on the cover of the Mexican edition of Vanity Fair, dressed and posed in a way most Americans, much less most Mexican readers, probably can't relate to.




Then at about 11.00 p.m. Saturday night, as the country was in chaos after her father's horrifying immigration ban, first daughter Ivanka felt it was important to show the country how she was spending the evening:

pic.twitter.com/aWXH6lKF3g

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) January 29, 2017

Hairdo Malfunction

POTUS got through his inauguration ceremony without any serious hairdo malfunctions, but when he arrived back in Washington after his trip to Philadelphia, the wind got the better of him.

Catching Up With The Olympics

The next Olympics, the Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, are 379 days away. Does that surprise you? It surprises me, in a "time flies" kind of way. Wasn't it just yesterday that we were snarking about the Sochi Games? Vlad's "Look how cool I am" personal ego trip, at the cost of $51 billion dollars. The light bulbs that wouldn't turn on and the toilets that wouldn't flush. The way-too-warm climate in Sochi, where on several days of the games it was warmer there than here in Chicagoland. Those were the days, for sure, but as always happens, the games went on, everyone lived to tell the tale and when it was all over, the Olympic flag was passed to PyeongChang.

The PyeongChang games are the first of three Olympiads in a row to be held in Asia, followed by the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. The location of the 2024 Summer Games will be announced in September, to be chosen from one of three remaining candidate cities, Los Angeles, Paris and Budapest. Will the games return to the U.S.? As I've written before, I think they will. In 2024 it will be 28 years since the Summer Games in Atlanta and 22 years since the Winter Games in Salt Lake City. It's more than our turn.

Farther in the future, cities including Calgary, Stockholm, Sapporo, Innsbruck and 2022 runner-up Almaty are believed to be looking at bidding for the 2026 games. Apparently Lake Placid, New York, which hosted Winter games in 1932 and 1980, might consider a bid, but only if L.A. does not get the 2024 games. All this info comes from a fun website called Gamesbids, which obsessively tracks everything related to Olympic bidding. Check it out here.

Katherine Heigl

Friday morning update: Melania's not on the cover of  People, but she is on the cover of the Mexican edition of Vanity Fair, and it's a doozy:



Original post:
Issue dated February 6, 2017: Katherine Heigl

People used to have a tradition of featuring the new first lady on the first issue after a presidential inauguration, but Melania's nowhere to be found here. My guess is that she'll show up on the cover before too long; in the meantime we get another "attractive blonde woman with baby" cover. It's not referenced on the cover, but Heigl is also starring in a new television series called Doubt, that premiers on February 15th, which is probably the real reason she's featured here now.

68 Is The New 58

How tall, exactly, is Trump Tower in New York City? Not as tall as The Donald says it is. From an article at the New York Times, dated November 1, 2016:

Though the tower was built with 58 floors, Mr. Trump later explained to The New York Times that because there was a soaring pink marble atrium and 19 commercial floors at the bottom, he could see no good reason not to list the first residential floor as the 30th floor. The pinnacle became the 68th — the height that appears in marketing materials, online search results and news articles to this day.

… As a review of his Manhattan building portfolio shows, Mr. Trump repeated his Trump Tower innovation at least seven more times.

The idea quickly caught on with other New York developers looking to sell condominiums of ever loftier height, status and, most important, price. By 1985, the year after Trump Tower opened, the developer Harry B. Macklowe had employed the same stratagem to turn his 67-story Metropolitan Tower into a 78-story skyscraper.

Mr. Macklowe’s team credited Mr. Trump for the idea. So did Mr. Trump.

“A lot of people have copied me,” he told The Times in 2003.

In this case, imitation is shrewd salesmanship. One57, the billionaires’ aerie on 57th Street that laid temporary claim to being the tallest residential tower in New York when it was completed in 2014, was said to top out at the $100 million 90th-floor penthouse. Actual floor count: 75.

“The higher your building, the better it is for your marketing purposes,” said Amir Korangy, the publisher of The Real Deal, a real estate publication based in New York. “Nobody’s trying to have the shortest building in the city, so any sort of edge you can get to add a floor here and there, you take it.”

The city’s Buildings Department does not object, so long as the floors are counted accurately in the building’s certificate of occupancy.

Hence the Trump SoHo on Spring Street, completed in 2010, where, according to the condominium offering plan filed with the state attorney general’s office, Mr. Trump skipped the 13th floor for superstition’s sake and a few more for marketing’s sake. There are 43 floors, but the elevators go up to 46.

Or take the Trump International Hotel and Tower, the hotel and residential building on Columbus Circle that was, pre-Trump, the 44-story Gulf & Western office building. Mr. Trump improved the structure so thoroughly that it managed to stretch into a 52-story tower, even though it stayed, strictly speaking, the same height.

Because new apartment buildings usually have lower ceilings than office buildings, Mr. Trump explained in 1994, the 583-foot building was about as tall as a conventional 60-story residential building.

Seen this way, measuring the converted tower at 52 floors was an act of altitudinal restraint.

“Depending on how you view it,” he said, “you could look at it as 60 stories.” (A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization did not respond to several requests for comment.)

Then there is the Trump World Tower on the East Side, built in 2001, which enraged antagonists as varied as Walter Cronkite (whose views it blocked) and the United Nations (whose height it dwarfed). At 90 stories and 900 feet — actually 70 and 843, according to Buildings Department records — the World Tower was once billed as the “tallest residential tower in the world,” until it was overtaken by a skyscraper in Dubai, prompting Mr. Trump to switch to a less easily fact-checked superlative: “most luxurious.”

Read the entire article here.

Cakegate

Did you hear about cakegate? If not, you can read about it here, and this is the cake in question:

Funniest part? It's not a real cake. Except for a small slice at the bottom, the whole thing is made of styrofoam.

It Is Hard To Be Intimidated By Ridiculousness

More: Per Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for President George W. Bush, the combative "press conference" had to have been Trump's idea. Or to put it another way, Trump ordered Spicer to go out there and lie, and apparently Spicer doesn't have standing to say, Gee, Mr. President, I'm not sure that's such a good idea.

This is called a statement you're told to make by the President.  And you know the President is watching.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) January 21, 2017

Now consider two of Trump's tweets this morning: First this:

Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2017

Then, less than 2 hours later, this:

Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy. Even if I don't always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2017

Clearly someone convinced Trump to tone it down a bit, at least in one tweet. My guess: SIL Jared Kushner.

Final thought, at least for now: Is there any significance to the fact that Trump was using his personal Twitter account (@realDonaldTrump) instead of the official one (@POTUS)?

Original post:
It's been a bad first 48 hours for the Trump administration on many levels and it feels like it's going to be a long, long 4 years. I like Josh Marshall's take on it, specifically referring to press secretary Sean Spicer's strange press conference that wasn't really a press conference:

On the one hand it is chilling, bizarre, un-American to see the President's spokesman begin the term excoriating and threatening the press, telling demonstrable lies, speaking with a palpable rage in his voice. On the other, the President and his toadies are on the second day almost vanishingly small. They are embarrassing themselves. They look silly. They look ridiculous. It is hard to be intimidated by ridiculousness. I suspect this will be the abiding duality of the Trump presidency. (Read more from Marshall at Talking Points Memo.) 

Note that this was written Saturday night, before Kellyanne Conway (dressed in regular clothes this time) went on Meet The Press to explain that Spicer was utilizing "alternate facts." 

Kellyanne Conway: What Was She Thinking?

Another Republican Weighs In On Obama

Disagreed on many policy issues with POTUS but his intelligence, fundamental decency & optimism embodied the best of America. Remarkable man

— stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) January 19, 2017

To Hat Or Not To Hat

Will Donald Trump wear a hat at his inauguration? His familiar red cap doesn't exactly fit with the formality and solemnity of the occasion, but as we've snarked about before here at Writing.The.World, when Donald goes bareheaded outdoors, he's at risk for a serious hairdo malfunction:

The current weather.com forecast for zip code 20004 (the Capitol) on Friday is 49 degrees, 80% chance of light rain, humidity of 84% and 5 miles-per-hour winds from the southeast. Sounds like it won't be too windy, so I'm guessing it will be Hat: No/Hair Product: Yes. There are perils with that too, of course. One doesn't want to look too stiff:  

The 'do isn't the only thing he has to worry about right now, because he's also expected to give a nice speech. Not to worry, the PEOTUS is on it: 

Writing my inaugural address at the Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago, three weeks ago. Looking forward to Friday. #Inauguration pic.twitter.com/S701FdTCQu

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2017

A cynic might wonder why he's holding the pad up like that. Doesn't that make it hard to actually, you know, write? Is it possible that the pad's just a prop, with no actual, you know, writing on it? Probably. 

True Crime

Issue dated January 30, 2017: True Crime (From 35 Years Ago)

I got behind with posting the People covers; this is the new one and I'll post the others shortly. 

The Bach Is Back And So Am I!

Welcome Rosebuds! If it's January it must be The Bachelor and season 21 is well underway. Former Bach villain Nick Viall (pronounced "vile") redeemed himself enough last summer on Bachelor In Paradise to get cast as the lead this time around and we've now seen two episodes. Before I start snarking on Nick, Corinne, Liz and the rest of the gang, however, let's do a little review, because believe it or not, this show has now been around for *15* years.

Really. The first season, starring Alex Michel, premiered on March 25, 2002. To put it another way, when the show started, this season's youngest contestants, Hailey, Taylor, Alexis and Ida Marie, who are currently 23, were 8 years old. They probably can't remember a world without The Bachelor, bless their (much too young for 36 year old Nick) hearts.

First, a quiz. Can you name all the previous Bachelors? I asked this question in a post a couple of years ago, and after doing some googling, I put together the entire list. Because I like lists, I'm keeping it up-to-date:

1. Alex Michel
2. Aaron Buerge
3. Andrew Firestone
4. Bob Guiney
5. Jesse Palmer
6. Byron Velvick
7. Charlie O'Connell
8. Travis Stork
9. Lorenzo Borghese
10. Andrew Baldwin
11. Brad Womack (the first time around)
12. Matt Grant
13. Jason Mesnick
14. Jake Pavelka
15. Brad Womack (second try) 
16. Ben Flajnik
17. Sean Lowe
18. Juan Pablo Galavais
19. Chris Soules
20. Ben Higgins
21. Nick Viall

Have things changed much in 15 years? Yes, oh my Yes. First of all, by today's standards, there wasn't much show in 2002. The first season consisted of just six *one hour* episodes plus the Women Tell All episode, and things moved really fast. (For comparison, the current season will have 11 *two hour* episodes, plus the Women Tell All and After The Final Rose.) The women went from 25 to 15 to 8 to 4 in three weeks, with Hometown Dates happening in week four, and one of the 4 women hadn't even had a one-on-one date at that point. The dates were more pedestrian than what we expect now, and there were no roses given out on dates, no two-on-one date and and no First Impression Rose.

The cast didn't travel, either, except for Hometown dates and the Fantasy Suite dates, which took place in three separate locations (Amanda in New York City, Shannon at Lake Tahoe and Trista in Kona, Hawaii.) Alex and the final two women (Trista Rehn and Amanda Marsh) then returned to the house in California for the final rose ceremony. Overall there was much less drama in the house (no one got drunk the first night... ) and things just seemed flat compared to what we see on the screen today. How do I know all this? Not from memory, ABC recently posted Alex's complete season online and I admit I watched (most of) it over the week-end. Check it out here.

The biggest difference, however is not what we see on screen but what happens off screen: Social Media. Strange as it sounds now, Social Media almost didn't exist in 2002. No Twitter, no Facebook, no cell phone cameras and no Instagram, etc. It was a lot easier to keep the outcome secret in those days, and the participants didn't become nearly as famous as they do today. In fact, I've come to believe that "gaining enough Instagram followers to make money with #ads" is now the prime reason for going on the show.

The most recent Bachelorette, JoJo, has 2 million followers, and Ben Higgins has 1.5 million. Even such also-rans as Ashley Iaconetti, Caila Quinn, Amanda Stanton and Jade Roper Tolbert have several hundred thousand followers each. Do they run ads? Oh you bet they do, for such stellar products as vitamins that make your hair shiny, tea that helps you lose weight, and Ponds Cold Cream. (Both JoJo and Kaitlyn want us to believe that they've been using Ponds for years, which is, to put it mildly, not credible.) JoJo's runner up Robby Hayes (current Insta followers: 333,000,) got himself in hot water when it came out that he had reached out to previous Bach alums and asked them to help him get more followers. Even with all the evidence to the contrary, it's still important to pretend that everyone is there for the "right reasons."

Just out of curiosity, I've been keeping an eye on the Instagram accounts of some of this season's "stars." On January 3, the morning after the premiere episode, Nick had 795,000 I followers, bad girl Corinne had 11,800, Jade's maid of honor Liz had 12,200 and good girl Vanessa had 21,400. Now? (I'm writing this on Monday afternoon, right before the start of episode 3.) Nick: 868,000; Corinne: 56,100; Liz 24,800; and Vanessa: 73,200. (Corinne's already running an ad, check it out here.)

Who will be the next Bachelor? It's way, way too early to know, of course, but now that producers have broken the pattern of picking the new Bachelor from the most recent season of The Bachelorette, are all the wanna-be Bachs out there frantically trying to position themselves for a redeeming turn on Bachelor In Paradise this summer? Ummmm, yes. Robby, Chase, Jared, Grant, Josh and who knows who else are all probably hoping they can "pull a Nick" and be the star of the show next year.

In particular, I'm guessing that Chase and Luke, who came in 3rd and 4th respectively on JoJo's season, are hoping for another shot at the job. Both men have said in interviews that they thought they would be the Bachelor this time around, with contracts signed and in Luke's case, bags packed, until that fateful moment when producers called and said they were "going in a different direction." Ouch. It can't be easy to watch Nick's turn in the spotlight, which to me seems brighter than ever before. I'm not sure if ABC is promoting this season more vigorously than in past seasons or if I'm just more tuned into it this time around, but Nick is everywhere. He'll be over 1 million Insta followers in no time, possibly with a turn on Dancing With The Stars as icing on the cake.

And finally, have you ever wondered what Nick's real job is, when he's not in Bachelorland? When he first appeared on Andi's season he was described as a software salesman who lived in Chicago, but now that he's famous, those days are so over. Glamour magazine sat down with Nick recently and asked the question for all of us:

Glamour: Lastly, forgive me for this, but what exactly do you do for a living? Do you have a job?

Nick: [Laughs] No, it’s fine! I had a great career selling software. I was living in Chicago, and after Kaitlyn’s season I was lucky to have the option to go back. They always gave me their blessing to take risks out here. Since then, and recently, a few months before I was asked to be the Bachelor, I actually started a small business with a couple partners. It’s online and for men’s grooming products, so I’ve been focusing a lot of time on that. Before The Bachelor, I was out in L.A. kind of dabbling in modeling a little bit. Right now, my focus career-wise is on that [men’s grooming] business. I’m very lucky that being in the Bachelor world gives you a platform. I’ve used my business acumen that I’ve learned in corporate America and the platform that I’ve been fortunate to gain in the Bachelor world to kind of see if those two can work together. Read the article here. 

That's all for now Rosebuds, it's almost time for episode 3. Meet me back here later this week for more snarking on The Bachelor. Same Bach time, same Bach channel.