SaM Blog Update (February 9, 2018)

If you have been following this blog for a while, you may have noticed that I have not been posting very often. So, I thought I’d share a blog update to talk about that and my plans for the foreseeable future.

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Reasons for My Lack of Activity

Most weeks, I’ve been good about posting my Famous Sayings featured posts, but for months now, that has been the only regular post I’ve made each week. I’ve scaled down the News Roundups to at least one a month and there are some series that have been left hanging.

One of the series I wanted to finish concerns sports and politics. I wanted to pick up that series before the Super Bowl, but I ran into some problems and I struggled with a consistent problem.

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On Super Bowl Sunday, Ram Aired a Shameless MLK Ad …

A couple of years ago, I complained about TV commercials, particularly those that aired on Super Bowl Sunday. Well, tonight, I’d like to add a complaint about one ad that on Super Bowl Sunday aired this year.

Last night (February 4, 2018), Ram aired a pretty shameless ad which used audio from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In response, a YouTube user decided to replace the audio with another MLK speech in which the civil rights leader excoriated capitalism.

This situation reminded me of what I started looking into last month. As it turns out, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a different person than many people who talk about him want the rest of us to believe. While much of what we learned about him is true, it is used to hide the fact that he became a democratic socialist by the end of his life and was highly critical of capitalism as well as U.S. domestic and foreign policies.

This of course ties into the Ram ad and why the truck company’s decision to use MLK audio is ironic and sad.

Famous Sayings: #100 — ‘Didn’t You Get the Memo?’

February 4, 2018

Bro, you can start some sentences with a conjunction. Didn’t you get the memo?

This week, I wanted to go with a theme that either pertained to the Super Bowl (which already happened as of the time this post was published) or current events. Guess what I went with.

As you may know, the word “memo” has made the rounds since the middle of January because the Republican Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee, Devin Nunes (who hails from my state, California), spearheaded a secret memo. That memo contained notes about the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, which the Republicans in the Intelligence Committee alleged were conspiring against President Donald Trump and his associates. Reactions to the release of the memo were definitely mixed, but the prevalent response was overwhelmingly negative and Nunes received the brunt of it.

There was a lot of ribbing going on even before the memo was released on Friday, like this February 1, 2018 article from USA Today:

“OnPolitics Today: Did Trump get the memo on changes to the memo?”

On a lighter note:

The phrase “did you get the memo” may have been popularized from a comedy from the 1990’s, but I wanted to do a little bit of extra research to see when memos were first used.