Girls returns on January 13.
OMG Booth Jonathan is back! And I’m so relieved we’ll get to see a lot more of Adam. I’m counting on Lena Dunham to stand her ground and not cave in to the PC police.
Jackie had a fantastic idea – live-blogging the premiere. I promise to figure out how to do that, so mark it on your calendar! 9 PM on HBO, Sunday, 1/13.
No related posts.
{ 31 comments… read them below or add one }
I loves me some Lena! I don’t share your love for Booth, but I’m rooting for Adam. He and Hannah fit together in some weird way. They are both odd ducks, and they both grind down each other’s hard edges.
Oh, and first!
I’m so excited about this. I saw the trailer the other day, and I was immediately filled with glee.
Was that Charlie I saw? Hopefully, he’s gotten a little Alpha in him, that would make him a real catch.
Yes, it looks like Charlie has a beard now! Definitely more manly looking. I’m also glad to see that Shoshanna and Ray are not done. My favorite part is Adam laughing in a sinister way, Bwahahaha. Hannah is crazy if she doesn’t go for him.
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
Girls is coming back– and Susan is using my idea! Live-blogging = Party @ HUS!
The Return of Adam Driver! Ray and Shoshonna– going strong.
Marnie and Booth Jonathan (this is going to be ripe for the commenteriat)– Charlie, please stand up for yourself. Did I spy with my little eye Donald Glover in the dating montage?
Just please, Hannah, no more compulsive nudity!
I fear that the yellow fishnet top she is wearing is going to give us a full view of her squishy pancake boobs.
The boobs don’t offend me. I just don’t want to see the tats.
Escoffier will agree with you there.
“I fear that the yellow fishnet top she is wearing is going to give us a full view of her squishy pancake boobs.”
Ok.
I watched this.
Some of it was funny.
Some of it made by brain melt.
She looks like a high school male wrestler at a meet in that yellow thingy.
Also, the blond hippylike girl seems really annoying.
Oh my word, I love this dude. He used to belong to a sketch comedy group called Derrick Comedy when I was in high school, and I was obsessed with their videos. “Bro rape” is a classic.
” live-blogging the premiere.”
Oow, exciting!!
“Hannah is crazy if she doesn’t go for him.”
Hahaha *rolls eyes* We will see.
I’m gonna go ahead and call nudity from Lena within the first episode, or two. Bound to occur.
“Also, the blond hippylike girl seems really annoying.”
Lol, anyone wanna bet that she’s already divorced by the premier?
I think that the hippygirl is going to be voted off first.
Or the guy with the beard.
@SW
Not to cause any OT waves, but what’d you think of Ms. Dunham’s pitch for reelecting the President? I’m referring to the V-card analogy she came up with.
@Megaman
It disgusted me. It’s one of the reasons I fear for the show.
I’m okay with Lena getting nude if she’s getting banged.
I like seeing sex if it’s sexy sex.
Can we have some more sexy sex and less stupid awkward sex? Then again this show is about 20 year olds that don’t know WTF they are doing, so I dunno…
I do not understand the appeal of this show.
@SW
I can’t speak for the show, don’t watch it. And this isn’t meant to be partisan, I’m much more of a political observer than anything else.
This gender gap that surfaced during the election got me thinking. Men, mostly married men, went for Romney. Not a surprise, given that men made up 2/3 of job losses during the recession. Women, particularly single women, and presumably single mothers, voted for the President in a big way.
We’ve got some global examples of “alpha” male politicians successfully appealing to female voters (Putin in Russia), and not so much (Tony Abbott in Australia). Dunham’s pitch for the President, indeed his entire campaign courting women, struck me kinda strange. It seemed akin to the ideal “alpha/beta” combination you’ve often mentioned.
He’s arguably the most left-of-center leader America’s ever had, on domestic issues anyway. His persona as presented was sort of the sensitive guy, who cares about women’s issues. But also, as head of state, the great male protector (i.e. more aggressive than Bush) and provider (i.e. “free” health insurance). If my surmises are correct, it was a decidedly non-feminist appeal to women, and from the Left to boot!
I would simply remind you that Richard Nixon, a Republican no less, proposed an extremely liberal healthcare law–far more liberal than Obamacare, as it offered a government plan and required all employers to provide insurance–and it was too conservative to pass at the time!
@Ms. Olive
No, you don’t need to remind me. Or shout so much!
I’ve read The Making of the President ’60, ’64, ’68, and ’72 by Ted White. I did say “arguably”, but it was more of an all-around description. Nixon positioned himself as a moderate when running for office, but on the full spectrum of issues would probably be considered a libertarian-conservative (not to mention a bigot) these days.
Besides, health care spending was 7% of GDP back in 1970. It’s close to 18% today, way higher than the inflation rate. Nobody back then imagined the huge increases in longevity, demand, medical costs, etc. I doubt this new entitlement will make a dent where it counts.
In the interests of full disclosure, I’m actually to the LEFT of the President on the issue. I love the Japanese model. Not sure it can be replicated in other countries, though…
”chris December 6, 2012 at 12:31 am
I do not understand the appeal of this show.
”
Its to women what porn is to men.
Anyone know when it gets to the UK?
I cannot wait to not watch it.
I enjoyed not watching the first series so much that I’m getting happy remembering not watching it, maybe I’ll not watch it again tonight.
@Feelist
if I were a woman I’d still rather just put the spin drier on and skip the show.
@Megaman
Exactly. It was meant to objectify Obama, and the hypocrisy of that is what I object to.
Re the gender gap in the election, people seem focused on how the sexes voted, but not nearly as much on whether they voted. The voters this year were 53% female, 47% male. I haven’t done the math, but that’s a huge swing in favor of Obama, presumably, simply because fewer men voted.
@SW
Hah, didn’t mean to sidetrack the thread. Final thoughts, since I did some number-crunching over at CNN.com last month…
Electoral vote: the President won by ~380,000 votes in 4 swing states (FL, IA, OH, VA). This was a very close election, though not as tight as 1960 or 2004, and certainly not as embarrassing as 2000!
Popular vote: the President won by a 3.2 million vote margin, all of which and more was accounted for by CA and NY. The rest of the country was pretty much split 50/50. He got 7.5 million fewer votes than he did in 2008. Gov. Romney got 1.2 million fewer votes than Sen. McCain did in 2008.
Turnout was way down, unemployment still relatively high, and the President still squeeked it out. That’s an accomplishment, though nowhere near FDR’s in 1936.
I liken the 2012 campaign to a $6 billion board game that lasted 18 months with the outcome being… the status quo. And it was particularly negative and personal, though I’m not sure what else the incumbent could have done. Reminded me a lot of the federal budget battles back in the late ’90s…
The election was not THAT close. They are still counting votes (amazingly, about a million remain to be counted, mostly in deep blue states). Obama’s lead is now over 4.6 million votes (3.6 percent) and is expected to grow by the time the counting is over. The decline in turnout from 2008 was smaller than it initially appeared.
Some commentators have made much of the fact that Romney’s share of the total vote is now 47 per cent (rounded off from 47.32%). Of course, if you remove California and New York from the vote totals (and include Texas) the race looks like a dead heat. However, despite the ingenuity involved in such creative accounting I wouldn’t recommend using it as a basis for political analysis.
For me there are three particularly fascinating aspects of these results, two of which may be relevant to the issues discussed at HUS:
1. There is a HUGE gap in voting patterns between married and unmarried people. While the gender gap is frequently mentioned, the marital status gap, which is even larger, is rarely noticed. Married people vote mostly Republican and single people strongly support Democrats. This gap remains even if you control for other demographic variables. It seems to be greater for women than it is for men.
2. More than 70 per cent of Asian voters voted for Obama. They were one of the few ethnic, religious or socio-economic groups among whom he did better than in 2008.
3. Highly educated voters are trending Democratic. Education used to be positively correlated with voting Republican (obviously because education and income are linked), but that is not true for holders of graduate degrees. This does not apply only to lawyers or liberal arts PhD’s or even university professors, but also to holders of advanced degrees in STEM subjects. Employees at leading tech companies such as Apple, IBM and Microsoft contributed far more to Obama than they did to Romney.
Here are the latest election numbers:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AjYj9mXElO_QdHpla01oWE1jOFZRbnhJZkZpVFNKeVE&toomany=true
And here’s an article which discusses the election results on the basis of updated totals:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-david-wasserman-results-20121130,0,852127.story
I apologize for the thread hijack, but this subject is fairly close to my professional interests.
@Thras
All very good points, particularly the voting trends among married and the educated. I hadn’t checked on the numbers since late last month, and was unaware they were still counting votes. Looks like the President only got 4 million fewer votes than 2008, and Romney did slightly better than McCain.
I should’ve included TX along with CA and NY. Those 3 states had the largest vote differences (+3.4 million net for the President). In all the other 47 states, he had a +1.2 million net vote advantage, or a 1.28% margin.
I guess there’re a couple of ways to assess how close an election is. One rule of thumb is whether the winning candidate had a popular vote margin of 5% or less over his opponent. Since 1950, that’s only happened in 1960 (Kennedy by 0.17%), 1968 (Nixon by 0.81%), 1976 (Carter by 2.10%), 2000 (Bush by, heh, -0.54%), 2004 (Bush by 2.49%), and 2012 (Obama by 3.70%). That would make this year’s election the 6th closest in 62 years.
But since winning the Electoral College vote is really all the matters, it’s interesting to take a look at which handful of swing states actually put the winner into the White House, and by how many votes:
- Kennedy won by 55,000 votes in IL and TX in 1960, or 0.08% of all votes cast nationally for either him or Nixon.
- Nixon won by 314,000 votes in CA and OH in 1968, or 0.50% of all votes cast.
- Carter won by 46,000 votes in OH and WI in 1976, or 0.06% of all votes cast.
- Bush won by 537 votes in FL in 2000, or 0.0005% of all votes cast.
- Bush won by 119,000 votes in OH in 2004, or 0.10% of all votes cast.
- Obama won by 482,000 votes in FL, IA, OH, and VA, or 0.38% of all votes cast (so far).
That’s my preferred method, which would make this year’s election the 5th closest going back to 1950. I hear the ’48 election was pretty close, too.
This is just a hobby of mine, honest!
Just stumbled up “The Flip Side”: http://screen.yahoo.com/flip-side-dating-000000612.html
2:30 made me snort.
One of my current hobbies is reading the weekly Archdruid report (and Jeremy Grantham’s Quarterly Letters, etc.).
Here’s what Greer says with respect to Vox Day’s no women voting/only propertied men voting reactionary schema.
“Now of course there’s a significant minority of people who react to the inherent problems of democracy by insisting that it should be abandoned altogether, and replaced with some other system portrayed in suitably rose-colored terms—usually, though not always, something along the lines referred to earlier, in which an unelected cabal of ideologues gets to tell everyone else what to do. The claim that some such project will provide better government than democracies do, though, has been put to the test more times than I care to count, and it consistently fails. Winston Churchill was thus quite correct when he said that democracy is the worst possible system of government, except for all the others; what makes democracy valuable is not that it’s so wonderful, but that every other option has proven itself, in practice, to be so much worse.”
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2012/12/consuming-democracy.html
Hey Susan, have you converted this article into a post yet (h/t Stuart Schneiderman)?
It seems to present evidence that Girl Life Plan #3, which you used to accomplish your life, isn’t going to work for most women these days:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larissafaw/2012/12/05/why-are-so-many-professional-millennial-women-unable-to-find-dateable-men/
@JP
Funny you should say that, I’m putting the finishing touches on that post now.