The National Weather Service said Sunday, urging people living below Oroville Dam to evacuate. The evacuation was ordered because of a “hazardous situation” involving the Northern California dam’s emergency spillway. The National Weather Service said the auxiliary spillway is expected to fail and could send an “uncontrolled release of flood waters from Lake Oroville.”
Thousands of people evacuated below the Oroville Dam, jamming roads…
TV news footage showed long delays out of Oroville, with officials urging people to move to higher ground. Gas stations were also packed.
Evacuation centers were set up in Chico.
Butte County officials said they evacuated jail inmates due to the situation.
If President Trump’s shock-and-awe attack on truth, decorum and liberal sensibilities is intended to bludgeon his opponents into submission, “Saturday Night Live” felt like his latest victim this weekend.
Not that the show, which has been one of his most outspoken and popular antagonists, didn’t remain on the attack. Melissa McCarthy reprised her savage impersonation of Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, and Alec Baldwin (in his 17th appearance as host) donned his flaxen wig and prosthetic jowls to play Mr. Trump in a “People’s Court” sketch mocking the president’s attempts to have his travel ban reinstated. Kate McKinnon — who, in a Tatiana Maslany-style tour de force, also appeared as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Senator Elizabeth Warren — played the presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway trying to seduce her way onto CNN in a “Fatal Attraction” spoof.
And this
Ms. McCarthy opened the show as Mr. Spicer, and the news-briefing sketch was again the high point. Its simple premise — take the thin-skinned, venomous attitude and brazen duplicity the Trump administration has exhibited and render them as naked, schoolyard-bully aggression — was still effective, coupled with Ms. McCarthy’s absolute commitment.
But the sketch was even more underwritten than before, name-checking controversies rather than illuminating them, which has been true of most of the show’s Trump-related material. In the absence of new ideas, old ones recycled from last week’s sketch were simply amped up: The wad of chewing gum was bigger, the weaponized rostrum was now motorized. The physical attacks on reporters here included an assault with a leaf blower, which was jolting and kind of fascinating when the machine was pointed at the face of a reporter played by Ms. Strong, but not so funny when it was used to blow her skirt up over her head.
A few points of fairness to be pointed out.. First of all, even George W. Bush did not face the lampooning of this nature like Trump. Obama? The most that Lorne Michaels gave him were jokes about his opponents or his ears.. It was lame. Eight years of really un-funny political parody.
The Trump material is funny and quite frankly putting a really pungently stale SNL back on the map again. But for how long?
The NYT article correctly mentions that already the Spicer material is getting .. well .. old. Already.
It was funny, sure. And actually the motorized podium was great. But it was simply copying off of what worked last week, and not what should work based on the lampooning.
SNL does this a lot.
Politics aside, Saturday Night LIVE has often become mired in its characters.. the cheerleaders.. the girl who smelled her armpits. They just used taglines and did tag-things for applause and cheap laughs. Funny at first but quickly stale.
That is not being critical of the Baldwin portrayal of Trump (though I think Hammond is the most unfairly forgotten since his impression was almost 100% accurate and spot on) .. and certainly not saying Melissa McCartney didn’t already create a classic comedy character.
But my point really is this: Politics, in itself, is getting to us.
Before SNL began last night, the REAL Donald Trump appeared at a late Saturday night ‘news’ event with the Japanese prime minster. North Korea launched a missile and the US was forced to respond .. or at least let Japan respond and us support. Then the comedy of SNL began.
Netflix has a new show about race. A new horror movie coming out about race.. The Super Bowl and its commercials featured debates about politics and what team are friends with the Donald. It’s all too much.
SNL is not unfunny but may become the victim of the over-doing of political comedy. Political nightmares.
And if SNL does what it has always done, it will do just that… overdo a character to the point of exhaustion.
Outside a strange silver object like nothing they’d ever seen before, hovered over a field, just beyond their playground.
Headmaster Ralph Llewellyn dismissed the distraught pupils’ claims, without going outside to look. It was a decision he would regret forever.
For to this day, even as adults, they maintain there was only one description of what they’d seen – an Unidentified Flying Object .
Schoolboy David Davies, in the playground on that February Friday afternoon, stood looking at something that would leave him with a lifetime’s fascination and a drive to get to the truth of what that strange object was.
“It was pearlescent silvery-grey,” he says, “approximately 40ft long, torpedo, cigar-shaped, with an upper domed section that covered the central third of the vehicle and which was topped with a red pulsating light.”
Upset their claims were being ignored, David and his classmates handed in a petition to the police station.
In the end, the headmaster separated the children and asked them to draw what they had seen under exam conditions. He was amazed to find their drawings were almost identical to each other.
It is one of the more famous UFO stories in our short history of such things. And very controversial. A large amount of people buy their story.. a large amount don’t–attention grabbing kids, they say! People even said the teaching incited the madness and told them what to draw..
There was another famous mass UFO sighting among school children – this in 1994.. It was the town of Ruwa, Zimbabwe, on September 16th 1994. The children claim to have seen multiple hovering objects that resembled what we would describe as spaceships. In that case, ALL of the 62 kids said they saw a UFO –all – and all describe virtually the same exact thing. The warning from the entities was about environmental calamity.. This story has been well documented, is very serious, and was studied by various researchers. One of them is Harvard University psychologist Dr. John Mack. He himself interviewed these children personally, as well as many others. The story spread around the world quite fast and his interviews with the children were conducted shortly after the incident.
Melissa McCartney has created a hit.. a reoccurring character based on Sean Spicer.. this week she was back with a rolling podium, more insults to ‘fake news,’ and a hilarious spoof of the daily White House press briefing..
For some reason… I can see this turning into an actual box office film. Watch that.. I bet money it happens.
The pilot got passengers’ attention when she boarded the plane in her street clothes.
“She shows up dressed like a civilian and asks to us to take a vote to see whether she should change into her uniform or fly as is,” said Pam O’Neal, who was aboard the flight.
Passenger Randy Reiss tweeted, she “asked if we were ok with her flying like that… then says ‘sorry I’m going through s(sic) divorce.’”
She then used the plane’s overhead PA system to rant about President Trump and Hillary Clinton — calling them both “a–holes” and then ranting about her divorce. That’s when passengers began tweeting to United to get a new pilot.
“She started off by saying that she had not voted for either Trump or Clinton because they’re a bunch of liars,” said passenger “O’Neal. “That’s an odd way to start of the welcome to your flight. It really sort of went downhill from there and didn’t make a lot of sense to any of us.”
“We were a little afraid having someone somewhat unstable flying the plane,” said O’Neal.
About 20 passengers said they didn’t feel safe with her in the cockpit and got off the lane.
The box office war got cold this weekend.. initial Friday interest among kids went to BATMAN LEGO.. the adults took over the box office by Saturday night..
What results: 50 shades less than $50 million and the super hero in lego form strong with near $55 and really good reviews on various websites where such reviews are done..
