Tagged: Washington Post

Making Frank and Claire Underwood Look Like Jed Bartlet

Last month, Zachary Pincus-Roth, writing for The Washington Post, reported on how The West Wing had become a way for liberals to escape the Trump era. He profiles a couple who, in 2018, produce a podcast about the series that wrapped back in 2006:

The Attrydes, both in their 40s, are apolitical, but still — these days, rewatching a show about idealistic wonks working for a Nobel Prize-winning economist president is “a little slice of heaven,” said Paul, wearing a gray “West Wing Weekly” sweatshirt. “It’s the president we all want but don’t have.”

The funny thing is that I seem to remember when the series launched in the late 1990s that the series was marketed as being about a presidency “we all want,” implying that it wasn’t one we had. And this was during the waning days of the Clinton administration, which admittedly was hardly a paragon of liberalism.

When the Trump presidency began to crystallize last year, I was watching the fifth season of House of Cards. As I was watching the calculating and diabolical machinations of the Underwoods, I often thought about how the Trump presidency made House of Cards look like The West Wing.

What I would give for Frank and Claire Underwood today?!?

Apple Pay Offers a Free Suburban New York Train Ride

Despite using Apple Pay since getting an iPhone 6 in 2014, I didn’t know until today that Apple maintained an offers page, or at least that they posted one for the holidays.

There’s some very compelling offers, such as…

That last one comes about a week too late for me. I did take an MTA Metro North train after Thanksgiving, returning from an short bike ride to Tarrytown, but this offer didn’t take effect until December 1.
Also, the offer expires on January 1, which is a shame. I would have appreciated a discount on the $36 round-trip fare to Greenport or Montauk when cycling season begins anew next year.

The Broadcast Archives at the University of Maryland and a Few TV-Themed Board Games

The last time I was in College Park, Maryland was in 2006 to visit the National Archives. While the National Archives is housed in a Greek Revival building in Washington, D.C., easily accessible from the Archives–Navy Memorial–Penn Quarter Metro station, most of the archive’s materials are housed off-site in College Park.

While in College Park, you can also visit the Broadcast Archives at the University of Maryland. The archive consists of two collections: a collection devoted to public broadcasting and the Library of American Broadcasting. This archive was featured in a recent video on the Washington Post website, where Post reporter John Kelly donates some television-related memorabilia.

Most of the artifacts in the video, such as the Partridge Family and the Starsky and Hutch board games should be familiar to most contemporary pop-culture fans, but you might not recognize Swayze. At first, I didn’t recognize it either, but, as I suspected, Swayze was named for John Cameron Swayze. Between 1949 and 1956, Swayze hosted the Camel News Caravan, which was also called the Plymouth News Caravan after 1955, when the automaker and cigarette maker began co-sponsoring the program on alternating days.

Swayze was a news trivia game made by Milton Bradley, produced around 1954. Apparently, you can find a copy for sale on Ebay, the Internet’s largest unofficial archive of ephemeral culture.