The Meaning of Pluggers, part this is my life now

Pluggers, 20150810:

Today, "Plugger" means "Male-identifying Western-themed TV show enthusiast without Internet connection".

Did you know movies and TV shows used to be made primarily for middle aged white men? Because they were the buying powers and the decision makers of the house. It was a marketing study that changed everything by showing that middle aged television owners aren't actually susceptible to marketing because they generally know what they like. (See previous installments re. crusty minds incapable of change.)

And that's how we got the now-classic "13-35" key demographic. Why make shows for people who don't care about advertising?

So we don't see a lot of new Westerns these days. (Team Coen's True Grit was a masterpiece, but, you know, remake). And reruns is all you get if you don't know how to work the Inter Netflix on the pirate machine. Kind of weird when a grown man and old film enthusiast is taken completely by surprise that an actor he idolizes did a movie sixty years ago but imagine his joy.

Funny story, you know in Blazing Saddles when Bart invokes Randolph Scott's name to stir the hearts of the townsfolk? Here in Sweden, the subtitlers translated "Randolph Scott" as "John Wayne". That was incredibly confusing to me when I was six and didn't speak a word of English.

Your humble critic's plugger status: Negative

The Meaning of Pluggers, part 10

Pluggers, 20150805:

Today, the para-stable matrix of the hyperword "Plugger" returns to meaning "Old".

Maybe not as old as Keith Roberts thinks, though. We had party lines when I was a teenager in the 1990s. I called them with our rotary, bakelite phone. I'd have guessed they died out with the advent of fiberoptics, but it turns out they still exist. Just not in your big city-centric reality. What, you thought the subway map marked the edge of the civilized world? Turns out there are still people living out there, and I'm not even talking about suburbs. I'm talking about isolated communities deep in the wilderness where you'd have to vespa for days to get a wireless connection.

Or, wait, maybe I'm reading this wrong and it's not about the cultural isolation of the incestuous Pluggers author/readership where they come to think something as blatantly unthoughtful as "Where did those party lines we used to have before we moved to the city go?" is a universally shared thing that everyone of their generation is thinking. Maybe it's about being so old you start believing your party's lines and actually value their rhetoric over their demonstrated interests, competence or integrity; that quoting a good-sounding soundbite is better than doing useful things like let's say keeping people from starving to death in the street.

I've seen that level of oldness. It's not pretty. But it's perfectly in line with what we expect from Pluggers.

Your humble critic's plugger status: Probably negative, sadly.

I miss you, Marmaduke Explained

Marmaduke, 20150727

Marmaduke teaches young men to embrace the loss of all that is wild and free in the world to give place for more Pizza Huts because it means they get to pay premium for a hot, greasy pizza dinner instead of foraging for roots and berries, and a monstrous great dane to lead them instead of finding their own way. Damn, did I just become older than Paul Anderson?