DramatistDreamer

Hold on to your hats. Let's see if Lucy pulls out the football, or not.

I'll have to ask my family about this, some of them are Canadian citizens and reside in Ontario, although a few have very strongly negative feeling about the whole "Quebecois" issue (i.e. secession, not the political party). I will have to ask about the Alberta factor as well. From what I understand the other party that the Liberals would need to work with, in order to pass legislation are not conservative so that prospect looks a lot better compared to the possibility of having to work with conservatives. Hasan Minhaj did a good interview with PM Trudeau some time ago. It started out playfully but quickly evolved into Minhaj asking some serious questions and chiding Trudeau on environmental issues, which really put Trudeau in the hot seat. A quick look on Wikipedia, and it seems that Quebec has something of a special status called "Statut particulier", which gives them a status of being a "distinct society", while still being a part of Canada.

Alberta has made the same threat in the past--they are beginning to sound like Quebec, that has never made good on that threat. Quebec used to threaten to secede too, which still has yet to happen.

Trudeau's party did lose some seats though, and as a result, fell short of taking the majority.

Northern Ireland has been in the news a lot lately, mainly because of Brexit and the 'Irish backstop' intrigue but ICYMI-

Speaking of Bernie, he and AOC are under some fire for the Sanders campaign using the front of the Queensbridge Houses as a backdrop for his endorsement rally while making little to no effort to inform residents.

Netflix seemed to be quite successful when they placed more of a priority on distributing films by little-known and first-time filmmakers, e.g. Ava Duvernay's In The Middle Of Nowhere but it looks like it is their buying up big-budget fare, (some of which doesn't do well in numbers or even critically) may truly be what is putting the company "in the red". So many streaming companies are now coming onto the landscape as competitors to Netflix and using some variation of Netflix's production model. I wonder whether there will be similar problems ahead for these streaming platforms? Combine this with the growing subscriber fee fatigue (and just broke wallets). But unless Netflix is over-bidding (which is entirely possible, since it has been known to happen at Sundance more than once), I'm skeptical as to whether it is first-time and unproven writers who are busting the budget as I would think their rates would be more economical. I think perhaps it might be a lot of big names whose projects have not produced the numbers that require a lot of money for the production budget and contracts.

Meanwhile-

Meanwhile the British tabloids and media are harassing Meghan, no one seems to be reporting about this in Great Britain.

One essential thing I mentioned though is that the EU never wants to be seen as the one to blame if/when sh*t hits the fan in the wake of Brexit, so despite the fact that they're obviously tired of the U.K. and would rather they just go at this point, they've been highly accommodating to the British PM, whoever she or he is at the time. The EU has been doing this for over 2 years now, despite accounts that their patience is wearing thin. I'm not into making predictions at this point, I think we have to see how it will all unfold as the month of October winds down to its conclusion.

A lot of people believe that Lopez is not aging very well. All those late-night misadventures taking a toll? I haven't really looked all that closely.

I wonder in whose bed did he wake up in?

Whoa, the randy really jumped out at the end, LOL. The first few minutes of the video, I noticed some tongue from HT too, so it wasn't entirely one-sided, lol.

I was just going to say that in his condition, Feliciano looks like he's about to go home with somebody who is not his wife, lol. Just looks totally out of it. I don't really blame Murray, the British press is truly tiresome from every conceivable direction--they both hype up as well as harass people for the most ridiculous reasons.

I'm just going to curb my tongue from making the joke about Feliciano that I originally wanted to make. With Stan losing to Andy (whew, boy, Stan's serving was just...!), the British media will now be in a frenzy. We can only hope that Scotland decides to break from the U.K. after Brexit because that will be the only way we get some peace from the Murray Media Frenzy that's surely coming now.

My thoughts exactly. Monica Puig recently posted a message about how tough her season was and the implication was that personnel issues (we know it was her deteriorated coaching relationship with Kamau Murray) that was a big part of that difficulty. This made me wonder whether coaches dumping players is a recent thing, or is it something that was basically done in the shadows without it being public knowledge?

Kiki and Sascha are splitsville.

No, I didn't take the comparison to be coming from you, I was kind of riffing off the idea. It's going to be interesting to see where all of these countries land after in a post-Brexit landscape. Will there be a United Kingdom after all? It's not like England hasn't lost territory before.

In England, but the U.K. is made up of more than just the England-based tabloids. The coverage has been far from positive in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Also, tabloids in the U.K. no longer have the gravitas that they once had twenty years ago, at least not since the phone-hacking scandals. The U.K. isn't comparable to the U.S. where people digest everything the papers spew out and think about it only a year after the fact. This tells you all you need to know about the U.S., which is why most of my family would never live here.

This is how weird Brexit is becoming. I haven't read the article yet, but that image-

All of it is truly concerning. The possibility of food and medicine shortages. And from someone who lived in London for nearly five months, I can tell you that Great Britain imports a great deal of its food and as Bob Marley once sang "A hungry man is an angry man". I don't know if it would ever reach "The Troubles" level since Ireland seems more prosperous now than it was then and back then it was political, not financial. When it's financial, many of the Irish simply move/migrate, when it's political, it's more about taking a stand. Although, I imagine it wouldn't be too pleasant to for citizens of the Republic of Ireland to look across the border and see that their E.U. member affiliated neighbor, Northern Ireland living far more prosperously than they are, which is a real possibility in a post Brexit crash. Scotland has oil and gas, has a lower unemployment rate than the rest of Great Britain, so it seems as though the U.K. might need Scotland more than Scotland would need the U.K. Where a United Kingdom is concerned, the possibility of any of these things coming to pass just seems like a bad outcome for Great Britain and England especially. Then again, systems like the NHS are already coming apart since so many foreign doctors, nurses and medical professionals have already left the U.K. and many of those vacancies are still unfilled.

These are truly uncharted waters, so the situation or any ending resulting from the decision seems completely unpredictable at the moment. One thing seems certain--lawmakers will be seeking to lay blame at someone's feet for this, if chaos should ensue. The E.U. did something very clever, perhaps more for self-preservation but they have been fairly patient and accommodating throughout this entire process, because they don't want any measure of blame if/when sh*t hits the fan for the U.K. So, even as the E.U. has been firm on the rules, they also have taken every meeting, held tireless hours of negotiations and approved extensions requests from the U.K. over the past few years. As I posted up-thread though, the E.U. wants the U.K. to "sh*t, or get off the pot" at this point. I think the E.U. is girding for the pain of a "No Deal Brexit" and just wants to be done with Great Britain. If Boris Johnson flops this (which there is a higher than average probability that this will happen), there is likely to be a general election for a new occupant for his current position. Remember Johnson was selected by his party but not by the British voting public, many of whom are jonesing for an opportunity to chuck Johnson out. Another possibility, if things go badly, is Scottish independence won't seem like such a far-fetched possibility anymore. People will no longer scoff at another referendum to vote on independence. Also, even though there was a negotiated agreement for the 'Irish backstop', if there's no agreement in place for that...well, let's just not get into that because...Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland truly do have a history of violent conflict, that I seriously doubt anyone wants to revisit.