2023 Time Person of the Year

[ChrisLong]

Irrelevant to this discussion, but can someone explain the popularity of Jennifer Coolidge.

Yes, I know she started an entire genre from
American Pie. I don't watch White Lotus, but I don't think the Discover commercials are clever or funny in the least.
Is it just a goof of her playing a ditzy blonde?

I've seen her in interviews and she was terrible. Really gave vague answers and was not funny at all.

What am I missing?

A big-titted blonde who likes to f**k. What else do you need to know?

 

[goalmouth]

Time has been MIA for a decade or more. I don't even see it at doctors offices.

Maybe choose global citizens living under duress instead.

 

[Vombatus]

6

 

[Neutral Corner]

It's always for sales, little more. But I think a case can be made that Swift deserved it over anybody else and the article does a great job of laying out that case. But, darn, it's a long read.

She was a one woman boost to the economy if nothing else.

 

[Neutral Corner]

Jesus God yes. And saturation coverage too. Make it stop.

She's twenty years past the sell by date on playing a Milf. Gilf just doesn't hit quite the same way.

 

[Small Town Guy]

Blame Taylor for the war. Rao is the woman who throws $5,000 dinner parties for white women to yell at them about how racist they are so this isn't a totally surprising tweet, though it is entertaining.

 

[The Big Ragu]

She was a one woman boost to the economy if nothing else.

Those stories made me laugh.

The billions people spent on her wasn't all new spending. It was mostly spending that was being drawn from forms of entertainment that people would have spent on instead -- a substitution effect. People can't measure the unseen dollars that would have been spent elsewhere if Taylor Swift hadn't come to town to do a concert, and you got a lot of misguided stories falsely giving the impression that she was adding money to the economy. Yes, her fans were spending a lot of money. But spending money is not the same as adding money to the economy. You need to not only look at what you can see (her fans spending money), you need to also be able to account for the unseen (that limited money her fans have not getting spent elsewhere because they decided to see her concert instead) to understand the true economic effect. Bastiat, a French guy from the 1800s, explored this, writing about "that which is seen and that which is not seen."

 

[Neutral Corner]

However you want to frame it, a lot of money circulated because of that tour. The musicians and dancers. The venues and their staffs plus whatever additional help that was hired. Airline tickets and hotel rooms and restaurant business from all the Swifties following the tour. Film crews and movie tickets and t-shirts.

No, the tour didn't create any new money, but hell, just the tax dollars generated by the thing add up to a lot of money.

 

[Starman]

Time has been MIA for a decade or more. I don't even see it at doctors offices.

Maybe choose global citizens living under duress instead.

Well, at least it still exists in some format, unlike Newsweek (still a sketchy website) and US News & World Report.

My parents got Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, the New Yorker, and Editor & Publisher every week throughout my entire youth. In due time I started subscribing to Golden Magazine, Boys Life, Sports Illustrated and Sport.

In addition to two editions daily of the Starrville Daily Screech (the morning/lunchtime edition my dad would bring home for lunch plus the afternoon home delivery version), the morning statewide edition of the Free Press, the 200-page Sunday editions of both papers, plus the East Starrville Weekly Sentinel and the Diocese of Starrville Catholic Courier my mom edited for a few years.

Needless to say when we got a puppy we had no problem with finding newsprint for her to pee on.

 

[Starman]

The point of all that was it used to matter when print publications made their annual person of the year selections. Not really so much anymore.

As far as Tay Tay, well... why not? Might as well be her.
My sister, the much referenced StarSis of all the youth sports threads, and her four daughters aged 22, 17, 17 and 13, shelled out a thousand bucks or close to it to see her back in June. They said she was great.

What the hell, I've spent thousands traveling around to Bruce Springsteen concerts.

I vividly remember my dad, along with my two uncles and ashembled aunts at Nana's birthday party in February 1964, laughing and shaking their heads at the crazy longhair kids on the Ed Sullivan Show on teevee.

By the time he died in 2001, my dad was wearing Rolling Stones tee shirts to work and was able to discuss songs by U2 and Bruce and how they hit on many of the same themes as Hemingway.

So why not Taylor Swift?

 

[kickoff-time]

She's twenty years past the sell by date on playing a Milf. Gilf just doesn't hit quite the same way.

Well, she was late 30s during the American Pie debut.

Marie Osmond is a few years older than Coolidge and she's a true Gilf.

What's kind of funny is Coolidge is probably best known for playing a milf and she's never had children.

 

[Neutral Corner]

Yup. She was playing an overripe peach when Stifler's Mom was a thing. If you look at the new commercials she has an obvious pot belly. It's not that she's trying to carry off the ingenue role, it's just that her typecasting no longer suits her reality. As was said above, she wasn't that funny.