November 21, 2016

"The Bubble. It's Brooklyn. With a bubble on it."



Glad to see "Saturday Night Live" figured out how to do at least some humor in the election aftermath.

By the way, did you know that Buckminster Fuller actually — not just humorously — proposed a bubble to enclose part of NYC?



Looks like Trump Tower is just inside Bucky's bubble.

16 comments:

YoungHegelian said...

My guess is that skit is an inside joke among the writers, directed at some of their co-workers on staff. Kate McKinnon springs to mind as a likely target.

Brando said...

Yeah when I was watching it I was thinking "isn't that already Portland?"

Curious George said...

Nothing new about the bubble except the bubble itself. There's thousands...perhaps millions...of them across the U.S. Do you any lefties not living in one?

Ann Althouse said...

"Yeah when I was watching it I was thinking "isn't that already Portland?""

When I heard the line that I quoted in the post title, I thought they'd adopted the humor style of "Portlandia."

The line reading was very "put a bird on it."

AllenS said...

Isn't that bubble over the upper west side of NYC?

AllenS said...

Actually, mid-Manhattan, below central park.

Ann Althouse said...

Bucky's bubble ends at Central Park, perhaps because the need for precipitation for the plants clustered there. South of that, you can just pipe water in.

Todd said...

At the end of the clip, they mention the lack of fire/police. In reality they would also be a shortage of garbage men, maintenance men, butchers, dry cleaners, etc. Within a month they would have so completely soiled their own "cage" that anyone that had not already vacated would expire.

Did you catch the eye-roll from the woman when the man was discussing race? Heh. I also actually liked the bit at the end about the "starting price", poor liberals need not apply I guess.

As someone else noted, this could have been an inside joke at some of the cast.

Freeman Hunt said...

I have a few friends in Brooklyn who have been very upset by the election, so the last line, among others, made me laugh.

Sprezzatura said...

BTW Althouse,

The previous SNL show that you thought was terrible was very much liked, specifically for the comedic writing, by Howard Stern and Robin Quivers.

IOW, your POV re, at least that SNL show, was wrong, as professionally judged. Maybe, you'll consider that your capacity for and understanding of humor is often wrong.

Anywho, you're a better lawyer then they are.

Alex said...

"Portlandia" already has done this and with far greater depth.

Also, go on the Youtube comments many salty liberals are saying YES I WANT THIS BUBBLE. Pity them.

Alex said...

Amazing the SNL writers are self-aware enough to realize HuffPo & Daily Kos are the worst of the worst.

Paul Snively said...

It's really too bad Fuller's geodesic dome came and went as a meme before the materials science could catch up with it. It's really an extraordinary design and has been proven under spectacularly harsh conditions, e.g. the domes covering arctic radar installations. I'm amused that the dome that housed Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose is now used primarily for filming large-scale "exterior" scenes in movies.

Peter said...

Fuller never did explain how he was going to handle air quality in general and automobile exhaust in particular within that dome, yet his drawings clearly show automobiles moving within the domed-over area.

Perhaps that could be excused on the grounds that he was a big thinker, yet the need to deal with car exhaust in closed areas had been well known at least since the Holland Tunnel was built in 1920.

Peter said...

"It's really too bad Fuller's geodesic dome came and went as a meme before the materials science could catch up with it."

Such as the Ford Rotunda in Detroit? The Rotunda got its geodesic roof because a conventional roof would have weighed more than the structure under it could support.

Unfortunately geodesic domes tend to leak; this one was lost to fire when a workman's torch ignited solvent that was being used to re-seal the roof panels on a November day in 1962.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Rotunda

Paul Snively said...

Peter: Unfortunately geodesic domes tend to leak; this one was lost to fire when a workman's torch ignited solvent that was being used to re-seal the roof panels on a November day in 1962.

Right; that's the sort of thing I think we now could do a better job of preventing at a reasonable cost than we could in 1962. Also, the machining tolerances on the triangles are better now.