Note: The first episode shown during the First Quarter 2025 was a rerun of #335 on December 23, 2024.
Episode #1008: I Want Roller Disco
First Broadcast: 12/30/24
Repeated: 2/17/25
In Part One of our year-end round up (don't call it "Free New York Wrapped" because I don't know who owns the trademark on it), we talk about some of the many things that occupied our time in our episodes in 2024. Things such as: What was the best year for movies? When was our 30th anniversary? Where do you get your physical media? What are your memories of The Honeymooners? What happened to that stolen pair of ruby slippers? Is Apple's Vision Pro a good idea? What should replace the Market Line at Essex Market? How should we remember Flaco the owl? Who wants to dine at the edge of space? How did you prepare for the eclipse? Did you see the eclipse and feel the earthquake? Do you have an OMNY card? Have you seen The Blair Witch Project? What's your favorite Roger Corman movie? How much of the Web is no longer there? And Donald Trump is guilty, guilty, GUILTY! Tune in for Part Two next week!
Episode #1009: Something to do with Something
First Broadcast: 1/6/25
Repeated: 3/3/25
In Part Two of our year-end round up, we continue discussing some of the many topics that crossed our paths in the second half of 2024, such as: What if a movie changed its content every time you watched it? Did Joe Biden really do that badly in the one debate he had with Donald Trump in this campaign? Did anyone learn any lessons from the first assassination attempt on Trump? Should we have tried harder to persuade Joe Biden to stay in the race, as opposed to dropping out? Were the early days of the Harris campaign the best they were going to get? Is JD Vance a bad nerd? Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a man who can't be trusted around dead animals? Did you enjoy your summer movies? How did we celebrate our 1000th episode? Have you mourned any dead restaurants lately? Are we watching too many sequels? Is pretending to work the same as real work in the mind of Donald Trump? Did you get out and vote? Were you as depressed at the election results as we were? Can we at least celebrate congestion pricing and compost? And is Die Hard a Christmas movie? I can't wait to see what we talk about in 2025! Let's hope we all finish the year in one piece!
Episode #1010: Events Overlapping
First Broadcast: 1/20/25
Former President Jimmy Carter died at age 100 on December 29, 2024, and many people provided various tributes highlighting the decent things that he did during and after his one term as President--and there are certainly plenty to choose from. From installing solar panels on the White House (which were subsequently removed by President Reagan), to pardoning men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War, to vocally prioritizing human rights in his foreign policy--to say nothing of his work for Habitat for Humanity after leaving office--he was one of the better examples of the American Presidency in recent years. However, as good as those acts may have been, there were other actions during his term that were every bit as horrendous as some of the worst aspects of the Bush, Obama, or even Nixon administrations. In this episode, I only focused on three. First: Turning a blind eye to the Indonesian perpetration of genocide in East Timor, doubling American arms sales to Indonesia, who went on to kill up to 200,000 people with those weapons--a prominent event in the works of Noam Chomsky. Second: Approving the South Korean government's killing of up to 1000 student protestors who wanted more democracy in the country--sort of a Korean version of the repression of students at Tiananmen Square a decade before the events in China. And Third, but not least: Carter approved his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski's plan to destabilize Afghanistan by funding & arming militias who would attack its pro-Soviet government, which would then entice the Soviet Union to invade and become stuck in their own Vietnam-like quagmire, draining them of money, personnel, and resources in the process. Those militias became the mujaheddin, the mujaheddin trained Osama bin Laden and later became the Taliban... well, you probably know the rest. Am I saying that this pivotal decision by Carter was one of many stepping stones on the way to the attacks on September 11, 2001? Well, I'm not saying it wasn't! Despite all that, I would still argue that Carter was a better human being and a better President than the person being inaugurated this year, and I'd rather not fathom how much worse everything might get between now and 2029. There'll be plenty of time for that later--I hope!
Episode #1011: A Little Shambolic
First Broadcast: 1/27/25
Repeated: 3/17/25
It's not a great world when someone like David Lynch is dead and someone like Donald Trump is President--again!--but we're all doing the best we can, I guess. Anticipating how needlessly vengeful Trump can be, President Biden issued proactive pardons for his immediate family and various officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci and members of the January 6th Committee on his way out the door, which was probably a good idea, even though it most likely won't do anything to lessen the unwarranted outrage various right-wingers have about those people. Not to be outdone, within hours of taking office, Trump dished out some pardons of his own, notably for all 1500+ people who were charged with participating in the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, including several who had brought weapons and assaulted police officers there. Did that overshadow the crypto "meme coin" that Trump released a few days before taking office, or the crypto that his wife Melania released soon afterwards that devalued Trump's coin by over 7 billion dollars, or the trip that Mayor Eric Adams took to Washington DC in the middle of the night so he could attend the inauguration and ditch two Martin Luther King Day events he had already committed to attend, or the "Carmen Sandiego" outfit that Melania Trump wore to the inauguration, or the fact that Donald didn't place his hand on the Bible--or anything else--when he was sworn in, or the long and rambling inaugural address he gave afterwards, or the Nazi salute that Trump supporter Elon Musk gave to a crowd at an inauguration event later that night? Good grief, I had forgotten how exhausting the "firehose" of news and disinformation from Trump's White House was in his first term. I'm not looking forward to four more years of this shit in his second!
Episode #1012: More Chickens Are on the Way
First Broadcast: 2/3/25
Repeated: 4/14/25
In the first week of his second term, Donald Trump started (and ended?) a trade war with Colombia, threatened a real war with Denmark over Greenland, pardoned 1500 rioters who tried to carry out his attempted coup in 2021, and insulted a bishop who had the temerity to ask him to follow Christ's teachings and be nice to people. "But what," you might ask, "does this have to do with the price of eggs??" Ah yes, one of the things he campaigned on, saying the prices of eggs and other groceries would come down as soon as he was back in office. Well, you may have noticed that eggs are even more expensive now than they were when Trump was elected, and neither he nor Joe Biden had anything to do with it, because it's almost entirely due to bird flu infecting millions of chickens across the nation, and since any live birds with bird flu can't be used for food and can potentially pass bird flu on to more birds and more chickens and--potentially!--even humans, the only remedy farmers really have is to kill all the infected birds to keep the infection from spreading any further. This happened once before in 2015, when over 50 million chickens were killed to stop the spread of bird flu, and the number of dead birds will probably be even higher this year, since 13 million chickens have already been killed in January alone. Naturally, if you kill that many chickens, you have less chickens that can lay eggs, which increases the prices of all the eggs that do get laid; and you also have to wait while new chickens are hatched that can grow up to lay more eggs, which takes time no matter who's president! The USDA thinks all this means egg proces will finally come back to earth sometime later this year, and Trump will probably claim credit for it even though HE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT, but when has that ever stopped him before? More chaos next weel, I guarantee it!
Episode #1013: God Damn, I'm Exhausted
First Broadcast: 2/10/25
First, Trump announced 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, and then he announced a pause on those tariffs for 30 days, but the damage appears to have already been done. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau echoed the feelings of many of his fellow Canadians when he expressed dismay at Trump's decision to "punish" such a close "partner," and the rest of Canada's fury was palpable, with liquor stores in several provinces removing American spirits from their shelves in one of the more visible protests across the country. If these tariffs aren't resolved, how expensive will Cinco de Mayo be this year? Was this decision by Trump as crazy as his order to empty reservoirs in central California with the idea that the water could be used to fight wildfires in Los Angeles, even though there's no way to affordably transport that water to L.A.? Will any of his supporters care that these actions are all more likely to make prices go UP instead of DOWN? Who knows anymore!
Episode #1014: Half A Point
First Broadcast: 2/24/25
On October 11, 1975, the first episode of the TV show that would become known as Saturday Night Live premiered on NBC, and has been airing as a regular weekly series ever since. On Sunday, February 16, 2025, NBC aired a 50th anniversary special to mark the occasion, and we here at Free New York were just as intrigued as anyone else, as it's not every day that a weekly TV show reaches 980 episodes [he said, glancing at the number of this episode, nonchalantly]. Imagine how many shows either SNL or FNY would have if we had The Lone Ranger's schedule, shooting 52 to 78 episodes at a stretch! But, I digress! Do you have any favorite sketches, like "Olympia Cafe" (a.k.a. "Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger")? Do you remember any lost sketches, like "Talent Show" from 1982 (I know, it was at VFW hall, not in Jamaica; don't come after me)? Was it a good choice to omit mentions of many of the hosts and politicians who have been on the show (probably for several reasons)? What does it mean for TV ratings today when the highest rated show of the night wouldn't have even made it to the Top 30 fifty years ago? I wonder what Saturday Night Live might look fifty years from now? Maybe with a little luck, Free New York will still be here to find out!
Episode #1015: Eggs and Toilet Paper
First Broadcast: 3/10/25
Did you watch the Oscars this year? I thought they were more entertaining than usual, and I appreciated how no one got slapped and no incorrect winners were announced (doesn't it feel like both of those events happened just yesterday?). I was a little lost on why they did a James Bond dance number, even it was ostensibly to honor Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli for "their contribution to the industry's theatrical landscape". What do you suppose will happen to the James Bond oeuvre now that Amazon owns the rights to make new movies? Can any actor really do better than Sean Connery did in that role? Am I just distracting myself from all the awfulness going on around here lately? Hey, everyone's allowed to enjoy themselves on their days off! If we can't do that, why the hell are we even here? Don't try to answer that last one right away...