100516- A joke

.....Product placement in Hollywood movies is really getting out of control. Someone just pitched a film about a Chinese concubine who comes to America in the 1930's to open a seafood restaurant. The working title is "Raise The Red Lobster".

100515- A joke

.....Not having grown up in the American South, I find the appeal of the Confederate flag extremely confusing.

[For any readers not from this country, the U.S. began as British colonies on the Atlantic coast. They reacted to exploitation and abuse of power by the then-current regime by breaking their ties to England, but they did it without any specific plans. Even with the snail's pace of communications back then it took less than ten years for everyone to realize that having no standard currency, legal code or even language made them a prime target for invasion by foreign powers. So, after a few years of heated arguments representatives of the former colonies compromised on a basic foundation with provisions built into it to make alterations as the needs arose. It was the Constitution that turned loosely affiliated confederates into a united republic. However, in order to get the cooperation of states that permitted slavery, the states that didn't promised to allow them to count a large fraction of their slave population when calculating their proportionate representation in legislature. Eventually they all had to deal with the obvious 'elephant in the living room': the additional representatives earned by the slaves' numbers weren't really representing the interests of the slaves, and inadequate representation in legislature was the whole reason for breaking away from England in the first place. Those who refused to allow slaves to vote planned to revert to a less structured confederacy. Unfortunately for them, the U.S. had been a single country for decades by that point and the republic had grown to include additional states and territories, complicating matters.]

.....For one thing, "strength through disorganization" isn't an inspiring motto for most of the human race. For another thing, what most people refer to as the Confederate flag was never "the" flag, it was just the last one in a long line of flags and most of the member states in the Confederacy flew their own state flags instead. Some of those states would incorporate small versions of it within their flags, but not all did. (Again, disorganization was a sacred creed for them.) You'd think that anybody in that much of a rush to look like a Caribbean island would be nicer to black people.

.....It doesn't even make sense in terms of underdog appeal. Someone walking around wearing a cap or sweatshirt from a high school team that never made the play-offs can at least imagine next year's team going all the way. There's no 'next year' for the Confederacy. The last possible 'next year' was fifty years before that flag was created. They didn't lose the Civil War because of anyone "cheating" or "being sneaky" or "shameful conduct" of their enemies; they lost for the same reason that they didn't start out as colonies of a druid empire. There was no way England could have become an international power since the Middle Ages without changing its political structure to manage that growth. The same was true for the U.S. It had grown too much since the revolution to throw all semblance of organization out the window. The Confederacy lost because there wasn't anything to win. If the Confederacy had got what they wanted and became a collection of Luxembourgs and Monacos they would have eventually been picked off one by one by European countries looking for sugar and cotton. How is that winning?

.....Variations of the U.S. flag were used when changing the course of two European wars, a Pacific war, winning two gulf wars and claiming the moon. It's also used when delivering foreign aid and participating in disarmament talks. What exactly does the Confederate flag commemorate? If you already have a flag that says "this is what 'E Pluribus Unum' can do for you", why would you knowingly choose one that says, "Oh, yeah? Well we lost. Take that, suckers!" It's like showing up in a stadium with a giant foam rubber hand that has two fingers raised and chanting, "We're Number Two! We're Number Two!... In a field of two!... We're Number Two!..."

.....Maybe I'm completely wrong about this. Maybe the Confederate flag has been around so long because it isn't a relic of history. After all, it wasn't even used that much until the secession attempt escalated to warfare. Maybe it's popular because each generation projects their own meaning onto it. For some it may mean warm memories of entrenched local power strangling employment opportunities, for others the comfort of glaring illiteracy rates and for still others epidemic teen pregnancy and the abstinence-only education policies that caused it. It's just that whenever I notice it flapping in the company of a 70's model Chevy blaring Lynyrd Skynyrd through mono speakers, I don't think of the Center For Disease Control. Well, not at first. I also don't think of the Tuskegee Airmen or Audie Murphy or R.E.M. or Truman Capote or peanut butter or Andy Griffith or gospel choirs or anything remotely commendable or decent or admirable. Well, maybe fritters. Still, if you're going to tip those scales, you're talking about an awful lot of fritters. And then we're back to pulmonary disorders.

.....I can just imagine sometime hundreds of years in the future when the human race is colonizing space. A teacher will be showing a room full of children the symbols of the home world and asking them to identify what part of the culture each symbol represents:

• A caduceus? "Medicine."
• A cross? "Christianity"
• A euro sign? "Money"
• A Confederate flag? "Umm... Wal-Mart?"

The teacher just stares blankly at the holographic image. "Yeah, sure. Sounds good."

100503- A joke

.....Back in the eighties the Reagan administration did everything they could to prevent the FDA from protecting the American public. The argument was that market forces would tell us what was safe to eat, that experimentation and testing was just a waste of tax dollars. To prove their point, they forced the FDA to sit on their hands while a chemical additive called Olestra, on which they had placed restrictions for fifteen years, was used to make fat-free potato chips. After thousands of people spent far more money going to their doctors than the FDA would have spent in taxes, makers of the chips still didn't pull Olestra products from the market but instead announced that they "forgot" to add a warning which, they felt, would absolve them of any legal responsibility.

.....Now here's the kicker: the disclaimer/warning became a news item when it conceded that products cooked in Olestra "may cause spontaneous rectal bleeding". It should be pointed out that the chemical causes diarrhea in nearly everyone, which only leads to hemorrhaging if you're stupid enough to keep eating a product guaranteed to give you diarrhea until you bleed. Still, it's a phrase that turns heads at parties, I'll give you that. More than that, it's a neat condensation of a personality test. In any sufficiently large sampling of people, if you were to ask each one which word in that phrase they find most alarming, I would wager that most would say "bleeding", as though other forms of spontaneous rectal activity were... uh, negotiable? For others, "rectal" would concern them most; I'll leave the Freudian interpretations of that to yourselves. There would even be others for whom "spontaneous" would cause more anxiety, that a negative side effect would seem more manageable if it were more predictable. Me? The one word in that sentence that I home in on has to be "may". It "may cause spontaneous rectal bleeding". It says, "We had some indication that it might cause spontaneous rectal bleeding but we didn't see any pressing need to nail that down before we made food for you out of it."

100501- A joke

.....The makers of Camel brand cigarettes have recently begun a U.S. marketing campaign for a smokeless product from Sweden called "Snus". I don't use tobacco, so I have no idea what this product is for or how it's used. I do, however, have a sneaking suspicion that their reason for marketing it in an English speaking country is that people will inevitably ask, "What's Snus?" giving them the perverse satisfaction of replying, "Oh, not much. What's Snus with you?"

100430- A joke

.....I once owned a 1977 Chevy Blazer, one of the original, full-size models. It was mostly a bucket of rust but despite being nearly worthless it had one of most dependable, never-fail anti-theft devices I'd ever seen on any car before or since: the engine. If any thief managed to get that thing to start in a timely fashion, I'd say they deserved each other.

100428- A joke

.....Tomorrow it will have been a week since Earth Day. I don't know about you, but I still hear a little bit every day about ecological efforts, unlike previous years where you got one day of lip service and then it was back to the bad old habits the next day. Everybody seems to be touting 'green' programs. For instance, Comcast seems to be putting all of its efforts into discouraging people from using electricity in any capacity whatsoever.

100410- A joke

.....This post is in fact the one hundredth consecutive daily post on this blog. As it becomes increasingly difficult to come up with original ideas on demand, I've noticed that since the fifty day mark that I've been using more long stories and topical jokes. Attributable quotes would be next, I guess, followed by cribbing Bazooka Joe comics and Snapple lids. Of course, I'm even more embarrassed that I haven't used the past seven weeks to nail down these tricky daily anniversary commemorations. For instance, a one hundred year anniversary would be celebrated with a gift of platinum (I think), seventy-fifth with diamond, fiftieth with gold, etc. Of course, once you get below the fortieth (rubies), the traditional list and modern list become radically different. That's because the modern list is a shameless, obvious scam. The later anniversaries are all the same because they're already remembered with precious stones and metals. They're already expensive and besides that, fewer people reach those anniversaries. Between death and divorce, there are far more people reaching their fifth anniversary than their seventy-fifth. The so-called modern list is an attempt to move the more expensive materials to the more common earlier anniversaries: the second anniversary, cotton, becomes china (previously twentieth) on the modern list; the twentieth becomes platinum. Leather becomes crystal, fruit becomes appliances (ooooh, romantic), wood becomes silverware and in an oddly specific turn wool becomes desk sets. This sounds less like a way to renew the bonds in your life and more like a stranger's attempt to empty a crowded warehouse. I say we just skip the pretense and insist that all anniversaries be marked with the elements on the tail-end of the periodic table. Accept nothing with an atomic number less than one hundred. These are the sort of materials whose nuclei are so massive that they can only exist if they're synthesized in a laboratory, and even then they almost spontaneously tear themselves apart. What better way to say that our time together is precious than with something that can't even exist for more than a fraction of a second? And best of all, the process is so expensive it nearly guarantees bankruptcy for most young couples early on, eliminating the need to memorize the rest of these silly lists.

100409- A joke

.....I can't believe news outlets are ignoring genuine issues in order to squander airtime babbling about the new television ad from Nike with Tiger Woods. If you haven't seen it, the visuals are a single 30-second shot of Woods in an extremely slow zoom-in but the audio is a clip of his late father's voice taken from an interview. His father seems to be answering a question about what he would ask his son. The last thing we hear him say is, "have you learned anything?" and then the visuals cut to a white Nike symbol in the middle of a solid black background. I'll tell you what I've learned from all this: "Just Do It" is just as idiotic a lifestyle model as it is advice for buying shoes.

100306- A joke

.....My friend hasn't come back from the Winter Olympics yet. I heard he saw a billboard that said, "Drink Canada Dry" and took it as a personal challenge.

100223- A joke

.....Today an exasperated George Lucas explained to reporters at a press conference-- for the third time-- that the various toy Yoda figures he has sold over the years are not defective and are not being recalled. "They're perfectly safe. My own kids play with them all the time. I can't understand where these stories are coming from. I never have problems like this in Japan."

100216- A joke

.....You've probably heard of the "Chicken Soup" franchise of books, the ones filled with wistful anecdotes and obviously fabricated "true" stories with fascistic spiritual overtones. They have titles like: "Chicken Soup for the Skier's Soul" and "Chicken Soup for the Dentist's Soul" and "Chicken Soup for the [fill-in-the-blank]'s Soul". I've always contended that those titles were all misnomers. The people who read those books don't have souls.

100110- A joke

.....I don't know who this 'Victoria' is, but I've seen that catalog with her wardrobe, and I don't think she has too many secrets left.