130104- A joke

So, NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre has stated, pretty forcefully, that the national response to the recent spate of mass killings should not be reinstating the ban on the only weapons that make such multiple murders possible. Instead, he insists, there should be stricter mental health screenings involved. Ohboyohboyohboy... this definitely comes under the heading of "Be careful what you wish for." I'm guessing ol' Wayne hasn't read very much O. Henry or seen too many episodes of "The Twilight Zone". It would be kind of embarrassing for somebody whose job was to speak for a firearms lobby to have to tell people he's not allowed to own a gun just because he's crazier than an outhouse rat.

110526- A joke

.....I don't know why pundits keep speculating about the possibility of Sarah Palin running for president. Even the voices in her head have started to pretend that they can only speak Spanish just to avoid having conversations with her.

110525- A joke

.....I don't know why pundits keep speculating about the possibility of Sarah Palin running for president. In her new self-aggrandizing documentary, one of the few people singing her praises is Andrew Breitbart. That's like saying, "Friends? Sure, I've got friends! Charles Manson still answers my letters..."

110524- A joke

.....The conclusion of the Oprah Winfrey Show will be marked by a limited edition commemorative dildo known as the Insteadman.

110521- A joke

.....I've heard the news out of Cannes recently. Director Lars Von Trier was banned for comments that he understood Hitler. Von Trier apologized and said he meant it as a joke. Considering what an ass he's always been, I actually find it more believable that he would find that funny than that he would empathize with anyone. Still, the festival organizers aren't letting him back in. There has to be a more direct way of saying "Ten years ago we sat through your excruciatingly painful movies because you showed a lot of promise and thought you were finding your voice. It took us this long to figure out that was your voice."

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."

100511- A joke

.....Shortly after President Obama announced that his nominee for Supreme Court Justice was King Solomon there was harsh criticism on talk radio and the blogsphere, much of it repeating Rush Limbaugh's accusation that the nominee was "a radical-left activist who once tried to socialize a baby."

100505- A joke

.....Politically, you can divide people into groups according to how they watch nature documentaries. There are those who are willing to sit through the hunt-and-kill segments in order to get to the courtship-and-mating segments (on the left), those who sit through the courtship-and-mating in order to get to the hunt-and-kill (on the right) and those who make a point of reading the credits (Ralph Nader).

100504- A joke

.....True story: about 20+ years ago I was watching the US broadcast television premiere of the movie "Godzilla: 1985". No, that's not the joke. It was broadcast TV, so there were paid advertisements. One of the ads was for a device that promised to shield your telephone conversations from electronic surveillance. It came complete with actors playing people who seemed to have serious anxieties about people listening in on their conversations, then expressed appropriately melodramatic relief and confidence once the device was attached to the receiver. I sat there watching that ad and thinking to myself, "Somebody paid money to run that ad. Somebody paid more money than I'm going to earn this year to run that ad. For what? How many people who could conceivably need this product are likely to see that ad? What are the odds that Henry Kissinger was sitting around snarfing cheese doodles and watching "Godzilla: 1985" that night? "He-e-e-ey, dot vould gome in quvite handy, I tink." The whole point of ads like that is that they rely on a certain percentage of the viewers being extremely stupid, or at least too stupid to understand the basics of cost effectiveness analysis. Wiretaps aren't magic. With the technology that existed at the time there would be the cost of the hardware to consider, plus the cost of the installation, plus the cost in man-hours of monitoring any recordings. Now, the only reason someone would fund all of those expenses up front would be if they anticipated that the information culled from the phone conversations would be worth more than the money they invested.

.....All I knew was that if I was holding onto information that valuable, I sure as hell wouldn't be spending my evenings sitting around watching edited Godzilla movies. I'd be watching them uncut and subtitled on VHS.

100423- A joke

.....I enjoy puns and you may see some occasionally on this blog. I understand that not everyone appreciates them as I do. Alexander Pope once said that the pun is the lowest form of humor. I don't know if anyone ever pointed this out to him, but somebody who had to go through junior high school with the last name "Pope" probably isn't going to be the most objective voice in this matter. Having to put up with "How'd you do on the test, Mr. Infallible?" and "Hey, I got a ring you can kiss!" is bound to influence your opinions. I'm just saying.

100415- A joke

.....Today the Tea Party Express (a private company created to siphon resources off from Ron Paul's group) ends its tour in Washington, D.C. They traveled around the country recently, making speeches about how they support "the troops" (paid for, fed, clothed, housed, armed, transported and hospitalized with tax dollars), how they want want the federal government to "keep their hands off our Medicare" (paid for, administrated and distributed with tax dollars), how they want to strengthen national borders (supervised with tax dollars) and how much they love Scott Brown (recently elected in an off-season special election requiring extra tax dollars and salaried with tax dollars) as they roll their large trucks over the nation's highways (surveyed, built and regularly maintained and policed with tax dollars) by burning cheap American gas (subsidized by tax dollars) to tell everyone how bad taxes are.

.....Because it's the rest of us who "just don't get it", and other meaningful phrases.

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.

100407- A joke

.....Another cliche that really needs to be retired is, "A face that could stop a clock". It only makes sense for mechanical clocks that run on counterbalanced weights that can be thrown off by severe shocks. While it's possible that there are still specialist craftsmen somewhere in the world building purely wooden cuckoo clocks out of a loving sense of red-eyed spite, that's just not something that's common to most people's experience anymore. Not only are most clocks digital readouts, but even mechanical sweep-hand clocks run on electrical current. You can turn them upside and shake them and they don't lose time, let alone stop. Normally in these cases all you'd have to do is just exchange outdated technology for modern, relevant technology the way Bob Hope used to use the same jokes repeatedly for sixty years. Hope exploited the pathological laziness and bigotry of the entertainment industry and their propensity for pigeon-holing people according to physical appearance. Jokes about Billy Barty became jokes about Paul Williams became jokes about Gary Coleman. Jokes about Jane Mansfield became jokes about Marilyn Monroe became jokes about Ursula Andress became jokes about Dolly Parton became jokes about Pamela Anderson... He stopped writing new material in 1935.

.....Anyway, the problem with the "stop a clock" cliche is that most of the things that react to sudden violence yield positive results these days, and the cliche is intended to be an insult. Somehow, "You've got a face that could light a glow-stick" or "You've got a face that gets my remote to work" just doesn't have the same gravitas. You can't go too far in the other direction, either. "You've got a face that could snap a baby's vertebrae" goes wa-ay over the line beyond snide put-down. The whole point is to straddle the line between playfulness and condescension, which is more difficult than it sounds. That's the reason people continue using the same phrases even after they've become cliches and even after they've passed the point where their derivation makes any logical sense. It's just so hard to find a replacement. Until something better comes along, I suggest "You've got a face that Dick Cheney deserves."

100403- A joke

.....The upcoming edition of The Chicago Manual of Style will include a revision requiring any use of the phrase "when hell freezes over" to be replaced with the phrase "when Nancy Grace blinks".

100401- Menu Options

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100317- A joke

.....For St. Patrick's Day, I felt I should forego tired old cracks about alcohol and leprechauns. I'm not above stealing material (a joke every day without fail is easy some days and nearly impossible others). The thing is, falling back on ethnic stereotypes feels even more lazy than it does offensive. I would like to think I had more self-respect than that. Instead, I'd like to use today's space to send out a warm, traditional Irish welcome to the man who has done the most to keep the spirit and memory of St.Patrick alive in these modern times: Mr. Samuel L. Jackson. Because let's face it, if you're overrun with snakes, who are the two people you think of?

100302- A joke

.....If there's anything worse than recording artists who can't sing using autotune programs to pretend that they can, it's artists who can sing using autotune programs to pretend that they can't. Why are people like Mary J. Blige wasting their time with robotic voices? Could you imagine the Metropolitan Opera hiring Luciano Pavarotti or Leontyne Price twenty years ago, and then when they got there handing them a kazoo and saying, "All the kids are doing it?"

100227- A joke

.....I'm sure many of you are a bit confused about why a huge powerful country like China throws a conniption fit whenever anyone mentions the Dalai Lama. The short, obvious answer is that he's a living testament to their half century effort at ethnic genocide of the Tibetan culture. If you're going to invade a country for completely illegitimate reasons, it would behoove you to make sure the leader was a thoroughly unsympathetic son-of-a-bitch whose subjects wouldn't dream of smuggling to safety at the risk of their own lives (what? I never mentioned Iraq; did I mention Iraq?) and not a pacifist who devoted his life to better understanding the human experience.
.....No, I believe China's apoplectic temper tantrums have something to do with koans. Koans have been described as zen riddles, questions that have no answers... or infinitely many answers. In fact they're intellectual disciplinary exercises. The eternal bane of dogmatic ideologies like Maoism and fundamentalist religions, koans aren't meant to be answered. They're meant as mental training for approaching any question no matter how difficult by posing one that can't be answered definitively. More is learned by the pursuit of the answer than would ever be learned by the actual answer, had one existed.
.....At some point, the Chinese communists became convinced that Buddhists were simply tricking everyone; that there were answers to all of those questions, and the Buddhists were hogging them all to themselves. By their reckoning, the slaughter and/or enslavement of millions was a small price to pay for knowing "how high is up". The clue that tipped them off was the lifestyle of the monks themselves. Many were brought to the monastery as young boys, got their heads shaved and wore a simple robe every day into adulthood. The communists refused to believe that anybody who spent their entire puberty in a remote temple surrounded by other boys didn't know what the sound of "one hand clapping" was.

100225- A joke

.....How come nobody remembers John Lennon as "the guy who broke up Fluxus"?

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."