Deal With The Devil

A scientist Christian attempts to create an artificial womb using cow parts and spare tires, to allow fetuses to survive after being removed from their mothers.  The scientist hopes this will prevent abortions, not by keeping the babies alive, but because the legal reasoning behind Roe v. Wade dictates that you can only abort a fetus if it would die outside of the mother.  The cow womb would make fetuses technically viable without the mother within the first week of pregnancy, meaning almost no babies could legally be aborted.

The scientist Christian hates abortion because he hates when people try to "play God"; being only semi-retarded, he realizes that his artificial womb is also playing God, so his intention is to invent the womb, use it once to prove that it works, then destroy the machine after abortion is outlawed.  His plan works perfectly, until he discovers the unintended consequences of his passion:  the scientist, a fun-loving bachelor living fast in the big city, has to raise the baby he grew in the cow machine.

Will he learn to live with this little demon, or will he end up changing his mind about abortion?  One thing's for sure:  he'll find out what it means to deal with the devil!

Starring Eddie Murphy and Jonathan Lipnicki.  Directed by Tyler Perry.  Rated PG.

"That kid is gonna end up killing me..."

Where will Lebron land?

I'm going to admit to having only recently purchased Empire State of Mind.  Jay-Z's verses are pretty half-assed, but I had a hankering to hear Alicia Keys on the hook, one part in particular.  Basically, I payed $1.29 to hear a hot chick say to me "There's nothing you can't do".  What's pathetic is that it's not even a sex thing.

 Not sure why she does this weird half-squat thing.  It may be a sign that she's amassed too much power, and that she's surrounded by people who are afraid to tell her the truth.

Accounting For Taste

It's like, hey man, how do we know that the orange that you see is the same as the orange that I see, what if what's orange to you is more like green to me?  Maybe we can solve the problem of the qualia by asking some color-sound synesthesiacs what orange sounds like; if they all say that orange sounds like a middle C on a Hammond Organ, then maybe orange is the same for everyone.  Bad poets love to use a good simile to convey their subjective mind-states, why can't scientists do the same?

We could take it one step further and ask some sound-taste synesthesiacs what different musics taste like, perhaps you'd hear them say, "yes, Ke$ha's voice tastes like shit, then again, I like the taste of shit."

Even her handwriting is deliberately awful.

Too Hot For TV

On Slate's doublex blog for womyn, an individual named Lauren Bans clucks about the Daily Show's "woman problem", and how, until just now, they hadn't hired a new female correspondent since Samantha Bee came on staff in 2001.   Bans is of course correct that this dry spell is pathetic and possibly sexist, but in the second half of the post, it becomes clear that the only reason she even brought this up was so she could make bitchy comments about Olivia Munn, the woman the Daily Show actually just hired as a new correspondent.

Maybe the problem isn't that men are misogynist, but that women fucking hate each other. 

Now why might the doublex blog have an instinctual dislike of Olivia Munn?

You Fascinate Me.

I just came to a realization:  the best way to get people to read my writing is by posting comments on their blogs.  By pretending to be interested in their thoughts, I can trick them into being interested in mine.  It took me way too long to wise up to this angle, perhaps because I refuse to make small talk. 

Courage

The New York Times has a piss-ant competition for its readers to define "Courage".  I'm almost afraid to admit this, but I submitted the following:

"Courage is being afraid of looking like a pussy."

I thought about changing it to, "Courage is when you're afraid of looking like a coward", because I was concerned they'd reject the submission for being vulgar.  But then I got worried that the softer wording would make me look like a bitch.

The Humanity

In the War on Terror, most of 'Merica's recent attacks against the terrorists have been carried out by robots, specifically by Predator drones.  In classic fashion, the counter-strikes against terrorists have been met by counter-charges of terrorism, with the Taliban and al-Qaeda accusing the US of wantonly killing civilians.

The US claims that the drones are incredibly accurate, that they've killed 400-500 enemy combatants and only 20 civilians, and that those civilians only died because the terrorists used them as human shields to obtain public sympathy.  Meanwhile, by Pakistan's estimates, the drones have killed only 14 terrorist leaders and 700 civilians.  As a result, some scholars have questioned the ethics of using drones, saying they've distanced us from the human costs of war, and that we're sacrificing the lives of innocent foreign civilians in order to avoid risking our own men.  Many fear that the drones are so despised in Af-Pak, that they've become a recruiting tool for al Qaeda. 

In the War for Hearts and Minds, the use of drones is in large part a PR decision, and its a sticky one.  Obama (in)famously voiced concerns during the '08 campaign that we needed more troops in Afghanistan so that "we are not just air raiding villages and killing civilians"; now, under his watch, drone attacks in Pakistan are four-times more frequent than under Bush.  This Reuters article says that he chose to use drones because if we went into Pakistan with troops, we'd inflame the Pakistani populace, and jeopardize our alliance with that country.  Additionally, capturing and detaining the militants might create another Gitmo or Abu Ghraib scandal, so the best strategy is to simply kill them from afar.  Meanwhile, the Pakistani government, who are forced by local politics to oppose the strikes, are secretly "providing more behind-the-scenes assistance than in the past", helping us locate terrorist targets. 


So much of this war is fought in the theatre of public opinion, and the US has to admit that weapons like the MQ-9 Reaper Hunter/Killer have a bit of an image problem.  Looking at this picture from Slate, its easy to see why some might view them as soulless machines of indiscriminate destruction.

There's something really freaky and inhuman about the lack of windows. 

This guy was in Pan's Labyrnth.  He had no eyes on his face, and an indiscriminate appetite to devour anything he could get his hands on.  This movie was praised for the craft of it's psychological brutality.

The Cylons, even though they were fighting on behalf of robot-supremacy, had the decency to anthropomorphize their Cylon Raiders, which were arguably more sympathetic than the craggy visage of Edward James Olmos.

Hate Mail, Vol. 2, I Challenge You To a Dialectic

This post is the second in a series of (selected works of) the (jealousy-fueled?) hate mail I send to professional writers.  This, and all other hate mails, can be interpreted:  a) as a cathartic purging of un-sublimated sexual aggression  b) through the metaphor of a dog shitting on the bed.

Today's target is Simon Critchley, an author and a professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York.  Critchley is curating a series about philosophy in the NYTimes, and he starts things off with an essay titled "What is a Philosopher?"  Critchley, channeling Plato, opens by feinting in the direction of self-deprecation, joshing about the philosopher's reputation as a man who dawdles around with his head in the clouds, but this quickly proves to be false-modesty, as the essay pivots towards self-aggrandizement.  

According to Critchley, the philosopher is not one who dilly-dallies, the philosopher is one who deliberates, while the rest of the world bustles through their daily routines.  The philosopher isn't oblivious to society's conventions, the philosopher is immune from their restrictions; free in mind to notice and criticize the faults of anyone and anything.  This makes the philosopher a danger to the status quo, and this is why so many philosophers have been censored and executed throughout the course of history.   It appears that, in Critchley's mind, the philosopher is like Tupac.

. . .

Hello Simon Critchley,

I challenge you to a dialectic.  I posted the following in the comments thread of your NYTimes article, as well as on my own personal blog, http://trivialpursuittheblog.blogspot.com/.

Society doesn't censor or execute philosophers, instead it gives them unlimited time and freedom to speak their minds.  This is called tenure.

The catch is, no one actually listens to what they have to say, because no one (except other philosophers) actually cares.  There's little point in killing these people when you can stick them in a tower, tell them it's status and freedom, when in fact it's a quarantine of pariahs, where they'll trifle away, arguing only over things that can't be proven.

This is, of course, only one view, and you're free to challenge it, at your leisure.  Such is the nature of your existence.

Ken Drinkwater

. . .

Go to hell, Simon Critchley.

. . . 

Mon, May 17, 2010 at 7:06 AM

Update:  Simon Critchley Responds

thank you ken,

i wish i had the time i described in my article to answer in full, but i have to get my son breakfast.
but basically you're right.
best

simon

. . .

On the surface, he concedes the battlefield and lays down his weapon, admitting, not only that I'm right, but also announcing that he is not really a philosopher, because he doesn't have the time.  

Under the surface, he subtly shifts the war to a broader theatre, making stealthy, passive-aggressive personal attacks through insinuation.  By taking a polite tone and making a joke, he pretends to the high road.  By mentioning his son, he points out my evolutionary failure while understatedly asserting, "I have a life, you do not, and I don't deign to debate you".  The artfulness of this passive-aggression is that I can't prove any of it.

  

 Fuck you, Simon Critchley.

Role Playing

What the hell is a sex surrogate, anyway?  Can you hire one and ask her to just pretend she's a prostitute?

 I never actually bought into Dr. Melfy.  She suffered from Sam Waterson Syndrome, where the actor doesn't seem smart enough to do the character's job.

Lady Antebellum?

Did you know there's a band called Lady Antebellum?  This may surprise you, but it's a country band composed of Southerners.  One of them is a hot chick, who presumably represents the Pre-Civil War South.  This is some smart marketing because it allows their hick audience to fantasize about having sex with the idea of slavery.

 Things were better for all of us back then.

Clever Girl...

This is sort of shocking, but Sarah Palin is not the only person who thinks it's witty to say "Lamestream Media", it looks like its some sort of hot meme in the Tea Party community.  This is deeply troubling; it indicates these people are even stupider than we thought.

First of all, "lame" doesn't exactly rhyme with "main", it doesn't start with the same letter, it doesn't really do anything.  This is a level of cleverness that would be self-redacted by the Ying-Yang Twins.

Second, in terms of substance, "lame" isn't the most pointed barb you could use against the media, not if you're trying to communicate that they're dishonest or at least delusional.  "Lame" is at the level of specificity that a 13-year old comprehends, where they understand that some things are "cool", and others are "like so not cool", but they aren't really equipped to articulate why. 

Honestly, it seems like they should have just gone with "Fagstream Media".

Judge a moron not by its worst moments, but by those times when it claims to be at its best. - Thomas Jefferson

Ooh Child

CoCo was on 60 Minutes this Sunday, and when talking about being elbowed out of the Tonight Show, he said this: "Everything happens for a reason."

Usually when someone says that, it means their house burned down, their first born died, or they just found out they have to live with a colostomy bag. In Conan's case, he got a $32 million severance, his enemies look like idiots and assholes, and he has a new show on TBS, with more control and fewer expectations than he had at NBC.  Oh yeah, people also treat him like a martyr.  There's got to be a silver lining in there somewhere.

Jay Leno turned himself into a George Bush-figure, now people will support Conan just to put their names down on the right side of history.

 
This is like an episode of Entourage, where Vinny's occasional failures inevitably lead to him becoming more famous. The lesson on that show is always the same, that you can't win them all, because sometimes the consolation prize is better, and you have to end up losing those ones.

 Vinny Chase, having a bad day.

I have no idea what this guy's saying half the time, which is part of the beauty of having a French vocalist - just pretend it's something relevant to the current situation.

Performance Anxiety

I just watched a DVD of the Upright Citizens Brigade's Asssscat improv show; as is usually the case, the live audience was laughing a lot harder than seemed warranted.  People often ascribe this phenomena to the "communal experience", where the crowd feeds off itself through the empathetic response.  Another explanation is that the audience paid good money to have a good time, and goddammit that's what they're going to do.

But in the case of Assssscat, which was performed in the tiny, 92-seat UCB Theatre, it seems like the laughter-threshold of the audience was lowered by a subconscious politeness-mechanism, where the audience unwittingly feels like it would be assholish to not laugh at the somewhat clever antics of the comedy brigade.  The setting is so intimate that the actors can see the faces of every member of the audience, and each of these audience members may feel that they themselves are putting on a reciprocal performance for the sake of the actors.

Asssscat, all up in my grill.

This is like when you're meeting someone for the first time, where you feel like you're each assessing each other, and the pressure to accept and be accepted causes you to laugh at each other's shitty jokes.  Of course, that only applies when the two people actually care what the other person thinks; with comedy, if the audience doesn't respect you, they won't bother with polite laughter.

The social pressure is not just in the audience's mind, on Comedy and Everything Else, stand-ups Todd Glass and Jimmy Dore discuss taking it personally whenever there's some fucker in the audience who's not laughing.  They also say that anytime someone gets up and leaves during a show, they'll neurotically assume it was because the person hated their act, not because the babysitter just called with an emergency.

Doug Benson likes to talk about how, ever since he established himself as the preeminent stoner-comic, some hardcore drug-dealer types will come to his show, and sit in the front row with thuggish expressions on their faces the whole time.  This consumes Doug throughout his set, he's worried they want to kick his ass because of how shitty his material is, but after the show, they'll come up to him and give him daps, telling him how much they loved it.  These gangsters don't have the polite-laughter mechanism ingrained in them, and that makes them stand out among Doug's crowd.

The phenomenon doesn't transfer to large venues.  Many comedians have talked about much harder it is to control a big audience of several thousand people. This is because, in a large crowd, the people don't feel the need to kiss your ass.  Its like being on the streets of New York, people won't even acknowledge your existence; meanwhile, if you're in Middleton, Wisconsin, you're considered a jerk if you don't greet every passerby with a nod and a smile.

But even if the chuckles at these comedy shows are born out of anxiety rather than humor, that doesn't mean they're invalid.  People go to haunted houses to feel scared, and on rollercoasters to feel nauseous, why shouldn't there be some way to induce awkward laughter?

I Shouldn't Be Alive

You've probably become aware of a show on the Discovery Channel called I Shouldn't Be Alive.

Take a look at these hands...

Up until now, it's focused on tales of survival by real-life outdoorsmen, guys are only alive because of their ability to react and their steely resolve. 

We're still waiting for the tale of woe by the depressive shut-in, a guy who's only alive because of his failure to act and his lack of resolve. 

Peg, It Will Come Back To You

On an old episode of Jordan Jesse Go, Jordan says that he's attracted to the redheaded woman in the Progressive ads.  He must have an extraordinary ability to apply real-world standards to people on TV, because on TV, this bitch looks like Ronald McDonald.

If you try really hard, you can imagine her being borderline-doable, but not the type of doable where you'd admit what you'd done.  Jordan, you surprise me.

I did a little more research, and it turns out that "Flo" is not her real name, she's actually a stand-up comedian/actress named Stephanie Courtney, and she's actually pretty good-looking, you can barely tell its the same person. 

That clown make-up cleans-off nice.

That's one good thing about having such an over-the-top costume when playing an obnoxious character:  once she takes off the disguise, she's no longer recognizable as that worthless person.

Meanwhile, there are these Clairol commercials where Angela Kinsey, the woman who plays Angela from The Office, is selling some sort of woman's product.  She's acting and dressing much more normal, and objectively speaking, you can tell she's an attractive person, but all I can see is the hideous shrew she plays so well on The Office.

Ta-Da! Sorry, still revolting.

This is the classic Ned Beatty phenomenon, where you get your foot in the door by giving an indelible performance, then spend the rest of your career trying to make people forget it.  Congratulations Ned, you're famous...for squealing like a pig while getting raped by a hick.

 Is this selling-out, or is it the opposite?  Did he suffer for his art or pay for his sins? 

Finding Your Audience

In the absence of any responsible authority, Conservatives have ceded control of their party to a free-market solution, granting their political leadership by default to the personalities that have been most successful in the realm of media, people like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.

This has worked out well for them in terms of getting attention and making noise, but politically, the long-term effects might be disastrous to their party; the business model of the media is completely different from that of a political party.  Media personalities gain publicity by saying outrageous things, but politicians often avoid saying anything substantive at all; media personalities can succeed by appealing strongly to a small minority, but political parties can succeed only by winning the favor of the majority. 
 
To be a successful politician, you want approval ratings above 50%; to get the job of President, you need at least 60 million votes, or about 1 in 5 Americans.

To be a successful cable TV host like Glenn Beck, you need Nielsen ratings of fewer than 2 million viewers, or about 1 in 150 Americans. 

To be a successful author like Sarah Palin, you need to sell books to about 1 million people, or about 1 in 300 Americans. 

Palin near her Alaska home, seeing Russia in the distance, as Putin rears his head.

Beck made $2 million off his TV show last year, and leveraged that exposure to make an additional $30 million dollars through other outlets.  Palin made $7 million off her book, Going Rogue, and has made $12 million total since leaving office last July.  Beck and Palin have been hugely successful as media personalities, but it's a mistake for the GOP to take its cues from them:  they've succeeded by targeting what the media calls a niche; in politics, it's called the fringe. 

There aren't very many political movements where the business model is similar to that of a media figure, where the goal is to have strong appeal to a narrow audience.  The one exception is a terrorist organization; they don't need broad popular support for their cause, they just need to win over a few zealots, who'll bully the rest of society to cave into their demands.  

By ceding control of their movement to the media business model, the conservative movement has ended up using the same business model used by terrorist organizations.  This has coincided with the rise of the Tea Party, a media-driven performance-group that's grown rapidly by courting the fringe and pulling publicity stunts.  Its relevant to note that, from a strictly tactical standpoint, the Boston Tea Party was a terrorist act; morally it was justifiable, but their methods involved a small group using violence to draw attention and coerce political change.

Last month, a Tea Party organizer tried to post the address of Democratic Representative Thomas Perriello and urged Tea Party members to "drop by".  One of the Tea Party-people ended up going to the house and cutting the gas line, even though the house actually belonged to Perriello's brother.  Fortunately no one died.

There were also the brick throwing incidents, where a conservative blogger goaded people across the country into smashing the windows of Democratic party offices:  "We can break their windows.  Break them NOW. And if we do a proper job, if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.”  Of course, like any good terrorist, he was quick to claim responsibility after his followers carried out his orders; this probably got his blog a ton of extra traffic.

This is the actual brick that broke the window of the Monroe County Democratic Committee Office.  You can tell its authentic because the spelling is wrong. 

Everyone knows that politicians are relentless self-promoters, but the burden of needing a majority to win office has usually kept them from being too reckless and sensational.  But now, the most prominent Conservative voices are no longer politicians, instead they're media personalities like Palin or media-driven performance-groups like the Tea Party.  They're not trying to get elected, they're just trying to get attention, so they can sell their books or their blogs to a fringe audience. 

Michelle Bachmann might currently hold office, but the way she conducts herself, it seems more like she's lining up a tv show or a book deal, as she says herself, "When I came to Congress, I didn’t come here to stay here as a fixture for ever and ever."

Last week, Bill Clinton gave a speech to commemorate Oklahoma City, in it he said that one of the lessons of that bombing was that political leaders need to be careful about the words they use, to avoid inciting their unstable followers to violence.   He said, "one of the things that the conservatives have always brought to the table in America is a reminder that no law can replace personal responsibility. And the more power you have and the more influence you have, the more responsibility you have." 

That's precisely the problem: due to the current leadership void, the Conservatives who have all the influence are no longer being held accountable by the need to win a majority; their only pressure is create a strong appeal to a small group of extremists.  Glen Beck and Sarah Palin have done a great job as de facto leaders, inciting passions among their followers, but I doubt we'll see them claim responsibility if something tragic happens.

This happened in the Midwest, not the Middle East.

Fine Dining, Good Eatin'

A proper formal table setting typically calls for three forks, three spoons, and two knives, each intended for its specific course.

I don't really know which fork is for what, I usually just try to turn whatever I'm served into a sandwich.

Start Being Real

Unless you've been out of circulation for the past couple years, you probably noticed this a while ago:  there are about a million prison-themed documentary shows on TV, shows such as Lockup, Lockup: Raw, Lockdown, and Locked Up Abroad.

The slew isn't all that surprising, after all, prison is fascinating (for example, Prison: Where You're Free to be Gay).  What's more surprising is that there aren't also more fiction shows and movies based around incarceration.

Maybe part of the reason for the disparity is that, when people are looking for a show about prison, they're looking for authenticity, and no made-up shit is going to cut it (for example, on OZ, Evan Seinfeld (a Jew) played a Skinhead; then again, maybe a lot of Jews actually do end up having to "blend in" with the Aryan Nation).

 Of all the dicks Tera Patrick has been with, this is the only one she get's criticized for.

But prison is just about the most authentic place in the world, where people stop being polite, and start getting real.  That slogan always sounded fake on The Real World, and not just because a bunch of white people co-opted the usage of "real" from prison (by way of hip-hop).  It was also because, even in its early days, everyone knew that "Reality TV" was utterly fake, not because the situations were so artificial, but because the people were all such goddamn poseurs. 

In prison, if you're fake, you get shanked.

Prison is full of rule-breakers, people who don't understand the number one rule in society:  pretend you like the people around you.  In a society of phonies, these prison documentaries are the only option for true reality programming.

Puritanical Outrage Pornography

Last Friday, The Chicago Tribune saw fit to publish 892  words of Puritanical Outrage Porn, and I am disgusted!

Sports columnist John Kass devoted an entire column to this smut, telling a story about a father and his six-year-old son going to the bathroom at a White Sox game.  Supposedly a pair of "quivering" legs were sticking out of one of the stalls. 

"'It was bizarre. It caught the attention of a lot of people. I tried to turn my boy's attention away from it, then I thought, ‘Is someone having a seizure?'

'So I kicked the door, just to get a reaction. I just wanted to make sure nobody was dying in there. That's when I heard a woman's voice yell, ‘HEY, STOP!' Something was going on and I had interrupted.'

Moments later, the stall door opened, and a tall, thin, blond man exited. The tall man held his arms up in triumph.

'His arms were straight up, like in victory,' Nemeth said. 'Everybody was hooting and hollering and giving high-fives.'

Then a second person left the stall, someone Nemeth described as apparently female, "scurrying" out of the restroom with a shirt or coat over her head.'

This is some pretty titillating stuff to print in a family newspaper, so of course that means the erotica has to be couched in a frame narrative.  That's the literary device used in the movie The Princess Bride, where the story starts and ends with Columbo reading the book version of "The Princess Bride" to Kevin Arnold.  This allows Grandpa to use the story to do some moralizing.

The year...was nineteen hundred and thirty two.  The bride...was a princess.

As you know, in Puritanical Outrage Porn, the pornographic narrative is framed by the pornographer issuing moral condemnations against all the sexy stuff the audience came for.  This allows a hack writer (or a concerned father) to get a ton of extra attention, all while he and his audience pretend to be morally superior.  Here's how Kass ends the story:

"'This guy will talk about this experience for the rest of his life,' said Nemeth, sarcastically. 'How he did it in the bathroom at a Sox game. What a man.'

Not really.

The guy in the stall isn't a man. He's protoplasm in a T-shirt, smelling of beer.

And I doubt that he's a dad."

What about the kids indeed.  You might remember that classic move from when they used it on Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton.  The Puritans condemn the fornicators for exposing children to acts of immorality, but by issuing these condemnations, the media actually exposes more children to the acts of immorality.

One of the worst Puritanical Outrage Pornographers of all time is D.A. David McDade, who distributed 35 copies of a sex tape to reporters, lawmakers, and members of the public.  The video is of High School football star Genarlow Wilson, "then 17, receiving oral sex from a 15-year-old girl and having intercourse with another 17-year-old girl."  They prosecuted Wilson for statutory rape, but maybe they should have prosecuted the DA for child pornography.

In another case, two High School sophomore girls took  pictures of themselves licking phallus-shaped lollipops.  They posted the photos to their private MySpace account, so only their friends could see, but apparently one of these "friends" forwarded the pictures to the High School Principal.  The Principal distributed the pictures to the all-male athletic board then forced the girls to apologize to the men in person for degrading the school.  Hey, whatever floats your boat.

If these Puritans would stop prying into these acts, fewer people would be defiled by the knowledge, but then they wouldn't have an excuse to distribute all this smut, and I wouldn't have something to talk about in my blog.

Celebrity Sperm Bank

If you were forced to raise the illegitimate son of some male celebrity, and the guy was going to be totally out of the picture, what celebrity's kid would you want to raise?

 Women love this guy, but its possible that men like him even more.  He's handsome, cool, and has good taste. 

James Blake might be a good choice, he's a professional tennis player, he went to Harvard, he's handsome (although I'm not partial to him), and he seems like an all-around decent guy. 

Then there's Larry David, he's un-athletic, unattractive, and sort of an asshole, but I'd probably choose his kid over anyone else's.  What does that say about my values?  Maybe it just means his kid would be one of the few I'd actually feel superior to, like a father's supposed to.