Low Standards

There's a Hampton Inn commercial where they brag about how they wash the sheets for each new guest.  Holy shit, all this time I'd been taking that for granted, now I'm wondering if I don't have (as yet asymptomatic (benign?)) crabs from a Quality Inn...I can almost feel them crawling on my nutsack.  Either this is a very ill-conceived commercial or I have to reconsider the whole concept of hotels.  It would be like if Denny's said they don't reuse food, of if a guy came on to girl by saying he showers on occasion. 

That slogan seems oddly sexual.  Hampton, I just wanted a place to crash, I didn't want to sleep with you, so please fuck off.

Share the Love

The logo invokes a pair of tits - two spherical orbs, between which lies a caring heart.  A savvy marketing strategy...my only criticism is that, by associating the tits with caring, it infantilizes the breast fetish.

Opening Day

It seems like they should change the idiom from "inside baseball" to just "baseball".

Then change the name of the show "Baseball Tonight" to "Baseball?  Not tonight..."

Reading People

Addressing the Conservative political arguments of Adam Carolla is sort of like kicking the shit out of a straw man, after all, the guy brags about how he "doesn't read" and how he "barely graduated High School";  intellectually speaking, there's no way he's representative of real Conservative thinkers.  Oh wait, George Bush "doesn't read" either, and he also almost flunked out of school, the same is true of Sara Palin, so maybe the Aceman is a perfect representative of Conservative America, in fact, he just might be the smartest one among them - at least he's coherent.

The courtship of the Conservative male:  1) Firm handshake.  2) Exchange business credentials.  3) Complain about taxes/government regulations.  4) Discuss national security.  5) Complain that you "can't say anything anymore without being called a racist." 6) If all goes well, consummate the relationship by using the n-word.

Carolla recently did a podcast with screenwriter-turned-conservative Roger Simon, a former liberal who took a hard right turn after 9-11.  Carolla lept at the chance to rant about the usefulness of waterboarding, and how stupid these Hollywood liberals are to oppose it:

"Hollywood people...you assholes don't know shit, you're actors, you barely know how to do that, just shut the fuck up when it comes to what's going on in Guantanamo Bay.  You don't know shit, let the professionals handle it, and that's the way I feel." - Adam Carolla.

Whoa, wait a minute, that's the way you feel Carolla, but you're just an actor, so shut the fuck up and let the professionals handle it.  Who exactly are the professionals?  Interestingly enough, probably not the people who were doing the waterboarding; in fact the CIA "interrogators" who implemented the practice had no prior experience doing interrogations:

"It's easy to forget that when the U.S. began interrogating al-Qaeda operatives in 2002, the CIA had no idea what it was doing. The last time the agency had been charged with conducting hostile interrogations was during the Vietnam era, and most of those officers were long retired."  - Robert Baer, Time Magazine

Robert Baer would know a thing or two about the Agency, he's an ex-CIA who, according to Seymour Hersh, "was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East."  Baer goes on to say:

"When the CIA was asked to resume hostile interrogations after Sept. 11, some agency leaders were dead set against it, arguing that the military was better equipped for the task. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted the job belonged to the CIA."

Classic Bush-era pro-ignorance decision-making.  But hey, the CIA got the job, and doesn't that automatically make them professionals? 

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. His interrogator, a former CIA colleague of mine, admits he had almost no training in the technique and knew nothing about how the cumulative effect of waterboarding might affect the quality of the information he was trying to extract."

Its too bad Baer's buddy didn't do a little research into the history of waterboarding, he might have found that:

"Waterboarding...was also acknowledged to have originated in "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War," a 1957 article written for the Air Force about abusive Chinese interrogations of U.S. troops during the Korean War. Anyone who wanted to could find it via Google for years."

That's right, waterboarding was invented by Communists to elicit false information.  Not only is it inhumane, not only does alienate us from the civilized world, it also gives us bad intelligence.  But then again, the Conservatives like Bush and Carolla have never cared if their information is accurate, just so long as they have something glib to say when its their turn to talk. 

Which reminds me, why am I wasting my time writing this, its not like I'm changing people minds.  If this blog is actually being read by anyone, its not by the illiterate ilk of Carolla and Palin; if you're reading this, there's a good chance you already knew everything I said, because people who actually bother to read shit, they tend to already know stuff.

Its an exercise in futility, trying to combat Conservative ignorance through the written word.

Head Games

If you're smart, you'll avoid brinksmanship, because a lot of times, that's a game where the winner is whoever's dumbest.

  

If its a tie, you both lose.

Adult Situations

According to the FCC website, a show can be branded with the TV-MA rating if it contains any of the following:

• (V)  Graphic Violence
• (S)  Explicit Sexual Activity
• (L)  Crude Indecent Language

Conspicuously absent are the old stand-by's of Adult Situations and Mature Themes, in fact, those designations don't apply to TV-14 either.  With that in mind, we're currently developing a pilot to exploit this legal loophole, with a show targeted at an audience of seven-year-olds.  The show would give them an irresistible glimpse into the unseen world of grown-ups.  According to the FCC guidelines, the show would be rated TV-PG, allowing it to circumvent the V-chip.

Kevin Nealon is playing a father, who's tucking his 6-year-old son Ben into bed.  Its Christmas Eve.

Kevin:  "OK, Benny, time to go to bed.  Remember, if you don't go to sleep, Santa won't come and give you presents."

Ben:  "OK, daddy, I love you!"

The father turns out the light and closes the door.  The kid tries to fall asleep but can't, the hands on the Mickey Mouse clock tick faster, denoting the passage of time; soon the kid is overwhelmed by his urge to catch a glimpse of Santa Clause.  He sneaks out of bed, quietly opens the door, and tip-toes down the hall.  He crouches near the top of the stairs, and peers through the banisters to see his Mommy (Jennifer Anniston)  sitting on the couch, hunched over the coffee table, while Daddy stands inspecting the tree. 

Mommy's drinking the bad-smelling-stuff.  They're speaking in a whisper, but its a loud, piercing whisper, like they're yelling at each other with inside-voices.  There are unwrapped presents on the table, the kid can't tell if its what he wanted.  Dad stoops over and picks up a wrapped present from under the tree.


Kevin Nealon:  "Could you please fix the tag on this thing?" 
Jennifer Aniston:  "No, that's not for Ben, that ones from Mommy to Daddy."
Kevin:  "No, you mean 'To Daddy, Love Mommy'...at least pretend that you still care about me."
Jennifer:  "Why, so Ben doesn't find out that Daddy is in love with a man he met at the racquetball club?"

Silence for half a minute...

Jen: "Did you remember to lock up?"
Kevin:  "You can do some work around here, for a change."
Jen:  "What, its your responsibility to protect this family, do you want Ben to find out you're too feeble and cowardly to actually defend us?  That's what I thought, go lock the doors."

Kevin locks the front door in a very angry manner...

Kevin:  "You know, I work very hard to provide for this family."
Jen:  "Maybe if you had more going for you, it wouldn't be such a struggle."
Kevin:  "I've made a lot of compromises for you!"
Jen:  "Are you referring to your morality?"
Kevin:  "What's that supposed to mean."
Jen:  "Well, your job is to trick people into buying a bunch of stuff they don't need at prices they can't afford.  In a way, everything you've given this family was taken from someone else."
Kevin:  "What choice do I have?"
Jen:  "Well, you could stop pretending to be a winner, and just admit to your son that you're a loser."
Kevin:  "Yeah, now that you mention it...why do I do all of this work, and buy all of these presents, just so a make-believe fat-man in a red suit can take all the credit.  It ends now, I'm going upstairs to tell Ben that Santa doesn't exist."
Jen:  "Don't you dare!"
Kevin:  "Everything we tell that kid is a lie!  My whole life is a lie, and its all because of Ben!"
Jen:  "Everyone lies to their kids, its part of being a parent!  Don't you go up those stairs!"

Kevin makes a big show of storming up the stairs, in his mind he's bluffing and he'll bail at any second, but when he gets to the landing, he sees his son lying on the ground next to several empty bottles of cough syrup and other medications.  He holds his dead son in his arms.

Kevin:  "He's in a better place now, where all the good lies come true."

Language Police

In this old David Foster Wallace article, he talks about the language police, whether they're providing a vital public service, or just being uptight.  This article was recommended by the Slate Culture Gabfest, and there's a lot of good stuff in here, so to avoid giving it short shrift, I'm going to disclaim that the following discussion addresses only one small facet of the issue, and ignores the utility of having multiple dialects.  

In one part, he mentions that "the notoriously liberal Webster's Third New International Dictionary came out in 1961 and included such terms as heighth and irregardless without any monitory labels on them."  In my view:

The word "heighth" seems totally invalid, I've never seen anyone using it, and if you use it yourself, its not a learned behavior, its just you being stupid.  And while it does communicate the intended meaning, it also unintentionally communicates that you're dumb.  Unintended communication seems like a form of mis-communication, which makes it safe to call "heighth" a crime.

"Irregardless" is nonsense, in that the user means the opposite of what they're literally saying, but at least enough people make that mistake that, if you do it yourself, you can just blame your parents.  The meaning is conveyed, and although it might communicate that the user was raised by trash, in this country (unlike the UK), most people don't admit to judging people by their parents, so I personally wouldn't hang someone over this word. 

This seems sort of like our country's approach to immigration:  the first wave that crosses the line gets treated like garbage, we do everything we can to get rid of that trash, or at least keep it confined to ghettos, but a few generations later, we start to accept the descendants into society and they slowly become assimilated.  Whoever is in power at the time conveniently overlooks the fact that they themselves are descended from immigrants, likewise, they forget that the English they speak now is descended from what once was considered improper.

Unfortunately, the exception is if you're black, society "ain't" gonna accept "y'all", no matter how much time passes.

The "Language Police" should be more like Immigrations Officers, who try to keep it manageable, limiting illegals to a slow trickle, so that for the most part, we can keep the riff-raff away from polite society, with the exception of the odd few that find ways to be useful. One can appreciate the role of Immigrations Officers while wanting nothing to do with them in day to day life, for example, one might be offended to see an arrest made a cocktail party, preferring instead that it be done out of their view.