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. 

Makin' Green

I finally got around to watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth; this was part of my ongoing "Several Years Behind Reality Tour", which has recently included: Inside Man by Spike Lee, Set Yourself On Fire by Stars, and still getting pissed off by George Bush. 

So yeah, I'm a little late to the party on this, but that's fitting:  I just gotta say that Gore won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for telling people a bunch of shit they already know.  His whole goal was to change people's minds, but the only people who'll listen to him are liberals who already agree.  No self-respecting ignoramus is going to spend $10 to watch a dork they voted against give a depressing lecture about something they don't want to confront; the inconvenient truth is that Gore's whole approach was almost perfectly designed to alienate his target audience.

That actually looks like a cool movie.

Gore's greatest failing has always been his inability to connect with the common dullard, that's why he "lost" in 2000, and why this "great success" of a movie should be considered a failure; the prizes he won for it weren't awarded by the American populous, they were given to him by The Hollywood Elite, and the Norwegian Intelligensia - not exactly swing voters.  Gore needs to take a whole different approach and focus on reaching the climate-change-deniers he so badly wants to convert.

First of all, Gore is persona non grata among the target demo, he might actually be one of the least qualified human beings for the job of speaking to these morons.  Instead you either need someone they identify with, like Adam Carolla, or someone they want to fuck/cuddle/fuck, like Hayden Pannatiere.  I'm going to go with Hayden, when you find something beautiful, you can't help but care.

Damn.

Every time I watch a nature show, there's all this gorgeous scenery, then at some point, the narrator starts talking about how mankind is ruining everything; this is when I quickly change the channel, I simply can't tolerate hearing all the bad things we're doing.  There are probably a lot of people who feel the same way, who'd go out of their way to avoid hearing it.  For that reason, Gore had a terrible business model, of asking ignoramuses to pay to hear depressing facts.  Instead, ignoramuses should be forced to pay to not hear to depressing facts. 

Gore should put together a commercial for Hulu, starring Hayden Pannatiere, standing among a managerie of exotic species, before a backdrop of beautiful rainforest.  But then she starts listing depressing facts about how rapidly we're destroying the planet:

• "According to the World Resources Institute, more than 80 percent of the Earth’s natural forests already have been destroyed." - National Geographic 
• "Global warming may drive a quarter of land animals and plants to the edge of extinction by 2050." - New Scientist
• "When you pollute, it makes the Baby Jesus cry." - Knoxville News

As she's doing this, the adorable animals around her are dropping dead, the forest is blackening to ash, all the while, her face is aging and her voice is changing, and she gradually becomes Hilary Clinton.  Using Web 3.4 technology, the viewers would have the option of donating money in order stop the depressing facts and the hideous aging process:  if they don't pay up, they'll have to see that commercial every time they watch Hulu, if they do pay up, they'll instead be treated to a cute girl playing with funny animals.  The revenues could be used to buy rainforests or to win elections.  We could save the planet, not by trying educate the ineducable, but by allowing people to stick their heads in the sand...for a price.

Brief Note

You know, I've been making a lot of porn references lately, but only because its a titillating subject, I'm not like some pathetic loser or anything.  The truth is, I don't watch more than 3 minutes a day.

Technically one minute, three times.

Q&A

Adam Carolla was cranky yesterday, which means he went on a twenty-three minute tirade about Mexican immigrants.  He says that the problems in the LA educational system aren't due to bad schools or bad teachers, they're due to bad parents - specifically, Mexican parents.  He makes a convincing argument that if the parents don't care how the kid does in school, the kid is probably going to fail, but its a whole other ball of wax, whether Mexicans are more likely to be "bad parents" with regards to schooling; at any rate, I'll tackle Carolla from another angle, just so he can't play the "don't play the race card" card.

 There's the thinking cap, then there's the "anti-immigration cap", which is not so much the hat itself as the angle at which its worn.

The thing about Carolla is that he's a professional complainer;  he's good at finding problems, but bad at finding solutions.  How exactly does he think the government can fix "bad parents"?  Here are a few ideas of my own:

• Post the kids' grades on a societal refridgerator, but replace the names of the kids with the names of the parents.  This will shame the parents into shaming the kids.
• If your kid doesn't get good grades, you can't go out on the weekend. 
• We're taking the car away.

Here are a few of the ideas that Carolla has proposed himself, on this specific podcast and others:

• No more free-lunches for school children.  He thinks giving the poor kids free food encourages the parents to be lazy, if we stopped giving handouts, it would somehow force the parents to care.  This is an idea he proposed on some older podcasts, but not this one.  There's a real hypocrisy:  in the present he says we need to save kids from "bad parents", but in the past he said "bad parents" will magically give a shit if we stop saving their kids.  The only thing consistent about The Aceman is that he doesn't want the government spending his money, not on schools and teachers, and not on free lunches.
• No more fucking in these ghettoes and having too many goddamn kids.  This is something he said on this podcast and also in the past; in the aftermath of the Haiti Earthquake, he said a big part of the problem was that there were too many people down there, and that we need to "thin the herd".  He says no one's allowed to talk about this because then you get accused of being a racist - listen, Aceman the reason you get accused of racism is because you use cattle metaphors while talking about  population control on a specific race, even Hitler would have found that impolitic.  The thing is, there are tons of people who not only talk about overpopulation, they take action to prevent it; these people are called liberals, and they want to provide sex education, condoms, and access to abortion, not just to minorities but to trash of all colors.  Politically correct liberals are not the problem, they're the answer; the people you need to cull from the herd are the conservative wackjobs who try to prevent sex education.  That would be called a "final solution".

At one point, he goes off on a tangent about how, if your kid needs an emergency appendectomy, or if you need your tonsils out, you don't go to Tijuana, you go to San Deigo.  Why he asks?  "Because America is the best."  Actually, the reason is because in America, we have government regulations that prevent bad doctors from opening up shop, Ace doesn't want to admit that fact because he'd look like a hypocrite for complaining about all the "bullshit building codes" that make it a hassle when he's trying to add the Nth addition onto his mansion.

Near the end, Donny asks "What is The Left's ultimate plan?"  Before he can even get the question out, Ace shouts "THEY DON'T HAVE AN ULTIMATE PLAN...Their plan is this....'I don't want to ask any tough questions, and I don't want to point any fingers.'"

Here's a tough question for you, Carolla:  as a libertarian, how do you propose that we control the individual, how do we force these parents to better raise their kids without creating a totalitarian state?  You'll spend half an hour complaining about a parking ticket, what would you do if they wrote you up for talking about farting in your daughter's face or getting a boner while wrestling with your son?

For whatever reason, I always end up forgiving the Aceman; the greater question is, how do I forgive myself?  I point the finger and place the blame squarely on my own sorry ass for continuing to listen to this guy.

Head Fake

You know how basketball players complain after every call?  Do you think the reflexive lying and self-delusion becomes second nature, carrying over into day-to-day life?

 Ben Roethlisberger's got this move down.

You might say "its part of the game", or "all the other players do it", and that might excuse it in ethical terms, but they're still practiced in the act of dishonesty, and at some point it has to become easier.

If Bart were an adult, he wouldn't have that look of fear, instead it would be the holier-than-thou incredulity of the self-entitled American adult.

We assume that the constant sucking and fucking of a porn starlet somehow degrades her, makes her "easier" off-camera.  What she does is just "part of the show", and "all the other porn sluts do it", so we don't condemn her in moral terms, but we still assume she's going to be changed by it.

We also assume that an MMA fighter is changed by the violence he commits in the ring.  The other combatant has agreed to the fight, so its not like the beatings are evil, but we still assume that that guy is going to be a more brutal person in his day-to-day life.

I'm not trying to say basketball players are bad people.  Lying and self-delusion are the only way that most people can make it through the day, so in a way, being a basketball player might make you a better person.

45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president"  - Harris Poll, March 2010.

 A knowing wink, or an impression of Dick Cheney.