Archive for September, 2009

Know Your Horoscope

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

horoscope

Aires: Good things are on your way, but you will have to wait.  While you’re waiting, bad things might happen too. It’s kind of a mixed bag that way.  Beware of falling objects, particularly when under them.  Remember that failure is a part of life, particularly when combined with ambitions to make money playing the clarinet.

Taurus: Romance is on the horizon, though heartbreak is on the vertical.  For this reason, stay low and flat. This month is a great time to pick up a new hobby, like stamp collecting or smoking.  The world is your oyster, meaning it is cold, slimy, and difficult to enjoy while driving through West Los Angeles

Gemini: Family is extremely important to you, particularly when borrowing money.  Remember that life is for the living, and those fancy towels with the white ruffles are for looking at only. Embrace your roots, but not too tightly, particularly when in the south. Your lucky number is cosine.

Cancer: Remember the wise proverb from that guy who used to work at 7-11 and always sold you day-old hotdogs for 50% off: Good luck comes to those who earn it, but then again, so does Chlamydia.  That certain special someone in your life is thinking about your tax return and when you are going to get around to filing it.

Leo: Beware the Ides of March.  The Youdes of April are no big deal.

Virgo: The planets have all aligned in such a way so that it is likely you will never be able to memorize Julius Caesar’s address to the Plebeians without giggling uncotrolably over the word “Plebian.”  Your motto: Mind over matter, but rock over scissor.

Libra: It’s time to reconnect with nature meaning your house will soon be foreclosed. Don’t sweat the small stuff like electrons.  The road to happiness begins with a single step, and also a whole lot of money.  Work on the latter first.

Scorpio: The position of Jupiter and Mercury indicate this is a great time to invest in new opportunities. Have I told you about my start-up company, Condiments Inc.? It’s a restaurant where we only serve condiments. Pretty cool huh? Call me.

Sagittarius: You put too much trust in the wrong people. A secret comes back to haunt you. You never go wrong following your heart, but don’t ignore your head. Try something new today. You have more spirit than you give yourself credit for. Beware of vagueness.

Capricorn: That sinking feeling you have deep in your stomach should not be ignored–licking the spoon is rarely appropriate when dealing with poultry.

Aquarius: Wow, there are a lot of these zodiac signs huh? Okay, uh, let’s see…uh, danger is everywhere and be careful and love for love’s sake is better than hate for hate’s sake and you get the idea, right?

Pisces: You will die. One day. And forever.

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Friday Links

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Back again with the ever-popular Friday links. So kick off your shoes, or if you aren’t wearing shoes, just kick something soft, and enjoy–

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A Little Yom Kippur Greeting

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News bloopers

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The Nightmare of Childrens’ Literacy is Over

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Jon Stewart: Moral Kombat

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Maybe they should serve this ice cream at the values summit

A broad in Asia?

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Free diseases! More Craigslist fun.

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Truly dark humor

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Cracking the CW Code

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

the-cw

I have cracked the formula for the CW’s primetime television lineup which includes such shows as Gossip Girls, 90210, and Melrose Place.  With this formula, one should be able to predict with some 72% accuracy how individual shows will develop as well as what future shows will look like.

Here is the key.

  1. Plot begins with an unfortunate misunderstanding resulting from a key character drawing a wildly inaccurate conclusion after misinterpreting a piece of data. [Example: Skinny Blond High School Girl (SBHG) walks into her boyfriend’s room and discovers a scrunchie that looks similar to one her old friend, Skinny Brunette High School Girl (SBrHG), wore in 6th grade and thus, becomes convinced her boyfriend is sleeping with SBrHG].
  2. A strange coincidence occurs which prevents the very simple misunderstanding from being cleared up. [SBHG confronts SBrHG to see where she was the night previous. SBrHG cannot tell her because she happened to be at a restaurant where she saw SBHG’s super rich father making out with the high school principal and doesn’t want to blow his cover because he promised her he’d help her get into some terrible Ivy League School that no one would ever really want to go to. Accusations and tears follow]
  3. The conflict is unnecessarily heightened by a third party that, for some reason, benefits from the misunderstanding. [SBHG’s sister, who really is sleeping with her boyfriend, encourages SBHG to stab SBrHG or at least write mean things about her on Twitter]
  4. Irrational anger and bizarre happenstances allow the simple misunderstanding to continue through many, many episodes. [Desperate to clear her name, SBrHG goes to tell SBHG the truth, but SBHG cuts her off, refusing to talk and calls her something so horrible that SBrHG changes her mind about telling her the truth and instead decides, for whatever reason, to actually sleep with SBHG’s boyfriend, which is fine with the boyfriend who is really only a prop in this show anyways].
  5. A new bad girl comes to town and does bad things that complicate everything. [She probably smokes and steals things. Later we will see her softer side in an emotional episode where we learn she used to be poor.]

Of course the formula is flexible. So with the new series The Vampire Diaries we can expect the added element of people also getting bit by vampires and maybe flying.  But the basic structure shouldl hold true.

PS (I have drawn this conclusion based on extensive research which includes watching 2 ½ episodes of Gossip Girls, 1 full episode of 90210 and the trailers for Melrose Place. Plus I went to the CW upfront back when I worked in advertising in 2007, where I just so happened to win a free recyclable tote bag. So yeah, I kind-of know what I’m talking about here).

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A Joke, Its Interpretations

Monday, September 21st, 2009

groucho-glasses

Joke (Voted Funniest in the United States, 2002)

A man and a friend are playing golf one day at their local golf course. One of the guys is about to chip onto the green when he sees a long funeral procession on the road next to the course. He stops in mid-swing, takes off his golf cap, closes his eyes, and bows down in prayer. His friend says: “Wow, that is the most thoughtful and touching thing I have ever seen. You truly are a kind man.” The man then replies: “Yeah, well we were married 35 years.”

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One wonders many things about this man, including why he has bothered to wear a golf cap. Is he a regular cap wearer? How do we distinguish his golf cap from his tennis cap, for example? This reminds us of the famous psychological experiment in which several golf hats were put on the heads of non golfers and all agreed that they still looked stupid. But when the golf caps were put on the heads of naked women, people just became confused.

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A central issue in the joke is the funeral. For a man to golf at his wife’s funeral is not traditional.  But if we take the funeral to be symbolic of the death of capitalism, and the wife is equated with Anglo-Christian ideals, and the golf course is in fact a symbol for post-colonial racial identity politics, then we start to wonder why people think this joke is funny? It seems quite complicated for a silly joke.  Perhaps we are a lot smarter than we give ourselves credit for.

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Another point of interest is that the funeral procession is described as long. Why long?  Because the joke is pointing out the ways in which a long life is good, but a long funeral procession needlessly blocks traffic.  Thus, the moral of the joke can be seen as “Do unto others, but not always, particularly during rush hour.”

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As for the dead spouse, we can conclude with some confidence that she loved her husband very much, but was probably cheating on him with his friend, who from all subtext here, seems like one of those smart-asses you often find sleeping with other peoples’ wives.

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Though we should not be quick to jump to conclusions about the gender of the spouse. The man is gendered. The spouse is not. This sly bit of inter-textual sexuality in the joke is not lost on a clever reader, who sees this as a clear WINK at the hyper-heterosexual golf culture and its insistence that hitting little white balls with long shafts is not at least as homoerotic as  saying the word “subtext” ten times fast.

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There is here a question of numbers. The first sentence says “A man and a friend,” but in the next sentence it says “one of the guys.”  Was the friend one of the guys or are there other guys? If so, why aren’t they friends with the man? Later it seems it is one of the guys that stops his swing, but this is also the man as determined by the end of the joke.  The joke seems to be wrestling with the distinction between what is a guy and what is a man and how many of them are there and does there need to be? At what point does a man become a guy and is there any surgical procedure that can reverse this? Would it make a difference if we knew there was just one guy in the joke and rather than golfing, he was trying to teach himself to play the tuba? Would we like him less?  And what, then, would we make of the golf cap?

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If you enjoy late night TV, you may or may not enjoy not-so-late night TV

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

jay-leno

Despite the fact that critics find him largely unfunny, and his squishy middle-of-the-road politics can be annoying, I generally have a soft spot for Jay Leno. I’m not claiming he’s the funniest guy to ever grace the planet, but he’s certainly not unfunny in the way someone like Dane  Cook is—the kind of unfunny that make’s you angry and sad. Whenever I hear him speak or give an interview, he seems nice.  I’m not saying I make my TV choices based on how nice a person seems to be through the false lens of a soft-ball interview (that’s how you pick a president), but if your going to be only moderately funny, it helps if you’re not a jerk too.

The Tonight Show under Leno was rarely hilarious. But it often made me giggle, if quietly, or at least smile. At its worse it was just fine, not funny but not boring.  Which, it occurs to me, is all I really expect from a TV show that airs when I really, probably should be sleeping.  As a general rule, the later the TV program airs, the lower my expectations. When your competition is another rerun of Becker and the juicer infomercial, the bar is relatively low.

So what to make of Jay’s new show, now it a sort-of prime time slot?  Having watched only the second episode, my snap judgment is that the show is remarkably similar to, well, every late night show.  While many genres have come into and out of fashion (the variety show, even sketch comedy other than SNL), the late night talk show format has stayed remarkably similar (and popular) since Steve Allen.  You have an opening monologue, some skits, followed by celebrity interviews—all spurred on by some band/sidekick.  Each new show introduces twists (Conan had his sidekick with him on the couch,  Jimmy Fallon does his skits live, Chevy Chase removed the comedy aspect), but the changes are minor compared to what remains constant.

That’s weird considering that a major component of the format (celebrity interviews) is usually so dreadful.  Celebrities may be interesting when they perform or are filmed having sex, but when they talk about their work, their family vacation in Turks & Caicos, and their new pet project to circumcise poor people, they are predictably dull.

Leno keeps basically the same format of his old show in his new show with a few, seemingly unnecessary twists. He doesn’t sit in a chair behind a desk. He interviews celebs via video in a segment called 10 questions (where we learned that Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz both like to laugh. That Cruise has never been to a strip club and doesn’t know if he’s better at sex or flying. Hopefully he’s better at both than he is giving improvisational answers to silly questions), and the set rotates to reveal different rooms for different bits.

It’s all fine. The monologue is good enough. In the episode I watched, a guest comic riffed about various things in the world he didn’t like and it was fine. The interview was boring but fine.  In other words, it’s all the same.  I didn’t like or dislike it.

The question is, will viewers tolerate three hours of basically the same show in Leno/Conan/Fallon?  Three hours of jokes about how Mark Sanford is crazy and Joe Biden doesn’t know when to shut up?  Three hours of Cameron Diaz telling us she likes sun screen?  In one sense, the people watching at 10 are different than those watching at midnight, so maybe it’s not a problem.  But the real challenge for Leno’s show is that will fine is better than fine at 11:30 pm, I’m not sure it is good enough for 10, when people have choices. Late Night TV provides one of the few opportunities for a captive audience as most watch from their beds or, at least, as they start to think about their beds. But at 10 people are moving around. There are crime dramas on TV. Lunches that need to be packed for the next day. Kids to put to bed. Twitters to twit.

Ratings were great the first show (as expected).  Less so the second show (also as expected).  On one hand, NBC must be betting if you liked Leno at 11:30, you’ll also like him at 10.  As one of those people who likes Leno, I’m not sure that’s a bet I’d take.

Then again, I predicted Lost would be canceled after one episode and that Lipstick Jungle would be a smash. So what do I know.

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Excerpt from the Diary of T.S. Eliot’s College Roomate

Monday, September 14th, 2009

eliot

8/26

College at last! The long days of summer (and working under my father’s merciless thumb!) have gone, and finally some freedom. Harvard is stunning in August. The campus is alive with energy. Already (and it has been 3 hours I’ve been here now), I’ve been invited to three separate mixers. I’m glad I brought plenty of clean pressed shirts!  Having moved into the dorms I have just now met my roommate T. He seems like a nice enough fellow if a little quiet. He spent the afternoon meticulously ordering, than reordering his bowties in the closet, arranged (I think) first by size, then formality (formal-informal), before finally settling on color. Oh well, I’m sure he’ll warm up soon.

9/7

Well, Harvard life has been all I thought it would be and more. Between my first year course work and social mixers each night, I must say my head has been pounding since I got here.  Had a strange disagreement with my roommate T, who for some reason conspiratorially accused me of using some of his toothpaste, which I did not. He sulked about this a good deal before removing his toothpaste from its normal position on his shelf and hiding it under his bed.  Later I asked him if he was fine and he said yes, but at night I heard him muttering once again in his sleep about the collapse of western values and how he doubted Donne ever suffered such indigenous treatment. I invited him out to a get together with some of the boys, promising there would be some interesting women he might want to talk with, but he balked at the idea immediately, faking a stomach ache.

9/23

The toothpaste fiasco has blown over, but now T insists on speaking to me only in old French which I can barely understand. Whenever I express confusion T gets this smart-ass grin and then switches to Greek. He’s certainly a brilliant fellow though I find the impulse to punch him in the face at times overwhelming.

10/21

Another exciting adventure in my life with T.  I brought a girl back to the room—a sophomore with a body like you wouldn’t know.  I wanted to show off my collection of Equestrian trophies and lend her a copy of my Harry Lauder phonograph.  Upon seeing her, T let out a squeak as if there was a mouse in the room, and immediately hid in the closet, claiming he needed to do some dusting. He remained in there for four hours after she left, refusing to come out until I bribed him with a piece of chocolate. He has quite a sweet tooth.

11/4

As finals pop up on the horizon, I find myself busier than ever.  The stress is made worse by the latest tiff with T.  He had written a poem and wanted my impression on what he wrote.  I told him it was interesting, though I wasn’t sure if I understood what he was trying to accomplish. He claimed I had no appreciation of the larger poetic tradition in which he was bravely forging forward. I told him as a student of Geology poetry really wasn’t my thing and that was just one man’s opinion. He proceeded to hold his breath for 3 minutes before passing out. When I finally got him to come to, he repeated the process . This went on for several hours until I calmed him down with chocolate milk and berries.  For the record, here is the poem. You be the judge:

I’m a cowboy

Yes, sir, I am

Yes, sir, I am a cowboy

Yes, sir, I am

I’m a cowboy

Yes, sir, I am

Yes, sir, I am a cow-ow-boy

12/1

Well, T had a date last night—miracle of miracles.  I’m not sure who the poor victim was, but apparently it didn’t go so well as he was home and in bed by 7:20 (his plan was to meet her at the “Oyster Shuck,” for dinner and drinks at 7).  Now all day he’s been moaning, “December is the cruelest month.” I offered him chocolate which he refused, rebuffing me in German or maybe Russian. That seemed to cheer him up as he began giggling uncontrollably until, at last, I broke down and punched him in the nose.

12/2

Apologized to T this morning but he would not look me in the eye. He handed me a list of his grievances, written in indecipherable Latin Hendecasyllabics.  Punched him again in the nose.

12/3

Approached T with every intention of apologizing further, but just looking at that smart-ass with his damn bow tie got me started again and I immediately punched him in the nose. He now has spent the better part of the day and night locked in his closet with his notebooks and toothpaste.

12/7

By order of the Dean of Student Affairs, I’ve been ordered to withdraw from Harvard at semester’s end for hitting a student. Apparently that prick T has some kind friends. As a fitting piece of revenge, I stole the notebook he keeps hidden under his bed with his toothpaste. The notebook was primarily filled with cowboy poems and pictures of topless women. The toothpaste was wintergreen.

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Friday Links

Friday, September 11th, 2009

Back after a one week hiatus with some super awesomer links covering everything funny on the internet (yes, there were only 6 funny things that happened on the internet last week).

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Existential French Textbooks

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More fun with auto-tuning

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An homage to my parent’s alma mater

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Conan’s Celebrity Survey

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Raaaaaaaand, with eight A’s

(parental discretion advised)

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School cafeteria serves up God (and also delicious fish sticks)

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Wisdom of the Rebbes

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

satmarab

Once, Rebbe Eliezer fell asleep beneath an apple tree and had a dream. In his dream, he was sleeping beneath a pear tree, dreaming about sleeping beneath a fig tree which, for reasons unclear to the Rebbe, looked identical to a juniper tree.  When he woke, he found he was actually inside his living room having drank too much plum brandy, thus proving the old proverb: There are many trees in the world, but few are found inside living rooms.

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A disciple of Rebbe Eliezer, having spent four straight days and nights studying the Torah, came to the Rebbe with a probing question. “What’s with all the smiting?” he asked.  To which the Rebbe replied, “Who are we to question God? Have you ever smitted before? Maybe smiting is fun. If God wants to smite, who are we to say he shouldn’t smite. He created the Universe and everything in it—let him smite once in a while if it pleases him to do so.  Plus, have you ever been smote? My friend Gary Berkowtiz was smitted just last week and now he spends his winters in Ft. Lauderdale betting on Jai-Lai and he’s never been happier!”

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Rebbe Eliezer was famous for his sense of humor and wicked backhand. To prove this he would often smash tennis balls into the backsides of unsuspecting daveners during certain High Holiday sermons.  He also had a favorite joke which involved him hitting a student over the head with his tennis racket throughout the Passover seder.

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It is true that Rebbe Eliezer was highly superstitious. He never left the home without a handful of salt in his left pocket, and before crossing the street would hum the entire book of Leviticus to the tune of Bach’s Fuge in E minor.  One of his more peculiar superstitions was his insistent belief that when eating a meal he be spoken too only in Greek, which the Rebbe could not understand. Some say this was in homage to the Macabees revolt against the Greek empire, though others say the Rebbe was just kind-of a jerk about these things.

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Universal Observations & Aphroisms

Monday, September 7th, 2009

universe

  1. The universe is vast, though as Carl Sagan famously pointed out, some parts are vaster than others, such as the less popular areas of certain black holes and the inside of Southern congressmens’ heads.
  2. Explaining just how vast the universe is, consider this: If put on a scale where the sun and Pluto are 40 inches apart, the nearest star to the earth would be n early 2,500 miles away.  The great paradox is this–in a nearly infinite universe of unmeasurable size, it is still impossible to find parking in San Francisco.
  3. The prospect of intelligent life somewhere is exciting until you consider how unlikely it is that any extraterrestrial life would be interested in having sex with us.
  4. Thus the wise proverb: A man who dreams about the universe is a philosopher. A man who dreams about his mother has bigger fish to fry.
  5. The theory of relativity states, in common language, that if you travel far and fast enough in any direction, it will eventually not matter to you who the Democratic candidate for president was in 1928 and why he didn’t do better.
  6. There may be multiple universes out there, perhaps even infinite parallel universes. This is of great interest to physicists, but less impressive to IRS auditors unwilling to even imagine that a missing tax return in this universe may exist elsewhere.
  7. In terms of having a sense of humor, the universe doesn’t disappoint producing such classic gags as Quarks, Uranus, and Libertarians.
  8. Does the universe have any meaning? This is a question many have pondered for a while, though most agree that whether there is some larger meaning or not, it would still suck to get hit in the face with a a comet.
  9. Some call the beginning of the universe “The Big Bang,” but recently this theory has come under attack from various other approaches, including but not limited to, “The Pretty Descent Sized Clank,” “The Moderate Pop,” and “The Horace Greenblat is A Big Fat Idiot,” named after the legendary physicists, and serious grudge holder, Henry Watkins.
  10. The Universe is expanding, but what this means for those of us struggling to find a good pastrami sandwich outside LA, NY, and Chicago remains unclear.

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Monologue Jokes Where the Punchline is Redundent

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Jokes written from the day’s top headlines with little to no thought.

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Fires continue to blaze across southern California.  Conservative Christians have declared it’s God’s punishment for not defeating Gay Marriage by a wide enough margin.

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Speaking of conservatives, GOP Senator Lamar Alexander says if Democrats try to ram healthcare legislation with only a simple majority of the vote, there will be a minor revolution.  Unlike the regular revolution, the minor revolution will be televised, primarily on cable news.

But, you can see where Alexander is coming from.  You can’t allow the majority to impose laws over the will of the minority.  You start thinking like that, it’s a slippery slope to democracy.

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A temporary outage on Gmail yesterday caused millions of people to experience the minor inconvenience of not being able to read their e-mail for a few hours.  Survivors of the outage are already dubbing themselves “The Greatest Generation,” for perseverance in the face of unthinkable obstacles.

In fairness, I complained about it nonstop for 43 minutes, until finally I could get back to my preferred schedule of round-the-clock complaining about how it’s too hot all the time.

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57% of Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan.  What’s worse, a whopping 68% of Americans say they also oppose news stories about Afghanistan that can’t resist pointing out that 76% of Americans couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map. Stop rubbing it in.

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Engineers at MIT have created a super robot Fish. On the one hand, the robotic fish is said to have no clear scientific value. On the other hand, MIT engineers point out it’s “super, super cool.”

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Whose to blame for your fat kid?  Terrible self esteem from news stories like this maybe?

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A bank robber told a judge he robbed a bank to get away from his abusive wife.  In a related story, Dick Cheney said he robbed the country for the same reason. Having listened to his wife, it’s believable.

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A man arrested for stealing beef jerky from 7-11 found himself in additional trouble when, after being arrested, he ripped out a light fixture while in lock-up.  This is probably one of the better outcomes you can hope for when you eat beef jerky from 7-11.

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A report shows states with the highest uninsured numbers are also the most opposed to healthcare reform efforts aimed at increasing their coverage. Like the saying goes, you can lead a Wyoming conservative to water, but you can’t stop him from fuc#ing up healthcare reform for the rest of us.

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