You Are Dumb - Celebrities

Joaquin On Sunshine

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:35:43 -0600

Celebrities, 12 November 2008

Memo to Joaquin Phoenix: YOU ARE DUMB.

One of the most glorious things about the reign of President-Elect Obama is that I don't have to feel guilty ragging on Joaquin Phoenix for being dumb while many more important and crucial perfidies and obscenities clamor for my undivided attention. Oh sure, even though the election is over, there ARE many more important and crucial perfidies and obscenities clamoring for my undivided attention, the point is I no longer feel guilty about it.

So fuck you, Joaquin Phoenix, you dumbass.

Apparently, at the ripe young age of 34, Phoenix has decided to abandon acting in country music biopics and concentrate on his own music career. And who can blame him? Why, the music world is just brimming with former thespians who have left the challenging acting world behind for critical and commercial success in the music world. I know I anxiously await the second return of Bruno, and if Russell Crowe had half the balls Joaquin had, we might have been spared Gladiator entirely. Well, probably not, but a man can dream.

Now, to be fair, I don't actually give a shit about Joaquin Phoenix quitting acting, concentrating on music, or any other aspect of his life or career. I have thus far led a nearly blissful, very contented, and almost entirely Joaquin-free life, and I would have been perfectly happy to keep it that way, if a certain photograph hadn't snuck through my filters and imposed itself in front of my abused optic nerves. And I now share that picture with you.

Where can I even start the compendium of things that are wrong with this picture? I dare not start with the obvious, so I'll begin by pointing out that that is so very much the look of someone who wants you all to know that he is no longer a part of your scene, and will no longer be playing your games, and he wants you to know that VERY HARD. He doesn't have to shave! He's focusing on his MUSIC. That is the face of a man who has determined with laser-like precision exactly how kempt he has to be to convey his "fuck off" message in a purely visual manner, and has nailed that kemptness level within a fraction of a percent.

Which makes the hands all the more hilarious. First of all, if you're going to write shit on your fists, in 2008, it'd better be something funny. And even more importantly, it'd had better be something REALLY funny. This isn't a new and clever ironic twist on the stuff-written-on-your-fists oeuvre. And using an exclamation point to fill out the fourth finger is cheating.

And, of course, the poor dumb fucker got the hands backwards. Which kills me. I mean, we just learned from the Carved B Hoax that when writing letters on yourself, orientation is vital to convincing your audience, but here's Joaquin Phoenix, getting it wrong for all the world to see. And he went ahead with it! Here, for your edification, is a list of things I would do if I found that, in a moment of paint-eating insanity, I'd written my farewell* message backwards on my hands:

Wear gloves and pretend the whole thing never happened.
Scribble over the letters with a Sharpie and tell reporters they're like indelible black armbands in support of some tragic global cause. Only, you know, around your fingers.
Scrub the hands until the letters are a bit faded, hope nobody notices, and just say they're stamps from a club if they -do- ask.
If all else fails, CROSS MY WRISTS. If my creaky, middle-aged bones can get my fists crossed so that the message reads right, so can Joaquin. Which means he didn't notice, or he didn't care. And either way, that means we get to laugh at him for being a doofus.

So byegood, Joaquin Phoenix. I wish you the luck of best with your career music, and if you ever decide to come back to acting, maybe you can get George Lucas to cast you as the young Yoda in some ridiculous cartoon prequel or something.

*A word which, I must point out, has eight letters, four for each hand, and MEANS GOODBYE. And if he got it backwards he could claim it's a solidarity message with America's poor.

Two Jims And A Big Baby

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:44:40 -0500

Dead People, 25 June 2008

Memo to James Lileks, Karl Rove, and James Dobson: YOU ARE DUMB.

For those who wonder about such things, no, yesterday's lack of column was not a tribute to the death of George Carlin. Not that he's undeserving of tribute - I'm just saying the two events weren't related. I do think it's both fitting and sad that he died when he did, though. Sad, because he died before the stupidity he railed against had fully bottomed out and we perhaps started to climb out of the hole we've dug ourselves. And fitting, because he died with all his most cynical feelings about the state of the human race completely justified. And in honor of that, IDIOTS SAY THE DAMNDEST THINGS!

"I never heard Carlin be as hard on himself as he was on his favorite strawmen. That wasn’t his job, of course, and you can’t fault him for the routines he didn’t do. But the more you confront and accept your own human faults the less outrage you find in the small mishaps of others, and I never got the feeling Carlin spent a lot of time interrogating his own character with the same confident derision he brought to things much greater than himself." - James Lileks.

Fuck you, James Lileks. Not for speaking ill of the dead, a pastime which I support wholeheartedly and, I suspect, will engage in with great glee when YOU finally pass on to a magical land where all the people remember Paul Anka and serve Jell-O salads and nobody is black. No, fuck you for being such a condescending prick about it. With the faux-sympathetic bit about how maybe Carlin would have been nicer if he'd recognized his flaws - flaws which you yourself don't actually bother to fucking enumerate.

About the only bad thing Lileks points out about Carlin is that Lileks found his later, politically-charged work less funny and more lecture-y, which is what happens when someone who's right is yelling at someone who's wrong. That's not Carlin's fault. But don't worry, James. Carlin never expected you to listen, and in your posthumous ramblings, you've managed to help vindicate Carlin's work. Dipshit.

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by." - Karl Rove.

I'll give Karl credit where credit is due. Only the first sentence is racist. The rest of it is some of the weirdest fucking image-mongering I've ever seen, and that includes the entire rest of Turd Blossom's illustrious career. Is Karl Rove trying to turn us away from Barack Obama by telling us he's essentially a cross between James Bond and Jon Stewart? Because I'll forget that FISA bullshit in a minute if it means trading in the retarded brush-clearer for someone who hasn't run up a record class deficit in addition to all his other record deficits.

I mean, obviously, Karl's trying to tap some deep vein of doughy, middle-class American resentment here, but as someone who would never come within 1,000 feet of a country club willingly, if I were forced to be at one, I'd be desperately looking for the guy making fun of everyone else in the country club. And I'd endure second-hand smoke to join in.

"I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology. He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter. Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?" - James Dobson

As irritating as this long election season is, you have GOT to love all these chances to see some of the most dominant rhetorical forces of the past decade, like Rove and Dobson, completely off their fucking game. First Rove attacks Obama for having metaphorical pretty girls date him, and now Dobson loses his shit because Obama mentioned his name in a speech about abandoning religious extremism in politics. And he does this by... being religiously extreme in politics. Even to a country deadened to hypocrisy, James Dobson accusing Obama of distorting the Bible will be the laugh line of the month.

Oh, and Dobsie? Let me answer your question. No, you aren't required to conform your efforts in a democracy. Assuming that means what I think it means. You do, however, have to be prepared to LOSE. And from the sounds of things, you've got a lot of preparing to do before November.

Dumb Fuck Chuck

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:57:01 -0500

Wingnuts, 28 March 2008

Memo to Chuck Norris: KNOW YOUR STRENGTHS.

If I were, at my current age, in my current physical condition, with my current experience, enter, shall we say, some form of martial arts competition, Chuck Norris would be well within his rights to laugh his ass off at me. I clearly don't belong there. I lack the discipline, the skills, the training, and the mindset to kick the ass of anyone over, say, five years old. Or whatever age they can reach my balls from a standing position.

So why the fuck is Chuck Norris writing political commentary? I'll tell you why. He saw all the attention he got when he endorsed Mike Huckabee, and somehow got the mistaken impression that the majority of that attention was due to his credibility as a representative of conservative politics, and not the novelty of an aging, has-been action star inserting himself into a losing campaign.

So Chuck keeps providing his insight, and TownHall.com, your one-stop shop for right-wing retardation, keeps publishing him. You know, in-between furious masturbation to Lone Wolf McQuade. It's a three-part column, divided into equal parts stupid, stupid victim, and incredibly offensive stupid, or as Norris puts it, "Guns, God, and Gays".

The guns part discusses the Supreme Court's latest gun-control case. Now, I'm not the big gun control guy I used to be as an Official Liberal, but this bit from Norris is just laughable. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Is someone joking? Could 27 words be any clearer?! 'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'" Well, stop the fucking presses, everyone! The guy from The Octagon just recited the Second Amendment! It's all so clear now! The last half-century of arguing was just a waste of time. If only Chuck Norris had recited the Second Amendment sooner, so many divisive battles could have been avoided.

After his stirring defense of the absolute freedoms offered by the constitution, Beardy McFuckKnuckles moves on to the "God" section, relating a tale of religious oppression that will chill you to the bone. Apparently, a college newspaper published a cartoon of God having sex with Mary and lying about his vasectomy. Now, given what we've learned from the right-wing reaction to the Danish Muhammed cartoon scandal, and what we've learned above about Norris' absolutist stance on the Bill of Rights, can we all guess his clear, consistent reaction to this cartoon? I think we can.

"How abhorring it is when the freedom of the press is abused to demean the biblical God and the most sacred couple in Christendom, especially right before Easter. If the cartoon depicted Allah or Muhammad, there undoubtedly would have been a national decry of bigotry. Yet it seems in vogue to disgrace Christianity, and so it was brushed under the rug of contempt and barely highlighted by any news agency."

Have I mentioned that Chuck Norris is a meatheaded shitwit who's taken way too many blows to said meat head? The column couldn't have depicted Allah or Muhammed, because neither Allah or Muhammed GOT MARY PREGNANT. The joke only works with the Christian God. And it wasn't brushed under the rug. The reason it was barely highlighted by any news agency is that the only news agencies who give a shit what cartoons end up in the University of Virginia school newspaper are the right-wing rag sites Chuck appears to get all his information from.

This is clearly evident in his "Gays" section, which is a long diatribe about the "National Day of Silence", in which students across America remain silent for a day to protest discrimination against, and beating of, gay and lesbian students. Keep that in mind, because here's what Chuck learned about NDOS:

"I was appalled when I read the American Family Association report that Friday, April 25, 'several thousand schools across the nation will be observing "Day of Silence (DOS)." DOS is a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools. DOS is sponsored by an activist homosexual group, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.'" - Now, the problem with getting your news from Donald Wildmon is that the utter void of knowledge it creates may cause you to say something so incredibly insensitive and offensive that the world will know what an asshole you are. Ready? PULL THE ASSHOLE, TEXAS RANGER LEVER!

"For example, Thomas Jefferson drafted a bill concerning the criminal laws of Virginia, in which he proposed that the penalty for sexual deviance should be unique corporal punishment. Jefferson's views were indeed representative of early America: 'Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro' the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least.' Can you imagine a statesman proposing such a law today?"

No, because with the exception of Chuck Norris and his friends at the AFA, we aren't quite as barbaric a bunch of bastards as we were in the 1700s. Chuck can claim all he wants that he's not really "espousing such treatment", the fact of the matter is his reaction to an event designed to focus attention on the physical abuse of gays and lesbians is to point out that Thomas Slavefucker Jefferson at one point advocated for the physical abuse of gays and lesbians. Nice one, Chuck. Very classy. Given the finesse with which you wield your debating skills, I've got to wonder just how many times the skills you're more famous for have been employed in, shall we say, a strident, fisty defense of "family values".

Comedy Waterboarding: The Final Chapter

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 19:41:07 -0600

Celebrities, 6 February 2008

Memo to Dane Cook: YOU ARE DUMB.

"There is nothing funnier than someone that is not funny trying to convince other people that someone isn't funny." - Dane Cook, on his MySpace blog, 3/30/07.

The agony continues. For those of you who missed yesterday's column, I've taken Dane Cook's offhand blog comment as a challenge, and sat through the entirety of "Vicious Circle" from its premiere a week or so back on Comedy Central. At this point in the viewing, we're less than halfway through, and I'm already starting to crack under the strain:

We all know you're gonna see your dad's dick. You've been telegraphing your dad's dick for five minutes. We are now desperately waiting for you to get to your dad's dick so that we can get past your dad's dick, even if you seemingly can't. There's such a thing as too much setup, and you flew past it four minutes ago and STILL HAVEN'T LOOKED BACK. Also, I don't know whether to thank you or chastise you for leaving all the creepy paedophilic implications of this last bit unexplored.

Oh god, he's interacting with a front-row fan. I can't even make fun of this segment, because I don't get Comedy Central in HD, and am unable to accurately determine whether the fan is just a drunken moron in a Red Sox outfit, or is actually a developmentally disabled person who got front-row tickets as part of some charity event. The guy asks Dane to "play 'What's In My Mouth'", which I am PRAYING is a classic Cook comedy bit. And now the guy is walking up the aisle, which makes no sense, and Cook chases after him and hugs him, and it's time for my second vomit break so far.

He's got a 'woman' voice! Of course he's got a 'woman' voice. All mediocre comedians have a 'woman' voice, and Dane's is... slightly higher-pitched and lispy. I will admit, though. Women are different than men. He's nailed that shit.

HALFWAY POINT WORD COUNT: Ergo - 0. Ninja - 1. Dude - 4.3 million. Some of those may have been subliminally implied.

It turns out that if you say the same words, over and over, changing the inflection on them maybe every third or fourth time? You get to make movies with Jennifer Aniston. Yeah, I'm not gonna try it either. But it apparently works.

Ah. Ironic dark punchline to sappy story inbound. We all know it's coming. Happy old married couple. What's the secret? What's the twist punchline secret that makes it funny? "Cheat". From the husband. Come the fuck on. Even the cheap solar-calculator comedy math that Cook does tells us it's funnier if the wife says it. It's like "cocksucker". Only a little funny in general, but out of the mouth of Betty White? Hilarious. So change it! We all know it's not a real couple. They didn't give you a real camera to take a real picture and give you a real anecdote with a shitty punchline. You made up that shitty punchline, and didn't even do the minimum legwork required to elevate it. And there's ANOTHER THIRD OF THIS TO GET THROUGH.

Hey, there's the titular title. You know, right before this originally came out, all the ads showed him saying "It's a vicious circle" without actually saying what the vicious circle was. Turns out it's cheating.

You know, there's a whole weird conservative vibe to Dane Cook's comedy. He's like the mirror image of a sermon at a megachurch, where it's about Jesus and family values, but there's colored lights and a sound system and a big-screen TV. And on the other side of the mirror is Dane Cook, who says "vagina" and "fuck", but also that atheists are assholes and you shouldn't ever cheat on your girlfriend. It's kind of creepy.

It'd be intellectually dishonest to fast-forward through the rest of this cheating bit, wouldn't it? Fuck it, I DON'T CARE.

Hey, guess what? He couldn't get through 30 seconds about talking back to the movie screen without mentioning black people! What were the odds? I suppose he tried to mix it up by making it so that he was the one talking so much black people were shushing him, but at this point, I am not feeling at all merciful.

No, seriously, how the fuck does this actually work? Universally appealing observational humor about shit NOBODY DOES AND NEVER HAPPENS? And not in an ironic, mocking-the-form kind of way, either. There's like some weird pact he has with the audience where he says stuff, and they pretend to identify with it. It's a corruption of the "it's funny because it's true" contract, and every last one of these cheering bastards is in on it.

GODDAMMIT FINISH THE MOVIE BIT ALREADY, YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER, BEFORE MY SOUL DIES SCREAMING! (this is a complete and accurate transcription of my note about 7 minutes before the end of the special, by the way.)

By the way, that bit from before? Where he talked about how much he likes talking back to the screen? It never pays off. We never find out what kinds of things he yells at the screen. You'd think there'd be an anecdote, a long fucking anecdote full of hand-waving, that the earlier bit was setting up, but no. Which would be a blessing, except that the space it would have occupied was instead taken up by making fun of movie trailers.

This is what I mean by shit not actually happening. I'm half-blind and barely coordinated. And I can get my cup into the cupholder in the dark EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME. It's like those infomercials for a hose reel where you have to exaggerate the difficulty of rolling up a hose, so you show an old woman tangled in garden hose and screaming for help.

The credits are rolling, I still don't know what that fucking hand symbol is for. Wait! There's a card for "Superfinger Productions". With the Inverted Spidey. Great. Thanks to the last 90 minutes, I was just able to construct, in my mind, an entire Dane Cook bit about the Superfinger that I'm sure appears in one of his earlier CDs. Kill me now.

I have to say. I have never, in my life, erased anything from my DVR with more relief and vigor than I did with Dane Cook: Vicious Circle. I hope, in some small way, I've lived up to Dane Cook's vision, and over the last three days, simultaneously convinced you that Dane Cook isn't funny, and created something that nothing is funnier than. But at what cost? I'm actually looking FORWARD to writing about the election again, and that ain't right.

Into My World About

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 07:04:41 -0600

Celebrities, 5 February 2008

Memo to Dane Cook: YOU ARE DUMB.

"There is nothing funnier than someone that is not funny trying to convince other people that someone isn't funny." - Dane Cook, on his MySpace blog, 3/30/07.

I'll say this for him. Dane Cook is confident of his material. He's selling these jokes like they're a '68 Camaro owned by a little old woman who only drove it to church on Sundays. I'll admit, that's easier to do when you've got an arena full of screaming, chanting fans. People who didn't even fucking blink at the Ticketmaster surcharge are probably going to be... receptive. But still. He's putting it all out there.

The first bit is about casual social lying. People are laughing, and I don't know why. Sure, meeting up with an old friend who's way more enthusiastic about seeing you than vice versa? Comedy staple. But why did they laugh and cheer when he said the guy called him "D.C."? Maybe it's a reference to something from an earlier show. Or maybe it just sounds like "peepee".

First actual for-real joke! Bees don't fly straight, ergo "beeline" is a misnomer. That's not how he told it. I'll be really fucking surprised if the word "ergo" leaves Cook's lips before this show is over. But it's an actual joke, and it's not awful. Especially compared to the old friend bit it's interrupting, which is still slouching toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born.

This motherfucker mimes EVERYTHING. He's like Marcel Marceau with Tourette's Syndrome. He's all over the stage, hands waving, body flopping, trying to set the Guinness world record for number of limbs akimbo. He's one estrus-y bonobo away from being the worst live sex show ever.

I've figured it out. Dane Cook's comedy style is the stand-up equivalent to reality show editing. We've all seen it. You watch a reality show, and the first thing you see is a preview that shows all the interesting bits. And before every commercial, they preview those same bits. And after every commercial, they recap any bits that have happened. The actual bits, the actual content, is a tiny fraction of the whole, buttressed by constant repetition and teasing. That's how Dane Cook tells jokes. One tiny dud explosion shown from twenty slightly different camera angles. Which would only be acceptable if he were some kind of rogue undercover agent of pop culture, out to undermine and destroy the very concept of padding. He ain't.

Second actual joke! What if a ghost came out of a Windex bottle if you used it wrong! It's nothing special, but again, it's swimming upstream against a tide of shit, so you've got to admire the joke's courage and stamina, if nothing else. It's one of the few moments throughout the whole show where I had no idea it would be coming next.

On sneezing: "I never go with 'gesundheit'. I don't even know who says that." Um, Dane? There's this country? Called "Germany"? Perhaps you've heard of it? Full of people who speak... GERMAN. There's your first fucking hint. Of course, it turns out he knows that and was just making a bullshit transition move, because he immediately puts the lie to it by telling us that when he says it, it sounds like he's saluting Hitler.

So now he's wondering what to say to an atheist when they sneeze. Gee, it's a fucking shame your last bit just disqualified "gesundheit" for its Nazi overtones, since all it means is "good health" and is therefore an ideal secular alternative. You fucking douchebag. Is it too much to ask that we don't have asides that completely negate the premise of the next bit? Apparently it is.

He's just reassured us that "snarky" is an actual word, and that he didn't make it up. Thanks. I was on hold waiting for Noah Webster, and dead lexicographers don't have toll-free numbers.

OK. So the whole last bit has been about an asshole atheist at a bus stop. And the athiest, who I assume is named Fakey Q. McStrawman, says that when he dies, he'll become "one with the earth" and turn into fertilizer and "become a tree". Which is stupid, but not problematic.

Cook takes the tree thing literally, treating the atheist viewpoint as a literal belief in botanical reincarnation. Again, stupid, but not problematic.

Then, and I know it's meaningless to say I saw it coming, but I FUCKING SAW IT COMING, Cook wishes for that tree to be brutally logged and processed. Which, despite being utterly predictable, is still not problematic.

The problem comes from the final big punchline, in which the tree is turned into paper... that the Bible is printed on. Which the crowd goes NUTS for. Scary nuts. And for the first time, Dane Cook is actually a force for evil. Not just the apotheosis of banal. Not just the current avatar of unjoke observational mediocrity. Not just the latest in an unending cycle of dickheads gaining fame and fortune through the mystical phrase, "Am I right, folks?" At this point, Dane Cook becomes evil.

Redefining Vicious

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 19:20:26 -0600

Celebrities, 4 February 2008

Memo to Dane Cook: YOU ARE DUMB. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"There is nothing funnier than someone that is not funny trying to convince other people that someone isn't funny." - Dane Cook, on his MySpace blog, 3/30/07.

Oh, it's on, frat-bitch. You may look at that line and see it as a head-back, defiant, devil-may-care riposte to your detractors, who are legion, but I see it for what it is: a challenge. Well, I also see it as a pathetic attempt at pseudo-reverse psychology, first seen on the Net forty seconds after Usenet was up and running, but that's beside the point. The important thing is that I see it as a challenge.

After all, I've hated Dane Cook for years purely based on cultural osmosis. I'm not saying I hated him because I was told to hate him by other people. What I'm saying is that the microscopic doses of Dane Cook I would get from time to time - a Good Luck Chuck trailer here, two seconds of Employee Of The Month flipped past there, or an ad for whatever current stand-up show he's hurled out there - was enough to firmly establish the hate. It's homeopathic hate, really. But it's time to take the Nestea Plunge. But sometimes, you take the Nestea Plunge and it doesn't go so great, and that's what I call The Nestea Plungeshit.

That last sentence, by the way, was what we call a "parody". And there are only two ways for you to have recognized that "parody". Either you're a Dane Cook fan, in which case you should probably go back and read the one about the guy who got fucked to death by a horse, or you have cable and watched the incessant promotion for the basic-cable premiere of Dane Cook's "Vicious Circle" show. Which I taped. And will now endure, in the hopes of turning my pain into your pleasure.

This'll be like liveblogging, except without the blogging part. And without the live part. For the record, this took about two hours, and resulted in eleven pages worth of handwritten notes. Think of it as my own personal "Heart Of Darkness", because I know I do. Time to head upriver.

Goddammit, they're chanting his name. It's a huge venue, with lots of lights. Jesus wept, it's arena rock comedy. Which, like a vampire, keeps coming back no matter how much fucking garlic you've stuffed into Andrew "Dice" Clay's mouth.

There's some kind of giant lit-up hand symbol motif going on - the middle and ring fingers sticking up. It's like an inverted Spider-Man. I don't know what it means, but I bet I'm going to find out. I'm twenty seconds in, and I'm already needing to siphon off my excess dread.

He's hand-slapping his way through the crowd like he's Hogan at Wrestlemania. Or like he's Colbert after a complete ironyectomy.

The first joke is key. That shit sets the tone for the rest of the night. What have I gotten myself into? I don't know yet. He's still soaking up the arena-rock adulation like an insecure sponge. Wait, he's got a microphone! He's raising his hand in the air.... fuck, it's the Inverted Spidey. The crowd's eating it up. Maybe he's metaphorically tickling their prostates.

Oh, he wants to know what's up. Consider me unshocked.

"There's so many things that I want to let you guys into my world about." First sentence of the evening, and I know I'm fucked. This is going to hurt. And you all get to suffer, second-hand, through my eyes. Enjoy your week!

Back To Branson

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:29:22 -0600

Science, 30 January 2008

Memo to Pat Boone: YOU ARE DUMB.

I don't know why stupid people aren't exhausted all the time just from the sheer effort they must put forth to say stupid shit all the time. I mean, it exhausts me, and I just have to LISTEN to them. They actually have to think it up, parse it out, figure out how to phrase it with a tiny and limited vocabulary, pretend they're not just repeating something they heard on Rush Limbaugh two days prior, and do all this while constantly dodging any of the various bits of evidence that demonstrate how ridiculous their viewpoint is.

You'd think it'd be like running a marathon. With atrophied legs. And no sense of direction. And without knowing what a "marathon" actually entails. But they pull it off, day after day, topic after topic, just being idiots like it's the easiest thing in the world, Maybe that's why they say it's bliss. If so, Pat Boone's a happy, happy, stupid, stupid man.

How much ignorance-fueled bliss does it take to overcome the fact that you're Pat Fucking Boone, your ironic comeback now eleven years in the past, doomed to an eternity of shows in Branson, Missouri, for audiences who probably can't even hear you? A whole stinking lot, that's how much. As evidence, I provide you Pat Boone's commentary on global warming hysteria for World Net Daily.

By all rights, I could stop RIGHT THERE. The mere existence of Pat Boone, writing about Global Warming, for World Net Daily? That's a textbook definition of insanity. The left is constantly being accused of taking marching orders from Barbara Streisand, but you don't see her posting about FISA on Daily Kos. But World Net Daily is quite happy to be the starfucker, no matter how dessicated and dim that star is, and certainly no matter how tenuous his expertise is. You want to know how Pat Boone came to his stunning conclusion that global warming is liberal hype? ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Some months ago, while driving back home from an engagement, I became fascinated with George Noory's late night radio interview with a solar physicist, one of a number of very dedicated scientists who actually watch and analyze the sun itself and its ongoing powerful effects on planet Earth. This was after former Vice President Al Gore had sounded his alarm in nation after nation about his belief that we're all in serious, imminent danger from global warming. And while the main topic of discussion on Noory's program that night was the remarkable list of prophecies recorded by ancient Aztecs from centuries ago – gleaned somehow from their study and even worship of the sun – the guest scientist brought up the concern solar physicists share about 'new, unexplained activity and disturbances' on the surface of that giant fireball in space!"

Let me get this straight. Pat Boone listened to a radio show and heard a guy spend most of his time talking about AZTEC MOTHERFUCKING PROPHECIES, and found his arguments about solar physics so damning to Al Gore's global warming campaign that he had to come forward and tell the world about it, and only World Net Daily was brave enough to post Boone's findings. Goddamned liberal media.

I love all the implications in that paragraph - that Al Gore invented global warming, while scientists who "actually watch and analyze the sun" know better. And also that we need to be told that the sun is a "giant fireball in space". And also that the stuff on the sun is fire. Which it isn't.

You know how you can tell the difference between an evil person, who would talk bullshit about global warming just to enhance his own personal power and wealth at the moment; and an actual moron who thinks he's got the whole thing sussed out? Well, for one thing, the evil person would know better than to quote his source saying this:

"No, the sun itself is the culprit – and we're studying again the ancient Aztec prediction that the year we call 2012 will see cataclysmic changes on our Earth, and throughout the solar system."

I can't even wrap my fucking brain around it. Pat Boone, who opens his column with the tritest fucking paragraph in the world about how nobody should believe Chicken Little when he says the sky is falling, is basing his calmness and lack of panic on the words of a man who is taking the Aztecs at their word that WE'RE ALL FUCKED IN LESS THAN FOUR YEARS.

He spends the rest of his column giving long, loving head to CFACT, the Committee For A Concerned Tomorrow, which he describes as "non-profit" and "non-partisan", but which, if SourceWatch can be believed, gets most of its money from the Scaifes and most of the rest from oil companies. It's largely dull and traditional bullshit, spending ten times as much verbage on how wonderful and sciency and careful and concerned CFACT is as he spends on what CFACT actually claims or whose ass the numbers were pulled out of.

So don't worry. Things will be great. Europe was warm in the 1100s and they just built lots of churches!* Don't listen to that crazy Al Gore. Listen to Pat Boone, and live it up for the next four years until the Great Aztec Cataclysm And/Or Rapture (also scheduled for 2012) happens! Although if you're a Pat Boone fan, you're probably not going to make it that long.

*ACTUAL PARAPHRASE TIME.

Plenty To Go Around

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:20:31 -0600

The News, 24 January 2008

Memo to the media: YOU GET A PASS.

Just for today, you get a pass. I'm not going to slam you for being the 24-hour, fact-free engines of rampant baseless speculation that we both know you are. Because today, I'm going to take that awful "three fingers pointing back at you" aphorism, no matter how much I despise it, to heart.

Because you really are giving people what they want, aren't you? Sure, I could argue that the job of journalists is to give people what they need, and if what they need doesn't sell well enough, the answer is to hire better marketers, not Glenn Motherfucking Beck. That maybe it's a bad idea to use the news to turn a profit in the first place.

But there's no denying it's what we want. And nothing drives that home like the death of Heath Ledger.

Looking at it objectively, rationally, and in retrospect, the impact of Ledger's death and the cause thereof on my life is nonexistent. I wasn't a fan. I don't own Roar on DVD. He didn't have some upcoming project I was looking forward to. Obviously, I didn't know him personally. Heath Ledger's continued existence, or not, is a complete non-issue.

Yet there I was, 30 seconds after hearing that he'd died, hitting the major news websites to see if they had any information. When they didn't, I moved on to the next one. And when they did, it was hearsay, speculation, and mostly wrong. Which is nothing new for them, and nothing I didn't know on an intellectual level. But I still kept looking, even though I should have known better.

And I bet a lot of you looked too.

Even assuming I had a reason to care about how Ledger died, which I don't, it's not exactly time-sensitive information, is it? If I find out today or this weekend or next month, it's all the same to me. Even if he was killed by some new species of sewer gator, I'll probably find that out long before the gators make it from New York City to the outskirts of Minneapolis. There's no rush.

But I still looked. Despite being unconcerned about sewer gators. Despite not being worried in the slightest about a serial killer working in reverse alphabetical order. I don't know if it's human nature, or conditioning from living in the Information Age, or some mix of the two, but the irrational need to know, and know NOW, is there even in the most high-minded of us.

And that is what the news exists to feed. They have to shove something into our mindholes, because if they don't, we'll just change the channel or hit the net until we find someone that will. Sure, they could be more responsible in the face of our madness, but there's no profit in that.

At least they're getting paid to lie, spin, speculate wildly, or just sit there and tell us over and over again that they don't know anything. We're getting lied to, told wrong things, and wasting our time trying to find stuff out we don't need, and nobody's paying us squat. So what's our excuse?

What The Flock?

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:40:44 -0600

Creationists, 6 December 2007

Memo to Sherri Shepherd: YOU ARE DUMB.

There are three things that prevent me from watching The View: my job, my brain, and my penis. Yet somehow, despite my complete lack of interest, the show not only survives, it thrives. And thrives so much that the media thinks I need to know every time the cast rotates. Hint: I don't.

I don't know how, but The View must have hit on some kind of winning formula. And while I have no idea what that formula is, I can tell you this much. It doesn't rely on all the hosts knowing what that formula is either. Or what A formula is. Or how to spell "formula". Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sherri Shepherd, The View's newest co-host. Stand-up comic, veteran of several recent sitcoms, and willing participant in "Who's Your Caddy?". And, despite her perfectly acceptable turn on "30 Rock", a complete and utter idiot.Apparently, back in September, she proclaimed her complete disbelief of evolution. Which is fine. Well, it's not FINE fine, but when it comes to jobs I don't want creationists to fill, "View co-host" is a lot less troubling than "presidential candidate". Anyway, Whoopi Goldberg asked her, as a follow-up, if the world was flat, and here's what Shepherd said:

"I never thought about it, Whoopi. Is the world flat? I never thought about it. But I tell you what I thought about. How am I gonna feed my child, how am I gonna take care of my family. The world... is the world flat has never entered into, like, has not been an important thing to me... If my son, Jeffrey, asks me is the world flat, I guess I will go and look it up."

I love this. Love it love it love it. And not because a talk show host, on national television, is equivocating and hedging about the SHAPE OF THE EARTH. No, what I love about it is the idea that somehow, even contemplating the shape of the earth puts her and her children in danger of starvation. It's just too damn much work. Flat or round? No time to decide. No time to even teach the controversy! Child must eat!

If only Joe Klein* had thought of that excuse. That would have been awesome.

A day later, she explained that she wasn't stupid. She knows the earth is round, she just got flustered and confused by the question. Which, again, is the kind of excuse our leaders should consider using. Bush could admit he's known for years that Iran wasn't building a bomb, he just got flustered every time he had to talk about it.

Fast forward to this week. The Viewbots are discussing Epicurus, for reasons I dare not contemplate. Cue Shepherd to set the record straight on the historical pecking order.

"They [the Greeks] had Christians because they threw them to the lions!" [Whoopi:] "I think this might predate that." [Shepherd:] "I don't think anything predated Christians." [Behar:] The Greeks were first, then the Romans, then the Christians. [Shepherd:] "Jesus came first, before them, so... I... OK..."

A-fucking-stonishing. I knew there were young earth creationists. I even knew there were heliocentric creationists. But Shepherd seems to be promoting New Testament creationism, shaving another four thousand years off the age of the Earth and declaring the birth of Jesus to be the Immaculate Big Bang.

That's a tough sell, but as a creationist, she's got the fundamentals, as it were, to pull it off. Attack anthropologists as secular liberals! Satan buried clay pots as a test of our faith! Demand that people who believe in Socrates are forced to drink some kind of indeterminate plant-based poison!

Do it for the children, Shepherd. All the poor children being lied to in history classes. Get Texas to demand textbooks that cover the entire historical record, from Jesus to... well, Jesus. Teach Whoopi and her round-earth, partial-Jesus history a lesson none of us will soon forget.

* Google terms for getting this joke: Klein Greenwald FISA.

I Hate Chuckabee

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 07:57:09 -0600

Politics, 26 November 2007

Memo to the media at large: MIKE HUCKABEE IS NOT VERY CLEVER.

I know, that as a general rule, comedy and politics don't mix. That's because comedy, at its best, is about taking chances. Saying things that are unexpected, so they can strike people in odd and unfamiliar ways, and thus provoke the desired reaction - laughter. Modern politics, at its "best", is about not taking any chances. Saying as many expected things as possible so that they strike as many people as possible in the most familiar way possible, and thus provoke the desired reaction - a vague sense of approval that hasn't been analyzed too carefully.

It's often said that we like to see politicians make jokes because it shows their human side, but I must disrespectfully disagree. Because what happens is that the politicians come across as someone without a human side desperately trying to prove to us that they have one. Without offending anyone in the slightest. In the most calculating way. Remember John Kerry, the motorcycle, and Jay Leno? That's precisely the kind of thing we need to be avoiding.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Mike Huckabee, who isn't funny. And it's vitally important, when someone isn't funny, that we, as a society, NOT ENCOURAGE THEM WHEN THEY TRY. Because then they might think they -are- funny. And they'll try again. And we'll all suffer. So I beg the media - please stop talking about Mike Huckabee's stupid fucking Chuck Norris ad.

You see, Chuck Norris has endorsed Mike Huckabee. Now, we're all aware that Chuck Norris is a complete fucktard who, thanks to repeated blows to the head, doesn't believe in evolution. A sane man would reject Chuck Norris' endorsement like it was Ted Nugent's "Mystery Stew". But Huckabee, despite not being kicked in the head for most of his life, doesn't believe in evolution either, so he decided to trumpet the Norris endorsement in a TV ad. Full of Chuck Norris jokes his staff grabbed off the Intertubes.

Step back from the ledge, folks. Don't jump. The election's still almost a year away, and it's not going to get any better. We'll get through this. Yes, the idea of Chuck Norris saying nice things about Huckabee's conservative credentials, while Huckabee reads from a printout of a Web meme is horrifying. It's even more horrifying in reality, because while Huckabee may be a strong proponent of Second Amendment rights, he's nothing compared to the guy off-camera with the gun to Huckabee's head forcing him to participate. Still, we must be strong.

And for fuck's sake, CHUCK NORRIS FACTS? Is it too much to ask that the bunch of out-of-touch programmed drone fuckers fighting tooth and claw to rule us with an iron fist stay even remotely current with their attempts at Internet hipsterism? What's next, a policy paper from Barack Obama advocating public ownership of our collective base infrastructure*? Just because Giuliani can't let 2001 go doesn't mean the rest of you have to live in the past.

But nobody's criticizing Huckabee for this. I see mild applause for his iconoclasm and mention of his refreshing departure from political advertising tradition. How fucking hidebound and moribund does an institution have to be when mentioning Chuck Norris's superfluous chin-fist is a breath of fresh air? It's like a mortician wearing a clown nose. No, worse. It's like a mortician's INSURANCE AGENT wearing a clown nose.

In the interest of promoting reasonably current Netmeme pandering attempts amongst the presidential candidates, I hereby offer up the incredibly valuable You Are Dumb Dot Net endorsement to the first candidate, of either major party, to make an on-camera or nationally reported LOLCats reference. I reserve the right to withdraw that endorsement five minutes later due to the fact that once I see it, it will not be so good actually, but five minutes is five minutes.

Don't try to convince us you're one of us. They say that worked for Dubya, but I'm not convinced that's even true, and if it IS true, it's because what he has in common with the everyday American is a simplistic and inaccurate grasp of the issues. All you prove to me by telling a Chuck Norris joke is that you have a staffer who had a LiveJournal in 2005. Which is not, the last time I checked, one of the necessary attributes of the leader of the allegedly free world.

*Tell me you got that. Lie to me if you have to, but please, tell me you got that.

Straight Line Heaven

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 22:53:08 -0500

Celebrities, 12 September 2007

Memo to Avril Lavigne: THANK YOU.

You know what the news is like on 9/11? I bet you do. Every fucking year it's the same. Are we safer? Are we less safe? Who gives a shit? We're really fucking safe. We were really fucking safe on September 10, 2001, and we're really fucking safe now. Yes, we've pissed off more Arabs than is wise, but that's really more of a concern to the 300,000 or so of us we've sent over there. Here, we simply do not get blown up often enough for "safer" or "less safe" to have any tangible meaning. And like so many things that lack tangible meaning, the news can't shut the fuck up about it.

The only thing different this year is that I heard Glenn Beck bitching that we were getting over 9/11 too quickly. Look, you stupid clown, you can only wear the hairshirt for so damn long before it's laundry day. Just because you don't notice the self-indulgent reek doesn't mean it's not there. And speaking of stupid and self-indulgent, have I mentioned how happy I am that Avril Lavigne exists?

Because Avril Lavigne is the Pons and Fleischmann of straight lines. Without even meaning to, she has tapped into one of the fundamental forces of comedy, and is radiating it into the atmosphere at a rate never before measured. Now, like the nerd-famed cold fusion experiment, it seems too good to be true. A setup. A hoax. Avril Lavigne did not really give Q Magazine a list of ten "commandments" full of comedy gold, did she?

Well, I've done my due diligence, seen the scans of the magazine page, and all I can say is, either she said these things, or Q Magazine wants us all to believe she did bad enough to get sued REALLY REALLY HARD if she didn't. But you'll understand my skepticism when you get a taste of ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Listen, when you are 17 you don't know how to hold a conversation with an adult, and you pretty much don’t want to. But I learned to channel that annoyance into my music."

Oh, the wisdom she's gained now that she's 22. Of course, she apparently hasn't learned that when you're responsible for "Sk8er Boi", it's never a good idea to put the word "annoyance" within smelling distance of the phrase "my music". I mean, that's just asking for it.

"When the hurricane thing happened I went to my closet, filled six boxes of stuff and said to my assistant, 'take it to Katrina!' I also like to give stuff to people who are my "workers", especially if they don't make much money."

I see this paragraph the same way I saw those birds of paradise from Planet Earth. With complete and utter disbelief that such a specimen could exist in the wild. I mean, I could see building it, you know, with CGI, or a version of ELIZA tweaked to sound like the writers room at a lame sketch comedy show. But in 2007, I can't imagine a celebrity saying this in a magazine interview without getting a tranquilizer dart in her neck right after the words "hurricane thing", courtesy of her publicist. Because if Avril Lavigne's publicist doesn't keep a tranq gun handy at all times, then he or she is obviously not doing their fucking job.

"I'm not particularly religious, but I am spiritual. What kind? Feng shui, mostly, and energy. I'm good at picking up people's energy, like I'm receptive or something."

Oh, that's what it is. It all makes sense now. She's so receptive that she's actually subconsciously picking up the collective jaw-dropping astonishment of a world aghast that she exists, and it's overwhelming her to such a degree that we're mistaking it for "being a complete and utter idiot".

"I want to get into movies next, a lead role in a super cool indie flick. I've been looking at scripts for the past two years now and most of them have been shit, but I know I could be real good at it. I have an agent now, and everything."

You know how I know this comes straight from the Eternal Straight Line Wellspring, the zero point source of comedy springboards? She said "looking at scripts", not "reading scripts". Which is a distinction so vital to the resulting joke that Avril couldn't have come up with it herself. No, she's merely a conduit to an external force. You could call it feng shui, you could call it receptive or something, but I like to think of it as a force that surrounds us, and binds us, and allows us to point and laugh at stupid people.

I Would Do Anything For Earth*

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 20:19:34 -0500

Environment, 1 May 2007

Memo to Sheryl Crow: BUT I WON'T DO THAT.

And yes, I do feel unclean for making that reference. But unclean is good, because today we're going to talk about poop.

You see, last week, on her blog, Sheryl Crow did some pre-Earth-Day musings about little things we can do to help the environment. I know, you're thinking the same thing I'm thinking. "Sheryl Crow can write?" It seems to be true. Either that, or she pays a blogger to take dictation. You know, like Tom DeLay does.

The point is, however she did it, Sheryl Crow blogged and had ideas for saving the planet. And one of them involves saving the forests by limiting our toilet paper to one sheet per visit sur le cannes. Lest you think she's excessively draconian, she does allow for "those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required.", or what the less delicate among us refer to as "a rousing rendition of Taco Bell's Cannon".

She now says she was joking. I don't care. This isn't Comedy Court. Whether she was kidding or not, Sheryl Crow has accidentally stumbled across a core truth of the universe - as liberal and environmentalist as I am, there's at least one thing I won't do to save the planet, and she's got it in one. Or two, if you go by traditional numbering schemes.

If there is any true measure of civilization, it's this - the more civilized a time or people are, the less likely it is that the average citizen will come into contact with, or have to deal with, poop. Civilization operates on an inverse shit ratio. My equivalent from a century ago had to deal with more poop than I do. 1807's verbal raconteur even more so. And back you go, farther and farther, with more and more poop taking up more and more of each individual's daily life. Chamber pots. Coprolites. The proverbial primordial poop.

On any given day, I can be pretty sure when I wake up in the morning that by the time I go to bed that night, I will not have touched poop. And what poop I have seen or smelled, I have seen or smelled briefly, and mainly because it's my own. And I can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my life is better as a result.

Ergo, since we do not live in a bidet culture, you can have my toilet paper when you pry it from my clean, dry hands. You want my car? Take my car. Want to ration my electricity? Go right ahead. But I will wipe my ass if it means drowning every last one of you sons of bitches on the coasts.

Maybe it's a clever ploy on Sheryl Crow's part. Yes, I just read that sentence too, and I know how implausible it sounds. But I know one thing for sure. The instant I heard this proposal, I started thinking about all the conservation I'd be willing to do instead. I'll buy the fucking compact fluorescents already. I'll bike to the co-op. I'll reduce my carbon footprint to the size of Cinderella's shoe. Just let me squeeze the Charmin. And let everyone else do it too.

Because the only thing worse than not being provided with the tools to properly deal with my own excrement is being on an elevator, or in line at Wal-Mart, or on a bus with a whole bunch of fellow humans ALSO limited to one sheet per trip, all living out their own private versions of An Inconvenient Poop.

Sheryl Crow may be able to deal with one sheet per trip. I'm sure she has people for that, too. But if it comes down to a choice between my anus and the extinction of all mankind? Well, I didn't like you fuckers much anyway.

*Today's special bonus alternate title: ALL I WANNA DOO DOO.

Two For The Price Of One

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 07:58:06 -0600

Sex, 20 February 2007

Memo to a whole bunch of people with no pithy, easily identifiable nomenclature: YOU ARE DUMB.

OK, normally I tend to be laissez-faire when it comes to bitching about news coverage of celebrities. There are people out there who get upset when CNN devotes five hours a day to Anna Nicole Smith and never mentions Darfur, but I'm not really one of them.

It's an inevitable result of news-for-profit. If you're going to get upset, get upset over the fact that providing people with the information they need has become subject to the vagaries of consumer demand, so people end up being told what they want instead. That's been the nature of the beast for a long time, and acting all affronted by it is old hat.

THAT SAID. Shut the fuck up about Bald Britney. If you can't shut the fuck up about Bald Britney, at least take to heart this You Are Dumb Dot Net Guide To Telling Whether Something Is A Fucking Publicity Stunt Or Not. If a celebrity does something that seems shocking but is actually harmless, and there's video of them doing this thing, and within days, artifacts from this event are being auctioned off for charity, IT'S A PUBLICITY STUNT.

Britney shaved her head? Big whoop. I'm not sure why people aren't more familiar with this, but hair? Grows back. The way the media fetishizes bald chicks, you'd think everybody at CNN had their first masturbatory experience watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Call me when Britney gets an arm amputated during a drunken night on the town. And even that would be less shocking than it could be - thanks to headset microphones, it wouldn't even be career-ending.

Now let's move from Britney Spears to porn, while typing another sentence that will do awesome things to my Google hits. Can someone explain to me why Julie Amero is facing 40 years in prison?

For those who don't know, Julie Amero is the substitute teacher convicted last month of four counts of risking injury to a child. She didn't dangle them off rooftops. What allegedly happened is that the room had a computer, students went on the computer when she left the room, ended up at a website full of porn pop-ups, and the students all saw the porn pop-ups. Students reported seeing naked people and one couple "engaged in oral sex", which, since it's Internet porn, means a blowjob. These were seventh graders.

Let's ignore the vast number of questions raised by the case and the convictions. Ignore, for example, that this school computer was, in 2006, running WINDOWS 98 and INTERNET EXPLORER 5. Let's pretend that the worst, most bullshitty dreams of the prosecutors were actually true, and Julie Amero decided to spend her substitute teaching day surfing the Internet for pictures of naked people and blowjobs and showing them to seventh graders.

Even if all that were true, and it's not, why is Julie Amero facing forty years in prison? I'm not suggesting that blowjobs should be added to the middle school curriculum, I'm just calling for laws and punishments that, you know, at least bear some vague proportionality to the harm caused by the actions. I mean, Ken Lay wasn't gonna get 40 years, and I bet everyone he ripped off would have preferred it if he'd just shown their kids some Internet porn instead.

Just explain to the kids that no, most of them aren't that big, and no, most of THOSE aren't that big either, and on the off chance that other thing ever happens to them, it's not at all necessary for the woman to look awkwardly toward another corner of the room. Problem solved, injury averted, and nobody's life gets ruined because your school's ancient fucking technology doesn't have a pop-up blocker.

A Sales Campaign

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 13:12:04 -0600

The News, 15 December 2006

Memo to Jeff Greenfield, with a side order of Rosie O'Donnell: YOU ARE DUMB.

Of all the excuses in the world, the one I may very well hate the most was "It was a joke". Because even when it's true, it's not an excuse. If you have to use it as an excuse, it means that nobody's laughing. And if nobody's laughing, it was a shitty joke.

Rosie O'Donnell got in trouble for a shitty joke. The shitty "Chinese people talk all ching chong ching" joke. That's a joke you have to put some fucking effort into to make work. It's not something you toss off as a segue on The View. But she did, without working any of the necessary and vital irony and detachment, and just came off looking like a fucking idiot. She held off apologizing for a week, and even when she caved, it was the "sorry you didn't think I was funny" variety.

But at least Rosie O'Donnell has a mild form of comedy as her vocation. At least you can understand why she was trying to be sort of funny. Not so with Jeff Greenfield, CNN correspondent.

Earlier this week, Greenfield was making his regular appearance on Wolf Blitzer's "Situation Room", where the news is more accurate, more exciting, and more real because it's surrounded by lots of other news on big video screens in the background. Greenfield was doing a piece on Barack Obama, informing us on the vital issue of how he dresses. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Ask yourself, is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of "GQ" to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable... Now, it is one thing to have a last name that sounds like Osama and a middle name, Hussein, that is probably less than helpful. But an outfit that reminds people of a charter member of the axis of evil, why, this could leave his presidential hopes hanging by a thread."

As a news piece, this strikes a number of nerves. Like whatever nerve it is that conducts Completely Fucking Ridiculous impulses from the ears to the brain. The "his middle name's Hussein" thing is the latest non-issue drummed up by bigots to try and take Obama down a few notches - to at least slow his ascent. I'm not sure why they're bothering. All the people that are upset about his middle name can already see he's black. PREACHING TO THE CHOIR.

After being called out on several fronts for being an idiot, Greenfield got snippy and went on the defensive. You see, it was a joke. ACTUAL JOKE EXPLANATION TIME!

"A piece I did for "The Situation Room" -- a piece I thought an obvious, patently absurd parody of muddled political thinking -- engendered howls of outrage from elements of the blogosphere, where it was assumed I actually meant to tie Sen. Barack Obama with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Of course he DID mean to tie the two of them together. He just didn't want us to take it seriously. But you have to tie the two together even if you're joking. That's the whole premise of the alleged joke. That's how comedy works.

Greenfield spins several variations on "how could you think I was serious", including saying it at least three times, telling us his wife said it, and, in one of the most amazing bits of unintentional projection I've ever seen, tells bloggers they have hair-triggers because they have "the need to fill all that space every day, or hour, or 15 minutes)". But that's the thing about blogs. They don't have to fill all that space every fifteen minutes. They can post whenever they want, when they have something. There's only one industry that actually has to fill every non-commercial minute of the day with some form of pseudo-information, Jeff. You may be familiar with it.

But let's take Greenfield at his word. He was trying to be funny, the bloggers didn't get it, the bloggers overreacted. This still leaves us with one huge, burning hemorrhoid of a question. Why, in the middle of The Situation Room, on CNN, was Jeff Motherfucking Greenfield trying to DO A BIT?!

Just because people get their news from The Daily Show doesn't mean they want to get The Daily Show from the news. And if there was such a thing as a state-mandated comedy license, I'm guessing Greenfield would fail the written and never even make it to the road test. And even assuming that a comedy bit in the middle of the show was a good and proper thing, and Jeff Greenfield was exactly who you wanted to pull it off, the joke doesn't work.

And the reason the joke doesn't work is that, to be a parody, you have to be an exaggeration. To be a satire, you have to overplay the worst excesses of what you're satirizing. Jonathan Swift wouldn't have caused a stir if he wrote a paper suggesting the Irish FEED BABIES.

And that's what Greenfield's piece on Obama was. It wasn't a parody of muddled political thinking, because it was functionally equivalent to the exact same muddled thinking and analysis that passes for content on all the cable news networks every hour of every day. When you spend all day swimming in a pig lagoon, "Hey, you've got some pig shit on you!" is not comedy.

And "It was a joke" isn't a good excuse.

The Gift That Keeps On Sucking

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 20:57:23 -0600

Main Column, 7 December 2006

Memo to America: STOP BUYING STUPID SHIT. AGAIN.

Looks like the Official YAD Holiday Antigift Guide will end up being a recurring feature. And why not? Someone's got to point out to all of you the things you may, in a moment of weakness, think are a good idea. You know, like a TV that claims to be the first one for both men and women. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm glad Sony's finally cracked the technological hurdle linking chromosomes to the ability to receive visual input, but you'd think, for the sake of humanity, they'd incorporate it into ALL their models, not just expensive plasma sets.

I guess we'll all have to keep living with our own gender-segregated sets until prices come down. And speaking of gender and television, it's come to my attention that Rachael Ray must be stopped.

I know it seems like I'm late to this particular backlash, but that's because I don't really -want- to hate her. It's just that she keeps making me. With the mute button on, and a bit of cardboard covering the entire screen from her forearms up, 30 Minute Meals isn't a bad little cooking show.

If they ever put season sets of it on DVD, though, we can strap creationists to chairs, prop their eyeballs open, and force them to watch this woman evolve from a slightly ridiculous cooking show host into a crank-addicted, Joker-gas-sniffing, multimedia prisoner of her own schtick. The personification of nails on a blackboard. And a one-woman post-Martha empire.

The moment I realized she'd become a menace to society was when I caught two minutes and eighteen seconds of her new syndicated talk show. That was months ago. I didn't write about it, because doing so would have required watching more than two minutes and eighteen seconds of her syndicated talk show, and that wasn't gonna fucking happen. The moment I decided I needed to tell you all she'd become a menace to society was when I saw a commercial for her Christmas album.

Put down the rope and step off the chair. She's not singing. At least not this year. No, instead, the eyeball-scrapingly-titled "How Cool Is Christmas" contains exactly one dozen Christmas songs, personally selected by some record company executive and shown briefly to Ray for five seconds to get a signature. And oh, what a dozen songs it is.

It's the reality show cast of Christmas albums. There's your requisite standards (Sinatra, Aretha, Doris Day, and of course the Bowie/Crosby Little Drummer Boy). There are the demographically-balanced covers of classics (Willie Nelson doing Blue Christmas, and Hall and Oates doing Jingle Bell Rock*), a couple of wacky tracks so that those approaching middle age can feel hip (Elvis, Buster Poindexter), and the requisite smattering of world music and jazz.

I don't understand why even people who can stand Ray are supposed to give a shit what Christmas music we're supposed to believe she likes. Or buy an album, even if there are a couple of recipes in the liner notes. I mean, if I want to hear that fucking Bowie/Crosby song, all I have to do is take my head out of its soundproof sack anytime after Thanksgiving and wait ten minutes. She should have called it "Songs As Inescapable As My Grinning Death Mask".

There is absolutely no reason you should buy this stupid piece of shit. Well, OK. One reason. If a crazed maniac kidnaps you, forces you on Amazon at gunpoint, and tells you to choose between Ray's Christmas album and her "mixtape for kids" or he'll shoot you in the head. The Christmas album is, incrementally, better than eating a bullet.

*A combination roughly equivalent to bleach and ammonia.