The Mad Boom-ber

This is my favorite Inspector Clouseau cartoon. Oh man, do I love this one.

The Good, the Bad and the Greedo

I stumbled across this amazing art site, Arethemost.com, here's a fun example:

10-4: Talk Like a Trucker Day

It took these guys (which had a picture of the greatest trucker who ever lived, Jack Burton) to inform me that today is Talk Like a Trucker Day (get it, 10-4?).

Here's a set of phrases to help ya'll out. Go here for my nostalgia for "Convoy" to get yo'self in the mood.

Back out from Bean-Town. Bah-bah.

Dave Barry and Bob Graham

As you know, my man Dave Barry has stopped writing a weekly column and has spent the past few years writing children's novels of unknown worth and following his wife to sports events. But, like with Calvin & Hobbes in newspapers, the powers that be have been reprinting old Dave columns. Most I've read already but sometimes we get lucky and there's a 'new' (meaning so old that it wasn't published in any of his books) column. So it was a week ago when I was able to read a 1983 interview between Dave and then FL Gov. Bob Graham (D).

I advise reading the whole column, but suffice it to say that Graham is possibly the sharpest politician I've seen interviewed, based on his extraordinarily swift wit. Mario Cuomo struck me as sharp and funny but just read this amazing interchange, which Dave swears actually happened, and was not pre-planned:

BARRY: What can the state do about harmonica safety? I don't know if you have any idea how many Floridians die every year in harmonica accidents....

GRAHAM: Well last year we actually made some substantial improvement. In 1981, there were four people who died of harmonica accidents. Now actually, I think it's only fair to count three of them, because the fourth one was actually, I would say it was more of a swimming-pool accident. He was playing the harmonica in the swimming pool and actually jumped off the shallow end, hit his head, and we don't know whether it was the fact that he swallowed the harmonica, or the brain damage. They counted it as a harmonica accident. Now, this year, or 1982, the last year for which we have statistics, we only had two harmonica accidents. I think it was the result of the public-service ads that I did....

BARRY: The Harmonica Safety Day I think was a wonderful....

GRAHAM: ...and we built it around the theme that if you want to play Dixie, it's fine, but don't do it in front of the air- conditioning duct, because that's where we found that most of the deaths occurred. It was the vacuum that was created.

BARRY: This leads us pretty much directly to toads. I've been staying at a house in Broward County, and there are, every morning out on the patio, toads the size of mailboxes. What can we do?

Just to 'fact-check', I searched to find if there really had been a Harmonica Safety Day. Nope. Gadzooks, what a guy!

I remember when he ran for president in 2004 and now I'm even angrier that he didn't make any headway. If he had run instead of John "Choke" Kerry?! Think about it: a sharp, savvy, popular Governor and Senator from Florida who opposed the Iraq War! Grrr.

Pic from this completely unrelated site.

Plasma! Dog Plasma!

Tex Avery Rules! Crazy Mixed Up Pup (1954):


Update: This was nominated for an Oscar in 1955, but lost to a Mr. Magoo! Note, even though some crank throws some hate on the Magoo on the IMDB page, it actually wasn't that bad. True, it's crazy that the best cartoon-maker of all time, Tex Avery, would lose any head-to-head contest, but we all know the Oscars are foolish. Anyway, determine it for yourself.

Fun Site of the Day

This blogger goes by the name of "Jake" on Balloon Juice and is an all-around good feller with a sense of humor.

Backpost from 4/30/08, moved it to today because why not.

Video of the Day: Evolution of Dance

This is such an awesome clip - I've mp3ed it and listen to it often. My favorite part starts at 2 min, 42 sec.

Late Update: My middle child was watching this with me one day and he started to dance like an Egyptian... so amazing.

h/t, this awesome site. Backpost - I meant to put this up over a year ago, November 21, 2008! Better late than never.

Fun: Television Tropes & Idioms

This is a very nice resource: Television Tropes & Idioms. An example, some of the tropes in the awesome Evil Dead (e.g. Army of Darkness) movie series (just the 'A's):

• Animate Dead: Subverted when Ash accidentally summons the titular Army of Darkness when he mispronounces a spell.
• Apocalyptic Log
• Arm Cannon
• Arrow Cam
• Artificial Limbs: When his hand is chopped off, Ash replaces it with a chainsaw. Later, he replaces that with a clockwork gauntlet.
  • And in the extended media beyond the films, he'll frequently swap out his gauntlet with the saw.
• Ax Crazy: How Ash copes with the events of the first two movies. By the third, he's turned it into Crazy Awesome.

A further explanation, using the last entry, the difference between Ax Crazy and Crazy Awesome:

[Pic of Jack Nicholson's character in the Shining] An "ax crazy" character is someone who is psychologically unstable and presents a clear danger to others. Ax crazies are capable of extreme violence, whether carried out with a Slasher Smile, a Creepy Monotone, or out and out murderous rage, and they're not too picky about their victims, which makes them extremely frightening to deal with. This mainly differentiates them from other eccentric characters who may themselves be obsessive, weird or seemingly crazy, but use this condition hand in hand with doing good, or at least not being in the way. However, some formerly established heroes can go through an episode of ax-craziness and still retain their heroic mantle.

vs.

Someone who is Crazy Awesome is someone who's nucking futs, in an amusing way, and is effective at what he does because of that craziness. In real life he'd get fired from whatever job he has/would have, or even arrested — at the very least, the things he does just plain wouldn't work. But somehow, he manages to be both effective and a character that the audience likes or even loves.

Like any good internet resource (especially those made by My GenX Brethren), each entry is hyperlinked to a bunch of other concepts. I declare this website, fun.

Pic from the website. Backpost finished 2009-12-02.

Fun - Starship Dimensions

This is a fun link, for you sci-fi geekers: Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions. Ya gotta see it to understand the coolness.

More Videos

My search for the Swayze obit video uncovered these two great, hall of fame, skits from SNL - (1) The debut of Chris Farley's "Matt Foley", (2) the commercial for "Bad Idea Jeans" (look how young, and/or alive, those guys were! [tear]):







Backpost finished on 2009-11-20.

Saturday Morning Watchmen (Video)

As I've mentioned before, I love me my Watchmen, and I dread my obsessive need to watch the (terribly reviewed) movie. Anyway, for those who know the book, and have a sick sense of humor, here's an awesome parody: "Saturday Morning Watchmen." The inside humor is vicious and delicious.

The original is from here, but some nice guy put it up on the 'Tube:

Purim Ahoy: Infant Costumes

Way too expensive for my horizons, but oh so very very cute.

Here's the whole infant page.

Superbowl Commercials: The Best Ones

I have two candidates:

While I hate to admit it, because I think it tastes like dreck, this wonderful slapstick commercial by Diet Pepsi may be my favorite in that I'd like to see it again and again:

Coke Zero's wonderful nostalgic commercial - perfect for Steeler fans, but really for anyone alive and watching TV in 1980 (see below for the original that this is parodying):

1980 Mean Joe Green Original:

Make Your Own Demotivator

Here's one device to make your own de-motivation poster. This genre of humor is one of my very favorites. It's got the right combination of art, humor, and tar-black cynicism. A few choice examples:

News from the Onion

The Onion is one of the great things in life, no doubt. And one of my favorite features (second only to Rawlings) is the 'American Voices' a.k.a. "What do you think." Not only is it consistantly funny, but since it's based on fact, I often learn some important new fact. Like this - only from them did I learn that Texas elected their first Jewish speaker of the House.

Backpost finished 2009-11-25; the pic is of the guy who - for no real reason - my brother and I think is given the funnier lines.

Law & Order

Since moving to Boston, we inherited two televisions with the house. Each is connected to cable (a necessity here). One TV is in the basement and is pretty much permanently affixed to PBS-Kids (and/or a running loop of Thomas the Tank Engine videos). The second TV is in our bedroom (remember, we inherited this setup) and is also permanently affixed to a station, in this case TNT. Why? Because my wife looooves "Law & Order." Luckily, it can be broadcast three or four times a night and since it's been on TV since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there's plenty of episodes to show.

We watched the show often, since our time in NYC. However in recent years I've found the show to be harder and harder to watch. The formula has become tiring. First of all there are the factual implausibilities: the level of murder in L&O-Land makes Manhattan look like Baghdad, the DA's staff have only two prosecutors, and the fact that the late seasons had the Manhattan DA (who has been a liberal Jewish Democrat for the past 300 years) as a cornpone Tennessee Republican cracker.

But the formula goes as such: (1) Before the opening credits is some grisly murder 'torn out of the headlines' (which is OK as a premise, I'm not criticizing this part as much as categorizing); (2) the police procedural which ALWAYS has a red-herring. Always. Jeez! The cops go after some generally skeevy dude and it's always wrong. Finally the real culprit is unearthed and it's often tendentious (it's the way cheap mystery writers create the sense of the unknown by either defying logic or by not giving you enough info). The green herring (as opposed to red), the real culprit, is usually a B-list movie star - a quick hint for the fourth wall viewer (3) The DAs are brought in and since the perpetrator is clearly guilty (sporting swastika tattoos on their forehead or what have you) the case must be made artificially suspenseful by having a major piece of the evidence thrown away on some technicality ('suspense' in L&O in the "Order" portion is as fictive and false as the 'mystery' is in the "Law").

This part generally causes me to leave the room in frustration. I just don't like being force fed images of stupidity. It's almost equivalent to the parts of late Dirty Harry style 80s films when the judge allows the serial-rapist to go free because the arresting officer read him his rights while hepped up on Twinkie filling.

The 'Suspense' is fake, false, and insulting... and the rest of the case proceeds from that handicap; the ADA needs to prove the killer shot his grandmother but the gun was ruled inadmissible because it was made out of pressed-together Korans. Whatever. The 'suspense' also violates the basic rules of narrative: a story makes sense for real reasons.

The L&O from the other night was a beaut: (1) the death is of a woman who was stoned to death (religion? maaaybe). (2) The red-herring was a set of Albanian Muslims who were known to be violent against immodesty (the victim was an art show producer who was showing pictures of Muslim violence against women). (3) The herrings are given an airtight alibi by the FBI (who have put the group under watch) but who happened to be investigating the murder victim because of NSA warrantless wiretapping; ya see, she was talking about "jihad" over the phone (and that was the theme of the art show, har har). However, lucky break! The FBI wiretap overheard that the victim was having an adulterous affair with the Muslim artist whose work she was going to show! Aha!

Now, so far, the writers have developed three very provocative plot directions but since we're in the throw away section of the show, none of these will be used again. Some people could look at this as a sign of the salubrious artistry of the screenwriters. But smart people (like you and me) will recognize that each part is salacious tabloid exaggeration - things that just don't really exist in real life and especially in close proximity to each other. No matter. It's all in the bin, for now we find out that the victim's son is the culprit.

He's discovered through another set of tendentious links. The victim's husband failed to mention to the cops that his son is a paranoid psychotic who has been brainwashed by an Evangelical pastor (played by a B-list Movie Star, Samwise Gamgee and/or Rudy depending on your age) into believing he was a messiah. The pastor convinced the killer to stone his mother to death because she committed adultery (bad) with a Muslim (badder).

OK, so basically, in the real world the killer and his pastor will be arrested and put behind bars. But not in Law & Order! Ya see, the killer claims he has visions from God and has a psychiatrist prove that his brainwaves change while he's under prophecy and the judge accepts this proof to say that the killer can't be held guilty while he's acting our prophecy.

Uh, yeah. Sure. Why is this even put on television? Well, after the regrettable few years of Fred Thompson as the Manhattan DA, the ultra-liberal writers are able to explain over and over that Americans hate Muslims so much, and love Christian wackos so much, that anything Christians do - especially violence against Muslims - will be considered acceptable to a Manhattan jury.

Maybe, maybe, if the show were set in Lubbock, Texas I'd have an easier time accepting that premise (as well as the huge yearly body count). But not in Manhattan. And you can say that I'm taking this too seriously. I am, I guess, but only because I watched it with my own eyeballs and I'm taking out vengeance for it's insult to my cranium. However, the response to people who accuse me of 'too seriously'-ism, you have to answer why fiction should be allowed to be not only stupid and incoherent (which I can basically live with) but also to teach bad moral lessons? To suggest that the world is actually much more of a hateful place THAN IT ACTUALLY IS.

I remember my reaction to the horrid little film "Wag the Dog" which indicted all Americans as credulous and easy to fool. Some even have put the proof of this movie on the Iraq war, to say that we bought those lies just as the movie predicted. NO! People bought the Iraq War's lies because (a) we had just been attacked on 9/11 and so people were jumpy about enemies, especially known psychopathic ones, (b) the government made the case using false information that Iraq was both responsible for 9/11 and that Saddam was preparing nukes against us... and the Press helped pass along these lies, (c) when the lies became clear (in 2005 or so), the nation moved firmly against the war (cf. the 2006 & 2008 elections).

Wag the Dog was evil back in 1997 because of the mean-spirited lies that it claimed were truths; for the accusation that people are scum. Law & Order, in its worst episodes (they're not all bad, only in the last few years when they ran out of ideas), does the same thing.

In the above episode, the court case proceeds against the pastor and - luckily enough - the police are given hours of incriminating videos of the organization which just happen to have been taped by one of the pastor's camp-counselor. Ya see, the pastor has been running a Christian-style madrassa that teaches 8-13 year old kids to fight a war against Muslims (even showing the kids in camouflage clothes and camo face-paint). And two kids went along with the killer and helped stone the mother to death. And in the full court the pastor starts screaming about how holy-war against the Muslims was necessary and that he agrees with what the killer did.

Yet he's acquitted. Why? Because Americans hate Muslims because Americans are so totally Christian. Proof? One of the jurors was caught reading the Bible for help in the deciding the case and he's dismissed as a juror!

The lessons learned are infuriating and insulting. Accept better.

Update Postscript: It's this same misanthropy that makes me also hate "slasher" horror films. The whole genre just hates people, and so do shows like this.

And I had a spare moment and found the name of the cruddy L&O episode I tore apart above: "Angelgrove." And to show you what I'm up against, here's the comment of some doofus IMDB member:

the story of a boy stoning his mother was compelling. I knew the Christofascists had Jesus camps in this country, but I never suspected that we could have Islamofascist-type Madrassas to indoctrinate the youth into killing for Christ. One would have to be completely clueless to suspect that a jury would convict in this case. Of course, the prejudices of the average juror would compel them to let this wacko go.

Sigh.

My new favorite Cartoon: Basic Instructions

So, so good. Since most of the great comedy - Daily Show, Onion, Simpsons - are being written by males of my age group (30-40 yrs old), I can find many things that fit my humor wheelhouse. Basic Instructions by Scott Meyer is such a house. One example, to munch on, and then go to the blog for the whole series. {click to enlarge)

My Favorite Onion Politics Story

The Onion does an awesome job covering current events, and the 2008 election is no exception. My favorite headline and caption (story is often secondary with the Onion) is this:

Obama's Hillbilly Half-Brother Threatening To Derail Campaign

Daily Show Awsomeness

"Yes, He, Can" comes full circle.

Video of the Day: John Cleese

h/t McArdle.