More Onion teevee: the election, apathy, and you

Today Now!: How To Pretend You Give A Shit About The Election

A preoccupation with symbols and empty gestures

Neither Spel-ChekR® nor I know how to spel tryptich, which is why I didn't include a similarly themed pic of McCain demonstrating hubris. I imagine lots will become available at the GOP convention.

Micah Holmquist:

Tim Russert was the only hope we had in this Road Warrioresque landscape. Without him, we are doomed.

Arvin Hill:

Saying "bring it on," kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner -- you know, "wanted dead or alive," that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that.
~George W. Bush to The Times of London

Arvin: The Boy King regrets not being a more accomplished liar.

No one could have foreseen such vanity.

Michael Cortese(aka Mykeru):

the recession seems to have turned the decades long game of “let’s make a buck with China” into, and I couldn’t believe it even as I watched, Lou Dobbs on TV the other night warning people about the growing threat of cheap coat hangers from China.

Thanks Lou. See that big building over there? That’s a Wal-Mart. Apparently there’s a whole lot of that going on in there. You’ll go in there fighting, and you’ll come out with golf clubs.

Alison Kilkenny: Jesus Arm-Wrestled Dinosaurs

Who is IOZ? Why, the king of the one-liners, that's who-

IOZ, "The Food bad, the portions small": Jesus Lord A-Mighty, buy some fucking bicycles, you whiny little bitches.

and, "McLame": John McCain is so old that creationists are actually forced to deny he exists.

an interesting new(well, new to me) site: Troubling Information http://www.troubling.info/

I'll miss this guy

George Carlin, May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008.

"There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions," he said. Yet, out of 400,000 words in the English language, there are seven: "That will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war...."

Harvey Korman

As you probably know, Harvey Korman died last week. He was only 71, but I notice he looks pretty haggard in some of the photos of him from the past five years or so.

Naturally I prefer to remember him looking like this. I thought about him when I heard that Bob Barr was running for president under the libertarian ticket, as I hate to admit Barr looks a little like him.

But Barr strikes me as mostly humorless, lacking that Harvey K twinkle in the eye, and he's possibly even less presidential, whatever that means. Actually I think they all leave something to be desired, even St Obama and Mister Straight Talk. We could really use a presidential candidate who isn't bought and paid for, and doesn't suck. But where would we find such a man? ... Why am I asking you?

Anyway, if you didn't like Harvey Korman you're probably a putz.





photos: CBS, Warner Bros

at the movies

from the Christian Science Monitor, via Bob from Michigan.

Kim Novak and one of the Mirisches

I'll be away for a while. Then I'll be back.

portable health care 2.0

via Mark Kleiman and Ron Wyden.

Huh?

It looks like unintentional satire-- intentionally, I assume.

I guess Slate doesn't exactly ♥ Hillary Clinton

The headline on the Slate article reads,"The Hillary Deathwatch Widget:Embed Clinton's sinking ship on your blog, iGoogle, or Facebook page."

I'm not going to put this on the sidebar as a permanent or semi-permanent fixture, just here for one post. As far as I'm concerned all three of the mainstream presidential choices stink, and HRC certainly is a corporatist, prowar phoney. But even as some of the humor directed at her amuses me, some, mostly photoshopped grotesquerie, is really off-putting.

Occasionally I wonder how much of it has to do with her simply being a woman, since-- inexplicably to me-- most people don't seem that bothered by the dynastic implications of two Bushes and two Clintons possibly ruling governing us for as much as 28 years in a row. Virtually none of the humor directed at her seems to touch upon that. And as far as humor about her ambition goes, well yes, it's certainly fair game, but all the men who ran and are still running are plenty ambitious too.

I guess gender equality means the soulless and power-hungry who would do their damnedest to persuade us to keep ruining our country (and others) via unbridled empire deserve to be blasted, irrespective of their sex. I'd prefer the kind of social progress that involves doing away with soulless and power-hungry leaders who want to wreck as many countries as possible, but perhaps I'm fussy.



(the inset panel above, regarding Scaife, is from Tom Tomorrow. The rest is from Get Your War On.)

Don't forget to vote

Or, stay home and watch "Mexican Radio"; the result may be the same-- who knows?

also: "find Chuck Norris"

I posted part of this earlier, then took it down- it's not meant as a commentary on the Mississppi primary in particular.

happy leap day

the last word on blogging...

And for your eyeballs

Putting aside my general sense of the polyannish meaninglessness of registering to vote, at least for a national election, I rather liked this little video.

episode 1


episode 2

episode 3

(Embedded above is episode 4, of 4.) For some reason I never realized Rosario Dawson was so, um, pneumatic, as Aldous Huxley would've said.(even though there is a mostly coherent story arc, I don't think the order you watch them in makes terribly much difference-- it ain't Hamlet.)

New Yorker-ish

Marta Costello regarding super Tuesday(and waterboarding...)

and, Dennis Perrin on Obama:

...The system demands cleansing, not the real kind, of course, but a general sense of the feeling, and Obama is the perfect vessel into which Hopers may pour their dreams. Right on cue and beautifully executed. You'd have to be completely numb not to appreciate the approach.

he's referring to this video.

the gnooze:Marta re Iran

I don't know what it is, but Marta Costello's phunny news shows are growing on me. Plus, it's a way to get phunny news without crossing a virtual picket line(ahem!).

Methylsulfonylmethane(MSM)

via the Onion and Myspace

"Nation’s Wealthy Cruelly Deprived Of True Meaning Of Christmas"

remember this?

1942 DeSoto

photo via ned

from "learn to say ain't"(2005)

(via mike gerber)

John Rogers:
let's talk image. When I first started out on the road, I was a skinny guy with a big nose, a Boston accent and a Physics degree telling jokes in bars out West. I was hitting a wall of resistance in a lot of rooms. One night in Rawlins, Wyoming, the headliner -- a sweet road comic named "Boats" Johnson -- took me aside.

"You're a good joke writer. I mean, damn, there's some smart stuff in there."
"Thanks. But, uh..."
"They don't like you much." Boats handed me a beer. "Second show. Longneck. Always a longneck. Bring it on stage. Sip from it every now and then."
"I don't really drink on stage --"
"Fine. Fill it with water. Don't bring attention to it, just sip from it."
I shrugged. "Anything else?"
"Yeah. Learn to say 'ain't'. Don't change the jokes. Just learn to say 'ain't' every now and then."

The shows went, much, much better after that. I told the same gun control jokes, the same pro-gay marriage bits, the same making-fun of the culture wars jokes. But now I was killing.

There are two lessons to be taken from "Learn to say 'ain't'." First, the fundamental dynamic in all crowd interaction is us vs. them. Period. It's sad. Oh well. Get over it and win.

Now, the fine line here is that, the audience also always knows when you're being dishonest. That's worth hitting again. When you are on stage, the audience's collective mind can tell when you're not being yourself. And even more importantly, they can tell when you're lying to be one of "us". (Like Kerry hunting, or Dukakis in the tank). Changing yourself to fit the audience would be the wrong lesson to take from "Learn to say 'ain't.'" No, the lesson Boats was teaching me was that there's no problem with relaxing a bit and showing that you're not one of "them." He was teaching me that connection is a half-way game -- just extend out a little, and the audience will come the rest of the way. They will extend the boundary of "us" if you advance toward it.
[...]
Kerry was so, so far outside of "us" that, frankly it was a testimony to how badly Bush has screwed up that he even got THAT close.

there's a lot more and you should go read all of it.

Gnooze?