Goddamn, this is gonna be a zany good time.
So I had these traffic schools to choose from to clear a ticket from my record. It was a tough choice; I nearly went with IdiotsTrafficSchool.com simply by the sheer brazen stupidity of the name. Alas, I settled on LosAngelesDriver.com because it’s specific, it’s local, and it speaks to me more as a Los Angeles Driver and less as a Cheap, Lazy Idiot or a fan of Comedy or Laffing.
But I ask you this: whence the comedy/traffic school crossover? Okay, I get it. Pre-Internet, it was a big draw for a Student of Traffic Law to matriculate where the faculty was likely to pass the time with yuckemups and heehaws spicing up an otherwise drab curriculum. At some point, free in-class Pizza was considered a big draw, featured heavily in a school’s name and Yellow Page ad.
But on the Internet? How funny could traffic safety possibly be? Well, maybe you’ve heard of a little comedy club called the Improv? Because the answer is: this funny (not affiliated with The Improv comedy club). Or maybe you enjoy the great comedians. You might want to check out GreatComediansTrafficSchool.com, with a traffic joke from Rita Rudner, right on the front page of the site! All I’m saying is if you thought traffic school on the web had to be about not laughing, you’re just plain wrong. But find your own pizza, fatty.
Being the kid of a pediatric dentist, mine was the house that gave out toothbrushes. Our door would have been so marked up with hobo code (three lines, plus some years, three dots and a hash for “Unsalted peanuts”).
Naturally, morning would come and our front lawn would be strewn with toothbrushes and sometimes ruder. When I reached jr. high age and made it clear to my parents that my reputation was at stake, we started giving out fun size candy bars, as the Pagan deity Hallowe’en intended.
Obama meets Joe the Plumber
Video of their chat is here, at ABC News. It appears as though Obama made a friend of Joe Wurzelbacher, if not a voter.
Iconoclasts: Charles Barkley and Björk
This is one of my favorite Kristen Wiig moments, culled from TV Squad’s Top 10 Kristen Wiig moments.
via Buzzfeed
“Brass Eye” (1997) - Drugs
Jesse Thorn was decent enough to hip me to the British comedy series “Brass Eye” on DVD.
Watch the clip. If you’ve got the jumpies, ➤➤ to 3:30 for the bit on “Schools Heightened Aversion Drug Therapy (S.H.A.D.T.)”. You will not regret it.
Validation is but a Google search away.
Having typed only “Garfield poster” before autocomplete added “osmosis” for me, as if by divination and demographic insight, I know that in my preteen classroom angst I am not alone.
Did you ever in your life so badly want to punch a poster?
Another shining example of autocomplete validation: “Jon Hamm je…” yielded “Jon Hamm jewish”. More on that later.
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Even in dirty campaigns such as this one, where half-truths, obfuscation and exaggeration abound (from both sides, mind you), when you challenge the voting public to judge your opponent by what is known of him, you show respect for your audience, your opponent, and the political process. When you do as the McCain campaign has done in these more dire of their campaign days—challenge your audience to judge your opponent by what is not known of him—you show a profound disrespect for humanity.
Let’s give a name to this meme, the implied answer to the question posed by the McCain campaign. Let’s call the meme “Obama is a terrorist” for simplicity’s sake. Of this I’m sure: the McCain campaign is run by smart people who wouldn’t be where they are were it otherwise. The McCain campaign knows that Barack Obama is not a terrorist nor a terrorist sympthaizer, that claims of his faith in and practice of Islam are without any legitimacy, that his ties with people whose past can be characterized as radical are based on nothing other than community building and never destruction. But the McCain campaign knows that there are fringe elements of its audience who don’t know this. And so they allow themselves the luxury of suggesting it by merely posing a question.
Granted, I believe that when McCain asks the question, “What don’t we know about Barack Obama?” his intentions are not to imply that Obama is a terrorist. On the contrary, I believe that McCain is decent enough to have been negatively surprised by the reaction his question received from an audience member in this clip from a rally in New Mexico last week. I believe that when McCain himself asks the question, he intends to simply convey the message that to many, the details of Barack Obama’s policies may be obscured by the magnetism of his personality (which, in itself, is a legitimate suggestion).
But the question, posed with a slightly different and increasingly common intonation, exploits that most dangerous of all human tendencies: to fear the unknown.
Let me be perfectly clear: challenging voters to judge a man based on the unknown is an outright appeal to ignorance.
UPDATE: This, via John Dickerson, is uplifting.
Digital Love in an Analogue Space
My first cell phone had a series of text message templates. They included such generally specific communique as “Be home soon” and “Where should we meet?”
Disturbingly, though, one template simply said, “I love you.” While the phrase may be the second most used in the English language (right behind “I think we should see other people,” luckily not an option on the phone) and while the letter “u” only appears once in the spelling, the many stages at the cell phone manufacturer needed for Text Template 8 to appear on my phone, the pure cynicism and reductionist thinking that led to a mass produced pre-typing of emotion, display the most Orwellian aspects of our increasingly wireless and nonverbal interactions.
Greeting cards have mass-produced sentiment for decades so maybe text messaging should be viewed in the same prism: distant, non-immediate communication. Except text messaging is, by nature, immediate and direct, right to your pocket past any barriers of rings or voicemail. When an impersonal emotional lexicon is used in a personal nature, a sad disconnect of message, medium, and person occurs, and we reduce ourselves even more to numbers in a spectrum.
