Time was when the masters of Musicology practiced an archane and dark art. They wore flowing garments and charms, slept in subterranean quarters and ascended into the world of men only to bring blessings and tunes to house-parties and car tape-decks. They were melody-making medicine-men, Judas Priests if you will...Alright, they were the no-account longhair with the lazy eye at the Zeppelin concert; the roadie who could tune your Stratocaster pitch-perfect, but who couldn't play a lick himself; the guy in the garage with the headphones and the spliff; the Star Wars kid at the record store who could name all the David Bowie b-sides from the Ziggy Stardust to the foppish-fascist eras. They were the connoisseurs. They were the aficianados. They were the Tambourine Men---and they dealt exclusively in records.
Forgive me, I've just introduced a rather technical term of art without explicitly defining it. By record (record-album) will be meant, variously:
(a) A set of musical recordings stored together in jackets under one binding.
(b) The holder for such recordings.
(c) One or more 12-inch long-playing records in a slipcase.
(d) A phonograph record.
(e) A recording of different musical pieces.
There. Now, I'm sure even the most thorougly modern millie among you has come across one of these artifacts at one time or another. I remember my first find: It was at a waste disposal site about a hundred meters from from my basecamp. I stumbled upon 40 to 50 largely or fully intact specimens dating from the Late Acid-Lithic to the early Funktaceous. Most of the glyphics were too faded to be analyzed, but I conjectured from what was left of the markings on one sample that it was recorded by an artist formerly known (among contemporaries) as "Prince".
Needless to say my amateur musicological discoveries spurred me into investigating the archaeology of albums further. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a sort of faux-record shop in a local mall called "Tower Records". As it happens, "Tower Records" sells digitized plastic reproductions of record-albums, complete with replica dust jackets and liner notes! Who knew you could get mp3s for money??!?!
Since my awakening, I've become a bit of a reactionary vis-a-vis musicological theory. As those of you versed in the modern orthodoxies know, the at-the-time inconsequential discovery of sub-albumic particles ("singles"), as pioneered by the work of Casey Casem and Dick Clark in the 1950s and 1960s in particular, has led to the formulation of the radical "quantum" musicological mechanics, which explains musicological phenomena in terms of their "wave functions" (i.e. in terms of how often in a given time interval t they are broadcast over a given television or radio wave). The fundamental unit of analysis in quantum musicology (as opposed to the record-album of classical mechanics) is the "hook". The hook is not only sub-albumic, but sub-singular in nature (that is, it is smaller than a record single). Proponents of the hook mechanics claim that practical musicological systems (such as clubs, request shows, and even concerts) which at one time necessitated the time-consuming and tedious employment of singles or even entire albums, can now be recreated using only sub-albumic hooks (see the Usher World tour 2003-2004). These sympathizers further point to the tremendous explanatory power of the theory and its ability to accomodate the facts about teeny-boppers and metrosexual club-kids everywhere. Recent theoretical strides made by the collaborations of Aguilera and Daly (1998), Spears and Daly (1999), Nelly and Daly (2001) and Quddus and Kelis (2004) have only solidified Quantum Musicology's place as the dominant research paradigm of our generation.
As for me, I only wish that I didn't have to resort to such painfully overextended metaphors and third-rate wordplay to convince you troglodytes that you probably ought to listen to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, or Blonde on Blonde, or Ring of Fire, or Pet Sounds, or London Calling or Born in the motherfucking U.S.A. at least once before you die from lack of novelty.
-The Man in Black
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Monday, February 07, 2005
My Generation's Rodent-Catcher
Ah, one Super Bowl down. Salty snacks consumed, victors declared, predictions disproven. A fun day, and what a perfect ending it is to sit down to my favorite daily dose of pseudo-intellectualism to read that we're restarting development of nuclear warheads. Ah, a tranquil slumber I shall have tonig--
Wait. What?!
Faded legends are a sorry sight. And it would seem that we've become the elementary school bully in his first year at high school. The other bully has transferred to another school/broken up into a loosely-affiliated commonwealth of independent states (here my metaphor breaks down, just like the USSR did), and he's no longer feared/respected. Instead, he tries to show to anyone who will listen (fewer and fewer each day) that he still has it: he can still punch harder and taunt higher. But instead of doing the sensible thing and try to play along with everyone else in the schoolyard, he decides to get into a race with himself.
That's right, we're making sure we're able to respond to the threats of the 21st century with the weapons of the 20th. No longer will recent foes like "insurgents" or "Sudanese instigators of acts of horrific genocide" or "Large masses of water moving at high speed towards unsuspecting shores" attempt to threaten us in the realm of nuclear superiority.
The really amazing thing about the NYTimes article, though, is the opposition it presents. After explaining that the thrust of this program was to step back from designing sleek, sexy bombs capable of ending millions of lives to constructing stoic, sturdy instruments of mass tragedy, the Times quotes as a critic Dr. P. Leonardo Mascheroni, whose complaint is that the program... costs too much. Instead, he thinks that we should make "lighter, robust [harbingers of death and destruction]."
Now, you might think that I, as a member of The Enfranchised, should be happy about support for nuclear weapons, which are essentially a jobs program for physicists, bureaucrats, and other traditionally-white-and-male eggheads. Shouldn't I want people of my background to strike pay dirt? But I'm not just white and male, I'm ambitious. Companies already exist that want to fight over this meager pie.
Men of my sort have always had a Klondike. In the 19th Century, it was Gold or the Railroad. In the 50's, it was Nuclear Weapons (hence the staked claim). In the 60's: plastics. In the 80's: we made money selling money. That's right. You give us money, we'll invest it, and eventually give you more. S&L scandal: the genius that only an oppressive majority could create. In the early 90's we made our fortunes as expats, selling democracy. And since then, computers. Cyber this and eThat. But mark my words: computers are a dying fad, and I want to know, what next? Will we start cowering at "Big Solar" or fearing legislation written by the Pastry Lobby?
Somebody once said, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." The meaning of my recounting this quote should be obvious: maybe, just maybe, the lucrative trend of this decade will be aphorisms, false advice, and greeting cards.
Wait. What?!
Faded legends are a sorry sight. And it would seem that we've become the elementary school bully in his first year at high school. The other bully has transferred to another school/broken up into a loosely-affiliated commonwealth of independent states (here my metaphor breaks down, just like the USSR did), and he's no longer feared/respected. Instead, he tries to show to anyone who will listen (fewer and fewer each day) that he still has it: he can still punch harder and taunt higher. But instead of doing the sensible thing and try to play along with everyone else in the schoolyard, he decides to get into a race with himself.
That's right, we're making sure we're able to respond to the threats of the 21st century with the weapons of the 20th. No longer will recent foes like "insurgents" or "Sudanese instigators of acts of horrific genocide" or "Large masses of water moving at high speed towards unsuspecting shores" attempt to threaten us in the realm of nuclear superiority.
The really amazing thing about the NYTimes article, though, is the opposition it presents. After explaining that the thrust of this program was to step back from designing sleek, sexy bombs capable of ending millions of lives to constructing stoic, sturdy instruments of mass tragedy, the Times quotes as a critic Dr. P. Leonardo Mascheroni, whose complaint is that the program... costs too much. Instead, he thinks that we should make "lighter, robust [harbingers of death and destruction]."
Now, you might think that I, as a member of The Enfranchised, should be happy about support for nuclear weapons, which are essentially a jobs program for physicists, bureaucrats, and other traditionally-white-and-male eggheads. Shouldn't I want people of my background to strike pay dirt? But I'm not just white and male, I'm ambitious. Companies already exist that want to fight over this meager pie.
Men of my sort have always had a Klondike. In the 19th Century, it was Gold or the Railroad. In the 50's, it was Nuclear Weapons (hence the staked claim). In the 60's: plastics. In the 80's: we made money selling money. That's right. You give us money, we'll invest it, and eventually give you more. S&L scandal: the genius that only an oppressive majority could create. In the early 90's we made our fortunes as expats, selling democracy. And since then, computers. Cyber this and eThat. But mark my words: computers are a dying fad, and I want to know, what next? Will we start cowering at "Big Solar" or fearing legislation written by the Pastry Lobby?
Somebody once said, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." The meaning of my recounting this quote should be obvious: maybe, just maybe, the lucrative trend of this decade will be aphorisms, false advice, and greeting cards.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Good Citizenship through Paranoia
I’m not a good person. I leave 12% tips on adequate service. I drink. I lust. I sloth. (slothe? Sloath? Sloth.) I don’t envy, but I’m jealous of those who can. I speed (more than the courtesy 10mph), I don’t use blinkers, and I make sure that if ever my wipers are on, my lights are off. And if I were alone, and had free time, in a room with a puppy and a knife… well… only one of us is walking out. And if you think I’m alone, well, maybe you don’t realize how evolution happened and why *they’re* *our* pets.
That being said, some things can scare me straight. The first time I meet a future mother-in-law (or as is more accurate, a soon-to-be-ex’s mother), I am on my bestest behavior with a cherry on top. I try to keep my swearing to a minimum in front of Friars, Fathers, and Nuns. And whenever I see the tell-tale markings of a lightbar on top of a caprice or a Crown Vic with governmental plates, I am the very model of Driver’s Ediquette.
The problem, of course, is that these markings are tell-tale. The silhouette of a bacon-mobile is easily recognizable, and radar detectors are a dime a dozen. This means that I am only in accordance with the laws and regulations of the road/municipality when I am being directly observed. All memory high school run-ins with the fine ladies and gentlemen of the New Providence Police Department to the contrary, cops have better things to do.
So, take this under advisement, procurement personnel of law-enforcement agencies across our fair land: branch out. Don’t restrict yourself to American sedans. Buy anything with 1.5-7 wheels, and use it to scare the shit out of us. I mean it: your job’s hard enough. Why not play with our minds?
Imagine if every Hyundai Boxy-wagon or Alfa Romeo roadster pulled to the side of a road were potentially a speed trap? No longer could you whiz by a Winnebago doing twice its speed: they might be SWAT team members on their way to see the Grand Canyon. Every impounded car or bicycle should be turned into another tool for enforcing ridiculously low limits on our ability to endanger myself and those near me.
It used to be that this was easily taken care of: every red-blooded American was decent and God-fearing. But the idea of an omniscient being who can see your every thought just isn’t as surprising in age of cell-phone cameras, surveillance photos, orbiting satellites, gossipy blogs, and attorney general Gonzales/PATRIOT act enforcer cyber-John-Ashcroft. So instead, instill fear in us with a reconstituted fleet of mopeds and Yugos with sirens hidden inside.
-D”I didn’t think I was even fighting the law, and the law won”an
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
The Challot
Ha! Wandering in the wasteland that is MY DOCUMENTS folder, I came across these articles I slipped under the noses of an oblivious administration in the April Fools Edition of my high school newspaper. Tell me folks, have you ever known a blogger who is so paradoxically both a smartass and dumbass?
STUDENT TOURISM TO LEBANON INCREASES 6430%
Dan Australianforbeer
Public opinion of Lebanon amongst RHS students has increased nearly seventy-fold in the past several years on the strength of a frenetic word-of-mouth campaign to encourage patronage in the war-torn Middle Eastern Nation.
"Beirut is the best! Woo-hoo!" screamed a sophomore girl who was reached for comment last Saturday night at the house of an anonymous senior whose parents were out of town. The girl’s speech was slurred and she walked with a noticeable disorientation, but even that couldn’t undercut her intense enthusiasm for Lebanon’s capital city.
"Everyone loves Beirut," remarked a prominent senior and organizer of several Beirut trips curiously referred to as ‘tournaments’. "After a hard week’s work you just want to unwind with your friends and have some fun. Beirut is the best thing for that, especially if your house is empty anyway." Trips to the Arab nation, located directly north of the troubled Israeli-Palestinian region, are sometimes planned and carried out with only a few hours notice, but some can last all night. "You don’t stop till you drop," claimed another RHS senior.
Many past and present tourists agree that all one needs to have fun in Beirut is several large plastic cups and a ping-pong ball. "Just don’t drink the Beirut water," one warned. "That’s just nasty."
________________________
ADMINISTRATION CENSORS ACTING LIKE A BUNCH OF [CENSORED] AGAIN
Smoove D
In the latest case of the incredible [censored] down in the [censored] department exerting their [censored]-like power over the ranks of RHS students, Administration officials have forbidden an article titled "[Censored] gerbils: A tale of [censored], [censored] and candlelit dinners" from running in the spring issue of The Yak.
When asked what he thinks about the re-[censored]-diculous censorship, Executive Editor Dan Foster responded, "I think it’s a bunch of [censored]ing bull[censored]." He went on to add vehemently, "If I had just one [censored] I’d grab them by their [censored] [censored] and drag them down to the nearest [censored] so I could [censored] them to the [censored] with their own [censored]. Then I’d really get angry."
This sanction is just the latest in the months long campaign of censorship by the [censored]faced administration. One senior official, clearly seen to be wearing a frilly [censored] beneath his three-piece suit, stated that the administration’s intentions are simply "to create a cleaner, more decent student-[censored] and a better learning environment." Also deemed indecent by the higher-ups was the AP Biology unit titled "The Descent of [censored] sapiens and How Man Came to Stand [censored]."
A group of students protested outside the office of one senior official, who’s home is reportedly heated by a stack of burning books, but their demands went unheard as a swarm of censors flanked them on all sides with Parental Advisory stickers.
______________________________
STUDENT TOURISM TO LEBANON INCREASES 6430%
Dan Australianforbeer
Public opinion of Lebanon amongst RHS students has increased nearly seventy-fold in the past several years on the strength of a frenetic word-of-mouth campaign to encourage patronage in the war-torn Middle Eastern Nation.
"Beirut is the best! Woo-hoo!" screamed a sophomore girl who was reached for comment last Saturday night at the house of an anonymous senior whose parents were out of town. The girl’s speech was slurred and she walked with a noticeable disorientation, but even that couldn’t undercut her intense enthusiasm for Lebanon’s capital city.
"Everyone loves Beirut," remarked a prominent senior and organizer of several Beirut trips curiously referred to as ‘tournaments’. "After a hard week’s work you just want to unwind with your friends and have some fun. Beirut is the best thing for that, especially if your house is empty anyway." Trips to the Arab nation, located directly north of the troubled Israeli-Palestinian region, are sometimes planned and carried out with only a few hours notice, but some can last all night. "You don’t stop till you drop," claimed another RHS senior.
Many past and present tourists agree that all one needs to have fun in Beirut is several large plastic cups and a ping-pong ball. "Just don’t drink the Beirut water," one warned. "That’s just nasty."
________________________
ADMINISTRATION CENSORS ACTING LIKE A BUNCH OF [CENSORED] AGAIN
Smoove D
In the latest case of the incredible [censored] down in the [censored] department exerting their [censored]-like power over the ranks of RHS students, Administration officials have forbidden an article titled "[Censored] gerbils: A tale of [censored], [censored] and candlelit dinners" from running in the spring issue of The Yak.
When asked what he thinks about the re-[censored]-diculous censorship, Executive Editor Dan Foster responded, "I think it’s a bunch of [censored]ing bull[censored]." He went on to add vehemently, "If I had just one [censored] I’d grab them by their [censored] [censored] and drag them down to the nearest [censored] so I could [censored] them to the [censored] with their own [censored]. Then I’d really get angry."
This sanction is just the latest in the months long campaign of censorship by the [censored]faced administration. One senior official, clearly seen to be wearing a frilly [censored] beneath his three-piece suit, stated that the administration’s intentions are simply "to create a cleaner, more decent student-[censored] and a better learning environment." Also deemed indecent by the higher-ups was the AP Biology unit titled "The Descent of [censored] sapiens and How Man Came to Stand [censored]."
A group of students protested outside the office of one senior official, who’s home is reportedly heated by a stack of burning books, but their demands went unheard as a swarm of censors flanked them on all sides with Parental Advisory stickers.
______________________________
Why the Eagles will win the Super Bowl
The Eagles will win the Super Bowl this year. I know this not because of sports certainty or information gleaned from analysis of marketplaces acting as conglomerators of insider knowledge. No, I know it for a stronger reason: narrative necessity.
Just look at the backstories. The Patriots have... what, exactly? They're Goliath. The favorites. They've won 2 out of the last 3 years. If they win, it's just setting them up as the mini-Yankees. And with the Red Sox already sucking up all the Miracle that the greater Boston Area could expect for the next three centuries.... No magic there, my friends.
But the Eagles are underdogs writ large. Terrell Owens managed to turn his privilege into a handicap by breaking his ankle or tibia or fibumacallit at just the right time to make his return triumphant and daring. Who can imagine any ending to this day other than him pushing himself harder than he should, extending a distressed joint just a bit more to make the catch. Sacrificing his body for the game. Wait, no, sorry: Sacrificing His Body For The Game.
But the real glory is Jeff Thomason: the assistant project manager at a Philadelphia construction company is back in the saddle. We all know the story: a has-been or a never-was that is suddenly thrust into the limelight. He wasn't even expecting to be playing, and here he is... The whole stadium starts chanting "Rudy". I mean, what the Eagles have is the destiny of every cliché sports feel-good movie.
The Patriots have two options to pursue if they want half-a-shot at the Lombardi Cup. 1) They could fire all their starters and replace them with a motley mix of cripples, orphans, and three-legged puppies. This unfortunately would start a bidding war with the Eagles, and end up with next year's top draft pick being used on a 7-year-old albino forced to enter the coal-mines to feed his family asbestos (the only thing he can afford on his meager wages) who has both emphysema and pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis.
Or, 2) they could up the ante and return the Eagles' dramatic story with a buddy comedy. Hire as their new wide receiver: a midget. A funny one, suitable of being in Jack Ass or Yet Another Mike Myers Movie. And aside from the physical humor of his lowered Hummer that has platinum-plated phonebooks for him to sit on, he contributes to the playing: the quarterback gives him the ball, then engages in everyone favorite illegal sport, midget tossing, and picks up a decent 7 yards.
So, keep your eyes open and your ears to the ground, and maybe we'll find out that this Sunday, we'll see not a matchup of the NFC and the AFC, but instead of tired heart-wrenching/tear-jerker vs. odd-couple/fish-out-of-water/Adam Sandler vehicle.
-D"Oh, and of course, everyone's actual favorite illegal sport is cockfighting"an
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
On Porn, Psuedo-Porn, and Pornicular References.
We're never happy with what we have. And just as it's true with mates, so it's true even with fantasies. If a woman's panties are bikini, we want them thong. If they were to magically become thong, we'd be unhappy because they're crotchful (the opposite of crotchless). Why, even if a woman is going the other way, hoping to lure us with the sex appeal of the librarian-type that appeals to the bibliophile in each of us, we need her sweater's neckline higher and its fabric fluffier. Why aren't we ever satisfied?
I do, from time to time, imbibe. And Thanksgiving last, I may have hit several bottles too hard. So I did what every red-blooded pseudo-intellectual does in this circumstance: I pointed my browser to magazineline.com and subscribed to, in order of increasing trashiness: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Playboy, and Maxim. I have yet to receive either hard-hitting journalism or cutting-edge fiction/not-nearly-witty-enough poetry/extra umlauts. But their absence has given me time a-plenty to examine the latter two.
And they lust for what they cannot show. Maxim, bless its heart, self-flagellates whenever it misses an opportunity to convey the presence of nipple. And Playboy's id comes out in cartoons that depict what its suggestive photospreads never can: that intercourse occurs. But allow me to point out a few techniques I have identified across these fine wastes of paper:
The holding-of-boobs: What bra is sexier than other flesh? In this strategy, a model obviously has bare breasts, and you can imagine that if you were to throw a ball at her, she might instinctively catch it. And haha: tatas! Plus, if she has oversized knuckles, you might be able to make out aureola behind those slim digits.
The untying-of-strings: I believe it was Xeno who first examined the paradoxes of catching motion in the still. But it was Plato who first took pictures of naked boys, so I don't know whom to credit. But in this scheme, the model is shown untying her bottom, leaving the reader to fast-forward the scene but five precious seconds, allowing gravity to exert its sworn influence and remove the offending items of cloth.
The doubling-of-porn-implied: This is my favorite. The previous devices have aroused imagination (and other things, yes, you perv) by making the mind's eye envision what probably didn't actually happen in these clinical-and-awfully-contrived photoshoots. But by taking a model, and hiding her "goodies" by having her stand against a mirror, over water, or in relation to some other reflective surface, the brain behind the camera makes that literary metaphor turn into the mind's cross-eyed: in the lecher's thoughts, there are now TWO naked women! And if only one would turn, there would be doubly-exposed pubic hair! Oh paradise!
Oh, and a note to Enfranchised followers: you may have noticed that our Crossfire like segment is entitled "Pissing in the Wind", and that last week it centered around issues of gender. This produced a notable upswing in traffic, almost entirely resulting from yahoo! searches for such esteemed subjects as "women pissing", "men observing men masturbate", "johnny carson ringtone", and the ever-popular "PISSING ON MEN." Now, I am not one to take advantage of hapless travelers. So I would be the last person to advertise this as the best site for "donkey punches." But if someone were to take "free golden showers" out of context or misinterpret the occurrence of words such as "ass rape with head in toilet.mpg", would I be taking advantage of them per se, or human nature?
And on a personal note, I guess I'm a bit... disappointed in the allegedly depraved nature of the web if such oblique references can boost me to the top of the hill for such specific queries. Obviously, our nation is in trouble if the above is the best hit it can produce for "urination olympics."
Monday, January 31, 2005
On Morality, Mortality, and Mor....pality?
Death's a funny thing. And I don't mean ha-ha funny (though which of us could stifle a laugh when James Cameron inflicted blunt emotional trauma on a computer-generated passenger in Titanic by having her fall onto one of that grand ship's propellers and tumble end over end to her icy demise?). I mean it makes people act funny in that crazy-if-poor/eccentric-if-rich kind of way.
Take the case of Michael Bruce Ross, a Connecticutian condemned to die. He has decided to stop appealing and face his punishment. Sounds reasonable enough, but it has spun up positively a tizzy in this small state already rocked by gubernatorial resignations and cancer.
Catch-22: some people think he's stopping his appeals not out of a recognition of guilt, but a desire to commit suicide by bureaucracy. Of course, suicide is illegal, so if this is why he's doing it, then we can't kill him.
Catch-23: Apparently T.R. Paulding (a man I can only imagine, from his name, resembles an egg in shape and gait), Mr. Ross's lawyer, is not a good attorney. You see, a good attorney would have exhausted all his appeals, done research, established his client's sanity before this point, and so Mr. Ross could be executed without hold-up. But the chief federal judge in Connecticut chewed out Mr. Paulding for errors that I'm guessing are legalistic and mundane in detail. This means that Mr. Paulding can no longer represent the dead man walking. Which means Ross has no counsel. And so can't be executed. The end result being that the only kind of lawyer who can save your life is not a Harvard Law, Yale undergrad lawyer. Instead, if you want to get off scot-free, you should hire an alcoholic child-beater with a sub-clinical case of kleptomania who is more likely to be passed out in a bar than to pass the bar exam.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
"No, no. Dick is my MIDDLE name."
I was recalling a bit of witty dialogue I had with a one-time friend of mine the other day (and by the other day, of course, I mean nearly 5 years ago. Memory is a funny thing.) Anyway, the conversation was about the resplendence of our respective todgers. You see, I was trying to ball his girlfriend at the time (or, more appropriately, she was trying to ball me and I was feeling terribly sixteen about the whole thing), so of course it makes sense that our simian minds would find some verbal sparring about the worth-and-girth of our junk to be in order. I'll try to reconstruct the crescendo here:
One-Time-Friend: My dick is so big it has several distinct climate regions.
Yours-Truly: The US Congress appointed a committee to study the matter of my dick further.
OTF: My dick is visible from low orbit.
YT: My dick is the obscure Sumerian god "Absu".
OTF: My dick has consulates in all the world's major cities
YT: My dick is responsible for 20% of the volume at NASDAQ.
OTF: My dick needs a crew of fifty stout men to sail it.
YT: My dick made the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs.
OTF:...touche.
Here at the Enfranchised, we like a good non-sequiter almost as much as we like the 1991 Don Johnson/Mickey Rourke classic Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. So I invite my fellow bloggers and our readers to make appendages to this post about your appendages. How big is your dick?
One-Time-Friend: My dick is so big it has several distinct climate regions.
Yours-Truly: The US Congress appointed a committee to study the matter of my dick further.
OTF: My dick is visible from low orbit.
YT: My dick is the obscure Sumerian god "Absu".
OTF: My dick has consulates in all the world's major cities
YT: My dick is responsible for 20% of the volume at NASDAQ.
OTF: My dick needs a crew of fifty stout men to sail it.
YT: My dick made the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs.
OTF:...touche.
Here at the Enfranchised, we like a good non-sequiter almost as much as we like the 1991 Don Johnson/Mickey Rourke classic Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. So I invite my fellow bloggers and our readers to make appendages to this post about your appendages. How big is your dick?
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Review: The Communist Manifesto
[printed in the entertainment section of today's Stanford Daily]
["The Record Bin" encourages readers to try oldies but goodies by reviewing art that's moved from the new releases shelf to the classics rack.]
Reading it now, "The Communist Manifesto", by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, seems prescient. It predicted the rise of consumerism, federalism, and intellectualism: aside from also forecasting a quick and permanent revolt of the working class, Marx and Engels were right on the money.
These authors actually created the now-cliché genre of "boy meets girl, boy is downtrodden by bourgeoisie, boy overthrows yoke of oppression, boy engages in dialectic." And the plot grips you from page 1 and never lets go. They trace the roots of communism from ancient
But their work is not without flaws. The opening sentence introduces and names their main character: "A specter is haunting
And at a few points, the authors allow their other interests to peek through. Marx and Engels pulled the 18th-century equivalent of printing a paper in 14-point courier when they start the second chapter with 11 consecutive one-sentence paragraphs (at the time, political tract publishers paid the author not by the line or sentence but per paragraph) And though they do offer a concise version of the entire work in the sentence "the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single phrase:", they do so deep in the middle of prose where skimmers will repeatedly miss it, consequently earning them further royalties from sales of the Cliffs Notes.
Of course these are all criticisms born out of a deep love for the work. M&E were the first to do what they did, and arguably the best. Who can forget the haunting refrain of "They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder." or the melodic, poppy jingle "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." So when I complain that the final sentence "WORKINGMEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" is just one gtg and two lol's away from being the product not of two enormous economic minds but a 13 year-old girl on a cellphone, remember that it is done as a longtime fan.
After writing the Manifesto, Marx and Engels broke up. The reasons? A mixture of skyrocketing production costs, their deaths, and the tiresome meddling of Yoko. So don't wait to catch them on tour and pick up this book. [A cautionary note: most bookstores will try to "upsell" you to a premium edition of the work, perhaps leather-bound, that includes B-sides, demo tapes, or live versions. Avoid these like the plague, or you'll end up as ashamed as the time you walked into Tower looking to buy "The Sign" single and walked out with an Ace of Base box set.] This collaboration marked the peak of each of their careers: Marx's sophomore effort, Das Kapital, is admittedly genius, but also an FDA-approved treatment for insomnia. And Engels never managed to regain his footing after the emotional toll of the faction, instead spending years in and out of rehab hoping against hope for a reunion tour and writing no fewer than twelve distinct prefaces over the next forty years.
Which isn't a bad thing, per se: if some other fallen legends had taken a similar route, our world might have been spared both Wings and "Ringo and the All-Starrs".
Friday, January 28, 2005
Friends Don't Let Friends Whine Punk
How well do you know your punk-teen?
I know, its a scary question. Time was when you wouldn't even have to think about it. When you asked your punk-teen just where she thought she was going at this hour, you could be sure that her response of "Away from your Fascism, Helen!" meant the Social Distortion show at CBGB (OMFUG), where she'd spend her hours in a 120 decibel catharsis before emotionally enslaving the Bassist from Jones Crusher and brutally stopping his advance from Second to Third.
But in these trying times, can you be sure even of this? Every day--in the paper, on the evening news, at your dinner parties--there are new stories about punk teens trading in their mohawks for faux-hawks, piercings for clip ons, filthy for "vintage". Why, I'd be as wealthy as Good Charlotte if I had a nickel for every time I heard about a parent accidentally walking in on an embarrassed punk-teen scrambling to cover up his iPod or to change the channel from MTV2.
It wasn't long ago that you'd see cheap, basement-made EP cassettes and vinyl lining your punk-teen's bedroom floor, those days when your intrusions would meet with screaming and door slamming and even the occasional wish for your death. But sadly, this is no more.
The vaguely directed rage has turned to Meloncholy (sans, even, The Infinite Sadness); the mood-swings of emotional breadth have turned to brood-swings of emotional depth. I'm afraid to say that our children have lost the Parental Advisories on their music, and with it, their innocence. There is a growing underbelly of archy out there; of well-organized, well-funded music shows at big venues, complete with sound engineers and lighting technicians, tickets to which are available only from Ticketmaster (R). Indeed it seems that the only constants in this age of uncertainty are the amorphous angst and the black eyeliner. That's right, friends:
Your children are so fucking Emo that it literally hurts.
But its not too late. Talk to your kids, tell them that its ok to be effectual again. Tell them its ok to want to get laid for its own sake, and not just for the post-coital longing. Tell them that its ok to turn up the volume and the gain on their Marshall Stacks; or, if your youngsters have already unplugged, that its ok to play major progressions again. Tell your son that the number of tattoos he has should be proportional to his chances of winning a fight, not inversely proportional to it. Tell your daughter that there will be plenty of time for unexplained emotional distance once she's married, and that its possible not to fall in love with every sickly sixteen year old who sort of looks like Chris from Dashboard Confessional. And most of all tell them that sometimes, just sometimes, the sigh and the thousand-mile-gaze are inappropriate responses to external stimuli.
All this and more in my forthcoming educational video: Blood on the Frets.
I know, its a scary question. Time was when you wouldn't even have to think about it. When you asked your punk-teen just where she thought she was going at this hour, you could be sure that her response of "Away from your Fascism, Helen!" meant the Social Distortion show at CBGB (OMFUG), where she'd spend her hours in a 120 decibel catharsis before emotionally enslaving the Bassist from Jones Crusher and brutally stopping his advance from Second to Third.
But in these trying times, can you be sure even of this? Every day--in the paper, on the evening news, at your dinner parties--there are new stories about punk teens trading in their mohawks for faux-hawks, piercings for clip ons, filthy for "vintage". Why, I'd be as wealthy as Good Charlotte if I had a nickel for every time I heard about a parent accidentally walking in on an embarrassed punk-teen scrambling to cover up his iPod or to change the channel from MTV2.
It wasn't long ago that you'd see cheap, basement-made EP cassettes and vinyl lining your punk-teen's bedroom floor, those days when your intrusions would meet with screaming and door slamming and even the occasional wish for your death. But sadly, this is no more.
The vaguely directed rage has turned to Meloncholy (sans, even, The Infinite Sadness); the mood-swings of emotional breadth have turned to brood-swings of emotional depth. I'm afraid to say that our children have lost the Parental Advisories on their music, and with it, their innocence. There is a growing underbelly of archy out there; of well-organized, well-funded music shows at big venues, complete with sound engineers and lighting technicians, tickets to which are available only from Ticketmaster (R). Indeed it seems that the only constants in this age of uncertainty are the amorphous angst and the black eyeliner. That's right, friends:
Your children are so fucking Emo that it literally hurts.
But its not too late. Talk to your kids, tell them that its ok to be effectual again. Tell them its ok to want to get laid for its own sake, and not just for the post-coital longing. Tell them that its ok to turn up the volume and the gain on their Marshall Stacks; or, if your youngsters have already unplugged, that its ok to play major progressions again. Tell your son that the number of tattoos he has should be proportional to his chances of winning a fight, not inversely proportional to it. Tell your daughter that there will be plenty of time for unexplained emotional distance once she's married, and that its possible not to fall in love with every sickly sixteen year old who sort of looks like Chris from Dashboard Confessional. And most of all tell them that sometimes, just sometimes, the sigh and the thousand-mile-gaze are inappropriate responses to external stimuli.
All this and more in my forthcoming educational video: Blood on the Frets.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
An Open Letter to Pop-Punk Emo
Dear Pop-Punk Emo,
Why must you be so good? You don't help me feel better about myself, my life, or my future. In fact, you make me feel bad. And not naughty-but-exciting-bad or evil-archnemesis-but-worthy-foe-bad. I mean curling-up-in-a-corner- and-then-being-sad- that-i-can't-do-anything- even-just-crying-right bad. Why must your lyrics be so creative and compelling when they are, objectively, about situations and circumstances quite awful. Why must Saves the Day's chords be so angsty but also bubblegummy? Your ironical sense of the world, finding the cloud around every silver lining, is reminiscent of Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but instead of having short sentences or fluid prose, you pile misery upon bad luck.
And yet, I come running. I heart your titles with their poignant combination of literary allusions, pop cultural references, and more words than can fit on one line of my iPod/iTunes/iClaudius interface. I have come to you many a night when the last thing I needed was to dwell on matters now ancient. And you, you with your backing vocals and well-timed-regression-to-acoustic informed me that I still had open wounds by rubbing the salt of your melancholic melodies into them.
But it is time to take a stand. No more will I listen to any album whose subtitle could very well be "50 ways to kill your significant other". Or that tries to sound triumphant through 40 minutes of complaint. Please release from your grasp and take me off your mailing list.
Unless you have new releases forthcoming because, if nothing else, I need new songs to get stuck in my head.
I remain your humble servant, &c.,
Dan Bentley
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Pissing In The Wind: Short, unfunny, and not wrong
So many words, so many links this week. What more can I say/point to?
Instead, I offer a suggestion: what if girls are innately worse at math and science? But not math and science in general, the math and science that predominately men have spent centuries creating? A math and science that, created by male minds, fits itself to male minds?
Great Minds Think Alike, for the appropriate definition of great,
Dan (probably speaking for the other Dan and the Lev)
Instead, I offer a suggestion: what if girls are innately worse at math and science? But not math and science in general, the math and science that predominately men have spent centuries creating? A math and science that, created by male minds, fits itself to male minds?
Great Minds Think Alike, for the appropriate definition of great,
Dan (probably speaking for the other Dan and the Lev)
Monday, January 24, 2005
Pissing in the Wind, Round ?: Orgasmic Chemistry
Before I get into this week's topic of gender roles/differences, as articulated by Harvard President/bull-in-a-china-shop Larry Summers, I should make a quick disclaimer. Like JFK, Natalie Portman, and the Unabomber, I'm a product of The Kremlin on the Charles, and have seen my share of Harvard debates turned national debates. Mostly, the only reason they get press is because of where they take place. Were this to happen at, say, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, I doubt any newspaper besides the Star Ledger would waste any ink on its behalf. So I tend to not take these things very seriously. So keep that in mind, as well as the distinct possibility that I've been brainwashed by the elitist, intelligentsia of fair-at-all-costs Harvard. But anyway, let me begin...
America is a nation of whiners. Always have been, always will be. We were founded by a bunch of whiners. "We want to practice our crazy religion and churn butter all day long," the Puritans whined. Thus, Massachusetts was born. "We don't want to pay our debts," and thus, Georgia was born. "We don't want to take showers," and thus, New Jersey was born. Then we whined about taxes and sequestering soldiers and having to chop down cherry trees and being forced to lie about it. And thus, America was born. The South whined about taxes, we whined back about slavery, and we had the civil war. Then a bunch of stuff happened which we naturally whined about...
Fast-forward to the 1960s. It was then that whining reached it's zenith in America history. Whining became a way of life. In fact, whining became its own movement, captivating the disillusioned youth and inspiring them to stage numerous sit-ins, teach-ins, LSD-ins, and other acts of symbolic protest which required little to no effort. They whined and they whined and they whined. And eventually, they won a few battles. We withdrew from Vietnam, and Nixon was forced to resign.
But then the generation of whiners grew up. Their whining was turned elsewhere. Rather than taking on The Man, they took on The Corporate Ladder. Instead of protesting the government's role in world affairs, they protested the government's role in their lives. Supply-side economics was Hot, and bellbottoms was Not.
What does this all have to do with Summers saying women suck at science for a reason? Well, if there's one thing the ex-whiners turned Reagan Democrats love to whine about, it's whining about how much the current generation whines about political correctness. Summers response was met by the religiously-PC camp with accusations that Summers thinks women (or rather, wimmyn, womin, or whatever it is you're supposed to say) are genetically stupid, and on the other side, by the religiously anti-PC faction that Summers' deriders were freedom hating lesbian-communists whose aim is to hyphenate every word in the English language. Allow me to take a side somewhere in between what I have misrepresented these two sides as saying.
I once read of an experiment where a group of Asian schoolgirls (easy there, perv) was given a math test. When they took it the first time, they filled out their name and gender on the answer sheet. The second time, their name and race/ethnicity. The two tests were relatively the same degree of difficulty. Surprisingly--or perhaps not--when they wrote "female" they did worse than when they wrote "Asian." And when they wrote "Asian" AND "female" the research team became incredibly turned-on. (Sorry, couldn't resist).
Obviously social roles, expectations, et. al. have something to do with performance. Granted not everything. I seem to remember reading once that males and females have their brains wired differently--one is more left-brained or right-brained than the other. But I'm sure that doesn't explain why the vast majority of people teaching or majoring in one of the hard sciences will be male, and the humanities female.
To be honest, I think the more interesting question is the relation between good-lookingness and intelligence. Go to any Ivy League campus and look around for a while and tell me what you see. I guarantee you'll see a student body composed of wildebeests, hunchbacks, and the disfigured. Do the genes that control for facial symmetry also control one's preference for shiny objects and loud noises? Is IQ lessened by 10 points for each cup size after A? Sure there are exceptions--myself and my co-bloggers obviously included--but by and large this holds true.
Just think about when you meet a person who is both good-looking and intelligent. You don't trust them. You just know there's something wrong with them. They're either: 1) an alien, 2) a free-mason, 3) a robot, 4) psychotic, or 5) gay/taken. Either that, or: 1) you're actually quite slow yourself and the person isn't all that smart, 2) you have painfully low standards, or 3) you're drunk, and it's a combination of 1 and 2.
Like Foster, I'd also like to close with a joke of my own:
A man walks into a bar. Ouch.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
(Same post, different blog)
America is a nation of whiners. Always have been, always will be. We were founded by a bunch of whiners. "We want to practice our crazy religion and churn butter all day long," the Puritans whined. Thus, Massachusetts was born. "We don't want to pay our debts," and thus, Georgia was born. "We don't want to take showers," and thus, New Jersey was born. Then we whined about taxes and sequestering soldiers and having to chop down cherry trees and being forced to lie about it. And thus, America was born. The South whined about taxes, we whined back about slavery, and we had the civil war. Then a bunch of stuff happened which we naturally whined about...
Fast-forward to the 1960s. It was then that whining reached it's zenith in America history. Whining became a way of life. In fact, whining became its own movement, captivating the disillusioned youth and inspiring them to stage numerous sit-ins, teach-ins, LSD-ins, and other acts of symbolic protest which required little to no effort. They whined and they whined and they whined. And eventually, they won a few battles. We withdrew from Vietnam, and Nixon was forced to resign.
But then the generation of whiners grew up. Their whining was turned elsewhere. Rather than taking on The Man, they took on The Corporate Ladder. Instead of protesting the government's role in world affairs, they protested the government's role in their lives. Supply-side economics was Hot, and bellbottoms was Not.
What does this all have to do with Summers saying women suck at science for a reason? Well, if there's one thing the ex-whiners turned Reagan Democrats love to whine about, it's whining about how much the current generation whines about political correctness. Summers response was met by the religiously-PC camp with accusations that Summers thinks women (or rather, wimmyn, womin, or whatever it is you're supposed to say) are genetically stupid, and on the other side, by the religiously anti-PC faction that Summers' deriders were freedom hating lesbian-communists whose aim is to hyphenate every word in the English language. Allow me to take a side somewhere in between what I have misrepresented these two sides as saying.
I once read of an experiment where a group of Asian schoolgirls (easy there, perv) was given a math test. When they took it the first time, they filled out their name and gender on the answer sheet. The second time, their name and race/ethnicity. The two tests were relatively the same degree of difficulty. Surprisingly--or perhaps not--when they wrote "female" they did worse than when they wrote "Asian." And when they wrote "Asian" AND "female" the research team became incredibly turned-on. (Sorry, couldn't resist).
Obviously social roles, expectations, et. al. have something to do with performance. Granted not everything. I seem to remember reading once that males and females have their brains wired differently--one is more left-brained or right-brained than the other. But I'm sure that doesn't explain why the vast majority of people teaching or majoring in one of the hard sciences will be male, and the humanities female.
To be honest, I think the more interesting question is the relation between good-lookingness and intelligence. Go to any Ivy League campus and look around for a while and tell me what you see. I guarantee you'll see a student body composed of wildebeests, hunchbacks, and the disfigured. Do the genes that control for facial symmetry also control one's preference for shiny objects and loud noises? Is IQ lessened by 10 points for each cup size after A? Sure there are exceptions--myself and my co-bloggers obviously included--but by and large this holds true.
Just think about when you meet a person who is both good-looking and intelligent. You don't trust them. You just know there's something wrong with them. They're either: 1) an alien, 2) a free-mason, 3) a robot, 4) psychotic, or 5) gay/taken. Either that, or: 1) you're actually quite slow yourself and the person isn't all that smart, 2) you have painfully low standards, or 3) you're drunk, and it's a combination of 1 and 2.
Like Foster, I'd also like to close with a joke of my own:
A man walks into a bar. Ouch.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
(Same post, different blog)
A Monologue of silence
In honor of the passing of Johnny Carson, a man funnier than Foster or The Leviathan can ever hope to be, I offer these snippets from his final monologue:
"The greatest accolade I think I received: G.E. named me 'Employee of the Month.'" [Editor's note: his show was the greatest moneymaker in NBC history, and at one point was 19% of the network's profits.]
"Farewells are a little awkward, and I really thought about this -- no joke -- wouldn't it be funny, instead of showing up tonight, putting on a rerun? NBC did not find that funny at all."
"During the run on the show there have been seven United States Presidents, and thankfully for comedy there have been eight Vice Presidents of the United States."
"And I said, well, I would prefer to end like we started -- rather quietly, in our same time slot, in front of our same shabby little set. It is rather shabby. We offered it to a homeless shelter and they said 'No, thank you.' I am taking the applause sign home -- putting it in the bedroom. And maybe once a week just turning it on."
And, finally, the way I hope I feel, said better than Nietzsche or Thoreau could, of a highlight reel: "If I could magically, somehow, that tape you just saw, make it run backwards. I would like to do the whole thing over again."
"The greatest accolade I think I received: G.E. named me 'Employee of the Month.'" [Editor's note: his show was the greatest moneymaker in NBC history, and at one point was 19% of the network's profits.]
"Farewells are a little awkward, and I really thought about this -- no joke -- wouldn't it be funny, instead of showing up tonight, putting on a rerun? NBC did not find that funny at all."
"During the run on the show there have been seven United States Presidents, and thankfully for comedy there have been eight Vice Presidents of the United States."
"And I said, well, I would prefer to end like we started -- rather quietly, in our same time slot, in front of our same shabby little set. It is rather shabby. We offered it to a homeless shelter and they said 'No, thank you.' I am taking the applause sign home -- putting it in the bedroom. And maybe once a week just turning it on."
And, finally, the way I hope I feel, said better than Nietzsche or Thoreau could, of a highlight reel: "If I could magically, somehow, that tape you just saw, make it run backwards. I would like to do the whole thing over again."
Friday, January 21, 2005
Pissing Into the Wind: "...but men are innately worse at shaking their sweet little asses"
What is it they always say on TV? "Art imitates life?"
Well, whatever it is, it's true. Bentley's topic couldn't be more topical--no more than 24 hours heretofore, over fish and chips, I delivered the Daniel R. Foster Memorial Lecture on Political Correctivity to an audience of severals and severals of people. My topic was, of course, the rt. hon. President Lawrence Summers' recent comments on the stuff chicks aren't good at.
So, although my remarks here mustn't cannabilize too much of what I intend to set forth more thoroughly in a monograph of the lecture tentatively titled Cute Things Girls Do, I will say a thing or two about the issue of gender differences.
Summers' comments were in bad taste. Let's all of us agree to that. The President of an American institution of higher learning should know better. You simply don't go out in public and suggest heterogeneity or deviation from uniformity of any kind. Unless of course, you're celebrating diversity (having filled out the appropriate paperwork in triplicate, and thus obtained the necessary permits)--in which case the bigger the cultural difference, the bigger the celebration. The annual Inuit-Zulu mixer, for instance, puts Carnivale in Rio to shame.
But lets leave aside for a moment the fact that it was Cretinous for Summers to open his mouth(it's my understanding that many at Harvard did not get enough iodine as children). Is there anything objectively wrong with what was said? Surely, the properly indoctrinated liberal* in you says "Aye! Summers' suggestions about differences between men and women undermine equality!"
And alas, that Janus-faced beast, with each of its free and equally malevolent aspects, rears its civilly liberated head. We Americans may be free to worship as we please, but in the end we kneel before one altar, worship one God, fondle one boy: and his name is Equality. A word so far up the American poopshoot, that there was a time in middle school when I believed they called it 'egalitarianism' because that's how it was done in the land of the Bald Eagle.
But what does it mean to be "equal"? Does it mean that each of us are entitled to be treated as ends and never as means, that we possess some innate, inalienable status as moral beings irrespective of things like race or creed? If that's what it means, I Kant say I disagree. But it seems equality is more than a moral notion, its a political principle as well. So what does equality in politcs mean? Does it mean we each of us have the same right in determining our modes of governance and the basic structure of our society? Does it mean the gaurantee of the equal protection of the laws? To the most extensive system of liberties compatible with similar such systems for others? If this is what political equality is, I'd gladly take a graze to the arm from a small caliber pistol to defend it.
But it's quite clear that if equality ever was one of these quaint notions, it has since ceased to be. I may not be the most astute of political observers, but it seems to me that political equality in America today consists mostly in white men in ties apologizing at press conferences and summarily tendering their resignations. Liberal political equality--as set forth on paper by a long list of non-American dead white mean who preferred cravats to ties, never held press conferences, and resigned only to obscurity--was a foundation, a preliminary maxim necessary for the formulation of substantive political principles. It was never, so far as I can tell, to be trumped as a political virtue in itself, but only (ideally) as a means of inviting everyone to the table to take part in the Great Conversation that is republican** politics.
But that's precisely what it's turned into, equality as an end unto itself. The thinking, I suppose, is that there's rarely much fuss among lemmings, and even less if they're issued modestly-priced SUVs, 3-bedroom ranches on quarter-acre lots, and have access to 162 unique blends of Ethiopian coffee. All we'd need is a tireless and dedicated Handicapper General to make sure nobody takes unfair advantage of their natural abilities.
Exactly where this thinking went wrong is unclear to me, but I'd like you to close your eyes and imagine for a moment that I've just presented all the arguments against the primacy of equality set forth in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Go ahead, I'll wait....
There. Now do you see what I mean? Good. So we're in agreement that equality as virtue in itself is completely vacuous and arbitrary. What's this got to do with our ould friend Larry Summers? Summers, according to his own account of the incident, was asked to attend a conference on the status of women in the "hard" research sciences, not as Chief Company Man of Crimson Incorporated, but as an economist. He was asked, in this capacity, to be provocative. While he refuses to provide a transcript of his remarks, reports suggest that he provided three hypotheses about why women tend to be underrepresented in the hard sciences. "The biggest, he suggested, was that fewer mothers than fathers are willing to spend 80 hours a week away from their kids. The next reason was that more boys than girls tend to score very high or very low on high-school math tests, producing a similar average but a higher proportion of scores in the top percentiles, which lead to high-powered academic careers in science and engineering. The third factor was discrimination by universities."
It was in stating the second hypothesis that Summers apparently used the words "innate ability" or "natural ability" as a potential explanation of the differing test scores in men or women. So what if he said it? Is the God of Equality so cruel It will smite thee simply for suggesting there might be a trace of difference between the sexes? Would Summers have taken just as much flak if he had suggested that "men, by and large, tend to have bigger penises than women"? My guess is he would have. Why? Because we're The Man. And we've played cricket and golf and hunted and lounged in recliners and drank Tom Collinses and fucked our secretaries and whipped our slaves and raped and pillaged and undervalued your currency and sent you to finishing school and converted you by sword and drank Old-Fashioneds and raped and stole your natural resources and kept you out of the Augusta and disenfranchised you and hosed you and drank Ginandtonics and sent you on the trail of tears and put you in the kitchen and circumsized and pacified you and drew humorous cartoons about it all in the New Yorker and who the fuck do we think we are? Fine, I've gotten used to the Dutch-Door, Kill-Whitey mentality and I understand that I'm not allowed to complain.
But Summers was expressing an empirical hypothesis, something we can test scientifically by collecting and interpreting data. Do I think that women are innately worse than men at math and science? Probably not. Do I think we could study the question in a meaningful, interesting and objective way? Absolutely. Do I think it will turn out to be the case that the under-representation of women in the hard sciences is attributable in part to socially defined gender roles? Almost certainly. Do I ask myself questions and then answer them with annoying frequency? You bet your ass I do.
But the point is that Mighty Equality can have my tax dollars and my soul and my first born, but It CAN'T HAVE THE TRUTH. It can't silence a well-defined hypothesis, however crazy, except by disproving it. So why don't all the female scientists so enraged by Summers' suggestion set about to showing that it's bunk? Because Equality would rather throw Summers into the bigot's dungeon and let him rot then DEAL with the fact that the diversity they perversely trump maybe, just maybe cuts both ways.
Maybe its the case that we can't all be particle physicists or astronauts, maybe women are from Venus and straight white men can't dance. But if you're the one heterosexual WASP who can really cut-a-rug, get out on the floor and do it. Not for straight guys everywhere or white guys everywhere but for you. And if you're a female grad-student studying Quantum Mechanics at MIT, don't let Summers (or Bentley) get you down, you publish that paper on wave-particle duality and stick it right the fuck to the man.
The Individual, my friends, is the ultimate minority.
And now a joke: A guy walks into a doctor's office and says "Doc, you've got to help me, I'm twelve years old and I have a full beard". The doctor examines the patient thoroughly, from head to toe, and after some time says, "Son, you're not twelve years old, you're a midget."
If that joke is against the spirit of equality, then call me the George Wallace of humor.
-The George Wallace of Humor
NOTES
*No, I don't use that word in the sense Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson use it. Instructions if this isn't clear to you: Put down your copy of USA TODAY, turn off The O'Reilly Factor, hit yourself in the face with a shovel, and go to a fucking library.
**See above if you think by 'republican' I mean Trent Lott.
Well, whatever it is, it's true. Bentley's topic couldn't be more topical--no more than 24 hours heretofore, over fish and chips, I delivered the Daniel R. Foster Memorial Lecture on Political Correctivity to an audience of severals and severals of people. My topic was, of course, the rt. hon. President Lawrence Summers' recent comments on the stuff chicks aren't good at.
So, although my remarks here mustn't cannabilize too much of what I intend to set forth more thoroughly in a monograph of the lecture tentatively titled Cute Things Girls Do, I will say a thing or two about the issue of gender differences.
Summers' comments were in bad taste. Let's all of us agree to that. The President of an American institution of higher learning should know better. You simply don't go out in public and suggest heterogeneity or deviation from uniformity of any kind. Unless of course, you're celebrating diversity (having filled out the appropriate paperwork in triplicate, and thus obtained the necessary permits)--in which case the bigger the cultural difference, the bigger the celebration. The annual Inuit-Zulu mixer, for instance, puts Carnivale in Rio to shame.
But lets leave aside for a moment the fact that it was Cretinous for Summers to open his mouth(it's my understanding that many at Harvard did not get enough iodine as children). Is there anything objectively wrong with what was said? Surely, the properly indoctrinated liberal* in you says "Aye! Summers' suggestions about differences between men and women undermine equality!"
And alas, that Janus-faced beast, with each of its free and equally malevolent aspects, rears its civilly liberated head. We Americans may be free to worship as we please, but in the end we kneel before one altar, worship one God, fondle one boy: and his name is Equality. A word so far up the American poopshoot, that there was a time in middle school when I believed they called it 'egalitarianism' because that's how it was done in the land of the Bald Eagle.
But what does it mean to be "equal"? Does it mean that each of us are entitled to be treated as ends and never as means, that we possess some innate, inalienable status as moral beings irrespective of things like race or creed? If that's what it means, I Kant say I disagree. But it seems equality is more than a moral notion, its a political principle as well. So what does equality in politcs mean? Does it mean we each of us have the same right in determining our modes of governance and the basic structure of our society? Does it mean the gaurantee of the equal protection of the laws? To the most extensive system of liberties compatible with similar such systems for others? If this is what political equality is, I'd gladly take a graze to the arm from a small caliber pistol to defend it.
But it's quite clear that if equality ever was one of these quaint notions, it has since ceased to be. I may not be the most astute of political observers, but it seems to me that political equality in America today consists mostly in white men in ties apologizing at press conferences and summarily tendering their resignations. Liberal political equality--as set forth on paper by a long list of non-American dead white mean who preferred cravats to ties, never held press conferences, and resigned only to obscurity--was a foundation, a preliminary maxim necessary for the formulation of substantive political principles. It was never, so far as I can tell, to be trumped as a political virtue in itself, but only (ideally) as a means of inviting everyone to the table to take part in the Great Conversation that is republican** politics.
But that's precisely what it's turned into, equality as an end unto itself. The thinking, I suppose, is that there's rarely much fuss among lemmings, and even less if they're issued modestly-priced SUVs, 3-bedroom ranches on quarter-acre lots, and have access to 162 unique blends of Ethiopian coffee. All we'd need is a tireless and dedicated Handicapper General to make sure nobody takes unfair advantage of their natural abilities.
Exactly where this thinking went wrong is unclear to me, but I'd like you to close your eyes and imagine for a moment that I've just presented all the arguments against the primacy of equality set forth in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Go ahead, I'll wait....
There. Now do you see what I mean? Good. So we're in agreement that equality as virtue in itself is completely vacuous and arbitrary. What's this got to do with our ould friend Larry Summers? Summers, according to his own account of the incident, was asked to attend a conference on the status of women in the "hard" research sciences, not as Chief Company Man of Crimson Incorporated, but as an economist. He was asked, in this capacity, to be provocative. While he refuses to provide a transcript of his remarks, reports suggest that he provided three hypotheses about why women tend to be underrepresented in the hard sciences. "The biggest, he suggested, was that fewer mothers than fathers are willing to spend 80 hours a week away from their kids. The next reason was that more boys than girls tend to score very high or very low on high-school math tests, producing a similar average but a higher proportion of scores in the top percentiles, which lead to high-powered academic careers in science and engineering. The third factor was discrimination by universities."
It was in stating the second hypothesis that Summers apparently used the words "innate ability" or "natural ability" as a potential explanation of the differing test scores in men or women. So what if he said it? Is the God of Equality so cruel It will smite thee simply for suggesting there might be a trace of difference between the sexes? Would Summers have taken just as much flak if he had suggested that "men, by and large, tend to have bigger penises than women"? My guess is he would have. Why? Because we're The Man. And we've played cricket and golf and hunted and lounged in recliners and drank Tom Collinses and fucked our secretaries and whipped our slaves and raped and pillaged and undervalued your currency and sent you to finishing school and converted you by sword and drank Old-Fashioneds and raped and stole your natural resources and kept you out of the Augusta and disenfranchised you and hosed you and drank Ginandtonics and sent you on the trail of tears and put you in the kitchen and circumsized and pacified you and drew humorous cartoons about it all in the New Yorker and who the fuck do we think we are? Fine, I've gotten used to the Dutch-Door, Kill-Whitey mentality and I understand that I'm not allowed to complain.
But Summers was expressing an empirical hypothesis, something we can test scientifically by collecting and interpreting data. Do I think that women are innately worse than men at math and science? Probably not. Do I think we could study the question in a meaningful, interesting and objective way? Absolutely. Do I think it will turn out to be the case that the under-representation of women in the hard sciences is attributable in part to socially defined gender roles? Almost certainly. Do I ask myself questions and then answer them with annoying frequency? You bet your ass I do.
But the point is that Mighty Equality can have my tax dollars and my soul and my first born, but It CAN'T HAVE THE TRUTH. It can't silence a well-defined hypothesis, however crazy, except by disproving it. So why don't all the female scientists so enraged by Summers' suggestion set about to showing that it's bunk? Because Equality would rather throw Summers into the bigot's dungeon and let him rot then DEAL with the fact that the diversity they perversely trump maybe, just maybe cuts both ways.
Maybe its the case that we can't all be particle physicists or astronauts, maybe women are from Venus and straight white men can't dance. But if you're the one heterosexual WASP who can really cut-a-rug, get out on the floor and do it. Not for straight guys everywhere or white guys everywhere but for you. And if you're a female grad-student studying Quantum Mechanics at MIT, don't let Summers (or Bentley) get you down, you publish that paper on wave-particle duality and stick it right the fuck to the man.
The Individual, my friends, is the ultimate minority.
And now a joke: A guy walks into a doctor's office and says "Doc, you've got to help me, I'm twelve years old and I have a full beard". The doctor examines the patient thoroughly, from head to toe, and after some time says, "Son, you're not twelve years old, you're a midget."
If that joke is against the spirit of equality, then call me the George Wallace of humor.
-The George Wallace of Humor
NOTES
*No, I don't use that word in the sense Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson use it. Instructions if this isn't clear to you: Put down your copy of USA TODAY, turn off The O'Reilly Factor, hit yourself in the face with a shovel, and go to a fucking library.
**See above if you think by 'republican' I mean Trent Lott.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Pissing In The Wind: You add like a girl!
The President of Harvard recently tried to explain that part of the reason women don't achieve as much in math and science is because they're just innately worse at it. There's been a maelstrom of negative press, no doubt protests are about to commence, and let's see him try to get a date now.
But was he wrong? Men are faster than women, by and large. Women look less ridiculous when figure skating, perhaps without exception. So is it that unbelievable that women just don't quite get the wave-particle duality?
Or is it all a masculine-based construction? Maybe the very concept of measuring liquid with a graduated cylinder is rooted in a phallic object for a reason: to exclude women.
So, this week, we present the battle of the sexes. Foster, Levi, I put it, what are women better at, what are men better at, or is everybody equally good at everything? Are the Olympics a social construction that if we didn't go into it with preconceptions would have every man, woman, child, and animal finishing the 100-meter dash in 8.43 seconds?
But was he wrong? Men are faster than women, by and large. Women look less ridiculous when figure skating, perhaps without exception. So is it that unbelievable that women just don't quite get the wave-particle duality?
Or is it all a masculine-based construction? Maybe the very concept of measuring liquid with a graduated cylinder is rooted in a phallic object for a reason: to exclude women.
So, this week, we present the battle of the sexes. Foster, Levi, I put it, what are women better at, what are men better at, or is everybody equally good at everything? Are the Olympics a social construction that if we didn't go into it with preconceptions would have every man, woman, child, and animal finishing the 100-meter dash in 8.43 seconds?
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Phone-a-Shmuck
A friend's recent blog post highlights cellular companies' latest bid to wring money out of the people who can least afford it: recurring charges for what barely constitutes content. The $1.99/month charge that they charge would be criminal, and is only made more so by offering you a Sir Mix-a-lot Ringtone. Let's face it, if you're appearing on VH1's I Love The 90's, Part Deux, nothing you are involved with is worth paying for.
But that isn't to say your star has completely faded. Cash in on your has-been notoriety! What if for that $1.99/month, instead of getting a Sir Mix-a-lot ringtone, you got a call from Sir Mix-a-lot! What else is he doing? Sure, this may be a pay cut from their star days: Optimistically, this would be equivalent to them living off the interest of $5 million, which is far less than they earned during their peak. But, I'm willing to bet, a lot more than they have in the bank.
So, let's set it up. You subscribe, and everytime you're out with your friends, you get a call from a different B- -list star. I know I'm looking forward to the day I'm bowling with a prospective mate and appear that much more sexy for being worthy of a ring-a-ding from Erik Estrada.
-D"As long as it's not Carrot Top"an
But that isn't to say your star has completely faded. Cash in on your has-been notoriety! What if for that $1.99/month, instead of getting a Sir Mix-a-lot ringtone, you got a call from Sir Mix-a-lot! What else is he doing? Sure, this may be a pay cut from their star days: Optimistically, this would be equivalent to them living off the interest of $5 million, which is far less than they earned during their peak. But, I'm willing to bet, a lot more than they have in the bank.
So, let's set it up. You subscribe, and everytime you're out with your friends, you get a call from a different B- -list star. I know I'm looking forward to the day I'm bowling with a prospective mate and appear that much more sexy for being worthy of a ring-a-ding from Erik Estrada.
-D"As long as it's not Carrot Top"an
Monday, January 17, 2005
The Logical Construction of Personality: A Long, Technical, and Marginally Humorous Study of Getting Laid
If you're like me, you want to get laid. And to do that, you'll need a modicum of looks, and (thanks to women's sliding scale of attraction) a heaping helping of personality. Nick Carroway said that personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, and he was gay, so he probably had plenty--that's how he managed to bed Jordan Baker, and she was gay. Most of us straight guys aren't so fortunate. But we do have a bit of a secret weapon in the fight against endless masturbation: science.
Let me explain what I mean. If we take Carraway at his word (and we can't, according to the same critics who have him longing for Gatsby even as he pals around with his golf-club-toting-ingenue-uberdyke beard), then it seems personality isn't some intrinsic property in a subject, but rather something extrinsic, in other words, something a subject does, a series of gestures, patterns of speech and behavior--a construct made of a particular sequence of ostensions and utterances. In still other words: Bullshit.
The good news about this account of personality is that you needn't waste any time attending wine tastings, Kabalah classes, foreign films, or, worst of all, being yourself. This is because your "self" is merely the affects of this logical construction of utterances and gestures. It runs no deeper than that. So all you need do is pick a mark--that is, some woman (or man) F-- and retire to the lab to build a personality P suitable for the job of bedding F.
Elsewhere, Jones and Foster (2004) have conjectured that for every woman f, there is at least one set of propositions (in this case, speech acts and physical gestures) call it p(x), which, when performed in a particular sequence (s), will succeed in rendering (f ) vulnerable to bedding (L). Call this expression Lp(x(s))f a bedding theory of f. The logical notation here might be a bit confusing at first, but it translates simply into "p(x(s)) L's f" or "the set of gestures p(x) in sequence s will bed (or make bed-able) f."
This theory is expressed in various ways in the vernacular: seducing f, wooing f, picking-up f, slipping f a roofie, etc. But, of course, the consequences of formalizing and systematizing such a theory are profound and far-reaching. Imagine, a universe of ass at the fingertips of every nerd with a graphing calculator or a slide-rule and basic hand-eye coordination. Provided you are neither troll nor troglodyte, you, dear reader, could very well bed Natalie Portman, or that girl from Accounting, or your TA, or the Queen of England. You just have to do the math.
Now, I know what you're saying: "Dan, where's the fucking empirical data?!? Do you expect me to swallow some a priori theory based on nothing but the Romantic musings of a fictional narrator and the anecdotal conjectures of two third-rate armchair philosophers?" Well, it'd be nice if you did, but I understand your hesitation. Here, take three test cases.
1) In one possible world, that is, the fictional world of the adult film classic "Buttbanged Hitchhiking Whores", our test subject Lex, executes a short series of gestures that secures him the bedding of not one but TWO attractive blondes. This particular instantiation of the theory Lp(x(s))f contained two gestures: one physical and the other sentential or propositional. Gesture g1 is physical; it entails Lex stopping his car at the side of the road. Gesture g2 is an utterance expressing a conditional proposition, which can be paraphrased thusly: "I will transport you and your compatriate to the destination of your choosing if you agree to engage with me in various unprotected acts of lechery, including several distinct sodomous acts." We can formalize this theory for getting laid by two blondes f1 and f2, thusly:
Lp(x(s))f = []Plc, E(x) [E(y) [((x=f1) . (y=f2)) . (Ql(f1 . f2) --> Dl(f1 . f2))]].
Notice how crucial the sequencing is here. If Lex had not pulled over his car before making the conditional proposition, it is doubtful he would have bedded either, let alone both, of the attractive blondes.
2) The most rudimentary of sequences. Our test subject is John, and the mark is Debbie, the village whore. Again, the theory contains two gestures, one physical action and one utterance. John first removes a five dollar bill from wallet and holds it stiffly in front of him, next he utters the English language phrase "blowjob". Needless to say he succeeds in bedding Debbie. Here the sequencing is less important; it seems fair to infer that the sequence [g1, g2] here described could have been replaced with the sequence [g2, g1] to much the same effect.
3) This is an extraordinarily complex instance. The test subject is Agememmnon and his mark is Helen of Troy. A complete model of the theory-sequence used to bed Helen would occupy countless pages, but suffice it to say it contains thousands of physical gestures--including boat trips, gorings, beheadings, horse-constructions, and body-draggings to name a few--and as many utterances in the form of dialogue and soliloquoy.
Of course, if you don't have the logical capacity or technical know-how to construct a set of gestures sufficient to bed the woman of your choice, there are two options. You might try the trivial gesture-sequence--that is, the set of all gesture-sequences. Elsewhere, my girlfriend has referred to this is as the "Groundhog's Day Sequence". Given enough time and access to a particular mark, you just continue to say and do things until she gives in. Lastly, researchers are hard at work on coming up with universal gesture-sequences, or sequences that work on all women. Preliminary calculations show that something called the "Pitt-Clooney Set" is probably the best bet. It includes being ridiculously good-looking, moderately talented, and fantastically wealthy.
Let me explain what I mean. If we take Carraway at his word (and we can't, according to the same critics who have him longing for Gatsby even as he pals around with his golf-club-toting-ingenue-uberdyke beard), then it seems personality isn't some intrinsic property in a subject, but rather something extrinsic, in other words, something a subject does, a series of gestures, patterns of speech and behavior--a construct made of a particular sequence of ostensions and utterances. In still other words: Bullshit.
The good news about this account of personality is that you needn't waste any time attending wine tastings, Kabalah classes, foreign films, or, worst of all, being yourself. This is because your "self" is merely the affects of this logical construction of utterances and gestures. It runs no deeper than that. So all you need do is pick a mark--that is, some woman (or man) F-- and retire to the lab to build a personality P suitable for the job of bedding F.
Elsewhere, Jones and Foster (2004) have conjectured that for every woman f, there is at least one set of propositions (in this case, speech acts and physical gestures) call it p(x), which, when performed in a particular sequence (s), will succeed in rendering (f ) vulnerable to bedding (L). Call this expression Lp(x(s))f a bedding theory of f. The logical notation here might be a bit confusing at first, but it translates simply into "p(x(s)) L's f" or "the set of gestures p(x) in sequence s will bed (or make bed-able) f."
This theory is expressed in various ways in the vernacular: seducing f, wooing f, picking-up f, slipping f a roofie, etc. But, of course, the consequences of formalizing and systematizing such a theory are profound and far-reaching. Imagine, a universe of ass at the fingertips of every nerd with a graphing calculator or a slide-rule and basic hand-eye coordination. Provided you are neither troll nor troglodyte, you, dear reader, could very well bed Natalie Portman, or that girl from Accounting, or your TA, or the Queen of England. You just have to do the math.
Now, I know what you're saying: "Dan, where's the fucking empirical data?!? Do you expect me to swallow some a priori theory based on nothing but the Romantic musings of a fictional narrator and the anecdotal conjectures of two third-rate armchair philosophers?" Well, it'd be nice if you did, but I understand your hesitation. Here, take three test cases.
1) In one possible world, that is, the fictional world of the adult film classic "Buttbanged Hitchhiking Whores", our test subject Lex, executes a short series of gestures that secures him the bedding of not one but TWO attractive blondes. This particular instantiation of the theory Lp(x(s))f contained two gestures: one physical and the other sentential or propositional. Gesture g1 is physical; it entails Lex stopping his car at the side of the road. Gesture g2 is an utterance expressing a conditional proposition, which can be paraphrased thusly: "I will transport you and your compatriate to the destination of your choosing if you agree to engage with me in various unprotected acts of lechery, including several distinct sodomous acts." We can formalize this theory for getting laid by two blondes f1 and f2, thusly:
Lp(x(s))f = []Plc, E(x) [E(y) [((x=f1) . (y=f2)) . (Ql(f1 . f2) --> Dl(f1 . f2))]].
Notice how crucial the sequencing is here. If Lex had not pulled over his car before making the conditional proposition, it is doubtful he would have bedded either, let alone both, of the attractive blondes.
2) The most rudimentary of sequences. Our test subject is John, and the mark is Debbie, the village whore. Again, the theory contains two gestures, one physical action and one utterance. John first removes a five dollar bill from wallet and holds it stiffly in front of him, next he utters the English language phrase "blowjob". Needless to say he succeeds in bedding Debbie. Here the sequencing is less important; it seems fair to infer that the sequence [g1, g2] here described could have been replaced with the sequence [g2, g1] to much the same effect.
3) This is an extraordinarily complex instance. The test subject is Agememmnon and his mark is Helen of Troy. A complete model of the theory-sequence used to bed Helen would occupy countless pages, but suffice it to say it contains thousands of physical gestures--including boat trips, gorings, beheadings, horse-constructions, and body-draggings to name a few--and as many utterances in the form of dialogue and soliloquoy.
Of course, if you don't have the logical capacity or technical know-how to construct a set of gestures sufficient to bed the woman of your choice, there are two options. You might try the trivial gesture-sequence--that is, the set of all gesture-sequences. Elsewhere, my girlfriend has referred to this is as the "Groundhog's Day Sequence". Given enough time and access to a particular mark, you just continue to say and do things until she gives in. Lastly, researchers are hard at work on coming up with universal gesture-sequences, or sequences that work on all women. Preliminary calculations show that something called the "Pitt-Clooney Set" is probably the best bet. It includes being ridiculously good-looking, moderately talented, and fantastically wealthy.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Pissing In The Wind: Wrap-up
So many good points by the two of them, fighting like hamsters who are in one corner of the cage fighting like... hamsters.
But what can I say that isn't said so much better by:
-D"Consumer*ist* whore"an
P.S. Buy the computer I'm orphaning to make space in my room, wallet, and heart for a mini the day they come out.
But what can I say that isn't said so much better by:
-D"Consumer*ist* whore"an
P.S. Buy the computer I'm orphaning to make space in my room, wallet, and heart for a mini the day they come out.
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Gates, Jobs, Gates' Job, and Jobs' Gate
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Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Pissing in the Wind, Round V: iThesis
It seems that Dan's topic for this week is somewhat less controversial than last week, and as such, less prone to inspire me to launch a barrage of baseless accusations at him. After all, how can you turn: "Apple or Microsoft" into "Dan's mom: lesbian Eskimo or just Canadian?" Unfortunately, you can't, so you're all just going to have to settle for some good 'ol fashioned cool reasoning.
________________________
Apple or Microsoft? iBook or PC? OSX or Windows? All questions we've undoubtedly thought about in passing two or three times in our lives. But did you know that hundreds of computer programmers have lost their lives in this bloody conflict? Deep in the heart of Silicon Valley, a vast guerilla war has been raging between the two tribes ever since Al Gore invented the internet. It includes numerous, unspeakable atrocities, like: 1) saying the other side's computers are slower and less technologically advanced than the others, 2) insults like "giga-nerd" and "mega-gay," 3) disparaging comparisons to the more unpopular characters of Star Wars and Star Trek ("Your wife uncrossed her legs and I thought I saw Chewbaca), and worst of all, 4) "super-dirty bombs"--flaming bags of shit the size of which you've never seen. But the Leviathan is all about peace and love, and so let's try to settle this in a sensitive, bitechnical way.
First, Apple has the following pros:
(Same post, different blog)
________________________
Apple or Microsoft? iBook or PC? OSX or Windows? All questions we've undoubtedly thought about in passing two or three times in our lives. But did you know that hundreds of computer programmers have lost their lives in this bloody conflict? Deep in the heart of Silicon Valley, a vast guerilla war has been raging between the two tribes ever since Al Gore invented the internet. It includes numerous, unspeakable atrocities, like: 1) saying the other side's computers are slower and less technologically advanced than the others, 2) insults like "giga-nerd" and "mega-gay," 3) disparaging comparisons to the more unpopular characters of Star Wars and Star Trek ("Your wife uncrossed her legs and I thought I saw Chewbaca), and worst of all, 4) "super-dirty bombs"--flaming bags of shit the size of which you've never seen. But the Leviathan is all about peace and love, and so let's try to settle this in a sensitive, bitechnical way.
First, Apple has the following pros:
- A sleek, sexy look to all their products. I don't often say an inanimate object turns me on, but just seeing one of those smooth, metallic wonders makes me want to download porn that much faster.
- Cool names. You have iBook, iTunes, iPod. How fucking cool is that?! Put a lower-case i in front of anything and it spices it up. iLeviathan--me, but more fun! iCar--hold on to your seatbelts, this is gonna be one fantastic voyage! iRabies--I almost want it now! iCUP--hahahahahaha.
- No viruses. Since no one owns a Mac, no one's gonna make a virus for it! Don't worry about your credit card number, social security number, or your ATM password. You can even save them as your wallpaper! And when applesecurity@hotmail.com asks you for them, go ahead and give it to them! I...I mean, they...just need to make sure your system is running OK.
- One mouse, one button. Forget about right-clicking anything, now you're going to put down the juice box so you can click with one hand, and press a Ctrl with the other. If anyone tells you they make a mouse with two buttons, don't listen to them. They have shit for brains.
- Poor music downloading software. If you thought Metallica was uncool for making you pay to download music, you really have to ask yourself: why the hell did you think Metallica was cool in the first place? Get ready to shill out change for every song you download, because the iTunes store will be your home away from home.
- Really, really annoying commercials. If you think the U2 commercial is annoying, think back to when iPods first came out. Remember when they had that goofy white guy with his iPod on rapping "I like big butts?" And that obnoxious little kid doing it to "The real Slim Shady?" That's right, you're only encouraging them...
- Software-friendly. Everything you could ever want in a Mac and more. Media players, music-downloading software, everything. Hell, they even have iTunes and iPods for Windows. And get this? They even acquired it legally! (You know Gates was going to steal them at any time).
- Fully-equipped from purchase. Microsoft everything. Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, even anti-virus software. And the best part? Their constant security updates will make sure you don't get the latest worms or viruses--or competing products like Firefox...
- Bill Gates! C'mon, what's not to like about him. He's been knighted for his foundations work in combating AIDS in Africa. He dropped out of college and still became the richest man in the country. Let's face it, in this uber-capitalist culture we live in, Bill Gates is about the closest thing we'll get to rags-to-riches. Call it: well-off to maniacally ruthless CEO (made for TV movie coming soon).
- Viruses. Contrary to Macs, you will get a virus. It's virtually guaranteed. In fact, if you don't get one within the first 6-months of owning your computer Bill Gates will personally send you one so you have to pay an exorbitant price to repair your computer. And it's not just Bill Gates you need to worry about. Every no-good, pimply-faced, punk teen will--when not loitering outside of convenience stores and making strange, whale-like noises while gawking about passers-by to their equally awkward pasty-faced friend--be designing a virus that brings them no tangible reward except for the cheap satisfaction of pissing me off (see also here).
- Bill Gates. Once you buy a computer with windows, Bill Gates now, legally, owns your soul.
- Pop-ups. "Want to date me?" "Improve your sex life." "Assholeclickswhat." You can download all the pop-up stoppers you want, but nothing will stop them. They'll become a part of your daily life. You'll see salesmen promising to enhance your penis size pop out of nowhere in your office. Strange men with dollar signs all over their suits will follow you on your way home. Co-eds asking you if they're hot or not will fill your dreams. Pretty soon, you'll speak nothing but catch phrases, and hear nothing but jingles.
(Same post, different blog)
Pissing Into The Wind: What Kind of Man Are You?
There are certain questions that get to the root of a soul. Are you a dog person or a cat person? SUV or Prius? Innie or Outie? But, of course, no nerd will start talking to you without first asking (of course, in some cases, they don't have to ask, and can know just by looking at you): Mac or PC.
The times have been a-changing recently. Previously, it was easy to cast off the lovers of that harsh Apple Mistress as bourgeois, who daily gorged themselves on caviar and washed it down with all sorts of expensive liquids: champagne, experimental pharmaceuticals, unrefined sweet crude. But Apple has made a few moves towards accessibility. iTunes[sic, and goddamn you Steve for making me mess with the capitalization that has been handed down father to son for centuries!] now exists for the PC, convincing a few otherwise lost souls to see the nirvana that is applications that, get this, have a brushed metallic look! Why, it hearkens back to the day that computeres were mighty beasts of machines!
And then today, apple introduced the cheapest Mac ever (at $499) that is also the smallest computer, and an obvious competitor for the cutest of the current year. The new iPod shuffle is a stripped-down sibling of an already petite product. But at only $99, and coming with a lanyard to prominently display it around your neck, you definitely get more bling for your buck.
Make no mistake about it, this is as monumental as BMW coming to high schools everywhere and saying, "No longer are we a mark of being Daddy's Favorite Expense. Give us your tired, your Dodge Daytonas, your Plymouth Voyagers, and we will issue to you a BMW 1-series. Sure, it may have the engine that we laughed at 18 months ago as outdated and slightly prone to igniting in holy inferno, and sure, the wheels may not be 'round', but, it's still a BMW."
So, commentators: after all the shakes-up and announcements, which way do your prayer blankets point: Redmond or Cupertino?
The times have been a-changing recently. Previously, it was easy to cast off the lovers of that harsh Apple Mistress as bourgeois, who daily gorged themselves on caviar and washed it down with all sorts of expensive liquids: champagne, experimental pharmaceuticals, unrefined sweet crude. But Apple has made a few moves towards accessibility. iTunes[sic, and goddamn you Steve for making me mess with the capitalization that has been handed down father to son for centuries!] now exists for the PC, convincing a few otherwise lost souls to see the nirvana that is applications that, get this, have a brushed metallic look! Why, it hearkens back to the day that computeres were mighty beasts of machines!
And then today, apple introduced the cheapest Mac ever (at $499) that is also the smallest computer, and an obvious competitor for the cutest of the current year. The new iPod shuffle is a stripped-down sibling of an already petite product. But at only $99, and coming with a lanyard to prominently display it around your neck, you definitely get more bling for your buck.
Make no mistake about it, this is as monumental as BMW coming to high schools everywhere and saying, "No longer are we a mark of being Daddy's Favorite Expense. Give us your tired, your Dodge Daytonas, your Plymouth Voyagers, and we will issue to you a BMW 1-series. Sure, it may have the engine that we laughed at 18 months ago as outdated and slightly prone to igniting in holy inferno, and sure, the wheels may not be 'round', but, it's still a BMW."
So, commentators: after all the shakes-up and announcements, which way do your prayer blankets point: Redmond or Cupertino?
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Crimes Referential
Randy Moss, that Vikings curmudgeon, is going to be fined. Normally, the schadenfreudic in me would take delight at this bully-gets-his-lunch-money-stolen story. But look at his alleged crime: pretending to moon fans! Even if he had mooned those Cheese Wizzes, woudl that have been so bad? You're allowed to show asses on ABC (though not the oldest network *cough*CBS*cough* ABC is the most disney, and hence representative of red state family values as well as blue state proclivities for dressing up), even when they're Dennis Franz. If you can get away with it on broadcast tv in the days of Herr Powell, you know that you're offending no more than 3 people and a dachsund with the FCC complaint line on speed dial. (he barks a tough but fair rant)
But Randy Moss, I'd like to highlight, mooned no one. He was merely informing the audience that he had a posterior, which was, in fact, covered. This is like someone going to jail for saying, "there are terrorists", which doesn't happen until Gonzales is sworn in as Attorney General.
My biggest fear in life is that our reality will devolve into a Monty Python sketch. And so I can just imagine a defendant (true fact: John Cleese studied law at Cambridge, and in a giant Fuck You to everything British then wasted it by appearing in Charlie's Angels 2) in a poorly-staged court. The solicitor (they wear wigs. Haha! Wigs! And are actually willing to identify themselves as Tories!) asks him what happened, and as soon as he explains that the defendent held the gun, just so, constables (what do you need those stupid hats for? to hide your stupid wigs? stupid) rush in and arrest him. And at his crime, his accuser does the same, and so on, until we are all in prison for the awful crime of knowing crime. Punishment for Original Sin, rendered unto Caesar.
-D"I expect the Spanish Inquisition"an
But Randy Moss, I'd like to highlight, mooned no one. He was merely informing the audience that he had a posterior, which was, in fact, covered. This is like someone going to jail for saying, "there are terrorists", which doesn't happen until Gonzales is sworn in as Attorney General.
My biggest fear in life is that our reality will devolve into a Monty Python sketch. And so I can just imagine a defendant (true fact: John Cleese studied law at Cambridge, and in a giant Fuck You to everything British then wasted it by appearing in Charlie's Angels 2) in a poorly-staged court. The solicitor (they wear wigs. Haha! Wigs! And are actually willing to identify themselves as Tories!) asks him what happened, and as soon as he explains that the defendent held the gun, just so, constables (what do you need those stupid hats for? to hide your stupid wigs? stupid) rush in and arrest him. And at his crime, his accuser does the same, and so on, until we are all in prison for the awful crime of knowing crime. Punishment for Original Sin, rendered unto Caesar.
-D"I expect the Spanish Inquisition"an
Sunday, January 09, 2005
On Insults
[Today, a piece that I originally wrote 3 years ago.]
The American lexicon has evolved, over the last decade, to have absent from it terms that can hurt people; I am, of course, thoroughly thrilled at such a happening. Such derogatory terms as “faggot”, “Wop” or “Mick” are no longer used, except by the coarsest of speakers, for fear of insulting “homosexuals”, “Italians” and “Irishmen” everywhere. I am pleased beyond belief at the deep, or at least surface-level, progress this highlights. But if our language is being smithed to prevent accidentally hurt feelings, then what the hell do I call someone when I mean to malign them and everything they stand for?
One solution proposed to the significant problem of insulting an individual instead of a group is to drop hurtful terms for their stereotypical characteristics. Dropping “gay” for “effeminate”, however, creates an affront that sounds forced and technical, and does most definitely not assign to the pejored shady morals and weakness of character. Indeed, replacing “Scotsman” with “Frugal” changes the character of an attempted insult so much as to sound congratulatory to the insulted for his ability to keep track of his fiduciary well-being, and forgets to suggest that he wears, late at night, the “tightest of woolen sweaters”. Thus, political correctness has disarmed my wit and taken from me my one mode of self-improvement in this world.
Hence, I have decided upon a course of action that I must undertake to rectify this problem. With my method, I intend to do for the English language what men such as Kipling , with the Indians, and our own Stanford, with the Chinese, have done in the past. I intend to set out on a voyage around the world, and find an heretofore undiscovered tribe of native people. They will then bend to the power of our “self-propelled howitzers” or, as they refer to them, “marching fire-ants of death.” Once enough of them are killed, the rest shall bend to our 21st-Century Manifest Destiny, an empire on which the sun sets only rarely.
The vanquished will supply us with a new cadre of insulting terms. Long after the Sex Workers Union deprives us of “cheap whore”, their delightful and primitive face-markings will give us a term for any gaudily-made-up woman. We will cast their men alternately first infertile and then savagely over-virile, as our needs suit us, on the brink of a bar-fight to challenge a drunkard’s convictions. Their children we shall view as wholly stupid, through-and-through, which shall reinvigorate conversation on playgrounds of our country from
Eventually, it is certain, “tree-huggers”, such as the Sierra Club, Amnesty International and Dendrophiliacs United, will grow wary of our treatment of these poor creatures. As such, they shall eventually be assimilated into our culture and assume the same place as every other minority in our “melting-pot” society, i.e., they shall claim their own strip of land and not associate with anyone else. Their lawyers and own anti-defamation league will strike from our tongues their name as an insult, and innumerable sports teams shall be renamed. I write this, therefore, to offer to future generations a blueprint for finding a new butt for their jokes, and young men with a new adventure to take up for the betterment of their people.
Friday, January 07, 2005
Pissing Into The Wind
So the Piss has turned, has it? Both my commentators have agreed, leaving only the moderator to reap vengeance? Fine.
Point Number 1: Under Capitalism, man screws man. Under communism, it's the other way around.
Agenda Item Letter B: I love America. Because I live in it. But if you're on the outside looking in, this "outpouring of aid" is more like a giant's pumpkin pie crashing down on you because his feast was so bountiful that he pushed it off the table. What the woodchuck are you going to do with a giant pumpkin pie? It's not that healthy, and fuck if you don't even have any whip cream, of either brobdingnagian or lilliputian proportions to eat it with.
Argument Animal Fish: Yeah, maybe the public did right in this one instance. But you know why? Cause it was photogenic in that awful, makes you face your own mortality kinda way. (When my roommate saw this, his first response was a shocked "oh my god". His second a "that reminds me of sim city") But Americans woudl donate so much more if we saw a picture of a puppy about to be ground up and fed to orphans, all of whom have lisps, stutters, or some other sort of speech impediment. Speaking of which, another of my friends recently referred to a Parkinson's as "speaking sign language with a stutter." He's going to hell. And so are you for laughing at it. Are these the kind of people you want making choices of aid distribution? No, of course not. Admit it, you're pulling for the bureaucratic, faceless, compassionless arm of the law to come through.
-D"Though I don't know what kind of arm does have a face"an
Editor's Note: For a scholarly (that is to say, unfunny) exchange about the aesthetics and psychology of tragedy, see Bentley's seminal Theory of History, and Foster's 7 Theses in response.
Point Number 1: Under Capitalism, man screws man. Under communism, it's the other way around.
Agenda Item Letter B: I love America. Because I live in it. But if you're on the outside looking in, this "outpouring of aid" is more like a giant's pumpkin pie crashing down on you because his feast was so bountiful that he pushed it off the table. What the woodchuck are you going to do with a giant pumpkin pie? It's not that healthy, and fuck if you don't even have any whip cream, of either brobdingnagian or lilliputian proportions to eat it with.
Argument Animal Fish: Yeah, maybe the public did right in this one instance. But you know why? Cause it was photogenic in that awful, makes you face your own mortality kinda way. (When my roommate saw this, his first response was a shocked "oh my god". His second a "that reminds me of sim city") But Americans woudl donate so much more if we saw a picture of a puppy about to be ground up and fed to orphans, all of whom have lisps, stutters, or some other sort of speech impediment. Speaking of which, another of my friends recently referred to a Parkinson's as "speaking sign language with a stutter." He's going to hell. And so are you for laughing at it. Are these the kind of people you want making choices of aid distribution? No, of course not. Admit it, you're pulling for the bureaucratic, faceless, compassionless arm of the law to come through.
-D"Though I don't know what kind of arm does have a face"an
Editor's Note: For a scholarly (that is to say, unfunny) exchange about the aesthetics and psychology of tragedy, see Bentley's seminal Theory of History, and Foster's 7 Theses in response.
...and the Southern Shaved Bush refutes the going botanical orthodoxies
Kudos to the Leviathan on his brilliant repost-riposte below. I hate to draw attention from it, but I was glancing over the Oxford homepage which I so often ignore, and I stumbled upon what may just be the greatest and best thing in the world.
Great Tits Challenge Evolutionary Theory
Now, I'm led to one of two conclusions, each of which is sufficient to convince me that, in Hemingway's words, the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. Either Oxford--the oldest, most prestigious and best educational institution in the world--has still got the sense of humor and set of balls so utterly lacking at the likes of Fenlands Polytechnic and the place my Bulldog-associate so lovingly calls Epcot Oxford, or the old Oxonian dons are so sublimely oblivious to all things peripheral to their ivory towers that this Pulchritudinous Pun simply swam over their heads with all the grace of a swan on the River Isis.
-H.R. Chortleton IV
Great Tits Challenge Evolutionary Theory
Now, I'm led to one of two conclusions, each of which is sufficient to convince me that, in Hemingway's words, the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. Either Oxford--the oldest, most prestigious and best educational institution in the world--has still got the sense of humor and set of balls so utterly lacking at the likes of Fenlands Polytechnic and the place my Bulldog-associate so lovingly calls Epcot Oxford, or the old Oxonian dons are so sublimely oblivious to all things peripheral to their ivory towers that this Pulchritudinous Pun simply swam over their heads with all the grace of a swan on the River Isis.
-H.R. Chortleton IV
Pissing in the Wind: Round IV, or, Why Dan Hates Freedom
I wholeheartedly agree with what Baron von Foster wrote, and honestly, have little to add. So to diverge from our usual weekly format, I will now direct my ire to Castro de Bentley.
In the original posting, Daningrad wrote:
President Bush has made it clear, though, that any more aid is going to come not from the government but form the public. Right. Cause Americans have such great hearts.
Why, comrade, do you hate America? Is it the freedom you hate? In an obscure post from several years back, he wrote:
Yes, I hate freedom.
(note: the author is paraphrasing)
So there you have it. He hates freedom.
A bureaucratic eunuch from the UN, financially supported no doubt from Dan's anti-freedom PAC, claimed America was being "stingy" with their aid. To which America grabbed our collective crotch and replied, "Stingy deez nuts!" Private donations have been pouring in so heavily that agencies have more than they can possibly use. Doctors Without Borders even told people to stop donating money to tsunami relief (people are more than encouraged to give money without earmarking it to the Asian crisis, but that's a whole different story).
But back to why Dan prefers to sleep with a cool, all-encompassing iron quilt rather than a nice, warm capitalist blanket. Digging further into Dan's shady network of writings, we find another window into his drab, beige-colored mind:
You know what I hate even more than freedom? Private property. Know what I really get off on, though? The rationing out of resources.
(note: this quote is from an actual article that was never written)
So Dan likes to give away his things to super-happy-fun-benevolent government, and then stand in line for hours on end to get his weekly allowance of slurry. Well, what's keeping you, Dan?! Is it freedom that's keeping you from doing this?! Why do you insist on hating freedom!
"Communism was a good idea," he says, "it just had some bad leaders." Know what else was a "good idea" with bad leaders? Gigli, and that movie fucking sucked. "What about socialism? Sweden and other Scandinavian countries are basically socialist, and they're doing fine." Oh, they're doing fine, alright. But when Lars and Hans aren't too busy building clogs, ice-skating around in chocolate leotards and combing each other's white-blonde hair they're hurling themselves off buildings. Not to mention their governments aren't socialist, but actually run by free-masons with idyllic visions of an uber-Aryan state.
I don't know about you, my sickle and hammer bearing friend, but I'm going to go buy some deep-fried fast food from a multinational corporation, make numerous unnecessary purchases of goods produced cheaply in third-world countries, and go write inflammatory things about my government.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
"Knock Knock","Who's There?", "Tsunami", "Tsunami Who?" "Tsunami gonna come up with a punchline for this joke"
Let me just start, as all startlingly unoriginal polemicists do, with some statistics. Some agents of the United States of America, which UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland called "stingy" last week, have ponied up the following:
-Pfizer: $35 million
-Coca Cola: $10 million
-Exxon Mobil Corp: $5 million
-Citigroup Inc.: $3 million
-Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: $3 million
-Merck & Co. Inc: $3 million in cash, plus drugs and health supplies
-Johnson & Johnson: $2 million, plus drugs and health supplies
-Abbott Laboratories Inc.: $2 million, plus drugs and other supplies.
-Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.: $1 million in cash, $4 million in antibiotics and antifungal drugs.
-Nike Inc.: $1 million
-American Express Co.: $1 million
-General Electric Co.: $1 million
-First Data Corp.: $1 million
-Amazon.com: collected about 87,000 donations totaling more than $6.2 million for the American Red Cross
-Wal-Mart Inc.: $2 million, plus donations.
-Catholic Relief Services: $25 million
That's more than $125 million and counting. This list is non-exhaustive. Also, it's a week old. Oh, and it doesn't include personal donations. Um, or the $1 billion in aid set to be paid out by the Feds themselves.
Just for grins, one could add that the US was responsible for 40 percent of all disaster relief aid paid out this past year. And if we were feeling particularly saucy, we might even let slip that Uncle Sam (or is it Uncle Scrooge?) donated $826 million to the UN World Food Programme, $100 million more than all the EU countries combined, despite the EU's larger population and GDP.
Stingy? If the US is stingy, then I'm unpretentious and satisfied with the size of my penis.
But boy, am I just all broken up about the fact the UN, the EU, the pot and the kettle all think we Yanks are a bit tight with the pursestrings. Its just that, by the time Marshall and Eisenhower and the boys got around to unclusterfucking Western Civilization and getting the electricity and running water turned back on in Brittain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the whole of Scandanavia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Balkans, the British and French Near East, Northern Africa, Turkey, Greece, Japan, China, Indochina, the Phillipines, Australia, Micronesia, and Luxembourg, we were a little light on walking-around money and a bit wary of real estate scams. But, if the free world is done borrowing the Modernity we loaned it, it could give it back and we could totally hawk it at the pawn shop for like, at least a hundred bucks.
See, what's sad is that a handful of minor powers have seen fit to make a point of outspending the US in Tsunami relief. The goal is to get into a pissing contest. If for nothing else, we can credit Bush with not biting. No press conference or forced contrition, just an envelope under the table and another subtle fuck you to the UN. Bush himself donated a measly 10K out of his own pocket. Why so little? Two reasons: 1) Sitting Presidents' assets are placed in a blind trust, and word is Bush's portfolio took a dive on account of some bad advice about Enron, and 2) Bush is setting a realistic example for every American. Nobody has to break the bank to help out. If you've got a hundred decent regular people, you don't need one Hollywood hero.
And you don't need your government proxying for you either. The American people are perfectly capable of recognizing a noble cause when they see one, and the needy are far better off when that recognition comes at the business end of a debit card than when it comes at the business end of a 155mm Howitzer.
There's a little spark of something left on this side of the pond that some other parts of the world look at as peculiarly as if it were a BetaMax(R) cassette player, and it's called Civil Society. You see, Civil Society is where people get together and do things without inviting George Bush and Nancy Pelosi. Sometimes they do silly things like sell each other tupperware, or collectively ape Oprah's literary tastes, or bowl for the league championship; and sometimes they do naughty things like dress up in latex and spank each other, or burn crosses, or vote; but every now and again they do something downright strange, like put a couple cans of soup or a few dollars or a little brawn and elbow grease on a plane and send it to people they'll never meet so their lives can be a little less miserable. Odd, I know. But then again we've always been a little fucked up like that.
I close, as all startlingly unoriginal polemicists do, with a quote--nay, a Gospel--from a petty Minnesota bourgeoisie by the name of Scott Fitzgerald. He said, "France was a land, England a people. But America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter. It was the graves at Shiloh, or the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, or the country boys who died in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart."
Now, despite my wont to make the occasional lighthearted quip, there is absolutely nothing capricious or funny about Mr. Fitzgerald's words. Except that "heart" rhymes with "fart".
-The Ugly American
-Pfizer: $35 million
-Coca Cola: $10 million
-Exxon Mobil Corp: $5 million
-Citigroup Inc.: $3 million
-Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: $3 million
-Merck & Co. Inc: $3 million in cash, plus drugs and health supplies
-Johnson & Johnson: $2 million, plus drugs and health supplies
-Abbott Laboratories Inc.: $2 million, plus drugs and other supplies.
-Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.: $1 million in cash, $4 million in antibiotics and antifungal drugs.
-Nike Inc.: $1 million
-American Express Co.: $1 million
-General Electric Co.: $1 million
-First Data Corp.: $1 million
-Amazon.com: collected about 87,000 donations totaling more than $6.2 million for the American Red Cross
-Wal-Mart Inc.: $2 million, plus donations.
-Catholic Relief Services: $25 million
That's more than $125 million and counting. This list is non-exhaustive. Also, it's a week old. Oh, and it doesn't include personal donations. Um, or the $1 billion in aid set to be paid out by the Feds themselves.
Just for grins, one could add that the US was responsible for 40 percent of all disaster relief aid paid out this past year. And if we were feeling particularly saucy, we might even let slip that Uncle Sam (or is it Uncle Scrooge?) donated $826 million to the UN World Food Programme, $100 million more than all the EU countries combined, despite the EU's larger population and GDP.
Stingy? If the US is stingy, then I'm unpretentious and satisfied with the size of my penis.
But boy, am I just all broken up about the fact the UN, the EU, the pot and the kettle all think we Yanks are a bit tight with the pursestrings. Its just that, by the time Marshall and Eisenhower and the boys got around to unclusterfucking Western Civilization and getting the electricity and running water turned back on in Brittain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the whole of Scandanavia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Balkans, the British and French Near East, Northern Africa, Turkey, Greece, Japan, China, Indochina, the Phillipines, Australia, Micronesia, and Luxembourg, we were a little light on walking-around money and a bit wary of real estate scams. But, if the free world is done borrowing the Modernity we loaned it, it could give it back and we could totally hawk it at the pawn shop for like, at least a hundred bucks.
See, what's sad is that a handful of minor powers have seen fit to make a point of outspending the US in Tsunami relief. The goal is to get into a pissing contest. If for nothing else, we can credit Bush with not biting. No press conference or forced contrition, just an envelope under the table and another subtle fuck you to the UN. Bush himself donated a measly 10K out of his own pocket. Why so little? Two reasons: 1) Sitting Presidents' assets are placed in a blind trust, and word is Bush's portfolio took a dive on account of some bad advice about Enron, and 2) Bush is setting a realistic example for every American. Nobody has to break the bank to help out. If you've got a hundred decent regular people, you don't need one Hollywood hero.
And you don't need your government proxying for you either. The American people are perfectly capable of recognizing a noble cause when they see one, and the needy are far better off when that recognition comes at the business end of a debit card than when it comes at the business end of a 155mm Howitzer.
There's a little spark of something left on this side of the pond that some other parts of the world look at as peculiarly as if it were a BetaMax(R) cassette player, and it's called Civil Society. You see, Civil Society is where people get together and do things without inviting George Bush and Nancy Pelosi. Sometimes they do silly things like sell each other tupperware, or collectively ape Oprah's literary tastes, or bowl for the league championship; and sometimes they do naughty things like dress up in latex and spank each other, or burn crosses, or vote; but every now and again they do something downright strange, like put a couple cans of soup or a few dollars or a little brawn and elbow grease on a plane and send it to people they'll never meet so their lives can be a little less miserable. Odd, I know. But then again we've always been a little fucked up like that.
I close, as all startlingly unoriginal polemicists do, with a quote--nay, a Gospel--from a petty Minnesota bourgeoisie by the name of Scott Fitzgerald. He said, "France was a land, England a people. But America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter. It was the graves at Shiloh, or the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, or the country boys who died in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart."
Now, despite my wont to make the occasional lighthearted quip, there is absolutely nothing capricious or funny about Mr. Fitzgerald's words. Except that "heart" rhymes with "fart".
-The Ugly American
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Pissing Into The Wind
Are we stingy? We've been guilted by the liberal and Jewish-(mother-)dominated press into pledging $350 Million towards Tsunami relief. As near as I can figure, this is approximately the same amount it costs us to be in Iraq for 74 seconds. (twice in a row)
President Bush has made it clear, though, that any more aid is going to come not from the government but form the public. Right. Cause Americans have such great hearts. We being the nationality most able to avoid eye contact with people in squalid living conditions who are yelling at us directly. And we're going to open our hears and our pursestrings for victims that had the beachfront property we all secretly wish we could have instead of this stupid-ass-Ranch-split-level-condo-in-a-gated-community-ohmygod-i-hate-the-burbs.
So, commentators, have at it. Illuminate us. What should we do to help our brethren? Would the response be the same if the wave had hit Western Europe instead of Asia?
President Bush has made it clear, though, that any more aid is going to come not from the government but form the public. Right. Cause Americans have such great hearts. We being the nationality most able to avoid eye contact with people in squalid living conditions who are yelling at us directly. And we're going to open our hears and our pursestrings for victims that had the beachfront property we all secretly wish we could have instead of this stupid-ass-Ranch-split-level-condo-in-a-gated-community-ohmygod-i-hate-the-burbs.
So, commentators, have at it. Illuminate us. What should we do to help our brethren? Would the response be the same if the wave had hit Western Europe instead of Asia?
Newest Year Ever (or: The Metaphysics of Then)
Faced with the choice that befalls every man at some point in his life--spend New Year's Eve with the ones you love, or with the ones you love and a hundred assholes--I opted, as a change of pace, for the latter. I was invited to a party at popular high school acquaintance x's house, and there promised to be a cadre of TNA and a contingent of Ubercrombie there to help vomit forth the new year in suburban style. Now, I know you, dear Reader, would never guess it, but old Foster kid wasn't often invited to the cool-kid parties back in high school. But I married up, and the girlfriend managed to secure spots for me and a crew of friends so motley we make Vince Neil and Tommy Lee look about as well-ordered as the set of positive integers.
So what was it like to hobknob with the beautiful people, the quarterback, the homecoming queen, the social directors, the winners of yearbook superlatives? Well, this isn't fucking page six. If you want a tit-for-tat account, go read Live Journal. We here at the Enfranchised deal in Big Pictures. Often of naked ladies. But I digress...
Suffice it to say that watching the ball drop while taking a trip down memory lane that goes all the way back to when your balls dropped, was a bit surreal. I've been quoted by some sources as saying that youth is a funny thing in that you're supposed to be young when it happens, but I was old at sixteen, too fucking old to go around being reckless and carefree.
When high school ended I remember realizing with a gasp and a blink that I only had four years left to do the things I was going to regret for the rest of my life, and that if I didn't I'd regret it for the rest of my life. But I didn’t have the stomach or the semen for that.
Besides, freshman year at university is neither what’s expected by hopeful intellectuals nor what’s portrayed in B+ movies. I rarely did find the bunchings of sensitive sophists, eagerly powwowing around the vast depth of smart things and/or painstakingly harvesting their collective minds for one kernel of Universal Truth. Therewere no academic orgies, nor orgies of any kind. The frat houses were shotgun and brick affairs that led one into the other along the mediocrity of H Street. Their pulp-fabled glory was non-existent. The parties were—for lack of a better word—lame. And then I asked myself, What did you expect? Corridors of alternating pulpits and soapboxes manned by the future giants of art and politics situated under a cherry tree and flanked on either side by Coors’ Light Gardens and hook-up chateaus, fueled by a never-ending string of full frontal shots and gross out jokes? Is that what you expected? Yes. Yes it is.
But, alas, people were either typical or typically atypical of the most common common denominator. They’re Thin-Candy-Shelled-Men wandering in the RecycledLand, whose deviancies and rebellions fall neatly into accepted norms. The last new idea was that we should be open to new ideas, and now all that's left are second-rate, third-generation Subterraneans who wear their old costumes with all the oblivious absurdity of a British Magistrate in his powdered wig...
Maybe that's why the suburban shindig at x's house was so oddly satisfying. Call it the-devil-you-know, but these people whose adolescences waltzed with mine all those years ago, they were somehow softer now, realer and less anonymous than the herds of WASPs and JAPs and BoBos in training who graze on stale beer and resin at America's institutions of higher learning. Now they're my small town heroes: The prankster who joined the Corps and ships off to Iraq next month, but not before you buy him dinner; that popped-collar who kicked his low-grade coke habit and worked his ass from County Junior College to Big State University, and dropped some of his superiority along the way; the dandy who's finally out and happy and minus one chip on his shoulder; and, of course, all the girls you thought you could have saved, the best of them with something like a self now to go along with the flesh.
If I've rambled its because the point is slippery here. Essays that hit a vein ought, if 9th grade biology serves me, get eventually to the heart. But essays that hit an artery...well, there the end of the road is a thousand other roads. But I suppose if there's something to be gleaned from this dwelling qua prose, it's the lessons of that temporal nexus we call midnight--when the bleary-eyed, sentimental longings of the past and the bright-eyed, zealous pronouncements for the future hurdle toward one another for about ten seconds, and collide for the briefest of instants at the orgastic Nowly Nowness of Now. Its just about the only time the artist, hedonist, and scientist versions of You are ever seen in the same room together.
-The '05 Baby.
PS: How obscure was this post? Your opinion is valuable to us, and will help us continue to bring you only the most obscure insight here at The Enfranchised. Please vote using the Modern Language Association's Obscurity scale: 1 being Charlie's Angels and 10 being Finnegan's Wake.
So what was it like to hobknob with the beautiful people, the quarterback, the homecoming queen, the social directors, the winners of yearbook superlatives? Well, this isn't fucking page six. If you want a tit-for-tat account, go read Live Journal. We here at the Enfranchised deal in Big Pictures. Often of naked ladies. But I digress...
Suffice it to say that watching the ball drop while taking a trip down memory lane that goes all the way back to when your balls dropped, was a bit surreal. I've been quoted by some sources as saying that youth is a funny thing in that you're supposed to be young when it happens, but I was old at sixteen, too fucking old to go around being reckless and carefree.
When high school ended I remember realizing with a gasp and a blink that I only had four years left to do the things I was going to regret for the rest of my life, and that if I didn't I'd regret it for the rest of my life. But I didn’t have the stomach or the semen for that.
Besides, freshman year at university is neither what’s expected by hopeful intellectuals nor what’s portrayed in B+ movies. I rarely did find the bunchings of sensitive sophists, eagerly powwowing around the vast depth of smart things and/or painstakingly harvesting their collective minds for one kernel of Universal Truth. Therewere no academic orgies, nor orgies of any kind. The frat houses were shotgun and brick affairs that led one into the other along the mediocrity of H Street. Their pulp-fabled glory was non-existent. The parties were—for lack of a better word—lame. And then I asked myself, What did you expect? Corridors of alternating pulpits and soapboxes manned by the future giants of art and politics situated under a cherry tree and flanked on either side by Coors’ Light Gardens and hook-up chateaus, fueled by a never-ending string of full frontal shots and gross out jokes? Is that what you expected? Yes. Yes it is.
But, alas, people were either typical or typically atypical of the most common common denominator. They’re Thin-Candy-Shelled-Men wandering in the RecycledLand, whose deviancies and rebellions fall neatly into accepted norms. The last new idea was that we should be open to new ideas, and now all that's left are second-rate, third-generation Subterraneans who wear their old costumes with all the oblivious absurdity of a British Magistrate in his powdered wig...
Maybe that's why the suburban shindig at x's house was so oddly satisfying. Call it the-devil-you-know, but these people whose adolescences waltzed with mine all those years ago, they were somehow softer now, realer and less anonymous than the herds of WASPs and JAPs and BoBos in training who graze on stale beer and resin at America's institutions of higher learning. Now they're my small town heroes: The prankster who joined the Corps and ships off to Iraq next month, but not before you buy him dinner; that popped-collar who kicked his low-grade coke habit and worked his ass from County Junior College to Big State University, and dropped some of his superiority along the way; the dandy who's finally out and happy and minus one chip on his shoulder; and, of course, all the girls you thought you could have saved, the best of them with something like a self now to go along with the flesh.
If I've rambled its because the point is slippery here. Essays that hit a vein ought, if 9th grade biology serves me, get eventually to the heart. But essays that hit an artery...well, there the end of the road is a thousand other roads. But I suppose if there's something to be gleaned from this dwelling qua prose, it's the lessons of that temporal nexus we call midnight--when the bleary-eyed, sentimental longings of the past and the bright-eyed, zealous pronouncements for the future hurdle toward one another for about ten seconds, and collide for the briefest of instants at the orgastic Nowly Nowness of Now. Its just about the only time the artist, hedonist, and scientist versions of You are ever seen in the same room together.
-The '05 Baby.
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Monday, January 03, 2005
Luxury's Lap
Mich Napolitano always was a funny bird. One of those guys who would be eccentric if he had money, but as things stood he was just plain crazy. I remember him explaining his Wiccan beliefs to seventh-grade me (he was an illustrious eighth-grader), when my knowledge of witchcraft was almost entirely culled from Nick-at-Nite reruns of Bewitched. And he and John Atkinson did a great scene from The Importance of Being Earnest at some high school drama festival (I can't remember who was Algernon and who was Jack, but, neither can the characters, so it evens out). So maybe it's because he's carved himself a niche in my mind's pantheon, but Mich Napolitano is the only person whose choice of Dunhill cigarettes I can respect.
You know Dunhills. Reds, Blues, Menthol Greens. They're the "top shelf" pack on the 7-11, holding their noses higher than the Camels and Marlboros to the left. They cost more, sure, but remember: you're not paying for a premium blend, you're paying for status. These have not one but two of those tin foil wrappers on the inside, presumably because a "Dunhill Man" needs to savor his cigarettes with a bit more freshness.
But if you really care about the quality of your tobacco, are you really shopping at the 7-11? No, you are not. You are shopping at Nat Sherman's or Mac's Smoke Shop or some store which caters to your taste. You are buying a brand no one has heard of because you think it will suit your palate better. If you are buying Dunhills, it is because you have an extra $1.80 burning a hole in your pocket and you want to treat yourself to "the best". The same reason that people buy Grey Goose or Glenlivet or Tanqueray Ten. These are not the best, these are just the best popular members of their classes.
So, enjoy your faux luxury. Drink it down. But I hope a small part of you remembers: there's no such thing as the best rum. So either invest as much time as disposable income and sample a wide range of sorts to develop your taste... or drop a packet of sweet and low in ethanol and call it a life.
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