Edits

Amidst the multi-year media onslaught that our presidential election process has become, I’ve had to adjust my critical thinking filter to an even finer sieve than before. Sometimes it occurs to me that at least the news media is flooding the landscape with an issue that matters to people’s lives. At other times, though, the campaign overkill reaches such a level of absurdity that I wonder if perhaps these press hacks aren’t qualified to tell us about anything more important than Anna Nicole’s baby daddy, so maybe they should stick with that.

Consider for example this AP/Yahoo News poll and writeup published yesterday, which concludes that John McCain is the candidate of choice among pet owners.

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Well, sort of betraying them. I know, I know… you’re thinking, “Hold on, this blog has principles?” Don’t be alarmed. We can have fun anyway.

In this blog, I aim to avoid what used to be known as player hating (I’d spell it in the street dialect form, e.g., playa-hatin’, but who am I kidding). I say “used to,” because I suspect the term has passed out of fashion; unfortunately I don’t know what expression may have replaced it. The point is, a fundamental characteristic of our National Miscourse™ is the cheap, lazy rhetorical default of saying that everything sucks. For examples of this, I would reference the vast majority of the blogosphere. Therefore, I strive to remain solidly in the remaining minority of bloggers by devoting a large proportion of my writing to things I want to praise; and when I must indict, always including a thorough reasoning for my disapproval.

Kind of a lengthy preface for link-blogging Dickipedia, a site that made me laugh pretty hard when I found it this morning. It’s a funnier (IMO) offshoot of the comedic news site 23/6, and, it should be noted, not an actual wiki but a parody of one.

I’m not actually issuing the scorn, I’m just linking to it. I admit may be cutting it pretty fine, but Dickipedia is certainly a few cuts above mere player hating: it simultaneously parodies Wikipedia while identifying prominent individuals as the dicks they are with wit and verve. I don’t have a problem with the inclusion of anyone profiled on the site, but this may be because I apparently share the site owners’ politics. I’ll excerpt a non-partisan example just to be on the inclusive side:

William Roger Clemens (born August 4, 1962, in Dayton, Ohio), is a starting pitcher for the New York Yankees, one of the preeminent pitchers in Major League Baseball history, an alleged user of steroids and human growth hormone, and a dick.

Clemens has won seven Cy Young Awards. He has also won two World Series championships, one for each banned substance he is alleged to have taken during the same two years he “won” the rings.

Clemens throws and bats right-handed. It is unknown whether he banned-substance-abuses left-buttocked or right-buttocked. His nickname is “the Rocket,” though this is not thought to be connected to the fact that his personal strength coach Brian McNamee, as the Mitchell Report put it, “injected Clemens approximately four times in the buttocks”…

Enjoy the dicks, everyone!

George Carlin is gone. Damn it. I never got to meet him.

His work showed me what comedy could be - that its full scope extends well beyond what is merely funny. His wit was restless, impatient; it tugged persistently at the uneven corners of our society. People who know me well will attest that in a normal conversation, it’s quite common for me to quote George Carlin. It’s no accident: he was so prolifically funny and insightful for so long that he covered the majority of topics relevant to our lives at one time or another. More than any other individual source, George Carlin’s stand-up formed the basis of my comedic sensibility.

When I was about 11 or 12, his 1972 album Class Clown became the first comedy recording I ever owned. I brought that LP home, listened to it, and then listened to it again. And then again, a few more times. Soon his brilliant riffs were committed to my memory (where they remain), and I returned to Tower Records in Mountain View to repeat the process with another opus from the Carlin catalogue. LPs gave way to cassette tapes - easier to store, useful for my new, bitchin’ bright-yellow Walkman, and good for comedy recordings because the eventual decline in audio fidelity didn’t matter so much.

As I’ve mentioned, his penetratingly funny insights are too numerous and wide-ranging to recount. Here’s just a few, off the top of my head. George, forgive me if I paraphrase.

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So I was goofing off and taking silly quizzes on the web when suddenly I came across a question that wasn’t so silly. It went a little something like this:

If you had to make an important decision about something that would affect others, which of these factors would you consider most strongly?

• Justice
• Compassion
• Practicality
• Self-interest

I sat here for about 5 whole minutes mentally kicking this one around. I immediately eliminated Self-interest - it’s a perfectly worthwhile answer, but given that my judgment is going to carry repercussions for many others it automatically feels least important to me. In the broader scheme of things I’m not sure that this tendency is such a plus; it’s often been suggested to me that I am by nature too unselfish for my own good… but I digress.

After another minute or two I eliminated Practicality. A course of action, I reasoned, shouldn’t be considered more right because it’s the easiest or most practical way to go. Here again, I like my decision but readily admit it as evidence that I’m a lousy capitalist.

I finally settled on Compassion, mainly because I’m a big fan of it. If you’re surprised, hear me out.

Justice seems like the obvious answer. Everyone loves Justice, me included, but the problem is that no two people’s notions of Justice are quite the same. For only one example, If you’re deciding what to do with a confessed murderer, the victim’s family is most likely going to have a different idea of justice than the murderer’s mother would have. This, of course, is a single specific example, not necessarily correlative to the hypothetical decision I’d be making.
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This is probably going to make me sound like a huge fogey, but the hell with it: this movie would have better if it had been made 20 years ago. It still wouldn’t be as good as Last Crusade, much less the original Raiders (kind of a tall order, since that was the movie that made me fall in love with movies as a kid), but it would have been better. A bit better, anyway.

Why? Because it would have pre-dated the CGI technology in which Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull overindulges. CGI, in and of itself, is no different than any other tool at the disposal of a filmmaker: it can be used skillfully, to thrilling cinematic effect (as in The Matrix, or the Lord of the Rings trilogy), but it can also be overemphasized, to the detriment of essentials like plot and character development (the lamentable Star Wars prequel trilogy). Crystal Skull is nowhere near as bad as the latter, but it falls well short of the former.

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