Harmless News Story or Intentionally Downplayed Opportunity for Ethical Boycott?

A story I happened to read today developed serious undertones of 'Age of Indifference' malaise in less than five minutes. The first embarrassing part of the story is that, while the article is posted in the 'Diversions 'n Oddities' section, it's a story about drug catapults on the Arizona-Mexico border. This has to be some kind of lesson in provincialism in news reporting, right? This is better than indifference. This is global indifference in the two best flavours: national and international.

Some day in the future, maybe, a disastrous-drug-trade-related story can be proven to be as completely harmless and stupid as a high-school physics project gone wrong, or some other comic situation. I don't meant to play 'morally-outraged idiot', but in this case I thought maybe there was some point to the dumb act, and I thought, goddamn, if the drug markets were slightly different, Mexico wouldn't have hooked even one investigator or digital repeater from the sensationalistic, tone-deaf, and apparently forgetful global media. Shit, before I forget: if Reagan had jumped on only one ideological grenade, he could have entirely prevented the Cuban Cigarette Boat Crisis in the 1980's.

The worst part is that the United State's economic blind eye is, as ever, responsible. The typical hot-and-cold relationship to drugs does enough damage (allegedly; yes; in some cases) to society on an individual scale, let alone a national one. While ignoring the right of civilian domestic supply with various measures, which are only now beginning to erode, it has created a drug bottleneck which has been exploited in many iterations, and in many ways throughout recent history.

What is most terrifying is to imagine the hypocrisy of ethical consumers in America who smoke marijuana (allegedly a small group of people, which is a rumor I find distasteful) who are apparently funding a small, ongoing war. Hippies, and maybe even a majority of unethical users, have problems with people being shot or decapitated. That is Bad Stuff in any language, but maybe not in the lingo of the much ballyhooed, tech-fueled 'age of indifference'. Even those considered politically conservative can agree that outsourcing profit that could be nationalized is a ridiculous proposition, right? And conservative moralists, do you really wish anyone to be killed, even as a result of inaction, and then ignore the moral or ethical implications? These the traditional enemies of marijuana and other drugs are of course oblivious to any argument about glasses or half-fullness.

Everyone is entitled to indifference. I am of the opinion that being indifferent to pretty much everything is alright, but I may have to change my opinions on things, because I can sense what the losing proposition is. If nobody plays their cards right there's a lot of dissatisfaction at the table, and it is all exactly as Kenny Rogers prophesied.

So there's one boycott of commodities the United States consumes regularly that can take place, potentially end a 'diversion' on its own border, without crippling its economy – perhaps even stimulating it. For my money, the dirtiest economism of all is 'ethical consumption', which is similar in smut-factor to the 'cap and trade'. The only good thing about the economy is that it is still a game that is somewhat open to just about anyone, unless one is blissfully in the gutter with an empty bottle of wine and no cash.

Surely there are even a handful of methadryl spillers in the USA who would put their honor where their high was for a few weeks if only to cripple the encroaching clusterfuck for a few years.


For those who are factotums to fact and nothing but the fact:

The Internet 'IRL', Courtesy of Something Awful

I've been watching the Flash Tub at Something Awful for years. It was originally quite good, but the quality always varied, and there hasn't really been anything outstanding or noteworthy there for a while, in my unfair estimation. It's a flash animation weekly feature, often with goofy and/or violent animation and tends to stray into  nonsensical self referential territory.

But now and again it proves that it does have a right to exist. For instance, when it does what Something Awful is best at: internet meta-commentary. The preceding sentence is a link to a flash tub cartoon that illustrates exactly what the world would be like if it were like the internet, as imagined by knowing denizens of the internet. When it comes to timely slap-downs of internet memes, social fads, or the type of snobbish commentary on music that Pitchfork simply cannot provide, Something Awful has been everyone's friend since at least 2001 and has doled out mountains of advice to loners, strangers, and goons of various persuasions.

To be honest, the cartoon is sharp as hell. Say what you want about the production (which, statistically, is above and beyond a majority of Flash work on the internet), but the content delivers.

The Case of the Missing Pun/Caption

After weeks of lame-duck jokes about the new format of coffee that Starbucks is introducing, finally somebody has the guts to lampoon the issue entirely. But instead of the risky, high-octane satire we expect from Conan O'Brien, we get a bit where Andy Richter is paid to dunk himself (like a doughnut) into a vat of coffee. The operative word in the joke is impossible to conceptualize, would it be troughe? Troffe? Things are getting grim and dangerous in the TV business, evidently.

Anyhow, there's a great joke in that image, whether in the background or in the foreground, but it's doubtful whether anyone could actually make that joke and tell it properly, so the victory has to be handed to the crew who made it happen.

The real question, as usual, is where did they get that much coffee? The idea of huge, bad-coffee-filled tankers rolling around LA ready to meet the challenge of any coffee gimmick makes me uneasy.

"Should Old Acquaintance be Forgot?"

This January has been a rough one. Between sleeplessness and the cold I've found a few sobering reminders of the natural law that all things must come to an end.

First is the end of Michael Steele's chairmanship of the RNC, which would be entirely unimportant if the Daily Show didn't exist. Wyatt Cenac's impersonation of Steele, in muppet style, is probably one of the greatest lampooning acts ever created on television. From the subtle nod to the unreal unfoldings of Michael Steele's time with the RNC to the 'bibbles', all of which were delightful, this was really one of those things which make an already great show undeniably awesome.

The other thing that finally came to an end is Superpoop, a webcomic that is known for taking a nonsensical stance on politics everything and being incredibly good at making amusing narratives out of disconnected images. Lately it became a bit more serious than usual, talking about the end of the world, and it just kind of ended there. Sure, there are mass animal deaths, and the poles may shift (good title for a stripper movie), and there are wars and rumors of wars, and rumors of famine to boot, but as deluded as our sense of stability is, the idea that the world will explode or somehow end in less than millions of years is ridiculous.

But January hasn't been all bad. I found a flash game powered by Java (and it's not Minecraft!) that has no point and yet is infinitely enjoyable. This game goes by several names: Dust, Powder Game, or something else. You'll know it when you see it, but here's a link to the game. It has no goal other than perhaps crashing the applet (by dropping the 'dot' counter to zero, which simulates, albeit facetiously, heat death via entropy) or creating an enduring equilibrium. Basically the game simulates particles, which the player throws into a space, and which behave according to certain rules, and eventually it all becomes madness.

A static image doesn't do it justice. This is just a weak representation of the sort of madness you can scheme up in this game, and I heartily recommend it. The trick is to start a kind of madness that you can leave alone for a half hour while you do something else, and return to find it still swirling. Inertia is the only enemy.

Late Night Talkshows: Conan's Inevitable Comeback

Last night's (Wednesday, 12 January) episode of Conan was a reminder that no matter how bad the opening jokes are, Conan O'Brien will make the first ten minutes worth it. The monologue jokes were weak, so weak in fact that I suspect they were purposeful stinkers, but I still laughed a lot, because Conan can salvage failed jokes almost as well as he capitalizes on good jokes. The snow joke was outstandingly bad, which made it good for a laugh.

Andy Richter's reaction to the story about masturbation was priceless, and then he mocked the opening jokes as well. The final joke, about the 'Nintendo Wii Wii" was so awful that I think my theory is entirely correct. La Bamba's snowstorm was classic, though, "All trombone music has been suspended for the rest of the show". When James Lipton showed up and was denied work the show had redeemed itself. And nobody even made a height-related joke, which is a mark of maturity.

When Denis Leary brought up typewriters and Conan derailed him in the 20's style was awesome, if you go in for that kind of humor. It's late-night comedy at its finest when Conan O'Brien pretends to telegram a Twitter posting while Denis Leary wipes away a tear of laughter. Plus, Leary said his mother was on Facebook, but said so in a Twitteresque way, which means that at least one of my predictions has already come true, even earlier than I thought. So keep an eye on local bears. The show ended well, with Ice Cube (who is not on Late Night shows that often) and a comic (Tim Minchin) on a piano (which sounds trite but he made it work). But the opening was really surprisingly funny.

This brings me to 2010 Retrospective Pt. 4 (or 5): State of the Late-Night Talk Show in 2010
Jimmy Fallon had a great year, and his show is definitely getting better, but I think his best years are still ahead. Leno and Letterman are doing as well as ever, and Letterman even crashed into a Christmas tree on stage a few weeks ago, so you know those shows are doing fine. Ferguson's show is still excellent and irreverent. They've all been stable and working in much the same manner as ever.

So there is a fair bit of competition, but Conan O'Brien had the comeback. And I read TV critics saying Conan was "uncomfortable" and "awkward" and that his show wasn't funny. Those TV critics are the same who ignored Community, so they obviously live in a time before 2009 and don't qualify to make judgments on contemporary TV. Conan wins because his show had only a month in 2010 to prove itself, and it was damn funny in that time. It's a comeback, and that is the kind of story you can't invent and have to watch while it happens. And I want to know how it plays out, so I know if I was right in my completely unimportant internet judgment.

Commericals Should be Taxed

Since they are a form of noise pollution, it is only reasonable to tax commercials unless advertisers stop cranking up the volume or begin to focus on quality and variety. And I mean television, here. Radio is as dependent or more on ad revenue than print media.

Maybe I sound like an old, embittered man for complaining about noise pollution, but the truth stands: television programming is pretty bad at times, but commercials are always worse by at least a factor of two. And they are loud, so they pollute with noise the very homes we live in. And people without televisions feel smug about it.

Television advertisements should be taxed because they are at least as bad for your health as cigarettes. Ads convince people to eat at greasy franchise restaurants, buy insidious deep-fried snack foods, participate in 'Cash 4 Gold' schemes, and pay to watch crappy movies in theaters. All of this drives the economy, sure, but also makes each and every person a compulsive and hollow shell. The bottom line has always been worth the common man, of course, but cannot the sham democratic system throw at least one bone to the very small percentage of people who watch TV and dislike being condescended to between their 22 minutes of show?

Smokers, used to the glares of passerby, now have to deal with being unable to smoke in places of business. Now this is somewhat of a twist unlogical, but why should normal people have to deal with business being brought into their place of living? And this analogy holds, because as smokers are addicted to tobacco (or the quest to look cool), so are TV addicts to their shows and dramas and sporting events and news. There are enough opportunities for untaxed product placements in television programming, so it's not like either taxing or abolishing televised commercials will really change everything.

Slurring Verses

One early morning I was looking up advice about noise pollution. From insulation, all the way to polite confrontation, went the advice I found. I found a page that I should've bookmarked which talked about gift baskets. Elsewhere I was advised to defuse the situation with some baked breads – which is disturbing if you have a perverse mind and even if you accept the words literally. Try solving anything beyond hunger with a home baked bread.

Baskets of gifts are pretty ostentatious, insulation is expense, and confrontation is the Achilles' heel of the misanthrope. I always think I'll figure out some devious cure to problems I may just be exaggerating. At least, that's what I think I do, but the truth is probably a bit more convoluted. In any case, I went wrong by seeking advice on the internet, and that's really the extent of the issue.

I am definitely not against the internet, but I can't imagine all the things it might've been if it wasn't immediately harnessed by nonsense. Things the inter-ignorant don't know much about, such as trolls, are actually becoming more common. Drastically more common, as a quick look at any forum or comment section (itself the curse of our stunningly obsessive and pathological habits) will prove.

But 'troll' has been a metaphor always, and not a bad one at that. I guess at one point a person could point at a nonsensically aggravating individual and say,

"Fuck off, you churl!"

 I write that academically, of course. I guess what I'm looking for, accurately, is advice for living with the daily trolls of the universe. I need a solution that works for any troll situation.

At the same time I have myself been guilty of being a troll in the past, and part of me looks at troll-problems as a function of karma - perhaps the ultimate expression of foot in one's mouth. If that's the case I need to be able to accurately measure karma, or else I'll never know when I should become its agent. Agent of Karma (good movie title +/- concept).

And noise pollution is itself kind of an interesting concept. Even good enough that someone could make a movie about it, but I suppose it is still rather misunderstood. It really exists, though, and you have to believe this. The best example is careless placement of wind chimes; maybe purposeful muffler alteration.

Wind chimes are not offensive in theory, but in practice, or windy areas, can get ridiculous. This is because they do not rest, and instead go on chiming at all hours. And chimes generate sharp noise, so the sound can travel a fair distance. Furthermore, if someone stands at a fair distance, and wishes to hear the night's elemental silence-music, they are forced to include the ostentatious music of chimes chiming in the breeze.

Muffler alteration for the sake of, say, noise, is probably the ultimate type of pollution. I'd say it borders on noise crime. I even know of a direct example of the power of even a small combustion engine.

Anyhow, trolls see noise-pollution as favorable because it allows them to broadcast themselves and trouble others. It's like interpersonal agitprop, or perhaps sonic graffiti, because it is deliberately noticeable and serves no noticeable purpose. I see it as a form of offensive excess, often used indiscriminately – why else the echo-mufflers of the world, the deafening car audio, F-1 racing?

It's always some more of that old noise pollution. Thunder isn't noise pollution because it is part of an inescapable process.  Television and radio are (or can be, if you're conservative), because few people speak judiciously. Marching in sufficient force is kind of a noise pollution. And I almost forgot about noise cannons and sonic weaponry, which is paralleled only by microwave weaponry in terms of odiousness.

That's all just energy pollution but with a target. And, ultimately, aren't bullets pollution as well? Couldn't we as a planet come to some sort of awakened conversation about pollution? We are submerged in pollution, and the green team has monopolized it in the name of ecological commonsense, but other very real types of pollution exist.

Perhaps, reader, and I am sorry to bring this up, but perhaps you are ignorant and you laugh. You think to yourself, "That untypical gentleman is throwing words together about things that he either invented or read about in an anonymous internet article written by, no doubt, a bunch of kooks and quacks." Maybe you don't even know or care about the multitude of disasters that have always existed, even that special class of disaster which is anthropogenic. If you do not care, you may be a troll.

Pollution, depending on how one defines it, is always the source of grief and stress in organisms.  Therefore it can be communicated as a bad thing, a negative. So when one repays pollution with more pollution, one has two bad things, and is sure to come to grief by both of them. If one merely accepts the initial pollution, one still deals with grief, and if one ignores it, the pollution still goes on existing. One can try to portray pollution as a good thing, and maybe even believe the delusion, but that does not change what exists.

So there's a thing called Troll Pollution, and, to the average person, it's more of a big deal than climate change or the pole shift or the greasy atmosphere. I've been thinking about it, and suppose it's simply just a negative aura that self-perpetuates, and if you look closely at a lot of the human world and its alleged history, you can apply the concept of troll pollution to explain such diverse topics as:

• Fights ending in death
• Theft
• Injustice – casual or severe
• Contention
• Fraud
• Noise pollution
• Jackasses
• Discrimination, hate crimes
• Psychologically damaging circumstances
• Fights ending in serious and/or life-threatening injury
• Consumerism, Postmodernism
• Authoritarianism, Feudalism, Anarchism
• 'Anarchism'
• Statism, Legalism, Recidivism, elitism
• Depression, Indigestion, Castration, Defenestration
• Charlatanism
• Entropy
• This blog post.

2010 Retrospective, pt. 3: Television vs. Extinction

My enthusiasm for television has never really changed. I lived without a TV up until the point someone asked me, "Are you one of those people who watch TV?" At that point, of course, I knew exactly what my life was missing. That said, I never really watched much. I did the thing where I would stare blankly at the television for a while, using it less as a source of information and entertainment (and never the twain should meet) than as a slack, mutable canvas on which to view my exact context in history.

Now one autumn day in 2009, following my usual after-work routine, I encountered a shock. I stumbled into an episode of a show that I had some dim awareness of. Slick dialogue and editing; snappy and unerringly clean characters; white male lead - yep, another bland and demoralizing situational comedy show. American TV at its best, in the most savage satiric sense. So kept watching, irritated that anyone had the gall to pull this kind of leprous rabbit out of the sleazy magic hat of television. It appeared to be unoffensive, silly, acceptable writing... and wait a minute, that's Chevy Chase, isn't it? And who is that free radical?

Community thus gained a faithful viewer. This show which was on nobody's radar at all, that I hadn't even seen on many network ads, actually entertained me. Sure, I knew about 30-Rock, the other sitcom on NBC, which was always good for a laugh but obviously a glass cannon. I had been getting tired of How I Met Your Mother, because I'd seen enough episodes to know that its main conceit was a red-herring, and that it was really just a very, very impressive remake of Friends. The rest of my faith in network programming had been slain by the enthusiasm over The Big Bang Theory, the appeal of which was lost on me.

With all of those odds stacked against it, plus the internet, television still managed to hook me. Thursdays I knew where to go to shake off my boredom. Community really is unimpressive on paper: Cynical failed lawyer goes to school, accidentally creates a study-group in order to get laid, finds out that the consequences are heartwarming but inescapable. It also has a really flat title, the sort of title that could've easily belonged to another 100 Questions. 

But the first season of Community was worth every episode. By the end of the Halloween special I knew what I had suspected when Troy and Abed first rapped together en Espagnol. The hippest of you are saying, "That was 2009, and standards were different. The 'meta-goldrush' is over, and meta-humor is played out and lame." Well, in 2010 I watched Community regularly. That show owned 2010. I know this because nobody else thinks so, and nobody else says so, but I couldn't find a single DVD of Season 1 when I went to the store recently. So what if it was on sale?

Which begs the question, "Is it shameful to admit you like Community?" Local 'TV Critics' who are published in newspapers did not mention Community in their predictable 'Best of 2010' lists so the show obviously lacks critical praise. In more realistic terms, maybe a third (33%) of people I know watch the show, and the rest do not care for it. I will watch that show until it's cancelled or someone steals my TV. When the season finale aired I actually (and this is shameful stuff) wished there were more episodes - and the show ended on a tone-perfect idiot note. The reruns were sobering reminders of what I might have missed if I thought that television was objectively bad, which in itself is kind of depressing, because I could've been an anti-TV rebel.

Season 2 of Community has been difficult. Three hundred people literally felt betrayed by the recent Christmas episode. Some accuse the program of being too clever by half, which is at least half of its charm to begin with. My opinion is that they have done no wrong at all, and that this season is at least as good as the least of the last one. There are some high points they'll never hit again, but they'll replace them with other distractions. Chevy Chase could quit, Dan Harmon might even drive the show off a cliff out of sheer perversity, or meddling hands will destroy it, but nothing can kill what they quoted, alluded to, or made fun of - especially 80's rapists, Goodfellas, and Cookie Crisp.

New Year's Evil

Funny how short-lived my enthusiasm for a new year is. I think we went wrong by celebrating an arbitrary point in our collective orbit (good band name), and then by getting drunk about it, and again by making a big deal about how and where we get drunk for it. This is the classic loser's offensive remark: "I go to sleep at 10:00 PM because, you know, what's the point?"

It's a weak position and would not get you voted into office, and complements the life of anyone over a certain age living in warm places, or anyone who works New Year's Day and isn't extreme enough to make it through a shift hungover. I mean entirely to brag by saying that  I worked an entire shift in a retail store with no backup, one day, while I was hung over enough to be sickened by rosewater. Fun fact: since referencing hangovers and New Year's, this article has gotten 300% more predictable.

I've more or less given up on holidays, myself. I still participate, but the illusion has failed me. And, really, the best perspective on the so-called "holiday season" is a cynical one, because it means you won't be disappointed in anything, from the tacky advertising to the annoying advertising to the repetitive advertising to the heartrending advertising for charities or even the edgy advertising for cars. Cynical people also don't act surprised when the mall is busy, because the mall is always busy anyways, and only an idiot would think otherwise.

It really does seem that this arbitrary point in the orbit was picked by the northern elite to ensure that their subjects have something to look forward to, whilst they sip 500 year-old cognac out of opulent vessels and bask in the warmth of a paper-money fire. I actually understand this behavior, because Christmas is the great time of retail up-trickle economics, when the midwealthy get their yearly bonuses. When the midwealthy go out to buy luxury products on boxing day, that money trickles up again to the elite, who sometimes have to make the heartbreaking decision to burn older stacks of money in order to be able to store the new. Some of them even have to deal with the stress of renovating their overlarge money safes.

For regular little people, a bit of stress arises from the hope that gifts given are either appreciated for their inherent value or useful to whomever they are gifted to. Also I see that my decision not to slavishly post on this blog was a mistake, because my whole readership evaporated. I just checked the stats, and am impressed that the numbers held out as long as they did.

Yeah, I've got peanuts for material on this blog, but I've explained that I am a shoddy blogger. I'll do a lot better this year, I promise.