Friday, September 07, 2007

 

This morning, CNN.com demonstrated its understanding of the Comedy Rule of 3

Labels: news

posted by Dan 9:39 AM
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Wednesday, May 02, 2007

 

A Little

Radio silence maintained at the moment. I actually have a lot to post about, but can't fight off the lack of entusiasm for my own loudmouthing. Apologies.

Meantime, here's a story scientifically designed to put a lump in your throat.

Labels: linkage, news

posted by Dan 2:16 PM
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Monday, April 23, 2007

 

It's All Theatre's Fault

Remember when I said this a few days ago, about the tragedy at VT and the involvement of plays:

...when Woody Allen got involved with Sun Yi, people started saying that you could see his perversity in his movies, and therefore you could find the perversity of any artist in their work, and therefore artists are perverted and their work should be monitored for deviancy. I'm afraid of another round of that.

I looked at the post later and thought, Trujillo, you're being hysterical.

I wasn't being hysterical.

In the wake of Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech in which a student killed 32 people, [Yale] Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg has limited the use of stage weapons in theatrical productions.

...

According to students involved in the production, Trachtenberg has banned the use of some stage weapons in all of the University’s theatrical productions. While shows will be permitted to use obviously fake plastic weapons, students said, those that hoped to stage more realistic scenes of stage violence have had to make changes to their props. (h/t The Agitator)

Nothing like a tragedy to inspire pointless gestures.

Strangely, I am inspired. In the past few weeks we've had this, the banned high school play about the Iraq war, and the Mike Daisey incident in Cambridge. Suddenly theatre seems not only still relevant, but still dangerous.

Labels: news, theatre

posted by Dan 3:30 PM
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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

 

Ugh.

The Virginia Tech massacre just took an uncomfortable turn.

UPDATE: What I mean is: when Woody Allen got involved with Sun Yi, people started saying that you could see his perversity in his movies, and therefore you could find the perversity of any artist in their work, and therefore artists are perverted and their work should be monitored for deviancy. I'm afraid of another round of that.

Labels: linkage, news, theatre

posted by Dan 5:10 PM
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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

 

Blasphemy

You might have missed this news on the big websites. Some very bright bulbs disproved evolution. No really. There’s video (h/t Brian Flemming).

All I know is, when you misunderstand the nature of peanut butter and bananas, you misunderstand The King. And that I will not stand for.

Labels: linkage, news, religion, tv

posted by Dan 5:21 PM
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Thursday, March 22, 2007

 

Cerebral Cornmeal

More evidence that we’re merely chemicals bagged in meat.

Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, centimetres behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgements in life-or-death situations, scientists are reporting.

That explains Gandhi’s exemplery forehead. Thought I must admit, I find some of the data specious:

Asked to resolve hypothetical dilemmas — such as tossing a person from a bridge into the path of a runaway train carriage to save five others — people with damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex tended to sacrifice one life to save many, according to a study published by the journal Nature.

People with intact brains were far less likely to kill or harm someone when confronted with the same scenarios.

Or, the people without brain damage figured out that one 100-200 pound human body is not going to stop thirty tons of runaway train carriage, and saw no reason to add to the body count.

People with damaged ventromedial prefrontal cortexes: please keep this in mind when walking with friends on bridges over train tracks.

In fairness, the article does say that "the scenarios presented in the study were unrealistic." But still, if someone asked you:

"Four babies are dying of exposure. Would you stab someone in the eye with a carrot and make a blanket of their skin?"

What part of the brain goes off first, the Moral Compass, or the Stupid Question Klaxon?

People with damaged ventromedial prefrontal cortexes: when in cold places, do not make stabby-stab with a carrot.

Labels: news, science

posted by Dan 3:28 PM
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Tuesday, March 20, 2007

 

Executive Privilege

CNN: White House OKs Rove, Miers interviews on U.S. attorneys

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The White House will allow the president's top political adviser, Karl Rove, and former White House counsel Harriet Miers to be interviewed by congressional committees investigating how the firing of several U.S. attorneys was handled.
But Miers and Rove will not testify under oath, the White House said.

The announcement came after White House counsel Fred Fielding met with members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, which had considered using subpoenas to force Rove, Miers and their two deputies to reveal what they knew about the firings of at least seven U.S. attorneys.

The White House's allowance of unsworn interviews only "is incomplete," said Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York.

"We would be able to interview the four people we requested ... but only in private, not under oath and with no transcript," he said.

* * *

Scene: A bar booth. Chuck Schumer sits across form Karl Rove and Harriet Miers. They share a pitcher of beer.

CHUCK
Thanks for coming down and meeting me.

HARRIET
Thanks for the beer.

CHUCK
Oh, it’s the least I can do. I’m just so thankful you came on down.

KARL
You know, we had the Saturday.

CHUCK
Cool.

So…s’up.

KARL
S’up.

CHUCK
Not much. Job. Family.

So…

Wow that’s a pretty necklace.

HARRIET
Thanks, it was a gift from George. You know, Consolation Prize.

CHUCK
Oh yeah, I’m so sorry about that, that was so messed up.

HARRIET
Water under the bridge.

CHUCK
Yeah.

So…

I’m so embarrassed to even bring this up but…

Did you two get the Justice Department to fire U.S. Attorneys based on their loyalty to the White House’s political objectives? I’m so sorry I had to ask that!

KARL
Dude, no.

HARRIET
Totally no.

CHUCK
Oh man I’m so relieved to hear that. I’m so sorry I had to ask that. It’s just you hear these rumors, and everyone’s like, Chuck you gotta ask them, God this is so embarrassing.

HARRIET
Hey, hey, honey, don’t worry about it, we totally understand.

KARL
Dude, you can’t listen to people, people are jerks.

CHUCK
I know, I know, you guys are so cool for understanding, I don’t deserve friends like you.

HARRIET
Forget about it. Water under the bridge.

CHUCK
Yeah.

Cheers.

They toast.

I just have one other question –

KARL
Dude I got the feeling you don’t trust us!

CHUCK
No no, it’s not about that, it’s about something else…

Say there’s this senior political advisor, and it’s not you…

KARL
Okay.

CHUCK
And say there’s this former legal counsel to the president, and it’s not you.

HARRIET
Okay.

CHUCK
If these two aids to the President that aren’t you wanted to fire a bunch of US Attorneys for political reasons, and we’re just talking hypothetically here, how would they have done it?

KARL
Hypothetically?

CHUCK
Totally. We’re just talking now.

KARL
I dunno. I never thought about it. Harriet?

HARRIET
I guess -- though it’s against my principles -- I guess I’d have someone make a list with three categories. Like, “Totally Down With the President, Not-So-Down with the President, and – “

KARL
“Ass on the Grass.”

Harriet and Karl giggle.

Chuck pulls out a piece of paper.

CHUCK
That’s funny, ‘cause a friend gave me a list just like that, and says that you -

KARL
DUDE! THAT IS SO UNCOOL!

CHUCK
No no wait!

KARL
WHAT MAN, MY WORD’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU?!

CHUCK
I just wanted to show it to you so you could prove it isn’t yours!

KARL
You can shove your list, and your beer.

Karl finishes his beer.

You are so bogus.

Karl exits.

HARRIET
I hope you’re happy. Hasn’t he been through enough?

Harriet exits.

CHUCK
Man, I am such a jerk.

Labels: news

posted by Dan 6:23 PM
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Friday, March 16, 2007

 

What Has Happened to the Ethics of Our Finest Advertising Firms?

Seriously though, what geniuses in the creative department thought this was a good idea?

If you don’t feel like clicking, it’s a fashion ad featuring a woman being held down on the ground by a man, with her dress hiked up around her hips, while four other men look on.

This was the winning idea. This idea probably beat out several other ideas.

Those In Charge had this excuse:

Stefano Gabbana, a partner in Dolce & Gabbana, has indicated that the image does not represent gang rape or violence but rather an erotic dream or sexual game.

Let’s take the statement at face value: the kind of woman your company markets to is the kind of woman who fantasizes about being held down by a man while four others look on.

Leaving aside that we all have dark, complex fantasy lives, leave aside that one might not call this particular fantasy healthy but one borne of serious trauma: why did it not occur to somebody somewhere that many other women would find this totally offensive? Isn’t it their job to understand the market?

Now let’s say that the excuse is b.s. (which it is): Why does the fashion industry hate women so much? Don’t they buy the product? Is there any other industry that has such contempt for its patrons? Besides Theatre, I mean?

Labels: news

posted by Dan 1:22 PM
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Monday, March 12, 2007

 

From the Department of “No Duh Dahd”

Neurological Basis for Teenage Mood Swings Found

This is why eighth-graders should receive a regimen of psychotropics. The breathing walls make the school day go by smoother.

Seriously, I’d like to thank my parents for not putting me on mood-altering drugs when my adolescent psychosis gave them ample excuse. And sorry about the car.

UPDATE: This is another reduction of personality to brain chemistry, as with my blood sugar problem. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Labels: news

posted by Dan 6:10 PM
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Wednesday, February 21, 2007

 

Lost Highway Quarterly

How is it that I’ve gone as long as I have, and not known that the magazine sales industry is a cesspool of drug abuse, larceny, prostitution and violence? This is the kind of bizarre tidbit I pride myself on knowing: that US Weekly is tainted not only with the entropic culture of celebrity, but the tears of sin and crime. How did I not know this?! I want to gather my employees in my office, slap the paper down on my desk and scream, “Why did I learn about this only just now, on the cover of the New York Times? If only I had employees.

Do not miss this exposé on the jaw-dropping horrors of the mag-crews. And whoever gets their play about it up first wins a year’s subscription to Cosmopolitan.

Labels: news

posted by Dan 3:42 PM
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Monday, February 12, 2007

 

Dear Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad,

Would you just kiss already? You’re not fooling anybody.

Yours in Love,
Dan

Labels: news

posted by Dan 4:46 PM
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Friday, February 02, 2007

 

Burrowing Mammal Confirms Global Warming

We're doomed.

Labels: news

posted by Dan 10:26 AM
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Monday, January 29, 2007

 

Har D'Har

Funny that Dinesh D’Souza is getting the pile-on today from the theatre-weenie sphere today for his book, The Enemy at Home. Must be something in the air.

D’Souza fails to mention in his sad self-defense that it isn’t only the James Woolcotts of the world that have taken him to public task. Many major players on the right have denounced him too, including Dean Barnett on townhall.com. I consider that site to be a bellwether of the Republican Party line. I also thought D’Souza was one of the poster children for the new generation of conservatives. So that chilly reception surprised me a bit. After all, what he was saying wasn’t so far from other memes floated by conservative thinkers. Why the betrayal?

Then I watched D’Souza’s interview on The Colbert Report. And I realized: This guy has no understanding of comedy.

If you haven’t seen this evisceration, it’s worth a peek. Colbert makes such Fluffernutter of D’Souza that he even breaks kayfabe at one point. If D’Souza had simply made one off-the-cuff joke, poked an atom of fun, he might have been okay. But he looked like an android at the premier of the latest work by Robert Wilson.

Excuse me, I just had to punch myself in the face for that last sentence.

It's odd to say about a guy who edited the Dartmouth Review. D’Souza hasn’t learned the lesson, best practiced by Ann Coulter, on how to use comedy to make the indefensible palatable. I think a few nods in that direction might have saved him the wrath of his colleagues. Humor is big cover to duck behind. Coulter knows that, and has been ducking for years.

Let’s take a look at how the master recently used homophobia to pitch the patently absurd (h/t GLAAD.org)

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about your private life. How do you know that Bill Clinton is gay?

COULTER: He may not be gay, but Al Gore, total fag. No, I`m just kidding. As someone ...

MATTHEWS: That's based on your private life?

COULTER: No, that's a joke.

MATTHEWS: Oh, OK.

COULTER: That's what we call in the writing business a joke. No, I mean, I state a manifestly obvious fact. Someone pointed it out on Free Republic, I think, a little disgruntled yesterday. Ann's amazing capacity is to state the obvious and make it news. I mean, everyone has always known wildly promiscuous heterosexual men have, as I say, a whiff of the bathhouse about them.

MATTHEWS: But you know, you were on — I was watching you on Deutsch last night. I watched it because it's all over the blog sites. You were immortal in that interview, by the way, and you said it because you were sort of pushed to say it. I just wonder if you believe it.

COULTER: This is standard ...

MATTHEWS: It's a joke. It's a joke. It's not a joke.

COULTER: It's not only not a joke, it's not even surprising. If feminists were not so in love with Bill Clinton — this is like standard — for any feminist with the benefit of something beyond a community college education, this is standard feminist doctrine that wild promiscuity shows a fear or hostility of women.

Yes, Coulter was just “stating the obvious”: that Al Gore is gay, but just kidding, Bill Clinton is, because he sleeps with lots of women, so he also sleeps with men, because promiscuous men are gay men who are gay because they hate women.

Did that sentence sprain your brain? Note how her understanding of comedy prevents you from spraining it on the first go round. If she had just contended her base thesis, “Gay men are gay because they hate women, Bill Clinton hates women, ergo Bill Clinton is gay,” dry and without any comedic frosting, the many layers of absurdity would be obvious and potentially radioactive to anyone who associated intellectually. But because Coulter pads it out in the dressing of Lenny Bruce-like stand-up, a like-minded thinker could say, “Coulter uses a lot of hyperbole, of course, but she does make good points…” Ultimately, she can’t prove any of her tacky bathhouse claims about Bill Clinton, and we know it; so her joke falls into the realm of Speculation on the Sex Lives of Public Figures, a hallowed comedic institution that effectively covers her ridiculous assumptions. I must ask the gay men I know to tell the story of when their seething spite for women drove them into the arms of another man. It should make for an entertaining few minutes.

I haven’t said that Coulter’s funny, by the way. She doesn’t have to be funny to be comedic. Being comedic is about understanding rhythms and poetic leaps of logic.

So, if D’Souza had found a way to couch his rhetoric in the comfy cushions of the comedic, I think he might have been better off. Here’s the thesis of the book that’s earning him the heat:

“I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.”

His later demand that conservatives join forces with fundamentalist Muslims against secular liberals and social moderates really sends him over the top. Too far, many of his fellow travellers said.

But suppose he’d opened with this gambit:

Death Squads have a bad rap. They’re kinda fun. Come on, look me in the eye and tell me that Howard Zinn dropping like a Djenga tower into a mass grave wouldn’t be worth at least a few minutes on YouTube. Especially if that sack-of-hams Michael Moore broke his fall.

But seriously, why are liberal academia and media begging for death from the Islamists?

I’m telling you, the reviews would have been:.

“Townhall.com says: “Death squads might be over the top, but D’Souza makes some excellent points…”

Mr. D’Souza, I’m available to do a pass on your next book.

Labels: news

posted by Dan 4:34 PM
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Wednesday, October 04, 2006

 

Family Watchdog Council

In repsonse to this piece of garbage left on the national doorstep, I have created the Family Watchdog Council, elected myself President, and issued a statement.

FWC Statement on Mark Foley

10/4/2006 11:15:00 AM

To: National Desk, Cabinet, and Ottoman

Contact: Dan Trujillo of Family Watchdog Council

BROOKLYN, Oct. 4 /U.S. Newswire/ -- In response to the events surrounding the resignation of Congressman Mark Foley (R- Fla.), Family Watchdog Council (FWC) President Dan Trujillo released the following statement:

"We are all shocked by this spectacle of aberrant sexual behavior, but we should be even less surprised at the aberrant sexual AND VIOLENT behavior of Charles Carl Roberts IV, the man that killed five Amish schoolgirls this past Monday, October 2nd. This is the end result of a society that rejects sexual restraints on straight men in the name of religious and cultural precepts. When little girls are not safe from a married father of three, we should question the moral direction of our nation. If our children aren't safe in a rural one-room schoolhouse, where are they safe? Maybe it's time to question: when is tolerance of straight men just an excuse for permissiveness?

"Both political parties need to be more serious about protecting children from fathers with guns. We need public policy in our country that protects those who avoid becoming married or breeders, respects Amish authority and aggressively polices boundaries around our children from armed heterosexual predators."

Am I angry? Just a smidge.

Labels: news

posted by Dan 11:32 AM
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Friday, September 29, 2006

 

After That Warm-Up

There are more serious things to discuss than CNN goofs. I make jokes to soothe my overwhelming anxiety: yesterday’s vote to suspend habeus corpus, grant the executive branch tyrannical powers of detention, push kittens into the sea etc. etc.

My thought is that, even though most polls show that a majority of Americans are at least theoretically against torture, a majority of that majority is not going to be too upset if torture happens anyway. This is speculation, but there seems to be an assumption among some people I’ve asked about this that the torture won’t fall on the doorsteps of good citizens, just terrorists and their abettors. As long as people can convince themselves of that, then they’re willing to look the other way. A reader at Andrew Sullivan sums up the position.

And please stop wasting your time on the 'torture' issue! It's not resonating at ALL among the people. They see what happens when an American soldier is caught by these animals, and are not impressed by people like you and McCain who want to Mirandize them and appoint them an ACLU lawyer.

The idea that the “torture issue” might fall on their own doorstep, and they might be in need of Miranda and the ACLU, doesn’t even blip on their radar. Does this have to get that bad before it gets better?

I hope that I’m wrong. I hope that I’m a paranoid moonbat lefty Williamsburg pinko. I hope that we can trust the government to show restraint. The derisive laugh that last sentence evoked in me makes me pessimistic.

But we must go on, we can’t go on, we go on.

Labels: news

posted by Dan 11:36 AM
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Breakfast For Your Head

Reading CNN, here was a headline:



But when CNN uses the word "thingy," we are so proud.

Labels: news

posted by Dan 10:16 AM
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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

 

They're On the Case

NYC considers banning trans fat from restaurants.

Dude, I was totally just thinking about that!

I was just thinking -- as I talked to my mom about my cousin’s tour in Iraq – that the single greatest problem facing the world today is the unregulated use of trans fat.

I was just thinking -- as I squeezed on to the increasingly overcrowded L train -- that the best use of our municipality’s time and tax dollars is the protection of people from accidentally putting trans fat in their mouths, especially when those curly fries looked so nourishing.

I was just thinking -- as I prepared my “go” kit in the event of a hurricane possibly brought to my doorstep through the miracle of global warming -- that I can’t possibly be expected to teach my daughter good eating habits, nor set an example by practicing them myself, because I am packing my “go” kit, and when you’re finished putting batteries in the portable radio you absolutely must unwind at the local fusion restaurant with an order of Crisco Pad Thai.

Dude, they are totally reading my mind.

Labels: news

posted by Dan 1:26 PM
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