Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 12 April 2014Here it is! The Scottish Play. The bloodiest of the bloody. An epic tale of magic, madness and stabbing. It’s so gory, even Tarantino thinks it’s over the top.
Making it funny was pretty tough. 😀
Because male sexuality is all about the visuals, men’s magazines are filled with pictures of naked women with freakishly large breasts and women’s magazines are filled with pictures of beauty products and ass-cantilevering $2,000 stilettos. Men evolved to go for signs of reproductively hot prospects — an hourglass figure, youth, clear skin, symmetrical faces and bodies, and long shiny hair: all indicators that a woman is a healthy, fertile candidate to pass on a man’s genes.
Women co-evolved to try to make themselves look reproductively hot, though that’s not how we think of it. […] Because men are turned on by disembodied photos of boobs, butts, and coochies, they’re quick to pull down their pants, click their cameraphone, and text some woman they just met a close-up of their zipperwurst. Really bad idea.
Men who’ve done this should pick up a Harlequin romance, which is basically porn for women (from the ravishing by some hot gazillionaire to the final commitment-gasm).
See any photo spreads of male crotch shots tucked in there anywhere, boys?
This is not an error of omission. Women aren’t fantasizing about seeing your willy; they’re fantasizing that somebody in the royal family will pluck them out of suburbia and marry them in Westminster Abbey.
Amy Alkon, Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck, 2014.
The National Football League has certain rules and requirements of the head coaches of all the teams, including a certain amount of mandatory contact with … ugh! … the media. Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer follows these rules — probably unwillingly, and certainly without much enjoyment or enthusiasm — but generally guards his tongue very carefully, not giving out any more information than he absolutely has to and couching that information in ways that are obscure and often inscrutable to the uninitiated media schlub or everyday fan. Fortunately, the Daily Norseman has on their staff Ted Glover, the world’s leading Zimmerologist, who can unwrap the verbal enigmas and decrypt the encoded truth and share with true Vikings fans:
Zim Tzu, image by Eric Thompson, Daily Norseman.
The Vikings warrior poet coach dispenses his words of wisdom
ED NOTE: This has bad words. None of the other things we write on here do, but this one does. It seems to be a popular bit, so until the law catches up with me, I’m going to keep doing it. Thanks for understanding, and thanks for not reading and not letting your kids read it if bad language isn’t your thing. Hope you enjoy the rest of our articles—Ted
Warrior poets don’t have time for deep, philosophical conversations once they’re in the maelstrom of conflict. You need accurate information, the lay of the land, and then you must make a decision. Good or bad, decisions must be made, because indecision is certain death. Good decisions could still end up with a bad result, for a number of reasons. Poor execution, faulty equipment, any number of things. But at least you give yourself the best chance of success.
And bad decisions? Bad decisions are more than likely going to result in your demise, but fuck it, at least go out with your boots on. And sometimes, even a bad decision can turn out okay with a stroke of luck, or poor execution of your adversary. And when that happens you feel invincible. Glory or death, bay.
Glory or death. Pain is temporary, chicks dig scars, but glory is forever. Unless you really fuck things up and lose, then you’re just a loser looking for answers, and you vow to not fuck things up like that again.
Because you are Zim Tzu, Scalper of the Capital, True King Of The Jungle, Potentate Of Those Who Eat Feces, The Biggest Apple, Commodore Of Outlaw Sailors, Master Falconer, The Once And Future King In The North, High Septon Of Eagan, Lord Commander Of The Iron Range And Twin Cities, Master Of Fortress TCO, Honorary Elder Of Mankato and Protector Of The Realm.
And when you need to explain setbacks, you’ll need help discussing things, because the proletariat has no concept of the shit you’ve gone through, man. None. So you need someone* to take your words and turn them into language that folks understand.**
You’re welcome.***
*Look, you don’t need anyone to help you figure this out. You’re a Vikings fan. Just shut up, drink, and bury those goddamn feelings.
**This whole post is incomprehensible bullshit. All the answers are made up, by me, because I need an outlet to vent and meth, apparently, is frowned upon in my house.
***Seriously, enjoy. Glad you guys like these remarkably bad interpretations of Zimmer’s press conferences.
[…]
OK, the most consistent mistake … not mistake, but inefficiency of business writing — and it was very consistent — is the absolute refusal on the part of the writer to tell you right away what message he or she is trying to deliver. I used to say to them, “The most important thing you have to say should be in the first sentence.” And “Oh, no, you can’t. I’m an engineer. We did a 10-year study, this is way too complicated.”
And inevitably, they were wrong. Inevitably, if they really thought about it, they were able to, in one sentence, summarize why it was really important. But they refused to do that because the way they found out was by spending 10 years of study and all this data and everything, and that’s the way they wanted everyone to look at what they did. They wanted their supervisors to go plowing through all they had done to come to this brilliant conclusion that they had come to.
COWEN: Through their history, through their thought patterns.
Drag everybody through it. And it was the one thing the newspaper people were taught to do that made more sense. You don’t have your reader’s attention very long, so get to the point. I found it was very difficult to get even really smart businesspeople to get to the point. Sometimes it was because they really couldn’t tell you what the point was.
What I wanted to say, but rarely felt comfortable saying, was, “If you don’t know what the point is, then you can’t really write this report.” But it was always too complicated for a layperson like me to understand. That was the way they did it. I was being hired by their bosses to tell them, “No, we want you to write clearly, and we want you to get to the point.”
COWEN: And why were they, at this meta level, resistant to your message?
Because nobody else was doing it. When I would start the class, I’d have 32 people in the class typically, and when they would turn in all their samples of writing, every one of them wrote the same way. They all wrote business-ese writing. This is my parody of it, but it was, “Enclosed please find the enclosed enclosure.” That kind of formal, nonsensical, meaningless flow of words. Somewhere in there would be something important, something significant, or maybe not.
Dave Barry, interviewed by Tyler Cowan in “Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man”, Medium, 2017-08-16.
James Lileks, Star Tribune, 2004-11-01.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 1 Dec 2013Here we go again! It’s only taken me several months…
Sarcastified Shakespeare returns, this time with a look at that historical tragedy we all love to write essays about, Julius Caesar!
I think the real main character here was Brutus’s crippling self-esteem issues…
Some people’s innate hatred of jazz is simply the result of an unfortunate experience, but then anyone who’s witnessed Art Blakey performing a three-and-a-half hour drum solo is entitled to feel a little peeved (and I speak as someone who has seen one at close quarters). On top of this, some people just don’t get it. Like the later work of James Joyce, the films of Tarkovsky and “tax harmonisation”, the fact that some things will always lie just beyond the common understanding is something jazz enthusiasts must learn to live with.
Also, jazz has often been victim to the vagaries of fashion, destined to be revived at the most inappropriate moments. The last time jazz was really in the limelight was back in the mid-Eighties, when it became the soundtrack du jour in thousands of matt-black bachelor flats all over designer Britain and when every style magazine and beer ad seemed to look like a Blue Note album cover. Jazz went from being a visceral, corporeal music to a lifestyle soundtrack. This was the age of Style Council, of Absolute Beginners … of Sting. Buying into jazz was meant to lend your life a patina of exotic sophistication and was used to sell everything from Filofaxes and coffee machines to designer jeans and sports cars.
Dylan Jones, “The 100 best jazz albums you need in your collection”, GQ, 2019-08-25.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 25 Oct 2019It’s Rome! It’s Greece! It’s… The Byzantine Empire! Check out how late Imperial Rome transformed in the centuries from Constantine to Justinian, as it evolved into a new and unique iteration of Roman civilization. Watch as Byzantine craftsmen revolutionize artwork by throwing a megaton of gold onto every last mosaic in the Mediterranean, and radically reimagine architecture by asking “But what if *dome*?”
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This time, it’s Tom Slater looking at the parliamentary situation well into the future:
The year is 2051. An 87-year-old Boris Johnson is still prime minister, commanding a majority of minus 200 in the House of Commons.
The taxidermied remains of Jeremy Corbyn looks lairily at him each day from across the chamber.
The Liberal Independent Group for Anti-Democratic Change, formed by breakaway elements of the other parties in the great merger of 2020, is by far the largest bloc.
For some reason it has never found the “right time” to assert control of the Commons. But by some convoluted means it has successfully delayed some 187 attempts to hold a General Election.
The UK is still a member of the European Union. But no one else is. Long since collapsed, it is now just a portacabin outside the Mini-Europe miniature park in Brussels.
It employs one man, whose job it is to sweep up, sort the post, and respond to the United Kingdom’s periodic requests for an extension to Article 50.
Somehow, his expenses are exorbitant.
They say making predictions these days is a mug’s game. But I’m pretty sure that’s where we’re headed. Or rather, given the Kafkaesque turn British politics has taken, nothing could surprise me now.
PM Boris Johnson has offered the opposition the election they claim to have been craving, again, and they appear set to reject it, again.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has indicated he will back a General Election once the European Union grants an extension to Article 50. But the EU is holding off on making that decision until MPs vote on the election.
You can see the problem here. But at least it will keep half of Corbyn’s parliamentary party happy, who are apparently dead-set against an election and would rather we go for a second Brexit referendum first.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 13 April 2013Well, this one is longer than the last one, but in fairness it’s 2000% shorter than the actual movie.
Continuing the trend, this video summarizes THE TRAGEDIE OF HAMLET PRINCE OF DENMARK, commonly known as Hamlet.
Goodness, he really is a whiner, isn’t he? And he’s supposed to be the sympathetic character!
Note: This is the second version of Hamlet Summarized, because I made the mistake of using a copyrighted song in the last one. Oops.
It’s reviewed along with another book on Waugh by Henry Hitchings in the Times Literary Supplement:
“Looking back over my career to date, and at all the people I have insulted, I am mildly surprised that I am still allowed to exist”, wrote Auberon Waugh in 1980. For the remaining twenty-one years of his life he took pleasure in adding to his list of victims. Feminism and AIDS were bracketed together as “plagues”, ramblers were “semi-uniformed thugs”, the “lower classes” appeared “ugly, boring, humourless and desperately conceited”, and the female delegates at a Labour Party conference struck him as “either hunch-backed or hairy-legged or obviously lesbian”. It’s natural to associate such views with an age now pretty remote. But Waugh was born in the same year as John Cleese and Margaret Drabble; he was younger than Jilly Cooper and Vanessa Redgrave, John Prescott and David Dimbleby. Were he still alive, he would not yet be eighty.
[…]
A lot has changed since the period that Waugh on Wine covers. The British mass market is no longer in the grip of a “depraved” taste for semi-sweet wine. The drinkers he has in mind when he refers solecistically to “the hoi polloi” do not exhibit a “passion for filth” by favouring cheap Teutonic gut-rot. Pink champagne is easy to find, and Chianti is no longer the preserve of nurses hosting dinners in fifth-floor flatshares in Fulham. A large proportion of the most sought-after French wines now end up in Chinese cellars. The globalization of demand has stretched prices. When Waugh complains about the cost of 1982’s most rarefied clarets, he proposes as an alternative Château Léoville-Las Cases at £9 a bottle; anyone thinking of laying down its 2018 counterpart will have to find around twenty-five times that amount.
The durability of a few of Waugh’s claims is hard to assess. For instance, do the “semi-professional poules de luxe on the fringes of café society” continue to disappoint their admirers by failing to serve good vintage port? Yet much remains as it was. Dry white Bordeaux still doesn’t have a great following in Britain. Neither, more regrettably, do the best German wines. It is true that in America “only obvious alcoholics drink anything like as much as the ordinary English professional”. The British still go on holiday to France and return full of hyperbolic enthusiasm for some local plonk that they have been inspired to import in large quantities – only to find, once it arrives in Blighty, that it is no more potable than the contents of a fish tank. There is a certain prescience, too, in Waugh’s remark that the best wines are, increasingly, beyond English pockets “shrunk by the growing indolence, incompetence and indiscipline of our island race”.
Waugh writes entertainingly about the social life of the drinker: “A tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering goes on under the name of Liebfraumilch“. An enterprising young wine merchant is portrayed as someone who “in earlier times, might have spread terror among the fat galleons of the Spanish main”. He shies away from no quarrel: with greedy producers, covetous investors “who treat fine wine like rare postage stamps”, and wine merchants who spew out empurpled hype. Oddly, though, he clings to the belief that people choose wine in order to impress their friends, not to gratify their own palates, and he likes to pretend that perplexity exists where in fact there is none – “Aperitifs are not to be confused with aperients, which are laxatives designed to open the bowels”.
[…] Reflecting later on the effects of his “camped up” approach to writing about wine, he provided what could be taken as an epitaph for an entire stratum of maverick journalism: “I am not sure that it helps much, but it is more amusing to read”.
H/T again to Colby Cosh for the link.
ReasonTV
Published 17 Oct 2019Remy returns to the news desk to bring you what passes for journalism these days.
Written and Performed by Remy.
Music tracks mastered by Ben Karlstrom.
Produced and Edited by Austin Bragg.LYRICS:
Trudeau denies the report. Ed?
A rough week for Canada’s first black prime minister. Thanks, Tim.A problem long posed, now finally an answer
A cure has been found to a rare form of cancer.
We’ll tell you who found it, what he thinks this means,
And dig up some tweets from his early teens.Plus the Good Samaritan, whose quickness and breadth
Saved a family of four from a fiery death.
We’ll ask how he did it, how he made it in time,
And why he tweeted this back in 2009.Uh, Ed? Yes, Tim. Forgive the defiance
But I think we should focus on the news part, the science
And not what they tweeted back when they were 10
The science, hmm. I’ll try it again.Archaeologists have unearthed a series of tweets
Made by this local hero when he was 13.
Will this middle-school tweet soon mean his demise?
Our report might just win the Pulitzer Prize.Pulitzer Prize? In what? Scrolling down?
We found immature things immature people wrote down.
Our country’s at war and that’s the story we sought?
War coverage, yes—I’ll give it a shot.This Navy SEAL unit is now under fire
For a series of tweets, we’ll take our magnifier
And pay no attention to how their recent life’s been
And tell you what you should think that says about them.Says about them? What’s it say about us?
That the first thing we do after someone’s discussed
Is comb through their childhood looking for dirt.
OK, I can do this, I assure you I’m cured.Well she’s the first woman to serve on the board
Of our town’s city council—and she just signed an accord.
We’ll comb through the details of what she did write
And through years of her tweets in hopes of wrecking her life.OK, see, I hate this, this is just what we do
Make things controversial for clicks and for views.
When we’re covering news, should our first thought each time
Be “Let’s find what they tweeted back when they were nine”?Finally, millions can now walk thanks to his prosthesis
But a hateful hand signal when he was a fetus
Leads many to now question what he promotes.
We’ll toss him in a well and see if he floats.
It was 1968. On the night before the last day of camp, a counselor named Charlie Brown interrupted our sunset meeting by the shores of White Bear Lake to tell us the news: Russia had launched their missiles and they would destroy America before the night was out. It was time to get right with God.
Silence; crickets; small sobs. I’m sure no one thought much about Jesus right then. We thought about Mom and Dad and Spot and our room, where we really, really wanted to be right now, with the familiar smell of the goldfish bowl, and —
Charlie Brown guided us through some prayers. We all said Amen, and I’m sure for some it was the least heartfelt Amen we’d ever said. Then Charlie Brown said he had made up the story. Russia hadn’t launched the missiles. But what if they had? Were we right with Jesus?
Back at the barracks we were quiet and unnerved. No one wanted to go to sleep. No one wanted to talk, either. Finally John Larson, the bunkhouse bully, broke the silence. He was the mean kid. He was the one who tormented me at home, and had bothered me at camp. Nelson Muntz without the charm. John Larson expressed his simple wish to stab Charlie Brown in the stomach.
A dozen little Lutheran campers nodded in the dark: ya sure, you betcha.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2003-09-11.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 11 Oct 2019Go to http://www.audible.com/overlysarcastic or text
overlysarcasticto 500500 to get a free audiobook, 2 free Audible Originals, and 30-day free trial.In the first of what is sure to be a multi-part series, let’s take a look at the history of Ancient India, from the earliest civilization through the development of Sanskrit literature and all the way to the great Maurya Empire!
FURTHER READING: The Discovery of India, by Jawaharlal Nehru (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_India)
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Andrew Heaton, in his latest newsletter, explains why he’s finally come down on the side of impeaching President Trump:
Okay, here’s the main thing I wanted to talk to you about: America is about to slap a TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT tariff on scotch. The underlying story involves the WTO and Airbus, but I think I can save everybody a lot of time by pointing out that our president is a mouthbreathing protectionist who’s too lazy to read Adam Smith’s wikipedia page.
Here are a few things to consider:
- Tariffs are just taxes, designed to punish you for having the gall to buy something from a foreigner.
- This will hurt Scottish distillers, and potentially price out distillers with low profit margins.
- I might have to switch to wine on dates.
- We have now spent more money needlessly bailing out farmers from a trade war with China than we did bailing out banks under Bush.
- We’ve known about the idiocy of tariffs since The Wealth of Nations came out in 1776.
- Trump, a man lacking an ideological core, for reasons which boggle the mind, seems to genuinely believe tariffs and protectionism are good things, as he has maintained since the 80s.
Chances are if you subscribe to this newsletter you’re not a teetotaler, but on the off chance you are, allow me to make a case against whisky taxes even if you are not personally apoplectic about a tax hike on Laphroaig. (A concoction personally invented by Almighty God. It’s like you’re drinking a campfire. Try it.)
There’s an old saying: when goods don’t cross borders, armies do. I concur with this. In fact my largest contribution to the field of economics (Nobel Prize forthcoming) is Heaton’s Peace Through International Mistresses Theory.My groundbreaking idea is that we want to have an interconnected, global economy with lots of transnational trade, because businessmen will be less supportive of bombing cities their mistresses live in. When trade wars happen, international trade collapses, and suddenly businessmen are flying to Berlin and Paris a lot less. Pretty soon we’re firebombing Tokyo.
It would probably be more appropriate of me to dedicate my political analysis to the forthcoming Ukraine/Trump/Biden/Impeachment circus which will dominate our lives for the next few months. However in my case I don’t need to. The president has messed with my scotch. Now it’s personal. I’m all in.
Impeach the guy.
#FreeTrade
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