ReasonTV
Published on 9 Nov 2018Remy updates the iconic Randy Newman anthem for 2018.
Parody written and performed by Remy
Camera and editing by Austin Bragg
Music tracks, background vocals, and mastering by Ben KarlstromReason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
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LYRICSNice fall day
In L.A. County
Sitting watching all the leaves change
Temperature dipping into the low 70’s
I dress accordinglyRoll down the window
Put down the top
You know what
Maybe roll it up on second thought
That guy was higher
Than the pension of a state employeeCan’t use straws here
No fois gras here
You can’t park here
Lots of laws hereEvery toilet
Barely flushing
But the sun is shining all the time
Looks like another bill to payI love L.A.
We Love it“Definitely recommend this crystal here.
Oh and this one is our number one seller.”
“What’s that for? Anxiety?”
“No. Typhus.”
“Ah”Public school graduates
Can barely read
And when they try to park
Well this is what they seeSweet regulations
Ain’t nothing like em nowhereBeachside
We love itMountainside
We love itRiverside
We…eh….Fixed streets
We love em
We love L.A.“Unfortunately I’ll have to fail your restaurant.
I found a rat in the kitchen.”
“That wasn’t a rat that was my, uh,
emotional support rodent.”
“Well why didn’t you say so!”“And this right here is a great hemorrhoidal crystal.
Uranus is in retrograde.”I love L.A.
We love it
November 10, 2018
Remy: I Love L.A. (Parody)
November 3, 2018
QotD: “Do you want to be married, or do you want to be right?”
Shortly before I got married, I received a piece of sterling advice that I have been mulling a lot over the last year: “You have a big decision to make: Do you want to be married, or do you want to be right?”
Even a good marriage offers a lot of opportunities for grievance. Suddenly, you cannot make any major decision without consulting this other person — who will, inconveniently, often have very different ideas from yours about where to live, what to spend the money on, how to raise the children, and whether to turn the basement into a home theater space or a library. (The correct answer, for those who are wondering, is “library.”)
The more determined you are to win every battle, the more likely you are to lose what’s important: the person you love so much that you have chosen to spend the rest of your life with them. And so every time you have a real disagreement — the kind that cannot be finessed by agreeing that tonight you’ll order Indian, and next time you’ll get Chinese — you have to think carefully before you decide to have that fight. Is this really the hill that you’re willing to let your marriage die on? Because if not, now’s a good time to shrug your shoulders and let them paint the ceiling teal. How often do you really look up there, anyway?
You have to decide this even when the grievances are more important than paint colors: Your partner snaps at you when they’ve had a bad day, leaves their junk lying around for you to pick up, spends too much money on things you don’t need, or vanishes whenever your family comes over. Some hills are worth dying on. But a lot of them are of no strategic value in gaining your ultimate objective: a long and happy partnership.
If you spend your marriage trying to ensure that everything is always rigorously fair and just, and grabbing the flaming sword of righteousness every time some minor wrong is done to you, you may soon find that you spend more time fighting than you would have picking up their towels or going into the other room to watch a movie because your spouse is in a bad mood. Or you may find that you have a peaceful, clean house that’s exactly as you want it — because you’re living there alone.
Megan McArdle, “Can This Political Union Be Saved?”, Bloomberg View, 2016-12-30.
November 1, 2018
QotD: Game theory
“Guys,” he writes. “It’s time for some game theory.” Game theory, for the uninitiated, is a branch of mathematics that uses computational models to predict the behavior of human beings in potentially conflictual situations. It’s complex, involves a lot of formal logic and algebra, and is mostly useless. Game theory models human actions on the presumption that everyone is constantly trying to maximize their potential gain against everyone around them; this is why its most famous example concerns prisoners — isolated people, cut off from all the noncompetitive ties that constitute society. One of its most important theoreticians, John Nash, was also a paranoid schizophrenic, who believed himself to be the target of a vast Russian conspiracy.
Sam Kriss, “The Rise of the Alt-Center: Why did establishment liberals fall in love with a deranged Twitter thread? It’s time for some game theory”, Slate, 2016-12-16.
October 31, 2018
QotD: Pumpkins
If it wasn’t for Halloween, this grotesque and useless gourd would be extinct. And good riddance.
Let’s. Review.
Somewhere dotted about the fruited plains of America something like lebenty-leben gazillion acres of pumpkins are planted every damn year. Then care and water and chemicals are slathered on these fibrous tumors causing them to grow big. Some very big. Some so big that they can be hoisted into the air, dropped onto a car and obliterate said automobile.
Many are midget pumpkins. This year I’m seeing teeny-weeny baby pumpkins ripe for pumpkin abuse. But most are middle to large hunks o’ pumpkin by the time they are “ready for the harvest.”
Sounds so pastoral, doesn’t it? “Ready for the harvest.” Except that when you actually “harvest” a plant the assumption is that, somewhere, somehow, some people are actually going to eat the thing.
This is the fate of only a smidgen of the pumpkins harvested. And even among those that actually eat of the pumpkin almost all are lying through their seeds when they say they like it. Pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, even (shudder) roast pumpkin — all foul concoctions fit only for the martyr mothers among us.
I know that many will claim to adore pumpkin pie, but that too is mindless. Give me any thick paste and let me pour tons of cream, evaporated milk, pounds of sugar, scoops of cinnamon and nutmeg into a butter-laced and crisp pie crust and you’ll love it even if the base plant was black mold from the basement.
No, the pumpkin is not an acceptable food. But do we plow it under and eradicate it from our list of things we use farmland for? No. Because anything worth doing in America is worth overdoing, we expand the acres devoted to this parasite.
Gerard Vanderleun, “The Big Pumpkin (Dump)”, American Digest, 2018-09-22.
October 26, 2018
An old-fashioned Fisking
The always-entertaining David Thompson harks back to the early days of blogging by indulging in what used to be called “a Fisking“:
In the pages of the New York Times, a philosophy professor named George Yancy is gushing his little heart out:
It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist.
Upon which revelation, I suppose we could all just stop and go home. But no, let’s press on.
More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the loss of my own entitlement as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.
The word toxic, by the way, is deployed no fewer than nine times, excluding various synonyms, as if it were an incantation. Now brace yourselves for some full-on testosterone-jacked beastliness.
For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name… While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence.
To reiterate. Asking a fiancée if she’ll change her surname upon marriage, as is still the custom, perhaps to avoid confusing people as to whether you’re actually married or not, and possibly to avoid imposing on any children lengthy hyphenated surnames… this is not sexual assault. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.
[…]
Or, as our educator puts it, tearfully, his face reddened with shame,
When I was about 15 years old, I said to a friend of mine, “Why must you always look at a girl’s butt?” He promptly responded: “Are you gay or something? What else should I look at, a guy’s butt?” He was already wearing the mask. He had already learned the lessons of patriarchal masculinity.
Yes, adolescent butt-watching. Oh calamitous woe. And which, apparently, girls never indulge in. Presumably, we should only be sexually attracted to personalities, and never the fleshy packaging.
There was no wiggle room for me to be both antisexist and antimisogynistic and yet a heterosexual young boy. You see, other males had rewarded his gaze by joining in the objectifying practice: “Look at that butt!” It was a collective act of devaluation.
Or possibly the reverse.
The acts of soul murder had already begun.
I’ll just leave that one there, I think.
QotD: Mis-using statistics
You’re like that crazy hobo on the subway demanding everyone justify the moon ferrets. But moon ferrets aren’t real, so why waste a bunch of time explaining that to a stinky hobo. But I’ll try, because I’m a retired accountant, and when people like you try to use stats it is like watching a monkey humping a football. So amusing, but kind of sad.
Larry Correia, “Run Forrest Run!”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2014-11-05.
October 25, 2018
Every publication in Canada must have had lots of volunteers for this story
In the National Post, Marie-Danielle Smith gets high for science!
I just remembered I am supposed to be writing.
I am stoned on legal weed, which finally came into my hands this morning after six days of waiting. Thank you, government!
It is a different thing to get high alone — to get high alone for work reasons, right after question period. I’m sitting at my dining room table, drifting off every now and then to examine the patterns on my stuccoed walls or to focus, intensely, on the album I am listening to, the one that Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett collaborated on. It would be a different thing to get high with the two of them.
The first thing you notice, after opening the cardboard box, which is just a little too large for your knapsack (backpack? knapsack? backpack?) … uh, you notice how much packaging there is. Tape. Crumpled-up papers. A box with government warnings and the logo of the licensed weed producer. A plastic bottle inside with a child lock cap that reminds you of Advil.
“She’s so easy,” sing Courtney and Kurt, repeatedly. Such a good album. This song has been on forever. Time stretches out. I’ve smoked a sativa-heavy hybrid strain called “Super Sonic,” which is supposed to make you feel creative rather than sleepy. On the Ontario Cannabis Store website, it’s described as having “a strong, earthy, sweet aroma, reminiscent of Quantum Kush.” I don’t know what Quantum Kush is but maybe our prime minister can explain it? (Remember that time? Anyway.)
Of course, not everyone is impressed:
I’m thinking of trying to write one sober, see how that goes https://t.co/woerC0verT
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) October 24, 2018
October 24, 2018
How long can you go without sleep? | James May’s Q&A (Ep 14) | Head Squeeze
BBC Earth Lab
Published on 5 Apr 2013James May talks us through how long you can go for without any sleep.
October 20, 2018
Don’t waste your time coming up with something original … use this map for your next RPG campaign
The Only Fantasy World Map You’ll Ever Need
by EotBeholder
Thrown together on a whim, yet meeting the needs of busy (or lazy) Dungeon Masters to this day, EotBeholder’s epic “Only Fantasy World Map” has all your role-playing game geography requirements covered.
Here’s something I threw together for the game I’m running with some coworkers. I plotted out where everything was going to go on a world map then decided, yknowwhat, let’s just keep the serial numbers filed off, so now it’s a map good for every RPG setting ever. Starting in the Tiny Bickering Fiefdoms is traditional but anywhere works. (My players are mostly from Tortuga.)
EDIT: Wow, almost four years later and this thing just exploded. The internet is a thing of mysteries. Thank you all! A lot (well, a number) of people have requested a blank version so they can add their own names… yeah, sure thing. To anyone asking for permission to use this for their own campaigns… I mean it hardly qualifies as “original”, so as long as you’re comfortable stealing from someone who steals from the people who only steal from the best, knock yourselves out 🙂
If I could make some additions (which I suppose I could, but, nah) I’d call out the Boring/Doomed Pastoral Village somewhere in the Tiny Bickering Fiefdoms or the Land of Poncy Knights, and also add a Giant Wall to Keep the Monsters Out. Giant walls are so hot right now.
H/T to Rob Beschizza for the link.
October 18, 2018
QotD: Relationships with much younger partners
A contemporary of mine, after a number of marriages, found a girlfriend less than half his age of a transcendent pneumatic beauty who hung on his every word — and dumped her after a couple of months. Why, I asked — she was perfect! “Too many things we didn’t have in common,” he said sadly. Like what? “Well, the Eighties.”
Which brings us to sex. Nicola has just exclaimed with unusual force that she has never slept with a 60-year-old and she’s not planning on starting now. Nobody wants to think about 60-year-olds doing it, least of all 60-year-olds. Another contemporary pointed out that it wasn’t finding the first grey pubic hair on yourself that was the doom-laden shock, it was finding it on the person you were sleeping with.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
October 17, 2018
QotD: “60 is the new 40”
… over the years I’ve watched people my age go from rarely mentioned as sportsmen and pop stars to more commonly as leading actors and television presenters and now ubiquitously I find myself in the thick of captains of industry, ennobled politicians, retired sportsmen and character actors. You only notice the accumulating years in relation to other people.
Last week an editor breezily mentioned that as I was coming up to a milestone decade would I perhaps like to write something about it? You know, is 60 the new 40? Why do you make those little noises when you get out of a chair? Am I considering getting a shed, or a cruise, or Velcro? And what about sex?
The only people who ask about significant birthdays are younger than you. No 70-year-olds are inquiring about my insights on being 60. Age is the great terra incognita. But then, all the people who tell me to do anything are younger than me now.
And please, can we stop this “60 is the new 40” thing? No one is saying 20 is the new 10. And who wants to be 40 anyway? An insipid, insecure age.
My generation, the postwar baby-boomers, are over the meridian of our vital parabolas. We’ve done our best and our worst, overachieved and underperformed, are either preparing to bask on the sun loungers of our success or suck our bruised fingers in the waiting rooms of failure. So 60 is both a personal summit from which to look back, breathing heavily, hands on my knees, and a generational one.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
October 15, 2018
QotD: Bureaucracies
… bureaucracies have lives and characters of their own, irrespective of the sort of men they employ. The public schools are made up mostly of good people, but they don’t work very well. One imagines that most IRS agents are scrupulous and dedicated. (The DMV people just hate us.)
Kevin D. Williamson, “Agents and Agencies: Donald Trump should push for intelligence reform”, National Review, 2017-01-06.
October 14, 2018
NPCs belong in video games or Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, not in the real world
Brandon Morse on a term that’s migrated out of its original gaming context and being used as a label for social justice warriors:
If you’ve ever picked up a video game that features other characters that are controlled by the computer, then you’ve run into non-player characters or NPC’s.
NPC’s serve a host of different functions depending on what the program you’re playing with needs them for. They’re the villagers in Skyrim, Toad from Super Mario Brothers, and the ghosts in Pac-Man. NPC’s may have dialogue, patterns, and personality, but at the end of the day, they’re just a program with pre-set behavioral patterns decided for them by a developer.Now let’s pretend we’re taking this article from the top…
If you’ve ever stepped onto a college campus or a protest demonstration that features people with neon colored hair screaming at the top of their lungs about identity politics or a social concern then you’ve run into a social justice warrior or SJW.
SJWs serve a host of different functions depending on what activists, politicians and the media need them for. They’re the crazed people trying to beat down the Supreme Court door, the Antifa members threatening motorists, or the male-feminist roundhousing a woman for expressing pro-life views. SJW’s may have dialogue, patterns, and personality, but at the end of the day, they’re just a program with pre-set behavioral patterns decided for them by professors, activist groups, or the media.
The comparison between NPC’s and SJW’s is pretty striking and simultaneously hilarious.
H/T to David Thompson for the link.
October 13, 2018
QotD: Evolution
Look… Just because H. habilis was several branches back on the family bush doesn’t mean we’re supposed to stop being handy.
I get not carrying a pistol. It’s not for everybody and, if done with any level of seriousness, demands certain commitments and obligations that not everyone wants to undertake, and that’s cool. It’s still (mostly) a free country.
But how do you go through life without a flashlight and some kind of knife? Our most primitive ancestors carried sharp rocks around with them. Hell, carrying a sharpened rock around in case of future need is basically how we tell where the apes stop and the people start in our fossil family album. If they could have carried a light around without it burning their fingers or going out all the time, you bet they would have.
They make flashlights and knives small enough to accommodate any code, dress or legal, up with which you have to put.
Tamara Keel, “Look…”, View from the Porch, 2016-05-26.
October 11, 2018
The wisdom of Zim Tzu, post-Eagles edition
After every Vikings game, win or lose, NFL rules require the head coach to meet with local (and sometimes national) media to discuss the most recent game and any other issues the team may be facing. It’s well known among the cognoscenti that Minnesota’s head coach Mike Zimmer considers this somewhere between distasteful and actual torture, but he forces himself to meet the ravening horde of unwashed media types … because he doesn’t want to get fined.
As a result, although Zimmer is known to be a straight-talker, what he says in these gatherings might not be exactly what he really means. Fortunately for those of us in the Vikings fanbase, the Daily Norseman employs the world’s leading Zimmerologist, the only man who can reliably listen to the words spoken to the masses and successfully decode the real meanings. Let’s hear it for Herr Doktor Professor Theodore “Ted” Glover:
