Quotulatiousness

March 11, 2016

Trump and the stand-up comedians

Filed under: Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

Gavin McInness on the seemingly universal view of Donald Trump among stand-up comics:

… They don’t have any arguments because this isn’t about facts. It’s about feelings and they feel Trump is a serious threat to their very existence. That’s really what’s going on here: Trump represents the traditional family, and modern comics—especially the alternative ones—have built their careers mocking exactly that.

Sure, he’s had a bunch of divorces and yes, there are plenty of comedians who are happily married with kids, but we’re talking about the culture here and in America’s eyes, Trump represents a good dad with great kids who wants to get back to when America was great, and comedians represent a reboot of everything traditional and that’s the nuclear family. Comedians are deeply scarred human beings who shudder at the very idea of a family. They’re not pro–gay marriage because they give a shit about two random homos who want to fuck everything that moves while pretending they live for matrimony. They’re pro–gay marriage because they’re anti-marriage because they’re anti-family because their childhood sucked.

I enjoy watching stand-up, but sometimes I look at these poor bastards standing on a stage for $20 and I just think, “You poor bastard.” If they came from big, happy families, they’d be the funny guy at the dinner table making their cousin Donny laugh until milk came out his nose. They’d be content amusing their inner circle and not have to stand on a stage and plead for a roomful of strangers to clap for them.

It’s not remotely controversial to say comedians are insecure and almost unanimously depressed. I believe this comes from having parents who didn’t love them. Not only are they drawn to stand-up because it mimics validation, they are drawn to the career because it’s the perfect career for the unloved. A family man can’t disappear for months and months at a time touring the country in his Honda Civic and getting paid in beer to make 35 people giggle at Chuckles. The more we respect the family and the idea of procreation, the less we respect their profession. Louis C.K. divorced his wife not long after they made two kids. Trump’s Great Again America sees that as a failure. The totally hip alternative America sees it as awesome.

Donald Trump is a constant reminder that plenty of us had parents who loved us and made us feel good about ourselves. We have mimicked this success story and created families of our own. We’re happy and what’s worse, we’re content. For the most part, comics are miserable people who developed the ability to make light of a bad situation. We get laughs from them because we’re not in a bad situation so it’s like doing a shot after you won the lottery. To us, seeing a comedy show is like taking Prozac when you’re not depressed. It’s a bonus. To the comedians, it’s what they need to stave off suicide. The more America becomes great again, the less resonance the kvetchers have. And when your entire ethos is based on complaining, you don’t want prosperity. It bums you out.

March 10, 2016

The Trouble with Transporters

Filed under: Humour, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 7 Mar 2016

February 29, 2016

“Left-wing People Care More Than Other People”

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

From the “The Unofficial Ladybird Guide To Left-Wing People“:

In The Olden Days

Left-wing people used to like working-class people.

Lots of left-wing people used to be working class people. These people were known as socialists and joined trade unions.

Sometimes working-class people used to frighten left-wing people, but they pretended that they weren’t frightened and were nice to them. They gave them money, sat in rooms with them and wore badges to show that they cared more than right-wing people, who wore ties instead of badges and didn’t care.

Nowadays

Nowadays, working-class people are bored with socialism because it hasn’t made them rich and happy.

Nowadays left-wing people are middle-class people. Working class people are a big disappointment to left-wing people.

Left wing people now think that working class people are:
a) Simple and easily led
b) Un-enlightened and susceptible to short-term pleasures
c) Terribly sad and struggling, unable to cope on their own
d) All of the above

Education Is A Life-long Task

Left-wing people think that working-class people are unable to think for themselves and require life-long education to help them make informed decisions.

Left-wing people work tirelessly on education programmes to encourage working class people to buy expensive food and clothes and not cheap food and clothes. They are disappointed that working-class people are un-ethical.

Working-class people like to drink alcohol and have sex. They do not understand that these activities are dangerous and need continuous education from left-wing people.

Working-class people need to be protected from newspapers, even though they don’t read them anymore. They are easily influenced and their happy-go-lucky ways can be turned into bigoted nasty ways. Left-wing people are needed to help them use Facebook carefully and not make mistakes.

H/T to David Thompson for the link.

February 28, 2016

QotD: Editing is the best thing that ever happened to writing

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

This will be scant, because it’s a column night and I have a big piece due Friday. The situation: 3,000 word piece due. The problem: I wrote 5,000 words. This is actually easier than only writing 2,000, despite what some may say. “Oh, editing it down is harder.” Nonsense. Only if you treasure every word. I do not subscribe to the “Kill your darlings” idea, though; If I love a line, might it not be a sign that it’s a good one? “But your judgment is clouded.” By what? Decades of experience?

The essay is mostly humorous, at least by contemporary definitions. It will not be funny soon enough. Styles change, references get lost, talents sag. For some reason I was thinking about S. J. Perelman the other day. In college I thought he was the best humorous writer, period. Inventive command of the language, occasional surreal bits of wordplay, confident persona. I am afraid to reread him, and discover I don’t laugh at his work anymore.

Then I thought it might be a consolation to see what he was writing at my age, and decide whether he had lost it. There’s a writerly endeavor, isn’t it? Ah, idol of youth, how you phoned it in. But that seemed like the work of a cramped spirit with no sympathy and malice galore — in other words, like Perelman. Or so I thought after reading some biographical notes, all of which noted his prickly and severe personality, his indifference to his children. You get a sense of the man in this Paris Review interview, which is amusing as a piece of performance, but he wasn’t giving an exaggerated account of himself for the purposes of entertainment. He was just that much of a pill, as my mother used to say.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2015-01-15.

February 20, 2016

JOURNEYQUEST IS RENEWED!

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:46

Published on 19 Feb 2016

Thanks to over 5000 backers on Kickstarter, with mere hours to go, JourneyQuest has been renewed for a third season! Congratulations, thank you, and ONWAAAAAARD!

QotD: The “joys” of winter

Filed under: Environment, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

The cold has returned — cruel, aching, deep-space cold. Not as bad as last year’s 20 below / 37 below with wind chill, but after you’re below zero it’s just numbers. There’s the cold you shrug off, the cold you note with brief displeasure, and the cold that still chews your toes ten minutes after you’re inside the Target store. Scout the Dog came in from a session outside disinterring bones and put his nose in his pillow and rubbed it around to get it warm. The boiler in the basement labors like a steamship stoker. There are no birds. There is no sun. When you slam your car door you almost expect the vehicle to shatter.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2015-01-05.

February 17, 2016

“Weird” Al Yankovic – Amish Paradise

Filed under: Humour, Media, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Uploaded on 2 Oct 2009

Music video by “Weird” Al Yankovic performing Amish Paradise. YouTube view counts pre-VEVO: 14,859 (C) 1999 Volcano Entertainment lll, LLC

February 15, 2016

QotD: Staying in touch with the everyday

Filed under: Education, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Posted something at the work blog today about these apps that help you do things you previously did with low-tech means, like assembling grocery lists. One of the comments praised a grocery app that gave you turn-by-turn instructions in your store. I never, ever want to hear my phone say “You have arrived at frozen breaded chicken patties.” The idea of people walking through a store, pushing a cart, staring at the screen to see where the coffee is located — as opposed to looking up for the word COFFEE — is the sort of thing from a comedic dystopia. Then: story in the WSJ the other day about someone else starting a service that delivers groceries to your house. The predicate for the business: “no one likes to go grocery shopping.”

I love to go grocery shopping. I went grocery shopping tonight; hit four stores in 90 minutes. Explain to me how it is possible to have an understanding of modern American culture without going to the grocery store. Someone who grocery-shops weekly has a better grasp on our civilization than somoene who spends four years getting a doctorate in Marketing. If they offer such things. I suspect that anyone interested in marketing gets out there and markets as soon as possible, and a doctorate would be useful only for teaching other people about Marketing, which you’ve never done, but studied.

It’s like Journalism school. Saying you understand Journalism because you went to Journalism school is like saying you have a command of the basics of Dentistry because you used a pencil to black out the teeth in a picture of someone’s head.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2015-01-15.

February 13, 2016

QotD: Education

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

I put the donkey ears on “teaching” to this purpose. I do own a tweed jacket, though as a priestly colleague has pointed out, it lacks the regulation elbow patches. That is about the extent of my formal credentials as a pedagogue, yet by unlikely fate I have found myself “teaching” sometimes, at the “post-secondary” level, on a variety of topics — from development economics, to science and scientism in Hellenistic times, to the elements of typography, to the prehistory of modern journalism, to proper English Lit — and these days will do almost anything for money.

My father was also reduced to teaching, on several occasions — medicine, for instance — in addition to art, when it was discovered in a certain developing country that he actually knew some anatomy, and had access to a nursing textbook belonging to my mother.

From him, I learned to cite Hippocrates: “First do no harm.” The young, shall we call them, have almost invariably greater capacities for learning than will be revealed in modern schools. This is not only because their wee minds are therein seldom teased nor challenged. It is also because subjects are taught to them in a methodically lethal way, dispensed in cubes from the intellectual freezer, by teachers who, as a general rule, know nothing of the subjects themselves. (They have specialized degrees in “education.”)

I retain vivid memories of a Canadian high school where best efforts were made to kill my budding interests in poetry, theatre, music, art, biology, physics, math, &c.

There are, as George Bernard Shaw once counted, two basic methods of teaching. One is “education through art,” in which the student learns essentially through mimesis, by doing and making, gradually unfolding himself, as a flower to the sun in the moist air, feeding upon the nutrients beneath him — rich soils collecting through time. And the other is through torture. Each has its own standards. (I’m not against torture as a last resort.)

The expression “education through art” could easily mislead the literal-minded, who may not realize that science is an art. One acquires science by doing science, starting at the most rudimentary level, with small children, magically enthralled. Moreover, the various subjects are entwined. To master biology, for instance, one must learn to draw, in order to observe with precision. Physics, which naturally pairs with math, also pairs with music, which turns to pair with dance. The art of writing requires the art of reading, but vice versa equally so. And as throughout this world, while body and soul stay united, form has everything to do with content; meaning everything to do with style. Neither, and nothing, can be “prioritized”: until it comes time for the waterboarding.

“First do no harm.” God has set before every teacher this anciently humane instruction. Even if he should fail to do a student any good, at least do no evil. Do not repel him from the book forever; nor clutter his head with falsities. Even the torture should be carefully administered, leaving a prospect of some better way, and the happier alternative of following it.

David Warren, “Sigrid Undset”, DavidWarrenOnline.com, 2014-12-04.

February 9, 2016

QotD: Aristocrats

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“So Sybil’s ancestors used to come along and talk to the hermit whenever they were faced with a philosophical conundrum, yes?”

Willikins looked puzzled. “Good heavens, no, sir, I can’t imagine that any of them would ever dream of doing that. They never had any truck with philosophical conundra.* They were aristocrats, you see? Aristocrats don’t notice philosophical conundra. They just ignore them. Philosophy includes contemplating the possibility that you might be wrong, sir, and a real aristocrat knows that he is always right. It’s not vanity, you understand, it’s built-in absolute certainty. They may sometimes be as mad as a hatful of spoons, but they are always definitely and certainly mad.

Vimes stared at him in admiration. “How in the hell do you know all this, Willikins?”

“Watched them, sir. In the good old days when her ladyship’s granddad was alive he made certain that the whole staff of Scoone Avenue came down here with the family in the summer. As you know, I’m not much of a scholar and, truth to tell, neither are you, but when you grow up on the street you learn fast because if you don’t learn fast you’re dead!”

They were now walking across an ornamental bridge, over what was probably the trout stream and, Vimes assumed, a tributary of Old Treachery, a name whose origin he had yet to comprehend. Two men and one little boy, walking over a bridge that might be carrying crowds, and carts and horses. The world seemed unbalanced.

“You see, sir,” said Willikins, “being definite is what gave them all this money and land. Sometimes it lost it for them as well, of course. One of Lady Sybil’s great-uncles once lost a villa and two thousand acres of prime farmland by being definite in believing that a cloakroom ticket could beat three aces. He was killed in the duel that followed, but at least he was definitely dead.

* Later on Vimes pondered Willikins’ accurate grasp of the plural noun in the circumstances, but there you were; if someone hung around in houses with lots of books in them, some of it rubbed off just as, come to think of it, it had on Vimes.

Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam, 2013.

February 7, 2016

BAHFest Seattle 2015 – Matt Inman: Fixing Problems

Filed under: Humour, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 2 Feb 2016

Matt Inman keynotes the first ever BAHFest Seattle and he’s here to fix some problems.

BAHFest makes its Pacific Northwest debut at Town Hall Seattle, with the all new theme “Big Science.”

That awful moment when music passes you by

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Kathy Shaidle recounts the painful moment of transition:

And it was during the 1990s — that is, my 30s — when That Thing I’d heard tell of and had dreaded ever since finally happened to me:

Every new! hit!! song!!! sounded like it was being played at the wrong speed. By an all-chimpanzee band. From inside a padlocked storage container. Kids these days…

February 5, 2016

“I’m all for a Darwinian Search and Rescue Plan, if you follow me”

Filed under: Humour, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Duffelblog reports on the kind of boaters the US Coast Guard has to rescue:

Nearly 83 percent of mariner rescues since 1960 involved unrelentingly stupid behaviors and/or people, according to a recent study by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Though the service treats all search and rescue situations equally, most on-scene commanders will privately admit that a majority of the time “it was just some dumb bastard with no concern for personal safety,” according to the study’s authors.

“These statistics are unthinkable,” said Coast Guard spokesperson Lt. Carla Willmington. “Our service prides itself on response time, SAR organization, and comprehensive rescue pattern analysis. But it’s tough to stay on task when the bulk of these cases involve people paralyzed from the neck up. ”

The U. S. Coast Guard Office of Search and Rescue report examined nearly all cases handled on inland and offshore waters from 1960 through 2014. Following the Federal Boating Act of 1971, increases in cases by “fucking idiots” and “goddamn morons” have been staggering, and very challenging to the service as it struggles to operate under a minimal budget.

Between 2010 and 2014, the most recent years studied, incidents involving “total assholery” increased from 10,687 to 38,335.

January 22, 2016

Top 10 Onion parodies on higher education

Filed under: Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Yeah, I know it’s a bit late in the year to still be publishing lame “top ten” roundups, but these are pretty funny:

1. Sex partner must say ‘yes’ every 10 minutes or it’s rape, 10th graders taught in California
2. Princeton student say he’s victim of microaggression over way he says ‘Cool Whip’
3. Study urges people to accept those who ‘identify as real vampires’
4. Professor: Harry Potter Helped Obama Get Elected
5. All-You-Can-Eat Taco Bars Deemed Offensive, Face Campus Extinction
6. Harvard Students Celebrate ‘Incest-Fest’ (tied with: Harvard University workshop to teach students how to have anal sex
7. Professors: Motorists more likely to run over black people than white people
8. Professor’s Book Hails ‘Apostle Barack,’ Compares Him to Jesus
9. University axes homecoming ‘king’ and ‘queen,’ replaces it with gender-neutral ‘royals’
10. Sexuality courses: Black dildos are proof of racism against African Americans

Update: Oh, wait. Sorry. These aren’t actually headlines from the satirical website The Onion. They’re all real headlines. My mistake.

January 19, 2016

JourneyQuest Season 3 Kickstarter Begins

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 18 Jan 2016

JourneyQuest 3 is funding on Kickstarter now! Click here to renew the show for a third season: http://vid.io/xqEB
Now on Kickstarter! Renew JourneyQuest for an epic third season, featuring the ongoing adventures of Perf, a dyslexic wizard with a quest problem.

Watch the first two seasons here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

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