Wall Street Douchebags are ready to tear up Main Street

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 has really led to an explosion in chain e-mails, one that might suggest the wise investor buy stocks in a company like Cisco whose products are part of the infrastructure of the Internet that keeps our inboxes stuffed with gems about 'Obama is a Secret Muslim, the Angel Of Death Is Nigh', or 'Obamacare mandates taking over kids' summer camps to turn them into death camps for Grandmas', or 'ACORN is going to take your gun and give it to a Mexican with syphilis'.

In this tradition, we have the hate mail (this article refers to it as an 'Angry Class-Warfare Email') from an anonymous trader who is NOT going to be made a scapegoat for the economic meltdown.

Some excerpts:

'Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.'

This is pretty funny, because around the time of the election, these Libertarian triumph-of-the-will masters of the Universe were threatening to 'go Galt', and withhold their God-given talents from an ungrateful society. Anybody who actually heard this bullshit or bothered to pay attention to it laughed with scorn and derision. 'Oh dear! Who will package toxic loans into opaque instruments to sell to suckers? Whatever will those of us without the Right Stuff for Wall Street do?'

Having been deservedly ignored, now the traders threaten to take our jobs and get up at 5am and work until 10pm or later when most of the people who currently hold these positions can take care of business in 40 hour/week time frames. Of course, management will notice the ex-traders' amazing powers of bladder control when he is able to stay in tedious meetings about new HR policies for hours without demanding a bio break, and he'll end up on top and dominate THE FUCK out of the office supply business in the tri-state area!

Having shorter work hours might mean the trader will have more time to spend with his family, assuming he has one. I am sure he will then parent the shit out of his kids and take the rest of us parents to school. Parenting is, of course, an easy job for women and Nancy-boys, he will tell us.

Which segues nicely into...

'For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America.'

Don't kid yourself, sir. Even assuming you are ALLOWED anywhere near a classroom, once you pull one of your macho-man stunts like pissing at the urinal from across the bathroom or wrestling a biology teacher to the ground to establish dominance, you'll be lucky if all that happens is you get fired. More likely you'll have to lawyer up, and then we'll see who eats whose lunch.

This kind of overpowering and dripping disdain for the teaching profession will probably be detectable from miles away even if you don't provide that helpful extra step of putting it in writing, like you have here.

Oh, and by the way, a lot of teachers ARE losing jobs due to budget cuts, in part due to all of you and your dick-swinging boys' club shenanigans.

I'm sure writing this stuff was cathartic for the guy, but a better forum may have been a personal journal. To be fair, writing this post was fun, too. It's possible the letter is even a hoax, but it touches a nerve because there are most definitely people with attitudes like this out there. I sometimes have to talk to and pretend to not be disgusted by some of them. I've seen them in the wild.

For now, I can say with complete confidence that on my things to worry about list, Joe Douchebag here doesn't even rate an honorable mention. Try harder, Joe. Looks like you're going to have to get up earlier than 5am and work later than 10pm at scaring me.

Also:

A fun smackdown at Wonkette

At Salon: Wall Street Rage

At the Daily Bail: a response to the email, perhaps, in cardboard sign form

Creation Science and Robotics: A match made in heaven, BY GOD!

I have been wondering recently whether there is a lot of robotics research happening in the world of Creation Science. It seems like a really good fit. If there are answers in Genesis, surely one of them is the answer to the question: how do you make an autonomous entity that will do your dirty work for you (naming all the animals, that sort of thing)? Surely Creation Scientists are not, as their critics claim, merely working backwards from what they've already decided is the truth and trying to arrange cherry-picked scraps of evidence to fit it.

Also, I think we've all seen the list of 500 people who have taken science classes who subscribe to creation science. Robotics is very high on the list of cool and fun science, so surely at LEAST one or two of these people have devoted their lives to emulating God by doing some of their own creating.

Unfortunately, after I downloaded the list from the Dissent From Darwin site, a search for 'robot' or even 'robo' came up with nothing.

Google was kind of my friend in this search. I found a reference to an Ian Juby, the owner of Canada's first Creation Museum (oh, Canada...). Ian is 'a robotics engineer by trade'.

Unfortunately, the trail ran cold on further digging. I was curious to see where Juby had studied, what papers he'd published, or even just messages he'd posted to robotics forums to help enthusiastic newbies out. All I could find was this one. It sounds pretty robotic-y, but you'd think he'd have been a little more active there, or, really anywhere.

Degreewise, I found that 'Ian received a college Diploma in Robotics Engineering from Canadore College, North Bay, Ontario, Canada, in 1989.'

Essentially, all I could find about Ian's career was this quote, from his own site:

The robot itself (remember, I'm a robotics engineer by trade; I know how much intelligence is involved in designing even a simple robot!) requires incredible and precise engineering, design, and intelligence.

Pretty much true, although my daughter and I have done OK with our Lego NXT kit (speaking of which, a kid at Falwell's Liberty University wrote a book about the NXT that's pretty good. Maybe one day he will be the big star of Creation Robotics).

I did considerable digging, and I couldn't really find anything to rank him higher in the robotics community than the cool guy who builds robots at hackerspace and in his basement. That guy will tell you that he is a pharmacist by trade, and it's true, but as a roboticist he is no slouch, not at all.

I may ping Ian and see if he can refer me to some info about his work in the field. Maybe he can do an interview with the people with the people at the Robots Podcast. I really don't want to give up on the idea of a rich and thriving robotics sub-branch of Creation Science, not yet anyway.

And Ian, if you're reading this, I just want to tell you it's OK if you're not a roboticist even though you studied it in school. I was a mathematician back in my school days. I loved math and really immersed myself in it, but today I'm the mathematical version of the guy who was a high school football star 20 years ago, but now gets winded going to the fridge to get a beer. I suppose I could call myself a mathematician, but I'd be lying to myself, and the world. I'd set myself up for all manner of ridicule and pity. Life took a different turn, and that's fine.

More About The Wit of the Staircase

It turns out the French phrase for thinking of something clever too late to use it is 'L’esprit de l’escalier or esprit d'escalier (staircase wit)'.

A classic example of this in popular culture is the Seinfeld episode where George wracks his brains thinking up a riposte to a co-worker's 'the ocean called, they're running out of shrimp', and all he can come up with is 'oh yeah? Well the jerk store called, and they're running out of YOU'.

If the French sounds too pompous for you, or, as in my case, you're not sure how to pronounce it, Wikipedia provides German and Yiddish options:

The German word Treppenwitz and the Yiddish word trepverter are used to express the same idea.

If You Have a Racist Friend...

Back when I was cycling through all the music subcultures of the past 50 years and I was on the ska chapter (2-Tone ska, not the Don Drummond/Skatalites 60s ska - yet), I of course loved The Specials. I still like The Specials a lot, they're just not in the kind of heavy rotation they were 20 years ago.

They had this song called 'Racist Friend':

If you have a racist friend
Now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end

Be it your sister
Be it your brother
Be it your cousin or your, uncle or your lover

This was a tall order. I had a racist mentor (about whom more later), and at least a couple racist relatives. I also had friends and acquaintances and classmates and room-mates that were decidedly racist. I felt like the song was giving me a hard time for not having the balls to give every last one of these people the heave-ho.

It really got under my skin because it called my attention to a weakness I sometimes have when it comes to people saying or doing hateful shit. At some point you have to say shut the fuck up, or at least I have no interest in your theories about how Mexicans are destroying the country, and if that doesn't work, not doing business with the person anymore is probably the best course of action.

Easier said than done.

(yes, embedding disabled by request. just click thru, don't be lazy)

The Internet: How do I work this?

"Bragging that you're not a blogger is like bragging that you're slow and stupid and probably don't know how to use the Internet that well."

-Jake Dobkin of Gothamist.com

This was something I heard on a not so recent episode of WFMU's Too Much Information, the DEAD MEDIA episode. I'm kind of slow (ouch) in mentioning it, but I agree with the sentiment.

On the other side of the news (although it's not really an opposition viewpoint, more a complementary one), we have this celebration of the joy of reading text on paper : You Can't Wrap A Fish In an iPad

..but you can tune a piano. I got nothin'. Carry on with your day now.

1st Quarter Report: 2010

Previously, I wrote about things I hope to do in 2010.

Now that Q1 of 2010 is over, let's see how I'm doing.

1) Get out of the I.T. ghetto

Pretty much no motion at all on this one. My job continues to be a pointless exercise in futility at a joyless hole (new nickname for my workplace, but if you own a bar in a shitty part of town feel free to use that name), but at least on the 'abandoning your hopes and dreams' scale, it's a couple steps less bad than being a crack addict with hepatitis C.

As far as this goes, my prediction is eventually I'll just get fired and then pursue a much more fulfilling second career. See? I'm an optimist! Stay tuned for updates.

2) Write more

This one started out well, but I fell back into my old not writing ways quickly. I did spend an amazingly long time writing and rehearsing what ended up being a 5-minute presentation for Ignite Bloomington 2 (on the Arduino), and that was really a great exercise in cutting out bullshit and general minimalism (although watch me now, all kinds of superfluous verbiage in this entry). Now that that's over perhaps I can channel the creative energy into less concise writing.

3) Find someplace other than Soma to hang out

Big success here. I was lured into Scholar's Inn Bakehouse on the square by their Twitter account ('free Euros with any purchase!'), and was reminded that in contrast to Soma's basement atmosphere, there's a lot of light and some nice outdoor tables at the Bakehouse, which makes it an ideal springtime hangout. There are comfortable chairs in the back, but they're almost always occupied. The coffee is good, and of course there are the baked goods, too. So I will at the very least add this place to the hang out circuit.

4) Go to Disney World

Done! We went the week of St. Patrick's Day for 3 exhausting days. I got up before 6 every day, which is unheard of for me except for race days. It was actually a lot of fun, and my daughter loved it, so again, big success on this one.

5) Learn More about Electronics

I have been going to the hackerspace meetings and doing more reading, particularly 'Practical Arduino' recently. I need to talk to the super-experienced electronics master there more, though. He was talking about he was going to teach us all about OpAmps but it hasn't happened yet.

6) Call in to the Best Show on WFMU

This one hasn't happened. I have a bad case of 'the wit of the staircase' (le wit l'escalier, I think) w/ the Best Show. I will listen, and then afterwards think 'oh! I should have called in with this story'. Maybe I'll pull it together on this one.

7) Learn to 'hover' on the unicycle

No progress here, although until a couple weeks ago, conditions for unicycling were hardly ideal.

Yours in the pursuit of better living,

SDC

And Jobs came down from the mountain: some analysts hype the iPad

Lest anyone think age and recent health struggles have in any way attenuated Steve Jobs' famous reality distortion field, check out this quote from this article over on ReadWriteWeb:

Mike Abramsky, RBC Capital Markets:

"With iPad, Apple creates a revolutionary e-reading, browsing, media, gaming experience. Newspapers, Web pages, books 'come alive' with video, animation, color and fullscreen touch." And as for the mixed reaction in the tech community? "Not everyone initially liked the Ten Commandments either -- but they endured." (Source: AppleInsider)

The 10 commandments? Really? Personally I would buy Woz as a Moses figure before I'd buy Jobs in that role. Although on the other hand, it's easy to see Jobs raining down plagues of locusts and turning the water to blood and all of that.

And what's not to like about the 10 Commandments? It's the other laws that make you give up pork and shellfish and not wear cotton/polyester blends that are kind of a drag. If I remember the Bible correctly, mainly it was wandering around in the desert for 40 years that really pissed people off, not the 10 Commandments.

Finally, the 10 Commandments took up 2 tablets. The iPad is only one, although with the touch interface paging through the 10 commandments will be a breeze. The iPad will make the 10 Commandments 'come alive' like Peter Frampton.

Thank you, Moses, I mean Steve Jobs, I mean all the engineers at Apple that worked themselves to death actually designing and creating this.

The Freshner!

I have gone on sometimes about the tedium and monotony of my life and job here. That's because this is a blog. Also, under all the griping and kvetching there was hope and optimism, mainly hope and optimism that I wouldn't spend the rest of my life answering calls and emails from mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging idiots incapable of figuring out the simplest things on their own.

I did finally get my wish, and already my life is nothing like it was a year ago. Not only that, I didn't make some lame-ass incremental move, like from a guy who fields moronic questions about databases to a guy who fields soul-crushingly stupid questions about websites. It was something completely unexpected, which was wonderful in a way.

It started one morning when I grabbed my coat and gym bag from the laundry room in the usual daily struggle to get out of the house on time. I didn't really notice it until I got in the car, but there was an overpowering smell, like a very strong chemical banana smell. I had no idea what was going on, but I think one of those plug-in air-fresheners had accidentally exploded all over my coat. It made me woozy and I rolled down the car windows in the sub-zero temperatures.

That didn't really help, and the fumes killed a lot of my brain cells, zapping away a lot of the higher functions that had been lying dormant for years anyway. It was kind of like a Terry Schiavo moment for my intellect. I am sort of sorry not to be able to think about the kind of complex things I never really got to think about at my former job anymore, but now I have a higher purpose.

I had several lost weeks, wandering on the streets in a semi-conscious air-freshening state. I really made the crackhouse I hung out in at my lowest point a lot more livable. Kids on the street started calling me 'The Freshner'. 'He's so Fresh, He's the Freshner, Fresher than the man Hans Messner'. I think they were making fun of me, but they gave up and left me alone because there aren't really any good rhymes for 'Freshner'.

I moved on from the crack house, because my work there was done. I taught the residents a valuable lesson about taking pride in your dwelling space, so that the freshness would live on long after the crack they were smoking there neutralized the effects of my fumes.

My next home was the public library. An elderly librarian noticed my talents and took me under his wing. He told me I had a gift, and I had a responsibility to use this gift to benefit humanity and fight evil, or at least musty dank or generally unpleasant smells. He would also touch me a lot more than I was really comfortable with.

Around this time I was tracked down by my former employer. They called me and laid the sob story on me. They were too cheap to pay anybody anything near the market rate to do my old job. They begged me to come back, ignoring my inability to construct full and grammatically correct sentences and my tendency to space out for a minute or two at random times in the conversation. They were so desperate that I felt sorry for them and agreed to a meeting.

This was a really stupid move, but as I said before, the same chemicals which gave me my new found freshening powers also really fucked up my brain.

Sometimes when a person comes home from a long vacation, they notice the smell of their house, which they are unaware of while living there day after day. This can be disturbing when a strange smell makes itself known. This is exactly what happened when I walked into my old place of employment after being away for so long. When I met with my old colleagues the odor was even more pronounced, and I recognized it as the funk of desperation and failure. I knew what I had to do: I would hide under the conference room table while they conducted interviews. This damning smell would be masked, and candidates would not be scared away. I was NOT going to come back to work for them, though. Not even part time. I'd seen people do that and get suckered into going back to full time gradually.

This plan was successful, and after a handful of interviews a replacement had been found. I had saved the day. Of course, he would pretty much figure out on his own what a horrible mistake he had made in time, but as John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run we're all dead, so cut me a break. As I walked out, never to return, people who had paid me no notice for years asked each other 'who was that man who smells like one of those Renuzit things?' 'Let's call him 'The Freshner!' 'That's a good name for him!'

I am sure there's a question in everyone's mind right now: how am I making any money doing all this? Well, as with social media experts and Internet gurus, I don't actually make any money doing this, I make all my money as a motivational speaker. The freshening activities are brand-building efforts. In these days having your own personal micro-brand is very important.

Next time: The Freshner! negotiates an end to years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and solves NBC's even more intractable 'Leno problem'.

Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby, is no longer with us

As a kid, my entry point into the Gumby world was via Eddie Murphy's portrayal of Gumby as an aging, bitter show business hack. I was too young to catch the original Gumby show on TV as a kid. Later I rented some videos of the best of Gumby, and I very much enjoyed the claymation and rich imagination of Art Clokey, Gumby's creator. The real Gumby was nothing like the bitter jerk on Saturday Night Live. He was a cute and curious character, loyal to his pony pal Pokey.

Since then I have been a big fan of animation in general, including claymation. While I do love Pixar movies that are made by teams of hundreds using the latest technology, I have a soft spot for animation that seems to be the product of one or perhaps a few imaginative minds, like Gumby or Wallace and Gromit. The relative simplicity and the more down to earth nature of these cartoons has a special charm not found in bigger productions.

Just 2 days ago I was reading an interview with Clokey in a compilation of the writing and comics in WFMU's 'LCD'. Although Clokey was involved with the preachy and much lampooned (see 'Moral Orel') Christian cartoon Davy and Goliath, the man was in fact very open minded:

LCD: We talked a little bit before about if you used psychadelic drugs.

AC: From 1955 through 1966-67, I didn't touch the stuff. Then I got caught up with the Flower Children in San Francisco. I met Alan Watts - we smoked hash together in Japan!

LCD: Did you think that the drug experience would open up your creative powers in some way?

AC: I think it probably loosened up and broadened my imaginative inclinations. Actually, it made me more interested in how Gumby acted, how he acted toward other people.

Gumby also inspired the collective PaperRad, who have done their own Gumby cartoons, and no doubt many of the creators of claymation and animation in general of the last 40 years were inspired in some way by Clokey.

The day after reading the interview with Clokey, I read a post in the Cartoon Brew blog informing readers that Clokey had passed away at 89. While he led about as long a life as any of us can hope for, and was recognized for his talents and skills, as we all hope we will be, I'm still sad to hear about his passing. RIP, Mr. Clokey, and thanks.

I broke the joke, baybee!

I haven't mentioned it explicitly, but I'm sure some readers have detected the influence of Bob Zany in my posts. You can find his website, a clever parody of late 90s web design, here. Bob is something of a trailblazer, with his 'fix the joke, baybee' being a good example of pre-Twitter and social media crowdsourcing.

This inspired today's feature, 'I broke the joke, baybee!' You readers at home can play along after these examples to get you inspired.

Q: Which way to Carnegie Hall?
A: Practice

My wife, for example...please.

A guy asked me if I wanted a frozen banana. I said sure, but I'm not going to eat it until it thaws out.

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender asks: 'why so glum, chum?'

I would not belong to a club that didn't have me as a member.

Get the idea? Post your broken jokes in the comments!

Free and Worth Every Penny: 'What Matters Now' by Seth Godin

People need help. I know I often do. Lots of us are stuck in schlubby jobs, wage slaves to the man. While we can find some consolation in knowing we are not alone (a report from the Conference Board research group tells us only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their work, and only 51% find their jobs interesting), or can lose ourselves in youTube/Facebook/Twitter reveries of low-to-no productivity, we can also strive and aspire to something greater.

Online personalities like Gary 'Cash in on your Passion' Vaynerchuck and Guy 'I worked on the Mac team in the 80s' Kawasaki, blessed with some sort of genetic high-energy levels and delusional unchecked optimism are out there inspiring us, and thanks to the Internet access most of us have at our shitty jobs, it is easier for these guys to get their messages out than ever.

Seth Godin, motivational speaker, internet personality, and writer of lots of books, recently released the book 'What Matters Now', and it's free! I downloaded it myself, because I am always keen to find free stuff to put on my Kindle.

The book consists of 200-word essays about 'big ideas', so we're already in oxymoron territory right out of the gate. I don't care how your Twitter-Fu is, really great ideas can not be crammed into 200 words. Sometimes a 200 word bite will pique your interest and inspire you to dig further, but most of the essays are about single words (Enough. Productivity. Focus.) It is unlikely somebody is going to get on Amazon and start shopping for 'Focus' books.

There are many hotshots and celebrities of the inspirational/self-help/internet world within: both Vaynerchuck (THNX) and Kawasaki (Evangelism), and even good ole Tom 'In Search of Excellence' Peters (his essay is on Excellence, and every third character is an exclamation point! It's annoying! I get it! You! sound! like! a! fucking! Henry! Rollins! SONG!!!! AAUUUUGGGHHHHHHHH!), and many more. I was somewhat surprised that there's no essay from Oprah, but she is mentioned twice.

Ultimately the book comes off like a lot of feel-good 'Chicken Soup For The Short-Attention Spanned Soul' empty calorie bullshit. I felt like Seth was sharing something personal with me, specifically, he was showing me his high school yearbook and pointing out all the cool and popular people who signed it and wrote cool things in it.

I suppose I shouldn't be so negative and am only hurting myself with my curmudgeonly ways. Actually and sincerely I'm happy all these people have been successful and gotten rich and made it happen for themselves. But as surely as they didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks, most of them got rich by working, not by writing empty fake bullshit, and probably not by reading really vapid value-free garbage, either.

As far as free books go, I like the book of Elric stories Amazon was giving away a few weeks ago a lot better. Believe it or not, when Elric says 'Arioch! My Lord! I give you blood and souls!' it is somehow less corny than every single essay in 'What Matters Now'.

Things I need to do in 2010

Here's the beginning of the year post most of you have probably not even started to read, being as you are a bit burned out by 'end of year' and 'end of decade' retrospectives. If you missed those, the consensus seems to be that the 00's really sucked, although I completely disagree as my daughter was born in the last decade, and this was a decidedly good thing.

New Year's resolutions are somewhat trite and often fail, but there's nothing wrong with the idea of assessing oneself and trying to better yourself in general, so here goes...

1) Get out of the I.T. ghetto

This one is my 'get in shape', the resolution I've made pretty much every year since 1999. Usually all I accomplish is pissing off people in IT who actually enjoy devoting their lives to installing and then upgrading software written by other people, people who may or may not have had serious substance abuse and personality problems when they wrote said software. There is no shortage of really interesting things in the world, and eventually most people get shoved out of IT as they age whether they want that or not, so I'm as hopeful as ever that this will be my year as far as this resolution goes.

2) Write more

I don't think writing is my ticket out of the IT ghetto. It is something I do genuinely enjoy doing when I can motivate myself to do it, so I believe this would be a worthy goal. There's also that whole thing that even if 95% of everything is crap, 5% of 200 posts is twice as much non-crap as 5% of 100 posts. I found this post from 'The Last Psychiatrist' (one of the better blogs I've discovered in the past year) particularly inspiring.

3) Find someplace other than Soma to hang out

I did manage to get a lot of the writing I actually did in 2009 there, and I witnessed or overheard things said by hipsters and/or douchebags that made for some nice tweets there. A couple of days ago I had a really great cappuccino there in a huge bowl of a coffee cup that made me regret and feel embarrassed that I'd ever had a cappuccino in a cardboard cup with a plastic lid on it. I have nothing against the place, it's just that I need to shake up the routine a bit and see if there are other spaces in town which are not geared toward getting some money out of me and then shoving me out the door so more people can come in and spend money.

4) Go to Disney World

I am not a 'Cats in The Cradle' dad. I spend a lot of time with my daughter and enjoy it and appreciate that such time is finite, but on that note, she's not going to be a little kid forever and is probably at prime Disney World age this year.

5) Learn more about electronics

I've had a lot of fun playing with my Arduino last year, but while my programming knowledge is reasonably good, I'm not so strong on the hardware and electronics side.

6) Call in to The Best Show on WFMU.

I need to face my fear of the heave-ho. Also I think Tom is looking for some new blood, so it's a prime time to be a new caller.

7) learn to 'hover' on the unicycle.

I think that's what it calls when you stay in one place. I'm good if I keep moving, but as with the other items, here's another plateau I need to get over.

Reasons, Lame and Otherwise, for My Recent Silence

In November, inspired by Nanowrimo, the event where instead of writing a novel nobody will read over the course of many years, participants write one in a month, I decided to blog every day that month. I didn't, but November featured more entries than any month up until then. They were not all good entries, but as with Nanowrimo, that wasn't the point.

I fell back into my old infrequent writing ways when December rolled around. I really wish I could say I developed and overcame a crippling meth addiction, or have been working on a grand new idea that will make me millions and make all of you love me for my gift to humankind, but I can't. Here are the actual things I've been doing instead:

Listening to The Best Show on WFMU - this 3-hour call-in radio show featuring Tom Scharpling and sometimes his comedy partner Jon Wurster has a very loyal following, including myself. It requires a bit of warming up to, as it's not boom-boom-boom punchline-a-minute comedy, actually some of the funniest bits have set-ups that are several minutes long. A recent classic moment had Tom and comedian Paul F Tompkins dissecting an infomercial for the 10th Annual Gathering of The Juggalos.

Listening to Comedy Death Ray - There is a bit of a theme here. I don't really listen to the radio at all anymore (except for WFMU online), it's all podcasts now. This one features comedians as guests, but it has a lot of comic characters doing bits - Nick Kroll's 'Bobby Bottleservice' character, Paul F Tompkins as Ice-T presenting his latest boneheaded side business, and Brett Gelman as Billy Crystal doing a one-man show of impressions including a very profane Miles Davis.

Looking for a Job - I'm lucky to have my current job and all that. But I'm kind of an ADHD dude, and am bored out of my fucking mind by the current dayjob. Hence the recent descent into comedy addiction. If nothing else, I've found other distractions, which is good. People, I am finding, are not keen on hiring somebody to do something they haven't been doing for the last 15 years. I don't suppose I blame them.

Spending time with the kid and family - Turns out that, contrary to our experience watching people drop out of the Bush Administration, you don't have to quit or lose your job in order to 'spend more time with the family'. You just have to cut down on some of the stupid time-wasting shit you do, like:

Goofing on Twitter - I am @SoundSystemSDC there. I have nearly 600 followers, some of whom may actually be people and not just programs. I've especially loved playing what I'll call hashtag-games for lack of a better term. People will start a hashtag game and then everybody piles on with their version of the joke. Today's is #domesticatedrockstars, which has featured comedy gold like those listed below.

• Minivan Halen (@SoundSystemSDC)
  
• Cleanin' Jay Hawkins (@SoundSystemSDC)
  
• Massengill Scott-Heron (@sexbiscuit)
  
• U2 Knock It Off Already--Can't You See That Daddy Is Trying To Watch the Game? (@JoeBerkowitx)
• Better Homes and Soundgardens (@klyph)

Hey, having done that, can I have a book deal? Nick Douglas put that book out: 'Twitter Wit', but there's no reason I can't cash in too by cutting and pasting other people's creative blurbs into print form. If I'm gone for another month or so, you'll know that's what I'm up to.

Lots of decidedly implied violence: 'The Impossibly' by Laird Hunt

A wise man once said 'we are all of us unreliable narrators'. Actually I thought I was that man, but it looks like a guy named Frank Wu, who has more Google juice than I do, has also said this. People (myself included) are always deceiving themselves as to their own flaws and shortcomings, or re-shaping the narrative of their lives, perhaps to improve employment or sex partner prospects. This can even be found in a perverse negative way amongst people at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings trying to out do each others' stories of hitting bottom, or among Born-Again Christians trying to convince people they were the worst sort of scum of the earth before they saw the light, perhaps to make the change in their life seem more dramatic, or to convince 'bad' people that they are inferior to the convert in terms of their capacity for badness.

Given this fact we can forgive the narrator of The Impossibly for at times contradicting himself, even sometimes admitting a retelling of a particular story is more what he wants to believe happened than necessarily what actually happened. It's also important to take into consideration that as a freelancer working for some shady international crime syndicate, years of training have made him very reluctant to provide details about some of the ugly violence he's been involved in. The book is full of violence, but there is none of the gleeful graphic goriness found in, for example, a Tarantino film. Consider this retelling of a dinner with his colleague and perhaps friend, John:

We do not, sir, have turkey, nor do I have for you an explanation.
And all I am asking for is an explanation.
Please leave.
Etc.
We did, finally, and following something a little like the interaction I have just described, get our turkey - they had some, by chance it seemed, in the freezer. Neither of us at the end of eating it entirely believed it had been turkey, but it had been called turkey with maximum enthusiasm by the man whose head John had placed in the sink, and it had been appropriately garnished, so we didn't complain.

Our narrator's life, as it turns out, is not particularly glamorous. He spends a lot of time lying on the floor listening to the river, and attends to mundane tasks like finding the paperwork required in order to get his washing machine serviced.

He meets a woman who has trouble coming up with the word 'stapler' (perhaps English is her second language - it's not clear), and they fall in love for a while, which it becomes clear is a high point in an otherwise entirely unsatisfying life. Together with his new love, his friend John, and her friend, Deau (yes, 'John Doe' - and these two people are the only people with names in the entire book) - he takes a trip to a town in the country, which everybody very much enjoys, and a good time is had by all. Unfortunately prior to the trip he's given an assignment, which he at first accepts, but later backs out of. He also manages to put the wrong address on a package before sending it, another screwup that pisses off his boss.

He is then 'disaffirmed', a punishment involving humiliation and considerable violence. Again, nothing is spelled out, but it seems he was burned repeatedly, and ultimately stapled (with the aforementioned stapler) to the table.

He and the woman separate, he takes a job in a bakery and gets very fat, sings opera, wears shorts, and, as is always the case in these kinds of stories, gets drawn back into the organization. He seems to meet the woman again and re-connect with her, but it's unclear. Identities become more fluid and uncertain. Hats and sunglasses feature prominently. This part of the book culminates in his participation in a particularly horrifying event involving a feather duster, red duct tape, a 'miniature computer' (this was written in 2002 - it'd probably be a smart phone now), and following orders delivered by intercom in a pitch black room filled with people 'none of whom knew who had been chosen or who was coming or what beyond unpleasantness would occur'.

By this point both narrator and reader are quite disoriented and it becomes increasingly difficult to piece together what exactly is going on or what happened. Not that this difficulty is a bad thing necessarily - sometimes for example upping the difficulty level on a videogame makes it more rewarding, and humorless unimaginative types who demand linear stories devoid of ambiguity will have given up before page 10.

Our hero, such as he is, is sent to live in retirement - a perk described in brochures for the organization, as he recalls. His basic needs (food and shelter) are provided for by mostly unseen people, but he still hasn't left the violence behind -

It was into something like this last that I went late one evening to witness, and in a small way to participate in, an event. It was not a nice event - there was a lot of white rock and then the white rock became splashed with red - but it was diverting. At one point, after I had, more or less symbolically, taken a turn with the mallet, I remarked to another individual that what they event lacked in subtlety it made up for in vigor. Yes, it's colorful, the individual said. I feel like I've gotten some exercise. Yes, definitely, I think the upper portion of my forehead is damp. Yes, mine too. I won't dream at all tonight. Or if you do it will be pleasant. Why is that? No one knows.

Our narrator goes on to conduct an investigation to determine the identity of his assassin. As the book draws to a close, much is revealed, and there is a shock at the end - the magnitude of the shock will depend on how well the reader has been keeping up, and, indeed, on how the reader has chosen to make sense of the events.

I've read the book twice - something I rarely do - partially because I was fascinated with Laird Hunt's style and enjoyed the absurd sense of humor our hapless narrator possesses, and partially, I admit, to take another stab at making sense of the thing. Having done that, there is now a storyline I confidently believe is the 'true story', but that's not really the point. It's possible another person could read the book and have a different version of the story which they firmly believe is what happened, and that's perfectly OK with me. The book is like life that way - a series of almost random events described by unreliable sources, and our minds, desperate to see patterns, create patterns where there may be none.

30 years Later, I'm vindicated by the Cake Boss

Many people enjoy complaining about reality shows, because, like griping about there being no good Chinese food in town, it can really help you feel superior to those around you. Personally, I finished High School, and I love some reality shows, so the complaining-about-reality-shows magic doesn't work on me.

A recent favorite is the show Cake Boss, which is about a guy in Hoboken named Buddy Valastro, who has the classic New Jersey accent (which most people from New Jersey claim does not exist). He and his employees at Carlo's City Hall Bake Shop make the most incredibly inventive and artistic cakes imaginable, which are then eaten. This makes them like Tibetan Sand Paintings, only delicious.

In one episode there is a meeting of two highly creative cultures where Buddy and his crew make a robot cake for a hackerspace party. It's not some lame sheet cake with a computer generated robot decal on top, nor a flat cake cut in the shape of a robot. It was a 3-D motorized robot, driven by Buddy using remote control.

Another episode reminded me of my own brief experience with creative cake design. It was 1977 and I was in the Cub Scouts, which is pretty much the extent of my military experience. Anyhow, our pack was going to auction off some cakes to make some money, and there would be prizes for the best cakes.

I was very interested in airplanes, particularly airplanes from World War I, so I decided to make a Red Baron plane as a cake. This presented a couple of challenges. One was that mixing red food coloring in with vanilla icing resulted in pink icing, no matter how much food coloring I used. Another was the whole business of how to hold up the top wing of a biplane. I had already given up the idea of making the Fokker Dr. I triplane that people associate with the Red Baron, which was fine really, because earlier in his career he flew the Albatross DIII, a biplane. There were some monoplanes used in WWI, the Fokker EIII being a good example, but biplanes are just cooler.

I did not know what great building materials rice crispy treats and fondant, (used extensively by Buddy's team) are. I didn't even know what fondant was. My Dad and I did come up with the idea of using cardboard 'struts' to hold up the upper wing, and that worked quite well.

Needless to say, the biplane stood out among the cakes in the shape of race cars, and the cakes in the shape of cakes, but with a picture of a race car on top. I ended up winning 1st prize, but as is always the case, haters gotta hate, and when they found out there was cardboard in the cake it caused a minor controversy and some comments about 'oh no what if I accidentally eat the cardboard?'. I ended up getting my picture in the paper, but in the caption they described it as a 'pink airplane', which pissed me off, because as mentioned earlier I was not exactly thrilled that the red hadn't worked out.

30 years later I'm watching Cake Boss, and Buddy gets a job designing a cake for an Air Force event. Of course there has to be a an airplane as part of the tableau, and guess what, Buddy uses a wood scaffolding and builds the plane around it using rice crispy treats and fondant. Next to that airplane, my airplane looked like the Wright Brothers plane, or even that plane with a hundred wings that folds up like a lawn chair in that funny clip. Still, I was glad to see that using cardboard was perfectly fine, as even a cake genius like Buddy needed to use something non-edible but sufficiently rigid to hold the airplane up. The Air Force airmen didn't whine about 'oh noes, there is wood in there!' They loved the cake, and as always the episode ended with everybody happy and agreeing that life is wonderful, especially when you're doing something you love.

The Happiness Hat Will Solve all of Your Problems

This was in Gizmodo weeks ago, so this isn't exactly a scoop, but it really captured my imagination: The Happiness Hat Will Spike Your Skull.

happiness hat from Lauren McCarthy on Vimeo.

While the idea of having a spike poke my head to remind me to keep smiling is unpleasant, an honest self-assessment tells me I really could have benefitted from such a thing in my youth. Even when I am not in the grips of the black dog of depression, I'm not particularly a smiley guy. This caused much social friction for me throughout the years. At my first 'real' job, which I really hated (ostensibly I was writing C++ code for the Navy), I once had to endure a lecture in the break room from a woman who was brainwashed by Disney. It started with 'you know what I notice about you, Steve? You NEVER smile!' She then proceeded to let me know how wonderful my life was, and how I had a wonderful job and really should be happy. I wondered at the time: who would feel happy and lucky in the middle of a dressing down from the Cheer Police?

Though she was a loathsome person who would do things like sing two lines from the song 'Young At Heart' repeatedly over the course of several days, there is certainly some validity to what she was saying. People do like and feel more comfortable around smiling people. I think there's a Chinese Proverb that goes 'A man without a smiling face should never open a store'. Possibly it's 'A man with a smiling face should open a store'. Either way, if you frown all the time, stay out of the almost extinct small family owned store business.

In my case I believe it was always assumed I was depressed, or angry, or stuck up. None of these is particularly great in the winning friends and influencing people game. And even though it's true that I don't particularly enjoy being around people and only really like a few people, I am the first to admit you can really open a lot of doors and even keep people off your back if you smile a lot. It keeps HR from looking into your business, and for that alone it's worthwhile.

The hat is of course ridiculous, but it's also very cute and non-threatening, which probably helps. It looks like something a grandma may have made, and who but the most monstrous heel would mock a smiling person wearing a cute hat made by a loving grandmother? It's a really brilliant prototype, and some engineering love could make the device practically disappear. Perhaps engineers could even use the technology that allows Rush Limbaugh's drug-destroyed ears to function here. Sensors could administer a shock not to cause pain, but to stimulate the face muscles to smile! The day will come when we'll never have to look at grumpy people again.

Of course, then we'll look elsewhere for emotional cues, and we'll be back where we started. Sigh. Why bother with any of these ideas? It's all futile.

Geisy Arruda of Brazil Keeps Berkeley Naked Guy's Fight Alive

Geisy Arruda, a Brazilian student at Bandeirante University in Sao Bernardo do Campo (near Sao Paulo), managed to get herself expelled for wearing a skirt that was deemed 'too short' by the people who get to decide these things, although in the pictures the skirt was no shorter than any skirt you'd see in a bar in a college town on any given night. At least that is what I am told.

This is strange to me for many reasons. Apparently it was not only the uptight, made-for-80s-college-exploitation-movies administration prudes who chided Arruda for dressing like 90s fake TV lawyer Ally McBeal, who also fought the power by wearing short skirts (she was also on a hunger strike, although they never explained why). Her fellow students also jeered her, and some are being suspended for that reason. Also, isn't Brazil famous for men and women running around naked or nearly naked? Somebody wiki that for me, please.

Geisy's story reminds me of Berkeley's Naked Guy, aka Andrew Martinez, who stirred up controversy in the early 90s by wandering about the UC Berkeley campus with no clothes on (he did wear sandals, and sometimes compromised by wearing a bandana, but not on his head). Naked Guy made the talk show circuit, but his story took a sad turn, as after college he had to deal with homelessness and schizophrenia, and committed suicide in prison at 33.

It would be easy to chalk up Martinez's naked activism to the mental illness he struggled with, but that would be disrespectful to his memory and to those who suffer from mental illness. It's possible for a mentally ill person to still have a mind of his own and strong beliefs. Geisy's story reminds us that people are still strangely uptight, and I'll be the first to admit that in above 80 degree weather, having to wear clothes can really suck. I'm also pretty sure this kind of thing drives the sort of people who founded the Creation Museum batshit insane, and I have to support that.

You can't say I didn't blog today!

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Knee-Jerk News

Today the world celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The guy from Jesus Jones who sang 'Right Here Right Now' could not be reached for comment. MTV organized a concert in Berlin featuring U2, and came under fire for erecting a 2 meter wall to keep out people with no tickets. Several people were tasered while trying to climb the wall to escape during one of Bono's speeches.

A nameless storm wrecked havoc in El Salvador this past weekend. Meteorologists gave the storm no name in honor of Clint Eastwood's 'Man With No Name' character in the Sergio Leone films. Kanye West stirred up more controversy with a televised comment that 'George Bush does not care about South Americans'.

'A Christmas Carol' beat 'Michael Jackson's This is It' at the box office this past weekend. Film-makers blame circulating internet spoilers about the ending of 'This Is It' for the poor showing.

Nokia recalled 14 million phone chargers after discovering a youTube video that demonstrated how the chargers can hard boil an egg, and then deliver a fatal shock.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 203 points today. In a press conference, Ben Bernanke announced that this marks the end of the recession for the cocaine and prostitution industries, which are believed by many economists to lead the rest of the economy by one quarter.

In the sports world, fans have been bewildered by the recent lightening of 90s home run great Sammy Sosa's skin. This is the first time a baseball player's appearance has changed drastically in a short time for no apparent reason.

An Arizona State University poll released today shows half of Arizonans are avoiding large crowds because of the flu. The poll also revealed that half of visitors to Arizona are avoiding large crowds because they're full of Arizonans.

Tonight on Curb Your Enthusiasm

Larry goes to buy a tackle box for his friend Funkhouser, but gets into a heated argument with a clerk who won't sell him one because he doesn't have a fishing license.

Later, while discussing the script for the Seinfeld reunion, Larry screams at a waiter who gave him Lime Diet Coke, when he had asked for Diet Coke with real lime in it. Seinfeld tries to rein Larry in, but this makes Larry so angry he tells Seinfeld the reunion show is off.

At Funkhouser's birthday party, Larry presents Funkhouser with a gift card for the Sporting Goods store that refused to sell him the tackle box. Funkhouser expresses his disappointment with the gift, using that voice of his that sounds like something from a radio PSA about symptoms of Acid Reflux disorder. Susie overhears this exchange, and cusses out Larry, which is hilarious because she's a woman.

Finally Larry is ejected, and on the way out he sees a plate of glasses of Diet Coke with slices of real lime on the rims. He tries to grab one, which prompts Funkhouser to punch him in the face. The scene freezes right before Funkhouser's fist makes contact with Larry's face, and the signature tuba theme begins playing.