In Other News

Today is Canada's sesquicentennial, as well as Pamela Anderson's 50th birthday. In celebration of the latter event, this is a fun read.

Poll Tree

I suppose it's okay to have a bit of a snicker over the idea that there's a small percentage of grown-ass adults who seriously think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, but it should be more concerning that nearly half of Americans take bible stories 100% literally.

Sometimes you figure that at least some of these people are just fucking around with the pollsters; after all, there's a fair chance that I would do something like that. But then you have occasion to venture out into the beautiful, big, messy world and talk to some of these folks, and you realize with much chagrin, they're dead fucking serious.

Death Wish

So on December 23rd, we watched the Extras Christmas special series finale, which has a brief cameo from George Michael. The next day we watched the Rosemary's Baby episode of 30 Rock.

So I've spent the last several days seriously considering watching a few episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, especially if they have a Kanye West appearance.

In Other News

It seems that everyone had the same bright idea after seeing the Bidens' summer playlist, to create a proper Onion Diamond Joe Biden playlist. Fuckin' A.

Here's what I like about the real Joe Biden:  I feel like he is probably aware of his Diamond Joe doppelgänger, and he thinks it's funny.

Freudian Slip

Okay, sorry to crack wise about what is clearly a tragedy, but the headline typo does point in the direction of the absurd:

Who knows? Maybe it was an angry elf.

The Heretic's Dilemma

Twenty-five years ago, about this time of year, I went what is probably the only true vacation of my adult life, a six-week trip around Europe. We started and ended in Ireland, where I have cousins who live in a house that has been in the family since the early 17th century.

From there we went on through Wales and England, and to the Continent, through France, Switzerland, Austria, what was then still a unified Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Belgium (in that order), before heading back through the British Isles.

We spent a few days in Paris, which was not nearly enough, but we did see the main sights. At one point we went to Sacre Coeur, which is every bit as amazing as it looks.

Looking back, I suppose I made the shift from believer to agnostic to atheist from ages 10-14, give or take. And at the time we were in the Sacre Coeur, I was twenty-four years old, long hair, proud (and sometimes arrogant) unbeliever, caring only about working a job to feed my habits -- guitars, women, motorcycles, beer, and weightlifting. It was a warm June day, but it didn't seem right to wear shorts, so I wore jeans, a blank t-shirt, shoes. These details matter somewhat, as we'll see.

Rando Grammo

Look, even people who are skilled with the rules and conventions of language will acknowledge that "grammar nazis" are, for the most part, insufferable twats. This does not absolve the gaggle of maroons who think they are above having to learn what are, if one is passably literate and reads or writes with any frequency, mostly simple and consistent rules. Even English, which has more irregularities than most other major Indo-European languages, has plenty of consistent rules that are easily internalized with, again, regular infusions of these things called books.

Liars' Poker

In terms of making a mint from the internets, I frequently think I was born about 15-20 years too early (1967), maybe more. I think people born about 1990 or so, growing up with the modern toys we all take for granted now, are instinctively attuned in a way we older folk had to learn. I can definitely say that even mundane things such as Excel have made me think and process information differently than I did in the previous century, but they've grown up with those things, where we older folks learned them, implanted them on the old paradigm we grew up with, which was so different.

Having a teenager in the house is a constant reminder of how difficult it is to convey how much different life was before these wondrous things. Of course I have tried, by mentioning such oddities as rotary-dial phones and black-and-white TVs, but understandably I just get a blank stare. It would be like my great-grandmother trying to explain how music recordings were once played by wax cylinders.

Like many kids her age, my daughter wants to be a video game designer, which is yet another area in which I can only lamely attempt to tell her how things used to be. Games are as sophisticated as movies now, of course, and as such require not only coders but scriptwriters. I don't have any ironic nostalgia for Pong or Adventure or Pitfall or Pac-Man, as much fun as those games were back in the day, anymore than I would trade Breaking Bad for Dukes of Hazzard. Trust me, your Facebook friends posting memes about that shit are missing the boat.

News of the Weird

I don't mean to be insensitive [Ed.:  Since when?] that a man drowned trying to save his cat. But, uh, and I'm just asking for a friend, who takes a cat canoeing?

The Invisible Scalps of the Marketplace

Random surfing on a lazy Sunday afternoon:  over at Cole's jernt, some low-hanging fruit got me thinking a bit (I know, I know, throw your worst at me). Normally, watching some bien pensant fool get hoist on his own petard after giving low-wage food service staff a hard time would give me a pretty fat outrage boner.

But this is nuts -- as ham-fisted as this schmuck's attempt to Do The Right Thing and speak Truth To Power turned out, he lost a $200K/year job, $1M in stock options, received a bunch of death and bomb threats, and now lives with his wife and four kids in an RV, on food stamps. All for a dumb two-minute video he shot almost three years ago.

Meanwhile, if you're a butt-hurt cheapskate pastor, you can get an Applebee's waitress fired over a shitty comment on a receipt, involving a $6 tip, and still peddle 27-page self-help books at ten bucks a pop. (And take your tax write-offs, of course, no doubt including the aforementioned meal.)

I'd say Adam Smith paid a huge price for a relatively minor transgression, and that these viral incidents happen randomly, and without proportion. People get away with being raging assholes to waitstaff everywhere, all the time, while others lose their careers because they said something stupid.

And yet Donald Trump continues to fester in the public eye, a turgid, nasty reminder that karma really is just a fiction we tell ourselves, to reserve the hope of justice in an entropic, indifferent universe.

What got Smith dinged up is that he chose to insert himself into a politically contentious issue, one that clearly has its share of potentially violent bozos. But it's not even the bozos and weirdos that were the problem -- the problem was the mere potential that Smith expressing his opinion and pissing off a bunch of emotionally retarded people could be bad for business.

Corporations and their sponsors rule the world now, and perceptions and marketing matter more than ever. Sometimes that works out for the best; as Arizona found out last year, and Indiana is about to find out soon, gay people buy stuff, and so companies are loath to piss them off. Who knew?

Watching the video, Smith's uncalled-for smuggery and his abuse of the staff stand out. While he was polite enough to Rachel the fast-food worker, his senseless trolling on what he gloated was a busy day was shitty and unnecessary. What did he think was going to happen, that Rachel was going to get on the phone with Dan Cathy and tell him that his unkind comments about gays cost them a free cup of water for some rich douchebag?

But again, he paid a more-than-harsh penalty, for what virtually any food-service worker will tell you was a comparatively minor transgression, and it was mostly because he aggravated an interest group that are organized and skilled at intimidating their opponents. You hear of Phil Robertson getting any bomb threats, losing any part of his livelihood, over all the hateful shit he's said over and over again? Me neither.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is that Smith's story has resurfaced because he -- wait for it -- put it into an e-book, which has been amazingly poorly received, and whose description shows Smith's unfortunately thin skin.

[Pro tip -- never put this sentence anywhere near the product you're trying to sell:  Update as of 3/27/2015, 6:45pm, PT, regarding the many 1-star ratings my book has received today and yesterday, I would like to note that I have only sold 17 digital copies thus far, yet there are 23 1-star ratings on my book. This fascinates me! LOL!]

Then again, after the disproportionate punishment they've received for their high crimes, it would be understandable if Adam Smith or Justine Sacco came off as a bit sensitive.

The Out Crowd

Few things are funnier than watching huge corporations appropriate teenybopper slang for cheesy social-media marketing lingo as it's already played out; as by its very nature such silly words and phrases are ephemeral. This is by design, obviously -- once the 'rents have figured out what you're saying, it's time to let them have it and come up with something else. But hey, if you want your multi-million dollar bidness to sound like an eighth-grade girl, knock yerself out, hoss.

It's sort of the linguistic version of Charles Eugene "Pat" Boone fucking up Little Richard songs.

The Malacca Triangle

Remind me never to get on an Asian passenger jet. Two in about ten months, they're losing these things like socks in a fucking dryer.

Self Indulgence

Talk about grabbing the wrong end of the stick on an argument. Look, as the quote at the top of the page at this here popsicle stand illustrates, I am unabashedly biased on the subject of Orwell's Politics and the English Language. Obviously, my writing style does not hew closely to Orwell's prescriptions, though I at least strive toward his lofty goal of absolute concision.

I've re-read Politics probably every six months or so over the past 10-12 years. Many times a piece or point in there will jump out in a way it hadn't before; sometimes new clarity comes with time and revisiting something you thought was familiar.

I believe that Self is misreading Orwell's intent by obsessing over Orwell's advice regarding things such as similes, brevity, or words with Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin roots. Writing at its best is really just the process of organizing one's thoughts and ideas coherently, in order to communicate them effectively, with as little lost in translation or parasitic motion as possible.

The examples of poor writing provided by Orwell in Politics should remove any mystery. Orwell was concerned primarily with meaningless deconstructivist burbling, as well as propagandistic writing. He felt, rightly, that language should convey meaning, and honest writing should reveal rather than conceal the writer's intent and meaning. Too often cheap erudition and baroque sentence construction were employed for the opposite purpose, to conceal either an unwholesome intent, a complete lack of meaning, or the incompetence of the writer.

The goal is not to encase writing style and vocabulary in an "acceptable" box; in fact, I suspect that Orwell felt very much the opposite. There's nothing wrong with new coinages, new rhythms, new ways of elucidating one's thoughts, so long as it's with clarity and purpose in mind.

Ad and Subtract

We've done a few "revenue model" posts this year, highlighting the rapidly changing dynamic taking place on these here internets, and how it has radically altered the traditional pelf-scooping activities that were enjoyed unhindered -- indeed, with a 10-year-old Cuban cigar, a 15-year-old Scottish single malt, and a 20-year-old Malaysian escort performing spectacular fellatio -- by the establishment media impresarios in the past.

So now it's a brave new world of content curation and such like, and so, since we're willing to put up with commercials, we must of course be willing to put up with pop-up ads. I dunno about you, Tonstant Weader, but I'll share this with you -- I pay about $90/month to DirecTV for I have no idea what, and aside from HBO, there's commercials up the wazoo on every fucking channel. I remember as a kid watching broadcast teevee being told that commercials were the price we paid for free content -- so now we're paying for the content and the commercials? Hunh. Spare me the lecture, So-crates.

There are two competing ideas here, both of them absolutely true. One is that people who create content -- even shitty "12 Weird Things You Didn't Know About Justin Bieber" copy-and-paste articles -- deserve to be compensated for their effort, commensurate to the value they create. Unfortunately, almost all value on the internet is created by selling advertising.

Which brings us to the second thing, the idea that the internets, just like the broadcast airwaves, should belong to the people. I mean you paid for it, right?

But because advertising, like gorging on food, is one of the few things Americans do well anymore, we get to sit through a million fucking commercials selling cheap insurance and expensive pharmaceuticals. Apparently we are running out of these things, if the wisdom of the marketplace is to be duly heeded.

And the wild wild web is no different in that unfortunate respect, a veritable wasteland waiting to be populated by pop-ups and embedded videos and such. Maybe they have packet sniffers waiting to spoof your computer's cloaca and give it the violent malware buttfucking it's been waiting for, maybe not. The choice is yours, valued consumer!

Where you used to just purchase a device that allowed you access to the entertainment infrastructure -- a television, in other words -- you now have to purchase the device and the access and the content itself. And you still have to put up with all the goddamned commercials!

Most of this, of course, is just a sop to the telecom giants who own and operate the infrastructure, per the supposed capitalist model. Capitalism, you may recall on the off chance that it occurred somewhere in the past for you, is predicated on the idea that someone creates a product or provides a service, and you exchange a fair amount of money for that product or service. This idea is commonly known as "fair value" or "getting your money's worth."

So, uh, when was the last time you really felt that you got your money's worth from the telecom industry -- $100/month for 500 channels, maybe 12 of which are worth watching; $50/month for "broadband" that really isn't (though at least your choices on the internet really are damn near infinite; it's your own fault you chose to while away your time jerking it to midget porn and playing internet spades all night); and another $40 or so per month to play Candy Crush and take selfies on your smartphone.

Now, value judgments aside, the point here is not really about our entertainment choices, it's about what kind of value we get in return for renting an infrastructure paid for by tax dollars in the first place. Imagine what you could get if your infrastructure wasn't controlled by demotivated greed-sucking monopolistic enterprises.

Words With Friends

When it comes to pedantic arguments over "correct" usage of this or that word, I tend to be something of a fence-straddler. I personally know and use the right word in the right manner, because I regard them as tools with specific functions. Just as you wouldn't use a screwdriver where a wrench is called for, why would you use "literally" for an analogy that is clearly figurative, or even fantastical?

However, as a practical matter, correcting someone on their incorrect usage is off-putting, a clear dick move. They are not going to learn from your noble example. Save your time, and your reputation, and move on. I recall seeing some fluff Sunday morning show piece about a couple of guys who would go around to restaurants and "help" them correct their menus, usually over misspelled words or misused apostrophes. Life is just too short.

The "literally" thing actually makes a small bit of sense to me, because there's not really a common-usage adverb -- aside from "figuratively" itself, which might be somewhat unwieldy in a casual conversation -- that conveys the figurative nature of the exaggeration in question. We know that the speaker's head did not literally explode, and yet it's scarcely worth the trouble to point out that that word does not mean what they think it means. They know, that just happens to be the handiest word at their disposal.

Now, I'll admit that I take a breath when I see the aforementioned misspellings, and especially the misused apostrophes, because the rules on those are so simple -- possessives, not plurals. Writing "ect." (or saying "ek cetera") is another peeve, because "et cetera" has a literal meaning, an actual function. "Should of" instead of "should have", that sort of thing. Approached as tools with functions, these things are not at all complicated.

But habits -- especially bad ones -- form through inattention and lack of caring. This is what the corrective pedants, well-meaning as they are in their quest to preserve the care and feeding of our noble, evolving language, may not quite get. People use "ect." and can't get the correct "your" or "there" homophone because they don't give a shit. By definition, correcting someone who clearly couldn't care less will not correct the mistake, but merely annoy that person.

Back in the chat forum days, I had several lively discussions about this subject with professional academic linguists, people charged with the mission of identifying, classifying, and organizing the various phonemic and grammatical constructs of languages. As a kid, I was fascinated by a variety of languages, and gained at least minimal competency in most of the major European languages.

The more you learn about language -- especially one as widespread and multiply sourced as English -- the more you realize that it is never static, it's a river that flows slowly but flows nonetheless. As with political systems, the outcomes of languages are frequently a result of a large enough mass of users who don't know or care to understand the nuances of what they're engaging in. They deploy it to convey their own immediate use, and some of it will accrue habitually. The more they read and/or write, the more competent they will be in hewing to convention, as one might imagine.

And that, ironically, is where preservationist linguists fall short, imho. It's easy to understand the impulse to chronicle and archive one of the thousands of dying languages around the world, spoken only by a dwindling group of elders in a remote village. But that impulse contradicts what we've noted above, that languages evolve with use. A dying language, by definition, is no longer one that is being used. It is intellectual lepidoptery to stipulate that a language that is dying out precisely because of its lack of use and interconnectivity has any utility, beyond capturing the oral history of the remaining few who speak that language.

In the end, the pedantic attention to upholding the simpler and more obvious conventions of language comes down to cash in many instances. I've been on plenty of hiring panels, and thus reviewed hundreds of résumés over the years. And I can tell you right now, when I encounter a misspelled word or a misused apostrophe on a cover letter or résumé, I don't bother correcting jack shit. I don't have the time. It just goes straight into the round file, I won't even bother to finish reading it.

And I'm far from the only one; I have heard and read plenty of hiring managers say the exact same thing. Ultimately what it comes down to is whether or not someone can be bothered to pay attention to what they're (as opposed to their) doing, and if they can't, hiring managers won't waste their time with that stuff.

Hatesong

Why did I not know about this before? I'm just now discovering Hatesong, and there is something noteworthy about, say, David Lynch despising It's a Small World so much, he won't let the interviewer refer to it by name.

Fortunately, I'm at a point in my life where I simply don't encounter most of these awful songs. I mean, I've never heard Katy Perry's Firework, like not a single note. I've never heard more than a few seconds of My Heart Will Go On. I've never heard a Justin Bieber song, again, not so much as a single note or word or melody. Life is too short.

Still, I think we've all had jobs in the past where workplace radio is plopped onto some lowest-common-denominator shit sandwich, endless streams of commercials sandwiching three-song blocks of heavy-rotation dreck. No wonder the American worker is stressed out to the point of a breakdown.

But most of us are certainly familiar enough with some of these songs, so when you turn a fine, observant mind such as Steve Coogan on the aerosol can of cheese The Lady in Red, hijinks are bound to ensue. Yet there are still people who listen to it on purpose, there are nostalgia radio stations that play this sort dreck deliberately.

This makes me sad, really. It makes me think of a person who has been stuck in a basement or a cornfield in Kansas their entire life, with no radio or TV or internet, and so they think that the entire world is a desolate cornfield, because they've never seen anything else. Not that I expect other people to like exactly what I like; far from it.

But there are songs (and Lady in Red is a prime example) where, as Coogan points out, creativity is absent, nothing but trite greeting-card sentiments are listed. It's the musical equivalent of having sex through a hole in a bed sheet, missionary only. To enjoy -- or even to be not offended by -- inert, lifeless crap just seems to be a symptom of missing out on a whole 'nother universe of great stuff.

Most of this stuff is very fish-in-a-barrel; honestly, do you know anyone who likes a floater like Mambo No. 5? But pairing the right person with the right song is just magic in this context, as the legendary Matt Pike demonstrates in his evisceration of the Aerosmith handjob Dude (Looks Like a Lady). Pike hates not just that song, but the band with a level normally reserved for someone who you just watched run over your dog. On purpose. Fun stuff. Check it out if you haven't already.

[Update:  Also, too. Certainly a valid point here, in that someone's taste -- or lack of -- doesn't pick anyone else's pocket or break their arm, so why sweat these poor folks on their schmuckery?

Two reasons, says I:  one, it's frequently funny (and some of the commenters in the Hatesong pieces are flat-out hilarious); two, beyond the subjectivity of mere pop-culture aesthetics, the fact is that when these objets de merde are popular, however long that toxic half-life may be, it's tough to get out of range of the smell.

I've never seen so much as an episode of Survivor, American Idol, or really any reality teevee, and yet a certain amount of "informational" oxygen and media space gets taken up with coverage of this sock-drawer-sorting nonsense, so I know way more about these things than I would ever have wanted to. You can only change the channel so fast; you have to read the headline before you can choose to skip past it. This stuff becomes very difficult to completely avoid. The same can be said when it comes to music, for those poor folks who are compelled to share communal space with aficionados of said dreck.

It's one thing to posit that someone who lurves them some Mambo #5 is no worse or better than someone who knows every Beethoven string quartet by number and key; it's quite another to have the mambophile blaring their crap over the cubicle wall every day.]

Resource Allocation

I know this has been covered elsewhere, and even featured on Homeland, but it is still fascinating. Ordinarily, the hard-wired misanthrope coursing my veins would compel me to shrug and say "fuck 'em," but I'm in awe of the ingenuity and fortitude of these folks. We jabber about wealth inequity and poverty in the US, but it ain't jack shit to what goes on routinely in the rest of the world.

In Other News

Random observation from checking out my stats dashboard:  there have been more pageviews here with the keywords "arnold schwarzenegger in a gay pron" than for "arnold Schwarzenegger gay porn" (because of this classic post). Discuss.

Quit Parade

So Dave has dialed back to one-a-week, and now TBogg is apparently checking out, at least for the time being. Too bad, but ultimately it happens to everyone who decides to tie on the butcher's apron and set about the gruesome work of cleaving offal from meat. After some time, everything looks like roadkill, and there's only so many ways you can cook roadkill.

I don't know if it means anything or nothing, if it's a signal that "blogging," whatever that means, has (let's say) an attenuated utility at this point, in this vaunted era of twittardery and daily outrages and not thinking or talking through much of anything. For the record, I don't believe that that is the case; I think there remains a sizable audience for thoughtful commiseration, for whom 140 characters doesn't quite cut it.

So folks are welcome to come here or go there or whatever's clever. Reading the "please don't go" comments in anyone's GBCW missive is a lot like listening to someone bemoan the cancellation of their favorite teevee show, or the breakup of their favorite group. As if there aren't plenty more of each out there, of comparable or even greater talent and vitality. (In fact, since the past-due dismantlement of the networks and record companies, there's more great stuff than ever. There's also more shit than ever. As always, it's up to you, Tonstant Weader, to discern which from which.)

Asking people to stay on in any line of work -- especially the creative line -- is an invitation to eventual crushing disappointment. You know what the Beatles or Zeppelin would have been like if they'd pressed on? They'd have sucked; they'd have lamely cadged slivers of mediocrity on the remnants of past greatness. Perhaps nowhere else do the laws of diminishing returns (or expectations) have such impact.

Perhaps in some cases, walking away is also a tacit acknowledgement of the facts of the game -- that the writer, who presumably seeks at least some measure of legitimacy and/or efficacy, is basically the Ultimate Salmon, swimming against the impossible current of abject ignorance. For the political blogger, it's impossible to ignore that in the aggregate, politicians generally reflect their constituencies.

You can try to convince yourself that it's the fault of gerrymandering, a lazy or complicit media, money buying power, etc. And you'd be right. But at the end of the day, it comes down to dipshits being easily baited into voting against themselves. And no quantity of tilts against windmills will change that.

So you press on for the folks who do pay attention, who give a shit about something besides the tips of their noses. But they're fewer and farther between, and there are always more distractions. After all, there's probably another season of Duck Dynasty or some such gearing up right this here second.

(Not that I'm necessarily high-minded in my choice of entertainment -- the only reason I bother to watch The Newsroom is that I would absolutely wreck Olivia Munn.)

Anyway, hang in there, I have more to yap about in the near future, and should at least make the 10th anniversary of The Hammer come 1/1/15, which is closer than it might appear tonight. We have things to discuss, to disparage, to defame and decry, and as a famous cartoon character once said, I have not yet begun to fart. Or fight. Whatever. The Ultimate Salmon swims on, despite the odds.

Random Appreciation: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Apropos of nothing, this is a wonderful turn of phrase that applies to so much more than just the learning of French:

The Internet is overrun with advertisements meant for those who feel the longing for another language, who hope to attain understanding without the fear, the pain of mocking or rejection. There is a symmetry in language ads that promise fluency in three weeks and weight-loss ads that promise a new body in roughly the same mere days. But the older I get, the more I treasure the sprawling periods of incomprehension, the not knowing, the lands beyond Google, the places in which you must be immersed to comprehend.

As the man famously said, it ain't what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so. That and the assumption that we can learn and gain things of lasting value over a weekend.