Yes We Cans

Debunking the creationist debunkers of mundane scientific principles such as evolution and, um, carbon-dating tends to be a monumental waste of time, as they cherry-pick their falsehoods, argue in bad faith, and willfully (by their own acknowledgment) remain ignorant of even the basic precepts of scientific method and observation.

But hey, at least Professor Tits McGee here has a fresh take on the subject, from what I paid attention to. Better that take on bad science and repudiating the modern world than what you get from certain other places.

Photo Shop

So, uh, The Fappening, right? Wild and crazy stuff. Stay hydrated, friends, and get up and walk around at least every hour or so, hyuk hyuk. Now, I get the feminist meme that "humiliation" is part of the package for downloaders and internet voyeurs. There might be some truth to that, for some folks. I'm not a psychiatrist, nor do I pretend to play one on TV.

But I'd suggest that there is something more primal and simple than the obvious "forbidden fruit" stuff. It's a double-edged sword, this thing of celebrity. A very lucrative and hyperactive industry is built around the very goal of bringing scores of attractive women to the attention of men and women alike. Men are told that they want to bang Celebrity X, and women are told that, since men want to bang Celebrity X, women would be wise to follow suit and accessorize in similar fashion.

So when grainy selfies of Celebrity X suddenly surface, yeah, there's gonna be a feeding frenzy, precisely because of the lack of pretense or contrivance in the very candor of the photos. Sex sells, who'da thunk it? Men in particular just want to (to put it as crudely as possible) break a nut, as it were, and new stuff is always welcome. Let's not overthink this. It's not just famous boobs, though there's always a frisson to that.

What qualifies as "sexual" can be interesting. Side-boob, cleavage, most of the breast, all but that magical pink or brown nozzle at the end. The nozzle makes all the difference in the world, aesthetically and legally. It's the difference between a PG and an R rating for a movie, or a magazine being moved from the floor shelf to behind the counter.

But again, that entire industry goes to great lengths to give you as much as possible, holding back that 2% of the boob that caps off said boob. I mean, the publicity machine has put Jennifer Lawrence front and center for a couple years now, in a variety of provocative poses and outfits. The only difference between today and yesterday is that now you know what color her nipples are.

Doesn't make it right, and it certainly doesn't make the image of millions of cybergoons spanking their monkeys any less repulsive. But it's no surprise, either. Part of democratizing all this wondrous technology is that it removes any notion of a centralized controlling authority for this stuff. It's a free-for-all out there, and when fans no longer have to wait for the next carefully crafted press release, things can get kinda weird.

White People Problems

If the contents of my spam folder on any given day are an indication, there are almost literally numberless ways one can cadge a fair-to-decent living on these here intarnetz. So, uh, I have to ask -- did a new bidness model start up Sunday night, where commenters are getting paid to start with some variation on "I'm way too cool for school to own a teevee/watch the Oscars/see a Hollywood film" and end with some form of "....Seth McFarlane was waaay out of line with [pick a random bit]"? Because that's really what it seems like.

Look. I get that there is, sadly, an honest-to-Jebus industry around this one night, where overpaid ninnies strut and preen and stroke each other all night, and media minions press their noses up against the kewl-kids' restaurant window to sour-grapes their way through the ensuing week. Aside from England, bless its barnacle-encrusted hull, no country has mastered the art of making the truly inconsequential seem meaningful the way the American PR industry has. The vaunted ceremony and "pageantry" are, in and of themselves, more than a little unseemly to begin with, though in much different ways than McFarlane's stock in trade.

And McFarlane has become obscenely wealthy peddling the same cheesy frat-boy and bathroom schtick over and over again in Family Guy (not to mention its iterations in American Dad and The Cleveland Show). Some of it works, some not so much, some is just played out at this point, which McFarlane himself has tacitly acknowledged in more than one interview.

But it's undeniable that McFarlane has genuine layers of talent that aren't really out there in great quantities -- he's obviously a very gifted voice actor, can actually sing well, and clearly reveres not only many of the '80s fetish objects he routinely skewers, but also big-band classics and somewhat deeper cuts (in this day and age) such as the Hope/Crosby Road movies. McFarlane's sensibility is clearly much more fartsy than artsy, but he's also not your typical bonehead Jackass fan.

And that's more or less what he did, at least for the 70% or so of the show that I watched. Yes, the Captain Kirk/We Saw Your Boobs thing went on way too long, like most Family Guy bits, but even that is part of McFarlane's schtick, the meta joke of taking some stock borscht-belt dead fish and beating you over the head with it until there's nothing left but a dorsal fin and a bad smell. Which is to say, there were absolutely no surprises. They got what they paid for.

The show producers sought McFarlane in order to pull the young male demographic, not usually the Oscars' sweet spot. Apparently it worked in that regard, insofar as any young males would have been an improvement for the show. But the legitimacy of the show itself has played out, and it's like the producers don't quite understand that; I would be willing to wager that the number of people who really have the urge to see, say, a musical salute to 50 years of James Bond movies, is at the very least dwindling, if not almost completely non-existent.

So they brought the Family Guy guy in to provide some edge on what is essentially a bowling ball of a show, something with no edge whatsoever. Everybody keeps clamoring for Tina Fey, and I agree she is wonderful and would make a great host for anything, but maybe they were watching a different 30 Rock than I was for seven years, because I saw a show that routinely had some of the raunchiest and most thinly veiled double-entendres this side of South Park. Plus, you know, at least as many cutaway gags and non-sequiturs as Family Guy. I mean, I love Werewolf Barmitzvah and all, but there's not a huge amount of qualitative daylight between that and the giant chicken gags (which was obviously the point).

Fey is very clever in incorporating her natural "cool nerd chick" persona into the things she writes, but in her SNL days as well, she was never shy about getting her hands dirty for a laugh. Fey might be slightly more respectful of the process, because she has a family and still makes movies, where McFarlane couldn't care less, since he's rich enough to not have to care, and clearly just wants to spend the rest of his life banging every sweet young thing in Hollywood. But they're both pretty raunchy when they want to be, and frankly, that's what this puffy-shirt of an annual stroke-fest needs in the first place. Whether it's politically correct or not is -- or at least should be -- irrelevant. It's not like he called a nine-year-old the C word.

I'm not saying they need to bring in Gilbert Gottfried to do a roast or read excerpts from Fifty Shades of Grey, but I will unequivocally say that three hours of group fellatio bookended with weeks of fawning adulation and passive aggression is a dead entertainment model, except for the Kardashians.

Next year they'll bring back Billy Crystal to dutifully clean up yet another hosting snafu that they asked for. The talkerati will sharpen their snark crayons to a nub and talk shit about some 125 lb. tubbelard in a tight dress, and the usual 'net suspects can convene to remind each other that they're still too cool to watch this shit, but they heard it was really fucking boring.