The Muppets do a rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that will totally rock your socks off–and this is coming from someone who even thinks that song has been played out and parodied to death. As one twitterer put it, “this thing is going to go viral so fast that the CDC will be studying it for years.”
You can even watch it in 1080p. Whoa.
It’s not only Palin that symbolizes irony in politics, to state the biggest understatement on this blog, and Obama is not immune. Whether he’s getting censored for making a speech on censorship, using stimulus money to create jobs in congressional districts that don’t exist, or paying for that stimulus with the equivalent of one huge subprime mortgage, Obama is no golden child (despite a very strong showing in many other respects).
Obama often seems to hold promise if for no other reason than that he is capable of appreciating perspective and history, thus taking the sting out of our foolish failures if we at least heeded their lessons. Of course, that might rely on the notion that the history that was written didn’t have biased writers, in which case we may just be screwed.
Speaking of Sarah Palin, she is an interesting historical figure as she is simultaneously the focal point and embodiment of the decline of American politics. Her book release has undoubtedly launched her firmly into the 2012 presidential race, and upon some fact-checking from her critics the gauntlet was thrown down and she was forced to hilariously defend herself, girding her throngs of adoring fans against the unAmer’can intelligentsia. The troublesome part is really the last group. Watch the whole video below. It’ll make you say “Sweet Baby Jesus.”
The most incoherent interview you’ll ever read just might not be Sarah Palin’s. It might be Coolio’s extended interview with the Boston Globe on the subject of his new cookbook–yes, cookbook–entitled, Cookin’ With Coolio. His self-described “Ghetto fusion” cuisine ranges from “Blasian” to “Ghettalian” and features dishes such as “Chicken Lettuce Blunts” and “Cold Shrimpin’.”
Q. I’m a little worried about the longevity of these recipes. Some call for a nickel bag or dime bag of, say, oregano. But a nickel bag today isn’t going to be a nickel bag in a few years. Does the cook have to adjust for inflation?
A. Nah, don’t worry about it. The price of salt went up some, but not much. You can still get a box of salt for a dollar something. Salt was more expensive back in the day. We used to use salt to trade. You could trade for [darn] gold, for silk, you could trade spices for women.
Q. You mention some rules of cooking in your book, which you call cool-mandments. Which do you think are most key for our readers?
A. Wash your Shaka-Zulu hands. That is the most important thing. After you touch chicken, you wash your [darn] hands.
It’s like every bad pun (re-)mixed into one. I guess I should applaud his efforts as a fan of writing, cooking, fusion, hip hop, breaking artificial barriers based on inaccurate expectations, and so on. Let’s hope that this additional chef doesn’t spoil the stew.
College Humor can hit nails on heads with hammers every now and again. This time the nails are HBO’s woefully inadequate and almost-misleading warnings.
Some of my favorites:
So, a prankster pretended to be a 10-year old soliciting jokes from congressmen for a “school project,” and quite a few Senators fell for it. Well, to look on the bright side, at least some Senators have a sense of humor–most often about themselves–and replied with some jokes.
The best joke, as voted by the voters, was Olympia Snowe’s, who has been kicking some ass lately. To paraphrase:
Michaelangelo and a politician arrive knocking at the pearly gates simultaneously, but the heavenly masses roll out the welcome mat for the politician and slam the gates shut in Michaelangelo’s face. Befuddled, Michaelangelo knocks again, St. Peter recognizes the mistake, and lets him in. When Michaelangelo asks St. Peter why heaven would be so quick to dismiss Michaelangelo in favor of a politician, St. Peter replies, “Oh, Michaelangelo, I am so sorry. You see, we get a great many artists and religious people entering through the pearly gates, but this is the first politician we’ve ever had!”
Not bad. Not nearly as bad as thankfully-ex-Senator Rick Santorum’s response, which was just bizarre. Here’s his answer to the inquiry, if you can call it that, verbatim:
Although a favorite joke doesn’t immediately come to mind, I do enjoy laughing.
WTF?
In what is being cautiously touted as the most important law passed in a year, last year Congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which prospectively prohibited employer discrimination on the basis of genetic testing. Somewhat surprisingly, President Bush signed it into law, a fact curiously/conspicuously omitted by the New York Times’ article (bias, anyone?).
This is a rare example of a policy issue and stance that would be difficult for a member to vote against if presented on the floor (after all, who wants to be seen as in favor of genetic discrimination?), but one would think the vested lobbying interests (read: biotech companies, insurers) would have prevented such a bill from making it out of committee intact. The scope of the bill is limited to employment discrimination, so I’m guessing that has a lot to do with the lack of opposition. If the bill prohibited the use of genetic information in insurance calculations, there would have to be a new CBO score on Health Care Reform. Either way, I’d also guess that any currently vested interests didn’t expect enough of a financial stake in mere testing to oppose the measure.
Either way, I applaud Louise Slaughter and Olympia Snowe (isn’t she great?) for their foresight, and would wager that President Bush has moved one small notch higher in the eyes of history.
The obvious-in-retrospect truth about parenting seems to be that lesbians make better parents. What’s more, the kids show no greater tendencies toward homosexuality themselves. Now if only raw data correlated to equal rights…
Why would this be obvious? Because those lesbian parents had to try really hard to become parents and are determined to raise their kids right. That’s a lot better than one could say for most parents out there, who don’t even necessarily intend to have kids, let alone go through an intensive screening process to make sure they’re fit for the arduous task that heterosexuals claim as their birthright–no pun intended. Indeed, self-selection may be the most powerfully determinative force at work here, and that’s the factor in which no ideologue claim heteronormative superiority.
Robert Pozen’s Op-Ed in the New York Times does a fabulous job of simplifying the state of patent law and takes a no-nonsense concise approach to communicate what needs to be done to fix some major flaws. It even manages to do so without needless reductivism and oversimplification. In that sense, it is a major accomplishment of writing, if not policy, since I’m guessing Robert Pozen isn’t lining the pockets of Congressmen.
The quality of American patents has been deteriorating for years; they are increasingly issued for products and processes that are not truly innovative — things like the queuing system for Netflix, which was patented in 2003. Yes, it makes renting movies a snap, but was it really a breakthrough deserving patent protection?
As I reported yesterday–admittedly in a tweet–the social networking parlance “unfriend” is the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2009. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that per se grammatical and linguistic snobbery doesn’t do much to advance the OED’s purposive cause. Restricting its content to words that Antonin Scalia would use because the Founding Fathers used them would be an awful sound strategy for advancing overall human understanding of the English language as it stands today. Furthermore, there’s no doubting sometimes despicable words enter the English language through force of common use (e.g., “meh,” “sexting,” “staycation”), and a dictionary should reflect the actual landscape of speech. At their best, some made-up or reinvented words are able to comment profoundly on the state of discourse generally, but such commentary usually operates by virtue of the fact that the word is absurd or made up to begin with.
However, “unfriend” would perturb your average militant grammarian–George Orwell comes to mind, in particular–because the usage turns a noun into a verb through a clunky negative. Of course, turning nouns into verbs are is a practice more condemnable for using stale imagery and meaning to blunt the impact of the word. Words like “unfriend,” by using a common and known root, inhibit the mind from having to mentally process what the writer/speaker is actually intending to communicate and vice versa. As Orwell himself put it in his seminal Politics and the English Language:
By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.
This trend is especially prevalent today in the pitch-intensive world of “Web 2.0″ and “netrepreneurship.” Orwell’s diatribe against political language could easily describe the cacophonous sound of Silicon Valley pitch-men using the same buzz words about “teh Internets”–or “the cloud” these days I suppose–to make it seem like they have the next big thing in store for some lucky venture capitalist:
As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.
Does “unfriend” evoke the emotional response that the activity it signifies should come with? Does the word adequately communicate the rite of actively demanding that one cease to receive information from a prior acquaintance? In some contexts, “unfriend” may appropriately describe the mere “undo” nature of the activity. But by virtue of its anointed status as the chosen word for the activity, “unfriend” undoubtedly will be straddling too much conceptual ground (e.g., describe the return of an engagement ring, perhaps?), and therein lies the problem.
