Ever since I was about ten years old and watching Comedy Central when it was still known as The Comedy Channel, I recognized that the comedian Gallagher’s routine was overly and detrimentally simplistic: he smashed things with a hammer, and people laughed at it. At that age I was waking up to the benefits of layering meaning onto things, so even my ten-year-old self realized that there was no depth to smashing watermelons with a hammer and, subsequently, little to no artistic value. Enough people apparently disagree with this that Gallagher is still floating around these days, so his popularity was also an early lesson in the large numbers of people who can be entertained by dumb things. (Myself fully included, but I feel like the performer has to be at least somewhat self-aware of the dumbness before I can enjoy it. Otherwise I’m worried that they’re just as dumb as their art.)
To sum up that paragraph, Gallagher is terrible. That’s why I found his interview with intellectual hipster bastion The A.V. Club so utterly compelling: the interviewer took a completely awful performer, gave him enough rope to hang himself about eight times, and got a really curious and entertaining read out the other end. It does a great job of communicating the subject’s lack of talent without ever directly touching on it, simply by giving a man who smashes things for entertainment the space to rant about the celebration of mediocrity.
Golf clap to you, David Wolinsky, for recognizing when less is more to make your point effectively.
Today I got a letter asking me to subscribe to the Washington Times newspaper, the Rev. Sun-Myung Moon-backed conservative oracle. I don’t know how I got on their mailing list, as I’m the type (both actual and demographic) who’s unlikely to respond positively to a printed quote from Rush Limbaugh that “The Washington Times is a paper I can’t do without.” But the whole thing provided some unexpected fun.
First the letter noted how the liberal media doesn’t care to report the real news that affects people like me, and that the New York Times now has a section of the paper devoted entirely to corrections. (Don’t all newspapers have this? “Section” in this case just means, “A few paragraphs on the back of page one like newspapers have done for decades.”) But the stones were hurled powerfully out of the glass house when the same letter disparaged — not once, not twice, but thrice — the terrorist-loving platitudes of one “Barrack [sic] Obama”.
Sadly for the consumer marketing team at Washington Times, they can confuse the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee with military housing all they want and it won’t make much of a difference in my subscription status. After all, the liberal media thing has been working out pretty well for me.
I’m sitting here reading about PHP exception handling when the idea strikes me: some peanut-butter toast would hit the spot like some sort of proverbial spot-hitting device. That got me thinking about why peanut butter is an amazing product.
Peanut butter tastes great. You can rock peanut butter with lots of things: chocolate, jelly, Nutella, bread, celery, apples, Thai food, cookies and lots of other stuff. Maybe I’m expanding on the Thai food part, but they use crushed-up peanut paste with oil in their cooking, so that’s close enough for me.
Peanut butter has phat mouth feel. Mouth feel is the term for how food feels all up in your craw, and peanut butter is great. You don’t have to chew it, but it still hangs out for a while, as if to say, “What’s up, mouth. Let’s get to know one another.”
Peanut butter is good for messing with your dog. If you put peanut butter in one of those Kong toys, it will blow your dog’s mind. He looks like a freaking idiot trying to lick peanut butter out of a rubber ball for 19 hours, but the mutt loves it!
Peanuts are a friend of the environment. They’re natural — granted, Jif or Skippy not quite so much — and you can grow hella peanuts on just a little land. That means more efficiency and fewer animals getting faded for protein. Sadly there is no such thing as peanut bacon just yet, but scientists are probably working on it. Speaking of that,
Peanut butter is associated with George Washington Carver.Wikipedia says he did not actually invent peanut butter as we know it, but he did do lots of work with it. Plus, the dude made gasoline and nitroglycerin substitutes out of peanuts. His name always seemed to come up in school, and I admired him for his devotion to that greatest of foods. Now if someone just steps up to his legacy and invents bacon from peanuts, we’re in good shape.
Granted, the title “stuff liberal white yuppies like” is a lot more accurate, but this is still quality satire. Here is a good example; I had a design prof in college who loved AdBusters. (Ironically she was not white.)
Advanced white people will supplement No Logo with a subscription to AdBusters, where they will learn how to subvert corporate culture and return it to the masses. Specifically, this means taking ads and redoing them to give a negative message about a product. Apparently the belief is that when other people see this ad, they will be hit with an epiphany that their entire existence has been a Matrix-style manufactured universe.
UPDATE:Mark Coatney posts the exact “No Come Here Anymore” routine by that one fat-dude comedian that popped into my head when initially reading this story.
And then there’s the Simpsons episode in which Homer sues the Sea Captain for kicking him out of the all-you-can-eat buffet. Yar, that one was even seafood-related too.
Ever since I was about ten years old and watching Comedy Central when it was still known as The Comedy Channel, I recognized that the comedian Gallagher’s routine was overly and detrimentally simplistic: he smashed things with a hammer, and people laughed at it. At that age I was waking up to the benefits of layering meaning onto things, so even my ten-year-old self realized that there was no depth to smashing watermelons with a hammer and, subsequently, little to no artistic value. Enough people apparently disagree with this that Gallagher is still floating around these days, so his popularity was also an early lesson in the large numbers of people who can be entertained by dumb things. (Myself fully included, but I feel like the performer has to be at least somewhat self-aware of the dumbness before I can enjoy it. Otherwise I’m worried that they’re just as dumb as their art.)
