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Wil Forbis
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Last night, I watched SNL for the first time in a while and caught the performance of this Them Crooked Vultures band featuring Dave Grohl, John Paul Jones, the dude from Queens of the Stone Age and some bald loser. It was some of the worst new music I've heard in ages. There's got to be a point during a project like that where at least one of them is thinking, "You know, this sounded great on paper, but something is not happening here." But, at that point, what can you do? You can't call off the project because everyone's ego will be hurt and the media will have a field day. So you just keep smiling like a douchebag, pretending this onslaught of barely classifiable noise you are producing can pass for real music.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
I think everyone's familiar with the trust building exercise, often performed on corporate retreats, where someone has to close their eyes and fall backwards and anticipate being caught by a coworker. I was thinking a better exercise might be having the person fall over backwards and hit the ground and be knocked unconscious. To make the point that you can't really trust anybody.
Another possibility would be placing a bed of nails where the person will fall.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Andrew Sullivan has an interesting post castigating himself for failing to see what a douche John Edwards turned out to be. Sullivan is fully aware of the disparity between in his relentless criticism of Palin and his general disinterest in Edwards. Part of the defense he offers is that he he felt the actions Edwards was accused of were too extreme to be believable.
... I dismissed it too easily. I mean his wife was confronting death on a daily basis. I just couldn't believe a husband could do that to his wife then.
This actually leads me into the strange position of wanting to defend John Edwards. I would ask, if not then, when? By this I mean, I can understand being in a relationship with a partner who has a terminal disease, is daily facing trials and tribulations no one would want to deal with, and finding that part of yourself just wants to just escape. And maybe that escape comes in the form of a attractive, willing sex partner. You can certainly condemn that behavior for being hurtful and childish, but I can understand it in the context of wanting to get away from the nightmare of your life, and I would argue it's more forgivable than having an affair when things are going great (e.g. Tiger Woods.)
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Say it ain't so!
I got a chuckle out of Andrew Sullivan's snarky response to a Senator's defense of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.
"Alcohol use, adultery, fraternization, and body art," - Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), on what he claims will follow in the wake of repealing DADT.
Alcohol use by soldiers? Unimaginable! Who would ever believe such a thing? Next thing you know after ending the gay ban will be soldiers screwing around on leave. Or ... swearing!
Monday, February 01, 2010
So, Haloscan, the company that provided my commenting system, is going out of business. I'm switching over to a new system which should "remember" all the old comments. If you were thinking something like, "gosh, one day I'd like to get a real job or meet a nice girl and get married and that's not happen if they can go on the web and find all the horrible stuff I said on wil forbis's blog. It sure would be convenient if his commenting system died." well, you're out of luck.
There's an interesting blog post going around the net that gets into how our brain derives pleasure from the act of listening to music. Scientists are theorizing that our brain is constantly analyzing patterns in music (the sequences of notes in a scale used in a melody for example) and predicting the music to come. When a composition violates these predictions, there is a spike in brain activity --- the brain becomes "intrigued."
There's some additional discussion on how great composers will structure their music in such a way that they "tease" us by leading us to anticipate a pattern or chord. Good composers draw out the delivery of such elements so that when they finally arrive, our emotional satisfaction is overwhelming. As some commenters on the blog note, this is akin to being wooed by a lover. What is more satisfying, sex with a woman everyone knows gives it away (e.g. most of my readers's moms) or with a flirtatious seductress who coyly implies you made bed her, than withdraws the invitation, then offers it again -- back and forth several times until the expectation is driving you mad?
This sex parallel also explains the use of humor and music. The classic humorous opera cliché is a melodic line which climbs up a scale and anticipates an "answer" melody which will descend back down to the first note. Instead, the "answer" is a musical fart --- an arhythmic, dissonant musical line which completely defies our predictions. Anticipating something, and getting something completely different in return, is the essence of comedy. And we can all envision the sexual equivalent: You meet a nice girl at a club and after several drinks you talk her into coming back to your place. While you're making out on your couch, you reach over and unfasten her skirt, then pull it down her legs and gaze into her thighs to take in the sweet sight of her... AHHH! SHE'S GOT A DICK! IT'S A GODDAMN SHE-MALE! CHICK WITH A DICK! CHICK WITH A DICK!
That's comedy gold right there people.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
So, I was up in LA for most of this weekend. While walking back to my hotel room Saturday night, I decided to swing by this bar that a friend of mine works at. I was taking a shortcut through an alley to get there, and came across a curious looking pile consisting of: two small teddy bears, a soaked pair of male underwear, a strap on dildo.
Technically it may not have actually been a dildo. I always think of dildos as hard plastic things; this was essentially a fake penis made out of hard rubber.
Anyway, I went into the bar and another guy I knew was working there. I informed him of the situation and we both went out in the alley and he grabbed the strap on (using a towel) and claimed it as a sort of trophy for the bar.
Friday, January 29, 2010
So I was out at dinner tonight, and an idea occurred to me that I thought was pretty funny --- and by that I mean it was cruel and dehumanized a person or group of persons -- and I thought, "I should make a point to blog that." But now I've forgotten what it was.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Will digital piracy suck the money out of the book industry as it has the music industry? I know I've asked the question before; here's an interesting tidbit.
... there were 9 million illegal downloads of copyright-protected books in the closing months of 2009, according to the Association of American Publishers.
I wonder if the hippies who defended music piracy will sing the same tune when we're living in an illiterate society of cannibalistic savages?
So there's been a lot of discussion about the Scott Brown election and its subsequent derailing of the health-care bill. My sense was that it wasn't so much the Massachusetts election as it was the fact that the bill's popularity was somewhere in the upper 30/lower 40% that has caused Democrats to rethink the bill.
Now, my dad's about as hard-core Democrat as you can get, but he was recently doing an honest casting about for answers to this question of why support for the bill is so lukewarm. And he arrived at the what now seems like obvious conclusion: health care is simply not the number one priority for Americans right now. The point is often made that there's some 40 plus million people without health care (that's including fairly wealthy people who could afford healthcare if they chose to, and illegal immigrants), but seldom is the obvious inverse statement made, that there's some 260 million with healthcare. So what are those people concerned with? A letter writer to Andrew Sullivan's blog sums it up succinctly:
The bottom line is that 80% of Americans have health insurance that they are basically happy with and they do not feel that now, with massive deficits, 10% unemployment and a shaky recovery, is the right time to pass a bill that will not make the system more efficient, will not cut the deficit (anyone who believes this will be deficit neutral is delusional) and will still not cover everyone.
And here's a chart basically saying the same thing --- the economy and jobs rank far above health care as a priority.
And I have to admit, this matches my own life. I ran up some decent sized medical bills in the past year --- a couple MRIs and various visits to neurologists --- all of which were covered by my insurance without a peep. If anything, I'm surprised my co-pays are so low. And I've never been denied a liver transplant or anything, of course, the reason being I've never been up for major surgery.
My point here, is that Obama was attempting to solve a problem that is experienced by only a minority of the population. On the other hand, jobs and economic concerns affect a clear majority. I would say that making health care the number one priority (as my dad states Obama did some speech; I'm not going to expend any effort to verify it) is the greatest mistake Obama has made so far.
At this point, however, I think it would be political suicide to completely give up on health care the way Clinton did. People may be lukewarm to the bill, but they despise spinelessness. But as for the specific methods of getting a bill passed, I have little understanding or comment. I think Obama has one credible argument which is that while health-care costs may not be killer now, they certainly are trending in that direction, and when they get high enough, that will affect most people. However, cost containment is probably the weakest part of the bill currently on the table.
Fundamentally, I don't think this is an ideological battle -- it's not a war between the Right's limited government and the Left's nanny state. I say this because people seem to be saying, "we don't want you to fix health care, but we do want you to do something about jobs." What that "something about jobs" is is up for debate, but I don't think the conservative argument for less taxes and regulation is taking hold with people. I think, frankly, they want to be bought off with various job programs.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
This video has been making the rounds on the Internet, featuring a keyboard playing cat and dog performing an essentially long-distance duet. Many find it amusing; I do not.
It's not that I don't find their skill impressive, especially being mere animals, but I feel their choice of material falls flat. As artists, as musicians, they have an obligation to challenge their audience, to take their audience places they might not be comfortable going. Given the unique opportunity each of these artists have, knowing full well that much attention will be given to them because they are a cat and a dog, shouldn't they have chosen any one of the richer, more textural pieces from the canon of 20th-century classical music? Could they not have played, say, an atonal piece by Webern? Or perhaps a fiery, impassioned performance of one of Shostakovich's later piano works? Would this not elevate them from mere technicians to true virtuosos?
Monday, January 25, 2010
I saw Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones" this weekend. It reminded me of the first Jackson film I ever saw, "Heavenly Creatures." Both films interspersed scenes of humdrum everyday life with fantastical imagery. In "Heavenly Creatures" the imagery is representing the imagination of the two main characters. In "The Lovely Bones" it is scenes of a magical purgatory the protagonist is stuck in.
I remember when I saw the scenes in "Heavenly Creatures" I was blown away, both by the director's imagination and his ability to bring to life what was in his head. The imagery in "the Lovely Bones" is equally tantalizing but I found myself less impressed. And as I thought about it, I realized "Avatar" is to blame.
When "2012" came out, I made some comments that they had taken CGI to such an incredible level -- where they could basically flatten the entirety of California --- that the magic was lost. If you look at the original "King Kong" or even the 1970s sequel, part of what grabs you is just your curiosity as to how they created the visuals. It would seem to be such a mammoth task that the effort involved takes your breath away. And while I'm sure there's plenty of effort involved in modern CGI films, it's not quite the same. You get the feeling they approach the task absolutely confident they can achieve it, which I don't think was the case when they were building a giant monkey. And, I think "Avatar," with its total immersion into the world of CGI, is the movie that cemented this sense in the moviegoing public, that Hollywood can now construct any imagery it wants, no matter how fantastic.
The effects of this will no doubt be detrimental. If Hollywood can create whatever story it wants with no technical limitations, the very value of storytelling will plummet. And if mankind loses its stories, I see only two possible outcomes:
1) Without stories to move or inspire us, humanity will be overwhelmed with a muting lethargy that will dull our senses, grind our inertia to a halt and eventually lead to a wasting away process that will cause mankind to go extinct.
2) Without stories to move or inspire us, humanity will attempt to reengage with life on the most visceral level, taking up formally repulsive practices such as cannibalism, necrophilia and feces eating which will cause global warfare to spread across the planet leading to the extinction of mankind.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Well, it is all penis Friday, and this is definitely worth a gander:
Everyone knows my feelings on John Edwards, so it should be no surprise that I would link favorably to an article asking whether the National Enquirer deserves a Pulitzer for its exposé on him. (Especially days after he finally conceded he was the father of the child at the heart of the scandal.)
Edwards' motivations to dissemble are obvious, but what is the excuse of the mainstream media -- especially when campaign funds are alleged to be involved? In 2009, the Enquirer beat other media outlets not only on the fallout of the affair on Edwards' family, but also on the grand jury investigation of campaign funds. And in this later aspect, it appears that the Enquirer's reporters and photographers uncovered the stories the old-fashioned way, by putting the time and manpower into an investigation.
Of course, one can make an argument that the Enquirer does not deserve a Pulitzer --- after all, they only engaged in the kind of garden-variety journalism any news organization should be capable of. The problem is that the rest of the media fell so short of even this standard that the Enquirer looks good by comparison.
It's a shame the Weekly World News isn't still around. I have a sneaking suspicion John Edwards is also the father of the bat boy.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Last night I was talking to a friend of mine who was plagued with a problem I think a lot of guys have encountered: you have a female friend who's a lot of fun to hang out with, but you're just not attracted to her. Unfortunately, she is attracted to you. So how do you handle the situation? I came up with what I think is an ideal solution. If they push you to get intimate, you say, "The problem is that there was a girl that I was very much in love with, and she died three years ago and I've never gotten over it."
To which your female friend might reply, "You mean you haven't had sex in three years?"
And you can say, "No, we still have sex."
It strikes me that if you're a Democratic politician worried about a potential backlash in November, this is not what you say: Feinstein "...There is angst. . . . People do not understand [the healthcare bill]. It is so big, it's beyond their comprehension."
Basically she's right -- I don't understand all of it myself -- but this is only a couple degrees removed from "they're too stupid to get it."
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
So, as Scott Brown wins in Massachusetts, signaling the possible end of the health-care bill, Democrats are looking for places to put blame. Some blame Republicans for their all out obstructionism and the time wasted attempting to placate them. Others blame their own party -- progressives and blue dogs -- whose dillydallying held up the bill.
Yet no one is willing to point the finger at the obvious culprit: Teddy Kennedy. If he hadn't so thoughtlessly died at a totally inappropriate moment, the party would not be in the state it's in.
Ironically, with a little strategizing, even Kennedy's death needn't have killed the bill. I would put forth that the Democrats could have engaged in a kind of "Weekend at Bernie's" scenario. Democratic aides could have carried Kennedy's corpse to and from his Senate duties, and, when it came time to cast a vote on the bill, could have raised Kennedy's hand in a "yea" vote. But the Democrats have never been known for this kind of out of the box thinking.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
I'm always hearing various friends and family rave about the Macintosh user interface and its supposed superiority to Windows. And I was basically neutral on this topic for a long time --- I've worked with Windows machines for about 15 years and lord knows they have all sorts of UI quirks I hate. Being that I seldom spent time on a Mac, I had little insight into how they compared with Windows. But, I've recently moved into a house with a Mac, and have started to gain some experience. My verdict:
THE MACINTOSH UI BLOWS DONKEY BALLS!!
I'm actually writing this post to record the specifics of the experience I just had so the next time one of these Mac lovers starts raving about how awesome the UI is I can pull out this blog and shove it in their face.
The power went out in the house today. After it came back on, I had to figure out to reactivate the wireless network on the Macintosh. First problem --- how to turn the Macintosh on. There's no obvious on button. I finally find some little piece of black plastic on the back of the machine, press it, and the Macintosh starts. This probably seems like a silly point to regular Mac users who have long since learned where the on button is, but, Jesus Christ people, turning on a computer should not require what is referred to in the software application industry as "user education." It should be painfully obvious -- preferably large and red with the words "on" or "power" on it. But I guess Mac users, who are all art snobs, would rather have their beautiful Starship Enterprise aesthetics then, you know, actual function.
So then it's a question of turning on the wireless router. I type "wireless router" into Help, and click on a promising result. It says I need to go to "Apple Menu > System Preferences." Well, what the fuck is the Apple menu, and where the fuck is it? After some frustration, I hazard a guess that it's this tiny apple icon* in the far left-hand corner. I click that and sure enough a menu appears with many options, one of them being "System Preferences."
But I need to stop here and make a side point. Jump back to when I'm looking at this help page which says I need to go to "Apple Menu > System Preferences." For years, Windows would dish up similar Help advice like telling me to go to "Start > Control Panel." And I would always say, why can't they make the words "Control Panel" a hyperlink that one can click, and thus pop open the Control Panel, as opposed to having to drag their mouse all the way over to the Start button, and then select the Control Panel from the options. Well, finally a couple generations of operating systems ago, Microsoft got this and implemented it. That's to their credit, I guess, though frankly it seems like something that should have been done in Windows 95. Anyway, the fucktards at Apple STILL HAVEN'T FIGURED THIS OUT!
Okay, so we're back to where I'm clicking "System Preferences." Nothing seems to be appearing. I minimize some windows and see that the System Preferences did pop up underneath one of the windows I had open and GAVE NO INDICATION WHATSOEVER! On top of that, it claimed that the wireless router was on. I turned it off, then turned it on again and suddenly the wireless network is working in a house, making me suspect it was not really on when it claimed to be.
I wouldn't really complain about all this if not for the fact so many people are constantly raving about how "easy to use" the Mac is. I'm the first to give Apple credit for any one of the rather ingenious and functional UI inventions they've implemented over the years --- the accelerometer on the iPod for instance. But, I'm sorry people, they have got a ways to go.
And, by the way, have you tried to use Garage Band? That thing must have been designed by blind monkeys. (If anyone can tell me how to create music by dragging and dropping notes, as opposed to recording either a sound or MIDI instrument, I'd appreciate it.)
* Again, this probably seems like a minor point to regular Mac users, but a normal user, unfamiliar with the system (not someone like myself whose gargantuan intellect and stunning good looks allow them to circumvent most problems) could be stopped in their tracks. At the very least, making the word "Apple Menu" a link to some other help file which describes what it is would be useful -- and something Windows has largely implemented in their help system.
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