* I enjoyed the thoughtful responses in the previous post. And the thoughtless response, “Red truck good war ice cream!”
* You know how some people begin talking about a complicated subject with, “I’m no expert or anything, but…”? Is it just me, or is this the linguistic equivalent of prefacing your sentence, “Now, I’m a dumb ass, but…”?
Let’s say a friend is taking a herbal supplement for depression, like St. John’s Wort. He tells you how much better he feels after taking it for a few weeks. Later, you read in the newspaper about a long-term, comprehensive study that says it proves that the herbal supplement has no medical affect. Do you tell your friend about the study?
And what conditions, if any, would make you change your answer?
In politics, the phrase “new low” is used so often in fits of hyperbole that it is almost a signal that the person using it is biased and exaggerating. So I hesitate about calling this a new low from the Bush campaign. But I can’t think of a better candidate.
Several months ago, Moveon.org ran a contest where people could submit 30-second political commercials against President Bush. The best commercial would be aired a few times on national TV.
Over 1,500 ads were submitted and posted on the web site so people could vote for their favorites. One of these ads compared George Bush to Hitler. I’m not familiar with Moveon.org’s screening process and whether anyone saw the ad before it was posted. Regardless, the ad shouldn’t have been on the site because, in theory, it could have won. Also, it insulted a lot of fans of Hitler.
RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie and other conservative groups tried to equate the view in the ad with the views of Moveon.org and called on the nine Democratic presidential candidates at the time to denounce the ad, Moveon.org, and just for good measure, other evil groups like Planned Parenthood and Trader Joe’s. Moveon.org pulled the ad, denounced the views expressed in it, and a few days later the RNC moved on to the next scandal: John Kerry’s Botox injections.
That’s the background for what may be the Bush campaign’s new low, a new advertisement that tries to tie the aforementioned ad to John Kerry. The Bush campaign’s ad is on the campaign site’s front page, and contains many informative facts I did not know, like Al Gore compared President Bush to Hitler in a speech. How the hell did Gore keep that faux pas from every single major and minor media outlet? Maybe that was when he had a beard and no one was listening to him.
I should mention that, on a comedy note, the end is absolutely hilarious.
…about your new haircut.
“Did you do that on purpose?”
…after telling someone that you walk dogs.
“Oh, Jason. Always with the jokes.”
…from an audience member at an open mike after a particularly bad stuttering day.
“What’s the deal with your stuttering? I mean, you don’t really stutter that much, do you?”
Speaking of which, I’ll be in Baltimore at the National Stuttering Association convention for the next few days. It started today; I got back a hour ago. I rented a SUV and I’m commuting from home (60 miles one way) in an attempt to simultaneously destroy the environment and save money. You know how some people in DC sell The Washington Post or bags of fruit while people are stopped at red lights? Today, I saw a man selling hair clippers.
(About the quotes: friends told me the first two, and I was instantly amused. The third happened almost a year ago, and while I think about the comment rarely, part of me hasn’t yet released the Anger Bird so it can fly over the ocean and eventually drown in the Sea of Forgiveness due to starvation, the lack of food caused by overfishing of the Carp of Seething Resentment by the Wharfing Boats of Willy-Nilly. )
During an interview with NPR today, Clinton was asked if he thought the U.S. intelligence bureaus should be restructured so they came under one, overarching department. Clinton gave a qualified yes. He said it would be a good idea on the condition that the restructuring did not create an atmosphere where homogeneous opinions would be encouraged and dissenting views suppressed.
Clinton’s answer gave me an idea for another sporadic Pancake City contest. The contest: the first person to hear President Bush say a four syllable word gets a prize.
The rules:
1. The word must be four or more syllables.
2. Compound words and proper names are not valid (e.g. “evil-doers,” “Condoleezza”).
3. The word must have as many syllables as it is supposed to have.
4. Excluded words: all forms of terrorist and intelligence (e.g. “terrorisms,” “intelligenced”)
The first person to post the word, preferably with the context and time heard, wins a yet-to-be determined prize. Something small but personalized. The contest end date is whenever this post leaves the main page, approximately a week from now.
Good luck and happy hunting.
Monster.com’s current ad campaign features job hunters describing their skills and what they can offer to employers. The TV ads are a mix of folksiness and oatmeal container slogans. “Hi, I’m Bud. I have 23 years experience in systems engineering and analysis. If you want something done, I’ll do it right. The way it should be done.”
The tagline is, “There are thousands of candidates just like Bud on Monster.com,” which is good, because this Bud doesn’t come in a six-pack. But the message distracts from the real point. If your job web site has to resort to promoting unemployed people in a national television campaign to find them work, then either you need to expand the search engine categories from “easy work,” “hard work,” and “work it like a Polaroid”, or the economy is doing much worse than any of us have thought.
The first time I saw this commercial, I expected it to end with “I’m John Kerry and I approved of this ad.” A few tweaks and it becomes a diatribe against President Bush.
“Hi, I’m Bud. Thanks to George Bush, I have to appear in 1.2 million homes five times a week to even hope of tasting once again the sweet nectar of a full-time job. I can barely afford to feed my children. Bud Light is starving and last week, my daughter, Bud Dry, went to the hospital for dehydration. I can’t even afford the drugs she needs in America. If it weren’t for our friends, the Molson’s, we’d be on the street, lying in a gutter somewhere.”
If you missed The Daily Show last night, go out of your way to catch the first 10 minutes of the repeat tonight at 7:00 (in the DC area). It encapsulates the best about The Daily Show and reminds one of the worst habits of major media outlets: avoiding or being timid about saying the truth in fear of seeming biased.
* I saw a video clip of Britney Spears after her knee injury. Britney Spears is the only person in the world who can wear a full-leg cast and still show some butt cheek.
* I stutter a lot on vowels. I’m the only American who wishes he was born in a better place: Kyrgyzstan. Maybe the two countries can set up an exchange program with me and a stutterer we know loves apple pie, aspires to assist others, and absolutely hates the KKK.
* In my sketch writing class yesterday, we each made a list of three emotions, three professions, and three physical deformities. We put each word on a separate slip of paper, organized them into three piles, and picked one from each pile to generate a character. My list is “confused, carpenter, no hair”. At the end of the class, the instructor asked three of us to hold onto a pile for next week.
I got the physical deformity pile. When I woke up today for a walk, I found out that the slips of paper fell out of my notebook and were scattered on the ground. I wonder what people walking by thought of seeing a pile of paper with words on it like “deformed head,” “No Leg (amputee)” and “dozens of ears.”
I believe there should be balance in life. That’s why I drink expired Kaopectate.
9/11 Plot Vetted by Bin Laden
See? Vetted. It’s everywhere. It’s the new “Kiss my grits.”
O’Brien to Leave ‘Access Hollywood’
Cites contractual dispute, co-hosts calling his reporting “O’crap.”
Al Qaeda-Iraq Link Dismissed
Cheney acknowledges error, admits he should have stuck with original “Al Qaeda-Kevin Bacon-Iraq” link. Rues Cheney: “When you’re making a Truth Sandwich, you can’t leave out the Bacon.”
Retired Diplomats Assail Bush Team
Retired diplomats join active diplomats, part-time diplomats, career diplomats, temporary diplomats, wipe you feet on the diplomat, the cast of Sesame Street, and other people who hate freedom.
The DC-based Theater Lab is offering a six-week sketch writing class. The class is $180 and starts this Sunday. I took it when it was last offered, a year and a half ago, and I’m taking it again. If you want more info about it, see the hyperlinked word “class” up above? Don’t click on it. Click on this link instead.
Even though Google’s free email service, Gmail, is still in its beta stage and unavailable to the general public, it is already affecting its competitors. Yahoo! announced today that it is raising the storage limit on its free acconts from 5 mb to 100 mb and its attachment limit from 2 mb to 10 mb. Google offers 1 gig of storage.
While Yahoo! still offers an upgraded account with 2 gigs, they have acknowledged the obvious: no one is going to be making money from offering more email storage from now on. I’ll be shocked if Hotmail doesn’t follow Yahoo!’s lead in the next few weeks. It’s inconvenience to switch email accounts, but 998 extra megabytes of storage and a spam-free account (at least for the first days) does a lot to quell inconvenience.
vetted
I may say something more profound than this later, but suffice to say I strongly suspect that, besides the word’s unfortunate lack of the letter ’s’, the word ‘vetted’ has been printed more times in the last year than the previously five combined.
Steven Wright is performing at DC’s Warner Theater on Friday June 18, 2004. Tickets are $30.50, not including Ticketmaster’s well-deserved $7.20 convenience fee. I didn’t know Steven Wright was still performing. The ticket price is on the edge of how much I’m willing to pay and I’m thinking of going. The only caveat is that I hear he turned into a prop comic.
