"So I thought, I wonder if my place is still there. When I got home, sure enough, it wasn't there ... The vehicles were gone, everything. It was completely toasted. I've never seen such a complete burn. It's like someone did it on purpose to really destroy every aspect of it."
Said Mel Gibson...
NEW – Mel Gibson's Malibu Mansion Burned Down While He Was Filming Joe Rogan's Podcast
"I was doing the Rogan podcast and I was kind of ill at ease while we were talking because I knew my neighborhood was on fire. So I thought, I wonder if my place is still there. When I got… pic.twitter.com/TvknivxywB
"... that k sounds make the best punchlines. ('I don’t know if you can print this, but my example was always: "Punched in the dick" is nowhere near as funny as "kicked in the cock."') Saturday Night originated in the same lifelong curiosity. 'Anyone who is a self-described comedy nerd—you’re interested in the weird chemistry of what makes something funny,' he says.... 'We interviewed everyone we could find that was alive from opening night,' Reitman says. 'Every living cast member, every living writer, people from the art department, costumes, hair and makeup, NBC pages, members of Billy Preston’s band—I mean, anyone we could find.'... [Laraine] Newman’s anecdote about guest host George Carlin... objecting to a sketch about Alexander the Great’s high school reunion became a key part of the film, and she’s grateful that Reitman focused on the strange mix of stakes they faced that night. 'We were led to believe that nobody was watching—11:30 p.m. was considered just a dead time,' she says. 'There was no expectation that the show would last. So really, it was like we were doing the show for ourselves....'"
"'George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,' an hour-long video supposedly written, voiced and illustrated by an AI model trained on decades of Carlin’s comedy routines, constituted copyright infringement, according to the lawsuit filed this week in the Central District of California."
George Carlin's daughter Kelly said: "The ‘George Carlin’ in that video is not the beautiful human who defined his generation and raised me with love. It is a poorly-executed facsimile cobbled together by unscrupulous individuals to capitalize on the extraordinary goodwill my father established with his adoring fan base."
How is it different from a live human being who does a George Carlin impersonation? We've accepted impersonators for a long time. They "capitalize on the extraordinary goodwill" of beloved performers. Is it that impersonators need to work hard and we respect human labor? Or is it that they are human and we can imagine being an impersonator but we can't imagine being A.I.?
"... certain reusable water bottles have become trends in their own right. The wide-mouthed, screw-top Nalgene — first popularized among campers and hikers in the 1970s — were everywhere in the late 2000s. ... In the following years, tall and heavy stainless-steel water carriers rose to prominence.... In 2018, Vanity Fair declared the Goop-approved water bottle with a whole natural crystal affixed to the inside it... the status symbol of the year.... In 2021, a $28 'motivational' gallon jug of water with encouragements for the drinker printed on it at each level ('12 p.m.: Keep drinking,' '2 p.m.: Halfway there!') briefly became a social-media sensation.... Around the same time... Sasha and Malia Obama... were noted as Hydro Flask users...."
Dropped an f-bomb. Give me a break. Saying "fuck" isn't the equivalent of violence. It's not a bomb. Say "f-word" if you're somewhere — where?! — where you can't say "fuck." But in this case it wasn't the f-word. It was the M-WORD.
Beto O'Rourke called a guy in the crowd "motherfucker." "Motherfucker" is a lot worse than "fuck." It has a separate entry on George Carlin's 1972 list of "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." As you can see at that last link, to Wikipedia, Carlin later spoke of some guy criticizing him saying "motherfucker is a duplication of the word fuck, technically, because fuck is the root form, motherfucker being derivative; therefore, it constitutes duplication. And I said, 'Hey, motherfucker, how did you get my phone number, anyway?'"
Anyway, what does NPR have to say about the pros and cons of Beto calling a guy in the crowd "motherfucker"?
Gaetz: "Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb." pic.twitter.com/0qqvun3Pf8
At least "look like a thumb" is an original image. But he's using a very old idea about feminists: They're the women who are so unattractive that they can't succeed in the traditional feminine way, which is by partnering with a man. And it's creepy to use the words "Nobody wants to impregnate you" when the format of your humor suggests that you're trying to say "Nobody wants to fuck you."
"... The [new HBO] documentary shows the comedian bantering about it with Johnny Carson on 'The Tonight Show' a couple of months later.
'What did they do to you in Milwaukee?' Carson asks Carlin.
'Well, what did they try to do to me … ?' Carlin replies, going into the old Blatz Beer jingle, 'I’m from Milwaukee, and I ought to know … The routine worked everywhere, really, very well … Except in Milwaukee, where they must really be bad words. One policeman took exception … apparently he hadn’t been listening in the locker room.' Carlin was arrested by a Milwaukee police officer who happened to be at Summerfest with his family.... The promoter rushed over to [Carlin's wife] Brenda, telling her that the police were going to arrest the comedian.... 'My mom knows that my dad is carrying weed and coke in his pockets,' [Carlin's daughter] Kelly remembers.... 'She grabbed a glass of water and walked out on to the stage, whispering in his ear, "Cops are here, exit Stage Left."' Carlin left the stage, Kelly says, emptying his pocket as he went.... Tom Schneider, then a young assistant district attorney, had been at Carlin's show.... Schneider's boss, who knew he'd been at the show, asked him if Carlin had disturbed the peace; Schneider told him Carlin received a standing ovation.
The charges were dismissed in December 1972."
You might think "Exit stage left" was a potentially confusing way to aim Carlin toward an escape route, but "Exit stage left" was a catchphrase of the time. Popularized by this:
"Few of us care in quite the same way if our choices in life would meet the approval of Johnny Carson or Andy Kaufman.... It’s still bracing to hear the bitter wordplay in his lament: 'It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.'... But the durability of Carlin’s material can be dangerous, too. Dislocated from the time and circumstances that inspired his work, the arguments he delivered can be made to serve purposes he didn’t intend.
As those who were closest to him have learned, when he is unable to advocate for himself, he can be made to seem like he supported any opinion at all. 'It is a daily battle for me,' said Kelly Carlin, the comedian’s daughter.... Kelly Carlin said her father was '99 percent progressive'... But he was also critical of Democrats and 'guilty white liberals,' while he endorsed other ideas that conservatives supported. He despised euphemism and the policing of language, reviled what he called 'the continued puss-ification of the American male' and rebuked his countrymen who would 'trade away a little of their freedom for the feeling — the illusion — of security.'"
If artists lose themselves in fantasies of independence, they become the tool of malefactors, who prefer to keep art apart from politics so that the work of oppression can continue undisturbed. So Mann wrote in an afterword to a 1937 book about the Spanish Civil War, adding that the poet who forswears politics is a “spiritually lost man.”...
[During] the time that the novelist spent at [Princeton U]niversity between 1938 and 1941... Mann called for “social self-discipline under the ideal of freedom”—a political philosophy that doubles as a personal one. He also said, “Let me tell you the whole truth: if ever Fascism should come to America, it will come in the name of ‘freedom.’ ”
That's a great quote — "if ever Fascism should come to America, it will come in the name of 'freedom'" — and I googled it to see if today's anti-freedom leftists had used it against conservatives.
Looking for Mann, I got Ronald Reagan: "If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism."
But it would be a mistake to think Reagan nicked it from Mann and that Mann was the originator of the "if fascism comes to America" clause. In the 1935 Sinclair Lewis book, “It Can’t Happen Here,” there's: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying the cross.”
You get the picture. There's a lot of If fascism ever comes to America, it will look like my opponents.
The "conservative manifesto" referred to in the New Yorker article title is "Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man." That book was recently reissued — here — and Ross is displeased by the new introduction, which he says "trivializes" Mann, putting him at "the level of an op-ed columnist":
"By sterilizing our bodies and spaces... we may be doing more harm than good.... [T]he microbes we encounter in daily life — on other people and in our spaces — are the data that the immune system relies on to program and regulate its operations.
Deprived of these exposures, especially at the start of life, the immune system is prone to malfunction. The result can be allergies, asthma, autoimmune disorders, obesity, Type 2 diabetes and other chronic medical conditions.... Hygiene zealotry not only deprives people of interactions with helpful bacteria, but it may also be driving some essential microbes into extinction.... In the months to come, the health of our microbiomes may partly depend on the willingness of those who are vaccinated and at low risk to take off their masks and intermingle with one another, as we all used to do. 'A lot of things people do when they’re together that we didn’t use to think about — shaking hands or embracing, kissing or hugging — these sorts of sociocultural practices could play a part in the exchange of microbes,' says Tamara Giles-Vernick... a medical anthropologist...."
There are lots of different risks, and avoiding some causes you to take others. I'd say let the people who want to go without masks — and get back to hugging and kissing — do it. Study how it works out. This idea of just being extra careful about everything until we're sure isn't even coherent, as this article shows, because taking extra care to avoid contact with germs is a failure to take care to maintain exposure to good microbes. Those of us who are vaccinated should be free to encounter the world again.
Notice that warning: "Deprived of these exposures, especially at the start of life, the immune system is prone to malfunction." That means the lockdown is particularly risky for babies and young children (who are also the ones with the least risk from the disease).
FROM THE EMAIL: Mike sends this apt bit from George Carlin:
The "root causes" language is a reference to something Harris said: "While we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law. We also — because we can chew gum and walk at the same time — must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek."
Walking and chewing gum at the same time is a metaphor,* initially designed to insult someone who can't do these 2 relatively easy-to-do things simultaneously. It doesn't work too much as a brag, unless you're saying that the 2 things are easy to do at the same time.
What are the 2 things? There's a huge difference between wanting people not to come + caring about root causes and effectively enforcing all of the law restricting the border + changing the conditions that are causing people to come to the border.
The first set of things is easy to do, damned near effortless. The second set is nearly impossible, done together or done one at a time. Might as well laugh about doing them together because you know you're not going to make much progress at all on either.
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* "The term is recorded in a Texas newspaper in [1964]. President Lyndon Johnson allegedly said that then-Congressman (and later president) Gerald Ford couldn’t 'fart and chew gum at the same time.'
As early as the 1900s, it was observed that women talk a lot and chew gum a lot, but don’t 'talk and chew gum at the same time.' Entertainer and cowboy philosopher Will Rogers was described in 1926 as 'the only man in the world who can chew gum and talk sense at the same time.' It’s probable that the saying 'walk and chew gum at the same time' developed from the earlier 'talk and chew gum at the same time.'" That's at Quora. To speculate more coherently: People said women can't "talk and chew gum at the same time," then some crude fellows thought it was funner to say "walk and fart at the same time" — because walking and farting is a very funny subject. (I've seen George Carlin demonstrate the hilarity.) Then it got turned around for fun to LBJ's "fart and chew gum at the same time." Then it got cleaned up into the present-day corruption, "walk and chew gum at the same time."
Almost every day of his young tenure, President Biden has entered the State Dining Room, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln looking down and wood burning in the fireplace. He speaks on the planned topic of the day. He sits at an undersized desk and searches for a pen to sign his latest stack of executive orders. Within 30 minutes of entering the camera’s frame, he has left it.
It is all plotted and planned. Little room is left for the unscripted or the unusual.
Biden’s first full week in office has showcased an almost jarring departure from his predecessor’s chaotic style, providing the first window into a tenure whose mission is not only to remake the White House in Biden’s image but also to return the presidency itself to what he sees as its rightful path.
The result so far is a 9-to-5 presidency — a tightly scripted burst of activity that was charted over the past few months, as Biden seeks to avoid heated conflict and stick to his plan of lowering the political temperature to a level that many Americans can tune out.
So it's a plan, eh? What else is in the plan? What will you do after we tune out? Or is this all quite beneficent — a plan to give us rest and relief, respite from the frenetic, attention-seeking Trump?
By the way, I found many things to laugh at in those paragraphs. Just to flag things that amused me: "young tenure," "wood burning in the fireplace," searching for a pen on "an undersized desk," "Dining Room... little room," a "departure... providing" a "window" (or is it a "chaotic style, providing" a "window"), a "tenure" with a "mission.".
This post gets my "I'm for boring" tag, and I am for boring. I would like government to operate in a boring, reliable way. I envision hard-working experts, solving problems, serving the public interest. But I do see the downside of making it look boring. If you were really up to no good, you'd try to create a nothing-to-see-here atmosphere.
Naturally, I think of George Carlin's "It's The Quiet Ones You Gotta Watch." Of course, it's absurd to think that whenever nothing looks out of the ordinary, that's exactly when you should be most alarmed.
"You know there's no sound to represent it — any more than there is for a question. Suppose you have said to your friend 'You are better to-day,' and that you want him to understand that you are asking him a question, what can be simpler than just to make a '?' in the air with your finger? He would understand you in a moment!"
Wrote Lewis Carroll in "Sylvie and Bruno," describing the gesture made while singing the words "this was their wish" in this stanza of a song:
“The Badgers did not care to talk to Fish:
They did not dote on Herrings' songs:
They never had experienced the dish
To which that name belongs:
And oh, to pinch their tails,' (this was their wish,)
'With tongs, yea, tongs, and tongs!'”
I print the entire stanza because of the badgers, of course, this being Wisconsin. But why — you might ask, marking the air with a "?" — am I fooling around inside "Sylvie and Bruno" this evening? I have an answer!
I was reading the Wikipedia article "Air quotes," which naturally traces the origin of air quotes. It gives Lewis Carroll credit for arriving at the basic idea — albeit only with parentheses and question marks — all the way back in 1889.
The oldest definite use of air quotes seems to be Glenda Farrell the 1937 screwball comedy, "Breakfast for Two":
Isn't that wonderful! But air quotes got too popular in the 1990s and became subject to derision, notably by Steve Martin, Chris Farley, and Dr. Evil. And here's George Carlin in 1996:
People got the message and restrained themselves, but air quotes were still around enough to make their appearance in the fall of 2002, in the thing I just watched that got me started on this little research project, Episode 3 of Season 9 of "Friends" — where Joey (ostensibly the dumbest person in the group) does not understand how air quotes work:
"A pomodoro, once started, must not be interrupted, otherwise it has to be abandoned. But in this stringency, there is relief: You are not allowed to extend a pomodoro, either. After a set of four 25-minute intervals are completed, you’re supposed to take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes before continuing.... We waste hours keeping on going when our concentration’s long gone, caught in drowsy, drawn-out moments staring glumly at a screen, and not only when we’re supposed to be doing our jobs. Leisure time has also taken on a timeless, hypnotic quality lately. Everything our culture produces feels at once never-ending and meaningless — or perhaps meaningless because it’s never-ending. Movies explode into cinematic universes; series are designed to be binge-watched; every video, song or podcast tips over and auto-plays another; social media scrolls toward infinity and the news never stops broadcasting. An everlasting present expands around us in all directions, and it’s easy to get lost in there — all the more reason to set some boundaries. Now that my breaks are short and fleeting, I think more carefully about what I’d like to do with them, and I’ve found it’s quite different from the unimaginative temptations I would otherwise default to (flopping on the sofa, scrolling on my phone, becoming annoyed). Instead I’ll make a sandwich, do a quick French lesson, reply to a few texts, have a shower, go to the laundromat; and such humdrum activities, now that they’re restricted, have become sources of great pleasure."
"Pomodoro" is just the Italian word for tomato. The technique was invented by a guy who used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. These are quite common. Here — you can buy one on Amazon. Perhaps that would make the technique feel more real, more tangible. Oh, now I want a tangerine timer.
And here's the inventer's book, "The Pomodoro Technique." I bought that. I'm interested in breaking my concentration and getting little things jauntily done.
And I like the way it interlaced with something I heard David Mamet say in his Master Class "Dramatic Writing." It was something like: It's hard-wired in the human being to fall into a minor lull every 7 minutes and a major lull at every third interval of 7 — basically every 20 minutes — so it's best to think of 7-minute-long scenes and 20 minute acts.
I have a vague memory from my college years of calling out "7 minute lull!" when a conversation fell into what was about to be an uncomfortable silence. That was based on some sort of scientific study we'd heard about that said conversations have a rhythmic cycle with a lull every 7 minutes. Was it 7? I'm not sure. Does anyone else remember calling out "X minute lull" back around 1970?
Ah! I did some research. It is "7 minute lull" and George Carlin has something to say about it:
"Marriage is the death of hope" brings up webpages that purport to quote Woody Allen. I'm dubious.
"Marriage is the death of romance" gets me to some boring relationship advice plus the assertion that it's the translation of a Chinese proverb:
I'm dubious. It used to be very common to hear characters on TV (often in ads) say "Ancient Chinese wisdom" (in a fake Chinese accent) followed by something in the form of a proverb (almost always a manifestly fake proverb).
"Marriage is the death of love" gets me to boring relationship advice, some more groping after a Chinese proverb, and a review of a play about Maynard Jackson, "the first African-American mayor of a major U.S. city, elected in Atlanta in 1973":
[Playwright Pearl Cleage has a] sagacious way with words, and epigrammatic pearls like "There's no greater cynic than a failed romantic" (a variation on George Carlin’s "Scratch a cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist"). Later, when Evey recalls an epiphany of self-discovery in Paris, she tells J.P., "Marriage is the death of love."
“The only thing that really worries me is what happens if I hit him, for his sake and for mine as well,” [Mayor] Jackson said.
“[He] will not land one punch in one round, and if he dreamed it, he better wake up and apologize!” Ali responded....
But Jackson won with a technical knockout:
“Those trunks he had saved him because he had them too high.,” Ali told reporters. “I couldn’t hit him low because you’re not supposed to hit below the belt. He came with the trunks up to his breast, therefore I couldn’t hit him in the effective spots ‘cause he’s so big, he’s like a balloon, and if you hit him he’ll bust.”
Some people are hot to destroy all the comedians who made us laugh by shocking us with their transgressions. I see Sarah Silverman is on the chopping block for tweeting, "Hey, is it considered molestation if the child makes the first move? I'm gonna need a quick answer on this." That was back in '09, when Obama was President, and people got the idea of a comedian posing as evil and not actually being evil. There was a word for it back in the old days. A "joke,"* we called it.
I was just by chance paging through a book written by one of our all-time greatest comedians, George Carlin, and I ran across this:
The book is "Napalm and Silly Putty." The publication date is telling: July 1, 2001. Wait 2 months and 10 days and nothing will ever be funny again. Or at least that's what I, personally, thought on the morning of September 11th. And then I heard myself make a joke: "I guess we don't have to talk about Chandra Levy anymore."
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* "Something said or done to excite laughter or amusement; a witticism, a jest; jesting, raillery...." (OED).
1670 J. Eachard Grounds Contempt of Clergy 34 To have the right knack of letting off a Joque, and of pleasing the Humsters....
1748 S. Richardson Clarissa VI. liii. 210 I..should not forbear to cut a joke, were I upon the scaffold....
1790 J. Beattie Elem. Moral Sci. I. i. i. 117 The practice of turning every thing into joke and ridicule is a dangerous levity of imagination.
Yes, and the practice of turning everything into a nonjoke is a dangerous gloominess of imagination.
"Humsters" in case you are wondering are people who express approval by humming. It's an obsolete word, and who needs it? Not until we revive the practice of expressing approval by humming.
[The ethnomusicologist] Joseph Jordania suggested that humming could have played an important role in the early human (hominid) evolution as contact calls. Many social animals produce seemingly haphazard and indistinct sounds (like chicken cluck) when they are going about their everyday business (foraging, feeding). These sounds have two functions: (1) to let group members know that they are among kin and there is no danger, and (2) in case of the appearance of any signs of danger (suspicious sounds, movements in a forest), the animal that notices danger first, stops moving, stops producing sounds, remains silent and looks in the direction of the danger sign. Other animals quickly follow suit and very soon all the group is silent and is scanning the environment for the possible danger. Charles Darwin was the first to notice this phenomenon on the example of the wild horses and the cattle. Joseph Jordania suggested that for humans, as for many social animals, silence can be a sign of danger, and that's why gentle humming and musical sounds relax humans (see the use of gentle music in music therapy, lullabies).
Some experts have recalculated and say we have 20 years instead of 3 in the "carbon budget" (that is, how long it will take, at the current rate of emissions, to warm the earth to 2.7°F beyond what it was in the late 19th century — the "pre-industrial" time).
IN THE COMMENTS: Expat(ish) says:
Hate to be picky about a headline written by a non-STEM person, but the "calculations" don't give the "Earth some time."
First, the *new* calculations predict that more time will pass before X.
Secondly, there will still be time for the "Earth" (why is that capitalized?) no matter the climate. Unless the SMOD breaks it to smithereens when Trump is re-elected.
1. If you follow The Chicago Manual of Style, the word "the" determines whether you capitalize Earth/earth. So if they were hot to capitalize "Earth," they should have left out the "the." Notice that we always capitalize "Mars" and "Venus," but we never say "The Mars" or "The Venus" ... when we're talking about planets. One can imagine a museum curator saying "We need to relocate the Venus to the stairwell."
2. Earth isn't in the market for time. That's a human desire. George Carlin said it best (NSFW):
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