Ron DeSantis does not wear women's suits.

Deepfakes could lead people to mistakenly believe that Ron DeSantis was the star of the beloved NBC sitcom “The Office” https://t.co/l1hUOqPBPY

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 27, 2023

By its own account, "Cubik is 'a deeply human organization' that 'seeks personalities before skills" — "you don’t just work at Cubik, you 'Be Cubik.'"

"An online quiz prompts you to discover your Cubik profile: Reflection, Action, or Relation. 'Cubik’s V.I.P. drinks have hardly begun and you’ve already talked to all the guests,' the description for the last category reads. 'You now know at which sport Jean-Yves is unbeatable, where Joëlle will spend her vacations, and that Antoine has planned to cross Slovenia on a tandem bicycle.' Whew. Jean-Yves, Joëlle, and Antoine might be having the time of their lives. Or they might be frantically texting the babysitter or wishing they were at yoga class. Cubik boasts, 'Because we are proud of our culture, we have many rituals for getting together.' These include an annual corporate retreat just before the summer holidays, 'to celebrate the past season and take a step back from working.'"

From "The Right Not to Be Fun at Work/In a win for workplace dignity, a French high court recently decreed that businesses cannot force their employees to participate in supposedly enjoyable activities" (The New Yorker).

Can the capacity to have fun be made one of your professional responsibilities? It's one thing to be allowed to have fun or even encouraged to have fun or rewarded for bringing your delightful spirit of fun to the workplace. But it's quite another to fire you because you're no fun. But what is this "fun"? An employer's idea of fun can be distorted and burdensome. Isn't that what the TV show "The Office" is about? I don't know, I don't watch it, because I can't stand that sort of thing even vicariously.

I've got 9 TikToks for you tonight — all things I liked. I invite you to appreciate them too.

1. The crochet genius.

2. A Kardashian Christmas.

3. The joy of Neptune.

4. The importance of routine during the long polar night.

5. The importance of layers when dressing for winter.

6. Let a girl show you how to approach a girl.

7. Celine Dion explains her rare disease — stiff person syndrome.

8. He gets AI to write a folk song about his dog dying.

9. AI envisions the cast of "The Office" as babies.

"Musk’s interest in electric cars or Ukraine comes and goes, but the richest man in the world is constantly joking."

"A shameless punchline thief, he doesn’t discriminate between dad jokes or insult humor. On Twitter, he’s Beavis and Butt-Head, chuckling at everything.... His stated reason for buying Twitter is to expand free speech, a cause he took up in part because it suspended the account of a conservative parody site, the Babylon Bee, after a post. Days after taking over Twitter, he tweeted: 'Comedy is legal again.' Then people started making fun of him and you’ll never believe what happened next. Elon Musk, comedy savior, transformed into the joke police.... The reason he’s found himself cast in this public drama as the humorless square, the Comstockian scold, is that while labeling something parody might be bad for comedy, it can be essential for credibility.... While he’s not especially good at comedy, Musk is a wonderful comic character: The boss who thinks he’s funny but isn’t. He’s Michael Scott from 'The Office,' whose terrible jokes everyone must if not laugh at, at least put up with.... Musk doesn’t need to own his haters in a tweet. They already work for him for free." 

From "Hey, Elon Musk, Comedy Doesn’t Want to Be Legal/He’s Twitter’s chief jokester, but as his free-speech impulses conflict with his push to label parodies, he shows a misunderstanding of how humor works" by Jason Zinoman, the NYT comedy critic.

Zinoman packs a lot into that column. It was hard to excerpt! As a reader, I felt flattered to be assumed to know what "Comstockian" means. If anyone needs to brush up on the story of Anthony Comstock, here's his Wikipedia article. Excerpt:

"A lawyer I just interviewed told me essentially that there was no reason to go into the office at his firm since no one was there, so if you go in, you are all alone."

"He works from home, as does almost everyone. It is just no fun, and there is really no law firm at all. Just a bunch of people logging in. That is why he is interviewing with me — because he wants a place to go where he has friends and human interaction.... At my firm, I am proud to say — and, indeed, the whole point of the firm — is that we are together. We are having fun with each other. We all have friends here. We are a team. We are in the office partly to do work, and partly so we can all add value to each other. Professional value, emotional value, inspirational value, value when we are down to get picked up, value to have the thrill of teaching and being taught, and every other kind of value. Yes, we have bad days of stress, but overall it is fun to be in our office with our friends.... If you are the employer — the partners — you need to make sure your office is one that people want to go to. Or they won’t go in, and as I said, it is game over, sooner or later."

From "Work From Home = Dead Law Firm/Working at home, to your bosses, can make you seem nothing more than a fungible billing unit" by Bruce M. Stachenfeld (Above the Law).

(I only clicked through to that article because of the picture, which was displayed in a much larger version at Facebook. It accounts for my use of the "men in shorts" tag.) 

ADDED: The linked article takes the extrovert's perspective and much of human life has been structured around the preferences and capabilities of the extrovert. The lockdown imposed the structuring that would have been chosen all along by the introverts — if only they'd been vocal and active enough to structure the lives of others the way they would structure it for themselves. Now, the extroverts want to deprive them of working conditions that served them well. The extroverts presume the are the normal we've got to get back to.

I can't watch the TV show "The Office" because office life makes me feel bad, but isn't the opinion expressed in that article pretty close to the attitude expressed by the boss on that show: "We are having fun with each other. We all have friends here. We are a team. We are in the office partly to do work, and partly so we can all add value to each other...."

When you are the guy who says things like that, you don't understand how it feels to those who don't say things like that.

"I think there’s the potential for the whole range of human emotions, right from humiliation when you give someone a gift. It’s important to us how others feel about our behavior and how it comes across."

Said a psychologist, quoted in "Millennials Want To Ban Secret Santa Because It Gives Them Anxiety" (The Daily Wire).

I'm tired of the reflexive attacks on "snowflake" millennials. Save it for when they really deserve it. Feeling bad about "Secret Santa" events at work is not some special new problem. It's always made people feel bad! I've only been stuck inside one of these things once in my life, and it was way back in the 1970s. It was bad then and it's still bad. I'll bet there are episodes of "The Office" about Secret Santa parties that made everyone — Boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials — feel bad. I don't know, and the reason I don't know is that office stuff like that makes me feel so bad that I cannot enjoy watching a sitcom about it. And this is leftover bad feeling from the 1970s. Millennials want to ban Secret Santa because it gives them anxiety?! Everyone wants to ban Secret Santa because it gives them anxiety. Now, that's hyperbole, so don't tell me you like Secret Santa. Obviously, some people like it. I'm sure on "The Office" there are episodes that reveal what kind of people like Secret Santa and take the lead in making sure the horrible festivity is perpetuated.

Okay, I looked it up. There is a "Secret Santa" episode of "The Office," Season 6, Episode 13. I'm not going to watch it.

"If we did implement a wealth tax, should it tax tenure?"

"Professorial tenure is, after all, a valuable asset. As long as you show up and teach your classes, and you don’t make passes at your students or steal from the department’s petty cash drawer, you can draw a paycheck for the rest of your working life."

That's Megan McArdle, possibly pushing back the lefty academics who are enthusiastic about taxing wealth.

Midway through the piece, she shifts topics from tenure as wealth to the enjoying your job as wealth. Instead of continuing with the job of professor — a job I find immensely enjoyable — she talks about the job of big-media news reporter — maybe because it's the job she knows but maybe because she wants to push back lefty reporters.

She compares the job of big-media news reporters to the job of someone working in a non-famous accounting department. This part of the article amused me because — even though I agree jobs that pay the same may have greatly different value — McArdle, a big-media reporter, assumes that being a big-media reporter is immensely more enjoyable than working in accounting. She regards things like work travel and getting fed at receptions and seeing that other people recognize the name of your employer as big pluses. But some people like to stay close to home and loath aspects of work that resemble genuine social functions with friends and scoff or puzzle at lines like: "When [a big-media reporter] tells people where he works, he gets to see their eyes light up and his impressiveness immediately rise four notches — six, if he reports on something really cool."

It's far more subjective than McArdle acknowledges. But even if we could all agree that it's better to eat out and get far from home and impress people with the name of your employer, we couldn't put a number on it. Imagine doing your taxes and getting to the line where you're supposed to put a dollar value on the enjoyability of your job. Did you just double your salary? Or were you trying to eke out a deduction?

McArdle doesn't really support trying to tax these things. She's mainly brainstorming in resistance to the charms of the book she is reading, Thomas Piketty’s "Capital in the Twenty-First Century."

ADDED: Rereading my phrase "aspects of work that resemble genuine social functions with friends," I am reminded of the idea of the "uncanny valley":

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of human aesthetics which holds that when human features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some human observers. Examples can be found in the fields of robotics, 3D computer animation, and in medical fields such as burn reconstruction, infectious diseases, neurological conditions, and plastic surgery. The "valley" refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of humans as subjects move toward a healthy, natural human likeness described in a function of a subject's aesthetic acceptability.

I think that some human observers feel this kind of revulsion about work-related social events. Isn't this what the TV show "The Office" was often about? I have to ask because I've barely ever watched the show, which I can't enjoy because of how awful these events do feel to me. It's the uncanny valley between work and your personal life. There are people who feel good in that place, and they are not only revolting, like a too-realistic robot, but they are often in a position to compel you to participate in these events, and they are powered on by their belief that they are making the workplace better and taking on the task of staging these horrors.

"The foolish leader, the two normal people who realize how foolish the leader is but are inhibited from saying so, and the creepy suck-up."

A template for fictional characters proposed by my son John in an iChat discussion about "Flight of the Conchords":

When I first saw the show, I felt like, "well, I'm not that interested in the two main characters, so I probably won't like the show very much."... It's weird for those 2 characters to be so central, yet I see almost no differentiation between them. In any given episode, Brett might be acting differently from Jemaine. But it doesn't seem to be part of any larger character trait — "oh, that's so Brett!"

I said: "sometimes having a bland center works as a plot device. i learned that when I studied 'tom jones' in high school." John said:

[Brett and Jemaine are] kind of like Jim and Pam on The Office. And Michael Scott is like Murray. And Mel is a lot like Dwight. Those 4 fit the same basic template.

So there's the more general idea of the dull central character (or characters) and the more specific idea of 2 bland central characters with 2 livelier characters, one of whom is the foolish leader and the other who's some kind of weird suck-up. Examples?

Humanizing the IRS.

This latest effort at extending the outrage at the IRS scandal is — in my opinion — backfiring.

These nameless, faceless bureaucrats are subjected to inane activities that look like something from "The Office." It doesn't look like profligate spending. It looks like sad and misguided morale-boosting.

Don't make me empathize with the taxman, you hapless scandalmongers!

What am I doing?! Simultaneously empathizing with the taxman and the scandalmongers?

Finding everyone here far too human, I will return to the mountaintop retreat I call Cruel Neutrality.

"You didn’t hear words like cringe-worthy or cringe-inducing in a complimentary way before."

"Does that make the show a classic? I don’t know. But I do like the fact that the show made people appreciate the entertainment value of cringing."

I'm one of the people who simply cannot enjoy watching "The Office." I understand why it's good and why people find it funny, and why the "cringe-inducing" quality is considered a sophisticated element of comedy, but it makes me feel bad. Even thinking about watching the show makes me feel bad.

By the way, the word "cringe" literally means (according to the unlinkable OED): "To contract the muscles of the body, usually involuntarily; to shrink into a bent or crooked position; to cower." Basically, you curl up into the fetal position. Figuratively, it means: "To experience an involuntary inward shiver of embarrassment, awkwardness, disgust, etc.; to wince or shrink inwardly; (hence) to feel extremely embarrassed or uncomfortable." The first historical example of the figurative meaning is:

1868   Harper's Mag. May 793/1   ‘I should like a smoke,’ was her only comment. I may have cringed at the idea of putting my pipe between those broken teeth, but I of course made haste to do what was hospitable.

The most recent is:

1993   Time 25 Jan. 18   Privately, Clinton advisers cringed at the wreckage left behind by all the U-turns.

Somehow I'm thinking about cigars...

Joe Biden at the debate reminded me of Steve Carrell in "The Office.

Here's something I wrote yesterday under the heading "How would you have reacted to Joe Biden?"

In real life, [t]here are different reactions, depending on how much of a friendship you have and... sometimes you're in a situation where you must maintain your demeanor, despite the other guy's antagonism. For example, in a job interview or a discussion with your boss or maybe when you were a kid and your father was exerting his authority. The VP debate is also, obviously, one of those situations. Imagine if Ryan had given Biden the finger? Ryan is a young man, he had to have been thinking of the various reactions that you'd use in an ordinary social situation, even as he rejected each one and told himself that he had to keep acting as if Biden were not behaving inappropriately.

A discussion with your boss.... It's like on "The Office." The employees are continually repressing their reaction to the boss — Steve Carrel's character Michael Scott. Example:



The boss is having a grand time, and he thinks he's a great guy, and socially, it's utterly dysfunctional, because he gets no proper feedback, because he's the boss. "The Office" has been so extraordinarily popular, I think, because viewers identify so strongly with the employees. Personally, I have difficulty watching the show. I understand the humor, but the identification with the oppressed employees is so strong that it's painful, and since it's the situation of this situation comedy, the pain is chronic.

Here's another "Office" clip:



Key line: "Have you ever been to Scranton Jan?" Scranton! Scranton is Joe Biden's home town!

"My name is Joe Biden and as strange as it sounds, everything important in my life that I’ve learned here in Scranton, I’m serious.... You are the grit, the sinew and the soul of what freedom is all about, sounds corny, but you really are, you are a special group of people, this is a special place and this soul is thick with pride and loyalty."

Picture Michael Scott pestering his employees with a morale-building speech when they just want to get back to work. Back to work... in Scranton... where unemployment is 10%.

"For Your Love."

The other day I heard the old Yardbirds song "For Your Love" on the satellite radio in the car. This was a 1965 song that I bought as a single before the Yardbirds first album came out. I was an early adopter when it comes to The Yardbirds. (I was — and am — particularly attached to "Having a Rave Up with The Yardbirds," which is not their first album and does not contain "For Your Love." )

For some reason, the satellite radio causes me to notice song lyrics, and the lyrics to "For Your Love" are embarrassing:

It will be the final season for "The Office" — and "all questions will be answered."

Including who's been making the documentary. Who are the people on the other side of the fictional camera that the characters have been talking to all these years? And why would any documentary about a relatively dull and unimportant office keep filming and filming for 9 years?

The news has no impact on the possible Dwight-centric spin-off The Farm, which will be introduced in an episode of The Office to air this fall.

Via Throwing Things, which says "Do we care about Schrute Farms, which is apparently going to make its first appearance as a backdoor pilot during this season?" and which also notes:

Starting next January, ABC is flip-flopping Nightline and Jimmy Kimmel Live, with Kimmel going head to head with Letterman and Leno.  I'm not a huge Kimmel fan, but will be interesting to see how folks respond to a younger option in the timeslot.

I think it says something about American politics that the run-up to a presidential election seemed like the right time to make it harder to watch the serious news analysis show. (Cue the comments that Nightline is more comedy that Kimmel could ever hope to be.)

Senator Schumer "is known to cajole, nag, and outright pester his staff" about getting married and having babies.

The NYT seems to be celebrating the man for using his position in the workplace to harass underlings about their private lives:

Cupid’s arrow lands where it will, but many of the couples say that Mr. Schumer, a New York Democrat, has an unusual knack for guiding its journey. He keeps close track of office romances, quotes marriage-friendly Scripture (“God to man: be fruitful and multiply”), and is known to cajole, nag, and outright pester his staff (at least those he perceives as receptive to such pestering) toward connubial bliss.

Religion too! He sounds like the Steve Carrell character in "The Office" — the inappropriate boss, who doesn't know the normal boundaries.

Forget Master of the Senate. This is the Yenta of the Senate.

“What’s the holdup?” the senator asks couples who are dillydallying on an engagement. “Did you get a ring yet?” Other could-be-marrieds receive a simple instruction: “Get moving!”

The NYT thinks this is cute, but you know damned well that if a conservative politician were doing this he would be accused of making the workplace a hostile environment.

[H]is focus, like many a politician’s, never strays far from his legacy: first comes Schumer Marriage, then come Schumer Babies.

“Have kids; have a lot of kids,” Mr. Schumer, who has two daughters, is known to intone. “Start early and keep having them.”

Jeez, he's appropriating their marriages and their babies.

Sometimes, Mr. Schumer greets a former staff member, “So, is your wife pregnant again?” Other times, he does not even bother with the question. One former aide, who asked not to be named, recalled seeing the senator bump into a recently married couple, both Schumer alumni. “He just stared down at her midsection and said, ‘Well?’ ”

Staring at a woman's belly as a way to convey the desire that she get pregnant? War-on-women warriors would be calling for his head if he were a Republican.

“Our staff is a family,” Mr. Schumer said, his voice often taking a paternal tone. “I want them to be happy. I get worried that they’ll be lonely. So I encourage them. If I think it’s a good match, I try to gently — as gently as I can — nudge it.”

Picture Steve Carrell saying that directly into the camera.

“It brings him joy,” said Risa Heller, a former communications director, one of more than a dozen former aides who recounted his sayings, often while imitating his voice. “He picks good people to work for him, and when they pick each other, it’s even better.”

You want to get ahead in the Democratic Party power structure? Submit to the matchmaking... and make some babies. I'd like to know more about how this picking of "good people" is carried out. Are good looking women chosen to provide wives for the men? Do the women continue climbing in the party hierarchy or do they retreat into babymaking and husband supporting?

I'd like 10 years of data.

"Tony Robbins event ends in disaster as 21 people are treated for burns after walking on 2,000-degree hot coals."

"Robbins was hosting a four-day gathering called 'Unleash the Power Within.'"

Unleash the stupidity within.

Witnesses say on Thursday, a crowd went to a park where 12 lanes of hot coals were on the grass....

Witness Jonathan Correll says he heard "wails of pain and screams of agony"...

"First one person, then a couple minutes later another one, and there was just a line of people walking on that fire. It was just bizarre, man."

I only have one question: Do you have what it takes to be a regional manager?

And let's go back to 1995:

[I]t should come as no surprise that even President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton invited a trio of self-help gurus to Camp David just before the new year.

Anthony Robbins, the best-selling, self-described "peak performance coach," Marianne Williamson, the prophet of love whose devotees include Oprah Winfrey and Elizabeth Taylor, and Dr. Steven R. Covey, author of one of the most successful books on management ever — "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" — all refuse to divulge the substance of their meeting with the Clintons. Mr. Covey said only that it was "marvelous."

Did the Clintons scamper over hot coals? I agree that would be marvelous.

Pundits quickly speculated about a White House so bereft of ideas it had to seek them in the transcendent. Mrs. Clinton downplayed the meeting, and later complained in a letter to the editor of Esquire, to be published in April, that she was not "tight" with Ms. Williamson, who was merely one of many religious and spiritual advisers invited to meet the Clintons.

Merely one of many purveyors of bullshit that the Clintons consorted with. Noted. Also noted: Steven R. Covey was buried today.

"Colorado theater shooting suspect was neuroscience Ph.D student."

At the University of Colorado-Denver.

[James] Holmes is suspected of walking into an Aurora theater's midnight showing of "Dark Knight Rises" wearing a gas mask and bullet proof vest and shooting at least 54 people. Twelve are reported dead.

There's a photo of the 24-year-old man at the link. He looks ordinary. Smirking... but it's the kind of smirk I associate with the character Jim on "The Office."

ADDED: Breitbart reports:

According to New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, James Holmes, 24, the alleged perpetrator of the mass murder at the Aurora, Colorado theater showing of The Dark Knight Rises, claimed he was “The Joker” during the shooting. “We have some information, most of it is public,” said Kelly. “It clearly looks like a deranged individual. He had his hair painted red, he said he was ‘The Joker,’ obviously the ‘enemy’ of Batman.”...

Health Ledger’s portrayal of Batman arch-nemesis The Joker in the last installment of the Batman saga, The Dark Knight, won him a posthumous Oscar. The Joker was focused in that film on destroying Gotham City through chaos and mass murder; he also rigged buildings with booby traps in order to achieve that end.

Once when I was a kid, my brother and I raked leaves for Uncle Henry, who then paid us $5.

I asked my father to split it for us, and he tore it in half. That made a big impression on me.

That memory came back to me when I watched this video clip from "The Office"...



... which somebody pointed out to me when I mentioned that I was thinking of buying a desk that has a push-button motor that raises it into a standing desk.

"[T]he long-fantasized-about meeting between Gervais' David Brent (the lead of the original British version of the show) and Steve Carell's Michael Scott..."

... was unfortunately leaked in advance, wrecking the surprise element, but pretty cool nonetheless:



"Comedy is where the mind goes to tickle itself."

"Will you quit annoying me?"

That line appears at 1:58 in this clip from the great Marx Brothers movie "Duck Soup":



It's a funny scene with all sorts of things in it, such as Harpo surreptitiously cutting off the man's pocket and using it as a bag for his peanuts. (Yeah, count the phallic symbols.) But that line — "Will you quit annoying me?" — has stuck with me for many years as a particular type of funniness. I was IM-ing my son John about it this morning.

Me:

do you remember the line "stop annoying me" --- finding that really funny? what movie and how would you explain why we thought it was so funny?

John:

"would you quit annoying me!!!"

Duck Soup [+ link to the above clip]

similar to W.C. Fields in It's a Gift saying, "I hate you"*

In a comedy you expect wit, wisecracks, innuendo .... So it's funny if someone blatantly says the obvious thing you've been watching for several minutes.

Me:

thanks!!!

it's the element of surprise, but the surprising thing is its flatfootedness

it's surprisingly ordinary

John:

Also, it's funny for someone to openly say what they think of someone as if there are no social inhibitions

Reminds me of a scene in The Office (last episode of season 2) where Michael Scott is talking to everyone in the office about they're going to have a gambling night in the warehouse....

Michael Scott: Oh, and another fun thing. We, at the end of the night, are going to give the check to an actual group of Boy Scouts. Right, Toby? We're gonna...

Toby: Actually, I didn't think it was appropriate to invite children since it's, uh, you know, there's gambling and alcohol. And it's in our dangerous warehouse. And it's a school night. And, you know, Hooters is catering. Is that enou-is that enough? Should I keep going?

Michael Scott: Why are you the way that you are? Honestly, every time I try to do something fun or exciting, you make it not... that way. I hate... so much about the things that you choose to be.

Ha ha.

Speaking of analyzing exactly why something is funny, I put a lot of thought into the title of that blog post last night with the praying mantis. Originally, I had "Non Compos Mentis Campus Mantis," then, thinking it might be off-putting to start in Latin, I made it "Campus Mantis: Non Compos Mentis." Then, this morning, I was sorry I switched it. "Non Compos Mentis Campus Mantis" seemed much better — kind of like a 3 Stooges title. Looking at all the 3 Stooges titles, I'm not really sure why.

_________

* The key segment is at 4:40:



CORRECTION: "Praying" changed to "campus" 3 times.

"I went to Cornell.... Ever heard of it?"

There's this:



And then there's the WSJ article calling Cornell Law School "white hot" and it wasn't clear what the reason was.

Some Cornell Law School applicants were citing that Andy Bernard character on "The Office" — in the clip — so the school "decided — let's have a little fun with this." They put the "Office" character on the front page of their website in a slideshow along with various "distinguished" alumni.

And some alumni, distinguished, presumably, but a lack of a sense of humor, started blogging things like "Somebody at the Law School Needs to be Fired." Oh, now they've updated that post to specify that the problem is that Andy Bernard isn't a positive character. He's "like the uncle in your family that nobody quite likes" and "you don't bring him up unless asked." And what are we to think about someone who demands that somebody get fired because he pushed the comedy envelope a little? If I had an uncle who did that I wouldn't quite like him.

An ear for humor is an excellent attribute for a prospective law student. When you read legal arguments, one thing you do is ask: Does this pass the laugh test? Understanding humor is a legal skill, people. Use it. And value your colleagues who have it.

So I think the new popularity of Cornell Law School might be that there are a lot of smart young people who think it will be cool to be able, some day, to say: "I went to Cornell.... Ever heard of it?" And I hope when they get into court, they run rings around the stuffed shirts who can't understand why you'd want to identify with a fictional fool.

***

Disclaimer: My son went to Cornell.  

Ever heard of it?