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Thad
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Articles

Postby Thad » Wed Nov 12, 2014 1:31 am

Okay, doesn't go in the Assorted News thread because it's not news; doesn't go in the Science thread because it's not science; doesn't go in the Truthiness thread because it's not parody.

So okay, let's have us a new general none-of-the-above articles thread.

Marvel has a Veteran's Day piece up on Jack Kirby's service in WWII. Most of it comes from Jack's son Neal, so it really does appear that Marvel and the Kirby family are on good terms now.

(Also, I noticed, as I was toggling sites in NoScript so I could see the graphics, Marvel stores its slideshows on a domain called annihil.us. That's funny! If not an altogether original idea.)

My favorite Kirby war story, which is entirely consistent with Neal's recollection of his father telling stories about pretty grim subjects from a detached perspective, as quoted on The Comics Journal:

the King wrote:There was one shell that had hit, and I saw these Germans laying in a perfect circle except the bottom half of their bodies were missing, see? The shell evidently hit right in the middle of this group. You see a lot of these nice designs if you’re an artist.

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Re: Articles

Postby Mothra » Mon Dec 01, 2014 6:26 pm

Great interview with Chris Rock over on Vulture. Starts on comedy, touches on the Cosby case, moves on to Obama and America as a whole, then his movie, then Ferguson.

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Re: Articles

Postby Thad » Wed Dec 03, 2014 2:12 am

It's a great piece; he's a sharp guy and has a lot to say on a lot of subjects, all of it worthwhile.

My favorite bit:

Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

[...]

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.


The bit I'd quibble with is his assertion that Jon Stewart is funnier than Dennis Miller or Bill Maher because he's closer to the American center politically. I think the reason Stewart is funnier than those guys is that he's closer to the American center TEMPERAMENTALLY. Those two guys are smug assholes; Stewart is a nice guy.

Now, I DO think politics play into it a bit, and Rich tried to lead Rock toward this point but Rock didn't really go for it.

In Miller’s case, do you think that identifying with those in power is an impediment to laughter?

I’ll say this. Poor people laugh harder than rich people. Especially black people, they laugh with their feet, too.


I think Rich has the right of it: conservative humor is inherently unfunny because it entails siding with the big guy and mocking the little guy. That's not funny, it's just cruel.

Comedy is, often, about seeing the little guy triumph over the big guy, at seeing the people in power laid low and ordinary slobs achieve victory. Or, at minimum, seeing people do socially unacceptable things without experiencing social consequences.

As Mark Evanier likes to say, conservative humor is like making a Marx Brothers movie and trying to make Margaret Dumont the funny one.

That's not to say conservatives are unfunny. Conservatives who I think are funny include Kelsey Grammer, Drew Carey, Mike Nelson, Jackie Mason, and Ben Stein, off the top of my head. It's not that conservatives aren't funny, it's that conservatism isn't.

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Re: Articles

Postby Mongrel » Wed Dec 03, 2014 2:17 am

I really liked his Cable TV analogy (Cabal TV? Yuk yuk yuk) for Bush Jr. as the first president to exclusively serve only their supporters. I mean, you can quibble with it and maybe cite an earlier president, like say Nixon or Reagan, as doing that on some occasions, such that there's precedent for that sort of hyper-partisanship, but I think I'd agree that Bush was the first to just be that way all the time as the default mode.

Regardless, it's a really sharp observation - just as you might expect a comedian to make!
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Re: Articles

Postby Thad » Wed Dec 03, 2014 2:30 am

Lincoln?

But yeah, it really has always kind of astounded me how much Bush just straight-up did not give a fuck. I think that's true of the entire Republican Party at this point. (I used to comment that if Democrats cared as little about public opinion polls as Republicans did, we'd have universal healthcare. Joke doesn't work as well, but yeah Democrats are a lot more inclined to try and compromise than Republicans.)

Nixon and Reagan aren't really comparable to Bush; they both won in landslides. Even if they WERE only serving the people who voted for them, that was still an astoundingly large segment of the population. Bush most definitely lost the popular vote in 2000 (and all the statewide Florida recounts say he lost the electoral vote, too, and only became President because of the Supreme Court's intercession), and won by a razor-thin margin in 2004. And had the balls to call it a mandate.

I guess we ARE finally seeing Obama pull a "Fuck you, I'm doing this" on immigration. But, midterm elections aside, polls have pretty consistently shown that a majority of Americans WANT comprehensive immigration reform.

It's pretty funny seeing all the people who loved executive orders when Bush was making them start rending their garments about Obama shredding the Constitution.

(Hell, I bet Bush wishes he'd thought of this. He was actually pretty reasonable on immigration.)

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Re: Articles

Postby Mongrel » Wed Dec 03, 2014 3:47 am

Well, I suppose Lincoln counts by virtue of the other half effectively being a separate country for almost his entire tenure.
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Re: Articles

Postby Thad » Thu Apr 02, 2015 5:13 pm


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Re: Articles

Postby Mongrel » Thu Apr 02, 2015 9:38 pm

Andre stories ;____;
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Re: Articles

Postby Thad » Tue Oct 22, 2019 12:24 am

A Christian rock band hid a C64 program on a vinyl album in 1984

I remember drunkenly hanging out with Sharkey and Steve back in aught-four and between the two of them they had a sudden inspiration that someone should release a video game on vinyl.

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Re: Articles

Postby zaratustra » Fri Nov 29, 2019 4:33 pm

ok, this is a wild shot, but if any of you has access to a library website with an online newspaper archive, could you find me one of these pages at decent quality

New York Times November 15, 1981, Section 3, Page 21

The Washington Post 03-23-1982 Page B1

EDIT: Mazian got me both of the fuckers, thanks.

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Re: Articles

Postby Thad » Mon Jun 06, 2022 1:59 pm

Charlie Jane Anders gives us The Sweetweird Manifesto, which names the movement in popular fiction toward upbeat surrealism.

Also, apparently Charlie Jane Anders has a newsletter on Buttondown. Which presumably is like Substack only less transphobic. (Oh hey, Annalee Newitz has one too. If I subscribe to both of them, it'll be just like reading io9 in the old days when io9 was good!)

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Re: Articles

Postby Thad » Wed Aug 24, 2022 2:15 pm

Nathan Rabin attended the Blues Brothers convention at Joliet Prison.

It’s a sad realm of broken lives and lost souls where you can feel the dark, violent energy deep in your bones. The overwhelming aura of misery and suffering and despair sometimes makes it hard to enjoy the singing of James Belushi.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

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Re: Articles

Postby Thad » Wed Mar 15, 2023 1:49 pm

Nathan Rabin: The Tragicomic Glory of Pauly Shore in 2023

This is what I love about Rabin: he can find himself pleasantly surprised by something that, on the surface, is just an easy punchline, like seeing Pauly Shore live.

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