Eclectic Jukebox 7/3/08

Simon and Garfunkel - "America" (Live)

Shout-Outs

Blue Girl won one of the scholarships to attend Netroots Nation in Austin, starting July 17th. Congratulations to her yet again! My favorite of her many endorsements came from her mother: "She woke up one morning a pleasant toddler, then some time in the mid-morning, had a temper tantrum. It has never gone away."

Meanwhile, a stand-up comic I know, Adam Hunter, is on NBC's Last Comic Standing, which airs on Thursday nights. It's great exposure and a fantastic opportunity. Assuming he continues to progress, apparently viewer votes will play a factor. The show seems to slice up sets somewhat for broadcast, especially in the earlier rounds with so many contestants, which can hurt the rhythm of a routine. Still, I think enough comes through that you can judge his material and delivery for yourself. Here's his site, MySpace page, and last week's segment:



(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

Hook

Time for another poem. Here's the Wiki entry on James Wright, and the PoemHunter entry (a site with good content, but has annoying pop-ups and can be cantankerous).

Hook
By James Wright

I was only a young man
In those days. On that evening
The cold was so God damned
Bitter there was nothing.
Nothing. I was in trouble
With a woman, and there was nothing
There but me and dead snow.

I stood on the street corner
In Minneapolis, lashed
This way and that.
Wind rose from some pit,
Hunting me.
Another bus to Saint Paul
Would arrive in three hours,
If I was lucky.

Then the young Sioux
Loomed beside me, his scars
Were just my age.

Ain't got no bus here
A long time, he said.
You got enough money
To get home on?

What did they do
To your hand? I answered.
He raised up his hook into the terrible starlight
And slashed the wind.

Oh, that? he said.
I had a bad time with a woman. Here,
You take this.

Did you ever feel a man hold
Sixty-five cents
In a hook,
And place it
Gently
In your freezing hand?

I took it.
It wasn't the money I needed.
But I took it.

Homophobic Group Makes Olympic Athlete Homosexual!

That's intentionally misleading, but let's turn this tale over to Steve Benen:

Auto-correct can be a very helpful feature of any word-processing program. But when conservatives use it, they run the risk of embarrassing themselves.

Some far-right sites that subscribe to the Associated Press feed, for example, will use auto-correct to change “Democratic Party” to “Democrat Party.” This, of course, is because they have the temperament of children.

But the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website takes the phenomenon one step further with its AP articles. The far-right fundamentalist group replaces the word “gay” in the articles with the word “homosexual.” I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to make the AFA happy. The group is, after all, pretty far out there.

The problem, of course, is that “gay” does not always mean what the AFA wants it to mean. My friend Kyle reported this morning that sprinter Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials over the weekend. The AFA ran the story, but only after the auto-correct had “fixed” the article.

That means — you guessed it — the track star was renamed “Tyson Homosexual.” The headline on the piece read, “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.” Readers learned:

Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

His wind-aided 9.85 seconds was a fairly cut-and-dry performance compared to what happened a day earlier. On Saturday, Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat and had to scramble to finish fourth, then in his quarterfinal a couple of hours later, ran 9.77 to break the American record that had stood since 1999. […]

Homosexual didn’t get off to a particularly strong start in the first semifinal, but by the halfway mark he had established a comfortable lead. He slowed somewhat over the final 10 meters-nothing like the way-too-soon complete shutdown that almost cost him Saturday. Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: “A little fatigued.”

Now, the AFA has since changed the article back to the way it was originally written by the AP reporter, but don’t worry, Kyle got the screen-grab before the AFA edited the piece back.

(Click for a larger image.)

Homophobes turning an Olympic athlete homosexual! Heavens! Perhaps that Ted Haggard program will work for them.

Washington Post blogger Mary Ann Akers picked up the story as well.

Besides providing a good laugh, this story made me think of two things. One, this is basically the reverse technique of right-wing hate site Little Green Footballs, where proprietor Charles Johnson implemented a filter to clean up some comments – "raghead" was changed to "Arab," for instance. Both sites cater to bigots, but one is trying to hide it a little bit. Two, I had a student who liked to pepper his papers with what he thought were impressive words, using Microsoft Word's synonym function to help him (a George Will in training, perhaps). The thing was, he chose these words without concern for syntax, precision or eloquence, and often didn't know what they really meant. My favorite was the essay where, in mentioning one of the plagues of Egypt from Exodus, the frogs didn't ravage the land; he wrote that they ravished it.

But then, those frogs were probably filthy homosexuals, too.

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

Eclectic Jukebox 6/26/08

Nanci Griffith — "I Wish It Would Rain" (Live, 1988)

I like this performance, although you can hear the harmony better on the studio version.

George Carlin (1937 - 2008)

Man. Carlin was one of my all-time favorite stand-up comedians, as I know he was for many people. I taped one of his HBO specials as a teenager, and watched it more times than I count. His material was good to brilliant, but his delivery was about as sharp as you can get, due to the speed, the faces, the vocal inflection, the shifts. There's a line attributed to both Bernard Shaw and Billy Wilder: "If you tell people the truth, make them laugh, or they'll kill you." Carlin often exemplified that. But even when he was being more silly than deep, he was damn funny. He had a long and impressive career, but boy, he will be missed.

Carlin has too many routines to post them all, but here are several. Feel free to link more. (Oh, needless to say, most of these routines are Not Safe for Work.)

Seven Words:



We Like War:



Voting and Politicians:



Religion:



A Place for my Stuff:



Baseball and Football:



Modern Man:



Update: skippy and Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast have been doing roundups of the posts on Carlin. I appreciated the insight into how hard Carlin worked, and how kind he could be, from Louis C.K. and
the Sailor at VidiotSpeak. Here's a guy who could have ridden the nostalgia train, but instead constantly developed new material and seemed to get sharper as he got older. It would be really hard to over-praise Carlin's performance skills, his dedication and, well, courage. I agree with Mustang Bobby about Carlin working in the tradition of the Shakespearean Fool, telling truth to power but getting people to laugh at it. It's humor based on truth, and self-recognition, versus solely mocking other people. That is the real deal, it's hard to pull off, and that's why it's so damn obscenely gorgeous when someone nails it. As Steve Benen writes, "I’d seen plenty of stand-up, but I’d never seen someone make an audience think and laugh at the same time, about subjects most comedians wouldn’t dare touch."

Fresh Air did a good recap of past interviews with Carlin.

Blue Gal linked Carlin's very interesting "What I've Learned" piece for Esquire.

Meanwhile, I love Roy Edroso's closing lines: "Like Voltaire, Mencken, et alia, Carlin died out of the good graces of the bullshit merchants. I guess they knew he was driving away some of their customers."

You fucking got that right.

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

Hey, Democratic Party Leadership

The graphic is adapted from a cartoon by the brilliant John Sherffius.

The line comes from Mike.

I might get one of these made up.

Update: I might substitute another line (not mine, either): "That's okay - I wasn't using my civil rights, anyway."

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

I am Aware of All Internet Traditions

(Click the pic for a larger view.)

For background on this meme, see here, here, here and here - plus many, many other places.

(Boy, that Nietzsche was a heavy cat, wasn't he?)

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

Right-Wing Cartoon Watch #30 (4/7/08 - 6/15/08)

The new installment is here! Check out the 30th, long-delayed, super-sized installment of RWCW, covering eleven weeks of election mayhem, skyrocketing gas prices, and um... surely other things happened elsewhere in the world, too?

Eclectic Jukebox 6/19/08

Priscilla Ahn – "Dream"