Unsolicited Advice

I am stuck on a thing. Not because I don't know what to write, but because I have no idea why I'm writing it. I used to not care, but then Colbert said a thing in an interview about working "with intent" and now I feel wholly inadequate because that seems like an important step that I keep skipping. I also don't normally care about conforming to other people's processes, but everything I've seen of his is a terrifyingly accurate mirror of how I do these things. I tripped over this a while ago, which is a reel of BTS/raw footage from an interview he did (in character) when Jon Stewart was asked to host the Oscars. They clearly told him what they wanted to talk about when they called him up, but also clearly did not bother to hash out a script, so he's running the character improv. There's a bit near the end where he knows what the character's response would be, but hasn't quite settled on how to phrase it, so he just runs it over and over, ...

I just finished a brief biography of Jon Stewart. It was a remarkably uncomfortable read. Not that it told me anything horrible, or that the writing was 50 Shades-levels of atrocious. My own brain just nagged me the whole way through, you know, he doesn't really like talking about any of this himself, isn't this obnoxiously nosy?  Jon Stewart is the sort of person who will gladly tell you what he thinks of things whether you've asked him or not; it's just almost always in the present tense. He does not seem to have oodles of patience for navel-gazing, at least not with other people present. I did finish it, although I needn't have bothered. It was cobbled together almost entirely out of things Stewart has dropped over the years in interviews, so technically it was all what I'd consider fair game. It happened to be by the same author as the Colbert one I'd dug up, and while I found it annoying that she paid little attention to internal motivation in that on...

Funny thing about going and feeding someone's entire oevre into your head. You run across a lot of stuff that you wouldn't have touched in a million years otherwise. I am definitely not a fan of Bill O'Reilly, and I hesitate to say that I like him, but I'm reasonably sure I could make it through a dinner party without punching him in the face. The angry shouty grandpa bit on The O'Reilly Factor  is at least partly a put-on. Made me jump the first time I saw it, in fact, because my first exposure to him was on The Daily Show , where he is very dry and laid-back to the point where he is one of the few conservative guests comfortable enough to pull sight gags on the host.  O'Reilly, so far as I can tell, is a fiscal conservative and hard-right on most military things, but also not an idiot and drifts remarkably centrist on some social issues. He sat down and looked into the legal arguments for and against same-sex marriage at one point, and came to the co...

I signed a petition on Change.org earlier this week, requesting that someone get Jon Stewart to moderate one of the 2016 Presidential debates. I have absolutely no idea if he wants to; right now he's busy guest-hosting WWE events, of which he is a longtime fan, and stopping just short of going eeeeeeheeheeheheeee  like a prepubescent fangirl whenever they let him into the ring. I wish to note, for the record, that 1) they don't let you get body-slammed by pro wrestlers unless you've practiced that first; 2) he's not doing too badly for a guy on the far side of fifty who routinely describes himself as "a hundred and fifty pounds of osteoporosis"; and 3) his dress sense, when not in costume as a news anchor, can be summed up in sexist meme terms as 'adjunct faculty in the humanities, whose wife has completely given up', and if he were one of my undergrad instructors, I would absolutely hit this man up for weed. I know exactly why I want him to do it, ...

I don't usually bother getting annoyed at the phrasing of things in news articles. Entertainment news is especially addlepated and mired in sexist dreck. I mainly register my protest by not applying my eyeballs to it, which denies them some tiny portion of the attention and ad revenue they need to live. People have noticed that I am trying to distract myself by watching smart humans fuck around in front of a camera, however, and keep sending me links to things about Jon Stewart's final episode of The Daily Show . All of the US articles I've seen, and almost all of the Commonwealth ones, describe his reaction to Colbert's final thanks as "emotional". This is technically accurate, but suspiciously tactful from an industry based on publishing paparazzi photos of reality stars who are coked out of their minds, and police blotter items they dug up by seeing whose name Google can link to both "DUI" and "SAG". Seriously. Dude's crying. Pre...

I sat down and watched Jon Stewart's last episode of The Daily Show . I'm torn on whether or not that was a good idea. There are a lot of things going on in my life right now that I really just cannot handle, and he's leaving a job that he's worked the hell out of for sixteen years. I should have realized I was going to end up crying. They got Colbert to do the farewell thanks . I don't know they would have even thought to ask anyone else. Various cast and crew comments suggest my guess was right: The two of them snapped together like magnets as soon as they got within range. Their friendship became one of the meta-laws of the Daily Show  universe that was implied by the counterfactual narrative, like the acknowledgement that the comedians on the show were selected on the basis of being quite smart, even as the "correspondents" were written to be idiots and loons. The undercurrent remained even though the character of "Colbert" should logicall...

When last we met, I was explaining a lot of things about election regulation in the US which were equal parts terrifying and mind-destroyingly boring. Now, I give you: Part II: The Execution Thereof, or: The post where I link to all the funny bits.

It transpires, frighteningly enough, that not a lot of people in my age group quite get why Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert trolling the SEC was so funny. Non- estadounidenses  are probably even more confused. The explanation is long and convoluted, but I promise to try to be amusing. Part I: Shit You Need To Know First, or: Go pour yourself a drink, you'll need it.

Are you all having a good day? I hope so, because I'm not, and I like to fantasize that the universe has some sort of built-in balancing mechanism. In the interests of making myself think about something less unpleasant, I am now going to intensely, bordering on  fractally , over-analyze a joke. It is always interesting to investigate what people think is appropriate to joke about, and what kind of snark is acceptable. I am of the mind that anything can be sporked from the proper angle and in the proper context, including the meta-analysis of when and where this is appropriate, which is probably why I tend to like comedians like George Carlin and Lewis Black and Frankie Boyle. All of them make a distinction between an abrasive stage persona who can get away with mocking just about anything, with creative profanity, and the person they are off-stage, who is generally horrified whenever they have to explain to other grown-ups the difference between comedy and real life. There i...

For those of you outside of the US who don't understand why Jon Stewart stepping down as host of The Daily Show is such a thing, it's because the program is, er, terrifying influential. I'm given to understand that most of the world gets news from America a lot more than America bothers to read news of the world, but I don't know how much of our context you can guess from it, particularly when the context is batshit insane. If you get television from the UK, it's rather like Mock The Week , only it runs Mon-Thurs for most of the year, so large portions of the program are produced on the sub-24 hr turnaround time of a real news show. I assume there are similar programs pretty much anywhere making fun of your leaders doesn't get you shot. Next time you sit down to watch MtW, imagine for a moment that you live in a world where citizens aged 18-35 peeled themselves off the sofa and voted in the next general election because they were listening to what made Dara Ó ...

I derive comfort from the oddest things sometimes. When I'm sick and/or miserable for an extended length of time -- which in fact I have been, and they have just given me another  bottle of drugs which does not work correctly , and my next return appointment isn't until next week -- with no clear end in sight, I cope by grabbing onto something, and researching the ever-loving fuck out of it. My brain is the only part of me that keeps working right when I feel lousy. I had the honest-to-God flu once, the kind where you spend a few days wondering if you're going to die and the next two weeks praying that you will, and in those horrible waking hours between one dose of drugs wearing off and my next dose of drugs kicking in, I crammed the entirety of the sci.electronics.repair FAQ into my brain. I now know far more about resuscitating dead VCRs than I will ever conceivably get to use. Another bout of problems coincided with the Doctor Who Restoration Team inventing yet anoth...

I don't remember when I lost the ability to cope with geopolitical news. I know I had to stop falling asleep to the half-hour cycle of CNN Headline News when I moved to college and was shoehorned into a 13'x 15' room with another human who didn't want the TV on all day and night. The flat refusal to read news was sometime later. It was sometime between 9/11, whose coverage I ended up watching on a television in the downstairs lounge right off the dorm lobby, and the second time we (officially) started shelling Iraq. The latter happened while I was on an airplane, and my embargo had been going on long enough that I was pissed at the pilot for announcing that "hostilities [had] commenced" over the PA while we were six miles above the Rockies and I couldn't get away. (When I landed in Phoenix, I learned that my sister had freaked right the fuck out when the announcement came, terrified that someone was immediately going to shoot down the completely random a...