These open source developers have modest aspirations

Today I learned that the Firefox spell-checker recognizes the word "vagina" but not "vaginas."

one year anniversary

it's been exactly one year since four string samurai performed our first independent show. please congratulate us or wish us a happy smurfiversary.

we'll wait.

Link: NYT presents Mad Magazine fold-ins

About a month ago some blog or another linked to this interactive archive of Mad Magazine fold-ins in the NY Times. I enjoyed it immensely and promptly forgot about it until yesterday when in a conversation with my brother the topic of Mad came up. I explained that the archive is animated so you can drag the fold, to which he replied (slightly incredulous), "So you mean the folds actually line up?!" Indeed.

The Drinking Drinking Game

It's so hard to get amped up for a big night of drinking that honestly folks need a little motivation. And since Americans are winners, the best possible motivation is a game. Normally drinking games require you to have some cards or a specific movie or television show cued up. Not so the Drinking Drinking Game. The best part about the Drinking Drinking Game is that all you need to participate is some people who are drinking. Not only do they not have to be involved, it works best if they have no idea what's going on!

• Any time someone takes a sip, takes a sip.
  
• If someone with a cigarette says, "I don't smoke... normally" take a drink.
  
• Any time someone asks what you're drinking, take a sip. If your drink is in a clearly labeled bottle, take a drink. If it's the only option available or if the person asking is drinking the same thing, finish your drink.
  
• Any time someone tells an anecdote about a previous drinking experience, take a drink. If said experience occurred in college and the person is more than five years removed from graduation, finish your drink.
  
• Any time someone raises the roof or says "Woooo!" ironically, take a sip. If done unironically, leave without finishing your drink.
  
• If someone asks you to "Wait right here!" finish your drink slowly over the ten or fifteen minutes it takes you to realize that she's not coming back.
  
• Any time someone changes the music, and the new selection is worse than the previous one, finish your drink.
  
• Any time the conversation turns to politics or religion take your drink to another room.
  
• Any time you finish a drink, get another drink.

Feel free to adapt the rules to fit the peculiarities of the folks you drink with, or to submit additional rules via comments.

This has gone on almost long enough!

For April Fool's Day I switched one of my coworker's google settings to return only pages in Danish. This is very funny because he doesn't speak Danish, which you would know if you worked here. He also doesn't like to ask for help with his computer. He tries to hide it when he doesn't understand something. You know the type I'm talking about, or at least you would if you worked here.

It was very funny to watch him knowing that he was getting all this Denmark stuff on his computer. He was scratching his head and he made his browser text size bigger. This doesn't address the problem, at least not in Internet Explorer. He uses IE 5.5 which is hilarious if you know anything about browsers.

Anyway, today I noticed a gash an inch deep on his head and blood and hair and skin under the fingernail of his index finger. That's the finger he uses to scratch his head when he doesn't understand something. You'd know that if you worked here.

When I walked by, his IE 5.5 font size was so big he could only display one letter on the screen. It looked like this:

ø

i'll take mine with a fried egg

in reality, i was asleep before it aired, but by the power of the internet, i got to see jon stewart interview obama and was really happy to see the primanti's plug at the very end - SPOILER ALERT! stewart didn't pronounce it like a pittsburgher (he said it more like it was a british pub or something), but whatever. i hope obama went dahn to the strip at 2am last night. can you imagine being drunk and hungry and seeing obama ordering a cap n cheese? high fives would certainly be in order.

lots of eyes are on my home state of pennsylvania today.

The tenuous nature of politics, or, Scholastic rivalries that 99.9% of the nation could give a crap about

Today's Clinton itinerary:

The two [Hillary and Chelsea Clinton] will also be at Haverford College at 2 p.m. for a "conversation with families" at Founders Hall, 370 Lancaster Ave.

Woooooooooooooooooooooooo! Haverford! If I were there I'd have her autograph my plush black squirrel! Then we could split a plate of sweet potato fries! Senator Clinton totally has my vote!

Chelsea Clinton will also be at Swarthmore College at 11 a.m.

Boooooooooooooooooooooooo! Swat sucks! Gratuitous link dumping on their defunct crappy football program! You've lost my vote forever!

I'm throwing my support behind Jeff T-F.

Papal Bull#$*@

While listening to the radio this morning, I heard a story having to do with the pope's visit to the U.S. The commentator noted the differences between Pope Now (Benedict XVI) and Pope Before (John Paul II) and said that contrary to conventional wisdom, Pope Now wasn't as "strict" as people thought he might be when he was elected.

He then told a story about how Pope Before was more or less a rock star in this country (as well as others), but how that status didn't necessarily translate into greater devotion and obedience from America's Catholics.

The best line was a comment from a 20-something Catholic girl who, after hearing a papal address by John Paul II, was asked about the contradiction between the pope's preaching against pre-marital sex and her generation's fondness for said sexual activities: "Well, he's entitled to his opinion."

I would pay many, many dollars to see someone tell God's mouthpiece on earth that he's entitled to his opinion. But maybe that's because I'm Jewish.

(Aside: Happy Birthday, Pope! We know you're an avid reader, and we didn't want you to think that we forgot. We got you something really nice on Amazon.com, but it won't arrive for 3-5 business days. Of course, you could speed that up if you really wanted to. Just sayin'...)

Today I'm also linking to people analyzing the funny in very academic ways

While I'm at, Troy Patterson does a good job at Slate discussing what he calls "flabby satire. Then he and his readers delve a little deeper in chat form. It's all very interesting stuff, and makes me wonder about satire as a form and what's funny in general. So much of comedy comes from recognizing what's being said that simply repeating the cliche without any real reflection or depth is frequently the most economical way to "be funny."

[Full disclosure: I've done some lazy stuff of that sort on this blog, but then again I'm currently writing in my ostensibly free time to an audience consisting almost entirely of people who know me primarily as a means to make them come to this page and see my upcoming show times because it beats emailing people--hopefully folks get a chuckle and I get to be a little less diligent about asking folks to come out; I'd like to think I'd be a little more rigorous if this were my job. This is possibly self-deception or a poor excuse, but probably true. There's only one way to find out, folks who might hire me to write comedy professionally!]

In any case, I'm very predisposed to agree with the article because I made largely the same point almost ten years ago about SNL. My words were slightly different: "All parody, no satire." But they mean largely the same thing. It's comedy creation through a series of approximations and exaggerations of those approximations until the original gets lost. (Doonsbury sort-of-mocks-but-sort-of-participates in this by reducing politicians to little avatars rather than drawing caricatures. Bush is an asterisk, Clinton a waffle, Gingrich a bomb with a very short fuse, etc) What happens however is that eventually the comedians in a battle against the comedic law of diminishing returns end up exaggerating their own performances rather than continuing to build in an honest way on real world events (see also Carvey, Dana--George Herbert Walker Bush impression and). The results are often funny (again see Carvey, Dana) but cannot be considered "political satire" in any sense. Because the fiction conforms to our expectation better than the reality ever could, however, we now have a president that will likely be as remembered for something that he never said ("Strategery") as any of the ludicrous things he has said. That's mighty funny as sort of a society-wide art piece on collective memory, but it still isn't political satire.

Ultimately however the problem is that a high percentage of satire isn't funny and, even as one recognizes the inherent problems, the dumbed-down stuff is. It's great to explore the absurdities and ironies of politics on an individual basis, but when people try to do it for the masses it can often be a little cloying and self-important and self-congratulatory, or, alternately, blunt and crude and self-evident. Much like politics itself (which is a trite little self-important and self-evident joke itself). I'm reminded of the old feminist slogan "The personal is political"--there was more honest critique in Will Ferrell's "I DRIVE A DODGE STRATUS" guy than in all of his perfectly crafted faux-Bushisms. It feels more genuine to turn the lens on ourselves and expose our own foibles and in so doing critique our values and the power structures--familial, occupational, social--that influence our daily lives (see also Mooney, Paul--Word Association sketch and).

By the way this was not entirely an attempt to own the whole front page of the Four String blog. Not entirely anyway.

Today I'm linking to other funny people rather than making with the funny myself

Nerve.com and IFC compiled what they determined to be the 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of all Time. What changes this from the typical list-ism so culturally pervasive right now to an absolutely essential link is that many entries contain video. I can't wait to get home from work and watch a bunch of these--many of them are old favorites of mine but there are also plenty I've never seen. I wouldn't even know how to put together my list, but their top 4 are awfully hard to argue against.

Reuters "Oddly Enough" section: a laugh a minute!

Who doesn't enjoy some weird news? After all the "sub-prime this" and "there were no survivors that" which one normally finds in the news, it's nice to kick back with some goofy stories. Maybe a cat made friends with an alligator. Maybe a three year old can beat Wall Street analysts by circling stocks with an Elmo marker. Maybe a cat made friends with a rhino. Seriously, you never know what you're going to get when you hit the weird news section as far as subject matter, but you do know you're going to get a laugh and a reprieve from the dark clouds of the front page.

Let's see what's up with Reuters while I employ the narrative device of pretending to type my reactions in real time in order to make a greater didactic point!

Berlusconi's sexism chafes as Italian vote looms: Hee hee! He has sex chafes! Try a little KY, Silvio. Wait a minute--sexism? That's not funny. Let's keep looking.

Hair salon scalps customers: Umm, this article is about forcing people to stay in a salon for hours against their consent in attempt to extort them for more money after a bait-and-switch on the price of a haircut. But the title is a pun! "Scalp" is a hair word! That's got to count for something, right? On second thought I'm going to move on.

Duck gets "order of protection" after attack: Now this is more like it! A duck in the court system. "Here I have thousands of letters, all addressed to Donald." Miracle on Thirty-Fowl Street! Except reading a little further I see that the duck was a pet and that a neighbor was abusing it and shooting it with a pellet gun. I think I'm going to cry. Ducks are cute.

Witchdoctor killings condemned: I think I know how this will turn out, but I'll at least look at the lede. I've come this far.

Tanzania's President Jakaya Kikwete has condemned witchdoctors who kill albinos and harvest their body parts in the hope it will bring prosperity.

I think I'll go back to reading about the sub-prime crisis.

The game will most likely be won by the team that can put the ball in the basket more often (adjusting for the relative values of different baskets)

Tyler Hansbrough called last night's loss to Kansas "frustrating." Some people might have called it "heartbreaking" but not Tyler Hansbrough. Tyler Hansbrough's heart does not break. I have never seen Tyler Hansbrough's heart take a play off. Tyler Hansbrough's heart works as hard or harder than any other player's heart in the country. I've seen Michael Jordan's heart, I've seen Mateen Cleaves' heart, I've seen Steve Wojciechowski's heart, and none of their hearts hearted any harder than Tyler Hansbrough's heart, night in and night out.