The Big Game

Play-by-Play Guy: With about two and a half minutes left and the Little Rock Hudsons trailing the Waikiki Vandeweghes by 18, it looks like the Vans will be moving on to the next round. The Stars were the favorites at tipoff, but it will be the Vandeweghes facing the Scottsdale Carnegies in the championship game.

Crotchety Old Analyst: Not so fast, the momentum has shifted in the last several minutes.

PbPG (incredulous): How so?

COA: Well 7 of the last 10 times the ball has gone through the rim, the Hudsons put it there.

PbPG: I'm not sure I understand...

COA: You have to admit, it raises serious doubts about whether Waikiki can close the deal.

PbPG: While the stats you cited are in a sense accurate, the Hudsons hit six foul shots and a layup while the Vandeweghes knocked down three three-point shots. The Vans have actually increased their lead slightly during the period of the game you're discussing.

COA: That's a good point. You have to admire the offensive efficiency of the Hudsons.

PbPG (flustered): I don't think I implied that.

OMA: The Vans can't play in the paint. It's all well and good to hit threes in the semis, but only a team with a good post game can win in the Finals. You need high percentage shots to win. The inside game has been the foundation of the Bi-Coastal Conference for fifty years. They're not going to beat the Flyover Central League champ Carnegies without that.

PbPG: Regardless, the game is decided by the score.

COA (condescendingly): Is it?

PbPG: Yes.

COA: Ultimately though, the Hudsons have the better chance of beating the Carnegies. We've seen the Vans miss quite a few open looks. You think the Carnegies won't exploit that?

PbPG: Mathematically however it's virtually impossible for the Hudsons to catch up.

COA: You can't make that determination until all the baskets are counted.

PbPG: What are you talking about?

COA: The Hudsons had an outstanding shoot-around. It is wrong to disenfranchise those baskets.

PbPG: Now come on! We all knew when we started that those baskets wouldn't count. The Vans weren't even on the court during part of that time!

COA: That's why it's up to Conference officials to step in here and award this to the Hudsons. They can send the Vandeweghes home. They have the power to do this.

PbPG: Why would they invalidate the results of a fairly played game?

COA: Because the Conference needs a title badly. They don't want the Carnegies strutting around. Especially since the Crawford Brimleys of the Flyover Central League have been such abysmally bad champs. This is Bi-Coastal Conference's best chance to win it all.

PbPG: Shouldn't the rules we all agreed on at the beginning continue to mean something at the end?

COA: Hold my headset. I'm going to go move the goal.

FIN

Horrified/Horrifying

Heckuva Job, Bushie

Laura Bush today said in a press conference that the Burmese junta failed to adequately warn folks before the cyclone struck. Because no democratically elected government would ever dick around while a storm kills thousands. Also, the $250,000 in aide is totally inadequate for the type of infrastructure you need to survive a future storm of this magnitude. As any NFL owner could tell you, it costs at about 200 times that to build a decent dome which is by all indicators the best any government can do for its people during a catastrophic storm.

We call it "Bad Newz Stables"

I don't get all the gnashing and wailing over Eight Belles. In the horse fighting ring Dan Fouts and I run, those poor bastards break legs constantly.

eat 5 to 9 a day

so, i'm sitting at home listening to internet hockey and snacking on my peeled mini carrots from kroger. you with me? well, on the bag of peeled mini carrots from kroger is a logo that says "EAT 5 to 9 A DAY" and i've included that logo to the right. however, there's a problem: every fifth carrot i eat tastes bad.

i wanted to do it right, so i tried what anyone would try: good carrot, good carrot, good carrot, good carrot, BAD CARROT! i tried again: good carrot, good carrot, good carrot, good carrot, BAD CARROT! i tried this a bunch of times and every time it was good carrot, good carrot, good carrot, good carrot, BAD CARROT! on my final try, which JUST happened before this sentence started, i tried something else: good carrot, good carrot, good carrot, good carrot, GOOD PICKLE!

i'm left satisfied.

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.

CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Most people don't know that the shows that Four String Samurai does on stage are actually the shows within the shows, or the "mise en abyme" as the incredibly nerdy might call it. You know, it's the same as the technique used by Shakespeare in Hamlet ("The play's the thing") and Gary Shandling in The Larry Sanders Show and a bunch of other stuff. So the meta show is us hanging around and doing stuff and preparing for the show within the show that we put on stage roughly once a month. We also drive around in a van and solve mysteries.

What you didn't know when you started reading the previous 102 words was that all of that was prologue for this, the release of the 4SS season 5 spoilers!

• A new member joins the group who knows more about '60s R&B, soul, and proto-punk than Paul! Is this the start of a beautiful friendship, or is there only room in Four String for one person with obscure taste in old music?
  
• Ben places Chris on an exacting calisthenics regimen. Has he gone too far, or is this just what the doctor ordered?
  
• The guys learn an important lesson about fire safety from Purple Feather recording artists The Donnas.
  
• It just so happens that Bret is a corpse that only moves when music plays like Bernie does that one weekend. What happens when Eric and his piano go out of town for a few weeks?
  
• Ryan learns to astrally project himself thousands of miles. Will he use this new-found power for good... or evil?
  
• The group has their toughest mystery yet. They can only solve it with the help of this week's guests, the Harlem Globetrotters!

Global media domination

According to sitemeter, our traffic is twice what it was a month ago. Based on this "doubling every month" trend, our traffic will rival that of Facebook in about a year. I've included a graph to illustrate future projections.

So thank you for reading. And if you want to invest, the offer stands.

The secret of my success

Oh hi. I didn't hear you come in. My name is Christopher, but you can call me by my graffitoist name, Pup Luv. After seeing a particularly choice graffito of mine, young graffitoists will come up to me and say, "Hey Christopher" and I'll say, "My name is Christopher, but you can call me by my graffitoist name, Pup Luv." Then they will inevitably say, "Hey Pup Luv, can you tell me some secrets? I want to make a graffito as good as yours." Then I will say, "I have no idea what you're talking about." Then they will convince me that they are not a cop, and I will tell them my secrets.

These folks focus on the smooth bubbles of my letters and the straightness of the lines that I intend to be straight, and the perfect spacing of it all. It is then I share my secret:


That's right, the rolling ruler. This classy measurement device is a protractor, a compass, a ruler, and a rolling ruler all in one. When you're in a men's room stall and find it's time to unsheathe your sharpie and stick it to a harpy, it's rolling ruler time. The rolling ruler is perfect for marking your small scale trail.

"But Christopher," you might say, and I would reply, "My name is Christopher, but you can call me by my graffitoist name, Pup Luv." "Pup Luv," you say, "I saw a graffito of yours just today, and it covered an entire wall, and a large one at that, and it was rolling ruler perfect." "Aha!" I would say.

I would say "Aha!" because of this:


These images are not to scale. The second one is of my giant client, the jumbo rolling ruler. It is twelve feet long. The holes are big enough to accommodate a spray can nozzle. It is the real deal, Banana Peel.

But what about the quieter times? When I feel the need for an evening auto-erotic graffito experience, I reach for this:


That is the one-inch-long-with-the-inch-divided-into-twelfths rolling ruler. When I want to tag my bag but also need to measure than angle of my dangle to get it right, Dwight, I know I can trust my one-inch-long-with-the-inch-divided-into-twelfths rolling ruler because of its precision protractor.

Since you let yourself in (remember I didn't hear you come in) please feel to show yourself out. Just remember next time you're out at a fine store to seek out your new rolling ruler, preferably in all three sizes. You could tell them Christopher sent you because my name is Christopher, but you can call me by my graffitoist name, Pup Luv. They'll know me be the latter.

mimicking the master

this dog learned to pray, and yet we still can't get bret to post to this blog.

Stop the madness...

The word bracket has become like tiny grains of sand in my ass crack.