Unmockable

I do not think that means what you think it means. [Link]

At last, we know the reason why comedy writers don’t make fun of President Obama much.

It turns out the man is completely unmockable.

We learn this from Jim Downey, the longtime “Saturday Night Live” specialist in political japery. “If I had to describe Obama as a comedy project, I would say, ‘Degree of difficulty, 10 point 10,’” the writer says in the expanded new edition of the “SNL” oral history book, “Live from New York.”

“It’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey says. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto — certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature. [Al] Gore had these ‘handles,’ so did Bush, and Sarah Palin, and even Hillary had them. But with Obama, it was the phenomenon — less about him and more about the effect he had on other people and the way he changed their behavior. So that’s the way I wrote him.”

Oh really?

The charter Choom Ganger, confessed eater of dog and snorter of coke. The doofus who thinks the language spoken by Austrians is “Austrian,” that you pronounce the p in “corpsman” and that ATMs are the reason why job growth is sluggish. The egomaniac who gave the queen of England an iPod loaded with his own speeches and said he was better at everything than the people who work for him. The empty suit with so little real-world knowledge that he referred to his brief stint working for an ordinary profit-seeking company as time “behind enemy lines.” The phony who tells everyone he’s from Chicago, though he didn’t live there until his 20s, and lets you know that he’s talking to people he believes to be stupid by droppin’ his g’s. The world-saving Kal-El from a distant solar system who told us he’d heal the planet and cause the oceans to stop rising. The guy who shared a middle name with one of the most hated dictators on earth.

Nope, nothing there to mock. No way to get a grip on this polished, oiled obsidian.

One does not simply use the letters 'mor' to show something is evil

Well, actually, you can. [Link]

In fact, "mor" may be what is sometimes called a phonestheme: a part of a word that tends to carry a certain connotation not because of etymology or formal definition but just by association. Words that start with "gl" often have to do with light (glow, gleam, glimmer, glitter, glisten, etc.) even though they are not all related historically; similarly, words that start with "sn" often relate to the nose (snoot, sniffle, snot, snore, sneeze, etc.). It doesn't mean that all words with those letters have the meaning in common, but there is a common thread among a notable set of them.

How does this happen? Whether it's through sound association or the force of a particular root word, it just seems to snowball. It may be partly through words with phonesthemes in them being preferred to words without (glitter chosen over coruscate because it sounds more, well, glittery), partly through words with phonesthemes in them shifting sense under the influence of the phonestheme (snub is getting more nose-focused), and partly through words changing form to come to have phonesthemes in them.

One possible case of a word changing form to have a phonestheme is the oldest of the "mor" names above, Mordred, the betrayer of King Arthur. His name actually was originally Medraut orModred, Celtic versions of the Latin Moderatus. How did it get the "mor"? Possibly with some influence of his mother, Morgause, or of Morgan le Fay. But possibly also through some sound associations, with murder (earlier murther) and with the French morte. After all, the best-known account of the Arthurian legend is Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur.

We know that some of the names drew directly and deliberately on "mor" words. J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and knew very well what he was up to when he chose his words.Morgoth, Mordor, and Moria are all formed using the same mor root that shows up in his Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin, a root referring to darkness and blackness. He borrowed it from the old Germanic word mora, which, as I mentioned, shows up in the modern word murky.

J.K. Rowling is well known as a dab hand at wordplay. Voldemort is right from French: it can mean "flight from death" or "theft of death." Rowling herself pronounces it with a silent t as in the French, though she's just about the only one who does.

Classical roots very likely played a role in the name Morbius, too. The first one, after whom the others (in Spider-Man and Dr. Who) are named, was in the 1956 movie The Forbidden Planet: Dr. Edward Morbius, his ship's master of languages and meaning, a man with an out-of-control unconscious. Morbius himself would have noticed the resemblance of his name to Möbius (of the famous loop) and Morpheus (shape-shifting god of dreams). He probably also would have known its similarity to Latin morbus, meaning "sickness" — source of English morbid. We can reckon safely that Irving Block and Allen Adler, who wrote the story an
d invented the name, had some idea of this too.

A 70's version of the future today

Space Station '76. [Link]

South by Southwest Music, Interactive, and Film Festival is in full effect in Austin, Texas. There are many low-budget indie movies that will premiere among smaller studio releases such as Jon Favreau’s Chef and the Veronica Mars movie. The main draw for SXSW’s film slate is the indie films that didn’t make the cut for the Sundance Film Festival a few months ago. Among them is a new science fiction comedy called Space Station 76.

THR reports that Space Station 76 will find its way into theaters soon. Jack Plotnick co-wrote and directed the film, which features a story about “a group of people (and several robots) living on a space station in a 1970’s-version of the future who are forced to confront their darkest secrets when a new Assistant Captain arrives and inadvertently ignites tensions among the crew.” Jennifer Cox, Sam Pancake, Kali Rocha, and Michael Stoyanov also co-wrote Space Station 76. The film premiered on March 8 as part of the Visions section during SXSW.

Ex-NSA director jokes of placing Edward Snowden on kill list

You know how when you travel, the TSA has no sense of humor about jokes made by travelers about bombs or terrorism? I think the same general guideline should apply to government officials who make jokes about putting citizens on 'kill lists'. [Link]

[F]ormer National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden made a joke about putting Edward Snowden on a kill list.

Snowden, who leaked secret NSA documents to news reporters, has been nominated for the "Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought," considered to be Europe's most prominent human rights award.

According to Sasso Hayden quipped, "I must admit, in my darker moments over the past several months, I'd also thought of nominating Mr. Snowden, but it was for a different list."

This could be one sweet heist movie

Maple syrup heist in Quebec. [Link]

The puzzle is how the culprits managed to siphon off almost C$30 million ($30.4 million) of syrup. That’s the equivalent of 10 million pounds or roughly 15,000 barrels of syrup. And the stock didn’t vanish somewhere in the supply chain of a major city. It’s missing from a warehouse in Saint-Louis-de-Blandford, a tiny town of 903 people, according to the 2011 Census. They’re usually more focused on cranberries, whether it’s harvesting them or celebrating them in cranberry festivals.

So imagine the surprise when a “routine inventory check,” as the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (FPAQ) calls it, revealed evidence of a massive heist. Row after row of barrels were empty, filled with nothing but sweet-smelling Quebec air.

Now it’s the federation that has some explaining to do. These are the protectors of the sap, the maple barons who have an OPEC-like sway in syrup circles and represent some 13,500 producers. Along with handling bulk syrup sales and marketing, the federation is responsible for what it calls the “global strategic maple syrup reserves.” Much like oil reserves, those backup supplies are supposed to protect against the vagaries of bad weather and volatile prices. Last week, everyone thought Quebec was heading into the winter with 37 million pounds in reserve. More than a quarter of that is now gone.

An empty suit in an empty chair

Made for each other. [Link]

Last night, Clint Eastwood made fun of Obama. You’re not supposed to make fun of Obama. He’s Obama.

It is not a sign of confidence for the President to respond to remarks from an actor, even if it is Clint Eastwood.

This seat's taken. OFA.BO/c2gbfi, twitter.com/BarackObama/st…
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 31, 2012

Like the Onion, but Military.

The Duffel Blog. And like the Onion, occasionally satire is not noticed and gets posted as real news.
This one is a particularly believable.

HTTP Status Cats

Awesome. [Link]

Saturday Night Live Japan

Now it can be unfunny in another language. [Link]

SNL JPN‘s live format is mostly unfamiliar to a country where most variety shows are heavily edited. The show will air once a month, and feature “the heavy influence of Japanese Konto style slap-stick comedy.” My favorite!

Tips for Not Appearing Crazy on the Internet

VERY GOOD ADVICE!!!!!! Ahem. [Link]

In a recent column, I touched on the topic of conspiracy theories, which of course brought in lots of crazy people to the comments section. As I looked through the responses, I noticed how easy it was to scan them or just read the first sentence and say, “Well, this one is a crazy person.” And lots of people scan like this, because crazy people have this habit of self-identifying on the internet that allows sane people to skip over what they have to say before even getting to the crazy point. Thus crazy people never even get heard.

The advent of the internet should be a Renaissance for crazy. Crazy people used to have to try to spread their views through poorly photocopied newsletters with weird font choices that no sane person would read. But on the internet, crazy people can put their opinions right next to those of sane people. If they can just use a little self-discipline to not immediately identify themselves as cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, they might actually get their ideas read.

Now, I’m not going to try to tell people how not to be crazy anymore. That’s a long, involved process of correctly identifying the internal things making them angry in their own psyches that they instead project onto external things. And it sounds hella boring. Instead, I’m only going to tell you how to conceal your craziness. I’m going to teach you how to take your freak flag and fold it up and put it in your back pocket. If you’re successful, people are going to have to really read your points before understanding that you’re crazy. They might even miss your crazy entirely and really consider what you have to say (e.g., “This guy makes some interesting points; maybe I should find out more about this ‘Ron Paul’ person”). Doesn’t that sound great, you social outcasts and conspiracy nuts?

I see some crazed nodding. Let’s get started.

Not quite the 'Feel-Good' we had in mind

Netflix suggestion. [Link]

Okay, the category Dan and his family were browsing on Netflix is called "Feel-Good Movies." Not "Feel-Good G-Rated Movies," or "Feel-Good Kids' Movies." Still, he was still a little alarmed to see an R-rated documentary on the porn industry between the Rugrats and Leapfrog features recommended for his young son.

The Age of the Jokeless Comedy

Interesting trend. [Link]

Is “The Hangover Part II” a comedy? Yes, definitely, but only of a recent strain: the now-dominant form of cinematic humor we’ll call the jokeless comedy.

This mutant subgenre is the offspring of two genetically compatible fathers: Todd Phillips, director of both “Hangover” films, as well as “Old School”; and Judd Apatow, director of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up” and the producer/midwife to a litter of similar-looking movies with mix’n’match titles. (“Forgetting the Greek”? “Get Him to Sarah Marshall”? “Drillbit Taylor Express”?) Together, like Lenin and Trotsky, Phillips and Apatow have engineered a comedic-cinematic putsch. “Old School,” in 2003, was the April Theses for this uprising, and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” in 2005, was its October Revolution.

Their movies are, at first glance, similar: profane but intrinsically sweet-natured comedies about doughy broheems orbiting one another, water bongs and adult life. Apatow’s boys are usually fringe geeks or happy outcasts (comedy nerds, career stoners), while Phillips’s characters are unhappy, neutered or denatured adults: dentists, stereo salesmen, sad-sack husbands and henpecked clods. In Apatow, the enemy is adulthood, which ruins life; in Phillips, the enemy is women, who ruin men.

What these auteurs truly have in common, though, is that they have systematically boiled away many of the pleasures previously associated with comedy — first among these, jokes themselves — and replaced them with a different kind of lure: the appeal of spending two hours hanging out with a loose and jocular gang of goofy bros. (Also: ritual humiliation. Humiliation is a big part of it, too.)

And these movies are often enjoyable. If you were to list your favorite comedies of the last five years, I bet at least three of either Apatow’s or Phillips’s films would make the list. Yet can you recall a single famous gag from any of these movies? What was the absolute most hilarious joke in “The Hangover”? (My informal straw poll suggests that it was Galifianakis’s mispronouncing “retard.”) Tellingly, the most quotable sequence from any Apatow movie is the “You know how I know you’re gay?” exchange between Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which was improvised on the sidelines, then stuck into the film, and which, trust me, does not benefit from being reproduced for posterity in print. Surely there must be at least one indelible gag, line, or scene from just one of these films? If there is, I can’t identify it, and don’t call me Shirley.

All modern movie comedies can be divided roughly into two categories: character-driven and joke-driven. The first category includes movies like “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Meet the Parents,” “Manhattan” and “The Hangover”; the second includes movies like “Austin Powers,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Bananas” and “Airplane!” The primary distinction lies in their respective relationship to reality. In character-driven comedies, funny people say funny things and fall into funny situations, but it’s all contained within the realm of plausible realism; nothing absurd or unbelievable occurs. Joke-driven comedies, by contrast, start with the absurd and unbelievable and go from there. Their jokes burst the boundaries of realism; in fact, they’re often about bursting the boundaries of realism. Character-driven comedy is Meg Ryan loudly faking an orgasm in a deli and an old woman saying, “I’ll have what she’s having”; joke-driven comedy is a woman (in “Top Secret”) being asked to translate a conversation and saying, “I know a little German,” then turning and waving at a midget in lederhosen.

Helping Move

This is why you hire movers. [Link]

You're like a Spanish conquistador but instead of bringing smallpox you bring Scandanavian furniture, property damage, cast urine, and irresponsibility. 

Irony

I'm sure she can taste it. [Link]

In this anonymous Facebook exchange, a young woman proudly shows off her new "VEGAN" inner-lip tattoo to her friends; they offer her a string of congratulations that comes to an abrupt end when one friend points out that black tattoo ink is made from burnt animal bones, and thus the VEGAN in question will forever have an animal product in her mouth

I have nothing against vegetarians, in fact I respect that commitment quite a bit, but this is right up there with getting a tattoo of Chinese characters that don't quite mean what you think they mean.

Vindication

This is funny. And what is funnier is that some people will find this unfunny. [Link]

“VINDICATION: When the loudest critic of your policies achieves his greatest success because of them.”

I can hear the liberal cries of outrage, so to recap: The interrogations of KSM (which included waterboarding) and the interrogation of Hassan Ghul (held in “black site” prisons) were key to identifying the courier; the president then authorized military action in a foreign country without going to the United Nations or informing the host government; the military action was unilateral, and we did not consult with our allies; Congress was not informed of the military action; and it increasingly appears that no serious effort was made to treat Osama bin Laden as a criminal (reading him his rights, etc.). The monitoring of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s phone call was a result of an extensive global wiretapping system. Furthermore, as Charles Krauthammer notes, the helicopters used in the raid came from Bagram and Jalalabad; if we had withdrawn from Afghanistan on the antiwar Left’s timetable, we would have had no bases from which to launch this operation.

Well done to one president for enacting all of these policy changes, and well done to his successor for keeping them in place.

The Onion Should Develop the Next Version of Microsoft Word

A feature that starts in satire and continues right on through to believability. [Link]

"Microsoft Word Now Includes Squiggly Blue Line To Alert Writer When Word Is Too Advanced For Mainstream Audience."

When cats have thumbs

They'll come for us.

China passes off Top Gun footage as real

Amazing. [Link]

A few days ago, China Central Television showed footage of what they claimed was an air force training exercise conducted on January 23. From the looks of things, they were actually just playing clips from Top Gun.

The clips in question were reportedly aired during the News Broadcast program on China Central Television, the major state television broadcast company. They supposedly showed a J-10 fighter firing a missile at another aircraft during a practice exercise.

But an internet commenter quickly pointed out that the aircraft the J-10 was shown shooting down was an F-5, an American aircraft, and the very one Tom Cruise guns down in a scene from Top Gun. Comparing frames from the CCTV broadcast (left) and Top Gun (right), well, they're lookin' pretty much identical.

Visual Studio Achievments

Awesome. [Link]

What if Visual Studio supported achievements, just like games on Steam, Xbox or PS3? Bragging to your coworkers about which one you’ve just unlocked, imagine that! Here’s a little proposed list for some of them. .NET / C# flavored, of course.

• Falling Down – Created a new SharePoint project
• Job Security – Written a LINQ query with over 30 lines of code
• The Sword Fighter – 5 Consecutive Solution Rebuilds with zero code changes
• Shotgun Debugging – 5 Consecutive Solution Rebuilds with a single character change
• The Mathematician – Defined 15 local variables with a single character name
• The Academic – Written 1000 lines of F#
• Spaghetti Monster – Written a single line with more than 300 characters
• Wild One – Mixed tabs and spaces for indentation more than 5 times in a single line
• The Organizer – Created a Solution with more than 50 projects
• The Portal – Created a circular project dependency
• The Multitasker – Have more than 50 source files open at the same time
• The Code Keeper – Uninstalled Resharper because it made you redundant
• Pasta Chef – Created a class with more than 100 fields, properties or methods
• Procedural Programmer – Created a method with more than 10 out parameters

More at the link.

Zoolander 2

Awesome. [Link]

Ben Stiller confirmed 'Zoolander 2,' is happening, and even gave some big plot spoilers.

After co-star Owen Wilson talked up the development of the film in December, Stiller took it up a notch in an interview with Empire Magazine, saying he'd finished and submitted the script and then talking about what's happened to the characters since the first film, and what to expect in the sequel.

"It's ten years later and most of it is set in Europe," Stiller revealed. "I don't want to give away too much, but it's basically Derek [Stiller's character] and Hansel [Wilson's] ten years later - though the last movie ended on a happy note a lot of things have happened in the meantime."

Not a lot of good things, he specifies. But good news for fans: their favorite villain may be coming back.

"Will Ferrell is written into the script and he's expressed interest in doing it. I think Mugatu is an integral part of the Zoolander story, so yes, he features in a big way."

The center needs to be at least three times bigger than this.