Monthly Archives: January 2009

Hewlett Packard Scanner Bleg

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I just plugged the thing in, my first scanner. After you do a scan, where do you find the scan that you’ve done? When I look at the menu item for Open Project (I think that’s the term), it’s all grayed out. Yet I know I’ve done at least one scan. I lined up a picture on the flatbed, the picture showed up on my screen, and I clicked Accept. The Help files says that’s what you do when a scan is ready to go. I even did a Saveas and gave the scan a name. But now … gone and nowhere for me to look.

No instructions in the box, and the Help files I downloaded have no items about finding saved files.
Fuck. I know the answer is something simple, but this still pisses me off.

Gene Roddenberry’s Favorite TV Show to Watch

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Barney Miller. He used to be a cop and found the show true to life.


I was happy to hear he liked it. Barney Miller has always been one of my favorites. That and Married … With Children are two superior tv shows that earned followings but never got much media fuss.
From Inside Trek: My Secret Life with Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry by Susan Sackett

Useful Definitions

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Years ago, on my first job, I had to write an obit of the man who invented Twinkies. Since I worked for a reference publication, I included a definition of Twinkies for future generations: “a tan, cream-filled cake roughly the shape of a cylinder.” That caused people around the office to laugh at me.


Now the political publication The Hill defines rickrolling, though to slightly less absurd effect:  

37 seconds into the video, though, viewers are RickRoll’d, which is when a copy of the music “Never Gonna Give You Up” by 80s musician Rick Astley surprisingly appears instead of an image the viewer was expecting


The viewers in question are watching Speaker Pelosi’s try at rickrolling, a very tame sample. The finest specimen I’ve seen is here.

A Pulp Haiku

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Since Noah’s a poet, so am I. I wrote this years ago during a quiet moment on the Bond Buyer copy desk.

A Pulp Haiku
“Get your goddamned hands
where they can do me some good,”
she said gustily.

Twentieth Century Boy

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Since we’ve been talking about comedy and humor, and since I’ve been sneering at Achewood, I thought it only fair to show what happens when I try to be funny in a creative context. This was published a while back at Poor Mojo’s, but I think I forgot to link to it. Anyway, I’ve reprinted it here, in all its scatalogical, metrically confused, and pointlessly erudite glory.

If there’s a lot of enthusiasm for this, I may reprint my filthy parodies of CCR songs. So, you know, comment at your peril.

***************************

Twentieth Century Boy

I took the road less traveled and ran into a ditch.
Robert Frost was there already so I fucked that bitch,
on and on, ‘cause my genius is for lovin’;
He whinnied, “Are you Yeats or is this the second coming?”
Santorum spread like wisdom
Wisdom spread like kitsch,
I pounded him like Ezra till his modern jism twitched.
A canto is a canto but my manwhich is for real;
I manipulate my Mandarin so hard your cheeks’ll peel,
and my daring manifesto bears the Manischewitz seal.
No ideas but in things,
no things but in your butt,
abstractions are distractions from the traction of my nuts,
and the friction of my diction gets me deeper in the cut —
“Is this your lost generation?”
“Nah, my shit is just backed up.”
You’ve got to keep it regular; you need a complex structure,
and my foot-long has the footnotes that’ll help your bowels rupture.
My allusions are protrusions that pry you ever wider;
I’m going to show you fear in a handful of fiber.
You’re the casement; I’m the cannon;
you’re the system; I’m the thinker;
you know it cause you feel aesthetic movements in your sphincter.
The pains increase, you sue for peace, call in the League of Nations;
You’re whinin’ cause you say I owe your hymen reparations.
You got a pact? It’s wack.
I’m not half through being fractious;
just look the other way and I’ll slip up like parapraxis,
And there are you,
the six millionth Jew.
impaled upon my axis.
W.H. was an odd one, Wallace was an even
I’m going to show you thirteen ways of looking at my semen.
My consciousness is streamin’,
My epiphanies are peein’,
Just a taste of my waste and your life’ll lose its meanin’.
You think April’s cruel? Then watch this mother breedin’!
“The horror! The horror!” My Kurtz steams up your Congo.
Your inferior interior is throbbing like a bongo.
My craft begins to quicken.
My Lord Jim’s in your riggin’.
More dusky booty than Gauguin — I’m an atavistic brigand.
I stole the plums out of your icebox —
my thumbs up in that nice box —
my wheelbarrow’s in your chicken as Depends fall on the sidewalk.
My free verse is plain and simple like a lumpen rake or hoe.
This No Man’s Land is fallow and I’m waiting like Godot,
for your skanky bum to put out with the existential flow.
You’re farting like you’re Sartre; there’s no exit to the loo;
the atmosphere gets plaguey like I’m sittin’ by Camus.
You think that I’m dissuaded? Hell, filth is my milieu —
a clean crack is the one crack I do not go gentle through:
Let’s all rage, rage, against the wiping up of poo.
The fragrant asses of the masses fire up my five-year plan;
I’m building up my industry in your Uzbekistan;
I’m developin’ like Oedipus all randy in his pram:
I put the sex back into complex and the oral in exam.
Finnegan’s steak is the text and I’m ready to cram:
this is a portrait of the artist as a battering ram!

who wants your life, anyhow?

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Noah’s recent post on Achewood (especially the comments) and Tom’s recent post on Judd Apatow writing a William Shatner sketch for Saturday Night Live, are making me think about a certain kind of humour.

People on the Achewood thread are talking about standup-style humour, at least the kind we hate, and what it is, and why we hate it. A couple of years ago, my husband got satellite radio, and had a phase of listening to the standup channel on long drives. Until that experience, I had thought I liked standup. But during those long drives, I got to thinking, “Man! Standup comedy is just a societal tool for enforcing conformity, isn’t it?”

Outside of comedy geniuses, standup seems to be all “Men are like this. Women are like this!” “Black people are like this. White people are like this!” “Straight men are like this. Straight men better not be like this if they know what’s good for them!”

Which brings us to Apatow having Shatner shit on his fans: both those guys make their living primarily off of people who are nerds, losers, you know, people who escape through fantasy, who at least have the image of themselves as people who fail at romance, or are socially awkward or immature. People who need to “get a life,” because the one they have is not the one they’re supposed to want.

So is it a self-deprecating kind of joke, and we’re supposed to think Shatner and Apatow are also losers who need to get a life (except not because being a geek is fun)? Are they trying to appeal to the cool kids who are not Shatner (or embryonic Apatow) fans, to convince them that Shatner and Apatow are really better than those trekkie losers? Or is it just making sure as many people as possible feel vaguely insecure that they aren’t measuring up to standup comedy stereotypes, and fall in line and/or, you know, buy something?