Category Archives: Humor

Meanwhile, in Real America…

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…Fox News has suddenly discovered an existential crisis of corporate responsibility. Before you run around your house in circles, screaming randomly and tearing your hair out at the singular improbability of this development, fear not: the “victim,” in this case, is a military veteran.

There, there, it all makes sense now. After not-so-subtly taking the soldier’s side — this alone is newsworthy; I’d always thought Fox

News was “fair and balanced,” after all — the vaunted news network waits until the sixth paragraph to note:

Spirit has a hard-and-fast “no refund” rule for customers who don’t pay extra for insurance, and while company officials expressed sympathy for Meekins, they refuse to make an exception in his case.

While I can sympathize with a dying veteran’s last request (and that is the only non-tongue-in-cheek portion of this post), it is important to remember that the new conservative orthodoxy clearly states that “corporations are people, my friends.” Which necessarily implies that this soldier is just a deadbeat asking for handouts from hard-working Americans.

Of course, Peter Forbes, president of the Veterans of the Vietnam War and the Veterans Coalition, disagrees with my assessment. In fact, he stated:

“What would have happened if this patriotic American said “no” when called to serve his country? Life at Spirit Airlines might never happened,” the letter obtained by FoxNews.com reads.

Not to nitpick, but given the war in which he fought, I think it’s safe to say we’d all be OK. Not that this was his fault, but if we’re going to be hyperbolic about things, at least pick a good cause, please. I mean, this did make the front page of FoxNews.com. As we all know, this is an impossibly high bar to clear. There must have been at least four separate articles in the queue alternately comparing Obama to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and even Quagmire from Family Guy — and yet this thrilling narrative of an airline ticket snafu leapfrogged over all of them. But for the love of God, stop picking on my good friend Spirit Airlines. He’s a good people…my friend.

 

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The life and wild times of Thomas Friedman

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Almost six months ago, I began this blog with an inaugural post making fun of Thomas Friedman. I am neither the first nor the last person to do this, and my mocking was not the funniest on the topic either. But for what it’s worth, I thoroughly enjoyed doing it.

Incidentally, it also wasn’t the last time I’d make fun of him on this very same blog. Yup, you got it: Friedman’s gone and done it again. Now I realize the man doesn’t write his own headlines, but one gets the feeling that whoever does that job for him is mailing it in too. His latest column’s title? “Pay Attention.” (I suppose when you reach the level of inanity that Friedman has, blatant pleas for a captive audience are to be expected.) Somewhere in there is an apt metaphor for the last gasp of fast-declining newspapers. But like Friedman, I’m too lazy to elaborate. Why make logical connections when you can make large, specious leaps instead?

Now if I were Sir Thomas, here is where I’d inadvertently run into a [Singaporean bureaucrat/orphaned Cambodian child/Chinese investment banker/taxi driver from any one of those countries]. He’d casually throw out some inauspicious line, like “The traffic here is bad, but an empty road is worse luck than a traffic jam.” Or, “It may not be perfect, but I love my country.” Or, “Dude, stop dictating crappy metaphors into your iPhone while I’m trying to drive here.” As Mr. Friedman, I’d take it from there, weaving in a completely distended argument that manages to mention clean energy, Chinese high-speed rail, and wi-fi, all within a neat 700-word column (written, of course, in under five minutes).

As it happens, I don’t have to do this for him, since Mr. Friedman has taken care of things all by his lonesome. I could tell from the very start that this latest column was a keeper:

I had some time to kill at the Cairo airport the other day so I rummaged through the “Egyptian Treasures” shop. I didn’t care much for the King Tut paper weights and ashtrays but was intrigued by a stuffed camel, which, if you squeezed its hump, emitted a camel honk. When I turned it over to see where it was manufactured, it read: “Made in China.” Now that they have decided to put former President Hosni Mubarak on trial, I hope Egyptians add to his indictment that he presided for 30 years over a country where nearly half the population lives on $2 day and 20 percent are unemployed while it is importing low-wage manufactured goods — a stuffed camel, no less — from China.

Brilliant! The man managed to squeeze in China, tacky gift shops, airports (Thomas Friedman loves him some airports), and an utterly nonsensical plea to imprison Hosni Mubarak for participating in a little thing called globalization. (Later, the essay even closes with this absolute gem: “This is so much more important than Libya.”)

But Friedman isn’t finished, oh no. Just a bit further down, he ruminates: “If elections for the Parliament are held in September, the only group in Egypt with a real party network ready to roll is the one that has been living underground and is now suddenly legal: the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.”

Heavens to Betsy, no! Anything but that! God forbid a democratic revolution actually results in…democracy. Friedman quotes Mohamed ElBaradei, a (non-Muslim Brotherhood) presidential candidate, warning, “You will have an unrepresentative Parliament writing an unrepresentative Constitution.” (To be clear, ElBaradei’s “unrepresentative Parliament” refers to representatives elected freely by the Egyptian population.) Sadly, it never really dawns on Friedman that perhaps a contender for the presidency may in fact have a vested interest in portraying all rivals as less than desirable.

Towards the end, Friedman lays out his case more succinctly:

Free elections are rare in the Arab world, so when they happen, everybody tries to vote — not only the residents of that country. You can be sure money will flow in here from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to support the Muslim Brotherhood.

America, though, cannot publicly intervene in the Egyptian election debate. It would only undermine the reformers, who have come so far, so fast, on their own and alienate the Egyptian generals. That said, though, it is important that senior U.S. officials engage quietly with the generals and encourage them to take heed of the many Egyptian voices that are raising legitimate concerns about a premature runoff.

For those of you keeping track at home, things Monsieur Thomas is afraid of include: 1) democracy, 2) “everybody [trying] to vote”, and 3) outside campaign contributions — the last of which would never happen in the United States, obviously. In Friedman’s intricate mind (which, not unlike the Internet, also appears to consist of a series of tubes), America cannot intervene in Egyptian democracy. It can only pressure the undemocratic Egyptian military to delay voting so the preferred candidates win. Because if we can’t even pull off a little vote-rigging here and there, what was the point of displacing Mubarak in the first place?

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Bruins win! And Tim Thomas is simply divine.

Humor, Politics, Sports, ,

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Tampa Bay cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Tim Thomas, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the hockey elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

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Will Ferrell on “The Office:” brief thoughts

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On the bright side, my worst fears went unrealized. I love Will Ferrell, and I’ve watched — in several cases, multiple times — Old School, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Blades of Glory. Ferrell is phenomenal at what he does, which is to play larger-than-life caricatures whose narrative arcs neatly travel from cocksure/happy-go-lucky man-child to depressive failure to mature survivor, after finally confronting and conquering some innate (and ridiculously obvious to everyone but himself) personality flaw. (This, incidentally, is part of the reason Old School was so hilarious: the flaw, in that case, was his wife. She was properly disposed of in short order.)

The Office wisely sidestepped such theatrics. Ferrell is hardly a man known for his subtleties (his outstanding turn in Stranger than Fiction notwithstanding). And yet it was obvious that a continuation of his one-dimensional film roles, condensed into a twenty-minute teleplay format on a show known more for its situational humor than outsized personalities, simply wouldn’t work.

So the writers went with a subdued version instead. One problem with this approach, however, is that Ferrell’s surprisingly low-key character wasn’t that funny. This is, perhaps, forgivable. Given the fact that we already know he’ll be sticking around for another three episodes, hitting a home run on the opening pitch isn’t mandatory.

But it helps. Far more concerning, however, is the fact that, by attempting to mold Ferrell into a somewhat relatable role, the writers wound up immediately painting him into some contradictory corners. In a sense, Ferrell was too multi-dimensional. How can a guy call an impromptu meeting while receiving a shave at the office from his private barber one moment, and then express his deep insecurities to his predecessor just minutes later? This disconnect between the public and private personas is indeed a significant portion of Michael Scott’s story as well, but in his case the reasons for this were thoughtfully portrayed over the course of years, and dozens of episodes. In the case of Will Ferrell, we immediately gain access to both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and end up (at least somewhat) discounting both.

Regardless of any potential misgivings, I’ll be watching next week’s epsiode anyway. I just hope the writers manage to make Will Ferrell’s character a bit more coherent than they did on the first try.