The Rapport
First of all, in yesterday's comments, conversation turned to the phrase "monkey steals a peach." For those of you too lazy to read every comment, it was pointed out by some wannabe ninja dork that "monkey steals a peach" is a term used to describe a specific action in martial arts. It seems esoteric and lame--like everything else martial arts related--but these things have real-world applications. Just a few nights ago, "monkey steals a peach" was demonstrated on national television.

Watch the video if you dare.

(Safe for work...)

(...so long as your boss thinks it's OK to spend upwards of 10 seconds watching basketball video instead of doing... whatever it is you do in exchange for pay)

...

On Sunday afternoon, I was sitting, along with my wife, in those super-comfortable airport gate waiting-area seats. We weren't sitting together because she doesn't like to be seen in public with me since I got the implants, but we were both stuck there at the same time waiting as our departure was delayed for about an hour for "mechanical reasons."

Some people are impatient fliers, but as far as I'm concerned, if there's a question about anything mechanical on the plane, my position is "you know what, take all the time you need."

Happy as I was to wait, that meant sitting along the concourse whiling away the minutes, not allowed to indulge in the things I do at home when I'm killing time (smoking, video games, masturbation, amateur taxidermy), all of us stuck there watching the same TV run the same goddamn loop of CNN Headline News.

The whole point of CNN Headline News is that you get all of your news in about 11 minutes. Every story they're going to cover, they cover in roughly that span. We were there for, all told, about an hour and a half. It got to the point where I could read the anchor's copy for her. We all, as a potential plane-load of passengers, agreed that we should change the station, but wouldn't you know it, none of us could find the remote.

I was going to try throwing my shoe at the TV, but I remember what happened last time I tried that. Hey, did you know airports have their own jails?

Anyway, one of the stories they kept looping over and over and over again was about the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. This is the yearly black-tie event where the president and the people paid to cover him get together in a room to have gentle fun poked at them by a famous comedian. And oh ho, isn't it all so droll. And my, isn't the chicken delicious. What are these little brown things, capers? Lovely.

The image they kept showing over and over again was of the president and a look-alike doing a scripted side-by-side comedy bit. See, the premise was the look-alike could speak but the president talked like... well, the president. For instance, the look-alike would say "nuclear" and the president would say "nucular". Ha ha. Except the president fucked up his own line and said "nuclear". Just so you know, he's still a tool.

They showed the face of this year's host--Stephen Colbert--for a grand total of about a second. I didn't think much about it after that, mostly because the plane got fixed and I spent the next roughly five hours screaming at the top of my lungs in preparation for certain fiery death at 36,000 feet. Flying is stressful. Some people take tranquilizers, that's how I handle it.

I get home and start looking at internet news and reading blogs and, holy shit, apparently our Stephen took no prisoners.

And yet somehow the apparent fire-bombing has gone largely unremarked upon in regular press circles.

The blogosphere is another matter.

The right wingers say: how dare he! He should apologize to the president for being disrespectful. Also: unfunny and no impact.

The left wingers say: oh, hurrah and kudos! We stretch in the direction of the newfound sunlight! Let us fete him as no man has been fete'd before! Also: a hastily designed website!

YouTube has the video if you want to see it.

There's some question about what the president thought of it. I invite you to look at this picture and judge for yourself:


I don't really know what those who object are complaining about. The man has a well documented body of work both on his own show and on The Daily Show they could have consulted, and presumably did.

All they needed was YouTube. They could have, for instance, found this old Daily Show piece Colbert did that ends with a joke about Laura Bush and a bucket full of horse semen.

And we're all shocked--shocked!--that he would go up there right in front of the president and say things in a sardonic fashion that might be construed as less than flattering. How dare he do what he was hired to do!

Look, I understand that it is possible to go too far in a specific context and it is also more than possible to try to be funny and fail. Both of those things are, I would argue, the bedrock principles on which this blog was founded.

But if you're going to let the crazy homeless guy into your house, you can't get THAT mad when he takes a dump on the sofa. That's what crazy homeless guys do. Well known fact.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 3.7



Pops
- posted by Pops @ 9:44 AM