Baby Cakes: Accidental Poetry From Comedy

SuperDeluxe.com, in case you have not yet seen it, is a pretty great new-ish comedy web-site, full of animated and live-action skits along the awkward, ironic lines of Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!

The best series is "I Am Baby Cakes" by comic artist Brad Neely.

Presented below: the best of that series: Diary #3. In it, an ogre-looking man-child named Mark, or, Baby Cakes, who is "not ashamed to get excited" reflects on his walk in the park.

It's supposed to be comedy. But it comes across as spoken-word poetry aided by pictures, about a naive narrator looking for meaning in all the oddest places. He is not wise, but some of the sentences he produces are accidentally illuminating. You feel pity for his stupidity and his willingness to believe in things that only exist in role playing games, and a faint jealousy that you wish you could believe in a tenth as much wonderfulness as he sees every day in the world around him.

They are very funny, but the humor conflicts with how sad the main character is. Most viewers probably just focus on the humor of what he says instead of him as a character, which is all well and good. They would probably say that I am taking this too seriously. Perhaps.

Just Give Up and Eat Crap.

Apparently The International House of Pancakes has had enough of your refusal to eat their high-calorie flapjacks. They are now taking the militant route to forcing these thick cakes down your gullet by reminding you in a glossy campaign to SURRENDER to their syrupy-sweet will.

In a series of on-site posters, television commercials and web ads, a trio of new dessert-themed pancakes are photographed in sensual, erotica-style lighting, with feminine font telling you that "To surrender is the only option."

It's called "Pancake Surrender."

IHOP seems to be telling its potential customers to give up on any notions of healthy eating. It's as though they're saying, "Fuck your diet. Your fat ass is going to win anyway."

Resistance is Futile, friends. Give up. You're all going to die of heart attacks at 50 anyway, hardened arteries clogged with years of roadside-chain-restaurant grease, keeping your saccharine blood from reaching your overworked lungs till a whole team of medics comes and hauls your 400-pound body away...

I wish I was making this up, guys. We apparently are in a war with the forces of junk food, and its peddlers have the gall to tell us to put up the white flag.

VIDEO: Man Tasered To Death Due Partially to Language Barrier

Boingboing.net, my favorite website, ever, posted something that definitely doesn't fit their tag-line of "A Directory of Wonderful Things."

Remember in the taser post I mentioned a foreign man killed in a Canadian airport by taser-happy cops? Well, this video provides better context.

It is causing an uproar on that blog, with many people saying that boingboingwent too far - claiming it's a "snuff film."

But according to police reports, he didn't die until after the incident- so you might not actually be watching him die. You might just be watching him lose consciousness in a short journey to a place that he goes through quickly to get to death.

I can barely watch it. But it's important to, as an impartial observer, it is a valuable piece of footage.

But it brings up a good point that I didn't know before- he DOES look threatening with that chair, there. Maybe the taser was the best choice?

Regardless of the police's decision making, which is incredibly difficult to judge, it's a tragedy he had to die.

Tragic core hit: AGAIN! Yes. Ow.

Finally, Spam is Art

(Picture from here.)

The lead singer of Sonic Youth stole this blogger's secret idea and made poetry using the subject lines of spam emails that he unintentionally collected over the years.

A whole book of it.

Well, he didn't exactly steal this blogger's idea, it's a pretty obvious one. Anyone who has received enough unsolicited email can attest to its occasional, accidental brilliance.

Ahem. In the spirit of this new release, here is some brilliant poetry concocted by whoever the hell it is who makes spam.

These are real spam subjects. I only changed the punctuation a bit.

I need your urgent assistance.
Check out the best cardboard curlicue silicon,
Discount domain registration, Thompson.
Read this and choose your new reality-
Our sexual life maybe incredible and exciting.

This wine has been drunk before.
Explain my satiable swizzle,
Bufflehead!

Nice or naughty?
How do you turn it on?
Find what you need,
Naughty cam girls,
Looking for Zor!

Kind Of Forgot About That Whole Wet Thing Over There

(Image from here)


Eh, the ocean. Who cares?

Bizarre coincidence: two oil tankers spilled their toxic guts all over the place in a matter of less than a week: one near San Fransisco on Wednesday, and then one split up in a storm in the Black Sea on Sunday.

How often does this happen, anyway? What are the odds of it happening so close together? The devastation for each of these is tremendous, though it is a little heartening to think that at least in San Francisco there are volunteers trying to help the wildlife recover.

Alright, so now that the world is falling apart and everyone knows it, how is it being covered in the press?

With so many dozens of ecosystems collapsing all around us, which ones receive the blessing of media coverage affects which ones people work to preserve, rescue, or at the very least care about.

And I'd like to propose that these news stories about the spills are going to go off the news' radar very soon. That TV, the internet, and newspapers will treat these two examples of the ocean being completely screwed over with minimal coverage of the environmental effects. That these will be a blip on the radar screen.

And then compare the coverage to the extensive, continuous stories about the melting ice caps right now, from businessmen hoping for a new trade route to everyday people sad about the fate of the polar bears that now live on a sheet of ice fast becoming slush.

Why will we focus so little on the tarnished oceans, comparatively? It's because we are shockingly disconnected from our seas. We just don't tend to pay attention to them.

They take up 71% of our planet's surface and yet we know so little about their biology still- as proved by the new species of whale apparently discovered earlier this year.

We worry about organically grown produce, meat, and milk, but how many times have you heard these concerns raised about seafood? How many times have you heard about the environmental problems caused by pesticides on plants vs. how many times have you heard about overfishing and deforestation issues associated with wild-caught and, respectively, farm-raised fish? Did you know that fish farms have a tendency of destroying tropical mangrove forests? Depressing but true.

Why this disconnect? A lack of empathy. It's tough to feel sad about algae, squids, or fish dying, they're so weird-looking they just confuse us when we try to think about whether or not we care about them dying in mass numbers.

Polar bears on the other hand are rock stars of the environmental conservation world. One news report I watched recently included an interview with someone who said they wanted to reach out and hug one (let's ignore the fact that in reality the bear would eat her face off, just for the moment.) Everybody wants to save them because they have two cute little eyes, an adorable black-button nose and fluffy soft fur. Aaaw!

I mean, look, he's even on two legs- how cute, he thinks he's people! Once people start anthropomorphizing a specie, they care about its fate.

But poor ocean critters. Covered in oil, suffocated by plastic, and no end in sight, no campaigns reaching out to protect plankton, where most of the world's oxygen comes from.

Maybe our species should learn to respect our mother more. She gets mad sometimes and throws angry clouds around.

Award For Awesomest First Paragraph

Maybe I will do this every Friday. I will show an example of the best first paragraph (known as "leads" to journalism people) from a news story.

This week it comes from, of all places, Fox News.

"The most energetic particles in the universe — high-energy cosmic rays — likely come from enormous black holes nestled in the restless hearts of traumatized galaxies, scientists say."

RESTLESS HEARTS OF TRAUMATIZED GALAXIES! How gripping! I feel for those cosmic entities, somehow, while simultaneously being terrified of their might.

This journalist was probably a creative writing major who wants to write a novel someday. And I hope they do. Because I will buy that novel, if they can make something as dry and clean-cut as a news story sound like a heavily symbolic love poem written by Spock himself, then they could do great things in the wide-open world of fiction.

MMMMM science journalism! Beautiful!

Not A Terrorist, Just Emotional. Drunk. And Self-Strangled.

Thank gosh for private investigators. The death of Carol Gotbaum, a 45-year-old Manhattan woman related to some New York politicians, was figured out, thanks to them. Part of my mind has been waiting with baited breath since I heard of the death, simply because of how hard it was for a layman to guess what killed her.

No bullets. No obvious physical acts in the video that should have lead to death. No medical conditions mentioned, or tasers, or jumps out of windows. But a death? How?

After making an overly-emotional scene after missing a flight in a Phoenix airport, police arrested her, cuffed her and took her into custody. (One thing that sticks out , though, is that they didn't try to talk her down, just calm her first, before arresting her. Just went in and forced her to the ground in a matter of seconds. Add this to the "police are too impatient" file.)

She was left in a waiting room in the security section of the airport for a matter of minutes by herself. In that span of time she died. She was found with her handcuffs in an odd position around her body.

Was it police brutality, I wondered?

The coroner now says that it was strangulation, that was probably only possible because of how drunk she was. Apparently drunkenness, prescription drug abuse, handcuffs, and odd positions don't mix.

The odd thing is: she was on her way to rehab when this whole thing happened.

It's a real tragedy. But it reminds me of a very important fact that has been drilled into me these past 6 years: AIRPORTS are a FREEDOM-FREE ZONE. Don't to anything suspicious. Anything. Weird, emotional, creative, intellectual and, oh yeah, Middle-Eastern people, try as hard as possible to look as normal, whitebread, calm and average as you can.

Do it wrong and you might get unlucky. You might get arrested. And, well, if you are really really unlucky and also drunk, you might just die.


Emotional bit: knowing that she was screaming "I'm not a terrorist" as she was arrested and accidentally taken to her death just hits my tragic core. Ow.

Treehuggers Looking More And More Normal As Each Day Passes

The New York Times print edition had an entire section called "Business Of Green" today all about how the market is now driving corporations to start acting more green. This must have made environmentalists rejoice, since after 40 years of claiming that business is going to have to comply to their demands for efficiency and lower pollution sooner or later, the fringes and some main parts of corporate culture are starting to actually agree.

The zeitgeist is catching up four decades after the radicals and weirdos started the discussion. Better late than never? Let's hope.

The most exciting part is the head article all about a proposal in Congress that could actually do good by making carbon-heavy fuels more expensive than more environmentally-friendly ones.

This idea has been around for a little while. Federal politicians are just now starting to play with it.

Now, let's see what will happen when the oil executives open up their NYT to see the words "A proposal in Congress to put a charge on greenhouse gases could overturn the economics of energy." If my money was made based on the oil, coal, or wood market, I would start shaking in my boots and calling up the lobbyists.

I foresee a coming war in Congress between terrified old-energy lobbyists and forward-thinking, green-publicity-craving politicians. Or will those companies find a way to capitalize on the changing needs of an increasingly self-aware country, and be totally okay with moving away from those old-fashioned fuel types?

I am actually going to put my energy into hoping that the green imperative will win, for no other reason than a blossoming awareness of the finite nature of many traditional energy sources is starting to seep into the business world.

It only took a few decades for the rest of the world to stop calling environmentalists- also known as "people capable of looking at patterns and thinking way ahead"- crazy hippies. But Thank Gaia it's at least happening now.

To celebrate, wanna go smoke a joint and take LSD? I mean, go to a board meeting and watch the OC! Damn it! Board meeting and OC, really!

The Invisible Hand That Feeds

Hahahahah!


Conservative authors, some of whom have been on the bestsellers lists in recent years (including a Swift Boat writer-guy!), have gathered together to sue the parent company of the imprint that published them, Regnery publishing. They claim they are not being paid enough in royalties.

Apparently this company that has a habit of publishing books critical of things like government regulation of business now has its authors complaining about being ripped off by profit-margin-above-all-else, big-business tactics.

Best quote- Richard Miniter, author of Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror, in the New York Times today: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?" Of course, "Marxist" is neo-con speak for "further to the left than me."

Open Letter to Miniter: Maybe, sir, because "Marxist" cartoons are accurate in their depiction of businesses: they are simply profit-making machines with little to no regard for worker or human rights or privileges, unless they are forced into considering these factors by strict laws. Ooh, shudder, sir, for I am telling you that a law pertaining to business tactics- one of your mortal enemies- could have prevented this situation from happening to you. Would you support that law now that you are furious at the big company that ripped you- a worker, of sorts- off? Maybe you guys should have formed a union, like those writers who are on strike did. That would have really helped you out.

This is a bit like if women critical of giving the HPV vaccination shot to female children in school, by coincidence, contracted cervical cancer themselves, and then, in their hospital beds, argued that someone should have given them a shot to prevent the cancer. It would have had to have been given before they had sex, maybe in, say, middle school? Huh.

Watch the logical loops spin in on themselves. Irony is everywhere, and it's hilarious.

Taser-Pa-Looza!!

Why are police so obsessed with using tasers inappropriately right now?


An 82-year-old woman was tasered last week by the Chicago police. She was schizophrenic, and wielding a hammer threateningly. But still, she was 5'1'' 160 lbs, and 82. I think that a police officer could have taken her down without the use of something as dangerous as a taser. Yet they did. She had to go to the hospital.

This brings back recent memories of the foreign man tasered to death for the crime of not speaking English in a Vancouver airport in late October. The security forces were confused, and tasered him out of sheer befuddlement, perhaps feeling threatened by his foreign language?

And don't forget the famous case of Andrew "Don't Tase Me, Bro" Meyer whose begging for mercy while being tasered at a John Kerry speech created an internet in-joke, and the strangely underreported story of the UCLA student who was tasered for not showing his ID at a school library.

Since they are so dangerous, tasers are supposed to be used only for situations where near-deadly force is needed.

Ask yourself: Were the police in any of these situations really in need of near-deadly force? A tiny old lady with a hammer? A man who simply did not speak English? A disobedient political zealot whose greatest threat was his immature handling of public speaking? A student who left his ID elsewhere?

IF arresting these people was neccessary, which is more than dubious in some cases, couldn't they have used the old-fashioned "get them to the ground and put handcuffs on them" method? Are modern police officers getting too out of shape to do that? Too overzealous in their use of power?

It seems they may just be impatient. Impatient at the refusal of a person to immediately subordinate themselves to the officer, to immediately and flawlessly give up. Don't have time to talk to them, or just don't feel like them giving you lip? Just zap the f*ckers. That'll teach those squirming things called "citizens" a real lesson.


Police: Please only use tasers if deadly force is really needed. Not when you get lazy or fed up with people resisting you.



And anyway, tasers have been around for something like a decade now. Why the sudden obsession with them?

Introductions

Everybody and their dog blogs.

Then why even start? Why even presume that what one person has to add to this massive clusterf*ck of opinions and linkage even matters (Hey, maybe even the blogosphere itself doesn't matter! How overwhelming!)

What I have to say doesn't 'matter' like literature or what the president has to say 'matters'. But it may just amuse, inform, or provoke someone out there, so here I go, hoping one person out there is affected.

Here I go, saying that this is worth doing, presuming that the fact that I am an educated young human in the Western Hemisphere with access to (and a near-obsessive interest in) the media and an ability to write coherently entitles me to an opinion.

Here I go into the wild, disrespected world of internet journalism.

If you agree with me that the news matters, that music matters, that science and the environment and high and low culture and politics all matter, then you are cordially invited to join me.

We're on a road to nowhwere, come take that ride.


I promise it will not be boring.