Borrowing Is Stealing.

You ever wonder why I feel shitty when an avi or pic is stolen on Twitter? It's because I heard the age-old adage that "you can't copyright a joke".

Well yes you can. You can't copyright a subject--anyone can joke about a subject. You can't copyright a gag--if someone makes a similar joke to you, and it's funnier, they win. But you can copyright a gig. You can record a series of jokes. That's a real thing that can be copyrighted and exists.

I saw Lisa Lampanelli last weekend. She *has* to be above-board, because she's famous. But the idiot opening for her blatantly ripped off a Larry the Cable Guy joke. Of ALL the people to rip off, he chose a famous hack. Not even a good one.

He also wore a hat for 1 joke. Which means he wore a hat for 1 joke--he wore a hat for a whole set for 1 sad, hacky joke. He also based 80% of the rest of his act on Woody Allen's old comedy. He was neither new or better, just repetitious.

I am a comedy fan. I love new comedy. Hacks piss me off because they're useless. They're desperate for attention, but provide nothing. It you're a hack, you're not interesting.

You Can Go Back

When's the last time you saw your soul
When't the last time you played your role
When's the last time you felt the way
You were really meant to?

I wrote that. Sorry. I wrote it about 14 years ago, when I was 17. See, I was in a band. I play guitar, but I'm not very good. I never have been. I have a facility for languages, but though I've tried to learn how to read music around 5 times in my life, I can't do it. I'm not bad at playing by ear though, which is what gave me the idea for this post.

I started out on piano when I was around 12. I was determined to get a drum set, but my parents used the 3 genius arguments of "No," "Fuck no," and "You can't play drums on your own, you'd be better with something you can do melody with." So for my 13th birthday, I got a guitar. I still have it. It's my sweet baby, and she sings the blues or whatever hackneyed phrase people are using to describe their love for their instruments these days. I do love that damn thing. It's a little beat up, but that's given it character and a sweeter sound over the years, like me. I don't mean that. I sound like crap recently because I haven't played in months, except for filling in on bass for a cover band last weekend.

Your Fucking Head Split

I know some of the no one who reads this blog will disagree with me, but: I don't dream. Pretty much don't dream. I dreamed a lot as a child, but I haven't had a memorable dream outside of fever-caused ones since I was 17 or so.

Old Stuff: More Goofy Religion Full of Failing

[Originally posted on February 19, 2009]


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29259293/?gt1=43001

No offense to any of my Indian/Pakistani friends, but when people debate why the US has only bombed brown or very-swarthy people in recently memory, I hope beliefs like this are why. And that bombs only hit idiots like this. I know they didn't, but I'm trying to express my wish that they did. (Please note that I'm apparently apologizing for decisions that not only weren't my own, but that were undertaken by a country I am not a citizen of.) Marrying a dog. To ward off tiger attacks. Fucking stupidity.

Old Stuff: Drunken Missive #2: Explaining Calgary

[Originally posted on July 18, 2008]


So...there are bars everywhere here... (See? I can too carry a story when I'm drunk!)

Let's blame it on Ralph.

That sounds like a goofy thing to say, but in this case, it's true.

See a long time ago, there was a political reporter who liked to sit in the St. Louis Hotel's bar and listen to the politicians who came there to drink after a long day at city hall, which is right across the road.

Eventually, this political reporter decided that he had heard enough drunken tales. And he had also picked up an impressive drinking habit from his time at the St. Louis, as most people who go there do.

So he decided to run for public office. And eventually, Ralph Klein became the mayor of Calgary. And his decree to all the little boys and girls of Calgary was that "thou shalt never be further than walking distance from either a bar or a liquor store!"

And thus it was so. And then there was light. Or at least, drunkeness.

And this was a long time ago, when Calgary was smaller, so as the city grew, thus did The Ralph's rules grow into law throughout the new land. And so became the city of Calgary today: with bars and liquor stores fucking everywhere.

But The Ralph did not stop there. Because in the holy decade of the late-70's to the early-80's, when AC/DC were kings and Led Zeppelin did rule the land and Aerosmith were probably good for an honourable mention or something, King Ralph heard the word of the Lord and decided that municipal politics were no longer for him.

So he ran for premier of the province.

And thus did the age of the King begin. When he was drunk at a homeless shelter and argued with the residents, the people of Alberta did rejoice. For he was one of them. (Seriously, drinking and driving here is less like a felony and more like a competitive sport.) As The Guardian, the great UK paper put it, the man arguing wasn't "just another drunken rightwing jerk [...] Actually, it was Ralph Klein, the premier of the Alberta, dropping by for an unofficial visit on his way home from a party." Oh, and by "arguing with", I mean he yelled at a bunch of homeless people to "just get a job!"

"King Ralph", as he became known, "actually ran his mayoral campaign from the St Louis hotel bar, and the bar's owners had mugs made up with is picture on it that were known as Klein Steins. After he won, he continued to keep 'office hours' at the tavern."

And thus did Alberta become known as the province of the drinker. The buffoon. The giggler. It's frickin' hilarious here. See, the province itself is fairly right-wing, but if you're in the big cities (Edmonton or Calgary), you'd never know it. See I don't see the province as right-wing, per se, just libertarian. They don't want government interference in their lives, and Conservatives tend to offer the least interference. (Not provide, but offer.)

And so on lives the legacy of King Ralph, the first village idiot who was elected leader. See whatever my next post is for the continuation...because it's only gotten worse since then...

Enjoy!
-Dan

Scapegoats

[Originally written May 23, 2007]

You might want to read this before reading this note. Disclaimer: It's a pretty gross story:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/05/20/baby.in.microwave.ap/index.html

Ah, scapegoats. Fall guys. Where would our society be without them? Here's what I think their greatest contribution is: They allow people to continue doing business with those they know are corrupt/assholes/guilty, while not openly doing business with the bastards in question. It allows someone who regularly has to do some type of business with a horrible-but-necessary person to continue that business.

Here's an example: imagine a politician from a state where oil transport/drilling is a major industry taking millions of dollars in contributions from the oil industry. Now imagine that there's a major oil spill. From the point of view of someone who has to get re-elected, he has to speak out against it. From the point of view of someone who needs those millions, he has to make the issue about something else. So what would you do in this case? If I were a conservative, I'd find the smallest infraction by whatever government regulation group was supposed to be overseeing the safety at that site and rail against them. I'd talk repeatedly about the failure of expensive government oversight groups (forgetting that I was a part of that government) when compared to deregulated private safety corporations. From a liberal viewpoint, I might blame a low-level individual at the drilling company. Either way, you get your contribution and the conditions for the spill are still allowed to exist. Did I forget to mention that it might be expensive for your buddies in the oil industries to make their sites safer and more environmentally sound? So the scapegoat is government or some low-level worker no one will miss. When it should have been your site for fucking up in the first place.

I've just re-read that paragraph, and two things strike me about it: I have really got to start working on my examples, and that it's kind of politically cynical, in that the problem isn't fixed by either approach but the final one, which is blogistically boring.

Here's a quick "cynicism test": When you read the paragraph above, did you think I was abstracting from a true political story, or making one up?

I made it up. But if you believed it could be true, that tells you a lot about how you view politics. By the way, I apologize for the poorly-thought-out example, but the cynical part comes from years of observing the outcomes of political "events".

I am a relative newcomer to working in an office, but I've noticed that office politics come in to play a lot. I'm lucky to have friends who don't play inter-personal "political" games, or at least I'm insensitive enough to be able to tell them to rise above the shit caused by unnecessary and useless drama. This has led me to this belief: everything, if you try hard enough, can be politicized.
Take marriage, for example. It's a fairly common thing, it happens to many people throughout the course of their lives. You'd think that it wouldn't be easy to politicize the love between two people. Isn't it a personal thing? Until politicians started railing against gay marriage. Suddenly tons of voters, rather than ignoring the morons who were trying to convince them that this was important, actually thought it was important. Let me spell out the stupidity of this to you:

if...other...people...get...married...it...doesn't...affect...your...marriage. At all. Not even a little. Unless, in some weird way, two guys loving each other makes you love your significant other less. In which case you don't deserve her, let her find someone who's more stable.

But in a lot of cases, it worked. Gays and lesbians became the distracting concept in a debate that should have been about the candidates and the issues. Scapegoats.

That's not even the largest scapegoat concept. I'd say that the largest scapegoat in world history is religion. Bear with me now...

The Crusades: thousands (millions?) of people killed, religion blamed.

The Inquisition: millions killed, cultures destroyed, countless priceless historical artifacts and sites destroyed and lost forever, religion blamed.

Israel/The Middle East: I'll write about theologically-based states later. Needless to say, they've proven themselves to not work very well no matter where they are in the world, or what religion they're based on. Suffice to say, religion blamed.

Those are the big, historical ones. What about the little ones? The Jonestown Massacre. The Waco thing. The unending and unfortunate progression of Christian-vs.-Freemason thriller books.

The article I recommended at the beginning of this post is about a quote from a woman who says, basically, that her husband was forced by Satan to put their daughter into a microwave because he [Satan] was scared of the idea of her husband becoming a minister.

In other words, her husband was an abusive, homicidal lunatic who injured their daughter in a disgusting and horrifying way. And she's scapegoating religion, saying that it's not his fault.

It is his fault. If we take the Christian religion as a truth for the sake of argument, there are several logical problems (yes, in addition to that). One is that the whole basis of creation is that God gave man free will and the ability to exercise it. That's why so many stories have been written, in the Bible and outside it, about the Devil tempting people and them ultimately resisting it. Because we are able to. Because we CAN.

So if this guy is going to be as incredible a preacher as she claims he will be, you'd think that denying the Devil would be fairly easy, yeah? It's got to be easy to have faith if you want to lead people willing to follow a fairy tale. She thought this guy would be so good that the Devil was scared of him. 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Devil supposed to be some sort of ultimate badass? This guy must have been really good. So either: (a) this guy wasn't so good, and so the Devil wasn't scared of him, or (2) she's a fucking lunatic, too.

See there's this thing that's puzzled philosophers for years called The Problem of Evil. It basically states that God can either be omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), or omni-benevolent (all-good), but not all three. If he's all-knowing, he is aware that evil is in the world. If he's aware of it and doesn't do anything about it, he's not all-good. If he's aware of it and can't do anything about it, he's not all-powerful. One of the three has to be wrong. I'm not sure (and I'm hoping someone will correct me on this), but I think this is where Nietzsche came up with the idea that God is dead.

George Bush led Congress to believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and scapegoated "bad intelligence" when they found out he was full of shit. They were able to keep working with him rather than rising up and slaying him. Eva Mauldin scapegoated (if such a word exists) religion when her husband did something terrible, and can therefore convince herself that he's still a good man.
There's enough blame already; whatever happened to responsibility?

North American Hegemony

I'm not going to be ranting about politics in this post. I feel it's important to say that at the outset, as I tend to forget it halfway through what I'm writing. This post is not about politics; it's about ideology. Specifically cultural ideology. In that case, Canada is very similar to the United States.

We obviously differ in many ways: Canada is more accepting of social programs, less accepting of guns, less violent overall if news stories are to be believed, and we have a more difficult time defining ourselves. One important facet where we tend to agree however, is in our media. We like the same shows. Whether it's the glut of objectively horrible reality shows or the few-and-far-between intelligent shows that are created south of the border, we both seem to like them. For many of those cheaply-produced ones (again, reality TV shows), we have our own Canadian versions, though the US ones are just as watched as our more local ones.