If she won't cut loose... induce!!

[bebopbalogna]

All your base are belong to us! 

the first time i've lol'd at an icanhascheeseburger-esque internet meme.  nice werk, dan!

[Poop Fresh-Herbed Pickles]

Pynchon seems to be easily distracted, so that's fitting.

[captqitn]

Yeah, I loved Crying of Lot 49, but I've tried Mason & Dixon 3 or 4 times and just can't drill further than a 100 pages into.

Dang, I'd heard the new one was an easier read.

[Doctor Rock]

I remember that, when I read Vineland, there were parts when I couldn't keep track of all the characters.  I just stopped caring and kept reading.  Eventually, things seemed to make sense again. 

[Moetown]

Vineland is the only Pynchon I've read. I've started Gravity's Rainbow 3 or 4 times, but have never stuck with it. It's been a long time since I've tried to read anything by him.

[Moetown]

I remember really enjoying Vineland, and when I'd mention it to various Pynchonites, they'd tell me it was his worst book.

[Sabamah]

 

[Poop Fresh-Herbed Pickles]

Does that mean you haven't tried to read a Pynchon novel 3 or 4 times?

[Sabamah]

since i have nothing to contribute about pynchon, here's what i got:

last night at the UCB, we saw a GREAT 'i love movies' with doug benson. his special guests were paul f. tompkins (who f'ing killed it), tom scharpling (who didn't get to talk as much, but was still funny), and jon hamm. it was AMAZING! i don't watch mad men, but man- i totally get the jon hamm fascination now. he is so goddamn handsome. and very, very funny. that 'i love movies' made me so happy.

then at comedy death-ray afterwards, we saw andy kindler and sarah silverman, amongst others. andy kindler is still so good after all these years- i didn't stop laughing the entire time. sarah silverman...meh. i gotta say, i have not been loving her sets that i have seen at comedy death-ray. she was being taped for dateline, so i understand that she has to do material that she's done before- that's totally fine. but i dunno, maybe i'm just over her schtick. i kinda just found myself being annoyed most of her set. she was trying to riff on this one black dude in the audience and it was just awkward and unfunny. got uncomfortable. i feel blasphemous for saying this 'cause she's, you know, awesome, but she's just not doing it for me really.

so yeah, that's what i got today. THE END!

[Poop Fresh-Herbed Pickles]

Black dude head

[Sabamah]

Black dude head

i wish it had been that funny.

[Poop Fresh-Herbed Pickles]

Are you ever scared of being singled out for ridicule at a comedy show?

[Jesse]

It happens all the time. I've found that ever since I grew my old-timey mustache, I've received nothing but compliments from strangers on the street, but have been singled out by the hackiest of comedians (and those "ironically hacky" like Matt Besser). It's pretty annoying.

[Sabamah]

Are you ever scared of being singled out for ridicule at a comedy show?

yes, that's why i like to sit next to jesse and his old-timey moustache- it helps deflect.

[Doctor Rock]

A friend of mine made me laugh pretty hard with this blog post:

Literally tens of Americans were shocked this week to discover that the United States military likes to kill people. Unsettling news, yes, particularly for those of us who had assumed in good faith that one million Iraqis had accidentally slipped on a banana peel one morning and fallen into a pile of mislaid cruise missiles, but before we leap to all sorts of unsightly conclusions, calling Our Boys “mass-murderers” just because they happen to enjoy the occasional mass-murder, let’s remember that in the fog of war with the eggs and the omelettes and the War Is Hell, who can say what’s right and wrong, what’s good and evil, who’s an unarmed pregnant woman and who’s a ticking time bomb threatening to produce future foreigners? Our troops have a job to do, after all – defending our country from those countries who would defend their country from our country – and if we hounded and nit-picked them after every little massacre, gang rape or atrocity, they’d hardly get any killing done at all.

Now, is this video disturbing? Of course. Were atrocities committed, innocents slaughtered, corpses desecrated and children maimed? Absolutely. But was it all done according to proper procedure? Ah, now, that’s the question. We should all certainly be willing to support a full and complete investigation into the possibility of an official recommendation for preliminary motions toward an investigation, looking into the matter of whether or not the people here were properly murdered in triplicate, signed twice on the goldenrod form, in accordance with the Code of Canon Law. And we shouldn’t rest until any guilty parties have been found, and strongly-worded disciplinary Post-Its firmly applied to their personnel files.

Apart from that, I don’t think we have to spend much time thinking about this sort of thing – this is an isolated incident, just like this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this – and one has to accept a certain amount of rape, torture and murder with one’s military. After all, if the military wasn’t free to rape and torture people, then it certainly wouldn’t be free to murder them; and if the military wasn’t free to murder people, then it wouldn’t be free to slaughter them en masse; and if the military wasn’t free to slaughter people en masse, then what would we even have a military for?