Why? The modern laptop is an amazing machine: mine is a hand-me-down from five years ago and is capable of estimating a ten-dimensional integral via Metropolis-Hastings at unbelievable accuracy and detail and yet launching Word takes longer than thinking up an example for this comparison. It’s a word-processing program. Why do we need all this extra crap that comes with it? When is the last time you used a feature of Word that was introduced after 1996? Why is this the norm? What the hell does it do with all that processing power?

Aaaaaah.

Since its launch in December 2006, Wikileaks has published nearly twenty thousand documents but not one single guide to holiday shopping. Not even a top ten list of gift ideas. With such a vast pool of candid correspondence between policymakers, it is laughable that there was not a single assessment of the demand for Inception on Blu Ray or for a new pair of Jeggings. Such a huge gap in their reporting can have only two explanations: conspiracy or incompetence. Incompetence, however, cannot explain the systematic pattern of leaks clearly timed to distract the public during the most vital shopping periods of the year. A few examples:

• Halloween 2010: Unsurprisingly, the Wikileaks post from October did not contain any suggestions for common professions that could be made into revealing costumes. Rather than point readers to important new developments in nurse costumes, fake blood, and toy swords, they cunningly drew attention to Halloween-irrelevant nurses, blood, and swords in Mesopotamia without any of the obvious Prince of Persia tie-ins. It seems likely that the very title of the release, the Iraq War Logs,  was meant to lure buyers of the Iraqi Warlords costume set concurrently marketed by Mattel.
• Back to School 2010: Rather than focus on the nation’s severe back to school needs, as was front-page news in nearly all other major publications, Wikileaks published the misleadingly titled Afghan War Diary (named to sound like a new model of spiral notebook).
• Mother’s Day 2010: While coupon books and spa suggestions dominated every other major news source for Mother’s day, Wikileaks bombarded the public with video footage showing the death of journalists and Iraqi civilians. The title given to the footage – “Collateral Murder” – ensured that it could be easily mistaken for a Lifetime movie.

The list goes on: from the release of the Bilderberg Group papers during “gifts for dads and grads” to their coverage of the Julius Baer Lawsuit that lacked any mention of Valentine’s day whatsoever.

We must ask ourselves “could it really be a coincidence that the frequency and intensity of Wikileaks’ reporting increased exactly when disposable income was starting to recover to pre-recession levels?” You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool the American people at gifting time. We have kept our wits about us and found deal after incredible deal this holiday season. We must show Julian Assange and his coconspirators that we are not ostriches who will bury our heads in his original documents describing tawdry war crimes in pornographic detail. We must look to the old-school reporting being done by the print media – New York Magazine, United’s Hemispheres, printer-friendly coupon sites – for the hard-hitting articles that inform the American public on the real issues: what’s on Michelle Obama’s wish list this season, how to tell if a gift is “green” or not, and how Oprah decides on her Favorite Things.

1. (Obviously) Orthographic: while their names are similar, they are importantly different
2. Snoopy has never done porn (seriously, I looked – I couldn’t find anything, which was surprising to me)
3. Snoopy is a much better musician, but a much worse showman

Though the distinctions are few, they are important.  Please keep this in mind from here forward.

Keeping Up With The Johnsons

There is a female president and her entire cabinet talks back to her all the time. She is constantly bullied by the people under her. What?

People get tortured like every hour. Basically, the story-arc of the season seems to be driven by more and more of our protagonists experiencing situations where they “have to” torture people, and then deciding they are cool with that. Seriously? Was this paid for by the Bush administration?

Finally, the numbers on this show make no sense. Two planes crash and they say ten thousand people died and probably more casualties on the ground. Who wrote that line? Who approved it? “Hey, Larry, about how many people does a plane hold?” “Shut up! I am masturbating!” “ok, I’ll just make up a number because there is no possible way I could ever find out this trivial information”

How can a 50-something Secretary of Defense, heavily sedatedmind you, overpower a young secret service agent? Screw you 24!

happy 2009.

this will be our year.

watch the ‘help me howard’ segments.

study them.

a thought I had today: 
no matter how great a man you are, pigeons will still shit on your statue (in fact, that is the most any of us can hope for)
2) when people say “throw your hands in the air and wave ‘em like you just don’t care” I think what they’re asking for should probably be accompanied by an “uchch” sound and rolling the eyes.  After all when I don’t care and throw my hands in the air, I am usually pretty fed up,not elated.

Take that comedy blog!