Use Your Freedom of Choice

Emmy and the Faucet

Top Gear

Lately, I've been quite obsessed with the BBC show Top Gear. Tony has been a fan for years, but for whatever reason it just caught on with me. I never saw it as any more than a "hey look at that car" show, but it's quite hilarious.

If you're not familiar, the show features Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May in their automotive adventures. They test out various cars and have various challenges which test not only the cars, but the hosts themselves. I've heard from various sources that Top Gear is one of the most accurate and fair shows in terms of their car reviews, and in watching quite a few episodes over the past couple weeks, it certainly seems to be true.

Each of the hosts seems to have their own preferences when it comes to cars. Hammond seems to be the only one that truly loves motorbikes, May seems to prefer taking his time and is the one of the three most likely to prioritize handling and comfort over speed, and Clarkson who likes things fast.

Aside from reviews of both regular and super cars, many of the challenges the three are faced with involve purchasing a car for less than a set amount and going on a road trip. For example, one challenge involved the trio buying cars for less than $1,000 in southern Florida and heading over to New Orleans. Breakdowns abound, but they made it in a reasonable amount of time, giving their cars away in post-Katrina New Orleans. At the end of the road trip, the thirty second summary made you realize exactly how much the cars had been through and how close a person can get to a motor vehicle in just a few days.

Anyway, the comedy is why I came, but the sheer power of some of the cars the hosts drive is mind-bogglingly. Some people, undoubtedly, are attracted to the show by the cars and stay for the comedy; I've undoubtedly been the other way around.

Celebration, Florida

The idea of a modern-day Pleasantville really creeps me out.

It all relates back to the fact that denial of the truths of humanity is futile in my eyes. No, that doesn't mean that the entirety of society should just give up on making people more empathetic and kind to each other, but to pretend that people already are empathetic enough is self-defeating. In order to properly fix the problems of society as a whole, one needs to recognize that problems exist.

Celebration, Florida is Disney's take on how a town should work. Its population crested ten thousand sometime in the last ten years, and it has always been blessed with a low crime rate. However, for the first time since the town's inception, a murder was committed within Celebration. This reminds me, and I hope it reminds others who idolize the "Disney Town," that as much as we want to live in a pretend world, we don't. We have a world with problems that need solving, with good people who want to do the right thing and bad people who don't.

I'm not happy the murder happened, but willful ignorance and pretending that plugging our ears and shouting will make the world any better just bother the hell out of me. Yes, it can be painful to look at the truth behind your and other people's motivations, but it's necessary. You can't fight the bad parts of human nature without knowing what they are. It really reminds me of this RSA Animate presentation done by Barbara Ehrenreich about the dangers of optimism, entitled "Smile or Die":

Sky

she of the sky
and i of the earth

if i hold her up
should she tear me down
steal the crown from my head

alack
she was not the first
to bellow with ashen breeze
for i lit the flame
Fault cannot be measured by the inch.
not blameless
and so came to pass

her ice and my fire

i spewed a dragon's breath upon the sky
her delicate snows could not withstand
the heat of flame
But what of blame?
blame is worthless to me now

no snow will land on my fiery surface now
not of her; not falling from her gray-tinted sky

Samson

Icky Thump

Generator

Cath...

Cath...
It seems that you live in someone else's dream
In a hand-me-down wedding dress
With the things that could have been are repressed
But you said your vows and you closed the door
On so many men who would have loved you more

Autotune That News

I love these things far more than I should. More than is healthy, I'm sure.

It's the smooooooooooooooooke.

'Cause You Want Your Love Just a Certain Way

Powerful Stuff

Really powerful video I just watched, linked from the Huffington Post's live blogging coverage. You can find said coverage here. It's a great resource if you want to know what's happening in the Tehran protests, and it's more condensed than the information you'd find on Twitter.

Anyway, the video shows protesters tending to an injured police officer who appears to have a pretty bad headwound. They help him out of the fray and tie a scarf around his head to help with the bleeding before assisting him away from the protest. Whether it's completely real or just showmanship, it's really powerful, and provides the viewer with a great deal of motivation to find the protesters to be the "good guys".

The Ice is Getting Thinner

I wish there were a studio version of this on YouTube, but Gibbard's a good performer so it works.

Letterman Lunacy

Another week, another stupid and essentially insignificant gaffe blown out of proportion. For those of you who somehow aren't aware of the Letterman joke at the Palin family's expense, he basically made reference to Palin's daughter being knocked up again. Yeah, really controversial to talk about a girl who got pregnant at an early age getting pregnant again. But wait! That's apparently not what the joke was about.

Palin and her menagerie twisted the joke to suddenly be about Palin's younger daughter, Holly. Oh, and it was no longer about becoming pregnant by not being careful, but rather about rape! This is clearly not what was intended by the joke, but they're rolling with it for the purposes of their moral outrage. Oh, and by the way, Palin knows a thing or two about that awful crime.

So where should comedy be limited, if anywhere? I've always been of the mind that if speech is not inciteful, it should be allowed. Period. Yes, that includes some forms of hate speech; slippery slope arguments aside, it's difficult to draw a line which isn't arbitrary besides "if it's directly inciting the commission of a crime or a panic, it's not allowed." And when it comes to comedians on television or the radio? I don't think there should be limits.

I had a discussion with a friend several months back with a similar subject. She posited that since minorities are downtrodden and ganged up on, it's unfair to make fun or joke about them. Speaking from a position of mostly-majority identities (heterosexual, male, white, middle class), I can't disagree with this more. I am a minority in my religious/spiritual beliefs, and honestly? I don't let jokes about atheists/agnostics bother me. Getting angry at Jim Norton for telling a misogynist joke is like getting angry at Edward Norton for playing a neo-nazi in American History X. You're raging against a character and not a person.

I choose not to use language that might offend people, and some people do not. I choose not to tell misogynist/racist jokes, because I know the power that language has to hurt people. But being hurt by speech isn't a reason to remove others' ability to use said speech. If you don't like it, though, you're completely welcome to not listen. But I digress!

Letterman's joke was harmless. It wasn't very funny, but it wasn't the malignant shot at the Palins that people are making it out to be. Despite Letterman's long winded apology on Monday, there were still protests outside his studio during his taping yesterday. They marched up and down the street, threatening (inevitably impotent) boycotts of Letterman's advertisers should he not be fired immediately.

Oh, and Nate Silver's best friend John Ziegler was on hand to rage against the comedian yesterday as well. I'm sure he delivered a speech free of ad hominem attacks (JZ: The purpose of the question, you pinhead, was we wanted to determine the Tina Fey Effect.) and finger-pointing toward some vague liberal elitist media.

The best part of the protest, though, was Sirius-XM Radio's own East Side Dave going ballistic within the confines of the protest. He was holding a sign reading "I'm a Right Wing Lunatic," which managed to get him confined to the PROTEST CAGE, as seen here:



Apparently Dave was going crazy the entire time, shouting random phrases and generally weirding everyone at the event out. As phrased by the Daily Beast:

Ziegler scowled as a huge red-bearded man carrying a placard reading “I’m a Right-Wing Lunatic” whirled around and shrieked such sentiments as “I hate it when people tell jokes on television!” “Jesus is speaking to me!” and “Letterman is worse than Hitler!” (Turns out the guy was a plant from the Ron & Fez Show on Sirius XM Radio.)

Who would be proud to have these people as supporters?

Crisis of Credit Visualized

Really, you should have already seen this. If you're unsure on the whole global credit crisis thing and the root causes of it, this is pretty much the best primer on it I've ever seen.

Satellite of Love

BUM, BUM, BUM, Satellite of Love!

GENTLEMEN

Knowing me, I already linked this to 90% of the people I know, but just in case. In the long series of TF2 "Meet the..." videos, this one has to be my favorite. It just shows exactly how much character is in the game, and how gorgeous it really looks. Of course, the characters aren't animated like they are in the video, but the game more or less looks exactly like it does in the video.



Also, this:

Some Underwater Stuff

They were talking about weird underwater stuff on Ron and Fez today, so I decided to post the awesome videos they mentioned.





The first one is amazing to me. Dolphins make art!

When You Were Young

You sit there in your heartache
Waiting on some beautiful boy
To save you from your old ways
You play forgiveness
Watch it now, here he comes

Onion Minute

Then there followed approximately one minute of all of the justices proclaiming that they were the law.