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In on online discussion a coworker wrote:
On a side note, Lucas just said that by popular demand he won’t make anymore Star Wars films.
“…and there was much rejoicing.”
However, I should point out my reply:
Please let us not overlook this small but important line from the article: “Although he wouldn’t rule out making one last Indiana Jones film, as his swansong.”
Sure, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis could be good. No guarantees, but it’d have a chance. The video game was pretty cool. But let’s not lose sight of the possibility of Indiana Jones and the Search for Shangri La, wherein he fights the Yeti. Nor let us ignore the possibility of Indiana Jones and the Perils of Xenu: “but we have this great volcano scene planned!” And really, with Twilight’s popularity, do nut think it impossible that, five years from now we could be staring down the brown, puckering barrel of Indiana Jones and the Castle of Dracula.
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This is my new favourite video. Granted, Charlie is my coworker, and he’s a pretty great guy, so I’m biased. Still…
Credit to Michael Hernandez-Stern for actually making this video.
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I’m always there to bring it down to the gutter.
Toby: We use developer in the product dev. sense – it isn’t a synonym for “programmer” – that’s a fine word as is. Developer means anyone who is part of our group of people who make some shit that wasn’t there before… i.e. develop something. SO TAKE THAT AND SMOKE IT, OR WHATEVER!
Ben: I’m gonna tell all my restaurant friends to call themselves “food developers.”
Me: And, as somebody who eats at their places, I can be a kind of developer, too, since I shall also make some shit that wasn’t there before! Just sayin’….
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One of the projects I’ve been on at work for the last year has been the launch of a new social media / review site. Honestly, I’m pretty proud of what we’ve done, and I like the ideas behind it.
What ideas? In short I’d put it this way:
1) I’m willing to spend more money to get products that are genuinely high quality, but I need to know that they are actually quality items.
2) I trust my friends’ opinions. And I know which friends’ opinions to trust in which fields. So I want to see what they recommend.
The site is Fav&Co, and we are giving away free stuff! From now until Christmas, every day we will be picking somebody who has added something to their wishlist this month, and that person will get that item for free! So go to Fav&Co and put stuff on your wishlist! I’ve seen the list of people who have added stuff to their wishlist this month, and it’s still amazingly short, so you have a really good chance of winning. You might win free stuff, and you’ll be helping me out when I can say “hey, look at how many people I got on our site”.
Also, you should add things that you can share with me. Like booze.
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I want a statue of Andy Rooney pointing at an oil panting of Mr. Rogers punching Hitler in the dick.
I don’t know why.
Still, you gotta admit, that would be pretty cool.
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Literally.
I don’t remember all of it, but I remember that it included a trailer for a new overdone, fun-but-kinda-self-satisfied, ensemble Christmas movie. But this one was called Elvis Costello Gets Married. I suspect that it was influenced by the movie 200 Cigarettes, though I have absolutely no fucking idea why that would be in my subconscious, other than the presence of this year’s overdone, fun-but-kinda-self-satisfied, ensemble Christmas movie’s posters in the subway stations.
Anyway, Elvis Costello Gets Married stars, predictably, Elvis Costello. And, perhaps a bit less expectedly, it stars Mick Foley. The wrestler.
This is very unexpected. Hell, I just had to go look him up to make sure it was “Mick” and not “Nick”. And to find out what he looks like in real life. (It’s different than in my dream.)
Oh, and it also stars e. e. cummings. Now I fucking guarantee you, I do not know what that guy looks like. But my subconscious sure thinks it does.
e. e. cummings? Really? Fuck you, brain. You’re a pretentious cock.
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My Dad sent me an excerpt from this article which claims that, due to this season’s lack of brilliant new sitcoms, we can safely conclude that “comedy is over”.
Right. Because every season for the last sixty years has featured brilliant, hilarious, ground-breaking new comedies. “Comedy is dead”? Grow up. Seriously, grow the fuck up. If a given decade spawns 4 great, innovative new sitcoms and a dozen genuinely intelligent and funny (though not brilliant) ones, it’s doing pretty well. I challenge this Neil fellow to go back to any three random seasons in the last 60 years. I bet that none of them has more than one truly great, innovative new sitcom.
Speaking of these 60 years: why is this year the year comedy ended? I mean other than the fact that this happens to be the year he needed to make a “bold” statement. TV– just like any mass-produced popular culture– is, at its best, made of 90% post-consumer recycled material. The hell with “new parent” territory, all parenting territory was over, done with, clichéd, and recycled thirty years ago. Is he just realizing this now? And let’s talk about “I Love Lucy”. I’m not saying it wasn’t a great show, but does this guy think it born in a vacuum? Does he think that it doesn’t owe a great debt to “The Burns and Allen Show” and “The Jack Benny Program”? Is he that small-minded?
I went and read the whole article. He’s like a plodding reversal of the old joke that Shakespeare is derivative because he used so many clichéd lines. He compares mediocre modern sitcoms to forty-year-old classics, declares “Q.E.D.”, and wipes the blackboard before you can point out the dis-ingenuousness of his claim. Does he really think that its reasonable to compare “Reed Between the Lines”, a show he, himself, calls “a plodding family sitcom on BET” to “Leave it to Beaver”? (BET “The only that is entertaining about your channel is that you guys think it is entertaining to black people.”) Does he really want writers to assume the same naïveté, the same lack of education on the part of the audience that they did in the fifties when he writes “What in 1958 occupied 25 minutes is now condensed into 15 seconds”? Did he actually think about this?
And what else he was trying to say before he wrote “The male-female workplace dynamic has been so thoroughly strip-mined that all you have to do these days is make a passing reference to it.” Is he that short-sighted? For starters, the use of the term “strip-mined” implies that this vein was mined in the most destructive way possible and, importantly, that there was some significantly less destructive way to mine it. But the sad reality is that mining, literal or comedic, is a process that cannot be done without affecting the landscape. Beyond that, he decries the end of comedy’s evolution while simultaneously bemoaning comedy’s evolution. Worse, he’s pointing to evolutionary dead-ends (shows that are just plain bad) when he does it! The problem isn’t that the new shows he’s citing are calling out “Number 721″ or “Number 394″. It’s that “some guys can tell a joke, some guys can’t.” [Sorry, that's the best link to it I could find.]
I don’t know if Neil Genzlinger is small-minded, short-sighted, or just needed to say something “provocative” to please his editor, but I am confident he’s wrong. He could have made the exact same proclamation, with nearly identical evidence and justification, a decade ago. And he would have been just as wrong then as he is now. He talks like a guy who walks outside, in Chicago, in January, and declares confidently and authoritatively “this sure disproves global warming! AmIright?!” As long as society continues to evolve comedy will also continue to evolve, the question is merely whether or not Mr. Genzlinger with evolve along with it, or go the way of the Neanderthal.
[For the record,
- "M*A*S*H" was a very popular, highly influential sitcom with a great deal of witty dialogue, and I'm not saying that the first few seasons weren't great. At the same time, I gotta say that I don't remember it ever making me truly laugh. Chuckle, yes. Guffaw, no.
- Yes, part of the brilliance of "The Contest" was that they never used the word.
- I love me some "Gilligan's Island" but that show wasn't that brilliant even in its own time. Take off the Nostalgacles.
]
Nostalgacles are spectacles that make you see mediocre things from your childhood as being flawless. Anybody who has gone back and watched any cartoon from the 80s knows the feeling ]
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