All right, that's enough, reading is reading no matter how you do it, okay? (Overthinking Stuff)

RE: Today's "XKCD."

I read this and instantly realized it was related to a story I heard about where Google is going to give people the Internet through balloons, a story I haven't bothered to look up to read yet, and now I won't have time to because this cartoon irritated me.

One could take it as a commentary on how the future sneaks up on people -- drifting in silently on a balloon to bring the entire world of knowledge to a guy trapped in the middle of nowhere with just one book-- a powerful metaphor, perhaps, for the elevation that expanding one's ability to learn and communicate would have over such a hermit...

..except for that Augh!, which implies that this is perhaps a bad thing, and I don't get it: why is the Internet a bad thing? There is not a single thing that the Internet does that cannot be recreated in the real world.  I get it if people want to pretend that all 'screens' (ARRGH I HATE THAT A SCREEN IS JUST A PAGE IF THE SCREEN YOU ARE READING IS A PAGE FROM A BOOK SO TURNING OFF 'SCREENS' IS THE SAME THING AS TURNING OFF THE BOOKS, IT'S THE CONTENT NOT THE DELIVERY SYSTEM) are bad -- I get that people want to pretend that, anyway, or maybe believe it, but they're not: as I pointed out here, kids today can still do all the crummy things we did as kids only now they have access to a whole world of awesomeness made possible by handheld computers that can almost literally let you have a wand fight using real magic, almost... almost.  That's so far way better than fake swordfights when we were kids that I don't even know how to quantify it.

But this cartoon?

This is just saying that the arrival of the Internet -- and in particular the arrival of it via a company which has as one of its stated goals the incorporation of every book ever written into the Internet -- the arrival of the Internet is a bad thing.  Is there any other way to take this comic? Any other way to interpret this solitary reader's startling fear at being told the Internet exists, than that the Internet is bad?

THAT is an alarming take from the guy who writes XKCD, who has always seemed to me to be something of a pretty smart guy.  I thought it was bad enough when Neil de Grasse Tyson, science-ruiner-in-chief, tried to crap all over Felix's Leap From Space, but now a guy with a physics degree who used to design robots for NASA is championing books over the Internet, and literally doing that over the Internet.

I get the impulse to poke fun at one's background: I tell lawyer jokes.  But I wonder if XKCD author is aware that his cartoon can only be read by me because of the Internet, and that absent the Internet, which is now available on balloons to carry his comics to other people, I would never have read his comic.  Absent the Internet, is a stick-figure comic strip about obscure physics topics going to make it into a book or newspaper? NOT HARDLY.

I mean, this isn't even a smart  joke or a funny joke or a wry commentary or a pun.  It's just... nihilism.  It's just saying stuff for the sake of saying stuff, and in doing so it not only manages to not be funny, but it manages to detract from the science and intelligence that many other XKCD strips aim to bring to people.  The other day, he had a strip showing the heights of ice shelves in the last ice age compared to the heights of cities and has done countless other strips that make scientific topics fun and interesting and now, apparently to fill space, he for some reason decides to make a point about... what?

About how bad it is that the Internet could come to rural places? Rural folk in New Zealand shouldn't have access to the same wealth of information we do?

About how books are great and the Internet is bad?  You know what was a book back before there was an Internet? "101 Uses For A Dead Cat."   Know what is an Internet site now? "Pro Publica", a site that today has stories on how Bank of America deliberately ripped off foreclosed homeowners, and an in-depth review of the Patriot Act provisions people have forgotten about.  BY ALL MEANS, LET'S READ BOOKS NOT THE INTERNET.

This cartoon is JUST STUPID.  I don't think I've ever gone from zero to incensed quite so quickly.  Seriously.  This cartoon is the pits, and it's made all the more stupid by the fact that it is written by someone who should know better.

AND all the more stupid-er by the fact that the little "hidden text" joke is a joke about how it would be funny to rip off companies like Verizon that offer 14-day free trials of internet hot spots.  YES, THAT IS FUNNY AS FUNNY AS IT WILL BE WHEN THE BIG CABLE COMPANIES LIKE COMCAST CONTROL ALL OF THE INTERNET IN AMERICA AND NET NEUTRALITY IS A THING OF THE PAST AND SMALL WEBSITES LIKE PEOPLE THAT USE IT FOR WEBCOMICS CAN'T GET SEEN BY ANYONE.

ha. ha.

Stock Photo Self-Help: Education.

Want to live a live like the happy, well-adjusted, oddly-clothed people in stock photos? This series will show you how!

Brett Favre Legacy Update (Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!)

"So what I'm sayin' is, it just MEANT MORE to win one
during the 90s, know what I mean?"

Let's get one thing straight: when Brett Favre and the Packers split up, I chose sides, and the side I chose was the winning side (provided that by "winning" you mean "technically,  not really winning when it counts ever again.")  So when I read this headline:

Brett Favre Admits Fault For Divorce From The Packers

My reaction could be summed up as:




Luckily for me, Favre wasn't the only one willing to blame someone other than Favre for the tension between the team that didn't want the man that didn't want the team:

Retired quarterback Brett Favre is taking some of the blame for his ugly departure from the Green Bay Packers.

Favre told WGR 550-AM in Buffalo on Thursday that he was "at fault" in the breakup, though he says he feels like "both sides had a part in it."

The old "It's my fault that it's so much your fault" routine is not the only thing Favre's doing to get Ol' Number 4 retired.  He's also trading text messages with Aaron Rodgers, according to that same story.

But DO NOT get the impression that Rodgers likes Favre.  As anyone who's ever read Nonsportsmanlike Conduct! knows, Aaron Rodgers doesn't like anyone, including cancer patients. So while he's willing to text Favre, he doesn't see himself as a mediator, according to that same article.

I was going to create a series of fake texts between Favre and Rodgers to demonstrate that, but the apps to do that turn out to be really annoying, and also I found this ACTUAL text message exchange:

That's supposedly a set of texts between Minnesota 'quarterback' Christian Ponder and his wife, after Rodgers became worth more than all the rest of the state of Wisconsin this year, in a move that will doom the  Green Bay Packers to Colts-like upper-level mediocrity for the next 7 years.  

The joke is somewhat less funny when you realize that it would take 151 years for the average person on unemployment to make as much as Christian Ponder makes in a single year. Ponder -- a bottom-tier quarterback on an afterthought of a football team -- makes $192,000 per month.

Feel better about yourself now? Have fun at work today! Hey, maybe wear that NFL-team logo tie you got for your birthday last year!

Nonsportsmanlike Conduct! has been devoted to monitoring Brett Favre's Legacy since Brett Favre's Legacy first became possible; read prior installments here. 

Stock Photo Self-Help

Or, how to live the kind of life you thought only the happy, well-groomed people in stock photos could have.

Today:  Business.

You will make your way to the top more quickly if you read the newspaper daily, and remember to keep your business secrets safely zipped into your jeans pocket.

Or....... was it? (365 poems, Poem 42)

Bad Morning
by Langston Hughes

Here I sit
With my shoes mismated.
Lawdy-mercy!
I's frustrated!
______________________________________________________________________

What I found most interesting, really,  about this poem, was how simple it was -- seemingly.  If you read any Langston Hughes, you know that his poems are about racial and class divisions, poems designed to read like diatribes that rhyme, and then you come across this poem, and I read it and thought "neat", but then I thought, no, there's go to be more than that and I remembered William Carlos Williams' "Red Wheelbarrow," a poem that is sparse but still paints a picture of a farm and family near the edge of poverty.

So I took another look at this poem, and wondered, could it be about poverty? Could it be a parody of what the upper class (and white) people thought about blacks when Hughes was writing?

Yeah, I think so.

Here's another thing I learned today: before he wrote his first novel, Hughes was supported by a woman for two years who was deemed his "patron," sort of the way rich families would support artists in the Renaissance. It'd be nice if things worked that way, now, wouldn't it? Imagine if Bill Gates would send me a check for $10,000,000 so I could finally finish that short story I'm working on. Instead of having to shill for pennies by posting obvious click-bait like poems by Langston Hughes.  NOTHING gets people on the Internet going to your site like posting a Langston Hughes poem.

Oh, yeah, there's also this, which I throw in to get the snobbish literary elite:

"Name a hot actor," I said to Sweetie.
"Start pulling your weight on this blog," I told her.
"JT Timberlake," she said,
which is not his name.
(NOTE: THIS WAS NOT A HAIKU)

Art, for the rest of us.

La la lalala la la laaa

Oh, hello! Don't mind me! I was just singing my favorite part of my favorite song, the beginning to "Get A Job" by "The Offspring." CLASSIC.  It's a classic.

But as long as you're here, I can leave off my individual karaoke and let you know that you should NOT BUY ART ON THE STREET CORNERS.  Seriously.  You know all those sales that crop up on busy street corners or in the far edge of the parking lot at Kroger's?  "Starving artist" sales and the like? Yeah, don't buy from them, because they don't have the kind of great art you can get at a Fine Art Gallery like Amour d'Art.

Amour d'Art is an online gallery that lets you get fine art at quality prices -- get it? Quality = good-- and you can shop for the art at your leisure, sitting at your desk, keeping your monitor pointed away from the room where nobody can tell what you're doing, so it's like you're getting PAID to shop for ART.

(NOTE: Not an endorsement of slacking at work, but let's face it, you do.)

Amour d'Art has Pino Art and works by Tarkey, and the selection is always being updated and constantly worth looking at. So spice up your home, your office, your... what else do people decorate? Their cars? No, that's not right. Why can't I think of a third thing?

Up until today I thought I was more significant than a "Moo Box." (Greatest Thing In The World, EVER!)

This is not a part of my ongoing quest to get the "Comment of the Week" Status on Josh Fruhlinger's "Comics Curmudgeon" (but it can't hurt, right? Sycophancy never hurts.)

OH MAN I just came up with a whole new motto for me and everyone else in the world.  By the time you read this that will be the subhead for this blog.

Anyway, here's what I'm on about now, as the British would say probably, maybe? I don't know any British folk.  Technically, that's not true.  I know my "aunt," Suzanne, who I believe is British but isn't really my aunt because she and my uncle never married.  Or maybe they did, now, because I haven't spoken to Uncle Doug in years.  Who knows? Anyway, she's British, as is Prince Harry of Wales, and while I don't know him, I know of him and that's about the same thing, at least insofar as my chances of ever getting knighted are concerned.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the latest Greatest Thing In The World Ever, which is this:

That's a real book, and an e-book, and it's real funny (and e-funny.)  I ate lunch today, as I do everyday, and at lunch today I thought to myself "What should I read while I eat lunch?" my choices being:

-- HuffPo
-- "The Brothers Karamazov,"
-- "The Gone Away World"
-- Other stuff like The New Yorker but I wasn't really going to read them so it was pretty much those three.

Then I thought "Hey, I'll read The Comics Curmudgeon instead," which you'd think (previously noted sycophancy and it's relationship to hurting already noted) was based on that being A BRILLIANT WEBSITE THAT OCCUPIES MY MIND ALL THE TIME AND I READ IT EVERY DAY.

Now that Josh Fruhlinger is no longer reading this post but instead has gone to tell all his 'buddies' (he uses the term ironically, I bet) that some guy on the Internet thinks he's brilliant, I can reveal the SECRET REAL REASON I READ THE COMICS CURMUDGEON which was:

My internet was loading slowly and so when I tried to go to the HuffPo front page to see the news, it took more than 3 seconds and I got bored and went instead to a different site, with the first one that came up being The Comics Curmudgeon.

So this post is basically being sponsored, as it were, by the simple-but-true-fact that if you make someone wait more than 5 seconds for something their brain stops focusing on that thing, which is actually probably true, if you take as "true" that I once heard something on Freakonomics, I think, about a hospital that revised its ER computers to provide medical histories faster because if a person waits 10 seconds that person, even an ER doctor, will forget what he or she was doing (I used "she" because doctors can be women, you know!).

I read today's Curmudgeoning quickly -- it's short -- which is good for internet people, 100% of whom stopped reading this post 8 words into it because it didn't contain a sexy picture of Sarah Hyland

until now

PROBLEM SOLVED!

So out of curiosity and because I still had some lunch left to eat, and therefore was not "done" with lunch yet, I downloaded the first 50 pages of that book-- remember what this post is about? -- for free,  because I'm not about to throw ninety-nine whole cents at something on the off-chance it might be good, right?

That's how people think about my books, apparently, anyway, so anyway, I downloaded the first 50 pages for free and was reduced to laughter and/or tears nearly 8 or 9 times in that first 50 pages, and found the rest to be so enjoyable that it immediately became The Greatest Thing In The World, EVER, and I heartily recommend you just shell out the $0.99 to get the ebook because I did, and I probably now will not get any more work done all day, but that's the breaks, kiddo, as the British like to say.

What makes it so great? Not just the hilariously bad writing, which is handily compiled FOR YOU by the book, but also the comments on each -- a one- or two-liner, usually, that has the effect of "sweeping the leg" when it comes to resisting the humor.

Take, for example, the "Moo Box" entry, which on Wikipedia is this:

The Moo box is a box, when you turn it upside down, creates the mooing of a cow.

And the comment in the book?

How’s this for a bleak realization: It’s extremely unlikely that your life will ever be notable enough to  warrant its own Wikipedia entry. Unlike the Moo box.

But this one was my favorite of first 50 pages, and what convinced me to buy the book:

At Disney Word, the Christmas Special ran until 2005 due to copyrights w/ some songs in the show like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But is rumored to return in the future!

___________________________________________________

You’ve just encountered the most depressing
exclamation point in the history of the English
language.

I'm laughing all over again.

One more:

Wikipedia says:

A cheese sandwich is a basic sandwich made generally with one or more slices of any kind of cheese on any sort of bread.

_____________________________________________

Book says:

From the Food Network’s newest hit series Anthony
Bourdain Phones It In.

It's awesome.  And, in case you were thinking about not reading any further in this post:

But actually you could have quit because it's over.

Want to know if there were ever any other Greatest Thing[s] In The World, EVER? There were but they were located on another blog, one that is sadly devoid of pictures of women in various states of undress but which does have MEN in various states of undress.  Long story.

CLICK HERE TO GO SEE MORE GREATEST THINGS IN THE WORLD EVER.

CLICK HERE FOR THE MEN UNDRESSED THING.

OH YEAH IF YOU WANT TO BUY THE BOOK THERE ARE LINKS TO EACH VERSION AND THE FREE PART HERE.

So Sam Champion picked his nose on national TV.

(And I was there to see it)

(Not there there, but watching-on-TV-there.)

Han broke up first. (Star Wars References)

While the rest of the world goes crazy over that breakup letter where the girl hid the guy's stuff, because love means never having to prove a letter isn't made up by, say, contacting the person who actually wrote the letter, I thought I'd share with you two Star Wars-themed breakup letters, because love also means never having to explain to your teacher that you have broken the cardinal rule, fallen in love, secretly married, and set into motion a chain of events that will eventually bring debris crashing down onto the jungle moons of Endor, spelling fiery doom for a race of innocent teddy-bear like people.

(What: you thought the remains of Death Star, Jr., would vaporize?)

The first is simple, to the point, and crude:

But what if you want to use Star Wars References not as a way to put people down, but to show how devoted you really are, by comparing yourself to evil or perhaps by comparing your beloved, now-ex, to the innards of an animal that smelled better when it was alive? You might write this:

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a restraining order.

As for whether the more-famous breakup letter is real, or not, I'll let you make up your own mind.  The letter:

was posted by "Nipplesquirrelham" (Really?) on Imgur, but Nipplesquirrelham (seriously?) doesn't claim he/she wrote it; rather, Nipplesquirrelham (doesn't have a job, I'm 100% sure) says it's the best breakup letter he/she has seen.

Nip... ok, I can't... this person also has as a goal to get 100,000 retweets by using that name, and otherwise appears to be in it for the notoriety.  

Not a single news story I read actually found the woman, or the man, or asked Ni... forget it... where he/she got the note.

So I did. I left him (?) a comment on the site, asking him to tell me where he got the letter.  We'll see what happens.

(NOTE: HE WILL NOT CONTACT ME BECAUSE THE LETTER IS A FAKE.)