oddly enough, if you go to freerepublic you will see there are people on the right who find him quite funny.
Unintended consequences, its like the helicopter scene in Apocalypse now that everyone loves.
So basically, you're of the opinion that he's become a later-day Alex P. Keaton? Interesting take.
So now I'm stuck. Did you make an unintentionally ironic statement out of historical ignorance, or did you make a subtle and wry comment poking fun at the people who say we should have concentrated on Afghanistan?
"The only war in that list that strikes me as having been started by one man in one country was the second, ongoing war in Iraq."
It seems a little heavy-handed and biased of you to blame the entire war on Tony Blair like that. A few other countries and leaders had a little to do with it.
Oh, and FYI, PDQ bach is not, and never has been funny.
Obviously we have different ideas of what is and is not funny. If you think it getting him relies on "8 years of piano lessons", then it just goes to show that you didn't get his best jokes anyway. I guess we gotta agree to disagree. Cheers.
I was modded as a troll for daring to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Don't worry about it, I've got karma to burn.
While I'm at it, I might as well point out:
Microsoft Windows works a lot better these days than it used to. Linux, while great for the server room, is still not ready to go on my mom's desktop. "The Family Guy" sucks. Really. A lot. There's more to anime than tentacle porn. The Nintendo Wii is nothing special. Grown men playing with LEGO blocks is kind of sad. The PATRIOT Act is pretty much the same thing as RICO, with "mobsters" crossed out and "terrorists" written in its place. HDMI is just another cable connection standard, and will not suck all the joy out of your life. Most people don't give a shit about how badly MySpace code is written, nor how ugly the pages are.
And finally, to serve back on-topic:
Wikipedia is a great first place to go to learn about a subject when you know nothing about it, but simply having read the "wiki" on a subject should never be mistaken for actual knowledge.
Other than coining the term "truthiness" (which was funny right up until the moment he explained it), Colbert really doesn't seem to come up with a lot of original material. But he commits a far greater sin as a comedian than not being original: He's not very funny.
Don't get me wrong, he's witty. He skewers his targets with laser-like precision. He's just not all that funny when doing so.
To do really great satirical attacks, you need to LOVE the material you are making fun of, if only a little bit. The works of "C.P.E. Bach" would not be funny in the least if Peter Schickele wasn't a devotee of both orchestral music and the intellectual culture which surrounds it. "The Blues Brothers" was one of the funniest movies ever made because Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were really, really in to the (then) fading Chicago blues scene. "Dogma" was pants-wettingly funny because Kevin Smith was, and is, a practicing Catholic. The guys behind "Spinal Tap" were obviously big fans of metal. If John Cameron Mitchell didn't like drag shows and glam punk, he never could have made "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." The list goes on.
Stephen Colbert, on the other hand, clearly loathes and detests the rising tide of right-wing opinion personalities (O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc.) This makes him very much the wrong person to attempt to effectively satirize them for the sake of comedy. His send-up of them is good enough to get smirks and nods of approval from those who share his disdain, but little else. He gets most of his laughs via typical SNL "Weekend Update" type bits, or by interviewing people who are more funny than he is.
For the record: Seeing Dennis Miller savage the left isn't really very funny most of the time either.
I used a Camelbak Zoid for a while, for carrying around my various gadgets (as well as some handy water!). It worked perfectly, but I got a lot of funny looks.
If you carried a pink clutch purse with a big heart made of rhinestones on it, you would still look slightly less gay than you probably did when using that thing.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
You could just do what most healthy, homophobic guys do when they have too many gadgets for their pockets: Carry a laptop everywhere, whether you need it or not, just for the sake of the side compartments.
Or cave in and buy the man-purse (a.k.a. "belt pouch", "belly bag", "fanny pack", etc.)
gets ranked offtopic; noone gets the joke. kudos my friend, i got it:)
Right, because nobody on Slashdot has ever watched The Simpsons. You and that other guy were the only ones in the whole damn world that remember that reference.
Or maybe, just maybe, it could be that it's not really as funny as it used to be, seeing as the Newton is a long-dead technology (which actually had the handwriting recognition down really well shortly before it was killed off.)
My generation is the one who started as it. So, from that perspective, parents here have no reference about how to handle videogames. But in any case it doesn't take to be a very bright parent to see that, if your child is hurting him/herself by doing nothing else but playing videogames alone, you need to do something.
Do something. Like turn the computer off and tell the kid to go play outside for a while? Is it really any different from 20 years ago, when parents worried that their kids were hurting themselves by doing nothing else but watching television?
Some people like to make life a lot more complicated than it needs to be.
You know, a lot of people watch television in excess of 4-6 hours a day. I've never once heard any of them referred to as "addicts."
Likewise, a lot of retired people play golf all afternoon six days a week. Are they "addicted" to golf?
Gaming is just another form of recreation, and like any form of recreation, some lazy slobs will do it to the point in which it interferes with their various "obligations" (school, work, family, etc.)
That's hardly the same thing as somebody who suffers violent withdrawal symptoms when they go for a day without cocaine.
Kensington has a Bluetooth 2-button & scrollwheel mouse for $60. I've been using one for over a year, and it's a battery hog but otherwise pretty nice.
That said, I'm getting the new Mighty Mouse for my media system and throwing the Kensington into my laptop bag (or vice versa.) It's a much nicer mouse, and well worth the extra ten bucks.
if it could have the following: -drag and drop functionality for ALL files -decent mic input, as well as a line input for uncompressed recordings
then i'm totally getting one. those two above points are what kept me away from the iPod (even free ones offered by TD Canada, etc).
Oh, the time you lost by being deliberately ignorant.
The iPod mounts as a drive right on the desktop, just like any external drive. You can drag and drop any file that fits. Adding music and video is even easier, as those files all sync automatically with iTunes.
Inputs are available as third-party attachments.
I've owned two iPods (sold a 2G to a friend when the 3G came out, and I've been using it ever since), and I've never used either of those features, to be honest. I just use it as a music player, and I'm very happy with it.
The two features which would turn my head are:
- 160 GB (or bigger) HD with 128 MB (or more) of physical memory. This is what it would take to make it practical to use my uncompressed library instead of AAC files.
- Gapless playback!!! "Joining" tracks is all well and good for songs that I'm only going to listen to in sequence with the rest of the album, but it would be nice to occasionally add something from the middle of side 1 of "Dark Side of the Moon" or other prog rock albums to my playlists without farting around with start/stop time preferences.
Until somebody comes out with a player which offers these two features, while matching the features and UI that I already have, I'm just going to keep replacing the battery on my old 20GB black-and-white 3G model every couple years.
Hating on MySpace is the "in" thing. Matter of fact, it's even more cool than MySpace itself.
Well said.
For my own part, I say anything that is equally despised by both politicians and web-design snobs can't be all bad.
Swerving back on topic, this is a non-story. There's no need to read Business Week to know this is going on. Just randomly pull up a few MySpace pages and it becomes immediately obvious, because these little third-party widgets for enhancing MySpace pages are extremely popular, and it would not take you long to stumble across a few of them.
I wouldn't call MySpace an "ecosystem", so much as I would call it a "framework." The fact that it's so crufty to begin with creates a rich environment for offering 3rd-party mods, because only a total masochist would attempt to alter a MySpace page with a text editor.
Slashdot Mirror
oddly enough, if you go to freerepublic you will see there are people on the right who find him quite funny.
Unintended consequences, its like the helicopter scene in Apocalypse now that everyone loves.
So basically, you're of the opinion that he's become a later-day Alex P. Keaton? Interesting take.
Your ideas are intriguing and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
;)
Play your cards right, and maybe I'll give you a blog link.
So now I'm stuck. Did you make an unintentionally ironic statement out of historical ignorance, or did you make a subtle and wry comment poking fun at the people who say we should have concentrated on Afghanistan?
SEE wins the thread!
"The only war in that list that strikes me as having been started by one man in one country was the second, ongoing war in Iraq."
It seems a little heavy-handed and biased of you to blame the entire war on Tony Blair like that. A few other countries and leaders had a little to do with it.
Oh, and FYI, PDQ bach is not, and never has been funny.
Obviously we have different ideas of what is and is not funny. If you think it getting him relies on "8 years of piano lessons", then it just goes to show that you didn't get his best jokes anyway. I guess we gotta agree to disagree. Cheers.
I don't know about that. Candide is perhaps the most biting, genius works of satire ever created
I agree that it was a work of genius.
I also maintain that it is not particularly funny.
I read Voltaire for the ideas, but give me Mark Twain if I want to laugh at satire.
Carlin, Pryor, Black, and Hicks are not satirists. They attack their targets directly, not ironically.
Dude, are you Jeff Albertson? :-)
You are aware that cartoon characters are not real, yes?
Because, if not, I have some bad news for you. You had better sit down.
I'm jutht getting thtarted! ;)
I was modded as a troll for daring to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Don't worry about it, I've got karma to burn.
While I'm at it, I might as well point out:
Microsoft Windows works a lot better these days than it used to.
Linux, while great for the server room, is still not ready to go on my mom's desktop.
"The Family Guy" sucks. Really. A lot.
There's more to anime than tentacle porn.
The Nintendo Wii is nothing special.
Grown men playing with LEGO blocks is kind of sad.
The PATRIOT Act is pretty much the same thing as RICO, with "mobsters" crossed out and "terrorists" written in its place.
HDMI is just another cable connection standard, and will not suck all the joy out of your life.
Most people don't give a shit about how badly MySpace code is written, nor how ugly the pages are.
And finally, to serve back on-topic:
Wikipedia is a great first place to go to learn about a subject when you know nothing about it, but simply having read the "wiki" on a subject should never be mistaken for actual knowledge.
Yes, I did. Thanks.
Word.
Oh... Sorry, you're from Canada. I meant:
Mot.
Rick Mercer pwns.
Other than coining the term "truthiness" (which was funny right up until the moment he explained it), Colbert really doesn't seem to come up with a lot of original material. But he commits a far greater sin as a comedian than not being original: He's not very funny.
Don't get me wrong, he's witty. He skewers his targets with laser-like precision. He's just not all that funny when doing so.
To do really great satirical attacks, you need to LOVE the material you are making fun of, if only a little bit. The works of "C.P.E. Bach" would not be funny in the least if Peter Schickele wasn't a devotee of both orchestral music and the intellectual culture which surrounds it. "The Blues Brothers" was one of the funniest movies ever made because Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were really, really in to the (then) fading Chicago blues scene. "Dogma" was pants-wettingly funny because Kevin Smith was, and is, a practicing Catholic. The guys behind "Spinal Tap" were obviously big fans of metal. If John Cameron Mitchell didn't like drag shows and glam punk, he never could have made "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." The list goes on.
Stephen Colbert, on the other hand, clearly loathes and detests the rising tide of right-wing opinion personalities (O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc.) This makes him very much the wrong person to attempt to effectively satirize them for the sake of comedy. His send-up of them is good enough to get smirks and nods of approval from those who share his disdain, but little else. He gets most of his laughs via typical SNL "Weekend Update" type bits, or by interviewing people who are more funny than he is.
For the record: Seeing Dennis Miller savage the left isn't really very funny most of the time either.
I used a Camelbak Zoid for a while, for carrying around my various gadgets (as well as some handy water!). It worked perfectly, but I got a lot of funny looks.
If you carried a pink clutch purse with a big heart made of rhinestones on it, you would still look slightly less gay than you probably did when using that thing.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
You could just do what most healthy, homophobic guys do when they have too many gadgets for their pockets: Carry a laptop everywhere, whether you need it or not, just for the sake of the side compartments.
Or cave in and buy the man-purse (a.k.a. "belt pouch", "belly bag", "fanny pack", etc.)
gets ranked offtopic; noone gets the joke. kudos my friend, i got it :)
Right, because nobody on Slashdot has ever watched The Simpsons. You and that other guy were the only ones in the whole damn world that remember that reference.
Or maybe, just maybe, it could be that it's not really as funny as it used to be, seeing as the Newton is a long-dead technology (which actually had the handwriting recognition down really well shortly before it was killed off.)
It's too big for me, though...it filled in the cup of my hand when I tried it out at the store, among other models.
;)
You know what they say about small hands, right?
Yeah. That's right. Small gloves.
People get addicted to it, absolutely, but the withdrawal symptoms are not a whole lot worse than when you withdraw from coffee.
Having quit coffee once, those coke addicts have my pity.
If his loving parents feared for their safety, the dude had much bigger problems than wanting to play video games too much.
My generation is the one who started as it. So, from that perspective, parents here have no reference about how to handle videogames. But in any case it doesn't take to be a very bright parent to see that, if your child is hurting him/herself by doing nothing else but playing videogames alone, you need to do something.
Do something. Like turn the computer off and tell the kid to go play outside for a while? Is it really any different from 20 years ago, when parents worried that their kids were hurting themselves by doing nothing else but watching television?
Some people like to make life a lot more complicated than it needs to be.
You know, a lot of people watch television in excess of 4-6 hours a day. I've never once heard any of them referred to as "addicts."
Likewise, a lot of retired people play golf all afternoon six days a week. Are they "addicted" to golf?
Gaming is just another form of recreation, and like any form of recreation, some lazy slobs will do it to the point in which it interferes with their various "obligations" (school, work, family, etc.)
That's hardly the same thing as somebody who suffers violent withdrawal symptoms when they go for a day without cocaine.
Kensington has a Bluetooth 2-button & scrollwheel mouse for $60. I've been using one for over a year, and it's a battery hog but otherwise pretty nice.
That said, I'm getting the new Mighty Mouse for my media system and throwing the Kensington into my laptop bag (or vice versa.) It's a much nicer mouse, and well worth the extra ten bucks.
Basically, it's a Choose Your Own Adventure, done electronically.
Yes.
And sometimes with cartoon porn.
if it could have the following:
-drag and drop functionality for ALL files
-decent mic input, as well as a line input for uncompressed recordings
then i'm totally getting one. those two above points are what kept me away from the iPod (even free ones offered by TD Canada, etc).
Oh, the time you lost by being deliberately ignorant.
The iPod mounts as a drive right on the desktop, just like any external drive. You can drag and drop any file that fits. Adding music and video is even easier, as those files all sync automatically with iTunes.
Inputs are available as third-party attachments.
I've owned two iPods (sold a 2G to a friend when the 3G came out, and I've been using it ever since), and I've never used either of those features, to be honest. I just use it as a music player, and I'm very happy with it.
The two features which would turn my head are:
- 160 GB (or bigger) HD with 128 MB (or more) of physical memory. This is what it would take to make it practical to use my uncompressed library instead of AAC files.
- Gapless playback!!! "Joining" tracks is all well and good for songs that I'm only going to listen to in sequence with the rest of the album, but it would be nice to occasionally add something from the middle of side 1 of "Dark Side of the Moon" or other prog rock albums to my playlists without farting around with start/stop time preferences.
Until somebody comes out with a player which offers these two features, while matching the features and UI that I already have, I'm just going to keep replacing the battery on my old 20GB black-and-white 3G model every couple years.
That's "to any god or government."
Hating on MySpace is the "in" thing. Matter of fact, it's even more cool than MySpace itself.
Well said.
For my own part, I say anything that is equally despised by both politicians and web-design snobs can't be all bad.
Swerving back on topic, this is a non-story. There's no need to read Business Week to know this is going on. Just randomly pull up a few MySpace pages and it becomes immediately obvious, because these little third-party widgets for enhancing MySpace pages are extremely popular, and it would not take you long to stumble across a few of them.
I wouldn't call MySpace an "ecosystem", so much as I would call it a "framework." The fact that it's so crufty to begin with creates a rich environment for offering 3rd-party mods, because only a total masochist would attempt to alter a MySpace page with a text editor.