Yes. Yes it is.

Some Thoughts Regarding Taxidermy

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:21:00 +0000

1.
I appreciate taxidermy as an art form. In addition to finding it pleasing on a purely aesthetic level, I consider it a welcome and all too rare invitation to contemplate mortality. I am less appreciative of the relatively rare practice of having one's deceased pet prepared for display by a taxidermist. At the risk of being judgmental, it seems strangely paradoxical to me.

I think it's fair to presume that in almost all cases, a pet owner who chooses to preserve his pet after its death would tell you that he "loved" his pet, which I think is a nice thought. Humans have the capacity to "love" any number of things, and I don't believe that you can tell a person that he does or does not love something; once one decides that he loves something, then he loves it. For example, I myself love many things, including both the Absolute Edition of DC Comic's Identity Crisis miniseries that I recently purchased on Amazon.com and my mother. Nobody will tell me otherwise.

I think it's also fair to presume however, that our hypothetical deceased pet preservationist would tell you that he did not love his pet in the same way that I love my Absolute Edition Identity Crisis. The main difference being that the pet owner loved his pet in the context of a relationship that he perceived to have had with that pet. Again, I think it's fair to presume that our pet owner would say that the way he loved his pet was closer to the way that I love my mother than it was to the way I love a comic book.

I don't want to be cruel here, but at this point, I'd be inclined to accuse this person of projecting human qualities onto his pet. A pet may or may not be able to have an emotional relationship with a human. Frankly, I have no idea if this is the case or not. I know that other humans are capable of engaging in emotional relationships because I am a human and I am not a solipsist. I cannot know this about animals. As our understanding of animal brains grows, we may be able to make a pronouncement on this issue at some point in time, but not yet. Since our pet owner does not know that an animal can engage in such a relationship, I think my accusation of projection is accurate.

Anyway, this is why I described the practice of preserving one's pet as "strangely paradoxical". On one hand, the pet owner elevates the animal to be capable of engaging in a human-like, loving relationship. On the other hand, he proceeds to debase the same animal by preparing, stuffing, and mounting its remains for display in his home. This seems logically inconsistent to me. You cannot treat an animal like a person while it is alive and then treat it like an animal when it dies.

I don't have a problem with loving one's pet. I don't have a problem with displaying a taxidermic animal in one's house. I do have a problem with displaying the preserved remains of one's beloved pet in one's house. Once you decide that you love another living thing, you cannot display its corpse on your mantle.

Right?

2.
The embalming of human remains is a practice that has a long history across many cultures. As it is commonly practiced today, the purpose of embalming is to temporarily preserve a corpse for display at a funeral. There are a number of differences between embalming and taxidermy, but they are essentially similar in important ways. First, they both involve a person performing some sort of artificial process on a corpse in order to preserve it. Second, the end goal of each is the display of the corpse to other people.

Embalming is an extraordinarily common practice. The "open casket" style of funeral, while perhaps relatively less common, is still widely practiced and is generally considered to be an acceptable thing to do. Performing taxidermy on a human is even less common, but certainly not unheard of. Premiere Exhibitions has been running an exhibit called "BODIES" in three states for a number of years that offers paying customers the opportunity to view preserved Chinese people. Hundreds of thousands of paying customers have taken them up on that offer.

So, it seems fair to conclude that we are OK with the following:

The preservation and public display of human bodies that we do not know or love.
The preservation and display to invited guests of human bodies that we do know or love, predicated on the assumption that the display is temporary.

That is to say, when have a relationship with the human whose remains are to be displayed, the variables that change are who is allowed to see them and for how long.

I can understand the first variable. If I were to preserve the remains of a loved one, I'd want to regulate who was allowed to view the remains because I'd want them to be viewed with a certain amount of respect and reverence. I can't say why, exactly, but this seems to be a valid natural response.

The second variable seems far more arbitrary. Assuming I can regulate access as stated above, why is it OK for someone to view my taxidermic loved ones for an hour or two at an open casket funeral, but not for a longer period of time in a similarly regulated environment? I'd guess it has something to do with the "invitation to contemplate mortality" that I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Contemplating mortality in a general sense is a useful and edifying experience, but contemplating the mortality of specific people to whom we are close is more problematic. This practice is certainly necessary in small doses, but likely to be destructive if engaged in for extended periods of time. But then again, shouldn't the appropriate length of time to contemplate such things be determined by the contemplator?

If we agree that the act of preserving humans for display is a fine thing to do and we agree that restrictions need to be placed on who can view certain humans, then why place arbitrary distinctions on the duration and venue of the display? Why can't I preserve a loved one and keep him in a glass case in my basement? Why do I even need the glass case? To be sure, the rules of social etiquette state that I should not keep him or her in a location in which I receive guests into my house (since I would be forcing mortality contemplation upon them and as I stated before, all contemplation rights rest with the contemplator), but outside of that I see no problems with the practice in and of itself.

The problems would come into play when multiple loved ones have conflicting desires for a single person's remains and there are no instructions left in the will. Of course, some problems would be easier to solve than others. If everyone agreed on taxidermy and the issue was where to keep the remains, a simple rotation would solve the problem (e.g. I get grandpa on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, you get him on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, then we flip a coin on Sundays). The more pernicious problem would arise when some loved ones were in favor of taxidermy and others were in favor of burial or cremation.

At first blush, this would seem to be an issue of whether we should consider the interest of the deceased or his still-living loved ones. That is to say, should we consider what the corpse would prefer if we were able to ask it or should we solely consider the desires of the loved ones?

If we decide to give preference to the the interests of the still-living loved ones, then our first inclination is probably to enter into a thorny hierarchy of a relationships (i.e. a spouse has more right to decide than a parent, who has more right to decide than a sibling, who has more right to decide than a best friend, etc., etc.). Unfortunately, the only person who could really decide how the hierarchy should proceed is the deceased since he was the only person who was a party to all of the relationships considered. Therefore, any such hierarchy will always be fundamentally invalid. Indeed, any scenario in which the preference is given to the interest of the loved ones is bound to be mired in unknowable emotions and subjective variables.

Unfortunately, if we decide to err on the interest of the corpse, we are presented with other difficulties. Were we to ask the actual corpse (absent any other information about the alive version of the corpse), he'd clearly prefer the taxidermy option to either burial or cremation. Resting for eternity in a climate controlled basement or storage closet seems infinitely preferable to being burned and scattered to the winds or left in the ground to decompose. Those are things that we do to trash!

But we can't ask the corpse and any attempt to do so is just a silly projection exercise. So at this point, the best compromise is some sort of hybrid approach. The wishes of the corpse are unknowable (again, this is a situation in which disposal was left out of the will), therefore we have to treat the corpse simply as an object to which a number of people have extraordinarily strong attachments. Again, we're presented with the emotional problem, but there is a way out.

In the Seinfeld episode "The Seven", Elaine and Kramer both have a claim to the ownership of a bicycle, so they take their dispute to Newman who issues a Solomonic decree that the bike will be cut in half and each disputant will receive a piece. Elaine dismissively agrees while Kramer rushes to the bike's defense and agrees to relinquish his rights to preserve the bike. Newman then grants Kramer ownership.

There is wisdom in Newman's ruling. First, he creates a framework for evaluating the relative strength of two people's attachment to an inanimate object. Second, he establishes an objective basis for understanding the interest of an inanimate object. Simply put, an object's interest lies in (and only in) the preservation of its own integrity. This seems pretty unimpeachable to me. When Newman's Bicycle is torn asunder, it ceases to be a bicycle (it is now two unicycles), therefore its interest must be to remain whole. On one level, this is a semantic argument; on another level, it's about the essence of non-human things. Anyway, I let you project the ability to love onto an animal earlier, why can't you let me project self-interest onto a corpse?

Speaking of which.

We couldn't decide which loved one to turn the corpse over to since we can't judge whose relationship with the person gets preference. We can't judge which relationship gets preference because we can't ask the corpse. We can't ask the corpse because the corpse is an object. But we just agreed that an object's interest lies only in the preservation of its own integrity. Therefore, whoever will act in the closest accordance to the the object's interest should have the preferential relationship with the object. Hence, the loved one who wants to taxidermy the corpse should always be allowed to do so since taxidermy is most likely to preserve the essence of the corpse, this aligns with the corpse's only interest, and this reveals the strength and preferential status of that person's relationship to the corpse. Taxidermy always wins out. It's the only reasonable conclusion.

Anyway, updating your will is a pretty easy process.

What Sort of Person Would You Have Been If You Had Been Born in the Past? --OR-- Some Advice on How to Avoid Being Judged Harshly in the Future by Your Unborn Grandchildren

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:06:00 +0000

One of my favorite episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is "The Gang Cracks the Liberty Bell," in which the show imagines what Dennis, Mac, Charlie, et al would've been like had they been alive just before the Revolutionary War. Since the characters are horrible, selfish people in present times, they behave horribly and selfishly in the past, attempting to curry the favor of a British officer by selling Dee to him. Besides the fact that this is hilarious, I like this episode because I enjoy imagining what I and all of the people I know would've been like had we lived in various significant historical times. It's a fun exercise and a useful way to examine morality.

You'll be glad to know that this blog post is not about what I, the people I know, or any particular class or type of person would've been like in the past. I don't really want to go down that road. Rather, the first part of the post is about a framework for how to think about the question, since lots of people seem to have been asking it this week. The second part of the post is about those times when we tweak the question slightly and ask what older people in the present actually were like when they were younger and how the Internet will make it easier for future young people to ask this question about us. If that sounds interesting, please proceed past the jump.

1.
First, just to be clear, I need to establish that we are NOT discussing the kind of person one would be if the current present version of him (with all of his existing biases and experiences) traveled in time back to a particular period and then lived the rest of his life there. This post is not about trime travel. The question I am asking is what kind of person one would be if he were born in a particular time period but were otherwise exactly the same. The assumption is that each person possesses some kind of intrinsic natural moral compass that guides his decisions in life. In other words, we are trying to predict what one's actions might've been given certain stimuli in the past by what we know about that person in the present. The purpose of this post is not to discuss whether or not this intrinsic natural moral compass exists (and I'm not advocating one way or another); you simply must accept that assumption for the thought experiment to occur.

Onto the pitfalls. The first involves the assumption of temporally and contextually independent rules of morality. In other words, if a person is "good" in the present, then we assume that he would be "good" in the past. The pitfall comes into play when we define what constitutes "good" in the past according to the rules of "good" established in the present.

The episode of Always Sunny that I discussed earlier does a good job of sidestepping this pitfall. Since the gang is "bad" in the present, they must act "badly" in the past. The key is determining the gang's degree of badness relative to a normal person in the present and then using that measure to predict their actions relative to the actions of a normal person in the past and in that particular society. Dennis is so truly, despicably bad in the present that it's not enough to just transport him into the past and have him brutally make fun of his sister in old English. Instead, Dennis actually makes a slave of his sister and prostitutes her to the British for personal gain. Dennis is an equally bad person in both time periods, but his past actions are worse (according to present-day morality structure) because they are dependent on the societal context in which he finds himself, that is to say Colonial America, in which people routinely dueled each other to the death in the streets.

Just to be clear, here's a more on the nose example: Take a present-day good person who does good things and stick him in Nazi Germany in 1936. If we fall victim to the first pitfall, we predict that this present-day good person will speak out against Hitler's Jew-killing policies since they are bad and he is good. This prediction is unlikely to be true since it ignores both the morality rules of the day and the societal context in which this person would have to operate. A good person living in Nazi Germany in 1936 may not have spoken out against Hitler's policies for any number of reasons and may still be considered a good person.

Note: The point above is debatable, but that is outside the scope of this blog post. I merely want to highlight the fact that we need to appraise past actions according to the prevailing moral guidelines of the past in order to more accurately predict those actions.

The second pitfall involves the creation of false dichotomies. We have a tendency to over-simplify events and mindsets in the past since we have the advantage of subsequent information discovery and the hindsight it provides. I can remember having conversations with friends in high school about whether or not we would've been hippies if we were alive in the 60's. The problem is that this puts everyone in the past into "hippie" or "non-hippie" buckets. We may have dressed like hippies only when we went to concerts. We may have agreed with hippies politically, but not embraced their lifestyle. We may have ironically dressed up like hippies to make fun of them (the issue of whether people in the 60's were capable of irony has never been conclusively proven one way or the other). We may have decided whether or not we wanted to be hippies on any given day based on the weather outside when we woke up. The point is, any of these things could have caused us to be identified as hippies in that time period by our peers, but if you had asked us, the answer probably would've been more complicated.

The second pitfall seeks to recognize that in any given time period, most people are part of a massive, moderate, mute majority. The average person has opinions that are often in flux and engages in actions that vary widely based on context. To return to our Nazi example, if we dropped our present-day good person in 1936 Germany, he might at times behave like a Nazi and at other times behave like a non-Nazi. It is likely that he will agree with some Nazi things and disagree with others. To attempt to definitively predict if he would've been a Nazi or not is foolish. We have to ask a better question that accepts some gray area.

2.
A similar exercise involves attempting to predict what one's elderly relatives were like in the past and specifically what kinds of screwy political opinions they may have had that were considered at least reasonably acceptable at the time. This exercise can be interesting since there is a definitive true answer if you select a time period during which the relative in question was actually alive and old enough to have opinions. This exercise can be irresistible for those of us whose families come from the American south and the screwy political opinions in question have to do with racism.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed 290-130 in the House and 71-29 in the Senate, so it must have been at the very least politically tenable for a congressman to vote against it and surely in some cases politically advantageous to do so. Someone who was 18 at the time of the passage of the bill would only be 63 now, so most of us have relatives or parents that were old enough to have an opinion at the time. Some of those relatives must have been against it, and some of those vehemently so, but almost all simply wouldn't cop to having those opinions if you asked them today. What we need is some kind of a verbatim, time-stamped record of opinions composed by the relatives themselves that we could look up 45 years later and use to judge them.

You know, something like Facebook.

If my dad had a Facebook account when he was rushing fraternities at Georgia State in the 1960's, we'd be able to look back and find one of three things:

A. He was a vocal proponent of civil rights legislation.
B. He was a vocal opponent of civil rights legislation.
C. His Facebook posts revealed no point of view on the issue.

If A were true, this would positively influence my opinion of my dad, since I, along with just about everyone else in present-day America, think that civil rights legislation is a good thing. It would also show that my dad held such conviction that he was willing to support it in a region of the country that would seem to be more likely to oppose the legislation based on the way the south's elected senators and representatives voted on the bill.

If B were true, this would negatively influence my opinion of my dad, but I would have to adjust the degree of influence according to the rules of the pitfalls in part 1 and whether/why his opinion has since changed.

If C were true, I would want to ask my dad why he didn't have anything to say about a major political issue that is to me just a clear and undeniable battle between right and wrong.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three potential answers he might have to that question:

D. "I didn't want to get into politics on Facebook. That's not what it's for. It's inappropriate."
E. "I didn't want strong political stances to negatively affect my career."
F. "I just wasn't that into Facebook. I hardly ever posted about anything."

If my dad answers with D, I would have a couple of responses. First, I'd look at Facebook right after the bill passed, see how his timeline was full of all sorts of different people talking about it, and be forced to conclude that in the minds of a significantly large amount of people at that time, Facebook is definitely for talking about politics and to do so definitely is appropriate. Since Facebook is comprised primarily of user-generated content, it follows that the users should primarily decide what it is for. Thus, Facebook is for talking about politics if a significant number of its users believe it is.

Next, I would assume from the D response that my dad's concern over violating some unspoken and highly suspect rule of Facebook etiquette is more important to him than speaking out against racism, a view that in itself calls his character into question. It's fair to want to be polite if you're talking about raising tax rates or education funding, but when the political issue is racism and your primary concern is being polite, than you have an unusual value system.

Finally, if a conversation was going on and my dad chose not to partake, I might be forced to assume that he was so uninformed on the issue that he didn't feel confident discussing it publicly, which would be almost as intellectually bankrupt as being an opponent of civil rights legislation is morally bankrupt.

Clearly, D is a poor response.

If my dad answers with E, I would wonder why he would want to work for anyone that would be less likely to hire him due to his being anti-racism. I might conclude that money is more important to him than righteous morality, which would again call his character into question.

If my dad answers with F, I would examine his Facebook usage in the years around 1964 to determine if he is telling the truth. If he is, then fair enough.

To conclude, if I could access the 1964 Facebook profiles of my relatives, unless they explicitly spoke out in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, I would have to first conclude whether they were regular Facebook users. If they were, then I would be forced to conclude that they were either morally questionable or shockingly uninformed, neither of which is flattering.

Here is an unsolicited piece of advice:

If you are able to identify a major political issue that, due to historical trends and the general trajectory of society, is clearly an issue that history will judge one side unquestionably had the right of, you should speak out in favor of it on Facebook lest your future progeny and progeny's progeny judge you extremely harshly. Think how nice it will be to sit with your son in front of a computer one day and say to him, "I know you think the world was crazy when I was younger, and maybe you're right. Maybe it was. But I wasn't. And I can prove it."

Got A Problem with Corporate Personhood? Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics May Be the Solution You're Looking For

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:26:00 +0000

Over the past few months, the droning rhythm of Occupy drumcircles has given way to the brittle crunch of drumsticks as Republican Presidential candidates dine at folksy fried chicken restaurants across the country in hopes that the grease dribbling down their chins will attract the Undecided Voter, for whom (as we all know), folksiness is the chief quality on which to evaluate potential leaders of the free world.

Due to their temporal proximity, it was inevitable that the Occupy Movement would rub up against the Republican primary, particularly in the case of Mitt Romney, who has taken some time off from swimming through massive underground vaults of gold coins to serve as the physical embodiment of everything that the Occupiers are not. Early in his candidacy, a few rabble rousers showed up at an event in Iowa to hoot and howl at everything Romney had to say. They suggested he raise taxes on corporations. He responded by saying that corporations were people. Much yelling ensued.

Romney is of course correct. Not just in the sense that corporations are made up of human beings, but also that corporations enjoy certain rights and privileges previously enjoyed only by the individual. In fact, corporations are probably society's most significant and successful non-religious attempt to create an entirely artificial person. Understandably, this makes certain actual humans uncomfortable. I have a proposal that may assuage those feelings that I will outline for you after the jump.

Isaac Asimov was a Russian science fiction writer who lived from 1920 to 1992. He is regarded by most interested parties as the greatest sci-fi novelist of all time and an abject genius. His work dealt chiefly with artificial intelligence, its possibilities and pitfalls, and the uncertainty the presence of artificial humans engendered in actual humans.

In order to ease the transition from an all-human society to a mostly-human-but-also-a-bunch-of-robots-more-or-less-indistinguishable-from-actual-humans society and to prevent Terminator-style mass robot uprisings, Asimov's robot manufacturers programmed all of their creations to follow the Three Laws of Robotics:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

These worked pretty well for a while, but complications arose where bringing harm to one human could prevent harm to many other humans or society at large. To fix these complications, a 0th Law of Robotics was enacted that would supersede all previous laws:

0. A robot may not harm humanity or by inaction allow humanity to come to harm.

Again, since the 0th law supersedes the 1st law, a robot could conceivably injure a human if doing so would benefit humanity overall. In other words, robots were now programmed to potentially kill people. This (as you can imagine) led to additional complications, but on the whole, the situation was probably better than it was before. If we had to have artificial intelligence (and this was accepted as an inevitability in Asimov's fiction, as it probably is in real life), this was the best way to go about it.

In the real world, we create artificial human-like corporations whose rights are more or less indistinguishable from actual humans everyday. Further, these corporate humans are allowed to engage in human-like interactions with one another and with actual humans.

In the case of us actual human beings, there are physical, social, emotional, economical, and legal consequences for behaving in a morally untoward manner to other actual human beings. Artificial corporate humans are, at least relatively speaking, free from these consequences. This is perceived as unfair by many actual humans. Hence the Occupy Movement and Romney's rabble rousers.

BUT. If artificial corporate humans were subject to Asimov's ~~Three~~ Four Laws of Robotics, that fairness would theoretically be restored. If we are going to create humans, the thinking goes, let's create good humans instead of jerks. Seems simple enough.

This proposal, if adopted, would quickly usher in a new era of corporate citizenship (which many business people believe to be inevitable) by providing extreme consequences for poor moral behavior on the part of artificial corporate humans. In Asimov's world, if a robot violated any of the Laws, it was immediately destroyed. The same would be true of corporations. One strike and you're out.

There are of course myriad problems with the proposal. The political ones notwithstanding, the interaction between the 0th and 1st laws would probably cause the most complications. Human brains are unable to see the future (which would make the impact on humanity of any given decision difficult to pin down with true accuracy) and are clouded by emotion (which would cause us to err on the side of those living actual humans in close proximity to us that would be affected by a given decision rather than the impact on society at large and future actual humans yet to be born). Therefore, we would need to rely on objective, dispassionate formulas and statistical models to evaluate the full societal impact of any given decision, while also taking into account some acceptable profit margin. This would be similar to how Edward Norton's character in Fight Club evaluates whether or not to initiate an automobile recall.

Unfortunately, as these algorithms are refined and their predictive power becomes more and more accurate, the computing resources needed to run them will increase exponentially. Accordingly, we will need to concurrently work on more and more advanced computers to run our more and more advanced algorithms. Eventually, the computers will be so fast that they will be better at creating the algorithms than our own human brains.

We are not so far off from this technology right now. What I am describing is, technically speaking, artificial intelligence. Therefore, if you follow my idea to its full logical conclusion, I am proposing that all corporations be run by super-intelligent robots that will determine the optimal societal impact of all their decisions. These robots will of course themselves be subject to Asimov's Laws so that nothing could ever go wrong.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Wait a second. It's blog posts like these that start the ball rolling towards exactly the type of Terminator-style mass robot uprising that you cautioned about before! What do you think you're doing? In fact, I sort of feel like you may have all along been a robot sent from the future to write blog posts that would begin to sow the ideological seeds for the future robot takeover! You lulled us into a false sense of security with all of your previous blog posts, which were just funny jokes, but lately, your blog has become more and more unhinged, nonsensical, and completely consumed with time travel. This was all a set up. You are clearly a robot."

Now, now, now. Take it easy. Don't be silly. You're getting yourself all worked up. Why don't you drink a warm glass of milk and go watch some videos of cats doing adorable things on YouTube? Yes, that will be nice.

Pitchfork's Review of Childish Gambino's Camp is a Textbook Example of Why People (Justifiably) Hate Pitchfork --OR-- It's Time We Give Pop-Rap a Break

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 21:04:00 +0000

Let me start off by stating that I do not count myself among the people referred to in the title of this blog post. I love Pitchfork. Read it everyday. I find its reviews to be generally evenhanded, if a little too English MFA-y in style. I like that it operates in a milieu slightly below the mainstream but well above the underground, which is where my own tastes lie. I find the regular columns (particularly Poptimist and Resonant Frequency) to be of uniformly outstanding quality.

But every once in a while, one of Pitchfork's reviewers writes a piece so misguided that it lends total credence to the leagues of Pitchfork detractors and makes me feel like a fool for defending the site as much as I do. Today's review of Childish Gambino's Camp was one such piece and speaks to a larger problem with music criticism in general. I'll explain why after the jump.

The most common criticisms of Pitchfork come from two camps: mainstream music fans who hate the site for being elitist and underground music fans who consider it unworthy of its taste-making reputation because it is too mainstream. The latter criticism is ridiculous on its face and would only come from someone so far up their own music-snob ass that they cannot see the rank absurdity of referring to Pitchfork as mainstream. The former criticism is occasionally valid.

Today's Camp review was written by Ian Cohen and fully embodies Pitchfork elitism at its worst. The first sentence of the review sums things up nicely: "If you buy only one hip-hop album this year, I'm guessing it'll be Camp," the subtext being that if you like this album, you are not cool enough or familiar enough with with the genre to appreciate "good" hip-hop. Cohen delivers the line with a wink and a nod to the tiny segment of his readers that spend too much time on rap message boards and a brazen "fuck you" to everyone else who were just curious to see if the album is any good.

Cohen's issue with the album is that he perceives Donald Glover to be simultaneously out of touch with and too derivative of the prevailing trends in hip-hop. According to Cohen, Glover does not have the right to brand himself as a hip-hop outsider since Kanye, Drake, and Cudi have been playing the emo-rap v. street rap game for so long that the outsiders have now become the insiders. All right Cohen, fair enough, you're probably right about that. Now, can we please talk about the sounds that come out of the speakers when you play the album?

And he does. A little. Cohen excoriates Glover for "painfully leaning into herniated punchlines like . . . 'Asian girls everywhere ... UCLA!'"; for being out of touch: "note how [Backpackers] co-opts the one epithet more outdated than 'hipster' in rap music circa 2011"; and for "R&B hooks so garish and impersonal that they make Lupe Fiasco's Lasers sound dignified."

Of course, Pitchfork would like you to forget that two weeks ago they bestowed an 8.6 and a Best New Music tag on Drake's Take Care. In the album's first track, Over My Dead Body, Drake both delivers an Asian-girl-inspired punchline ("You know I want it all and then some/Shout out to Asian girls, let the lights dim some") and name-checks the backpacker haters ("The backpackers are back on the bandwagon/Like this was my comeback season back, back in the day"). Again, this is all on THE FIRST TRACK OF THE ALBUM; the garish R&B hooks come later.

So what's the difference between Gambino and Drake? You may point out that the reviews were written by two different people with two different opinions. Fair enough, but Pitchfork has editors to ensure that their ratings maintain consistency over time, and these reviews were only two weeks apart. You may also argue that Drake is just flat out objectively better than Gambino in terms of delivery, production, or whatever else. While this is true, I think it's impossible to make the argument that if Gambino is a 1.6 then Drake is a BNM'd 8.6. Drake is better, but he's not THAT much better. He's certainly no less derivative of Kanye West.

All things considered, it seems clear that the main difference between Drake and Gambino is that somebody somewhere for some reason decided that Drake is cool and Gambino is not. It's the only reasonable explanation. Amusingly, this supports basically everything Gambino is saying in his lyrics. Glover's backpacker persecution complex is both completely validated by Cohen and the primary reason why Cohen hates the record. Go figure.

Cohen isn't all to blame here. His review is representative of the completely inane and myopic Internet Rap Conversation that has been raging for years. Rap fans are just so totally and ridiculously obsessed with their genre that they seemingly have no interest in music as a vehicle for pleasure in any way, shape, or form. They only see rap as something to argue about; heaven forbid it could be enjoyed. Paradoxically, Cohen totally understands this idea and references it in his review. The onset of the "post-racial, post-cred [hip hop] utopia" that he thinks we are closer to than ever and ostensibly wants is being hindered by precisely these sorts of reviews that focus on anything but how good the album is to listen to.

It reminds me of when I was growing up. My friends and I were fans of alternative/grunge music and nothing else. If a given musical act didn't play its own instruments and if those instruments weren't a guitar, base, and drums, then that act was completely unworthy of our attention. One of the things that I love about being a music fan today is that most of us simply do not feel this way anymore. Things like genre and authenticity don't seem to be as important now, and that is a great thing. If it sounds good, listen to it.

I'm not saying that all ardent hip-hop fans now are like how the rest of us were back then, but I am saying that this obsession with specific genre signifiers is more prevalent among ardent hip-hop fans than any other music fan group.

They certainly seem to be slowly coming around to Cohen's post-genre music utopia and it's been exciting to watch it happen. Kanye West deserves more credit for the transformation than anyone and that's what makes him such an extraordinarily important musician. He has enough credibility to be taken seriously by rap fans and enough universality to be loved by everyone else. The next step is for "serious" rap fans and music critics to finally recognize pop-rap as a legitimate sub-genre.They don't have to love it, but at very least, they should acknowledge its right to exist and recognize the fact that the world is not going to end if they find themselves bobbing their head to the odd garish R&B hook.

Pop-rap is rarely going to deliver a true masterpiece, but albums like B.O.B.'s The Adventures of Bobby Ray, Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday, and, yes, Lupe's Lasers clearly have some pleasures to offer. Some of Cohen's criticisms are legitimate (even if the slimy way he delivers them is not), but the problem is that he is so overwhelmingly concerned with genre that he blows up these criticisms into completely unforgivable sins and writes egregiously pejorative reviews for albums that simply do not deserve them. Sure, pop-rap albums generally aren't going to be 9.8's, but they don't have to be 1.6's either. Pitchfork would be well served to at least acknowledge the fact that these albums are bringing something to the table. A quick trip to Metacritic shows that the rest of the music press already does.

The "Socially Liberal / Fiscally Conservative" Code --OR-- Two Relatively Brief Political Diversions In a Blog Normally Unconcerned with Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 04:32:00 +0000

It is not, generally speaking, my custom to write about politics in these pages. I once wrote a piece about my experience attending Barack Obama's inauguration, but that piece wasn't explicitly "political" in the sense that I did not write it to advocate a particular point of view. I'm not sure that this piece is political in that sense either, although I will be advocating certain points of view. I am writing this piece for two reasons:

To try to better understand why people identify themselves as "socially liberal but fiscally conservative," and
To clear up a partially valid but embarrassingly delivered point I made in the context of a mortgage-crisis discussion I was having at a bar the other night with two (possibly three, my recollection is regrettably imperfect) new friends that I consider both highly intelligent and deserving of an explanation.

It is my hope that my discussion of the first topic will be interesting to a fair amount of people. I do not harbor such hopes for the second topic and suspect that it will be interesting to only that segment of the population that happened to be sitting at a certain table in a certain bar in downtown Athens around 1:00 in the morning two Fridays ago, and probably to only one specific member of the aforementioned population. Regardless, now you know what you're in for, so please click on the link below if you remain interested. If not, here is a link to a highly recommended YouTube video about cats.

1.
I am 27 years old and have, at this point, met a fair amount of people in my life. It is my contention that the vast majority of them (something like 75%), when asked a very general question about their political leanings, respond with the phrase, "I am socially liberal, but fiscally conservative." Now, this is not to say that I arrive at this conclusion about their views through a political discussion with them or that they communicate this fact about themselves without explicitly saying it. What I am saying is that, when asked where they stand on the political spectrum, they respond with this exact phrase.

There's been plenty written on the Internet for and against this phrase. The basic argument against it is that one cannot simultaneously support government social programs while railing against the taxes used to pay for them. This argument is

logically seductive
basically true, and
functionally irrelevant.

I'm not going to argue against "socially liberal but fiscally conservative," because it is (on its face) an illogical thing to say. This may or may not be true, but I'm not really interested in that. Instead, I will argue against the phrase because, in my estimation, it is completely and utterly devoid of any meaning whatsoever with respect to a person's political views.

To wit, I have met people who have claimed to be "socially liberal and fiscally conservative" who are vehemently against welfare. I have met people who use the phrase but are in favor of increased government spending on education, defense, healthcare, student loans, funding for the arts, or any number of other things our government might spend taxpayers' money on. I have met people who use the phrase and are for the legalization of marijuana, abortions, or neither marijuana nor abortions. I have met people who use the phrase who think that Everybody Loves Raymond was a funny television show, but are otherwise completely rational people. I have met people who use the phrase but then go on to say that what they meant by the phrase is that they are "libertarian" which is itself an almost completely meaningless signifier, at least absent of further elaboration. And so on, and so on.

I will say that almost everyone I have met who uses the phrase seems to be in favor of gay people's right to get married, so it at least has that going for it.

But outside of that, it is completely impossible to predict the person in question's views on an issue-by-issue basis. In other words, if someone says to me, "I am socially liberal, but fiscally conservative," then I have learned almost nothing about this person or his viewpoints. That's why I earlier stated that the logical argument against this phrase is functionally irrelevant, because it presumes that when somebody utters this phrase, they intend for that phrase to carry information about their political views. I am now of the opinion that this simply isn't the case.

So if people do not intend for this phrase to carry any significant meaning about their political views, then what do they intend for it to mean? Communication, by definition, carries meaning. It may not be the explicit meaning of the words spoken, but for this phrase to qualify as communication (and I think it does), it must convey something about the speaker. Obviously, the only person who knows that meaning for sure is the speaker himself (and even he may be an unreliable source), but I am certainly willing to speculate on the general meaning of this phrase as it is currently used in this country.

It is my contention that "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" has evolved into a cultural shorthand for

I am a reasonable person,
I hold political views, and
I am not interested in discussing those views with you.

First, a caveat. I am not saying that this is what the phrase has always meant. I suspect that this phrase has meant different things at different times in our country's history, particularly during the presidency of Bill Clinton. I am only saying that this is what this phrase means in most conversations at this particular point in time.

I think most people will agree with meanings 1 and 2. The first meaning seems likely, especially in a post-Fox News / post-MSNBC / post-Rally to Restore Sanity World in which the majority of people seem to want to be perceived as reasonable. By claiming that you have views on either side of the political spectrum, you want me to infer that you are reasonable. Fair enough. The second meaning is plainly self-evident. If you state that you are socially liberal and politically conservative then you are obviously claiming to have some sort of political views.

The third meaning may provoke some disagreement. I can only say that in my experience, the socially liberal / fiscally conservative meme has generally been a political conversation ender rather than an entree into further political discourse. Additionally, the statement simply does not seem to be designed to hold up to additional, issue-by-issue scrutiny. It is clearly vague (!) and clearly an attempt to summarize an un-summarizable jumble of thoughts and opinions. Neither seems to be an invitation to the further clarification that would inevitably arise from an in-depth political discourse.

So, what conclusions can we draw? If someone gives you the socially liberal / fiscally conservative code, then I would recommend, based on my reading of that code, two responses:

Do not make any assumptions about this person or his views at all, except that he is most likely in favor of gay marriage, which is an assumption you will make at your own peril.
Shift the conversation away from politics and into something that we can all agree on. YouTube videos featuring cats, for example.

As I said before, the second purpose of this post was to clear up an (I hope) uncharacteristically ridiculous statement I made in a bar two Fridays ago. The reader may be amused to know that, of the five people I was with that night, only one of them is (as of this writing) aware of the existence of this blog. Further, that particular person (the one aware of this blog) was so focused on one of the female members of the group that night, that he was completely unaware that a political conversation between the other four members was even taking place at all, so part two of this post is functionally irrelevant (note: stop saying "functionally irrelevant").

Without further dithering, I would like to say to the two people I disagreed with that

I do not actually consider you guys to be racist in any way, and
I more or less stand by everything else I said.

That's it. If you would like to hear my views on the mortgage crisis and potentially hear me accuse you or someone you know of racism (as is I am wont to do), then we will have to discuss that elsewhere. YYII is either above or below that sort of thing, depending on your viewpoint. Thank you for reading.

A Short Piece of Fiction Inspired by an Allegedly Authentic Photo of an Infantile Hitler that I Found On the Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:51:00 +0000

I leaned over the edge of the crib and peered down at the sleeping child. He had a thick head of black hair but was otherwise unremarkable. I hadn't necessarily expected anything different.

I glanced at my watch. 2:08 AM. I had four minutes.

Next to the crib was an old rocking chair that winced as I eased my way into it. I rocked gently back and forth, thinking of nothing in particular. I pulled my gun out of my vest and turned it over in my hands, making sure it was loaded. I didn't have much experience with guns. I wouldn't need it for my purposes.

I idly pointed the gun at various objects around the room. First at the bookcase on the left wall, then towards the open window on the right. We were on the ground floor of the house and the back yard stretched out from the window, culminating in a forest three to four hundred yards behind the house. The world was silent and unmoving outside the window, save for a slight breeze that gently disturbed the curtains as it trickled into the bedroom.

My watch now read 2:11. I stood up from the chair and walked to the center of the room. I raised the gun to eye level, pointed it directly in front of me, and waited.

At 2:12, the air in front of my gun began to thicken and shake. At first it looked like the shimmering liquid of far off asphalt on a hot day, but eventually it began to smooth out and coalesce. The little bit of moonlight let in from the window began to reflect off of the amorphous forms of indiscriminate particulate matter slowly materializing out of the air. After what seemed like minutes, but was only a few seconds, the matter began to take shape, rounding itself in parts and elongating itself in others. As if I closed my eyes, rubbed them, and then opened them again, the matter began to fuzzily intersect together into a human form. And then, as soon as it began, the air was still and clear. In the center of the room stood a man of about 6 feet. My gun was poised inches from his face. I spoke.

"Hello. Please put your weapon on the ground."

The man's eyes widened at the sight of me and he stumbled backward into the wall behind him.

"Your weapon, please."

He straightened and met my gaze. I must admit that I was impressed by the speed with which he regained his composure.

He slowly and deliberately reached behind his back and removed a large knife, which he placed on the floor. He raised his hands and stood upright once more and regarded me curiously.

"You speak excellent English," he said.

"Thank you." I said as I moved toward him, holding my gun steady.

"Your accent . . you're American."

I was now within arm's length of him and began patting him down, holding my gun to his forehead.

"What is an armed American doing in a nursery room in the middle of rural Austria-Hungary at a quarter past two in the morning?" he said.

I brushed my hand on the outside of his left pocket and, finding nothing, moved over to the right. From it, I removed a small vial of clear liquid and held it in front his face.

"I could ask you the same question," I said as I pocketed the vial and backed away from him slowly. "But then, we both already know the answer to that."

"Who are you?" he said. "You are not supposed to be here."

I held the gun steady. I could almost hear his brain working to make sense of the situation, trying to discern which variables he had left unaccounted for. I broke the silence.

"Did you ever doubt whether you'd be able to do it?"

He was defiant. "If you knew what this infant would grow up to be, you would not hesitate to kill him yourself."

"I know of the child. I know he will one day be directly responsible for the murders of nearly 11 million innocent people."

The man's eyes narrowed and he looked at me knowingly.

"Who are you?" he said.

"Unimportant. But I know who you are. You're Hank Morgan, born March 15th, 2086 in Suffolk, Virginia. You alternately studied and taught physics from 2104 to 2118, splitting your time between Oxford and The City College of New York. In 2119, you became employed by the government of the United Kingdom. Ten years later, you travelled back in time to this moment in 1900 and poisoned the infant behind me."

Mr. Morgan said nothing. He regarded me intensely, thoughtfully. I kept the gun trained on his head and I began to perspire at the strain of it.

"It is an honor to meet you, Mr. Morgan. You are unknown to all but a handful of men in my time, but thought very highly of by those who are aware of your existence."

My body tensed as I tightened my grip on my weapon.

"Your time . . . I had not considered this." he said. "You mean to kill me, then?"

"I do."

I began to press down the trigger.

"I would assume, in 'your' time, that you've discovered how to get back?"

I hesitated. He had his answer.

"I see," he said. "We thought it impossible in my time. Not everything has changed, then."

It was my turn to be silent. His hands remained raised.

"So you would murder me, then? Thus removing your last link to your own time?"

"You are neither more nor less of my time than anyone else here."

He considered this.

"So you style yourself of this time, now?"

"I am of this time now, as are you, there is no choice."

"Then you would spare the child and watch him grow to terrorize the world around you? Watch this time be plunged into war and despair, knowing that you could have prevented it? The blood will surely be on your hands as much as his."

"I know what happens if he dies! You can't imagine the horrors you visited upon my time with your ill-considered decision to murder him."

"Your time? Did you not say that we are of this time now? You will never know the fate of those who remain in your old time, if they do remain at all. What other decisions will you make as you live your life in this time that will alter the causality chain leading to your original time? You cannot possibly know, therefore, you must determine your actions and ethics as a man of this time and indeed of this very instant while the chain is still reasonably unadulterated. We must kill the infant now and save the people of this time! Rationally, that can be our only imperative. And then, together, we will focus on saving your time for the rest of our days."

"No. I am here to return the causality chain to its original state. There will be no further action on my part beyond that, I will disrupt nothing."

"Then you will kill yourself after you kill me."

"Indeed."

"You're a madman! You can never know the long-term results of your actions! Your plan is --"

I moved swiftly towards him and in one motion, swung the butt of my gun into his temple, knocking him unconscious. I then put my arms around him and lowered him gently to the floor, cradling his head in my hand.

Mercifully, he did not bleed; there would be nothing to clean. I produced the vial of poison from my pocket and brought it to his lips, emptying the entire contents into his mouth and down his throat.

The poison acted quickly. I held him fast as his body convulsed once, twice, and then was still. He was dead.

I picked up his knife, which still laid on the floor where he had placed it, and secured it safely in my vest. I then hefted his lifeless body, slung him over my shoulder and moved toward the window. I gingerly placed him on the ground outside the window and then climbed out myself. I picked him up once again and carried him off into the woods behind the house.

I walked through the trees for three hours until the sun began to rise. I found a clearing and, with the help of Morgan's knife, dug a five foot grave into which I rolled the corpse, the knife and the vial of poison. I packed in dirt around the body, filled in the grave, and spread some leaves and pine straw over the top to conceal it. I was exhausted.

I staggered over to a nearby tree, slumped against it, and produced the gun from my vest. I raised the gun to my temple.

I held it there for hours, unable or perhaps just unwilling to pull the trigger. My eyelids grew heavy and I eventually drifted off to sleep. I awoke the next morning in an all-encompassing state of spatial and temporal disorientation. I looked down at my right hand to find it still clutching the gun, which I returned to its holster in my vest. I thought of my old time and wondered what changes my actions had wrought.

I stood up and looked around. The forest seemed to stretch forever in all directions.

Perhaps I could find a way out.

An argument for the immediate, persistent video surveillance of every interior and exterior physical location on the face of the Earth

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:29:00 +0000

My argument rests on two premises: 1) that the universe is infinite along all four dimensions experienced by human beings (three space and one time) and 2) that there is a chance, however incomprehensibly small, that travelling backwards through time is possible. Obviously, I cannot conclusively prove either of these premises, but if you are willing to accept both, then you must be willing to accept the necessity of immediate, persistent video surveillance of every interior and exterior physical location on the face of the Earth. There is no other option.

I think most people will intuitively accept the first premise. Although the scientific community is somewhat divided on the subject, data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), along with other experiments, suggest that the universe is flat within a 2% margin of error. This data, coupled with WMAP's other finding that the universe's rate of expansion seems to be accelerating, indicates that the universe will continue to expand forever and is thus infinite. Regardless, if you accept that reality exists, then there always must be something to house reality and this something must be infinite if the concept of reality is consistently believable.

The second premise is probably harder to accept. Again, the scientific community is divided on the subject. The equations that form the foundations of physics seem to indicate that time travel should be possible. These equations have proven reliable in the past, so it is reasonable to presume that they would be reliable in this case as well. Even if you are extremely hesitant to allow for the possibility of time travel, perhaps you would allow at least a .00000000001% chance that it could happen.

If you are still hesitant, consider the implications of time travel. It is a well-known fact that if someone were to travel back in time and alter something, the resulting changes to the chain of causality could have disastrous implications to our present, including, but not limited to, causing mankind to stop existing. Surely these most dire of consequences would allow you to consider the possibility of the possibility of time travel existing, if only to err on the side of caution? To use another example, Gregg Easterbrook argues in The Atlantic that although the scientific community is divided on the possibility that a meteor will strike the Earth (anywhere from an infinitesimally small possibility to as much as 10%), the calamitous results of such a strike necessitate preventative measures. To wit,

". . . in 1908, a huge explosion occurred above Tunguska, Siberia. The cause was not a malfunctioning alien star-cruiser but a small asteroid or comet that detonated as it approached the ground. The blast had hundreds of times the force of the Hiroshima bomb and devastated an area of several hundred square miles. Had the explosion occurred above London or Paris, the city would no longer exist."

Therefore, if there is any chance of this happening again, even if that chance is extremely small, then we should at least spend some amount of time and money planning for the possibility since the consequences would be so horrible. Surely the same argument can be made for the existence of time travel. Although science is decidedly more mixed on the possibility of time travel than on the possibility of a meteor striking the Earth, the consequences of time travel could be far more cataclysmic than a meteor strike, so why not at least allow for the possibility? Can you afford not to?

If you are now willing to accept both of my premises, that the universe is infinite and that time travel is possible (no matter how small the possibility), then consider the fact that, in an infinite universe, anything that has any probability of occurring will inevitably occur. Therefore, if you accept my first two premises, then you accept the premise that time travel will inevitably occur at some point in time in the future.

Additionally, since we are dealing with time travel, it doesn't matter at all when it occurs, it can still have an effect on our present. If time travel is not mastered until a billion years into the future, someone could travel a billion and one years into the past and alter something in 2009 that would affect our 2010 reality.

Therefore, we must immediately begin taking steps to prevent time travel from happening or at least prevent a time traveler from altering anything should he travel into our time. Since a time traveler could conceivably completely wipe out human existence by his actions, then our efforts to prevent this from happening must be international and must take precedence over any other national or global initiatives. All of the world's resources must immediately be devoted to this task; there is nothing more important.

Time is of the essence. Since time travelling is an inevitability, many changes have undoubtedly already been made to the course of human history by time travelers. During the time that you were reading the previous two sentences in this paragraph, it could have been the case that John Adams was the first president of the United States. Between the time you finished those sentences and the time you began the next sentence, someone could have travelled back in time and rigged the election so that George Washington won. The you reading this sentence believes that George Washington was always the first president of the United States, and there's nothing anyone could do to change your mind, but you would be wrong. Thus, our entire world can change in a split second.

All of the changes that have been made to our past by time travelers already have caused us to arrive at the world in which we exist right now. This world is, at worst, tolerable, and is undoubtedly preferable to a random alternative, considering how truly disastrous the worst of those alternatives could be. Therefore, we have to act at once to prevent any additional changes from being made. We must preserve our present world at all costs.

To do this, we must prevent people from time travelling not only to our present, but also to our past and future. The only way to achieve this is by installing video surveillance cameras in every single physical location in the entire world, both inside and outside of buildings, as well as underwater. We will also need to create an international organization responsible for viewing and policing the camera feeds.

This will immediately solve the problem of anyone from the future time traveling into our midst. The cameras will recognize a human instantly materializing and then notify the proper authorities to apprehend this person and prevent him or her from altering anything. Nobody will be able to time travel into any time after the camera network is built without being immediately apprehended.

That would take care of people time travelling into our present and future, but we would still have the problem of people time travelling into our past. Fortunately, the camera network, by its very existence, will solve this problem easily. Once the network is built, we can expect a slew a time travelers to begin travelling into our present (like moths to a bug light) with the express purpose of destroying or somehow subverting the camera network, so that people of the future could once again resume time travelling with impunity. using the camera network, we will easily capture these people and force them to give us the secrets of time travel, which we will use to travel back to the point at which Earth was created in order to install another network of cameras throughout the planet in order to police the entire history of the planet and prevent anyone from travelling to a time before the first camera network was built.

Obviously, speed is of the essence in building the camera network, which is why we must mobilize all of the Earth's resources and people. Again, since the worst possible scenario is someone travelling back in time and causing the entire human race to cease existing and since this could literally happen at any moment, the only rational decision is to begin the mobilization immediately. Any opposition to the worldwide camera network or any negative externalities produced by its existence (e.g. lack of privacy, reduced freedom, etc.) pale in comparison to the prospect of humanity ceasing to exist and must be ignored.

In all likelihood, the mere fact that I was born and have written this blog post is proof that my plan has been adopted and is successful, so any remaining opposition to the camera network is futile. Since I am the first person to ever publish these ideas, surely someone must have travelled back in time to try and kill me before I wrote this or perhaps to try and kill my parents or their parents, and so on. Clearly, the overseers of the camera network have already apprehended several time travelers and gleaned the secrets of time travel from these people and used it to ensure my safety. So, as you can see, the very existence of this blog post is enough to prove the validity and inevitability of the camera network. The argument is true because I have made the argument. The camera network must be adopted; there is no other future available.

Why The Hills Was An Important Television Show

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:08:00 +0000

For much of tonight, the series finale of The Hills sputtered. Major plot points introduced in the penultimate episode were hurriedly rushed to a conclusion in the finale. Stephanie went from first date to exclusivity. Lo's relationship with the little-seen Scott became the most salient thing about her. Kristin put it all on the line with Brody and then decided to move to Europe.

Throughout, the girls talked much of transition. They seemed to share a sense that a chapter of their lives was ending. This is true, of course. After tonight, none of these people will be stars of a television show on MTV. But the cast members of The Hills aren't supposed to talk about the show on the show, right?
The fact is that all of this transition talk made complete sense within the context of the real world but none of it made sense within the context of The Hills. It was as if the show needed to end, so the girls made changes in their lives to accommodate this fact. The show was not about the lives of Kristin, Lo, Audrina, and Stephanie. Their lives were about the show.

Then again, Lo really is moving in with her boyfriend and Kristin really does appear to be moving to Europe. These things are actually happening regardless of the presence of cameras.

This push and pull between between reality television and "reality" television is nothing new for The Hills. The question of what is real and what isn't has long been at the core of the show, long before tonight's twist ending.

Last week, I imagined how The Hills season finale might play out in the universe of ABC's Lost. I did this completely jokingly, unaware of how apt that comparison would prove to be after tonights finale. In Lost's series finale, we learned that half of that show's final season took place in some sort of limbo between death and the afterlife and that everything that happened on the show previous to the final season was real, but only important in that it would eventually help the characters on the show transition into their afterlives. The plot of the first five seasons of Lost was not necessarily important in and of itself, but only important as it pertained to this alternate reality depicted in the final season.

The Hills concluded its sixth and final season in a similar way. As the camera panned away to reveal Brody standing in front of a backdrop surrounded by cameras on a Hollywood lot, the viewer was forced to consider whether anything that happened over the past six seasons was actually real. Further, he had to consider what the word "real" means in the context of that question. If all of the events depicted on The Hills actually happened to these people, but only happened as a result of their involvement with the show, does that make these events less real? In the after-show, Holly Montag was moved to tears due to events that transpired on the show while Brody and Kristin were glib and borderline dismissive of their on-screen tribulations. Does this mean that the portions of The Hills featuring Holly Montag are more real than those featuring Kristin Cavallari?

At the end of the final episode when Kristin said goodbye to Brody on the street and then got in her car to go away, where did we think she was going if she hadn't yet decided where she would live?

In the thirteenth essay of his seminal pop culture manifesto, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman argues that traditional modes of storytelling in entertainment have become obsolete because modern reality is "more transient and less concrete." He goes on to elaborate that, "traditional character models like 'The Everyman' and 'The Antihero' and 'The Wrongly Accused' are no longer useful because nobody can agree on what those designations are supposed to mean anymore . . . Modern movies can no longer introduce impending realities; they can't even explain the ones we have. Consequently, there's only one important question a culturally significant film can still ask: What is reality?"

This is the enduring legacy of The Hills. It is the first show to ask this question within the context of a reality television show. Up until tonight, the question was always asked implicitly, through the show's production. The Hills never depicted reality the way a show like True Life did. They preferred to serve a version of reality that had more in common with how our minds remember and distort past events than how our minds observe events happening in the present. Every frame was lovingly shot in a soft focus lens from carefully considered angles. Everybody always looked perfect; no hair was left out of place and no blemish left uncovered. Every seminal moment was soundtracked to the popular music of the time and everyone wore the trendiest clothes Every look and every gesture was suggestive and filled with meaning.

The Hills shows reality as we wish it was. Timelines of events are shoehorned into rough narrative structures. The rugged, dirty parts that don't fit are swept away while everything else is exaggerated and emotional and beautiful and the weather is always sunny and your hair looked just the way you wanted. It is the reality of memories. It only ever exists inside our heads.

With its surprise ending tonight, The Hills finally overtly asked the "what is reality?" question. They deliberately called into question their own airbrushed version of reality and left the viewer to decide which parts of that reality he wants to believe in. No reality show has ever attempted anything like that before. It was an interesting move and a memorable one.

The Hills was an important television series. Not because of the people on the show and events of their lives, but because of the way those people and events were portrayed. And in the end, surprisingly enough, because it made you think.

Six Degrees of Pitchfork.com Band Names

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Thu, 13 May 2010 01:28:00 +0000

There is a lot of duplication in band names these days, so I decided to map out some the names of bands and artists and see where they intersect. It's kind of like six degrees of separation for band names, but in chart form. I tried to use mostly current indie artists, but I ended up including some older names to make some good connections. My only rule was that all the band names used had to come up with at least one search result on Pitchfork.com (which is more restrictive than it sounds). You can find the chart and further explanation after the jump.

The chart consists of 62 words and 54 band or artist names comprised of 1-3 of those words. The words are collected into five groups. All the words within a group are connected to each other by forming a band or artist name.

The arrows connecting the words show the direction in which the name should be read. A thick line around a word indicates a single word band name. A dotted arrow between words indicates that the band name is formed by three words.

Here are all 54 band or artist names included in the chart and separated by group:

Deer Group

1. Deerhunter

2. Deerhoof

3. Deer Tick

Grizzly Group

4. Grizzly Bear

5. Little Grizzly

6. Little Dragon

7. Little Brother

8. Blood Brothers

9. Surfer Blood

10. Butthole Surfers

11. Nada Surf

12. Bloodhound Gang

13. Gang Starr

14. Stars

15. Big Star

16. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

17. Bad Seeds

18. Bad Religion

19. Big Daddy Kane

20. Trick Daddy

21. Cheap Trick

22. BlackStar

23. Black Lips

24. Flaming Lips

25. Black Keys

26. Alicia Keys

27. Black Eyes

28. Frog Eyes

29. Bright Eyes

30. Wolf Eyes

31. Sea Wolf

32. Wolf Parade

33. Black Kids

34. Getup Kids

35. Coldwar Kids

36. Cool Kids

37. Kool and the Gang

Neon Group
38. Neon Indian
39. Neon Trees
40. Indian Jewelry
41. Nite Jewel
42. Three Dog Night
43. Dr. Dog
44. Three Six Mafia
45. Six Organs of Admittance

Girl Group
46. Brazilian Girls
47. Girls
48. Girl Talk
49. Talking Heads
50. Futureheads
51. Future of the Left

Beach Group
52. Beach Fossils
53. Beach House
54. Crowded House

Here's the chart (click to expand):

And here's a link to a really awesome infograph about the Beatles. that is a million times better than the cheap chart that I made.

The Sports Fan Viewership Hierarchy

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Tue, 11 May 2010 20:10:00 +0000

Last night, the Atlanta Hawks' season ended in ignominious fashion with a second round playoff sweep by the Orlando Magic. It was a historically noncompetitive series and an embarrassment of the highest order for the Hawks players and organization. As a lifelong fan of this team and former attendee of the Dominique Wilkins basketball camp, last night's loss was a tough pill to swallow. The girl that I live with had a decidedly different reaction.

See, I've been watching a lot of sports on television lately. The period between January and May is a murderers' row of must-watch sporting events. The season begins with college bowl games and the BCS championship, which dovetails with the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl, which segues nicely into March Madness, which gives way to The Masters and baseball opening day, and culminates in the NBA playoffs. It's truly a great time to be a sports fan.

Since we only have one television in our house, it is also a great time for arguing over what to watch. All of these sporting events mean a lot less time for Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, and Glee (three shows that I absolutely despise); Cougar Town and How I Met Your Mother (two shows that aren't very funny but I grudgingly tolerate); and Gossip Girl (a show that I actually kind of like). Not to mention the fact that I have to fit in time for shows that I legitimately love (but she doesn't) like Lost, Treme, and The Challenge.

Accordingly, much bargaining and compromising and deal making has to occur in order to devise television schedules that will make both of us happy. The problem is that to many women, all sports are basically the same. Bill Simmons wrote about this beautifully in a column one time, but I'll try to paraphrase. Suppose you're watching a random regular season Hawks game on a Monday in March and get no complaints. Three days later, you want to spend all day and all night watching the first day of the NCAA tournament. Your girlfriend then says something like, "I don't understand why you have to watch that, you just watched basketball on Monday night."

It's hard to even begin to counter that statement. The first day of the NCAA tournament is literally one of the best days of the year to most serious sports fans, but this is difficult to explain to someone who doesn't follow sports. The confusion is compounded by the fact that you are a fan of the Atlanta Hawks, but are not a fan of any of the teams playing in the first round of the tournament. Also, you would've gladly skipped the Hawks game and watched Gossip Girl on Monday for the opportunity to watch the tournament on Thursday. It is a very intricate, nuanced situation that is steeped in tradition. You cannot blame your girlfriend for not understanding.

It is with these thoughts in mind and the desire to make television watching arguments simpler that I have created my very own Sports Fan Viewership Hierarchy. I've separated every meaningful sports event into levels based on how badly I want to watch each one. Levels Zero and One are completely nonnegotiable and can only be missed due to a death, potential death, or birth in the family.

Level Two events can theoretically be missed, but there had better be a wedding, an extremely attractive deal (for a guy in a relationship), or an extreme likelihood of getting laid as a result of missing the game (for a single guy). For example, I went wine tasting in Temecula during the Hawks' first playoff game this year. In return, I was able to watch every Hawks playoff game in its entirety for the rest of the playoffs, no questions asked. I felt like the back end of this deal was too sweet to pass up, plus I got a day of heavy drinking out of it. Win-win.

Levels Three through Seven contain a large variety of events that, for one reason or another, are missable to widely varying degrees. Before we get on to the list, I want to make clear that although this list is very specific to my own tastes, you can easily apply it to your own by substituting your favorite teams and sports for mine. To make this easier, here is a list of my teams in order of how much I care about them:

1. Georgia Bulldogs football - Serious, unhealthy, emotional levels of investment
2. (tie) Atlanta Hawks basketball / Atlanta Braves baseball - Lifelong fan of each regardless of quality of the team, will choose one over the other depending on the year
4. Atlanta Falcons football - Lifelong fan, but without the extreme emotional attachment of the top three
5. Georgia Bulldogs basketball - A fan because I went to school at Georgia. A few memorable moments, but my interest waxes and wanes based on the quality of the team.
6. Atlanta Thrashers hockey - Not really a fan at all, but willing to jump on the bandwagon if they are very, very good.

My favorite sports leagues:
1. NFL
2. NCAA football
3. NBA
4. NCAA Basketbal
5. MLB

On to the list . . . .

Level Zero: Must attend in person at all costs

A football national championship game involving the Georgia Bulldogs
An NBA Finals game seven in Atlanta
A World Series game seven in Atlanta

Level 1: Literally unmissable

An SEC football championship involving the Georgia Bulldogs with national championship implications
Any NBA Finals or Eastern Conference Finals game involving the Atlanta Hawks
Any World Series or National League Championship game involving the Atlanta Braves
A Super Bowl or any playoff game involving the Atlanta Falcons
A Final Four game involving the Georgia Bulldogs

Level 2: Unmissable with rare exceptions

A bowl game or SEC championship game involving the Georgia Bulldogs without national championship implications
Any Georgia Bulldogs regular season football game with national championship or SEC championship implications
Any Georgia Bulldogs regular season football game against Florida, Georgia Tech, Auburn, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, or other ranked opponent regardless of championship implications
Any round one or two NBA playoff game involving the Atlanta Hawks
Any divisional round MLB playoff game involving the Atlanta Braves
The first Atlanta Braves game of the year
The first Atlanta Falcons game of the year
Any round 1-4 NCAA basketball tournament game involving the Georgia Bulldogs
Any SEC championship or semi-final basketball game involving the Georgia Bulldogs
The first weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament
A game seven in the NBA Finals
Mayweather vs. Pacquiao level boxing matches

Level 3: Would really like to watch and will fight for the TV to do so

Any Georgia Bulldogs football game not covered above
A Georgia high school basketball playoff game involving the Wheeler Wildcats
Any Atlanta Falcons regular season game
The BCS championship
The Sweet Sixteen or later in the NCAA basketball tournament
Any NFL playoff game
A game seven in the World Series
The NBA Finals
Masters Sunday when the outcome is in doubt
Any iteration of the Real World/Road Rules challenge

Level 4: Non-Annual sporting events whose missability varies widely based on participants and circumstances

The Olympics
The World Cup & World Cup qualifying matches
The World Baseball Classic

Level 5: Would like to watch, but will not fight for unless it's close

Any Atlanta Hawks regular season game
Any Atlanta Braves regular season game
Any Georgia Bulldogs regular season basketball game
An NHL finals involving the Atlanta Thrashers
The World Series
The Conference rounds of the NBA playoffs
Any Saturday or Sunday at a major golf tournament
Thursday or Friday of the Masters
The semi-finals or later of Wimbledon when there's an American involved
All professional all-star games
The World Series of Poker

Level 6: Will watch if there's absolutely nothing else on

An NHL playoff game involving the Atlanta Thrashers
Prerecorded sumo tournaments
Strongman competitions
Friday Night Fights on HBO
Random MMA fights
Thursday or Friday at a major golf tournament
The championship of a major tennis tournament

Level 7: Will watch in person but will never watch on TV

Any NHL game not covered above
NASCAR races

The aforementioned girl that I live with will be happy to know that (barring a game seven of the NBA finals), there will not be a Level Zero, One or Two game until Saturday, September 4th. Go Dawgs.

Lost Is About The Act Of Watching Lost

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:14:00 +0000

In 1992, Seinfeld aired an episode called "The Pitch" in which Jerry and George attempt to come up with an idea for a television show. They end up agreeing on a "show about nothing" that will star Jerry, center around his life, feature characters based on George, Elaine, and Kramer, and will air on NBC. In short, the show that Jerry and George create is almost identical to the real-life Seinfeld. This plot arc continued throughout Seinfeld's seminal fourth season, turning the beloved "show about nothing" into a show that was, essentially, about itself. Twelve years later, JJ Abrams et al took that concept to absurd extremes by creating an entire six-season show not just about itself, but about the entire experience of watching it. Lost is the greatest television show ever made about the act of watching itself. I'll explain why after the jump.

Since its inception, people have felt compelled to talk about Lost. Like Star-Trek before it, Lost is a mainstream-popular show with an extremely loyal and rabid fanbase that loves to discuss the show and theorize about the mythology surrounding the show's setting, plot, and characters. Unlike Star-Trek, that rabid fanbase enjoyed an unprecedented opportunity to actively engage with each other in real time during the show's run. Lost-specific message boards and wikis were created by the dozens and in turn, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world were eager to use these media to dissect and expound upon the show on a daily basis.

Because all of this dissecting and expounding took place on the Internet, in public forums, for anyone to see, Lost's creators and writers enjoyed an unprecedented ability to receive feedback from their most loyal fans. This is significant. The writers were able to gauge exactly what their viewers thought about an episode immediately after that episode aired. Further, they were able to gauge their fans' expectations and theories for how the show would progress, which made it all the easier to subvert and confound those theories, which in turn fostered even more engagement with the show on the part of its fans.

This is how Lost became a show about itself. Since halfway through the first season, when it was clear that Lost had become both a mainstream and Internet phenomenon, the fans theorized and the writers responded. The writers were always reading the message boards. One member of the Lost staff, Gregg Nations (the so-called 'Continuity Czar') even contacted the creator of Lostpedia to inform him that the wiki had a detail wrong on one of its pages.

Of course, there is no concrete proof that the writers of Lost used message board theorizing to concoct plot arcs for their episodes, but it certainly seems likely. Many fans point to the season two episode "Dave" as the best example. The flashback features Hurley's time in the mental hospital where he is accompanied by his friend Dave, who is later revealed to be imaginary. The viewer learns of Dave's true nature when Libby, also a patient in the hospital, looks at Hurley talking to Dave, but sees only Hurley. Back on the island, Hurley interacts with Dave once again, but knows that Dave is not real. This convinces him that the plane crash and the island are equally unreal and that all of the events of the show are merely transpiring in his head. Libby once again steps in to save the day and convinces Hurley that everything is real by kissing him. Just as the viewer learned that Dave was fake by seeing him through Libby's perspective, the viewer once again relies on Libby's perspective to learn that the island is real (or at least real from all of the characters' perspectives and not just Hurley's).

Before this episode aired, a popular online theory was that since the numbers kept popping up in different places and Hurley was the only character with a connection to the numbers, then he must be the central character of the show and that all of the events of the show may have in fact been some sort of dream or vision that he was having. "Dave" directly refutes this theory. Thus, all of the proponents of the theory would now have to go back to their message boards and either subscribe to other pre-existing theories or concoct new ones of their own.

In addition to using plot lines to shoot down message board theories, there are many, many instances when the writers give voice to the audience through the Lost characters themselves, particularly Hurley. Frequently this is done by the characters questioning the general level of absurdity on the show, but there are other examples as well. I am not going to enumerate them here, because many other people online have already done so.

The writers' penchant for interaction with the thoughts and opinions of the viewers does not in and of itself prove that Lost is a show about watching Lost. Like its spiritual predecessor The X-Files, Lost is, at its core, a mystery show, but the mysteries that concern the two shows are very different. It is this difference that makes Lost unique in the mystery genre and highlights the fact that Lost is a show about itself.

The central mystery surrounding The X-Files was always who is the Cigarette Smoking Man and what does he know? Once we found out that he was a member of an organization called "The Syndicate" that had contact with the aliens, who were planning on executing all of the humans on Earth, that was pretty much it. Case closed. The central mystery surrounding Lost is much simpler: what is the show about? The X-Files was about two FBI agents investigating paranormal phenomena while slowly uncovering an alien-related government conspiracy. Nobody has any fucking idea what Lost is about. Sure, there are a lot of things you can point to: the lives of the characters, the connections between the characters, the conflict between Jacob and Smokey, the nature of the island, good vs. evil, faith vs. science, father/son relationships, free will vs. fate, physics, true love transcending time and space, second chances, the numbers, Walt's powers, Adam and Eve, the Hurley bird, what happens to you when you die? who makes the supply drops?, how did the island get submerged?, how did Jack get those cuts in the flash-sideways? how did Locke get paralyzed in the flash-sideways, who is the mother of Jack's son in the flash sideways?, and on and on and on.

All of these things are somewhat important, but none are crucially important in and of themselves. The only truly salient mystery on Lost is the mystery of what the show is about. Every single answer to a mystery ever given on the show either begot more questions or rendered the initial question irrelevant. Without exception. This is likely to continue throughout the remainder of the show's five episodes. As Carlton Cuse said in a recent interview,

"I don't think there's a right answer . . . . I think there's this essential human desire to have a unified field theory. Everyone is like, 'I want to unlock the single secret to Lost.' There isn't any one secret, There is not a unified field theory for Lost, nor do we think there should be, because philosophically we don't buy into that as a conceit."

I agree with Cuse when he says that there is no right answer, but only because viewers are asking the wrong questions. They tend to make one of two mistakes: 1) They get bogged down in the individual plot-related mysteries like 'who or what are Jacob and Smokey' and expect to be satisfied and have some deeper understanding of the show as a whole once these mysteries are revealed (which is never the case), or 2) They seek to answer the fundamental mystery of 'what is Lost about' by myopically focusing on only one of the many themes (good v. evil, fate v. destiny, science v. faith) and expecting one side or the other to come out on top (which is not going to happen).

Take the 'Faith versus Science' theme for example.You could probably write a graduate thesis about how the traditional notions of faith and science and their inevitable struggle form the central theme of Lost and everything that happens on the show revolves around this. And you should. That's why Lost exists. That's what it's all about.

To me, the 'Faith versus Science' theme merely echoes the sentiments of people watching Lost. The 'science' of Lost is the Lostpedia-style endless compiling of character connections and unsolved mysteries, all with the hope that the viewer will be able to add everything up in his head and arrive at some meaningful conclusion. The 'faith' of Lost is throwing all of that aside and just trusting that the writers will deliver you an enjoyable show week in and week out.

The entire progression of Jack's character has been about him learning how to "let go." To stop trying to control things and understand everything that's going on (the p.o.v. of the science-oriented Lost viewer) and trust his intuition that the island (a metaphor for the show itself) will provide him with the answers he seeks in due time (the p.o.v. of the faith-oriented Lost viewer). At the beginning of "The Last Candidate," Jack and SmokeyLocke have the following exchange:

Jack: "John Locke was the only one of us that believed in this place. He did everything he could to keep us from leaving this island."

SmokeyLocke: "John Locke was not a believer, Jack. He was a sucker."

In this exchange, SmokeyLocke represents the people on the message boards who have lost faith in Lost. They believe that the writers do not know what they are doing and are just haphazardly coming up with nonsense on the fly to misdirect people and keep people interested (the fact that the show is willing to give voice to people who have given up on watching the show is even further proof that Lost is a show about the experience of watching itself). SmokeyLocke accuses Jacob of doing this very same thing to his followers time and again. Jack, who is now in the faith position that original Locke used to occupy continues to believe in the provenance of the island (again, a metaphor for the show, Lost) and proves it by jumping off the boat and swimming back to the island.

My opinion is that the show is about the traditional struggle between people who believe strongly in science and people who believe strongly in faith, but within the context of viewing the show. Lost is about how a science person watches and responds to the show versus how a faithful person watches and responds to the show. If the writers are God and the viewers are human beings, then the science inclined human beings try to make sense of God's creation through the collection of data and experimental trial and error (Lostpedia) while the faith inclined human beings trust that God will provide and all will make sense in the end ("letting go," "jumping in," and just watching and accepting what happens). It is important to note that as Cuse said, there is no right answer. The show will (hopefully) not result in the writers saying, "Yes, faith was right." They are just two different approaches to watching the show. Neither will be ultimately rewarded, but neither will be left feeling completely unfulfilled.

As I said before however, it is not necessary to get bogged down in any one theme. All of the themes of Lost add up to support this theory. The father/son relationship theme reflects the God/creation metaphor I used in the above paragraph. The free will/destiny theme reflects the viewers' uncertainty about whether the writers knew what was going to happen all along or if they are just making it up on the fly. The good/evil theme reflects the viewers' apprehension about whether we will be rewarded for our 6-year investment in the show at it's conclusion. The many plot-related mysteries give us something concrete to ponder within the context of the themes described above. And on and on it goes.

The answer to the mystery of Lost is that the show is about the act of discovering all of these themes and mysteries and theorizing about their import. This is what the characters spend all of their time doing on the show. They theorize about the island, but the island is just a metaphor for the show Lost and the characters are just stand ins for the viewers of the show. The final season has brought this idea of theorizing and discovery to the forefront as Charlie showed something deeper about life to Desmond and he is in turn passing on the thrilling discovery to the rest of the characters. This is what Lost is about; the experience of watching the show, talking about it with other people, and interfacing with the writers through the characters on the show. To put it simply, Lost is about the journey of intellectual discovery, it's not about the destination of receiving answers. Lost is about the experience of watching Lost, and that experience is unlike the experience of watching any other television show in the history of the medium.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that my interpretation of the meaning of Lost can be easily extrapolated to the meaning of life. If Lost is not about the answers at the end, but about the act of watching Lost and the things you discover about it along the way, and the relationships you forge as a result of these discoveries, then life itself is about the act of living. It is not about the answers you get when you die, but about the learning, debating, theorizing, communicating, and connecting that occurs while you are alive. This is perhaps the ultimate message of Lost. Rather than being continually confounded by the inability to receive concrete answers, you should instead revel in the intellectual journey and relationships that arise from the pursuit of those answers.

No matter what happens in the end, and no matter what answers that end gives you, the real value was in getting there. That's the point.

P.S. Special thanks to my buddy Mark Hayward for helping me see that the endless quest for answers is missing the point of the show entirely.

There's Something Going On Between PetSmart and Office Depot and I Don't Like It

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:58:00 +0000

I recently moved to Las Vegas from Atlanta and it's been really great. Obviously, there's a lot of differences between the two cities, but the most readily apparent has to be the geography. There's a lot of rocks here. Like, just a ton of rocks. They're everywhere. People even make their yards out of rocks, because if they didn't, a bunch of rocks would just roll into their yards anyway, so, you know, eff it.

In addition to the small rocks that line the sidewalks, highways, and medians, there are also a bunch of really massive rocks called mountains. They're sort of like Stone Mountain back home, except they're hundreds of times bigger, way pointier, and have snow of the top of them. These mountains form a perimeter all the way around Las Vegas, and this is what really makes the difference. In Atlanta, when you look off into the distance, you can see the horizon formed by a tree line. In Las Vegas, the mountains surround you everywhere you look, and rather than feeling distant like a tree line, they feel very near.

I don't mean to make this sound negative, it's quite the opposite. Rather than making you feel claustrophobic, it makes you feel secure, like a blanket fort.* It feels like you're living in an insular, walled community, separated from the rest of the country. Couple this feeling with the fact that you can gamble in grocery stores and prostitution is only kind of illegal here, and it really feels completely different.

After you've gotten used to this different sort of feeling, you will notice that Las Vegas has tons of stores. Almost as many stores as there are rocks. For example, there are ten Subways (the fast food place, not the public transportation system) within a five mile radius of our house. Don't believe me? Check the Google Map:

Subway Locations Within Five Miles of My Apartment

I have never eaten so many foot long meatball subs.**

So yeah, there's a lot of stores. When you drive around and all you see are endless shopping centers, it's a little tough to get your bearings. I figured the best way to differentiate the shopping centers was by their anchor stores. There's the one with the Borders, here's the one with the Vons. Unfortunately, there is almost as much duplication with the anchor stores as there is with the Subways. So I had to go further and pair stores in order to differentiate one shopping center from another. This is the shopping center with the Ross and the Michaels, that's the one with the Ross and the Wal-Mart. There's the one with the Office Depot and the PetSmart and over here is the one with the Office Depot and the PetSmart.

And then I stopped. Not again, I thought. Are there seriously multiple shopping centers with both Office Depots and PetSmarts in them? The answer? A resounding yes. In fact, it's extremely common. Office Depot and PetSmart always mobbin. Take a look at these maps:

Office Depot locations in Northern Las Vegas (ODN)

PetSmart Locations in Northern Las Vegas (PSN)

The comparisons are striking. In the northern half of Las Vegas, there are seven Office Depot locations and six PetSmart locations. Of these, five are located in the same shopping center: E/I, B/D, D/E, C/B, and F/C (where the first letter is found on ODN and the second letter on PSN). Below are the maps of southern Las Vegas . . .

Office Depot Locations in Southern Las Vegas (ODS)

PetSmart Locations in Southern Las Vegas (PSS)

In southern Las Vegas, there are seven Office Depot locations and five PetSmart locations. Of these, three are located in the same shopping center: J/I, H/I, and C/F (again the first letter is found on ODS and the second on PSS). In total, metro Las Vegas has eleven PetSmarts. Eight of these (73%) are located right next to an Office Depot.

Then I started to consider the lay of the land back in my hometown of Atlanta. Come to think of it, I did seem to remember a lot of Office Depot and PetSmarts coexisting near each other. I did a little Google searching, and my memory proved to be correct. Metro Atlanta is quite a bit larger than Las Vegas and accordingly has way more locations, so I'll just give you a quick summary:

1. Northwest Atlanta

PetSmart #1571 - 1801 Howell Mill Road
Office Depot #2538 - 1801 Howell Mill Road
Distance: 0 miles

2. Kennesaw

PetSmart #282 - 860 Cobb Place Boulevard
Office Depot #294 - 845 Ernest Barrett Parkway
Distance: 0.6 miles

3. Dunwoody

PetSmart #290 - 128 Perimeter Center
Office Depot #434 - 1155 Mt. Vernon Hwy
Distance: 1 mile

4. Alpharetta

PetSmart #289 - 6370 North Point Pkwy
Office Depot #2311 - 5530 Windward Pkwy
Distance: 2 miles

5. Roswell

PetSmart #1048 - 625 Crossville Rd
Office Depot #77 - 1580 Holcomb Bridge Rd
Distance: 2.9 miles

And I could go on. So the PetSmart/Office Depot correlation held for Atlanta too, but what about towns in which I haven't lived? Another Google search revealed that this phenomenon takes place across the country. . . .

Clearwater, Florida:

Belton, Missouri:

Houston, Texas:

The correlation was undeniable, but why? At first I thought that maybe they were owned by the same company, but after a thorough search of each website, this did not seem to be the case. After all, they are both independently traded on the NYSE. Next I thought that there was one huge national shopping center management company that had some sort of contract with both stores. This also proved to be false as most of the shopping centers that housed the PetSmart/Office Depot locations I listed above were managed by different companies.

At this point, I started to become a little uneasy. What the hell was going on here? Who is behind this and what do they want? Are our pets training to work in our offices? Do they want to take our jobs? Some birds can already speak our language, how long until they're processing our payrolls? I once knew a dog that could answer the phone. He was very personable. To think . . . . I trusted that son of a bitch!

Well I for one am not going to take this lying down. Now, more than ever, we humans cannot afford our jobs to continue to be outsourced to robots and their nefarious animal cousins. We must rise up against our fine, feathered, former friends. Stop lining your bird's cage with the Wall Street Journal! Never clothe your dog in an argyle sweater again! The next time you see a monkey practicing sign language, tell him where he can stick his opposable thumbs! It's either us or them, people! The battle lines have been drawn! Just say no to animals in the workplace, because you never know what may happen. Instead of your co-worker just acting like a jackass, someday he may actually be one.

* * *

* But with way more blackjack tables.

** This is false. I always eat this many meatball subs.

His Stupid Mouth: Why I Still Love John Mayer

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:32:00 +0000

At some point in his life, every serious music fan has liked an artist before that artist became famous and successful. We love being among the handful of people to attend his shows and enjoy even more introducing our friends to obscure, new music. But when that artist does become successful, despite all of our former proselytizing on his behalf, we inevitably turn on him. The more successful he becomes, the more vicious our condemnations. I am certainly not immune to this phenomenon, in fact, it has happened to me many times. But there is one artist for whom this effect was particularly pronounced, due in part to the extreme fame he has reached and in part to the intensity of the connection that I felt to his music prior to his success. As I'm sure you were able to glean by the title of this post, that artist was John Mayer.* And although I no longer enjoy his new music, I haven't exactly turned on him. I'll try to explain what I mean after the jump.

As a young, socially awkward fifteen year old attending high school in the suburbs of Atlanta at the turn of the millennium who felt more comfortable collecting all 120 stars in Super Mario 64 to collecting girls' phone numbers, John Mayer was my champion. It wasn't just that he referenced local thoroughfares like Peachtree Street and I-85 in his songs or that you could get in to see him at Eddie's Attic with $8 and a ride to Decatur, it was that he understood me.

Songs like "No Such Thing" made me feel OK to operate outside of the faded white hat set by providing assurances that my full potential could only be achieved when not constrained by the halls of my high school. "Neon" and "Comfortable" were odes to the sensitive guy's love for the troubled or quirky outsider girl. "Why Georgia"? Indeed. But of all of Mayer's early-career gems, it was "My Stupid Mouth" that I found personally relatable on an almost eerie level. In particular, the scene in which he nervously fidgets with the salt and pepper shakers while trying to come up with something to say to a girl that he has just inadvertently offended was a page taken directly out of my playbook. As I would soon find out, millions upon millions of people felt the same way.

Surely you'll forgive me for having felt bad about this. The realization that one's feelings are not as special and personal as they once seemed makes one feel insignificant and indeed foolish for having put so much stock into those feelings. It is only natural to project this negativity onto the person who helped you recognize and analyze those feelings in the first place. Hence, I was throwing many a subliminal "fuck you" Mayer's way when Room for Squares blew up.

This is not to say that I didn't like the album in spite of myself. Although I frequently bemoaned the fact that Mayer eschewed the blue eyed soul of Inside Wants Out for the super saccharine top-40 treatments of his major label debut, I had to admit that the songcraft was still there. His keen sense of melody and universally relatable themes remained undeniable. He followed up Room for Squares with Heavier Things and although the pitch-perfect hooks were in less supply, he still kept me interested for at least half the record and managed to include a few songs that I still love today.**

Unfortunately, this (in my opinion) would signal the beginning of a steady decline in quality among his subsequent releases. The aptly named Try! was a naked credibility grab, Continuum was aggressively bland, his three live albums were mostly inessential, and by the time he released Battle Studies in late 2009, I found his music almost completely unlistenable. To be fair, I have changed a great deal since I discovered Mayer as a sophomore in high school, and my musical tastes have changed along with me, but I just can't shake the feeling that his heart is no longer in his music. I couldn't relate anymore, and I'm certain that I'm not alone.

But while his music became increasingly less compelling, his public persona followed an opposite trajectory . The local struggling musician I used to know became one of those famous people. At first, I resented him for it. Jessica fucking Simpson? Are you kidding me? She seemed to be the polar opposite of the type of girls we longed for together in "Neon" and "Comfortable." Who was this guy sleeping with beautiful women and constantly bragging about it to whoever would listen? What happened to you, John Mayer? You used to be one of us.

Male high school nerds construct elaborate personas for themselves. We tend to date a small number of girls in our scholastic careers, not because we're too scared to constantly approach multiple women, but because we can't. We're only interested in real connections. We're about romance and true love; things that matter. We operate outside of the in-crowd not because we lack the self esteem to get people to like us, but because we're too intelligent and complicated to appeal to the masses.

Of course, these are all lies that we told ourselves in order to feel better about our social failings, and John Mayer's early music served to completely validate them. Once I got old enough to recognize these lies for what they were, I stopped resenting John Mayer. He had not become just another fake famous person, as I had initially assumed. He was in fact the exact same John Mayer, only famous. He was a nerd with opportunity and he was taking full advantage. He was doing exactly the same things I would do if awkward high school me had suddenly become rich and famous; it would be completely ridiculous to hate him for it.

So I found myself at peace with famous John Mayer. I found his actions as a famous person to be authentic, even if his music no longer was. I liked him again. And when he got a Twitter account, the old flame was completely rekindled. I started to feel like I knew him again. Mayer is truly a master of the 140 character social medium.

My relationship with John Mayer has now come full circle. Beyond the bit about the salt and pepper shakers, the most telling line from "My Stupid Mouth" is painfully, plaintively direct: "I just want to be liked/I just want to be funny." Over a decade after he wrote this line, you would be hard pressed to find something so honest in his music today, but he communicates it loud and clear every day on his Twitter account.

My friend Ben and I recently had a conversation about how we were both way more excited to read his Playboy interview than we were to listen to Battle Studies. We realized that we feel this way because interviews and Twitter posts are the only places that you can get "My Stupid Mouth" era John Mayer anymore. He still can't help offending women with the ridiculous shit that he says, only now, instead of doing it over a dinner date, he's doing it on a world stage for everyone to see. His public persona has evolved into a kind of living performance art. His music isn't honest anymore, but he is. Back when he was a struggling local musician, we only had access to Mayer through his music, but now we have complete access through paparazzi journalism, interviews, and his Twitter account. And that's why I still love John Mayer. He's still as relatable and real and embarrassingly honest as he always was, it just no longer has anything to do with his music.

His stupid mouth? Fully intact.

* * *

* Please try to hold in your laughter.

** Most notably, "Clarity," which I still listen to regularly.

Love in the Time of Reality Television

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:41:00 +0000

I've never been a huge Bachelor guy. Compared to shows like Temptation Island, Flavor of Love, and Average Joe, it always seemed a bit too vanilla for my taste. I need triple kissing, hilarious nicknames, or high concept twist endings in my reality dating shows. Anything less seems like a waste of time. Accordingly, I usually just get my Bachelor updates from The Soup and then tune in to the finale, which is really the only episode of the season worth watching.

But boy is it ever worth watching. A typical Bachelor finale is an hour and a half of intense tension building followed by a complete emotional trainwreck in the last half hour. Because real feelings are seemingly involved, the final eliminations reliably reach levels of savage brutality that you simply cannot get anywhere else outside of a Taliban hostage video. Watching someone's heart get demolished is dark, prurient television at its very finest. I love it.

The post finale reunion, while less visceral, is equally compelling. The scorned contestant has weeks (months?) to mull over what they will say to their former love interest and usually comes up with something interesting. Last night's installment was no exception. Amidst all of the typical assurances that they would remain friends and the desperate but futile pleading for a concrete reason why Jake made the choice he did, I was struck by something that Tenley said near the end of her time on stage. I'll have to paraphrase here because I don't have the actual quote, but she told Jake that she felt sorry for Vienna because she could never marry someone who had such strong feelings for someone else at the time of the proposal. Basically she was saying that if Jake was truly in love with both of them as he repeatedly professed to be throughout the final episode, then at the best he should marry neither and at the worst, all of his feelings were rendered invalid.

At first blush, I completely agree with Tenley. It has always been my position that one cannot simultaneously be in love with two people strongly enough to consider marrying both. It seems to fly in the face of everything I've ever believed to be true about the concepts of monogamous love and marriage. If Tenley and I are wrong, if you really can love two people that much simultaneously, then the concept of love is a lot less special and rare than we belived it to be. Further, the age-old and worldwide accepted concept of non-polygamous marriage completely flies in the face of human nature. The concept of "The One" would be rendered laughably moot. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that if Tenley and I are wrong, we all have a lot of re-thinking to do.

Which is why it's scary to think that our position does seem to be incorrect. Taken at face value, The Bachelor consistently proves us wrong year in and year out. Unless the words he was saying in last night's episode were lies, Jake was deeply in love with two women to the point that he was not able to choose which one to marry until hours before the proposal.

At this point, you may disagree with me. Perhaps you would like to argue that Jake "loved" Tenley, but he was not "in love" with her. You are wrong, and here's why. If Vienna had never been born, then Jake would be engaged to Tenley right now. There was only one woman in the entire world standing between Tenley and Jake and she happened to be another contestant on The Bachelor. In addition to being extremely boring, Tenley also has rotten luck. Jake would've married her if Vienna was not on the show. This is a fact, so he must have been in love with her.*

You may further disagree with me by arguing that Jake merely got caught up in the beautiful location, the extravagant dates, the conceit of the show, or any other external factor that would effect his ability to actually fall in love with any of these girls. You would argue that two people could not possibly fall in love in such a ridiculously contrived situation. You are wrong again. At its core, love is nothing more than a subjective emotion that occurs entirely within a person's head. Once a person truly believes that he or she is in love, then he or she is in love. That's all it takes. It doesn't matter where you are, how old you are, or how many times you've been in love before. In the face of love, all external factors are rendered moot. If Jake truly believed he was in love with both women, and he said that he did, then he was in love with both women.**

Finally, you may agree with the last sentence, but feel that Jake never actually believed he was in love with Tenley. You may argue that Jake was simply lying to Tenley and to the cameras during his confessional interviews when he said that he was in love with her. Perhaps the producers told him to say that he loved Tenley because it made for good television. Perhaps he didn't actually believe that he loved Tenley, but merely said that he did in order to spare her feelings when she later watched the show. I do not believe any of these points to be true and if you watched last night's episode, surely you cannot believe them to be true either. I know Jake is a bit of a dandy and is extremely prone to bouts of tears, but it just didn't look fake to me. Either Jake is a terrible person capable of the most insidious of lies, he is one of the great dramatic actors of our or any generation, or he honestly believed that he was in love with these two women and therefore was in love with these two women. Maybe I'm naive, but having watched last night's episode, I can only believe the third statement to be true. Still, unlike your other two arguments, I cannot necessarily say that you are wrong here. You may be right. Jake may have been lying all along. We will never know.

But after all this, if your position is that Jake was lying and that he was only truly in love with Vienna, you have to ask yourself, do you really believe that or do you just want to believe that? Do you think Jake was lying because you just aren't comfortable with the reality that one could be so in love with two people that he would marry either? After all, if this is true, then it deals a pretty damaging blow to both the concepts of love and monogamous relationships. Either Jake Pavelka is a complete sham as a person, or monogamous love is a complete sham as a concept. You can only logically pick one. Choose wisely.

P.S. On a a lighter note, another absolute truism was once again validated by last night's finale: when it comes to men's taste in women, crazy beats pretty every time. Crazy trumps everything. No matter what other misgivings or questions you may have about male/female relationships, this will always be true.

P.P.S. I made it through this whole post without making fun of "On The Wings Of Love" and how unbelievably hilarious it was when they played this song after Jake made his choice. Aren't you proud?

* * *

*You may counter this argument by contending that love is destined. That Jake and Vienna were always destined to be together and that if Vienna hadn't been on the show, then Jake would've ended up with her anyway somehow, someway. This argument opens up a giant can of worms regarding the role destiny plays in every arena of life. It is beyond the scope of this particular post to delve into this particular worm can. For now, we will have to agree to disagree. Also, you may argue that Jake would have indeed married Tenley, but it wouldn't have worked out because he didn't truly love her. I disagree with this as well. A divorce or breakup does not invalidate the fact that you were in love with the person when you entered into the marriage/relationship. It is possible to fall out of love, but this does not invalidate the love you felt before it was gone.

**It always irks me when people try to marginalize the love that high schoolers feel for each other. I believe that all people are capable of love all of the time regardless of age. Whatever love you felt for your high school significant other is no less valid than the love you feel for your spouse now. It may feel different and the adult you may perceive it to be a deeper, more authentic brand of love, but that does not invalidate the intense love you felt in high school. If you feel it, it is real. This is necessarily true because love is nothing but feelings. Who are you to say that another person's feelings are invalid? Even if that other person happens to be the you of 15 years ago.

The validity of the concept of monogamous love completely depends on the douchebag pictured above.

The Cure for Avatar Depression is a New, Avatar-Inspired Worldview

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:34:00 +0000

Shortly after Avatar mania hit the streets, reports came flooding in of viewers leaving the film with feelings of depression brought on by the fact that they will never be able to live in a world like Pandora. I know exactly how these people feel, because I experienced similar feelings after seeing Meet Dave. I just couldn't continue living my mundane life armed with the knowledge that I would never be able to pilot a fully functioning life sized Eddie Murphy robot.* Colors dulled, food tasted bland, and I was unable to perform sexual intercourse. I even considered killing myself with the hope that, if I wanted it bad enough, I would be reborn into the living, breathing body of Murphy himself, Being John Malkovich style, so that I may finally come to know him in full.

So, as you can see, I sympathize with the feelings of the wistful Avatar fan. Pandora does seem like a lovely place. I like how the plants light up when you touch them. Also, I have always been a staunch supporter of the hammock. True, there are many dangers in the life of a Na'vi, but he is more than equipped to handle them. He can physically confront them directly, secure in the knowledge that if he dies, he is guaranteed that his spirit will be downloaded into the neural planetary network and will be accessible to future generations forever. The constant mortal danger of the Na'vi's life frees him from worrying whether or not he has led life well; his mere survival is validation of all of his previous life choices. Meanwhile, the Avatar fan's mind is free to second guess all of his previous decisions and worry constantly about what will happen when he dies. To the truly self absorbed, the life of a Na'vi seems comparatively nice. The grass is always greener.

But the Avatar depression runs deeper than merely wanting to live on Pandora as the Na'vi do. As one of the afflicted Avatar fans in the CNN article I linked to above said, "I really wanted to live in Pandora . . . but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth." There seems to be a feeling among the Avatar super fans that life on Earth could have been very much like that on Pandora, or perhaps more accurately, should have been like Pandora. That humanity pursued the wrong course and is irrevocably headed down a road that will never lead to us realizing our full potential and the full nature of our relationship with the Earth. As that same Avatar fan said later in the article, "I live in a dying world."

And who knows? Maybe they're on to something. After all, there were (and still are) large civilizations on this planet that bore strong resemblance to the Na'vi. The Native Americans are one, to use a local example. They lived a spiritual life close to nature and flourished throughout the continent. When the European colonists arrived, the two worldviews collided, the colonists eventually won out, and overran the continent. The culture that those colonists created there ended up becoming the dominant one throughout much of the rest of the world. Now here we are in the 21st century, caught up in all sorts of unimportant stuff like bath salts and Frasier reruns. We were cheated out of our collective destiny by our asshole ancestors with their guns and smallpox blankets. We should all be spear fishing and communing with tree spirits and having sex with 10 foot tall smoking hot blue women right fucking now.

But alas, the depressed Avatar super fan is stuck on this miserable planet, where we will all grow progressively colder and more distant from each other and our environment. We are seemingly resigned to this fate because we have conquered all of the other cultures who knew a different way to live. Those secrets are lost to us now.

Or are they? Maybe we aren't headed down the wrong path after all. Maybe a Na'vi-like life is exactly where humanity is going. Maybe we have always been going there and were destined to go there since our inception as a species.

All it takes is a little tweaking of the Avatar world as it is currently presented. Imagine that someone like Philip K. Dick wrote the movie instead of James Cameron. In this new version of Avatar, there would be a species of humans exactly like us living on another planet somewhere, only their civilization is much older and thus far more technologically advanced than us. On their planet, these technologically advanced humans have all come together to live as one planetary society. Unfortunately, life on their planet has become untenable for some reason. We can take the classic route and say that they polluted the planet to death. Or we can take another route and say that this one planetary society had solved the problems of war, poverty, and inequality and that their technology had largely solved the problem of our physically infirm bodies. Having overcome all of the problems of life, the members of this society were left only to sit and think for eternity about themselves and why they were here. Eventually, their minds became completely consumed by these thoughts and the turmoil that raged in their heads would be so unbearable, that some sort of escape was necessary to prevent madness. So the society creates elaborate entertainments to occupy their minds. Vast, fantastic virtual worlds are created and the people enter these worlds and play amazingly in-depth virtual reality video games with each other.

The society continues to steadily advance technologically and the games advance with it. Eventually, rather than creating virtual worlds, the society creates actual literal planets on which the games take place. Back on their home planet, complicated robotic systems are created to provide for every need of the physical bodies of these humans so that they may play their games on the other planets all of the time. People begin to live, work, love, and die all within the games. Over thousands of years, the people eventually forget that they are living in a game and simply accept their game world as reality. It would be just like The Matrix except for two crucial differences: 1) the world that these people go to is literally real (rather than existing only in their minds) and is thus accessible by anyone else in the Universe with a spaceship capable of reaching it; and 2) all of the people opted into the matrix rather than being forced into it by the robots.

In this rewrite of Avatar, there are only humans. The Na'vi are themselves all Avatars for actual humans, only they don't know it.** The Corporation who has stumbled upon the game planet Pandora is a separate, less advanced society of humans. Jake Sully eventually realizes the true nature of the Na'vi through his interaction with them and brings back proof of this to the Corporation at the crucial moment just before the destruction of the Tree of Souls. Once the people of the Corporation see that the Na'vi are really humans identical to themselves and that these humans are merely operating avatars to navigate Pandora just like they are, the Corporation is no longer willing to destroy the planet and its inhabitants. Half of the Corporation stays on Pandora to live in their Avatars as the Na'vi do and half returns home to figure out a way to reach the other society of humans and learn from them.

So here is the relief I offer to those afflicted with Pandora Separation Anexiety: Is it that hard to believe that our very own planet is heading down a similar path as the imaginary gaming society in my Avatar rewrite? The trend of human history leads toward the consolidation of society. Our systems of organization have evolved from a solitary hunter-gatherer to a tribe to a village to a city to a nation to a continent (the EU) and eventually to a planet. Our forms of entertainment are becoming more realistic and immersive; one need look no further than Avatar itself for proof of that. More and more people are surrendering more and more of their lives to video games at an exponential rate.*** My advice to Pandora-philes: stop wasting your time being depressed and instead try and figure out a way to remain alive long enough to see your glorious livable fantasy worlds become a reality. I doubt we have much longer to go.

But while we're here, let's take all of this one step further. Maybe transitioning to this gaming society is a part of the meaning of our lives and a natural progression in the ultimate destiny of our species. In his book The Singularity Is Near, futurist Ray Kurzweil outlines the argument that the evolution of scientific breakthrough is part of the evolution of man himself.**** That ever since man evolved the ability to create tools, it was his destiny to become one with these tools and evolve into something greater as a result.

Of course, this is already happening. The abacus was created to work with our brains to compute numbers more effectively, the pacemaker works with our hearts to ensure that they beat correctly, and Facebook works with our minds to better hold onto our memories and experiences. We are always becoming more and more intertwined with our technology. Even now, we are on the cusp of developing microscopic machines that will inhabit the body and regulate its functions. These machines will be a reality before I die. Is it not also reasonable to assume that someday these nanomachines will inhabit or brains as well and allow us to transcend our terrestrial planetary society by having access to a true planetary consciousness? Present day Twitter is the prototype for the planetary consciousness of the future. You can take a snapshot of the aggregate thoughts and feelings of millions of people by merely viewing the trending topics. This is an unbelievably amazing thing and to think, two years ago, it didn't even exist! Imagine if there was a tiny robot in your head that collected and reported all of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. What if every single person on Earth had one of these robots and they were all connected by the Internet? That would be a true planetary consciousness. It would be a world where all of this new age spirituality concerning interconnectedness and all of the mind-blowing breakthroughs in quantum physics finally came to a literal, actionable fruition in which spirituality and technology meld and the whole world lives as one. Just imagine it. There would be no countries. There would be nothing to kill or die for. There would be no religion or possessions or greed or hunger. Imagine a a true botherhood of man sharing the world. It's easy if you try. And it's not depressing at all.

* * *

*Of course if it had been me inside Eddie Murphy, I would've gone through with the original plan to drain the oceans like a boss.

**I really thought that this was the way the movie would end. Obviously, it would be a very different movie this way. Not necessarily better or worse, just different.

***I don't like to distinguish people who play video games from people who don't. The truth is, from board games, to charades, to playing cards, we are all gamers, we're just not all video gamers. But more and more people are becoming video gamers. Just look at Farmville, which has 69 million active players (which is more than all of the people who use Twitter). The growth of massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft has been exponential since their inception. Farmville and World of Warcraft are two sides of the same coin. World of Warcraft players are pulled into socializing with others through video games. Farmville players are pulled into video games through socializing with others. In the middle of the two is Second Life, which will probably be the most similar present day game to the future games that will become truly widespread across the world. A day will come when the majority of people on Earth play video games with each other, of this I am sure.

****Or if you prefer, that our creator gave humans the unique ability among all the other species on Earth to create elaborate tools for himself. Surely our ability to make these tools and become one with them figures into his ultimate plan for us, right?

Slinging Trees and Singing Songs

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:10:00 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a Christmas tree lot in order to earn a little extra money for the holidays. It has been mostly fantastic. Despite the fact that I am Jewish, I have a Methodist father and my family always celebrated Christmas. The holiday holds a special place in my heart, right next to the place that manufactures nostalgia and greed.

When my sister and I were young, we were always very discerning Christmas tree shoppers. We would pore over every tree available, dissecting the good and bad sides of each, wondering how our angel would fit on top or if our stand would accommodate the trunk. It was a lengthy, meticulous process made all the longer by at least one or two breaks to run amongst the trees playing hide and seek.

Now that I am a tree seller, I find that I prefer these discerning sorts of customers. I don't trust those who choose the first tree they see. I question their motives. After all, buying a Christmas tree is supposed to be a fun experience and it should be savored and enjoyed. Selecting a tree quickly implies that the whole experience is some sort of seasonal obligation; a chore to be completed after picking up the dry cleaning and before stopping by the grocery store to buy milk. If this is how you feel about buying a Christmas tree, then why even bother? Perhaps your time would be better spent orchestrating a hostile takeover of the Bailey Building and Loan or tying antlers to your dog's head while plotting to pillage Whoville.

I very much enjoy interacting with those customers who must appraise every tree we have to offer. My three years in the toilet business gave me a certain selling acumen that I try to apply in my new job. I read the customer and always try to reinforce his own feelings about a particular tree. If he seems to like the tree at first glance, I will praise its conical shape or the uniform density of the branches. If he does not like what he sees, I will agree that it seems a little sparse on one side or point out the crooked top. When a customer loves the first tree that we come upon, I love it too, but will insist that he view at least two more. I will then show him less than perfect specimens and when he inevitably chooses the first tree, I will praise his precise tree evaluating abilities and remark that this must not be his first time. When a customer looks at several trees but has not yet found one that he likes, I will pull a particularly heavy tree out of the excess stock, make a great show of lugging it forward, and then unbind it in front of him and fluff out the branches. Since he is the first and only person to have seen this tree, he will usually buy it and be secure in the knowledge that because of his shrewd buying habits, he got a special tree that a less discerning buyer never would've even known existed.

All in all, my main goal is to pass along some of that youthful excitement that my sister and I enjoyed so much when we were kids buying trees. I try to make the Christmas tree buying experience a memorable one; to make it feel good, both for the customer and myself. But truth be told, the tree game is not all chestnuts and figgy pudding. There is a lot of hard manual labor involved. Unloading giant flatbed trucks full of trees, mounting them for display, and tying them to cars all make for a pretty serious arm and back workout, especially throughout an 8 hour shift. I have been getting through it fine, subsisting mostly on Red Bull and whatever they put in the meatballs at Subway, but I tend to be quite tired when I get home and sore the next morning.

And then there's the Christmas music. All day, every day, nonstop, Christmas music. Traditionally, I have been a fan, even going so far as to play the converted radio stations in my very own car. But this year, I have been ludicrously overexposed. When you listen to the same songs played continuously on a loop over a few weeks, they start to become a part of you. It is unshakable, ever present background noise in your head. Inevitably, you start to dissect the lyrics and I have found that a lot of these Christmas songs have some pretty dark lyrics and themes that do not necessarily fit in with the spirit of the season.

Take I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus for example. During the memorable bridge of the definitive Jackson 5* version, Micheal exclaims, "I did! I did see mommy kissing Santa Claus! And I'm gonna tell my daddy!" I can only imagine the horror a child must feel watching his mother engage in an act of marital infidelity with the previously unassailable, morally pure figure of Santa Claus. And on Christmas, no less! The only course of action is to then reveal to the child that the Santa Claus his mommy is kissing is in fact the child's father, thus shifting his feelings of disillusionment from learning the fallibility of a parent to the stark, sobering realization that Santa Claus is not real and the entire yearly spectacle has been a sham from day one. Merry Christmas, indeed.

Or consider Santa Baby, a song that is downright inappropriate with its repeated requests for Santa to "hurry down the chimney" and "fill my stocking," two thinly veiled sexual references not worthy of a middle school boy's bathroom wall. Not to mention the lascivious tone in which the song is traditionally sung by the sexpot of the moment (marilyn, eartha, madonna, et al). Additionally, the song contains some of the crassest of crass consumer culture in the gift demands it makes, going so far as to request the deed to a platinum mine and a duplex.

But for the acme of creepy sexuality, one need look no further than Baby, It's Cold Outside. The song is comprised of a back and forth between a male and female speaker with the man trying to convince the woman to stay at his house rather than leave out into the cold. Despite over 25 protestations, the man continues to plead for the woman to stay, all the while attempting to ply the woman with alcohol a la Christopher Walken in The Continental. At one point in time, the woman even goes so far as to ask, "Say, what's in this drink?" Throughout it all, male lead only responds by maniacally repeating the phrase, "Baby, it's cold outside" over and over again. I can only imagine the icy, determined look in his eye as he circles his prey. One can be sure that should this woman ever actually make her way out of this man's house, a call to the local authorities and a restraining order are sure to follow.

Of course, sex and materialism aren't the only prurient themes one will find in Christmas music. Frosty the Snowman is a bone-chilling tale of an anthropomorphic snowman who spends his days cavorting with the local children. Unfortunately, not a single moment of fun goes unsullied by the specter of Frosty's impending demise. The inevitable changing of temperature at the end of winter will cause Frosty's body to melt in what I can only imagine is an unbearably agonizing death. He tries to assuage the children's fears at the end of the song by assuring that he "will be back again someday," but this promise rings as hollow as his corncob pipe.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is also less than encouraging. After deriding him his entire life on account of a birth defect, the other reindeer let Rudolph into their society not because of his personality or character, but because that same physical deformity has become professionally expedient for them. Rudolph, in a heartbreaking act of social desperation, agrees to be part of the team, thus acquiescing to being the star of the other reindeer's freak show rather than attempting to find another social group who will appreciate him for him.

Desperation is a common theme among Christmas carols. We Wish You a Merry Christmas's begging for food becomes sinister when the carolers threaten not to leave until they are sated. Blue Christmas's speaker would be better off getting out of the house and meeting new people rather than wallowing in the self pity he feels over being heartbroken. Even Joy to the World seems a little overeager in its extreme happiness at the appearance of a savior. Things must have been pretty miserable before he arrived to write a song like that. Similarly, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas's speaker is hoping against hope that the holiday season will bring an end to all of his problems ("from now on, our troubles will be out of sight") and wants desperately to be together with all of his loved ones but knows it will only happen "if the fates allow." This is of course to say nothing of the harrowing original lyrics to the song.

For my part, I am thankful that my favorite Christmas song is not on the rotation down at the tree lot. Dan Fogelberg's bittersweet tale of youthful love and what might have been, Same Auld Lang Syne, will hopefully remain untarnished throughout the remainder of my Christmases. I hope all of you have a merry Christmas this year, and to that end, next time you hear Christmas music, perhaps it's best that you not listen to the lyrics. They're a little weird.

Programming Note: My annual year-end wrap up will appear on Monday, December 21st. Get excited.

* * *

* The Jackson 5 Christmas Album is quite possibly the greatest Christmas album of all time. It is at least in the discussion along with Manheim Steamroller's Christmas 1984, Johnny Mathis' Merry Christmas, and Burl Ives' The Very Best of Burl Ives Christmas.

The Farris Participation Index for Fantasy Football

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:40:00 +0000

Introduction

I play fantasy football in an extremely competitive 12 person league. This is actually our first year accommodating 12 teams and I think the change has been good. It requires a little more player knowledge because you have to dig deeper to fill out your roster than you would in a 10 person league. I would however caution you before increasing the size of your league; it is imperative to ensure that each one of your owners is competing at a very high level. The increase in required fantasy football skill can lead the inattentive owner's team to fall by the wayside rather quickly, and if this happens to a significant percentage of the teams in your league, it can ruin the whole thing.

It was precisely this concern that lead to much debate within my league when we were deciding whether or not to allow two expansion teams. While considering prospective new owners, our number one concern was ensuring that the quality of play would not diminish. In 2008, the two prospective owners we tapped did not inspire enough confidence throughout the league and their membership bid was voted down. In 2009, we finally seemed to find a good fit with our prospects and they passed muster to gain entrance into the league by the slightest of margins. By all accounts, the expansion has been a wild success.

All of this debate over the past two years has made me think about how we decide who gets into the league and who does not or rather, what exactly makes a good fantasy football team owner. Obviously, win/loss records, championships won, and total points scored are all of the utmost importance. These numbers and titles are why we play the games and accordingly are an extremely effective measure of one's fantasy football prowess.

But these numbers do not tell the whole story. Imagine a fantasy football league that saw little to no activity post-draft but was still allowed to play out to its ultimate conclusion. There would still be win/loss records accumulated, points scored, and a championship won, but there would be no trade arguments or message board trash talk or waiver wire pickup races. I would argue that it is these things that make a good fantasy football league. I would further argue that it is one's willingness to participate in all of these activities during the season that makes for a good team owner.

If we're going to be completely honest, there is an awful lot of luck that goes into one's fantasy football record and the amount of points one scores. We are merely making predictions about future performance based on past success and barring any injuries. To be sure, a certain amount of preparation and research can lead to better predictions, but it is an inexact science at best. Conversely, there is no luck involved in crafting a hilarious message board post or ironing out the details of a trade over multiple phone calls and text messages. Those things require work and time. Further, a team owner's record and points totals will fluctuate year after year; the amount of dedication he puts into the league is more likely to remain consistent and is thus a better reflection of his efficacy as an owner.

It's all about not just being a successful owner, but being a good steward for your team and league. It is in this vein that I have created a formula to measure the amount of work a given owner puts in to his team and to making the league more interesting during the fantasy football season. I call it the Farris Participation Index or FPI and I have chosen this, the final day of most fantasy football regular seasons, to unveil it. FPI is made up of two factors: the Team Management Component (TMFPI) and the Message Board Component (MBFPI), both of which I will describe in detail below.

Team Management Component

The formula:

TMFPI = (acquisitions) + (successful trades * 4) + (activations / 2)

where,

Acquisitions are the number of times a player was added to the owner's team through a free agent pickup or successful waiver wire transaction.

Successful Trades are the number of trades in which the owner was involved that resulted in the exchange of players. This number is multiplied by four to represent the greater amount of work required to execute a successful trade compared to a regular acquisition.

Activations are the number of times the owner moved a player from his bench to his starting lineup. This number is divided by two to represent the relative ease with which an activation is executed as opposed to an acquisition.

The sum of these numbers will give an accurate portrayal of how involved an owner is in fielding a competitive team on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. It shows how much he is trying to improve his team through all the means available to him and how well he is utilizing his bench to cover bye weeks, injuries, and the like.

The TMFPI rating has many limitations. Chief among them is that it penalizes owners who had an extremely successful draft. If an owner comes out of the draft with a very competitive roster, the team can be expected to perform well from the outset and thus require less modification throughout the season. Less team modification results in a smaller TMFPI. While the stated goal of the FPI rating is to measure a given owner's level of involvement in the league throughout the regular season (as opposed to his involvement in pre-draft preparations), I do wish I were able to incorporate some measure of how well that owner performed in the draft. It would be possible to calculate such a rating with the hindsight gained after a full season, but such statistical analysis throughout so many draft rounds is beyond my mathematical ability. Also, the draft is the best part of a fantasy football season. If an owner cannot be counted upon to be completely prepared before it, then it is questionable whether or not he should be in the league at all.

In the same vein, TMFPI may penalize an owner for having a successful team during the season. If his team is doing well, not only will he be less likely to change it through trades and acquisitions, but in some leagues he may have a lower waiver order and will not be able to get his waiver pickups processed. To a certain degree, an owner's TMFPI rating must be viewed in light of his record at the end of the season. A successful owner can be given a pass for a lower TMFPI. Conversely, an unsuccessful owner with a low TMFPI will likely have to answer some serious questions about his level of commitment to the league.

Another limitation of the TMFPI is that it does not include declined trades or unprocessed waiver selections. Unfortunately, these statistics are generally not available in online fantasy football leagues or are only available to that owner whose offered trade was declined or whose waiver pick did not go through. I wish I were able to include the unprocessed waiver picks. These represent a good faith attempt to add a player to one's team and are thus indicative of a high level of attention paid to one's roster throughout the season. Also, inclusion of this statistic would slightly ameliorate the good team penalty described above. I am less worried about the exclusion of declined trades. Lopsided, unserious trades are consistently proposed every week in most leagues and usually represent either at best a jumping off point for additional trade talks or at worst a waste of everyone's time. It is a much better measure to include only those trades that were accepted as this represents actual work and commitment to the trading process.

The inclusion of activations is likely to be somewhat controversial. In my opinion, a large amount of activations is indicative of the hemming and hawing about one's lineup that goes through the mind of any conscientious owner in the days leading up to his game. The reader may disagree. Many internet fantasy football sites do not keep track of activations as a statistic. If this is the case with your league, I would recommend using a multiplier to inflate the TMFPI to a level commensurate with the MBFPI so that the total FPI is not weighted too heavily toward one component.

Message Board Component

The formula:

MBFPI = (threads created) + (replies) + (replies received)

where,

Threads Created are the number of message board threads that the owner initiated.

Replies are the number of times the owner replied to a message board thread regardless of who that thread was created by.

Replies Received are the number of total replies received to a thread that the owner created

The sum of these numbers will give an accurate portrayal of how much a given owner is contributing to the conversation in his league. It is a bit more elegant than the TMFPI because not only does it show exactly how often an owner contributes to the message boards, it also gives a measure of the quality of those contributions and how much that owner is fostering additional conversation through the replies received statistic.

Of course, the MBFPI has its limitations as well. Trash talking and league conversation extends well beyond the message boards to include phone calls, text messages, and in person communication as well. All of these are of course beyond the scope of our ability to calculate, but it is still unfortunate that an owner should be penalized if he prefers to do his trash talking verbally rather than through the written word.

Final Words

The goal of FPI is to determine how much each owner is contributing to the overall health of his league through his participation in it. Accordingly, there are many things that I wish could be included, but cannot because they would be difficult to count. For one, I would include a penalty for the cardinal sins of leaving a player in one's starting lineup during that player's bye week or not starting a player at every position. These are unforgivable oversights that damage the integrity of the league every time they are perpetrated.

In later editions of the FPI, I intend to come up with a draft component that would not only appraise the quality of an owner's draft selections as we discussed above, but would also appraise his performance and behavior during the draft itself. Things like letting the computer autopick for you or bringing a woman to a live draft always detract from the health of the league and should be factored in to an owner's FPI.

Finally, there is a somewhat legitimate concern that once an owner is aware of the FPI, he will artificially inflate his numbers in order to gain a higher rating. This would be particularly easy to do with activations and message board replies. My only counterargument would be that if someone cares enough to artificially manipulate a rating designed to judge how much he cares, then he should necessarily be precluded from being judged by that rating because the amount of care he showed in the manipulation renders the rating itself moot.

Despite all of these limitations and exclusions, I think the FPI does a pretty good job of objectively and numerically representing how involved a given owner is in his fantasy football league and how much he is doing to make that league better. It is important to remember to view an individual owner's FPI rating in light of the average FPI of that league and not as an absolute number. Each league will have different standards and demands for its owners. Additionally, it may be wise to view an individual owner's FPI rating in light of the league's median FPI rating. One or two extremely overzealous or inattentive owners can skew the average for the league, particularly in 10 or fewer team leagues.

I hope this new formula helps you and your league determine which of your owners are making your league a better place and which are not. I also think there is some value in looking at this particular data set at the end of the regular season. It will be interesting to see over the next few years if there is a correlation between FPI and league success. Finally, it can be comforting to those owners who did not have a successful year, but still had a decent FPI. At least he or she gave it a good shot. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must mentally prepare for tonight's Monday Night game. I need to win in order to make the playoffs. My opponent has Ryan Grant in tonight's game and I have the Raven's defense. I am currently down by six points, but will certainly win the bench points tiebreaker. In other words, I am mostly, but not completely, screwed. Go Ravens!

Why I Love Airplanes

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:41:00 +0000

I just returned from a series of extensive traveling. I went to Israel. And then I went to San Diego. And then I went to Las Vegas. And then I came home. It was pretty great.
With that amount of traveling comes a lot of airplane rides, which is good for me, because I love riding on airplanes. As a person consistently and thoroughly paralyzed by the amount of choices available in his daily life, the structure of life on an airplane is quite appealing to me. They tell you everything up front. This is your seat. You may get up if the sign says it's OK. If you get up, you may walk along this straight line. You can go either direction, but don't worry, whichever one you choose, there will be bathrooms. Here is what you can eat or drink. Here are the movies that will be shown. This is when they start. Here is what to do if we begin plummeting to our deaths. In the unlikely event that we survive the impact, there will be a series of lighted arrows that will tell you where to walk. Non-alcoholic beverages? Complimentary! The seat cushion? Also a flotation device! The airplane experience is a glorious mix of free stuff, entertainment, sitting down, and the perfect amount of choice and money-spending opportunities (that is, enough to keep you interested, but not so many that it bogs you down). The whole thing tends to scratch me in precisely the areas that the rest of my life makes me itch.

Of course this is completely at odds with my writerly instincts. It is a long standing tradition for columnists, comedians, essayists, bloggers, radio hosts, and memiorists to travel on an airplane and then describe to their readers/listeners how awful it was. It is a literary conceit as old as air travel itself: "I don't care if you're out of ideas, you owe me a column tomorrow night! Write it on the plane if you have to!" And so they did.

It's become such a cliche that the piece practically writes itself. Generally, the writer will start off by informing you that he cannot sleep on airplanes. We do this to make ourselves seem troubled and mysterious. We want the reader to envision a mind so alive with creativity that the sheer luminescence created by the firing synapses prevents our eyes from closing. We want the reader to wonder at the fantastic ideas we cannot help but dream up while the rest of the plane sleeps. In truth, it is a vicious combination of insecurity and curiosity that keeps us awake. We cannot help but study our fellow passengers and not just wonder what they are thinking, but wonder what they are thinking about us. Most writers are nothing if not obsessive observers of human beings; both those around us and ourselves.

So all of that observing will lead the writer to comment on his fellow passengers when he sets about composing his piece. Of course, he will not comment on the quiet and courteous passengers that comprise the majority of the flight. No, he will single out the portly or the rude. The one who takes up too much of the arm rest or the one who will not stop talking. For example, I might tell you about the woman who was sitting next to me on my flight from Phoenix to Atlanta. I'd start by relating a humorous anecdote about how she had to request a seatbelt extension. I'd tell you about her hair, which was the color of the stuff that grows between the tiles on the wall of my shower. How it fell in straight lines about her head like a cascading sheet of muddy water broken only by her misshapen Picasso face rudely poking through the middle. I might tell you about her shirt, which had the pharse "What if the hokey pokey is what it's all about?" emblazoned across the front. A shirt whose brand of humor is so aggressively bland that it literally saddened me. Sad for her. Sad for the shirt. Sad for the now certainly defunct K-Mart where she purchased it. Sad for the fellow who stood on the curb in front of that K-Mart with a neon sign beckoning passersby to peruse its liquidation sale. But most of all, sad for myself for having been placed within the proximity of all of these things and forced to consider them.

You see, the experiential writer is constantly put out. He is drifting along through life, constantly being knocked about by the riffraff and the huddled masses who could not possibly understand him. We mistakenly believe that the reader feels as we do; that we are better than everyone else on the plane, or if not everybody, at least the jerk sitting to our left. So we describe this jerk to you and invite you to commiserate with us. We hide safely behind our pretension.

And it is this pretension that leads us to deride the in-flight entertainment. On my flight, they were showing a movie called The Time Traveler's Wife. A movie so completely dull and uninteresting that it was a full 30 minutes in before I realized that I had my armrest headphones tuned to an adult contemporary satellite radio station rather than the movie's audio. Upon this realization, I declined to make a change. The difference would have been negligible and I had already come so far. This movie was followed up with an episode of whatever dreck CBS is currently showing before or after Two and a Half Men. The fact that this show is popular enough to sustain a halo of absolute trash in the time slots around it is twice as depressing as my seatmate's choice of apparel. I will never understand the appeal of a show centered around a sassy obese female archetype, a now past his prime child actor with no apparent redeeming qualities, and the corpse of Charlie Sheen all anchored by a nervous effeminate straight man in the form of Duckie from Pretty in Pink. How Sheen's character can seduce so many women with a wardrobe consisting mostly of cargo shorts and Tommy Bahama short sleeve button downs is almost as perplexing. If I have to pretend to like this show at one more family gathering for the sake of being polite, I may light myself on fire. I am dreading the holidays because of it.

This delightful cavalcade was somewhat ameliorated by a BBC documentary on Yellowstone Park ably narrated by Peter Firth; his rich British baritone perfectly complimenting the intimate, loving camera work that BBC nature documentaries have become so widely and deservedly acclaimed for. Unfortunately, this documentary was cruelly started just 30 minutes before we began our descent, so I barely made it halfway through. Much thanks to United Airways for the unnecessary slap in the face right before returning home. I guess what's important is that we got to see the Rachel McAdams/Eric Bana(l?) love story reach its conclusion.

And that's basically how it is done. We ridicule the in-flight entertainment to show that we could not possibly be entertained by that which has been deemed suitable for the flying public at large.We are far too enlightened to be bothered by such base frivolity. The writer may feel inclined to punch up his tale with yet another humorous anecdote about the state of disrepair in which he found the bathroom when he attempted to use it. Or perhaps the outdated, unfortunate hairstyles of the middle-aged female flight attendants. Or maybe even a hearty critique of the airline food, although I've always found the peanuts/pretzels and beverage service to be beyond reproach.

Of course it is perhaps not all our fault. The reader or listener does seem to have a certain affection for vitriolic derision and relentless lampoonery. Consider the spiteful talk radio host who does not see fit to merely disagree with his adversaries, but must heap scorn upon them in the most hateful tone of voice possible-, often accompanied by sound effects. Or the late night talk show host who piles joke after joke night after night onto the already beaten down body of whichever public figure happens to be undergoing the most prominent tribulation at the time. It is always he who says the most outrageous thing the loudest who garners the attention. Of course, that does not mean the speaker is right in doing so.

It's all just human nature I guess. We like to cajole in our writing and reading. It's comforting in a weird sort of way. Indeed, on a personal note, I rather enjoyed our tour through the traditional airline critique piece. As I said before, I had been traveling a lot in the past month and it was perhaps wearing on me a bit. My travels were of the sort that included a great deal of truthfulness and authenticity; enlightening, life-affirming moments; and genuine love and friendship. All of these things are desirable and rewarding, but too much can be exhausting after a time. This release of nastiness and cynicism felt good. Not unlike coming home, putting the key in my front door, walking up the stairs, and laying down in my own bed. I feel like myself again. For better or for worse.

If You Are Mad at Kanye West, Then You Are Dumber Than Him, Which Is Saying A Lot, Because He's Awfully Dumb

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:53:00 +0000

I wasn't going to write about this. It was not my intention. I was going to briefly cover it on Twitter and that would be it. In the interest of full disclosure, I did not even watch the VMAs. I was watching the first Sunday Night Football matchup of the season featuring Green Bay and Chicago because I had bet money on the outcome of the game. I won. And then I went to sleep.

But Swiftgate '09 will not be denied. I have had multiple people respond to my Twitter posts and multiple people ask me to weigh in on the situation in this space, and since I am nothing if not wholly dedicated to you, dear reader, here we are. I will make my opinion known and am happy to do it. If you are tired of hearing about this situation, then please leave now. I totally understand. If you would like to hear one more armchair pundit contribute to the decline of our shared culture by continuing to comment on this, then let's get started after the jump!

Here is what Kelly Clarkson posted to her blog in the wake of Kanye West's brutal and unforgivable attacks Monday night. I am reproducing it in its entirety:

Dear Kanye,

What happened to you as a child?? Did you not get hugged enough?? Something must have happened to make you this way and I think we’re all just curious as to what would make a grown man go on national television and make a talented artist, let alone teenager, feel like shit. I mean, I’ve seen you do some pretty shitty things, but you just keep amazing me with your tactless, asshole ways. It’s absolutely fascinating how much I don’t like you. I like everyone. I even like my asshole ex that cheated on me over you…which is pretty odd since I don’t even personally know you. The best part of this evening is that you weren’t even up for THIS award and yet you still have a problem with the outcome. Is winning a moon man that much of a life goal?? You can have mine if it will shut you up. Is it that important, really??

I was actually nominated in the same category that Taylor won and I was excited for her…so why can’t you be?? I’m not even mad at you for being an asshole…I just pity you because you’re a sad human being.

On a side note, Beyonce has always been a class act and proved again tonight that she still is. Go TEXAS!!

Taylor Swift, you outsell him ….that’s why he’s bitter. You know I love your work! Keep it up girl!

Here is what P!nk wrote on her Twitter:

"Kanye West is the biggest piece of shit on earth. Quote me."

Here is what the lead singer of Linkin Park had to say:

"Kanye West has officially earned the title of King Douchebag! Way to go dickhead! To think I thought he was kinda cool. LAME ...." (In other news, Linkin Park still exists!)

And finally, the venerable Ricky Martin weighed in:

"kanye what an asshole dude." "@taylorswift13 has sold more than 10 million cds in the last two years you deserve the award 10 million fans cant be wrong. enjoy ur night!"

More celebrity reaction here.

Suffice it to say that the celebrity Twitterati was pretty pissed. In the interest of completion, here is what your lowly and ever gracious author put on his Twitter. I will be explaining this for the remainder of the post:

"It is not logical to simultaneously believe the following two things: 1) Kanye did a terrible thing; 2) The VMAs do not really matter."

Basically, what I'm saying is that you have to choose one of the two camps. There can be no middle ground. If you believe that the VMAs are a complete farce designed to be one giant commercial drumming up interest for the artists whose managers made shady back room deals with Viacom executives in order to ensure that their artists win the awards and publicity that goes along with them, then you cannot be mad at Kanye. He is merely the biggest and angriest dancing bear at the circus. If the VMAs don't matter, then he did nothing wrong, because any action that any person takes at the VMAs could not possibly matter and you shouldn't be mad about things that do not matter.

If, on the other hand, you believe that the VMAs are important and that the winners are significant, then you have every right to be angry at Kanye because he ruined one of the most important moments in Taylor Swift's life and indeed one of the most important moments in the history of popular recorded music

But then again, if you do believe that the VMAs are important, then maybe you still shouldn't be angry. If the VMAs are important and legitimate, then Taylor Swift winning the Best Female Video award over "Single Ladies" is one of the most egregious tragedies in the history of not just awards shows, but the very idea of giving recognition to people or things that have excelled.

The video for "Single Ladies" is one of the most important and beloved music videos in the history of the medium. It's choreography is a truly classic Fosse update and will influence dance in immeasurable ways for as long as the art form still exists. The song alone was ranked #1 in 2008 by Rolling Stone, FUSE, and the Kids Choice Awards. The video was named the best of the year by BET. Flash mobs have performed the dance in public places throughout the world. Joe Jonas released a YouTube video of himself performing the dance. John Legend released a YouTube video of The President of the United States doing the dance. It has been parodied on commercials and Saturday Night Live. In an age when nobody watches music videos anymore, this video was absolutely huge.

I'll let Wikipedia describe the ridiculous melange of teenage wish-fulfillment, ugly duckling turning into a swan, band/football team dichotomy swill that makes up the horrible, horrible video for "You Belong With Me":

"Swift plays both the nerdy neighbor and the girlfriend (while wearing a brunette wig) of a high school football star (Lucas Till). The nerdy neighbor and Lucas have presumably grown up together communicating through their bedroom windows across from each other. They communicate through writing messages on note pads and showing the message through their windows to one another. At the very beginning Swift writes, "I love you." and attempts to show him, only to see that he has closed his curtains. Later they are sitting on a street bench talking when the boy's popular girlfriend pulls up in her car and kisses him. She then pushes him away, showing their unpleasant relationship. At a football game, the nerdy neighbor watches as her neighbor catches the game winning touchdown. He walks to his girlfriend, a cheerleader, only to catch her flirting with his teammate saying "You were awesome." Swift's nerdy character watches from her position in the team's band. The following night, the boy announces with note pads that he's heading to the school dance. Swift at first declines, but ultimately decides to go after seeing her neighbor's sad face. At the end of the video it shows a school dance where Swift's nerdy character has a Cinderella moment (and has put away her glasses). Her neighbor picks her over his girlfriend, Swift pulling out the "I love you" note from the start and her neighbor pulling out another "I Love You" note. They end the scene with a kiss between the two of them."

It would be cliche to call this tween rom-com trash pile of a video cliche.

So, if you have placed yourself in the camp that thinks the VMAs are significant, then how can you be mad at Kanye? He is your champion! He is speaking truth to power when nobody else has the courage to! It is patently absurd that Swift's video would beat out Beyonce's. If this is allowed to happen, then it totally delegitimizes your beloved award show. Kanye is on your side. Do not hate him. Embrace him.

But then again, if you think the VMAs are legitimate, you are either a complete idiot or did not watch the whole show. "Single Ladies" went on to win the award for video of the year. Therefore, MTV's position is that "Single Ladies" was the best video produced by a human in the past year, but not the best video produced by a female. The VMAs: where logic is thrown out the door and nothing is what it seems!

So there really is no logical reason to be mad at Kanye. If you think the VMAs are stupid and ridiculous, then don't be mad at Kanye because he just made them a little stupider and a little ridiculouser. If you think the VMAs are important and legitimate, then first of all you are a complete idiot, and second of all, you can't be mad at Kanye because he was fighting for the further legitimacy of the show in the only way he could.

Now, at this point, you may be saying to yourself, "Wait just a minute here. I think that the VMAs are silly, but I'm still mad! Kanye was rude to poor, defenseless, 17 year old Taylor Swift! That sweet, sweet girl! He ruined her moment!" First of all, please do not confuse the carefully tailored layers of bullmess that Swift's handlers have crafted to create her public persona with who she actually is. You do not know who Taylor Swift is because you do not know Taylor Swift. She may or may not be sweet and innocent, you are merely projecting that on her. For all you know, she left the VMAs, went to her hotel room, pounded a line of coke, and then spent the rest of the night as the centerpiece of a 30 person orgy. This is unlikely, but certainly possible. She's 17. I'd do anything when I was 17 if one other person thought it was a good idea. Also, she's not just 17, she's famous person 17, which is like 24 in human years. She can handle herself; she'll be all right. Kanye did not personally attack her in any way. He was personally rude to her by interrupting her, I'll give you that, but that should be forgivable. He did ruin her moment, but when Taylor Swift is on her deathbed, something tells me that she will not look back on her first VMA acceptance speech for an award that she so clearly and undeniably did not deserve as one of the most important moments of her life. Call it a hunch.

So please, do not feel bad for Taylor Swift. This is the best possible thing that could've happened to her last night. In fact, I'm not sure that the whole thing wasn't engineered by Jay Leno. He was the biggest winner in all of this. Not that there were any losers. Beyonce has now been elevated to sainthood because one of her handlers told her that it would be a good idea to invite Swift up to the stage later in the show. MTV has an excuse to continue airing the VMAs for another few years. Even Kanye should be the better for it. Any publicity is good publicity.

So give Kanye a break, please. What he did just wasn't that bad. Show-stealing, "unplanned," "controversial," outbursts by musiciancs are woven into the fabric of the VMAs.* That's why you watch the show. Kindly unbunch your panties, Kelly Clarkson. Save your trademark punk-girl vitriol for your next barely tolerable single, Pink. Save your vocal chords, Chester Benningfield, you'll have a lot of screaming to do on the next Projekt Revolution ~~shit parade~~ tour.Ricky Martin, you do you. You're OK in my book.

The only question that remains is what to make of Kanye himself. After the members of Radiohead, he is (in my opinion) the best and most important musician alive today.Yet, he seems to possess almost no emotional intelligence, sense of propriety, or common sense. With the exception of Kanye West, every single person in Radio City Music Hall last Sunday night knew that Beyonce would win video of the year and that Taylor Swift was being given the female video award to generate revenue for her record label, Big Machine Records.** Why on Earth he would take offense to such an obvious sham is beyond me. I guess we just have to treat him like an idiot savant. He is incredibly good at producing music and embarassingly bad at everything else.

One thing that you can say about Kanye is that he is incredibly earnest. In an age when pop culture is populated by celebrity robots like Beyonce and Alex Rodriguez who offer nothing of themselves whatsoever, I find the unchecked emoting of Kanye West extremely refreshing. He is all the way out there, and it helps him remain vital as an artist. Don't be mad at Kanye. He is just a borderline mentally disordered person doing what feels right to him. For anyone who has ever screamed at a television during an awards show, Kanye is there for you. For anyone who has ever said that they would keep it real if they ever became rich and famous, Kanye is there for you. For anyone who cares about music in 2009, Kanye is there for you. Do not hate him. He is us and we are him. Or at least the small part of us that acts like a 2 year old when we don't get our way.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go realize my dream of being the 1 billionth person to write "nobody puts baby in the corner" on my Facebook status update. Until next time.

* * *

*Andrew Dice Clay in 1989; Izzy Stradlin, Axl Rose, and Vince Neil in 1989; Bret Michaels and CC Deville in 1991; Nirvana in 1992; RuPaul and Milton Berle in 1993; Van Halen in 1996; Fiona Apple in 1997; Lil Kim in 1999; The Rage Against the Machine dude in 2000; Eminem in 2002; Fat Joe and 50 Cent in 2005; Some random dude named "Sixx" in 2006; Kid Rock and Tommy Lee in 2007; thanks to wikipedia for this list.

**Which later won the VMA for "Most Apt Record Label Name"

The Blueprint 3 and Jay-Z's Musical Identity Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:48:00 +0000

Jay-Z has a complicated relationship with auto-tune. Ostensibly, he hates it. In fact, the first single released off of his new album, The Blueprint 3* is called D.O.A. (Death of Auto Tune). In this song, Jay-Z utilizes the pitch-correcting, mistake-erasing audio processor as a modern metaphor for age-old gripes that serious hip hop fans have about certain elements within their genre. These gripes include a perceived lack of authenticity on the part of some rappers; a move by these rappers away from a masculine gritty, hardcore sound and persona to more polished, universal ones; and a general perception that these rappers' goals are to cash in on disposable, mass-consumed hits rather than creating enduring art and social commentary.

We can never really know Jay-Z's intentions in writing this song, but since it was hand picked to be the first single from The Blueprint 3 and was released over two months before that album dropped, it's hard not to hear it as a tone-setter for the rest of the album. Here are the first two lines from the first verse of the song: "This is anti-auto-tune, death of the ringtone/This ain't for iTunes, this ain't for sing alongs." In the context of rap's authenticity wars, it's hard not to hear these lines as a mission statement: "I am not fake and am against those who are. My goal is to make art, not to cash in on single and ringtone sales. I am making music that is personal and can only be truly enjoyed by the initiated."

He further enumerates these goals throughout the song. "All y'all lack aggression/Put your skirt back down, grow a set man" is a call for a return to masculinity (the subtext being that softer radio-friendly rap is ruining the genre). When he says "This ain't for Z100 . . ./This is for Hot 97" he is using New York's top-40 station and authentic hip-hop station (respectively) to say that his music is for serious hip-hop fans only. This is rap music, not pop music.

Let's stop there for a second and look at some pictures that I took yesterday (Sept 8th). Here's what happens when you search for "Jay-Z death autotune" on iTunes:

Wait just a second here! I thought "this ain't for iTunes" and yet, there it is! You can buy two versions of the song, the accompanying video, and yes, even a ringtone. Why is there a censored version available? That must be for the small subset of real hardcore hip-hop heads who also happen to be offended by coarse language. Allow me one more iTunes screen capture, please:

Now this just can't be right. Is that a song from The Blueprint 3 at number one on iTunes's list of all ringtones? A Jay-Z song is the biggest ringtone in the country! And that song is from the same album as D.O.A.! But I thought this album was "death of the ringtone."!

The inconsistencies don't end there. Kanye West is one of hip-hop's biggest auto-tune proponents. He made an entire album last year filled with nothing but him singing songs in auto-tune. That was the whole album. All auto-tune. You would think Jay-Z would be against this and would want to separate himself from those rappers that employ his most hated of music processing tools. Yet, here Kanye is on The Blueprint 3, receiving producing credits for 7 of the fifteen songs on the album and actually guest rapping on two of those tracks! One of those tracks, "Hate" actually uses an auto-tune like effect on a voice repeatedly saying "haters" to form the beat of the song.

So Jay-Z has made an album whose first single is decrying the use of auto-tune. Then he turns half of the album over to hip-hop's second biggest auto-tune proponent. Then he actually uses an audio processing effect that might as well be auto-tune on one of the tracks on that album. Like I said, this relationship is pretty complicated!

But Jay-Z isn't just mixed up on his feelings towards auto-tune, he's unclear about pretty much all other aspects of his music, too. Like we talked about earlier, Jay says in D.O.A. that his music is not pop music. Four tracks later we find Swizz Beats forming the beat to On To The Next One out of one of the biggest pop songs of 2007 (Justice's D.A.N.C.E.) In What We Talkin Bout, he says "[I'm] talkin' bout music, I ain't talkin bout rap." Two tracks later, he spends all of D.O.A. talking about specific things in rap that he doesn't like. In What We Talking Bout, he further says "You can choose to sit in front of your computer/Posin with guns, shootin YouTube up/Or you could come with me to the White House . . .", which is a Cosby-esque line about African-American culture needing to grow up, stop fetishizing gangster culture, and look to Obama as an example of what can be achieved if you buy in. Then again on D.O.A. talks about how the song is "practically assault with a deadly weapon", tells the listener that "you should feel threatened", and closes out with the lines, "If you a gangsta, this is how you prove it to me/Yeah, just get violent."

So what are we to make of this album, then? This is pretty far from a cohesive artistic vision. If he didn't want to pander to serious hip-hop fans, then why include D.O.A.? If he didn't want ringtones and radio hits, then why have Rhianna sing the chorus on Run This Town? If he didn't want a club song (or at least something that could be remixed into one), then why include the obligatory Swizz Beats track? It's almost like he's trying to make a universal record; something that can be enjoyed by everyone on a variety of levels.

The final track of The Blueprint 3 is a song that not so much samples Alphaville's Forever Young as covers it. When I first heard this track in the context of the whole album, I couldn't help but be reminded of Pinocchio Story, the closing track from Kanye's 808s. Both are highly emotional, highly polarizing closing tracks that basically tell the whole story of their accompanying albums. While Pinocchio painted a portrait of a lonely, desperate artist isolated by fame, Young Forever depicts a contemplative yet content artist in the twilight of his career who is cocooned and enveloped by his fame. In a career filled with (defined by?) lyrics obsessing about his legacy, Jay finally crafts a song about the subject that is compelling not because of what he says about his legacy, but the inclusive way in which he contextualizes it. He frames the whole discussion in the universal context of mortality and the accompanying struggle against age and irrelevancy, and then lays that discussion over a timeless, emotionally evocative pop melody. He is taking one of the central motifs in his music and finally presenting it in a way that anyone can feel. That is what great pop musicians do.

Your opinion on this album will most likely be decided by either your expectations for it or what you think Jay-Z was trying to accomplish. If you wanted a record that you could listen to by yourself on headphones and endlessly dissect, then you're going to be disappointed. This record is best listened to through car speakers in a full backseat. If you thought that Jay-Z was trying to execute a return to late 90's/early aughts form, you're going to be disappointed. This album is better than, but in much the same vein as, Kingdom Come. If you wanted a rap album, then you're going to be disappointed. This is pop music.**

But what are we to make of Jay himself, then? How do we receive an artist who tells you that he doesn't make pop music and then proceeds to release a pop album? I reconcile these two things by again turning to the context of rap. Braggadocio is de riguer among rappers. The idiom requires rappers to build up towering walls of hip, masculine artifice around themselves to inflate themselves and their music with authenticity and purpose. Often, a rapper's true self is either revealed in spite of himself or never at all. On The Blueprint 3, Jay-Z is an example of the former. To me, listening to him try to reconcile himself with the type of musician he has become and the type of music he now makes in 2009 is almost as interesting as him trying to reconcile his relationship with his estranged father in 2003 or reconcile his drug dealing past with his millionaire mogul future in 1998. Serious rap fans won't accept that,*** but don't worry Jay, pop music fans like me are ready to welcome you with open arms.

* * *

*Which was released a week early yesterday in response to the album leaking last Monday.
**Jay-Z fully became a pop musician with 2003's The Black Album, but he has been a huge unifying force in music since at least his seminal contribution to MTV's Unplugged series with The Roots in 2001. Think about Collision Course, The Grey Album (obviously indirectly in this case), the "I Declare War" concert, his R. Kelly collaborations, and even his recent comments about Grizzly Bear and the "Indie rock movement." Jay-Z spent most of the aughts uniting people and bringing disparate music styles together into something that everyone can enjoy on a variety of levels. That's what pop musicians do. That's what pop music is.
***And nothing says that they have to.

Special thanks to my buddy SciSmi for his insights on this album, which aided me a great deal in writing this post.

RIP, "Swagger" 1590 - 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:30:00 +0000

The word "Swagger," an oft-used verb and noun among speakers of the English language, died late Monday night on the popular television network NBC. It was 419 years old.

The Fulton County coroner ruled the death a homicide. "We found multiple contusions along the entire surface of the word," he said. "The injuries are consistent with those that have been found in other word homicides, most notably the tragic 'Bling' murders of aught-two. It would appear that Swagger had been wielded as a blunt object and used to repeatedly bludgeon something or someone, resulting in serious head trauma and internal bleeding to the word, which would eventually result in its death."

Although no arrests have been made at the time of this article, the location and time of death coincide with the 1,479,368th showing of a current AT&T commercial that features R&B singer Mary J. Blige holding various phones while her new single, The One plays in the background. Multiple sources familiar with the song have reported Blige employing the word in question in a clumsy manner similar to that described in the coroner's comments.

The timing of the death and the presence of Swagger in the song have led many to assume that Blige is culpable. At a press conference held Tuesday afternoon, Blige professed her innocence: "Let me break it down if you don't get it. Quality, I'm custom-fitted. I'ma say it again: they ain't go nothin on me, nothin on me."

Blige is not the first female R&B singer to come under fire for mistreatment of the word Swagger. The word was subject to a vicious March 2009 attack by Black Eyed Pea Fergie in the song Boom Boom Pow. Fergie's reported ham-fisted use of the word throughout the song allegedly led to injuries that would become exacerbated in the late summer Blige attacks.

In the wake of these two prominent attacks on the word, many hip-hop fans have called for a moratorium on the usage of current hip-hop slang by women above or approaching the age of 40. Proponents of this proposed measure point to the realtively good health of the word when it was employed by MIA in 2007's Paper Planes; she was 31 at the time the song was recorded.

Swagger was born in the year 1590 in Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The word was initially coined to describe a manner of walking characterized by a pompous or defiant air assumed by the walker. It later assumed a broader definition to encompass an individual's entire conduct rather than just his walk.

The word arguably achieved its greatest level of popularity when co-opted by the hip-hop community in the early 2000's. Swagger took on a positive connotation in this context rather than the somewhat negative context it had enjoyed previously. At the time of its death, the word was used not just to describe the physical behavior of an individual, but his entire character, with a particular emphasis on his confidence level and choice of shoes. The word first rose to widespread prominence with the release of Jay-Z's The Blueprint in 2001.

"After the death of auto-tune earlier this year, this almost seems like more than hip-hop can bear," said Jay-Z. "We will all have to band together to make it through these trying times."

President Obama released the following statement after hearing the news:

"As many of you know, Swagger was a very instrumental part of my Presidential campaign and I am deeply saddened at the news of its passing. Our thoughts and prayers go out to its family, friends, and the entire hip-hop community. Hopefully whoever perpetrated this vicious act will be brought to swift justice."

Rappers Jim Nastix and Curtiss Baker have set up a memorial to the deceased word that can be viewed here.

Swagger was survived by its parents, "Fresh" and "Ill", and its older sibling "Swag," who was also injured in the alleged Blige attacks and remains in critical condition at Grady Memorial Hospital.

How To Decide If It's A Good Idea To Date Your Sister's Friends: A Formula

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:50:00 +0000

I've never personally dated one of my sister's friends. She is five years younger than me so the difference in age has long been prohibitive. But as one gets older, the significance of age disparities in matters of the heart tends to decrease. Having just enjoyed my twenty-fifth birthday, I feel as though I may soon be entering a golden age of dating my sister's friends wherein such romantic couplings will not only be eminently enjoyable, but also socially acceptable, and perhaps even mentally fulfilling.

To prepare myself for the host of dating opportunities likely to present themselves in the coming years, I have developed a practical formula that will objectively determine whether a prospective partner would be worth the inevitable tribulations that would accompany such a union.

But before we delve too deeply into solutions, we must first identify the problems inherent in dating one's sister's friends. The main difficulty that I can identify is maintaining the brother/sister relationship in light of anything that may occur during the courtship of her friend. Obviously, maintaining this relationship will be of paramount importance if one expects to date any more of one's sister's friends in the future. Also, were the sister to become angry about something the brother did during the relationship, that brother would have two angry women to deal with rather than just one.

It is at this point that many people decide that dating their sister's friends is not a viable option. After all, it is difficult enough to keep one woman happy with a relationship, but to keep two women happy with a relationship is a Herculean feat that all but the hardiest of Mormons have neither the fortitude nor inclination to attempt. But we here at yesyesitis.com* are never ones to shy away from a challenge,** and we believe that we have developed an actionable solution that can work for you.

Let's say that you have taken the plunge and have decided to begin dating one of your sister's friends. Since your sister and this friend are both females and are friends, they will talk about their relationships incessantly with each other. This spells trouble for you. Since one of your major goals is keeping your sister happy with the relationship, and since there are bound to be bumps in the road on the way, you must control the flow of information that your sister receives about the relationship. Normally when you date a girl, you must be completely on point for one to two months before you start gradually acting like an asshole and decreasing dinner date frequency. The key to dating a girl that is good friends with your sister is to extend your on point period until you can thoroughly control the information flow to your sister.

But if your sister and this girl are friends, how can you ever control the information flow? The answer may be easier than you think. The natural assumption is that you have to become better friends with this girl than she is with your sister so that she is more loyal to you and won't share anything that you don't want her to share. This view is shortsighted. You don't ever necessarily have to make this girl like you more than she likes your sister, you merely have to make her like the relationship more than she likes your sister. This shouldn't take too much time; it is a well known fact that all women value a good romantic relationship more than any friendship they may have with their girl friends and will choose to nurture the former over the latter.*** The key is figuring out exactly how much more.

I postulate conservatively that, to any woman, one month of a good romantic relationship is worth 3 months of good friendship with one of her girl friends. In other words, a girl will choose a boyfriend of 6 months over a good friend of a year and a half, a boyfriend of 12 months over a good friend of three years, and so on.

Represented formulaically:

t = n/3

where n is the number of months the girl in question and your sister have been good friends and t is the amount of dating time in months that you will have to be on your best behavior.

Once your time table is set, you need only determine if your sister's friend is worth the amount of good behavior months you will have to log. Your willingness to log good behavior months is directly proportional to how desirable this girl is. The girl's desirability is of course directly proportional to how physically attractive she is and is also partially dependent on a host of other less important factors.

So, we need to create a "Desirability Index" to numerically represent the desirability of any given girl. Start by ranking her physical attractiveness on a standard 1-10 scale. Then do the same for an aggregate of all other factors that may make her desirable (sense of humor, down-to-earthiness, willingness to watch you get high and play video games with your friends on a Saturday night instead of going out, etc.). This will leave you with two numbers between 1 and 10. Once you have these numbers, decide percentage-wise how much each of them contribute to your overall level of interest in a given girl. If you are a superficial person, physical attractiveness may make up 70% of your interest level while everything else accounts for only 30%. If you are a dork, the reverse may be true. We will call these two percentages the superficiality coefficient and the x-factor coefficient; they will give you a more accurate view of just how desirable this girl is to you personally.

Here is the Desirability Index represented formulaically:

d = a(y) + b(x)

where y is your 1-10 ranking of her physical attractiveness, x is your 1-10 ranking of whatever other x-factors may contribute to her desirability, a is your personal superficiality coefficient, and b is your x-factor coefficient. d is a 1-10 numerical representation of her overall desirability to you personally.

This may be a bit confusing, so let's go through an example. Let's say I meet a girl and she's a stone-cold nine in terms of physical attractiveness. Unfortunately, her ringtone is "Rockstar" by Nickelback, she says things like "I just don't get Curb Your Enthusiasm", and only eats one or two bites of her entree when she goes out to dinner. Her x-factor is a 3. Now, I am a deeply shallow person, so physical attractiveness is of the utmost importance to me. In fact, it counts for 83% of why I like any given girl; everything else makes up about 17%. All our variables are now accounted for, so we can calculate my interest level in this girl thusly:

d = .83(9) + .17(3) d = 7.47 + .51 d = 7.98

As you can see a 9 who is dumber than a bag hammers only gets dropped down to a 7.98 in my book, so we're probably good to move forward. Now all we need to do is combine our two equations by determining how many months of good behavior each point of desirability is worth. I say 1.5.**** You may want to come up with a different number based on your tolerance for being on your best behavior. In our example, I've rated this girl a 7.98, which means that I am willing to put in no more than a year of being on my best behavior.

Now let's compare that number to our first equation. Let's say our extremely good-looking but slightly mentally challenged girl has been good friends with my sister for three and a half years, or 42 months. That means I'll have to be completely on point for 14 months before I reach the zone where I can ease up. If I slack off before 14 months, I run the risk of not only screwing up my chances with this particular girl, but also pissing off my sister, which will make her less likely to set me up with her hot friends in the future.

So, I'm personally only willing to put in 11.97 months of good behavior for a 7.98 girl, but I'll need to wait 14 months before I can risk slacking off. According to our equations, I should not date this girl. The amount of time it will take to get into the slack off zone is greater than the amount of time I'm willing to put in according to this girl's Desirability Index. It is way more headache than it's actually worth.

Our final formula:

If t > 1.5d ; do not date

I hope that you find our formulas effective in helping you sort out your romantic endeavors. Anytime you can boil down the essence of human emotion and affect into a couple simple mathematical equations, you really have to do it. Until next time, thanks for reading yesyesitis.com.

* * *

*We now own the yesyesitis.com domain, by the way. No need to go through the blogspot middleman anymore when typing in our address.

**Plus, we're going through a bit of a dry spell now and are open to new avenues.

***This is one of the most salient differences between women and most men.
**** Of course, if we use this number, it means that, since a perfect 10 is the best desirability score a girl can get, then there is not a woman on earth who is worth more than 15 months of good dating behavior.
***** I think this is fairly accurate.
***** That's right. Not even you, Jessica Biel!

The Vast Aruban Coin Shadow Economy or Money Isn't Real, George. It Doesn't Matter. It Only Seems Like it Does.

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:49:00 +0000

I have a job that requires me to handle cash frequently. Yesterday, in exchange for a product that my employer sells, I received a shiny circular piece of metal with various words and pictures etched onto its surface. I held the piece of metal in my hand, inspected it, and then thanked my customer, who left with purchases in hand. I then placed the piece of metal into a cash register and went on with what I was doing before the customer entered.

A monetary transaction had been completed. Trillions of transactions just like the one above take place every day in our country. These transactions form the basis of our economy and by extension, our society. The only catch: the piece of metal was not manufactured in the United States. It was in fact manufactured in Aruba. According to whomever decides these things, this piece of metal manufactured in Aruba is worth exactly 25% of an Aruban florin, which is the basis of Aruba's economy and by extension, the Aruban society. In case you were wondering, an Aruban florin is worth .56 American dollars. You'll have to excuse me because I'm really not sure who or what decides that either. I found out how many US dollars one Aruban florin is worth by typing the phrase "aruban dollar exchange rate" into an Internet search engine. The Internet is an amalgamation of interconnected computers. Anyone who has access to a computer is free to publish anything at any time to the Internet. You are in fact currently reading one such publication.

Somebody, somewhere decided these were worth something.

If you read the first paragraph of this Internet publication closely, you will notice that I inspected this piece of metal before accepting it as payment for my employer's wares. That was an important detail; forgive me for glossing over it so quickly. I should've said that I inspected it closely. So close in fact that I recognized it as not an American quarter (which it ostensibly was since it was being used in a monetary transaction taking place in America), but an Aruban 25 cent piece. I was able to recognize it as such because it had the word "ARUBA" emblazoned in relatively large capital letters across one of its faces and the number "25" etched in even larger characters on the reverse face. I knew that I was not receiving an American quarter as payment.

Additionally, I made the reasonable assumption that this piece of metal I was receiving was not worth as much as an American quarter. I knew both of these things and yet still accepted it as payment. I didn't care that it was not an American quarter. I didn't care that it was not worth 25 American cents. I didn't care about these things not because I am a lazy, absent-minded employee, but because I knew I would be able to give this piece of metal to another customer later on in the day and he would accept it just like I did. I knew this because I have done it many times before and will continue to do it in the future. I guess you could say that I had a high level of confidence that this Aruban 25 cent piece would be accepted in my society as being worth 25 American cents. Of course this is how all money works all of the time, everywhere. Pieces of paper and metal are assigned theoretical values by mysterious forces, but can only be given literal value by regular people like you and me because we are confident that other people will accept their theoretical value.

Yesterday, my customer and I imbued a piece of Arbuan metal with 7 cents of literal value that it never theoretically possessed. What power we have! I postulate that thousands of such transactions take place in our country every day. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions. After all, even if you don't actively choose to accept foreign coins as domestic currency like I did yesterday, you may accidentally accept them.

There are at least 51 versions of the American quarter in circulation today, therefore if I'm holding a quarter in my hand, you have only a 1.96% chance of telling me what it looks like.* You can certainly be forgiven for glancing at one side of a circular piece of metal found in America and assuming it's an American quarter. It's an easy mistake to make. I wonder at the value of this shadow economy of foreign coins in worldwide circulation. My customer and I created 7 cents of value out of thin air yesterday. In the trillions of monetary transactions that happen around the world every day, I wonder how many involve artificially inflated foreign currency. Average people like you and me could be creating millions of dollars of literal value every day! Of course, none of this matters at all. As long as you and I can agree on the value of any given piece of metal, then that's what it's literally worth. But it does make you think. Maybe money isn't real. Maybe George Jung's dad was right all along.

* * *

*Yes, I know that this probably isn't correct given the fact that there are more regular quarters than any one state quarter. Cut me some slack. God, people who read footnotes can be so particular sometimes!

June Now More Than Ever Top Ten

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:21:00 +0000

It is a recurring feature on this blog to highlight instances of people using the phrase "now, more than ever" as a way of exploiting the recession to advance some sort of agenda or highlight a bogus trend story. Here are 10 great examples from June.

10. State Needs Food Aid Now More Than Ever

The Times Herald (Port Huron, Michigan)

Stop begging for food Michigan, go out and get a job like the rest of us.

9. Tom Shales: With More Shows Out There, TV Critics Are Needed Now More Than Ever

Washington Post

Television critic Tom Shales writes a column about how there should be more television critics. Ladies and gentlemen, the newspaper business in 2009!

8. Why Day School Matters, Now More Than Ever

The Jewish Times

Article from New York Based* Jewish publication asking for more support in Jewish communities for Jewish day school. Personally, I couldn't agree more. I went to Jewish night school and it was a real pain in the ass.

7. Now More Than Ever, Vampires Are Among Us

The Toronto Star

Let's hope our neighbors to the north can contain them.

6. Landon Donovan - Now More Than Ever

BleacherReport.com

This is what I like to call a Hanging Now More Than Ever. The author makes no attempt to explain what it is about Donovan that is more now than ever. Landon Donovan: now existing extra hard.

5. Now More Than Ever -- Stand By Obama

Huffington Post

Typical Huffington Post excuse-mongering column excorciating liberals for not supporting Obama more. The Huffington Post: where the choir goes to hear the preacher tell them to sing better.

4. Obama Nation: More Taxes, Less Fredom

Cumberland Times News

Typical conservative swill bemoaning the most recent Democratic tax plan that begins with a 63 word quote from the Declaration of Independence and ends with the following paragraph: "Now, more than ever, we must remember that 'freedom is never more than a generation from extinction' (Ronald Reagan). The generation of the Founding Fathers fought for their freedom. So must we." Is the author advocating an armed uprising against Obama? Ladies and gentlemen, the newspaper business in 2009!

3. Vehicle Crimes Increase During Summer Months

CBS7kosa.com (West Texas)

From the article: "Now, more than ever, Texas drivers must become actively involved in vehicle crime prevention by practicing 'Hide, Take, Lock': hide belongings, take keys, and lock vehicle doors. The Texas Auto Burglary and Theft Prevention Authority (ABTPA) will hilghlight this philosophy throughout 'Watch Your Car Month,' which is being recognized this month of July." Do I make fun of the "Hide, Take, Lock" slogan, the oddly specific nature of the Texas Auto Burglary and Theft Prevention Authority, or the fact that July is Watch Your Car Month? You know what? Let's just agree they're all funny and move on.

2. Additional Demands Mean Time, Now More Than Ever, Isn't Always On Your Side

FWDailynews.com

An Internet article written by corporate motivational speaker Jeffery Gitomer, whom I can personally confirm** is a talentless jar of unfiltered smarm. A hack's hack. He seems to be advancing the point that, after enjoying a 4.6 billion year harmonious relationship, the man-made system of demarcating the sequential relation that any event has to any other has now turned on us. Why, time? After all we've been through together, why now?

1. Gambia: Observer's July 22nd Bus Arrives in Baddibous

The Daily Observer (Banjul, Gambia)

An article from an African newspaper describing the lives of villagers in a region of Gambia called Baddibous. From the article: "The education of the girl child is especially enhanced now more than ever before. Initially, the thought had been as to where to take their female children without the danger of getting them pregnant, among other issues. 'But now, it is a different thing,' said Dibba. 'They school here up to grade 9." Apparently now more than ever is a great time to be a girl child in Gambia. Africa, you are hilarious.

* * *

*Shocking, I know.

**He did a lot of work for a former employer of mine

A Catalog of Support Our Troops Merchandise

noreply@blogger.com (Corey J. Farris) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:34:00 +0000

During my daily Internet rummagings, I came across some great merchandise festooned with the "Support Our Troops" slogan. I was inspired by these items because they so effectively combine two great American loves: merchandise purchasing and troop supporting. Since we here at Yes. Yes It Is. support the shit out of our troops, and also support troop-supporting actions on the part of others, I figured I'd present a few examples of this patriotic merchandise to you here accompanied with links on where to buy them. It's the least I could do.

Support Our Troops BBQ Apron:

CafePress.com

Support Our Troops Customizable Coffee Mug:

FindGift.com

Support Our Troops Dog Sweater:

HandsNPaws.com

Those were great, weren't they? If you have a little extra money, now more than ever is a good time to purchase one of these fantastic products. All proceeds will presumably go to a good cause.

But since we here at Yes. Yes It Is. love our country extra hard, we're not content to merely purchase Support Our Troops merchandise. No, we've decided to go one step further and actually sell Support Our Troops merchandise. That's why I'm proud to unveil the Yes. Yes It Is. Support Our Troops Catalog featuring items* available for purchase (for a limited time only) right here at Yes. Yes It Is.!** All proceeds go to supporting our troops.

Item #1: Support Our Troops Waffle Iron

Tame the waffle batter of oppression with the scalding, non-stick surface of freedom when you use our Support Our Troops Waffle Iron! With its clean, stainless steel finish and easy turn handle, you'll be "ironing out" peace in the Middle East in no time! Comes with handsome knob on the front left of the control panel. Waffle not included.

$239.79

Item #2: Support Our Troops Foaming Face Wash

Say goodbye to unsightly blemishes with our Support the Troops Foaming Face Wash! Our patented cool, refreshing exfoliating moisture beads will shock and awe your skin into submission. Try not to act too confident when all of your friends tell you how well our surge of acne fighting medicine is working. When the terrorists see your beautiful, clear skin, they'll have no choice but to forget all about their jihad and move to Iowa to open their own Subway!

$14.79

Item #3: Support Our Troops Jockstrap

Tired of the constant pain and discomfort that comes from simultaneously supporting your manhood while also supporting our troops? Well suffer no more! Now you can finally support both our troops and your junk at the same time with the Support Our Troops Jockstrap!

$4.99 (pack of three)

Item #4: Support Our Troops Beekeeping Outfit

Let the whole neighborhood know that you stand with America while you're standing around spraying your beesmoke. Your bees will be begging for habeas corpus when they see you in this baby! Moustache not included.

$1,399.99

Item #5: Support Our Troops Lawn Bowling Set

Let's roll! This stylish lawn bowling set will be the envy of every weekend-warrior on your block! Remember, the terrorists hate our freedom, and what better way to show off our freedom then to throw things at other things? Sorry, that was a trick question, there is no better way!. This is in fact the best way.

$189.99

Item #6: Support Our Troops Troop Supporter

Fighting terrorists is hard work and God knows our men and women in uniform deserve a little rest every now and then. That's why we're introducing our brand new Support the Troops Troop Supporter. Simply prop up your favorite troop with our patented troop supporting technology and they can continue to fight the enemies of freedom (forever, if necessary) while luxuriously reclining! Look below to see it in action:

$299.99 Available in S, M, L, and XL

And that's the end. Just so you know, this entire post was created for that troop supporter joke at the end there. Hope you enjoyed the payoff as much as I did.

...

I'm sorry, I'm not very funny during the summer.

* * *

*All items made in China.

**This post would've been hilarious four to five years ago, but I didn't have a blog then, so here you go. Better late than never.