The World is a Darker Place

George Carlin passed away Sunday.

There are not many people who I consider heroes, but he was one of them. And not just because he is a personal hero, but because Carlin literally embodied the worst, and the best, of what he saw of the world. He was a comedian who dredged up some of the darkest, most profane, sickest humor one could ever hear, particularly in his last two routines dubbed Life is Worth Losing and It's Bad for Ya!. Yet, it made us laugh.

I've mainly been covering the election year in my sham of Internet political journalism for The Fhiz, but I've touched on some touchy subjects: the decline of the United States, suicide, terrorism, fraud, and Facebook to name a few. Despite that, I never try to let the tone get too serious, and inject some (often off-color) humor into it, be it making silly comparison of McCain to an office employee who shows up for work high on valium or just tossing a grumbled "fuckberries" in there somewhere. In George's words, "Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits."

That, which has become the veritable centerpiece of my writing, comes from George Carlin. The argument that I'm only 25 and he is "before my time" holds no water here. Carlin was just as relevant to youth culture on the day he died as he was in 1971 when he was arrested with Lenny Bruce, or in 1967 when he was just a feature on the Ed Sullivan Show. The man spanned generations in a bigger way than hit movie stars or famous bands: he, in a sense, grew up with the legend. Paul McCartney might be a "living legend," but anything he does is not going to live up to The Beatles or Live and Let Die. Carlin managed to avoid that trap, never passing a real prime, and never allowing the fame to get the better of him before he could create something new and meaningful.

These traits have followed over into all of my writing, from fiction to poetry to blogging. Comedians, and comedy itself, are important because of two things. Humor makes issues accessible. Nobody, not even me, wants to talk about politics all the time. But everyone loves a chuckle. Mixing the two allows the writer/speaker/poet/whoever to draw in a bigger audience from a wider range of backgrounds and opinions than if they stood behind a podium and listened to a politically correct, gender neutral, nonracial, formal English speech. In particular, humor does not concern itself with being offensive, so issues that make us squirm are all dealt with. Eddie Murphy did this in the 1980s with AIDS, and Jon Stewart does it today with politics. Most of what is covered in this not-news is bigger, more relevant, and more important than the news itself.

Secondly, and going hand-in-hand with the first, is humor's ability to soften the blows. By nature, we humans are pretty fragile mentally. We can only take so much bad news before there is some effect of it. Imagine if you watched Fox News all day, and all you heard about was how the A-rabs were going to come and kill you and how you need to tape your doors shut when the drop the chemical bomb and how Bird Flu is rampant and that your kids will go insane unless you get them on the hot new prescription and your husband will leave you and the President doesn't care about and God will send you to Hell unless you hate this, hate that, hate me, and hate yourself.. If you were sane, you'd change the channel, but given that Fox is still around, it is safe for me to assume most people don't. Humor does not stop all of the negativity, but, like unspoken issues, it makes it accessible. It's the unbreakable, full-body wetsuit you wear when jumping into a big pile of cow shit.

If there is a "most important thing" I'll take away from Carlin, it is this, which I believe is the lesson that comedy itself teaches: Never. Stop. Laughing. Ever. Because, if we laugh at it, we can deal with it. "It" could be our sham of a country, poverty, crime, suicide, the collapsing market, international terrorism, racism, the new disease that's wiping the human race out, global warming, alien invasion, World War 3, the cool new drugs your precious teens are sucking down, twelve year olds having babies, cancer, giant corporations polluting our back yards and giving us diseases, rednecks shooting anything that looks like its wearing a towel, or fucking nuclear bombs. Desperation, pointlessness, hopelessness, and doubt can all be kept at bay with a well-timed joke. I think, and I hope I'm right, that one thing George Carlin stood for was facing all of the evils the world has to offer without guns and bullets, without laws and police, without big ideas about encompassing philosophies - just facing the world clear-eyed and naked, with a damn good joke.

George Carlin: thank you.

Wii Fit Review, or, What I do At Work

Work was pretty dead today and my boss brought her Wii in, accompanied by the strange and oddly sturdy pad that goes with Wii Fit. I didn't get through much of it as it was limited to breaktime only, but it was enough to give some solid first impressions.

Surprisingly, there is little use of the remote, and the main focus of the "game" - I suppose it's more of a tool - is on balance. Basically, you stand on this pad and answer a bunch of questions, including age, height, weight, and then you take a balance test. The pad is kind of freaky because there is this computerized voice that sounds like a typical reserved Japanese girl, and as it is calibrating it flashes messages like, "Please don't step on me yet." The creepiest is when you step on to measure your weight, and as soon as your smooth, silky foot graces the pad, you hear a quiet little, "Oooh..." from Computer Girl. Afterward, the game spits out your body mass index and your "Wii Fit Age," supposedly the age that you are in terms of health.

And I'm 28!? What the fuck, Wii? What the fuck?

Afterwards, you start the games, which are in four categories: Yoga (which I didn't try because frankly yoga scares me), Strength, Balance and Aerobics. You also earn minutes, which are the currency of Wii Fit Land and unlock more games and bonus material. So, on to the games.

My best activity was push ups, where I did six iterations of a push up, then this weird twist-on-your-side thing -- OH YEAH!

I forgot to mention the trainers. When you do exercises, you pick between a male or female trainer. They are these kind of glowing, blue people who look like something right out of the Ethereal section of a D&D Monster Manual, only in gym clothes, and their mouths don't move when the speak to you! It is kind of weird to see this glowing person tell you how to do a Warrior pose or how to catch a hula hoop and see no mouth motion what-so-freakin-ever.

::ahem::

As I was saying, I did best at the push ups, scoring 91% on my first and only go, when quickly collapsing from exhaustion and crawling under a table (I wish I was fucking kidding.) I proved decent at hula hooping, and was average at everything else I tried: the ski jump, ski slalom, jogging, and soccer goalie. Ing.

Soccer was by far the most entertaining - though really me and my co-worker making asses out of ourselves was probably better - because you are suppose to lean towards balls to block them, but occasionally a shoe or a severed panda bear head will fly at you, slapping into your Mii's face with a hint of brutal realism and causing you to lose your hard-earned points.

The only game that actually used the "Wii"mote (God I hate that) was jogging, where you just run in place and keep the remote in hand or in pocket as a pedometer. We quickly found a way to cheat by flailing our arms around wildly, but even that gets tiring after a while, and besides, what kind of fucking pathetic loser do you have to be to skimp out on a video game workout? These people, honestly.

My knee-jerk reaction to Wii Fit was the world was in a sad, sick state of affairs when we had to market exercises gear in the form of a video game because people are too lazy to go outside, but I've had some time and now experience to rethink that. People, particularly in the U.S of A, need to work out more, and Wii Fit is innovated enough to actually get your sweating. Or at least it got my apparently 28-year-old ass sweating. The game also comes with a calender where you can check off days you exercise and how well you did, and also set goals on how much weight you wish to lose by a given date. Since the focus is on cardio workouts almost exclusively, it is designed to burn fat. And, while a hundred and seventy bucks might seem steep for a game, home gym equipment is double or triple the price, massive and heavy, and non-portable. You can fit Wii Fit in a backpack. And lets face it, a Bow Flex or that thing Chuck Norris sells is just far less entertaining. See, see, the bastard can't do everything!

It was a smart move on Nintendo's part to see that people took to the Wii as a form of exercise and capitalize on the idea. Wii fit is one of, if not the biggest selling Wii game to date, and it helps in that stupid Arms Race of entertainment because it is something neither the Xbox nor the PSIII can offer.

Fucking 28.

Some new music

I got some new music lately, and by new I mean out for a few months already. Anyway, the first is Looking Glass by The Birthday Massacre. There are three things that attracted me to this band: the name, the title track from the first album of the same name, and that I actually did a double-take while listening to said song and had a, "Did she just say murder-tramp? Neat." moment. They are a female-led rock band with some electronic elements, or as they call it in Merry Old England, electro. Points are automatically earned for having a keytar player, an instrument that died out, much like the dinosaurs, when everyone decided for some fucking reason Devo wasn't cool anymore. And while I still don't see a whole lot that is really special about the band's music, it is at least different in a music industry that happily shovels shit and piss down the gaping maw that is MTV, only for it to regurgitate all over the crying faces of 16-year-old Myspace kids with too much money like a giant mother bird.

::cough - social commentary - cough::

Anyway, the new album has an interesting 80s Asian rock quality to it, particularly the title track, with some nice bleeps and bloops that remind me of "I Think I'm Turning Japanese" or anything done by Wang Chung - don't you fucking telling me you don't know who I'm talking about! However, they do fall into that heavy-as-the-planet metal guitar snare drum sound trap that almost all metal bands do, and given that it is a female singer they have to sound like that crappy E-something band that got that one song on Daredevil a few years back. That would ultimately be their downfall, as it would rocket them to fame for roughly the same amount of time it would take to be put into a giant slingshot and shot up into the stratosphere, only to come crashing down and turn into a greasy spot, with accompanying YouTube set to equally bad metal music.

Seriously, what the fuck is up with those people? When I sign into YouTube, I just want to watch some Thundercats. What kind of poor taste do you have to think that goes with Slipknot, what!? If you see a weird ass cartoon of yesteryear and the first place your head goes is to images of burly men in jumpsuits and scary masks with lots of blood-painted pentagrams and screaming in the background: GET! HELP! YOU! WANKER!

Overall, I like the new album. Since I first heard them I developed a soft spot, a small one, but a soft spot nonetheless. It isn't very deep and the high school aged whining feels like riding down a kiddy slide made of cheese graters naked, but it is one of the few instances where I'll say the originality of the sound and execution makes up for it. A little.

The other is The Slip, the new Nine Inch Nails album. I thought Mister Reznor's first two albums were pretty interesting, and anyone who can come out and say that God is dead and no one cares is okay in my book. However, there isn't much I can say about the new album because it is pretty bad. At ten tracks it's a bit brief, a fact that I should be thankful for. I have always found NIN albums to be a self-deprecating to the point of being obnoxious and while I will concede that all of them are brilliant musically, The Slip well, slips.

::da-dum-phsssssss::

The entire thing is short and repetitive and sounds very lazy. I will give Senior Trent that his new album is totally free via their website, which is pretty awesome. I'd give him more credit if he were anyone other then Trent Reznor and didn't have enough money to buy real estate on Mars and could have used proceeds from the album to eat, but what the hell. One cannot exactly fault philanthropists for being wealthy, and the more free shit there is out there, the better.

Even if it is shit.

So, Birthday Massacre's Looking Glass and NIN's slip. Good for a listen, not worth the money, but, counterpoint; it isn't like anyone pays for music anymore anyway.

NOTE: There is no scientific correlation between the extinction of dinosaurs and the popularity of Devo.

Grandpa Fuckin Spaceshuttle

Yep, Grandpa Fuckin Spaceshuttle.