TubeDubber: Dental Plan, Part III

The "Dental Plan" sequence from The Simpsons possibly represents the greatest use of five words in comedy history. And if that overstates the case, at least consider that many of us have repeatedly gotten it stuck in our heads for over a decade without much complaint.

Because it appears in my imagination so much, it winds up becoming an accidental soundtrack for lots of different things. It's easy to pair it with other things for a YoutubeDoubler. Anyhow, a bad case of writer's block sent me procrastinating on Youtube, and this happened. Click Homer to load.


I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Tuesdays with Gamblor: The Problem of Telling an Oral History of 'The Simpsons'

I keep buying books about Hitler, and really this doesn't make much sense. All GOP claims aside, the world is not making more Hitler. Our Hitler levels remain constant at one or none, depending on your attitude. It's slightly illogical to pick up a book on Hitler and expect to find anything novel or radical. There is no new Hitler under the sun.

Still, I do this, not because I admire the man, but because I was once a hopeful young student who spent years reading about him and other monsters of the twentieth century before a history degree's non-practicality impressed itself on me. I invested so much time into learning the historiography of his rise and fall that I feel like I've never fully resolved the argument about him. Ninety-nine percent of the content of a new book by, say, Ian Kershaw will be old hat. Instead, the lines that jump out, the little things to search for, are the shades of argument that push interpretation gently one way or the other, changing history's verdict of the how and why, rather than the details of the what. This is a clinical and academic way of looking at it, but people do this all the time in terms of simple fan interest. (Hopefully not about Hitler.)

Consider the Beatles. New biographies come out seemingly every year, and yet the Beatles' existence as a band remains stubbornly mired in a period of a decade. As years pass, we only get more dead Beatles (seemingly along a spectrum of decreasing talent), but we don't get more of what made them. Fans refuse to let go, and so thousands buy the books to hear a familiar story again, just as more academic fans read to support or attack an argument like, "It was engineer Geoff Emerick and not Paul McCartney who changed the way McCartney's bass was recorded/mixed for the singles before Rubber Soul." (They were both trying to make him sound like James Jamerson anyway.)

It was inevitable that something like this would start to happen with The Simpsons. Like the Beatles, that show changed a generation and a form, and like the Beatles, the arguments about who created what and for what reasons will only intensify as the years between their heyday and the present increases, and as the few remaining facts in dispute continue to diminish. With the show creatively having run its last legs into the ground, it's time to assign credit and blame for the period in which it was a masterpiece. Chris Turner already tried a quasi-philosophical, uneven and solipsistic look at the show's impact on the zeitgeist with Planet Simpson, and recently John Ortved attempted a more straightforward oral history in The Simpsons: an Uncensored, Unauthorized History.

The Essential Weirdness of Christmas Music

After some time in the employ of some of America's finest retail clothing establishments, I went off Christmas music. I didn't stop liking it for what it was, but spending 240 hours with it blaring in the background, in the six-week period around Christmas, eliminated my ability to take much joy in it for a few years.

I imagine I otherwise might have gone to a store to buy CDs of Christmas songs, but over-saturation drove the impulse from me, for a couple of seasons. Besides, like any good family member, I spent most Christmases with family. Having my own copy of James Galway flautin' the bejesus out of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was unnecessary.

So this year, as host of Christmas festivities, I had nowhere to turn when it came to listening to music I had long since come to enjoy again. I turned on the cable box and cued up the "SOUNDS OF THE SEASONS" channel. If you've purchased a digital cable package anywhere in America in the last decade, you know exactly what kind of channel I'm talking about. You also know exactly why the Christmas music I listened to might be plainly weird.

'Everything Is Going to Be Great'

The cover of Rachel Shukert's Everything Is Going to Be Great speaks to the reader in the same way that the "Don't Panic!" cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is probably meant to. Her memoir evokes the anxieties of the collegiate and post-collegiate, groups for which the dread of embarrassment, confusion and failure — of having tripped coming out of life's starting gate — is far more real than for fictional space travelers. They need some assurance that the journey will be okay, and so does the reader, both in a general existential sense and because so much of her book can induce cringes of recognition and sympathy.

Shukert is a klutz and a serial bad-decision maker. Despite a going-nowhere acting career (or because of it), she takes off to Europe with a touring company, performing as an extra in a play that sounds annihilatingly dull, the sort of tendentious theater that you imagine Europeans and thin New Yorkers alone like because it helps them to hate themselves and to hate the people who hate it. She travels to Vienna and has a quaint May-November affair with a Viennese man. She takes advantage of an unstamped passport (and thus unlimited time in Europe) and stays with two gay friends in Amsterdam for what seems like months. While there, she gets involved with a man already in a long-term relationship, stands in front of the Anne Frank house passing out coupons for bad American comedy, has a wrenching but meaningful moment with her visiting parents and finally stumbles across a happy ending.

That last item is meant literally, but given much of the book's content, it's perfectly understandable that someone might mistake it for a handjob euphemism. Part of what makes Everything Is Going to Be Great so rife with anxiety at times is that many embarrassing moments are graphically sexual. In the midst of a dental emergency, a jealous ex-girlfriend shrieks at Shukert before she's whisked through a dark doorway and, basically, tongue-assaulted at both ends by a pair of Italian partners-in-fucking. During her Viennese sojourn, she discovers what an uncircumcised penis is like, in the most profound and orally immediate way possible. The former event betrays a shockingly undeveloped danger sense, and the latter shows a surprising inexperience. Both episodes are the sorts of things the book's title is for: Rachel Shukert emphatically and reassuringly pledges a positive outcome because, in many parts of the story, she does some pretty stupid and worrisome shit.

Profiles in Florida: Countdown to Rick Scott

Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott is entertaining. The man's career is so defined by devouring hospitals, he sometimes fittingly resembles Leonard Betts, the X-Files character who lived off cancer. Other times he looks like a loose-necked alien that someone stuck in an ill-fitting latex man suit that he's only recently learned to operate. But it's when you look closely at him that his value emerges. Even by the noxiously cynical standards of Florida politics, Scott's candidacy offers something uniquely imperious, baseless and stupid.

First, notice his campaign slogan: change. Virtually every candidate for office in America offers some riff on this word, if not hope, progress, honor, etc. Scott's campaign, however, promises change from "Washington" and "Obama," two things that have nothing to do with Florida and against which he primarily seems to be running. Opposing them is literally his biggest response to Florida's problems. He will address problems ranging from crippling budget shortfalls, collapsing property values and a public school system best described as "massively goddamn thunder-fucked" through a comprehensive program of directing formidable mind-beams against the President and the general D.C. Metro area. Duck and cover, beltway elitists.

Scott also pledges change by governing with Republican values and running the state like a business. Florida has had a Republican governor since 1998 and a Republican-controlled House since 1996. What's more, the Florida GOP and GOP Lite — viz. Florida's fiscally conservative Democrats, like his opponent Alex Sink — have attempted to run the state like a business for two decades. As is the case whenever conservatives run government like a business, they have succeeded, assuming their intended destination was "into the ground." Republicans run their precious government-business things like those dot.com bubble guys ran their insubstantial vaporware companies. They produce nothing, make a lot of loud, aspirational noises about ideas; then eventually someone does due diligence on the books; it turns out they've been bankrupt for decades, and they burned the petty cash on fancy chairs and coke.

SomethingAwful: The Emmys Are for Idiots, Part I

Unless you're the low man on the totem pole at William Morris or Creative Artists Agency and hoping a darkhorse-candidate client is about to walk away with the gold, you probably have no business caring at all about the Emmys. (Well, maybe you design atrocious-looking dresses.) They're historically hidebound, arbitrary and mostly gutless. So, if you're a sophisticated person with intelligence and taste, you've probably been having pointless, impassioned and highly detailed internet arguments about them for the last week anyway.

The Emmys are for idiots, and because I love television and so easily get sucked into arbitrary and pointless evaluative contests, they're just the thing for me. Click below, on the last remaining BORT license plate in stock, to find out why the history of the Emmys has me thinking about torture, Night Court, edelweiss and a centuries-old pandemic of Helen Hunt. Then check back next week for Part II, in which I explain why the 2010 awards were just as bad as every other year.


Continued in Part II.

SAVAGE SEZ: Free Lemonade Leads to Gov. Lemon-Aid

Terry Savage yells at her family in closed cars when they misinterpret the economic interests of children and lemonade. Then she yells at children. Terry Savage has made a career writing columns that tell you about the important things you don't know, and sometimes she's forced to improvisationally dictate these columns literally in your face, because you have failed to pick up a newspaper for mediated in-your-faceness. Terry Savage is sick of your bullshit, kids.

She is a successful writer. Most people probably know her for her book The Savage Truth on Money* (or other books that have "The Savage Truth" in them and are also about money; it's a theme). It offers the economic wisdom that an intelligent and dedicated person could write herself by reading scores of identical retirement-planning books already in existence, resolving contested issues by going with whatever interpretation or course of action was advocated by the most books, then rewriting all the information in her own folksy language. Terry probably didn't write her book this way, but she benefited from the luxury of having accredited letters following her name when she produced a work of similar content. Planning ahead: that's what separates people who sit in a car yelling about lemonade and those who have to sit there and pretend not to be mortified by them.

Cliff Kincaid and Right Side News: When Gay Abortions Are Arizona's Down's Genocide

People send in links pretty often, and most of the time there's not much to do with them, short of repeating earlier pieces or pasting a picture I have of myself from the time I visited a church in Brazil and started weeping blood. Now and then, though, someone tweets or IMs something fascinating. Last week, a very funny Twitter poster and nice guy named Sskylark sent me a link to a website called Right Side News and their article, "George Will Sells Out [sic] to Cultural Corruption."

In the interest of citing sources, I will provide relevant links, but first let me implore you not to click either the link to the site or the article in question. (Most of the article is quoted below.) I know; you're tempted, drawn with a complex and unfamiliar yearning toward their content. They offer news from the Right Side, a pledge that unhouses your beliefs. You were wrong all this time and never even knew it. What side are you even on? The wrong side? The side that has more animal droppings in its food? The side that can't gamble well? You will not find these answers at these links. Instead, you could only destabilize the fragile world of simultaneous conservatism-and-correctness that their name has erected.

According to their media kit (do not click), 77% of their audience is aged 45-74. Feral youths hopping willy-nilly from this site will only tear their ad algorithms away from absorbent adult pants toward discounts on absorbing African beats. Worse, you might crash their servers. Accustomed as they are to 3,200-5,500 readers per day, referred readers from this site could dangerously increase their traffic by 50-100%, and conservatives are constitutionally unprepared for flooding. As for why a dead African dictator writing 10-15 times per month can compete popularly with dozens of contributors posting daily articles and op-eds, know too that popular approval and demand is the nostrum of the liberal, who needs his seething hordes to overwhelm the elite and narrow privilege of hard, sensible reality.

By the Time I Get Near Alabama

I'm going to say goodbye to some of my favorite beaches on the Gulf Coast. In some cases it's probably premature, but I don't know when else I'll have an excuse to drive along them. I'm not sure if I'll see the bleaker stuff. Last year I took a back way out of New Orleans and drove through part of the Lower 9th Ward and felt like a human vulture. Even if there is something visually awesome and profound about seeing white sand beaches turn pitch black, like an original-series Star Trek race metaphor, there's no guarantee I'd have the stomach for it.

It's always tempting on these trips to try to scan the AM dial and see if I can replicate the Simpsons' "Itchy and Scratchy Land" experience and skip to the next item on the Signs of Evil Countdown. Black oil gradually destroying significant economic engines — fishing, tourism — for each of the Gulf states certainly offers a key ingredient for approaching the apocalypse like David Letterman.

Happy Martin Luther King Day: Fuck You, Leno

The old maxim that you can judge a man's character by the company he keeps seemed to specifically bite Jay Leno in the ass over the last couple weeks. Semi-retired comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Reiser spoke up in his defense, prompting some clever people to observe on Twitter that if they were overpaid comics who stopped being funny decades ago, they'd stick up for Leno, too.

Allowing Leno's friends to cast an instructive light on the man himself seemed fair when Reiser wrote a disingenuous op-ed piece for The Huffington Post called, "A Teachable Leno moment." With at least one of them declaring his personal knowledge of him to be a legitimate yardstick, analogy was let loose. Others doubtless crafted more generous comparisons, but to me Paul Reiser apologizing for Leno was a lot like Rudolf Hess parachuting into Scotland to try to explain that Hitler guy.

Reiser's one of those comics like Leno who a few people insist was absolutely brilliant but whose brilliance remains a mystery (or one of those remotely plausible facts) to just about everyone. You can find proof of it if you go looking, but most people aren't going to go looking since the evidence they have on hand doesn't make the effort seem worth it. Reiser abandoned his comic role early and often, beginning with Barry Levinson's Diner and reaching its apotheosis in the TV series Mad About You. Along the way he played supporting roles in several movies, including Aliens, in which his weaselly corporate whore character Burke was confronted and probably later impregnated by aliens to use his body as a generative husk for something more profitable to them. Retrospectively this role seems career-defining.

The AV Club's 50 Best Albums of the Decade Are All Wrong: Their Top 10 & Afterword

CONTENTS:
Intro & The AV Club's #50 - #31 — The AV Club's #30-#11
The AV Club's Top 10 & Afterword — Alan Greenspan Presents Our Top 10
___________________
by Mobutu Sese Seko with Rigamarock & Shwaywhat

(Note: all thumbnailed images go to Youtube videos of relevant songs from the band.)

10. The National, Alligator (2005)
"Alligator is The National’s third full-length, but the first that introduced a fully realized vision of the Brooklyn band: brooding, smart, and uniquely capable of soundtracking the ennui of rainy city life. It’s been accused of being boring, but it absolutely isn’t." Thanks, AV Club! Here's an idea: any time you feel compelled to frontload a single-paragraph blurb review of an album by addressing a common charge of it's being boring, it's boring. Just the fact that it's pretty much the first thing that comes to mind after placing the album in the band's chronology and placing the band geographically is a huge indicator that whatever point you're making is already a loser. "Brooding" and "soundtracking the ennui of rainy city life" are like two different rock-review variations on, "You're gonna love this girl! She's got a great personality."

Series Blog, Games 4 & 5: Gutty Twitter, Centaurs and Chinless Buzzards

This is the latest part in a volume of frustration. Part One deals with David Wells wearing a Member's Only jacket over his fatness. Part Two celebrates another postseason loss for the overrated/under-ridiculed Tony LaRussa. Part Three is your resource for FISTING and how getting a job because of your dad and grandpa doesn't work so well for people around you. Part Four details how godawful Joe Buck and Tim McCarver continue to be. Part Five focuses on World Series Game One and fan-paranoid jinxes. And Part Six covers World Series Games Two and Three. Let's play ball!

World Series Game Four

• Ugh, another national anthem, another gross martial display. Just once I sort of wish that the Air Force or Army (or whichever branch) didn't screen their singers carefully enough and sent someone out there with PTSD. We'd sit as baseball and the Armed Services again solemnized and venerated combat, death, injury and horror, and the well-coiffed representative would belt out the familiar lines, reaching the "laaaaaand of the freeeeeeeee" and hear the fireworks go off and immediately flip the fuck out. I think maybe that might dial back the aggressive patriotism to tolerable pre-9/11 levels, at least for a couple years.


• 8:23 pm:

McCARVER: More than anything else [Blanton's] a gutty performer, and that's why he's out there tonight.

We're not even at the first pitch yet, and we have a "gutty" sighting. As was the case with Chase Utley in Game One, McCarver has nothing to say and is scrambling for meaningless baseball generalities. In Utley's case, he didn't expect the guy to be the offensive hero of the first game, so he ad-libbed something that at first blush might have seemed meaningful. In this case, he's just trying not to insult Blanton. He can only bring up his good outing against the Rays in the 2008 World Series and the home run he hit off Edwin Jackson for so long — there is airtime to fill — but he can't go negative without alienating a huge FOX market share.

Series Blog, Games 2 & 3: Corporate Whore Stadium and, Like, Double Guitars

As I explained at painful and unfunny length in the Game One blog, I'm sports superstitious. Sure, I'll be ironic and dismissive about it, but I still take it seriously behaviorally. Sort of like a guy who constantly busts on fat chicks yet has unprotected sex with a different one every night. I might dismiss my sitting in a weird position for "Good Luck," and even mine some good jokes from doing so, but I'm still the one sincerely doing something inadvisable or aesthetically wanting with my body.

Because the Phillies had won Game One while I was chitchatting with people online, I had to do that for Game Two, right? I didn't want the Phils to lose. The problem was, the people I'd been yammering at weren't online. Thankfully, one of my few Pennsylvania buddies, a former online writer I know, was around and willing to be bugged. Let's play ball!

Dental Plan: Youtube Doubler VII

Even if it makes me seem like I'm permanently stuck at age 14, I'll probably always consider Pink Floyd one of the greatest rock bands in history, and I'll probably always consider the "Dental plan! / Lisa needs braces!" exchange from The Simpsons' "Last Exit to Springfield" to be the funniest five words ever written.

Now those two great tastes can taste great together.

Click the pic for more:


And, yes, I actually got drunk and watched this all the way through.

Endut! Hoch Hech!

No reason at all.

Doesn't have to be a reason.