The Family Circus Isn't Funny

Remember back in the good old days of the newspaper comics, when Gary Larson would every now and then publish a Far Side that was utterly bewildering to anybody who's never been dropped on their head. I think this Family Circus is Bil Keane's homage to a master.... The only thing is that with Larson, even when you couldn't figure out why the comic was funny, you at least knew where the joke was supposed to be. This Family Circus is... uh...

Well, in semiotic terms, the drink signifies... No, that doesn't work.

But in context...

It's like Keane was smoking hash one day and drew up this brilliant anti-comic epitome of The Family Circus. Where there's normally an observation of Jeffy's limited grasp of some common English phrase, instead Keane filled his circle with the most extreme, anodyne scene possible. A modern artist would invite the audience's participation and interpretation, but since I have no interest in the characters, Jeffy and his perpetual look of shock, or his father whats-his-name with the missing eyes, I'm starting to wonder if Keane's not testing me. I think he wants vindication, proof that anyone not chuckling at Jeffy pestering the Lord to bless his Spiderman action figure is a sexual deviant raping American values and destined to be left among those screaming and gnashing their teeth during the End Times. Take that, parodists!

Fifty big dudes from New York played football better than fifty big dudes from Massachusetts. That's such exciting news, especially since I happen to be from the same region of the country that the winning team plays their home games in! It's like we're all brothers! If I have to hear one more knuckle-dragger thrill about how "we" won the Super Bowl, I swear I'm gonna punch someone. "We" did not win anything ━ the Giants won, you sat on your fat ass and stuffed a bag of Doritos down your maw. There's a difference.

Even worse are the New York tabloids, each one the first to declare the Giants' win a "miracle," and the football players themselves, who all insist on thanking God for winning the game. God, if He exists, had better have more important things to spend His time on than giving Eli Manning (or somebody, I don't really follow football) the strength to throw an eighty-yard touchdown pass (or whatever), or I'm converting to Satanism. God ━ I know this isn't the way things work, but God should smite these football players for their hubris, and the false humility they mask it with. It's not like anyone at the Super Bowl is rescuing puppies from burning buildings or anything.

There's the argument that these professional sports, the community winning vicariously, cements us together in the shared experience. I've read about the Palio di Siena and its effect, that of a needlessly violent symbolic confrontation, dropping the city's crime rate, and I wonder if anyone's done a study about the communal effect of football and its ball throwing, catching, and primitive homosexual overtones. Personally, I think that actually smashing things in a consequence-free environment would be a lot more cathartic than watching other people do it, especially when they get a couple million dollars, a 2008 Cadillac Bling-Mobile, and a trip to Disneyland as compensation for the bruises and broken bones.

I believe that's why they came up with Grand Theft Auto.

B-List Celeb I Don't Care About: Dead!

Heath Ledger died two days ago. Noooooooo! The New York tabloids are keeping their usual sense of perspective, reporting on Ledger's death as if flags should be flown at half-mast. At least they're showing more restraint than "nina" from Tbilisi, posting on the BBC's message board:

Heath,I loved you always and everywhere.When I heard about your death I thought I would die with you but I couldn't.I remember once when I asked you an autograph,you smiled sweetly and asked my name.It was the best memory of my life.
i am now devastated.
Please don't say that Heath's dead.He lives in our hearts...forever...
Rest in peace my love

I'm surprised that A Knight's Tale even made it to the Republic of Georgia.

I understand mourning if you knew the man, if you'll experience some genuine loss from his death. But you didn't, and I don't care how many times you've seen Brokeback Mountain or The Brothers Grimm, or if you own the complete series of Roar on DVD, you didn't know him. He made his living pretending to be other people, okay? Maybe, if you stretch, if you pick up on the tics and nuances of individual actors, you can see him as someone whose job it is to entertain you, in the same way your supermarket checkout boy is the guy who bags your groceries. But since you spend your time writing misspelled posts on internet bulletin boards, I doubt that, too. You'll wake up tomorrow, go to work, have lunch, day after day, and eventually Access Hollywood will run story after story on some other instantly interchangeable twenty-something promising actor; the next thing you know, you're dreaming about marrying Casey Affleck or Zac Ephron on a beach in Malibu, nina.

The tabloids will keep up their usual respectful, objective coverage until Brangelina adopts another foreign baby or Britney has a back-alley abortion or something.

I didn't lose any sleep over that construction worker who fell forty-two stories to his death (around the corner from Ledger's apartment, too) ― and you didn't either ― so what makes Heath Ledger so much more worth the hyperbole? Front-page news versus the Post's "Local" section, buried among "Out of Control Psych Hospital $lapped" and "Charges Due in Base-Haul?" A "tragedy" or "tragic," according to... let's see: Nicole Kidman, Rob Reiner, the Australian prime minister, the president of Warner Brothers, and Mel Gibson. Benazir Bhutto's death was a tragedy that threatened to throw an entire nuclear-armed nation into chaos; Heath Ledger's death is unfortunate at best, although we all know it'll turn into an exhibition for Pat O'Brien to cream himself over while he's on The Insider pretending to give a damn.

If you saw Joel McHale's brief eulogy for Ledger on The Soup, he (inadvertently) highlighted what's so ridiculous about the reaction to Ledger's death: "In all our time doing this show, we've never had reason to mention him," which is the classiest celebrity worship possible. That's our standard? He wasn't a psycho douchebag with uncontrollable rage issues? Let's try raising our expectations of people a little bit.

There's less than a week till the next and, God willing, last Harry Potter book comes out, and I've made no secret about my utter disdain for this jejune fantasy kiddie lit. But I swear, all will be forgiven if Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ends right in the middle of a sentence, followed by like ten blank pages. Could you imagine the chaos reigning in streets? Grown-ups — not necessarily grown-ups with stellar literary analysis capabilities, but still — beat up their TiVos when handed this ambiguity, so I'd love to see a billion kids disillusioned with books in a way that all the cheesy pro-reading posters in all the libraries in the world couldn't fix. I would laugh and laugh and laugh at the children who've spent their whole lives with the series, never getting closure, because I'm mean like that. Man, that's a tough way to learn an existential lesson.

I would settle for an allegorical ending, humanity transcends its moral weakness for eternal bliss next to God. But that's not going to happen, because unlike in its far superior Narnia thematic progenitor, the hero of Harry Potter isn't a representative for humanity and because Rowling has the same lazy, and somewhat oligarchic, contempt for her readers that I have for her billion-dollar empire. It doesn't matter that it's a children's book where the ancillary characters die sometimes; for kids, the morals are necessarily as thin and the book itself is thick, and that makes any ending manipulative and cheap, as tacked-on as the inevitable sequels Harry Potter: The Next Generation, Harry Potter: Enterprise, and Harry Potter: Deep Space Nine.

People are going apeshit for Spider-Man. Thing is, I can't think about Spider-Man without falling head-first into some gaping logical holes. Okay, he's bitten by this irradiated spider, and how does that make him half-arachnid? I've never lived on a farm, or been in 4-H, but I'm pretty sure you don't get a mule when the horse eats the donkey. There needs to be some fucking going on, and the offspring gets the magical powers, or the nearsightedness, exostosis, and sluggish metabolism, if your sire and dam are my parents. I can see a radioactive spider bite giving you cancer, maybe. Or this. (Warning: eeewwwwww.)

I don't know how other people aren't bothered by this. Are the special effects that great that you can watch the movie and not be like, "But... spider silk comes out of their butts. Why would Spider-Man's webs come out of his hands? And isn't that convenient, how the unstable radio-isotope he's infected with makes the webs come out of his fingers, and not, say, his ears?" Anyway, I went to this Spider-Man page on Wikipedia, and what starts out ridiculous just becomes insulting. Here's a partial list of Spider-Man's superpowers: he can heal himself rapidly, has enhanced resistance to drugs, has enhanced vision, has superhuman strength, clairvoyance, and — for some reason — is immune to vampirism. Yes, but can he also keep aphids from destroying crop yields? Apparently the one beneficial thing spiders provide to the ecosystem, and Spider-Man can't do it. Pathetic.

Cool New MySpace People

I have lots of reasons for hating MySpace, although most of them are that MySpace is owned by a company called Intermix Media, which is owned by News Corp, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch... so every time you sign in to check on your top eight friends, it's like you're basically giving Sean Hannity a blowjob. Liberals in the media need to start spreading that image: A vote against H.R. 2060, the Internet Radio Equality Act, is like giving Rush a sensual massage — there's 336 dudes in Congress and I'd like to remind all of them that rubbing Limbaugh's junk is totally, a hundred percent gay, just in case the mental image on its own wasn't enough to discourage them. But today's reason for hating on MySpace is that they keep on suggesting I meet "Cool New People" like this:

I don't know about Ryan or Seamus, but Hillary? Really? Did they change the meaning of "cool" and forget to tell me?

Full disclosure: John Edwards is in my friends, but hey, at least he's got a well-defined universal health care plan and has taken responsibility and repudiated his vote on the war in Iraq. That makes him cool. I'm sure the entire MySpace demographic, which seems to consist of fourteen-year-olds, derivative alt-rock bands, and hacky, pandering stand-up comedians, will agree with me.

I'm a little disheartened by this MySpace electioneering, since most everyone on MySpace is either too young, too dumb, too drunk, or too much of an automaton selling home mortgage and penis-enhancement cream to actually vote. It's like campaigning at an underground rave, although who wouldn't get a kick out of seeing Mitt Romney in a mesh shirt, head to toe in body glitter and twirling a couple of lightsticks. Dude, Romney, if you do that, and drop some X, I'll totally forgive the whole Mormon, Reagan-idolizing Republican thing you've got going, which is being a whole lot more generous than most of your base would ever be.

By the way, did you hear that MySpace and Mark Burnett, also known as the guy who's responsible for shoving seventeen iterations of Jeff Probst in America's face, are coming up with a new political reality show. Bunch of people with webcams and free time upload audition videos, and — in a shocking twist for democracy — idiots vote on who's the most telegenic. It's all premised on the notion that anyone can make a good leader of the free world, even this jackass, who's flipping us off in his profile picture. Or this woman with presidential-sized tits. Or even this retard could be our president. I'm sure that's exactly what the founding fathers had in mind.

Despite the comparisons it's getting to American Idol, I'm not all that worried about MySpace Picks The President having a huge effect on the political process. See, with American Idol, all those millions of people keeping Sanjaya on TV for weeks had to do was send a text message or go online and vote. I firmly believe, and Hillary will back me up on this, that's all that the nation's youth is willing to do in order to make their voices heard. In the real election, you've gotta figure out where your polling place is, get off your fat ass, deal with the elderly people staffing the voting machines. Pretty sure the kids are all too busy posting panda fight videos on each other's bulletin boards.