MalAProp

Headline: "Bush blames Reid on immigration bill." [link]

[Edit: Awww, they fixed it.]

"I have this great act, where I trap these eight people in a house..."

My sweetie-is-away double feature last night:

1. The Aristocrats is a documentary about a bad joke. Penn Jillette and friend ask about a hundred comedians (from George Carlin to Eddie Izzard to Tommy Smothers) to deliver the same joke, Johnny Carson's favorite joke, a joke which has become legendary—not for its humor or its filthiness, but for its endlessly mutable structure. The setup and the punchline are mere parentheses, not at all funny in themselves; the punchline, in fact, is almost guaranteed to elicit nothing more than a mild chuckle. The creamy middle, however, is a blank canvas on which comedians can practice their art—never (or hardly ever) in front of an audience, but for other comedians, as backstage warmup or late-night one-upsmanship, in an orgy of obscenity and bad taste that can stretch to ninety minutes or more. The lack of any real punchline permits the comedian to experiment with boundaries, timing, and expectations in almost total freedom, which leaves the comedic structure hanging naked in midair. With a dwarf. And a diarrhetic pony.
   
   It's not a joke that can be told effectively to a camera, or even to a non-comedian; for it to be funny, the listener has to exist in a certain context and a certain state of mind. Over the course of ninety minutes, though, the movie brings us into that state of mind, with continuous retellings (each filthier than the last), historical asides, comedic analyses, and comedians making themselves crack up. By the end I was barely able to stay on the futon for laughing.
   
   [Edit: Many of the comments on IMDB miss the point of the movie, wondering why the comedians aren't telling funnier jokes. It's an exercise in creative constraint—if you give 100 artists a dead rat and a can of sauerkraut and tell them to create Art, you're probably not going to wind up with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (unless one of them is Rauschenberg). The interest comes from seeing their individual responses to the constraints, watching them exercise their craft to get as much value as they can from the materials they're given. Add in nifty anecdotes about the last 75 years of the Rat-Sauerkraut Contest, and you've got yourself a movie, even though you could trivially find better art than any rat-sauerkraut artwork ever created at your most podunk neighborhood museum.
   
   My favorite comment, from someone who hated it: "For example, incest can be a funny 'topic' if used in a conceptual sense with some interesting slapstick..." I really wish I knew what they were thinking of. And, okay, I also liked: "This type of writing , and verbiage should not even exist in the most private of settings, unless you are a closet child molester, or social deviant. If you enjoyed this movie.............seek immediate psychological intervention."]


2. I had more or less the same problems with Saw II as I did with the original: people are dumb, but they're not that dumb. If you're in a house filled with death-traps, you do not blunder blindly ahead like a lobotomized howler monkey. For instance, you do not crawl blindly into a giant oven without first looking it over to see if you can, say, disconnect the gas. Once inside, if the antidote you're looking for does not come free from its chain immediately, you do not yank on it. I'm sufficiently familiar with the fragility of mechanical devices that it breaks my plausibility meter to imagine eight people running free in a house of complicated death traps, surrounded by found objects, without being unable to gum up their works after two minutes of thought.
   
   That said, the plot was entertainingly twisty, and the traps were enjoyably squirmacious. Worth a rental for the horror fan.

Bonus review: Central Market's frozen crab rangoons are actually pretty tasty, for a supermarket-bought frozen appetizer, but you probably don't want to eat an entire dinner of crab rangoons. Almost certainly not while watching these two movies. Bloof.

Not to be alarmist, but...

Um. Ack?

The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue. [...] A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that "this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war." The former intelligence officials depicts planning as "enormous," "hectic" and "operational," Hersh writes. [link]

This is a delayed April Fool's joke, right?