Grok The Vote: President Cosby Addresses the Nation on Healthcare Reform
Nov 03Friends and fellow Americans,
When I was growing up in Philadelphia, one of the kids we’d play with was named Albert. And Albert was fat. So fat. Albert was so fat that we all called him, “Fat Albert.” Not maliciously, you understand. We called Harold Tall Harold because he was tall. We were consistent. That reminds me of the time that Harold and I got on the J bus by accident. It was Memorial Day, and my mother had sent me to the store with a dollar fifty to get a package of hamburger buns so my Dad could grill up some bacon burger dogs. It was seven blocks to the store, but Harold was in a wheelchair from the time when Junior Brown knocked him over the side of the overpass when we were playing street basketball. We all hated Junior Brown. Because we were poor, we had to make up our own games, you know, so I invented a game where everybody stood against the fence with their backs to one kid, and this one kid, see, would pelt the kids with trash and rocks. I called that game “Junior Brown.” Kids today with their video games and their Pokemons and DVDs, they aren’t being raised correctly. Instead of neglecting your kids inside, open the door and neglect them outside. Anyhow, Fat Albert was so fat that he’d have to come into my house through the garage, and as you could hear him coming up the walk – hear him because the earth shook as he took each step: “BOOM” “BOOM” “BOOM” “BOOM,” “Hey Hey Hey, Missus Cosby! Is Bill around? We gonna go play Junior Brown!” – the refrigerator would hide in the closet.
Now, Fat Albert is a drain on our nation’s healthcare funding on account of he keeps getting into humorous accidents because he’s so fat. So what we need to do my friends is increase awareness and promotion of fitness programs in our schools. I have also been asked to remind you all there’s nothing healthier or more patriotic than Jell-O Jigglers.
Good night.
Grok The Vote: Voting With Your Dollars/Eyeballs/Ass Cheeks
Nov 03That’s always the popular nerd refrain, isn’t it?
“Vote with your dollars.”
Can’t stand the direction of the modern-day DCU? Vote with your dollars. Sick of mediocre genre TV shows on the major networks? Vote with your eyeballs. Hate George Lucas? Vote with your ass cheeks.
(And by that, yes, I actually DO mean take a steaming dump on his front doorstep.)
Naw, y’all, but seriously. The idea of “voting with my dollars” has always mildly fascinated me, because it makes perfect sense, and yet it ALMOST NEVER WORKS.
Seriously. Can you think of one single occasion where not purchasing something, or watching something, or buying a ticket to sit in a movie theater seat for something, has had any impact on that said something whatsoever?
Here’s a few brief examples of me voting with MY dollars.
Grok The Vote: Yes We Can, but No I Can't
Oct 31While not quite as cool as getting a call from Optimus Prime or Samuel L Jackson, I am quite excited by this new technology that allows us to see a week forward into the future. Once they fine tune the bit where we can tune in to this reality frequency, instead of ones where I’m not a Canadian, and thus ineligible to vote. If your preferred candidate doesn’t win next week, it’s not my fault.
Grok The Vote: That One Thing
Oct 31When it comes to voting and politics, I think most of us want to be Spock. Logic and reason are our hoped-for guides, our arguments spilling forth in factually-supported constructs of such astonishing correctness that they knock the opposing viewpoint right out of the park…er, starship? Whatever. In reality, of course, emotion — hearts and guts — always worms its way in. We all have that one issue we can’t be cool and measured and rational about. For instance, this morning I spotted a certain bumper sticker supporting a certain California prop on the car in front of me and it made me so blood-boilingly angry that I suddenly had the wild, rageful urge to floor the gas and ram said car repeatedly. Or maybe just steal the assy bumper sticker.
I think the way in which we think about and discuss politics parallels classic Geek Fights in a pretty obvious way. Geeks don’t just like to argue. We like to argue using wordy analyses we have spent an inordinate amount of time constructing, made up of bits of continuity (“X character acted this way in all previous storylines, therefore his/her behavior in this storyline MAKES NO SENSE”), reasoning (“For X character to react this way is possibly consistent with past characterization, but is not in any way, shape, or form a logical way for a human to react and therefore MAKES NO SENSE”), and dental floss (“This is dumb and MAKES NO SENSE”). We might as well be stumping for a presidential candidate.
