Fact free in several formats

If the current wave of video blogging and podcasts has convinced us of anything, it is that producing good video or podcasts really is hard work. Not only do many of the usual suspects produce astoundingly crappy output, the mediocrity is enhanced by the same standard of accuracy they display in their blogging efforts. Which is why we were pretty excited when we discovered the Ole’ Perfesser and Dr. Mrs. Ole’ Perfesser show. What could be better than those two going at it? Those two going at it in the company of James Lileks and Cathy Seipp. From that edition:

Dr. Mrs. Ole’ Perfesser: I remember when I was a kid we had a smoking pit (?) in our high school. I didn’t smoke, but it was considered very uncool to be out there smoking. And now everybody’s like [sic] smoking and it’s supposed to be really cool. I mean, I wonder if we’ve gone too far, you know, with all this anti-this anti-that.

Now, we don’t know where Dr. Mrs. Ole’ Perfesser went to high school. We don’t know when Dr. Mrs. Ole’ Perfesser went to high school. But we do know one thing: Sadly, No!

The prevalence of current smoking among women increased from less than 6 percent in 1924 to 34 percent in 1965, then declined to 22 to 23 percent in the late 1990s. […]

…current smoking among high school senior girls was the same in 2000 as in 1988. […] (PDF)

Visual aid?

What about the recent past?

Expect us to revisit that podcast in the coming weeks.

 

Comments: 31

 
 
 

So, apparently, all these yay-hoos didn’t want to be political columnists and professional pundits. They wanted to host cable access shows. Makes perfect sense now.

And how wrong is it of me to be actually looking forward to the Adam Yoshida Variety Hour?

 
 

Good God, they’ve all got horrible voices. Especially Mrs. Instatwit; she sounds like a punctured goose deflating. And I never knew it was “lie-leks.” I thought it was “lee-leks.” Learn something useless and annoying every day, I guess.

Yoshida sounds like the character “Darylle” on Kids in the Hall. Goofy.

 
 

Some people blog for a reason, take Atrios for example. Same can be said for newspapermen, and many of that genre have been told they have a ‘face for radio’.

This having a voice for webblogging is a whole new standard. Who knew.

That said, vlogs should be left to the cute

and bright.

 
 

anyhow, that link was to MobuzzTV, a vlog.

 
 

Adam Yoshida asked why conservatives should even pretend to include liberals in the public dialogue. When he was feeling fat and happy, Nov. 2004.

Maybe we’ll look in on ya in 5 months, Adam :).

 
 

Aw, c’mon now… making fun of silly errors is one thing…but making fun of their voices seems a bit highschoolish to me…

 
 

Reynold’s wife is supposedly a social scientist (a psychology Ph.D. I believe)?

I doubt if she’s much of one from this bullshit comment.

“Dr. Mrs. Ole’ Perfesser: I remember when I was a kid we had a smoking pit (?) in our high school. I didn’t smoke, but it was considered very uncool to be out there smoking.”

Uncool to you and your little clique? Uncool to the slags? Uncooler than smoking dope? You measured “uncoolness” how? Was your group considered cool? Maybe it was the poor kids smoking out there which made the middle-class kids or those with aspirations find it uncool? etc etc. etc. This is a psychologist thinking like this?

“And now everybody’s like [sic] smoking and it’s supposed to be really cool. I mean, I wonder if we’ve gone too far, you know, with all this anti-this anti-that.”

Wow, reverse psychology! I thought that was only used in sixties television shows. I see it lives on with professional psychologists!

Feh

 
 

but making fun of their voices seems a bit highschoolish to me…

Come on, you think that’s highschoolish? The two posts before this feature ugly cats, three of the last four feature crotch shots…

Dammit, I love this place!

 
 

No it is highschoolish. I’m deepy ashamed….
….
….
….NOT!

I’m sorry, but all those dorks really bug me.

 
 

I measure uncoolness with a slab of raw meat.

watch it spoil.

 
Socraticsilence
 

Usage of the phrase “goin’ at it” with the people in question has left me mentally scarred.

 
 

…seems a bit highschoolish to me

Sometimes, Winston, sometimes two and two are COBAGZ!!!!!!

 
 

You guys are out of your mind. I’m TRAGICALLY embarassed to find that the blog I hang around the most is *ahem* Highschoolish. Shit. How the HELL am I supposed to show my face in the blogosphere after this. OH! Wait! That’s why it’s funny!!! Never mind…

mikey

 
 

Cathy Seipp: I don’t why, for some reason in my 20s, I started wearing them [seatbelts] constantly. And you know, it’s easy to laugh about this kind of stuff, but it got me thinking recently, you know those old ‘Buckle Up for Safety’ campaigns … really did work. Because for some reason, we changed as a society into … lackadaisical people never wearing seatbelts to now we do, all the time without thinking about it.

For some reason. It’s called good legislation, you libertarian moron.

 
 

I went to She Who Must Be Obeyed
(http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)
in eager anticipation to see her in action.
Disappointed again!
When will we finally see her flash us?

 
 

Lileks: They ban smoking in Irish pubs in Ireland.

Apparently, Lileks doesn’t know what they call Chinese food in China.

 
 

But what takes the cake on that podcast is the exchange about kids in public. First, Lileks goes on an extended rant about parents’ paranoia about sexual predators … at no time are the words “Bill O’Reilly” or “Fox News” mentioned. Then, Lileks and Siepp have a wonderful little exchange about how kids in the Midwest are so much better behaved in public than kids in the “indulged” liberal enclaves like L.A. All completely anecdotal, of course … except in a cool new solipsistic twist: minus any anecdotes.

 
 

God, InstaHayseed, Ms. InstaHayseed, Cathy Tripe, and the Gnat Daddy are boring. I couldn’t bring myself to finish listening. They reminded me of “Dolans Unscripted” before those two got booted off CNN.

 
 

It’s so sweet to watch Atlas and her child doing the Zarqawi death dance and lecturing Nick Berg’s father about revenge.

….*shudder*

 
 

It’s so sweet to watch Atlas and her child doing the Zarqawi death dance and lecturing Nick Berg’s father about revenge.

She’s raising a beautiful little fascist. Talk about getting the short straw and having the skanktacular Atlas as your mom. That is a tough break.

 
 

Guys, this twit is barely literate. I know she’s irritating, but it’s not nice to make fun of people who ride the short bus to school. Just cover your mouth when you laugh at her, that’s all I’m saying.

 
 

Oh, PS there was a “smoking pit” at my high school, fortunately it wasn’t the result of an incompetent chemistry teacher (not for lack of effort, however). I don’t remember if the kids were “cool” but they certainly were not, on the whole, wealthy or privileged. But as far as I’m concerned, people who make fun of the less privileged aren’t “cool”, they are just elitist pigs.

Now my high school is 40% immigrant and while the “smoking pit” was abolished in the 1980s, I think the smoking pit hasn’t reconstituted itself off-campus because for the most part, the immigrants are too satisfied just being alive to tempt fate with smoking.

 
 

Holy crap. I just watched Pamela’s insane rant on Zarqawi. Like JK47 says, weep for the little girl she’s raising to celebrate death. What a fucking nutcase.

It’s funny, too, how the insane, unreadable structure, design and content of her blog is mirrored precisely by her methed-out performance rants on video. I love the part where she babbles incoherently about JFK, stolen elections, how “Puerto Rico wouldn’t be Castro now if not for the Bay of Puerca”*, then winds up her blabbering by shouting out “Algiers Hiss!”

What a bloodthirsty harridan.

*Quadruple “huh?”

 
 

About the Zarqawi thing, am I the only one that gets the creeps when people are gleeful over a death? Okay, yeah, he was a bad guy, but my reaction to his death is relief that he won’t hurt anyone else, a little hope that maybe this might improve things a bit in Iraq, and grief at the waste of a life. What is there to be gleeful about here? It seems to me like a tragedy from beginning to end–a twisted psyche that spread destruction wherever he could.

This right-wing craving for blood, treating human deaths like deaths in a video game, is incredibly disgusting.

 
 

I’m so old I remember when Lileks was funny.

It was *harrrrumph* 25 years ago last week, when he was writing for the Daily and didn’t pretend to have politics of his own.

 
 

About the Zarqawi thing, am I the only one that gets the creeps when people are gleeful over a death?

The most disgusting part was when she started lecturing Nick Berg’s father about not being bloodthirsty enough. Cindy Sheehan, the 9/11 wives and Nick Berg’s dad are the new wingnut whipping boys. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve given to the country– if you are not a wingnut, they will stick the shiv right in your back. Of course John Kerry and Max Cleland will tell you the same thing.

Then there’s the bit where she prattles on about how we were “invaded” by people who want to “take over the country.” Bitch, if your country can be “taken over” by 19 thugs with box cutters, it isn’t much of a fucking country, is it?

At the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law, I have to say that living in this country the last five years has really given me a whole new perspective on how Fascism and the Nazi party came to power. If you patiently, steadily pander to selfish, paranoid creeps, you can create quite a little fascist movement for yourself. Of course it helps if the opposition party is a bunch of pampered, sissy-ass pansies and doesn’t stand up to the fascist bullies. At this point, it’s hard to even get outraged at the ReThugs anymore. We know what they’re all about. It’s like getting mad at a lion for eating a zebra. It’s just what they do. I’m more pissed off at the Democrats now. Stand up to this bullshit, you fucking pussies!

 
 

Yep, this appealing to people’s ugliest impulses is quite the lucrative business.

Sigh. It’s getting harder and harder for me to read the news, and not just because my IQ is dropping from all the exposure to wingnuttiness. Thank goodness for TPM Muckraker; schadenfreude is the only pleasant thing to be found in politics these days.

Here’s a tidbit that cheered me up a bit, though: a Representative from California (apparently one of the few not being investigated in connection with the Cunningham case and, not coincidentally, a Democrat) is introducing a bill to apply U.S. labor laws to the Mariana Islands. This is the bill that DeLay had been blocking for years; apparently, he was a big fan of sweatshops.

 
 

God. I just click on the Atlas Shrugged Video and I got douchechills of embarrassment over my entire body.
Seriously, goosebumps of embarrassment from my head to my ankles.

 
 

Dr. InstaStigma is everything wrong with clinical psychology today; the HMO fueled short-term cognitive-behavioral approach which is a corrective stance, embraced by none-too-bright authoritarian pricks. She doesn’t have a psychodynamic thought in her head, the practice requires near genius to carry off, which says something about its demise. Her theories are odious, blame-the-victim and get over it already, at the same time she inisists her clientele includes victims of family trauma, which makes her an expert. I suppose a prosperous well-heeled and statistically insignificant population of victims does exist, but in the real world victims of family trauma live out of garbage cans and trade blow jobs for sandwiches or a needle in their vein and could not afford the rich-bitch rates.

 
 

“They ban smoking in Irish pubs in Ireland.”

That´s the funniest thing I´ve read all week.

 
 

Podcasts — at last, a cure for my insomnia at work.

Have to admit that Lileks has actually got a decent radio voice — he just needs better material.

 
 

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