It's a funny story...or is it?

I have often said that I'm a card-carrying member of the "Nothing Sacred" school of humor. This isn't technically true, as there is no official school so named, nor do I actually carry any such membership card.
However, I like the idea of creating some cards, and giving them out to fellow members. It's kind of like the "school of life" or "school of hard knocks;" it may not be a real place, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from it.

The "Nothing Sacred" school of humor is built on a foundation of the following four rules:

1. Timing is everything. Any comedian will tell you this is true. If you tell a joke to quickly, too slowly, or even mess up the rhythm of the joke, its humor can be lost. You have then killed a perfectly good (or wonderfully bad) joke.

2. If you have to explain it, it's not funny. Have you ever told a joke, and it totally fell flat? No reaction from your audience, save the distant sound of crickets chirping and a lone tumbleweed drifting down a nearby road? Looks like that joke died, too. Don't try to resuscitate it by explaining why it's funny; you're just kicking the corpse. If you killed the joke, odds are it was lame anyway, and had to be put out of its misery. (Yes, I just compared jokes to horses. Ha! Beating a dead horse! Get it? Get it?)

3. Play to your audience. What is funny to one person may not be funny to another. A joke that gets full gut-laughs from your best friend may get a confused look from a family member, or may cause offense in someone you work with. Unemployment is rarely funny; even less so when it happens to you. With humor, one size definitely does not fit all.

4. Everything is fair game. George Carlin put it best when he said "I believe you can joke about anything; it's all in how you construct the joke." There is no topic you cannot turn into humor in some way or another. The trick is finding the right way to tell the joke, and the right person to tell it to. And don't let anybody censor you; that way lies the path of cutesy, milquetoast family fare that is only amusing to Ned Flanders. It's a slippery slope that has killed many comedic careers. Filter yourself, yes; but do not censor yourself. Either everything is acceptable to be joked about, or nothing is.

With these simple rules, it's not that hard to be funny. I'd like to get them printed up onto cards; then I could actually be a "card-carrying member."

A Rant About Ranting...

Dear LaRouche supporters:

Enough with the Hitler mustaches already.

I am asking this as nicely as I possibly can: please, please, PLEASE stop waving around posters with a Hitler mustache superimposed on the President’s face. I’m not just talking about President Obama, either. This is a completely non-partisan plea for sanity and reason. I don’t care if the ‘stache shows up on Obama, Bush or Millard Fillmore; it needs to stop.

If you want to be taken seriously, you need to stop comparing modern-day politicians to Adolf Hitler. Obama is not Hitler. Bush was not Hitler. They aren’t “The new Hitler,” “Hitler Lite,” “Diet Hitler” or even “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Hitler.” There are no more Hitlers, and there never will be again. The last surviving member of the family changed his name in 1947. The jersey has been retired. It’s OVER.

There are only three topics in which Hitler or the Nazi Party can be brought up logically: the history of Germany, World War II in general, and the suffering the Jewish people have endured for centuries. To bring comparisons to the Nazis in any other debate invokes Godwin’s Law: if you mention Hitler, you lose the argument. Period.

This is the same type of hyperbolic nonsense that has been spewed by extremists on every fringe of the political spectrum for nearly 70 years. Every tie-dyed, dreadlocked hippie demanding the legalization of every drug known to man; every Tea Party nut-job dressing up like a Revolutionary War-era Minuteman; every petulant teenager who was forbidden by his parents to go to an unsupervised rave at 1:30 in the morning on a Wednesday; they all will compare their opponents, or what they represent, to Nazi Germany.

When you show up on street corners with this kind of iconography, your credibility is immediately decimated. You will quickly be relegated to the status of “just another random lunatic,” and your message will be ignored, just as easily as we ignore the ramblings of someone in a tin-foil hat.

If you want to further a political candidate’s cause, the best way is to talk about the positive things that candidate has accomplished, and what he or she plans to do if elected. Nondescript ranting and raving, slogans that are offensive for the sake of being offensive and Nazi-themed Photoshop attacks become little more than white noise, and are dismissed just as easily.

I know that my plea for sensible, intelligent discourse may fall on deaf ears, but I have to hope that maybe someone will read this and realize, “You know, I’m not doing my cause any favors by using it to bludgeon people over the head.”

And besides: if reason doesn’t work, I could always get a paintball gun.

A Bad@$$ With a Bad Idea

Greetings, friends. It's time for "Surviving a Survival Movie, 101."

I saw "The Grey" (the new Liam Neeson movie where he fights off wolves in the Alaskan wilderness) over the weekend, and I can honestly say that I enjoyed it, for the most part. The acting was topnotch, the story was definitely engaging and I really felt for the characters. Liam Neeson, you remain one of the all-time most awesome badasses in cinema.

However...

There is one sticking point that my mind kept going back to, all through the movie. Try as I might to ignore it, I can't seem to get past the fact that the main character, John Ottway, has obviously never taken a single survival class, and wouldn't be fit to lead a parade. There is one absolutely vital rule in any situation where you are lost in the wilderness...

STAY WHERE YOU ARE.

The plane is the only location where the survivors have any chance of surviving until the coming rescue. There are several arguments for this:

1. There are no reasons the forest would be better, and plenty of reasons it would be worse.

Ottway decides, entirely on his own, that the crashed wreckage of the plane is not a safe place to be, since it is obviously within the wolves' territory. He tells the other survivors that their best bet is to head for a forest, about a day's hard march through the blizzard. He also admits that he has no way of knowing where the wolves' hunting trails begin or end, and that their kill-zone is over 30 miles wide.

So of course, leaving a big metal structure and trekking across the tundra while hungry and injured is a brilliant freaking idea. Equally stellar is the notion that you'll be safer in a place where there is cover for these vicious predators to sneak up on you. Besides, that forest is just as likely to be part of their hunting grounds, as plenty of prey most likely lives there.

Dude. Any one of the other survivors would raise his hand at that point and say, "Um, shouldn't we maybe stay near the plane, which rescue crews are most likely to be looking for? You know, where the pilot was probably making frequent radio check-ins, and is along the pre-arranged flight path that the FAA knows?"

The plane also most likely has a GPS and an emergency signal transmitter in its Black Box (flight recorder,) which is designed to withstand a horrific crash. An airplane's flight recorder is specified to withstand an impact of 3400 Gs and temperatures of over 1,000 °C (1,832 °F.) The authorities are going to be looking for that signal first. It seems kind of stupid to make them search for 7 tiny little people in a big honkin' tundra, after they searched for and found a plane.

2. Burned-out fuselage may look depressing, but at least it has a roof. And walls.

That plane is the one place anybody lost in the snow would want to be. It may be within the wolves' kill-zone, but it's also the most easily defensible location. There is plenty of scrap material all around that can be carried over and used to fortify their position against a predatory attack. The best thing they can put between themselves and the creatures who want to eat them is distance, but do you know what's a close second?

Metal. Lots and lots of metal. And distance is kind of hard to come by when you're trudging along at 1 mph, putting the scent of blood into the air. The survivors are basically turning themselves into a slow buffet line by walking away from the only real shelter they have.

3. Food and fire kinda come in handy when you're hungry and cold.

There is no guarantee there will be anything to eat in the forest. There is sure to be a cache of emergency supplies in the plane, probably somewhere near the aforementioned Black Box. Besides, a human being can survive for up to 3 weeks without food. That same human being is unlikely to survive the teeth of a Yukon Wolf for 3 minutes.

And while there is plenty of wood to burn in those trees, there's plenty to burn in the crash site too. And it's easier to light a fire when you're protected from the wind and snow by those nice, big, metal walls. Plus, body heat will not dissipate as fast, and the heat of 7 men will keep that wreckage nice and toasty for a good long while.

Admittedly, a film about 7 guys hanging out at a crash site until they're rescued a week later wouldn't be nearly as thrilling. Nor is it even half as badass as seeing Liam Neeson use electrical tape and mini liquor bottles to Wolverine his fist. But still, this character would be far more believable if he showed the survival skills taught to the average Cub Scout.

Let's rein it in a bit, okay?

I had a crystallizing moment today. I realized that I seem to be very single-minded when it comes to some of my friends. There are a number of people that I care about a great deal, who have certain aspects of their life that catch my attention. A couple of them are Jewish, some are gay, one or two have military experience and a good number of war stories. These are just a few examples of interesting parts of the interesting lives of the interesting people that I know and care about.

All of these parts of their lives are fascinating, and I have just realized that when I am with these friends, I tend to focus almost solely on these parts of their personality or history. Nearly my entire conversation with these people seems to center around one or two topics, usually related to these particular aspects.

When it comes to my Jewish friends, I always bring up topics about religion, Hebrew culture, and stories in the news about Israel or Anti-Semitism. With my gay friends, it becomes a discussion about gay rights, if and when they will be allowed to marry, and how the gay community is treated by certain groups. And with one particular friend who was a Navy SEAL, I always want to hear more epic tales about his time in the service.

The moment of clarity I had this morning has laid bare a fact about me that I'm not sure I like. I am single-minded. I tend to focus entirely on one topic, and proceed to beat it into the ground. This is not exclusive to what my friends have to say. When I want to tell people about a movie, band or book that I am into, I will completely canvas the entire subject, and talk about it ad nauseum. As a result, I will actually turn people off the topic I have brought up.

This is the exact opposite effect of what I would like to happen. I talk about things that interest me because I would like to get people interested in those same subjects. That is the typical goal of anyone. When you talk about something, it usually means a lot to you, and you would like it to mean a lot to others.

I now realize that this means I can tend to pigeonhole my friends into certain mindsets and labels. I don't like this. I need to realize, the people I care about are complex, multi-faceted people. They have many interwoven aspects to their lives that deserve my interest and attention.

So now, to any of my friends who have been on the receiving end of my one-note conversations, I would like to apologize and humbly ask your forgiveness. I want to know you as entire people, rather than just identifying you as one part of yourselves. So please, dear friends, let me know that there is more to you than what I focus on. I'll try in future to let our frienships be more encompassing. Thanks.