Category: No Politics Friday

I recently changed jobs, and now I ply my trade at a smaller, private, teaching-oriented university. This is a culture shock, having spent my academic career (if it can be so labeled) at massive, research-oriented state institutions. Not only is teaching the subject of zero shits given at such places, but the tenure process (and faculty culture) actively discourages putting any effort whatsoever into teaching.

So if you were curious, kids, that's why all of your classes at State U. are terrible.

This is not to say that I find myself in an idyllic paradise of outstanding pedagogy; in fact there is good and bad teaching to be found here just like anywhere else. However, it is noticeable how much more teaching is talked about here. It is a thing people actually think about and attempt to do well, even if unsuccessful. Talking about teaching leads to one of the real perks of academia: the teaching Horror Story.

It has been a while since I did one of these crowdsourced NPFs, so this one is all on you. I could tell you my stories, and in fact I occasionally do in the odd post, but where's the fun in that? What's the worst (hopefully in the amusing sense, not in the "One of my classmates shot someone" sense) thing you've ever experienced in a classroom setting? Who's the worst teacher you ever endured and why?

There is no right or wrong way to approach this question.
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You can mine your life experiences for anything from preschool to grad school. I'm sure you have some sordid tales of amazingly inept teaching.
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Let's get a nice blooper reel going here.

And…go.

You know how I love stuff about space and the internet has been ablaze with information about the Mars Curiosity Rover, a component of the Mars Science Laboratory, for the past few weeks. The comparatively large amount of publicity it has received indicates that NASA, in its sixth decade, might be figuring out Public Relations: target young people (but not children) who might be interested in, like, books and science and stuff while basically ignoring the "Hurr! Everything that costs money is bad!" crowd that cannot be pleased under any circumstances. The wildly popular landing video is brilliant marketing but merely a function of the technology being available today; had a video of a space probe landing been possible thirty years ago, it would have looked like that. In other words, the mission itself wasn't really groundbreaking. Logically, it outdid previous similar missions in technology – better cameras, more and more complex experiments, more data returned more quickly, and so on. On the surface (see what I did there?) it's not exactly the kind of mission you'd expect to grab the public's attention. It's just another thing the internet has made far more accessible.

Oh, and there was a guy with a mohawk, a probable candidate to be the first Hipster D-Bag in space. Not a dry panty in the house when he's at mission control, amirite?

As much as planetary exploration interests and excites me, I have to be the cranky old bastard for just a second and point out that NASA landed rovers on Mars that returned images and experimental data – Viking 1 and 2 – in 1976. And one of them continued to work on the surface and collect data for six years. It's not a pissing contest, as every mission allows new research and new insights based on the limits of technology available at the time, yet I can't help feeling that sending an orbiter to Mars and landing a rover is old hat to the folks at NASA by now. To think that they managed the same using the computer, communications, and telemetry technology of the late 1960s is a lot more impressive, for whatever that's worth.

It's great that people are interested in the space program and I'm sure the entire MSL program was challenging and time consuming for everyone involved.

It must have felt great to see it succeed. But now that NASA is cool (at least momentarily) I imagine there are a bunch of old guys who were there in the Seventies looking at Mohawk Guy and thinking "Yeah, we put a probe on Mars when you were in diapers, kid. It was made of transistors, a Pong circuit board, and two cameras we bought at a pawn shop in El Segundo after we did mushrooms at Buzz Aldrin's condo.
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"

And don't even get me started on Voyager 2, sonny. We stole half those parts from Radio Shack and that can of bolts is still working 35 years (!) and nine billion miles (!!!) later. And we didn't have the youtubes and the crazy haircuts and the memes and all that baloney. Now get off my lawn and get a nice military haircut.

I do "here's a bunch of links"-type posts rarely – the last one was months ago, and before that in February and January– usually due to time constraints but also because I collect entertaining things I want to share but don't have a ton to say about. Sometimes I have to admit defeat and say, OK, here's a thing.
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Just enjoy it.

1. For those of us who are 12 years old mentally, enjoy this compendium of vintage comic panels that are unintentionally perverted. The 1950s really were a more innocent time, weren't they?
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"Boner" had a lot more non-penile uses back then.

On a side note, I read Archie comics religiously as a child (and I flipped out if my dad dared to leave the grocery store without one) despite the fact that they were never, ever funny. Never. To this day I don't understand it.
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2. Here is a LiveJournal (side note: LiveJournal still exists, apparently) of vintage "cutaway" drawings of industrial and commercial buildings. It's difficult to describe, but trust me on their level of awesomeness. It's similar to those panels in superhero comics detailing the underground lair of the villain. How can you resist titles like "How a Modern Hotel Operates", "How a Modern Brewery Works", and "How Ice Cream is Made"? You can't.

3. Amidst all the talk about NASA over the past two weeks, here is a free downloadable eBook about the one topic that seems to fascinate all of us regardless of age: space food. Those guys in Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo must have lost a lot of weight in space.

Damn. Now I wish I had some astronaut ice cream.
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Reader,

The time has come for changes here at Gin and Tacos, a subsidiary of Nordyne Defense Dynamics. To accompany the relocation of the world headquarters from the South to the Midwest, the Board of Directors feels that it is time to freshen up the image of its signature blog. After debating several ideas for radical change – switching to an all-mime video blogging format, replacing NPF with "Hardcore Pornography Thursday", shifting our primary focus to Perfect Strangers slash fiction – cooler heads prevailed and it was decided that the status quo would be maintained for content but the content delivery needed a makeover.

Now it's time for a little market research. What suggestions do you, the loyal consumer, have for us? Are there particular features you'd like to see added to the site? Glitches in need of fixing? Layout/readability issues that bother you? A few issues are already well known to the higher-ups: comments get cut off with some regularity, and we will add threaded comments to facilitate bickering with bb responding directly to previous comments. We are also aware of issues with the current background at higher screen resolutions and with certain browsers. So those problems will be addressed. Any suggestions (about design and layout, not content) you wish to offer here will be taken seriously and subjected to due diligence.

Like all grotesquely large corporations, Nordyne has decided to outsource the job of Gin and Tacos Webmaster to an outside contractor. Do you think that might be you? Are you man/woman enough to fill that important role, probably for little to no compensation? Do you want your creative stamp to imprint upon this website and resonate with visitors for years to come?

It has been about four full years since the Big Redesign (from the old "green gin bottle" background and Moveable Type to the current Soviet propaganda/WordPress motif) and we believe that it is high time for the next step in the visual evolution of the internet's premiere source of politics, random information, and jokes about pant-shitting.

Sincerely,

Armand B. Ginandtacos IV
CEO and Potentate
Nordyne Defense Dynamics

During the last summer Olympics I did a post wondering why women's beach volleyball (and to a lesser extent, the shirtless men's version of the same) had to be played half-naked.

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To say that the photojournalism of this sport focuses excessively on tits and ass would be an understatement.
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The number of women's beach VB photos in which the athlete's head is omitted borders on comical. So this blogger took the concept beyond the beach and asked, what if every Olympic sport was photographed like beach volleyball? The results are predictably amusing.

I for one could do with more James Harden and Kevin Durant ass shots.

To people who say money can't buy happiness, I don't agree. The price of happiness is whatever it costs to buy a Jet-Ski. Ever seen anyone frown on a Jet-Ski? You haven't, because it's not possible. (*acts out sobbing while Jet-Skiing*)

That, delivered well, is funny. It's a Daniel Tosh joke. I consider it evidence that Daniel Tosh has the ability to be funny. He understands how a joke works. It starts with a universal premise and then takes an amusing twist that the audience is unlikely to see coming. Then it's acted out to emphasize how ridiculous the twisted premise is in reality.
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Good one, Dan.

Eventually, however, he realized that shock value is one of the cornerstones of humor, and a particularly easy one for a moderately clever person to exploit. Why bother writing good material when you can just say a bunch of "Oh no he di'int!" stuff? So Daniel Tosh got lazy and decided it was easier to do a bunch of shock material rather than write jokes. The problem is that over time it has been more difficult to shock audiences. Sex? Porn? Whackin' it? Dead babies? Racism? Abortion? Audiences are used to all of it at this point. As Jane's Addiction once warned us, nothing's shocking (anymore). You can only say "faggot" so many times and tell so many stories about masturbating. We get it. You're edgy.

So, there's rape. Rape is still offensive because, you know, it's horrible. It still shocks people. And it's OK to make jokes about things that are shocking. The problem is that most comedians are too lazy (or too stupid) to figure out how to tell a joke properly about something terrible. Here's a joke I use as an opener quite often.

It's so hot down here during the summer that I actually walked up to an Atlanta cop and begged him to shoot me.

*pause for tepid chuckle*

…and it would have worked if I was black.

*pause*

I'm kidding, of course. If you're black you don't have to ask an Atlanta cop to shoot at you.

I'm kinda proud of that one. It's not straightforward ("Cops are racists, amirite?") but it uses some misdirection humor to make the audience think about something that is fucked up. Racism: It's a Terrible Thing. So it's possible to tell a joke that makes people remember, "Oh, right…rape is a serious problem and it happens all the time, and it's ridiculous to believe stupid things like 'She was asking for it'." An uncharacteristically strong column on Jezebel includes a lengthy discussion of this point, with examples.

Daniel Tosh leans on rape jokes like Katt Williams leans on the F-word. They're not particularly well thought-out or funny. He just says "rape" a lot to keep things "edgy." And in that context – if the rape or the rape victim are the butt of the joke – it just isn't funny. His Twitter account has a "#rape" hashtag with dozens of jokes and references. His TV show includes at least one in every episode.

The problem with this whole ToshTroversy started here: with Tosh telling yet another stupid, un-clever, and lazy rape joke. People coming to his defense and wailing about censorship – a common response among comedians – miss the point. This is a classic Can vs. Should problem. You CAN say whatever you want. Should you? Should you tell a story in which your "clever" twist is that someone gets gang raped at the end? Sure, I guess…if you suck at comedy.

I have a lot of things to say about heckling, and that is the part of this story on which I originally focused. No matter what the comedian says and no matter how justified you believe you are, yelling at the stage is always an asshole move. Sorry. Try doing comedy sometime and you will understand what I mean.
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Comedy is not just a person talking, it's a person doing a performance that he or she has practiced hundreds of times and that relies entirely on flow and timing. If you fuck that up, the performer is going to be an asshole to you. He or she is going to do whatever is possible to get you to shut up and stop ruining the act as quickly as possible. The audience paid to see the performance, and it is a dick move to stop it akin to talking loudly on a cellphone in a movie theater.

But the more I think about it, the heckler is not the important issue here. The take home point is that he/she-got-raped jokes are lazy, stupid, and only amusing to dolts. Taking the low road and going for the easy shock laugh does not take talent and does not make one good at comedy. Audiences have to be sentient and willing to think a little bit about what they hear in a comedy club – if you decide that you are offended by any mention of rape in any context on a comedy stage, you're not much brighter than the people who laugh at Tosh. And if the comedian isn't thinking carefully about the substance of the joke – Who's the butt of the joke here? What's funny about this, and why? What am I trying to say? – he's not doing his job.

So this controversy has a relatively simple solution: Comedians, stop being lazy dickbags. Don't tell jokes that have no purpose beyond shocking or offending the audience. Try saying something useful. If you're unwilling or unable to do that, then at least avoid being hateful and offensive.
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Tell some fart jokes or something. Even if you don't care whether the audience is offended or belittled, self interest should be enough to talk you out of this.
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Nothing says "I'm a hack" quite like rape jokes. You're not edgy or clever. You're a cliche. Don't you want to be a little better than that?

(PS: Seriously though, stop yelling shit at the stage. Everyone who does it thinks they have a great reason. Most of them are wrong.)

I have a tendency to develop emotional attachments to inanimate objects. No, not like the guy on Taboo who has sex with appliances. What I mean is, if they are particularly useful to me or I own them for an unusually long time, I feel a little sad to let them go.

I'm not a hoarder, I promise. I throw things out. But I do, on occasion, say thank you while I'm doing it. If that makes me crazy, so be it.

Last week I sold the first and only car I ever owned, a 2000 Nissan Sentra. According to the paperwork I unearthed during the process of transferring the title, I bought it new in Madison, WI on July 30, 2000 for $14,072. It had 39 miles on the odometer. I sold it just short of 12 years later for $1,300 with 168,787 miles on it. It took me from age 21 to 33 and it never let me down. It was the definition of trouble-free and reliable through 12 years living in four different states (IL, WI, IN, and GA) and a dozen different apartments.

The first girl I was in love with drove me to the dealership to buy it. A decade later I drove it to my wedding. I drove it to my first real job post-college.

I drove it across the country and back several times. It regularly took me from Indiana to central Illinois to see my sister's kids.

It took me to dozens of band and comedy gigs. You get the picture.

I've replaced it with a far nicer vehicle, as it is pretty run down at this point in its life. Nonetheless, it was sad to part with it, to watch it drive away and see it for what is likely the last time. I said thanks, not so much to the machine itself but to the people who made it. I thought about the people in some factory in Japan who paid enough attention to what must be a not-very-stimulating series of tasks that I could buy one of the cheapest cars on the market and get 12 hassle free years from it. I appreciate their effort and I wonder if they realize how much benefit I derived from their relatively simple labors.

No, I don't go through this thought process every time I discard something (note: disposing of old underwear is an equally difficult process, albeit for entirely different reasons).

But I felt like I owed this hunk of metal and plastic a few moments of reflection for all the major life events it saw me through and all the places it took me. And yes, if you're interested, I recommend a Nissan without hesitation.