blog-a-palooza

I'm mildly disappointed to discover I did not invent this word, even though its about as sad an example of internet nonsense as could possibly exist.

I'm more disappointed that "Choose Your Own Blogventure" was already taken as well. Though, honestly, if there's a phrase out there that hasn't had "blog" dropped into at some point, I haven't heard it. If someone remotely famous said it, someone has reworked it in order to spout their deepest, most brilliant feelings about the deep, soul-searching life of being an ad rep for Milwaukee's third-largest local bank. It's numbing. As FDR once said, the only thing we have to fear are blogs themselves.

Speaking of which, pundits often comment on how "the number of blogs to humans is approaching 1-to-1." This is always followed by "the Apocalypse is near." (side note: Ablogalypse?) This is idiotic reporting and means almost nothing. Their methods of counting are so suspect that it's remarkable no one calls them on this.

For example, I write and maintain this blog. So that's my one contribution to this statistic right? Wrong. Since editing the templates on these blogs can be tricky, I also have a blog that I started at the same time that I use to test out any HTML changes I make. There was also a brief period I was trying to separate out my music and movie reviews into separate blogs, and both of those blogs are still alive. So that's four blogs on Blogger right now, just for me. And I'm not the only one with this system.

For a while, I was copying these posts over and reposting them on Xanga. No longer, yet my Xanga account still exists, even though essentially no one uses that website anymore. I have forty or fifty friends with long-unused accounts left on Xanga's derelict servers. How many Wordpress users have unused Blogger accounts, or vice versa? How many keep switching back and forth?

Plus I have a MySpace account, which has a "notes" function, and a lot of people or bands use this as their blogging space, so that counts as a blog as well. I also have a Facebook, which automatically imports my notes from Blogger. But even if it didn't, it still has that "notes" function. So that one counts as well.

I'm up to seven blogs without breaking a sweat, and I've still got half a dozen different websites I use that have blog functions as part of what they do, and so can be counted as "blogs" by any media member who want to make their story sound more impressive.

Speaking of "making a story sound more impressive," I would really like it if newscasters stopped saying things like "...with some polls having him as far as twelve points down" or "...with some polls having him as close as only four points behind" when covering an election. That's bad reporting and everyone know it. If there are 12 polls in the field, and the four most reliable have him between 7 and 9 points down, then use those numbers. Or, even if you want to use all polls, even the one done by the Omaha Herald, then please - please - use mean or the median number. If the polls have a candidate down by 4, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10, and 12 points down, the important numbers in that sequence are not the 4 and the 12. Stop relying on the outliers. I'm sick of bad polling being the most newsworthy piece of information to news directors.

Dave Barry VS. Bill Bryson VS. James Thurber

This one I'm just not doing. I know, I'm supposed to do all recommended blog posts, but I can't compare these three authors, there's just not a good post here. They're three of my favorite authors, they're all funny in different ways, and there's no really amusing way to compare them.

Instead, I'll make a recommendation: if you have never read anything by one or all of these authors, don't go another week without reading one of these:

In A Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber
Dave Barry's Complete Guide To Guys by Dave Barry

You won't regret it.

Why No One Should Read "The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty" in High School

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. - James Thurber

James Thurber is one of my all-time favorite authors, a world-class humorist, one of the few examples - and certainly one of the first - of a humor writer who could be known almost entirely for his short stories. Almost entirely blind from a childhood game of "William Tell" gone wrong (an example my siblings and I could certainly have heeded better), he nonetheless became a famed cartoonist for the New Yorker, sketching his works on giant sheets of paper until he was left with drawings of stunning freshness in a style that Dorothy Parker referred to as having "the semblance of unbaked cookies." He was an absolutely original talent, the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain.

When I was younger, my dad would read me selections from some of Thurber's best works, My Life and Hard Times or Thurber Carnival, pieces most people only discover in their mid-twenties but seem to be written just for children. Hard Times, in particular, is one of those works that jumps beyond Thurber's reputation as a "funnyman for intellectuals" into the realm of perhaps one of the best pieces of American humor writing of all time. To this day, My Life and Hard Times is my go-to present for people whose tastes I respect (or those whose tastes I am trying to improve). His style feels remarkably fresh today, perhaps because we have grown into his style of self-deprecation and wry sensibility - as Thurber himself noted, "The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself. "

I bring this up because while anyone who stumbles their way through high school is offhandedly introduced to Thurber through "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," which is a grave mistake. Not because "Walter Mitty" is anything less than a brilliantly evocative short story,but because high school English classes are no place for getting introduced to anything. It's completely the wrong atmosphere.

See, English classes are supposed to introduce you to new and exciting pieces of writing that you would never have read before. What they actually do is help you make the worst possible first impression of every writer in the history of the English language. English teachers think that they can assign humor writing and their ninth graders will find it funny, which they don't, because they're reading it to figure out the answers to the questions at the end of the chapters. Then they're scouring the story and looking for "themes," and reading the tiny bio of Thurber at the beginning looking for hints on how they're supposed to have responded to the work. Finally, they return to class, feeling that the whole exercise was entirely pointless since they don't feel particularly impressed with the story at all ("It was supposed to be about mankind's isolationism, but I just thought the guy was kind of a loser"). At this point, the teacher, who didn't really see the point in reading the story anyway ("it's all kind of silly. Let's hurry through and get to Pearl Buck."), gushes insincerely about Thurber's capturing of mood and the human condition for half a class period, and then moves on. And everyone is left with this vague recollection of this bumbling guy and how he was never paying attention to anything, which just gets filed away in the same distant mental shelf you keep the time you watched Dudley Do-Right on an airplane with no headphones.

Instead, paperback copies of My Life and Hard Times, along with a collection of Thurber's cartoons, should be handed out in senior English, in one of those random breaks between sections where there's not enough time to start something new before the end of the quarter. The teacher reads "The Night The Bed Fell" aloud to the class, then the students read the book over a weekend and try their hand at drawing a Thurber-esque cartoon. A small writing assignment will be assigned, having each student write a story of something that happened to them in a Thurber-ish fashion, and the stories will be read aloud. Whoever gets the biggest laugh gets bonus points.

And that's the sort of introduction Thurber deserves.


Muppet Movie Update

Information is slow in coming on the new Muppet movie, which probably means almost nothing is done on it yet. Jason Segel and Nick Stoller have given basic details: it'll be like a Muppet movie of old: "hilarious, fantastic, heart-wrenching, beautiful, nostalgic and remarkable." I'd settle for fun and not particularly disappointing. Anyway, the plot is as classic as it comes: an evil newcomer wants to tear down the Muppet Theater in order to drill for oil underneath, so they have to put on a show to save it. Sounds great.

By the way, odds Seth Rogen ends up in this movie: 2-to-1

By the way, I don't know if this is true or not, but here it is. If it's true, it's crazy.