Yeah, she’s an insult comic and bigotry forms the foundation of her humor. But there’s something charming about her Sopranos-like speech and her old-school prejudices. Reminds me of living in Jersey. (Plus, she clearly loves the people she pokes fun of)

She’s been on the Comedy Central celebrity roast circuit, roasting Pamela Anderson, Flava Flav and William Shatner. Really funny stuff.

Enjoy (from her Comedy Central show, Take It Like a Man)! NSFW!

And this is my favorite – about LL’s least favorite sexual practice:

Avoid serious soul-searching and take this simple (bordering on idiotic) test (but it is kind of fun), courtesy of Paul Zindel’s “The Pigman”, which I read in the 8th grade:

There is a river with a bridge over it and a wife and her husband live in a house on one side. The wife has a lover who lives on the other side of the river, and the only way to get from one side of the river to the other is to walk across the bridge or to ask the boatman to take you. One day the husband tells his wife that he has to be gone all night to handle some business in a faraway town. The wife pleads with him to take her with him because she knows if he doesn’t she will be unfaithful to him. The husband absolutely refuses to take her because she will only be in the way of his important business. So the husband goes alone. When he is gone, the wife goes over the bridge and stays with her lover. The night passes, and the sun is almost up when the wife leaves because she must get back to her own house before her husband gets home. She starts to cross the bridge, but she sees an assassin waiting for her on the other side, and she knows if she tries to cross, he will murder her. In terror, she runs up the side of the river and asks the boatman to take her across, but he wants fifty cents. She has no money, so he refuses to take her. The wife runs back to the lover’s house, and explains to him what her predicament is. She asks him for fifty cents to pay the boatman. The lover refuses, telling her it’s her own fault for getting into the situation. As dawn comes up, the wife is nearly out of her mind and decided to dash across the bridge. When she comes face to face with the assassin. He takes out a large knife and stabs her until she dies. Write down the names of the characters in the order in which you think they were most responsible for the wife’s death. Just list wife, husband, lover, assassin, and boatman in the order you think they are most guilty.

INTERPRETATION:

Each of the characters is a symbol for something and you have betrayed what is most important to you in life.

Wife= fun

Husband= love

Lover= sex

Assassin= money

Boatman= magic

In the runup to the Democratic primaries, I’ve pretty much been a Hillary supporter.

I guess I’m a member of the slightly more cynical (read: realistic) Democratic base that understands you have to make lots of concessions to various interest groups in order to get the votes and money in. People might find that loathsome, and that no particular candidate can truly represent their specific values, but this is how our system works–it’s been described as “coalition building before the elections” (instead of afterwards in parliamentary systems) but the outcome is pretty much the same. But especially in a country like the US where attitudes and values are so widely varied, a presidential contender is going to do something that will irritate his/her own primary base.

Barack Obama has built his base out of young, idealistic people, and rich people used to getting what they want. This kind of base is built on precarious footing because it won’t take much of reality to set them off.

The Democratic blogs like Daily Kos and Huffington Post have been allocating a large amount of their editorial attention to Obama’s recent association with an event featuring a “ex-gay” preacher that now foments loudly about the evils of homosexuality and how Christ has delivered him from his cornholing past.

Now of course this guy’s a moron. That’s not the point.

Obama has gone on the record of saying that he’s completely against what this preacher stands for, and has even gone so far to recruit a gay preacher to join on the dais.

Unfortunately, Obama’s base is used to seeing him as completely uncorruptible, pure and without fault like Hillary Clinton, whom they call a right-wing Republican in sheep’s clothing (while she’s paradoxically blasted as a Communist by the right). This gives him very little room to attract the support of other segments of his potential base who might have values and interests at odds with his primary base.

Let’s face it–black people are the most steadfast Democratic supporters, but they also have, more than any other ethnic group, issues with homosexuality. It’s pretty much impossible to appease both LGBT and black bases with the exact same message without appearing to triangulate and hem-and-haw. Which is exactly what Hillary does.

But Obama’s supporters don’t quite seem to get this. He should be true to his values! He should support everything his base supports! Even if his base seems to be 23% of the population and barely a percentage point more.

23% of the population won’t win any election.

Obama’s been under heat by his supporter for not moving up past that 23% point, and for not making headway against Clinton.

I think he’s going to have a tough climb. With the groups he’s cultivated favor with, he’s facing a zero-sum situation and he knows it.

This morning I opened Yahoo, and found two mistakes in their flashy news headlines section I was hoping to attribute to being half-asleep and bleary-eyed.

One mistake is a very common one, but still should have been caught if they have a halfway decent editor on staff. (Bartleby). The other is just asinine. Readheads? At first I thought it was some sort of pun. Maybe our Neanderthal ancestors had the gift of literacy? No, just a poorly-edited headline.

For shame, Yahoo. You have thousands upon thousands of employees. Get one that can spell to proofread your headlines before they go out. It just takes a few seconds.

Turkey, a developing country with a small parcel of land on the European peninsula, and with hundreds of years of engagement (read: war and occupation) with what we generally accept as Europe, has been trying to join the European Union for years.

And yet a very fundamental characteristic of what it means to be European is completely lost on the country: free speech.

Whatever you might think about Europeans, they both value and practice free speech, at least as much as we Americans do. They freely criticize, question, and verbally attack – mostly the US and their neighbors, but occasionally themselves too. (I’m joking; they criticize themselves almost as often as they criticize the US)

The point being that no one goes to jail for putting their governments on the defensive and forcing it to answer hard questions.

Even “New Europe” (which is often, ironically, older than “Old Europe”), despite enduring decades of represssion of free speech, is pretty open nowadays. I lived in Eastern Europe and people freely criticized their governments and had a lively, ongoing debate on policy.

Turkey, on the other hand, despite wanting to be considered European, and all the other adjectives associated with it (wealthy, sophisticated, developed, cultured, etc.), really fails on the basic premise of free speech.

Article 301 of the Turkish penal code makes it a crime to “insult Turkishness” - a really broadly-defined offense that is actually prosecuted very often against those who publicly mention the Armenian Genocide, an event that the rest of the world acknowledges (some in a more forthcoming fashion than others) but that Turkey fiercely denies.

Because of realpolitik the US will probably back down from recognizing the Armenian Genocide, but the real pity is that Turkey keeps article 301 in their books and thus stifles its own intellectual and cultural development.

It used to be the either poor or unscrupulously cheap of us would buy pirated CDs or DVDs off the street (count me among them). But you got what you paid for – shitty sound quality, or camcorder fumbles and audience members ambling in front of the camera.

So there was an understandable price differential – less money for low quality, or more money (full price) for high quality.

Then came online sales of CDs and DVDs, on sites like Amazon & Buy.com. They fit nicely into this price scheme too – you’d get a discount on Amazon or Buy.com, but you’d lose the immediacy of the purchase. You’d have to wait several days for your CD or DVD to arrive.

So we had:

• High quality & immediate – Retail - Highest price
• High quality + delay - Buying online - Medium price
• Low quality + a little work – Bootleg – Lowest price

Makes sense, right?

Now, with the download of streamable media like music, TV shows and movies, this perfectly reasonable price:quality structure has been turned on its head.

Let’s see – I can download:

• a movie for $3.99 off iTunes; their assy format occupies 3GB for a 2hr movie, and it’s choppy/stilted when watching on my desktop; downloading a movie takes about 2 hrs on my DSL connection
  -OR-
• a movie for free off BitTorrent; the formats use (which, admittedly, typically involve downloading an esoteric codec or two) typically less than 1GB for a 2hr movie, and the quality is stupendous – high-quality with smooth playback; downloading time is typically less than half an hour

What happened to “you get what you pay for”?

Fuck that. I don’t care whose fault this is; iTunes is a horrible value proposition.

As far as I’m concerned, ABC.com is the only one that seems to get it right. They broadcast their popular shows in their full-episode versions using a player that somehow transmits an HD-quality image over our weak DSL line. They monetize by showing ads 3-4 times during the course of an hour-long broadcast. Fair? Sure!

My boyfriend has watched about 30 ABC show episodes over the past week, and watches the ads since they’re short (30 seconds) and impossible to skip over unlike with Tivo.

The other TV networks can continue to operate under a prehistoric mindset with respect to digital media and online transmission. I’ll continue to use BitTorrent, and so will tens of millions of others.

Mainstream Christianity is associated with hypocrisy, judgmentalism, and homophobia…according to a majority of young people, including Christians. The fact that today’s most prominent Christians are so, well, unChristian (you know, tossing to the wind any sense of charity, tolerance and love for your common man) is not lost on young people.

My faith in the future: restored.

So while Jesus spoke extensively about the sanctity of marriage (meaning: not getting divorced), helping the poor, and loving the unloved, why have public figures like James Dobson, Donald Wildmon, the late Jerry Falwell, and power bottom Ted Haggard more closely resembled the Pharisees Jesus also most famously talked about?

Simple answer: it’s easy to insist on condemning exactly those behaviors you know you’ll never commit. Hence the obsession among the Dobsons and Falwells of the world with abortion and homosexuality.

(Closet cases like Haggard are just misguided hangers-on.)

I mean, why is it that the only people protesting in front of abortion clinics seem to be men and postmenopausal women? How convenient.

Let’s ignore all those religious edicts that condemn divorce, infidelity, hell, even murder (gotta keep that option open for a rainy day) and make abortion and gay sex the lynchpin of your platform of ethics. A very easy way for the biggest, most evil sinners to give themselves the illusion that they’ve taken the moral high-ground — eliminate all mention of those sins you’re repeatedly guilty of!

Today’s teenagers, apparently, aren’t used to just listening to the loudest, fattest, oldest man on television and take his blathering to be the gospel. This generation grew up with The Real World and child celebrities divorcing themselves from their parents. Truthfully, blind obedience to arbitrary authority has never been this country’s youth’s strong suit.

And thank God for that (no pun intended!).

Yet another example of an industry involved in the distribution of protected content just doesn’t get it. Yes, like the music industry, which makes you pay more for less quality.

I wanted to buy the David Allen book, “Getting Things Done”. Here were my options:

• $15 for the eBook – a PDF file – for download
• $8.99 for the actual book – free 2-day shipping from Amazon (via Amazon Prime)

Hmm…..  to store a 3MB file (one of the easiest to prepare from just about any document format) and distribute it via http download costs almost double a hard copy of the book, printed on paper, bound, shipped to Amazon’s warehouses, and then to me.

Then, to read the ebook, you can sit in your chair, if you have a desktop, put it on a laptop (really easy to read as you stand on BART, clutching the handrail with one hand), or read it awkwardly on a PDA or smartphone. Or you can read it on a “paperlike” Sony ebook reader, a $230 gadget.

To read the regular book, well, you just read the “paper” wherever or however you want.

What did I do? Downloaded the ebook from some of my friends because I wanted the immediacy of the read, and I’m considering ordering the book on Amazon (will see if reading the ebook on my laptop on BART is too much of a pain in the ass).

Sounds like the folks at Penguin Publishing need to check their math.

Now, like just about every man on the planet, I wouldn’t complain if my equipment were bigger (even Long Dong Silver would–female readers, I’m not sure I can explain this, but, ask any man, it’s true). And it wouldn’t bother me if I could engage in day-long Kama Sutra marathons. Who wouldn’t? But I have to say for the most part I’ve been pretty happy with what Mother Nature has given me, and with how I can keep up my performance when it matters.

Well, until recently.

It seems plenty of people–easily hundreds a day–have taken it upon themselves to email me, discreetly, to tell me that I don’t have to suffer with a small dick any longer, and that they have a solution (something called MegaDik, or, alternatively, Magic Stick).

I mean, I’m getting these emails from complete strangers. They’re so concerned with my…shortcomings…that they’re sending unsolicited emails offering succor to someone they don’t even know. Respectable-sounding names, such as Enid Lawson, Jewel Sanchez, and Penelope Smith, have delicately suggested I seek the help of supplements, pumps and semi-surgical techniques. They’ve even sent links where I can get more information and order. At substantial discounts (“at discounted prsices”).

I guess they were picking up on a subconscious feeling of inadequacy that I wasn’t even aware of!

They’ve also suggested I look in Viagra and Levitra (or, rather, V!ag/Ra and L.e.v.1.T.R.8), popular erectile dysfunction medicines, pointing me in the direction of Cypriot pharmacies and Indian clearinghouses that offer these drugs, or bioidentical knockoffs, for 80% less than what I’d pay stateside.

What’s more, they’re persistent and they reach me at several email accounts. Even at work! In fact, I get most of these helpful tips at a customer-service email account that they must somehow know I monitor. Talk about some clever cybersleuthing.

One of the keys to successful marketing is pure repetition. If it weren’t, we really wouldn’t give a shit about where Paris Hilton took her last piss–the fact that Paris’s every move is monitored so intently by the media makes us wonder if there really is something important about her.

In addition to the magic of repetition, these spammers use a concept typically attributed to Microsoft: FUD. Make people scared or unsure about something, and they’ll respond. Anyone familiar with the 2004 Bush reelection campaign will understand the power of manufactured fear.

Repetition and FUD are things Enid, Jewel and Penelope are very good at. Now I stare downward in the shower and wonder if I really should be satisfied with what I see. And whether there would be any harm in wiring $200 to an offshore bank account. I mean, being King-Kong sized is beginning to sound like it could be the answer to those prayers. I. Was. Apparently. Making…unbeknownst to myself.

The Internet really is amazing. Not only can you use it to gather information on problems you need help with, it provides you with information you never asked for about problems you never knew you had!

Me. Today. Waiting for the next BART train.

Ugly anorexic shrew in front of me (normally I couldn’t care less how strangers look, but read on).

The train going in a different direction comes. Those who want to take the train board. The rest of us waiting for the next train move up and continue to wait.

The shrew is motionless.

I ask, “Are you…” (waiting for the next train) is what I was going to say but the shrew turns her head away from me as if I were a man apologizing to his wife for having an affair with one of her best friends.

I shrug and move past her. She remains motionless. Pouting at the world.

The next train arrives, and I swear somehow the sheer force of her lunging at the train defies her 75-pound frame. She jostles her bag of bones brusquely past all of us and stomps into the train.

What exactly is this? Indignation at the world that she can’t eat? Bipolar disorder? Just plain old bitchiness?

I was not offended so much as puzzled.