Hi there!
(Note: Sadly, No! beat me to this punch by about an hour or two. They have nicely enough saved me some math. You should read them. They are very funny. I'm still doing this post as opposed to simply linking, because I want to slap that title into the Google algorithm)
Welcome to Kung Fu Monkey! Don't be alarmed by all the swearing and such, we're quite friendly.
Now, you've been sent this link because you sent somebody you love a piece of e-mail about how the murder rate in Baghdad or Iraq is no worse than the murder rate in Washington DC back in 1991 or so. That is very funny and ironic, I know. I myself am chuckling over the third such missive I've received, the latest just this morning.
Your friend would like to help you correct this misapprehension, so he or she sent you here.
What follows is the nice version:
The annual murder rate for urban Washington DC in 1991 was 482 murders for 598,000 inhabitants; roughly 80 per 100,000 people. You see that number used a lot. That is because it is the absolutely highest per capita murder rate in modern American history one can dig up. (The 2005 murder rate is about 35 per 100,000. Good job, D.C. law enforcement! We should make them a state.)
The murder rate in Iraq in October 2006 was, according to UN sources (pdf so no link, but you can find it easily enough), 3709 in total. That number's probably a little low, as counting dead folk is tricky in a culture that buries people quickly out of both tradition and fear of reprisal. But it's a good lower bar.
You may wish to use the US Army's estimates, which tend to be even lower. However, the US Army has admitted it doesn't count bombs, mortars or rocket attacks in its estimates. Personally, if I die in a mortar attack launched by my Sunni/Shia neighbor with the explicit intent on killing me, I count that as "violent death". We're going to stick with the UN estimate, thank you.
Now, what someone has done, when they sent YOU the very neat little letter you sent ME (or your concerned love one) was then figure out that ...
3709 murders/month for roughly 26,000,000 Iraqis works out to , ooooh ...
171 murders per 100,000 annually in Iraq.
Okay, bad, but not too bad. However, those numbers are comparing the murder rates of a city to the murder rates of a country.
A city and a country are two entirely different things. You do not compare the murder rates of cities and countries. It is just generally ... wrong. When someone does that, they are either stupid or lying to you. Feel free to look back on who cooked up the numbers in the letter you forwarded and draw your own conclusions.
More specifically, large swaths of Kurd-controlled territory are relatively peaceful (have been for a decade). Large sections of the south are both sparsely populated and got their ethnic cleansing out of the way early. Those aren't where we have most of our troops, and aren't where the fighting is. When the civil war comes, it will be in the urban areas.
But let's do the math thew way its supposed to be done, eh? Compare a city to a city.
According to the same UN sources, 2722 of those murders occurred in Baghdad. Hmm. Okay, and there are about 6,000,000 people in Baghdad ...
2722 murders/month/6000000 people times x/100,000 = ... carry the two ...
544 murders per 100,000 in Baghdad.
Ah. Now THAT is an unpleasant place. Is it civil-war levels? I don't know. But that's not my job. The person who sent you the letter was implying something with their flawed numbers. All I'm doing is pointing out that if these numbers are significant, the above number is the one you should be looking at.
Bonus round for the other e-mail meme going around: average 130,000 US troops in Iraq, 2872 dead, 44 months ...
"murder" rate of 602 US soldiers per 100,000 per year.
Is that a bad number? Again, not my job to say. But if somebody sends you a "US troops are safer than in Washington DC" e-mail, then you now know that this person is, again, either stupid or lying. For this particular statistic, I would add "flaming asshole." But that's just me.
Glad to help. You may wish to go now. Seriously, you should leave. Because here comes the ...
... not-so-nice version:
ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND? In what major American city do people get set on fire while soldiers stand around and do nothing? In what major American city do they find a hundred or so bodies a day with FUCKING DRILLHOLES IN THEIR NECK? In what major American city do car bombs go off killing 200 hundred people, in what major American city are there FUCKING MORTAR ATTACKS FOR CHRISSAKE!!! They seized the media today, people. Remember when the Crips took over Channel 10 and spent the day rallying Compton to declare war on its neighbors?
I don't know what shattered pathetic character defect keeps some people denying reality, but it's NOT HELPING. Whether it was wrong or right to go into Iraq, whether the Administration shagged it, or this was Plan A just a shitty Plan A, or things just went off the rails, denying reality Is. Not. Helping. We can't have a conversation about what to do next as long as a chunk of this country keeps clapping its hands and wishing hard. Hey, somebody wants to argue we need to stay for ten years, fine, lay it out. I'm open to the idea (I'm a Powell guy, what can I say). But how am I supposed to take this seriously when some people in the same breath try a bunch of statistical shell-games to show everything's just hunky-dory?
We're supposed to be tolerant, but the great Achilles Heel of this idea is that we're too tolerant of people who should just be, based on their track record of wrong-ness, laughed out of public discourse forever.
I call shenanigans!
... pant ... pant .. pant ...
Ahem. Sorry about that. Anyway, John over at Ezra's joint has an interesting point as well. Something similar to an argument I've made before: this country is crippled by the fact that a large percentage of the largest demographic group can't get its head out of its own ass and realize that It's Just. Not. 1968. Anymore. Let it go. How you felt about the hippies and Vietnam and whether we won or lost or were stabbed in the -- gaaaahhh, let it goooo.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Thursday, November 23, 2006
I Played with John August's "Wiki"
But I was drunk, so it doesn't count.
August has started a wiki of screenwriting goodness. It's in beta, but you may enjoy browsing.
August has started a wiki of screenwriting goodness. It's in beta, but you may enjoy browsing.
Happy Thanksgiving
With some day-off reading provided. hey, who says I don't link to conservative writers? This guy was up until recently a trustee of the National Review! (h/t Digby)
In all seriousness, best to you and yours. And please, take a moment from wanting to kill your family to appreciate: if nobody in your neighborhood was found this morning with drill holes in their neck, if you have more than two hours of electricity a day, if you're not sitting in a tent somewhere ten thousand miles from home, hoping those assholes in suits won't get you killed -- you're having a pretty damn fine day despite your Mom's bullshit about when you're getting married or how Dad doesn't believe what you do is a "real job.". Appreciate it. Give thanks for it. Because the awful truth is that there are no guarantees, ever, that your life will stay that way.
Oof, that was a bit grim, eh?
In all seriousness, best to you and yours. And please, take a moment from wanting to kill your family to appreciate: if nobody in your neighborhood was found this morning with drill holes in their neck, if you have more than two hours of electricity a day, if you're not sitting in a tent somewhere ten thousand miles from home, hoping those assholes in suits won't get you killed -- you're having a pretty damn fine day despite your Mom's bullshit about when you're getting married or how Dad doesn't believe what you do is a "real job.". Appreciate it. Give thanks for it. Because the awful truth is that there are no guarantees, ever, that your life will stay that way.
Oof, that was a bit grim, eh?
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Blue Beetle #9
... hits stores today. I totally spaced. Find out why Peacemaker's got a head full of "blue", how El Paso's reacting to having its very own superhero, and where Brenda finds herself a Mother Box.
Stand-Up is Tricky
One draft down, one to go. But in the interim, I got a fair number of requests to chat about the Michael Richards incident, from a stand-up's point of view. I got a couple similar notes requesting discussion when the Kerry debacle occurred.
All the Kerry incident tells you is that jokes are hard. A joke -- particularly the type Kerry was trying -- involves a reverse in both written concept and delivery, a SNAP of the curveball right at the plate. That's something a lot of civilians miss on jokes. There are jokes with an ironclad structure, and then there are ones that rely on delivery only for the laugh, while 99.99999 % require a personally stylistic blend of the two. Ellen DeGeneres, for example had these intricately timed clockwork jokes only she could deliver, while somebody like Elayne Boosler wrote marvelously solid jokes you could give a chimp to perform. Elayne's stage presence is the bonus.
Kerry's joke itself was poorly constructed -- not a lot of safety rails on it for the none-pro, and not the way a professional comic would have written it. (And again, liberal politicians -- we're right here. Stop just taking our checks and maybe let us help you not suck in public, maybe make an ad or two that isn't bog-fucking-boring. Happy to help, really)
This is a bit geeky, but let's look at Kerry's joke.
"Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
The point of the joke, of course, is that Bush is an intellectually lazy man, and one would do well to avoid his mistakes. In his comments afterwards, Kerry made clear that he was commenting on the President's intellect. That is, the President is dumb.
But the joke as written is about being lazy, not about being dumb. The problem is, that you want the punchline to fit the stereotype of Bush as dumb, not intellectually lazy. "Bush is dumb" is the stereotype, the instant mental shorthand that allows you to snap the image for the laugh. Sure, "Bush is intellectually lazy" may be closer to the actual truth, but it's useless from a humor standpoint.
Beside the construction problem, there's the mixed target pronoun. (I had this issue illuminated for me when I was writing a speech for Jenni Baird, an Australian, on GF.) Americans use "you" as a generic pronoun when proper English utilizes "one", that is, there's no real difference of intent between "You are needed" and "One is needed." But there's another layer -- "you" in stand-up not only stands in for the "generic person", but it's a tool a stand-up subtly uses to involve the audience as the subject/participant of the joke. Often there's an implied "I" in a stand-up's "you", too, making that "you" a "we", further emotionally, unconsciously making the stand-up and audience collaborators in the performance.
Knowing this, let's look at Kerry's joke as performed to his audience of students, but with the joke delivery structure exposed.
"Education, if you [students] make the most of it, you [students] study hard, you [students] do your homework and you [students] make an effort to be smart, you [students] can do well. And if you don't, you [Bush] get stuck in Iraq."
See how that's broken? One (heh) might think that the subject change is the reverse of the joke, but it's not it's the subject of the reverse. Meaning the audience hears the joke as:
"Education, if you [students] make the most of it, you [students] study hard, you [students] do your homework and you [students] make an effort to be smart, you [students] can do well. And if you don't, you [students] get stuck in Iraq."
How do students get stuck in Iraq? As soldiers. Ta-frikkin'-da. Add to that Kerry's bumbling of the pause required to accentuate the punch, and well ...
The comedy sins don't stop there. Kerry's writer muddied the joke setup, not just the structure: "make an effort"? "Do well"? Those are soft phrases. The more a joke evokes a specific image in the mind, the better the laugh.
In contrast, let's look at one of my favorite Chris Rock jokes. A slightly different intent, but the joke is oddly parallel in structure, and depends on the same audience realization -- the same snap -- for the laugh.
"A black C student can't do shit with his life. A black C student can't be a manager at Burger King ... meanwhile a white C student just happens to be the President of the United States."
Just quoting that joke doesn't do justice to the mastery of Rock's delivery. He's like a musician now, and there are multiple subtle rhythm breaks in the delivery of joke that really make it land. The joke is about privilege, not about Bush being dumb per se, but I hope it illustrates the point.
There's an interesting, longer discussion on how all humor comes from persona, how Al Gore is funny while Bill Clinton is not, and why George Bush will never be, but we'll get to that some other time.
The Michael Richards incident, however, illustrates that stand-up is hard. What the hell Richards was doing on the stage of the Laugh Factory, I have no idea. I've been out of the live-performance loop for some time; I don't know if he's been doing a lot of stage-time lately. However, Richards was never a stand-up before now. He was a sketch and improv performer. Setting aside the longstanding, friendly rivalry between stand-ups and improv performers, those are two entirely different animals. Improv and sketch performers, while walking their own high-wires, still operate under the culturally programmed shield of the constructed performance. They are doing characters, in a wee little play. It's a thin shield to be sure, but it completely changes the performer/audience dynamic. It's the blood/brain barrier of the nightclub world.
When Richards apologized -- a piss-poor non-apology -- he blamed "rage". That rage came from a lack of control, a feeling of helplessness before the hecklers. Those hecklers, weren't all the tough, the problem was they were right -- Richards was sucking. Hard. But that's not surprising, or even really a negative judgment on his talent or performance. He's not a stand-up. Whatever skills he does have, they weren't going to work at the Laugh Factory on a late show.
There's another layer here. It's one thing for Richards to go on stage with the audience having certain expectations of him, and being unequipped to fulfill those expectations in the format he'd chosen. But to have to deal with the knife-edge of audience control after a decade of being absolutely, unconditionally-given love as Kramer ... yikes. Thats got to be one toxic brew. Even more bilious to have had that attention and that love and the constant adulation and proclamations of genius ... to then not be able to grasp it again, to have these goddam proles cut you down, you sonuvabitches I WAS/AM A COMEDY GOD...
The human brain just isn't wired for fame. The lucky escape with their lives.
Class, please consult the finest text on this particular font of madness, Cintra Wilson's A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations. Discussions to follow.
All the Kerry incident tells you is that jokes are hard. A joke -- particularly the type Kerry was trying -- involves a reverse in both written concept and delivery, a SNAP of the curveball right at the plate. That's something a lot of civilians miss on jokes. There are jokes with an ironclad structure, and then there are ones that rely on delivery only for the laugh, while 99.99999 % require a personally stylistic blend of the two. Ellen DeGeneres, for example had these intricately timed clockwork jokes only she could deliver, while somebody like Elayne Boosler wrote marvelously solid jokes you could give a chimp to perform. Elayne's stage presence is the bonus.
Kerry's joke itself was poorly constructed -- not a lot of safety rails on it for the none-pro, and not the way a professional comic would have written it. (And again, liberal politicians -- we're right here. Stop just taking our checks and maybe let us help you not suck in public, maybe make an ad or two that isn't bog-fucking-boring. Happy to help, really)
This is a bit geeky, but let's look at Kerry's joke.
"Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
The point of the joke, of course, is that Bush is an intellectually lazy man, and one would do well to avoid his mistakes. In his comments afterwards, Kerry made clear that he was commenting on the President's intellect. That is, the President is dumb.
But the joke as written is about being lazy, not about being dumb. The problem is, that you want the punchline to fit the stereotype of Bush as dumb, not intellectually lazy. "Bush is dumb" is the stereotype, the instant mental shorthand that allows you to snap the image for the laugh. Sure, "Bush is intellectually lazy" may be closer to the actual truth, but it's useless from a humor standpoint.
Beside the construction problem, there's the mixed target pronoun. (I had this issue illuminated for me when I was writing a speech for Jenni Baird, an Australian, on GF.) Americans use "you" as a generic pronoun when proper English utilizes "one", that is, there's no real difference of intent between "You are needed" and "One is needed." But there's another layer -- "you" in stand-up not only stands in for the "generic person", but it's a tool a stand-up subtly uses to involve the audience as the subject/participant of the joke. Often there's an implied "I" in a stand-up's "you", too, making that "you" a "we", further emotionally, unconsciously making the stand-up and audience collaborators in the performance.
Knowing this, let's look at Kerry's joke as performed to his audience of students, but with the joke delivery structure exposed.
"Education, if you [students] make the most of it, you [students] study hard, you [students] do your homework and you [students] make an effort to be smart, you [students] can do well. And if you don't, you [Bush] get stuck in Iraq."
See how that's broken? One (heh) might think that the subject change is the reverse of the joke, but it's not it's the subject of the reverse. Meaning the audience hears the joke as:
"Education, if you [students] make the most of it, you [students] study hard, you [students] do your homework and you [students] make an effort to be smart, you [students] can do well. And if you don't, you [students] get stuck in Iraq."
How do students get stuck in Iraq? As soldiers. Ta-frikkin'-da. Add to that Kerry's bumbling of the pause required to accentuate the punch, and well ...
The comedy sins don't stop there. Kerry's writer muddied the joke setup, not just the structure: "make an effort"? "Do well"? Those are soft phrases. The more a joke evokes a specific image in the mind, the better the laugh.
In contrast, let's look at one of my favorite Chris Rock jokes. A slightly different intent, but the joke is oddly parallel in structure, and depends on the same audience realization -- the same snap -- for the laugh.
"A black C student can't do shit with his life. A black C student can't be a manager at Burger King ... meanwhile a white C student just happens to be the President of the United States."
Just quoting that joke doesn't do justice to the mastery of Rock's delivery. He's like a musician now, and there are multiple subtle rhythm breaks in the delivery of joke that really make it land. The joke is about privilege, not about Bush being dumb per se, but I hope it illustrates the point.
There's an interesting, longer discussion on how all humor comes from persona, how Al Gore is funny while Bill Clinton is not, and why George Bush will never be, but we'll get to that some other time.
The Michael Richards incident, however, illustrates that stand-up is hard. What the hell Richards was doing on the stage of the Laugh Factory, I have no idea. I've been out of the live-performance loop for some time; I don't know if he's been doing a lot of stage-time lately. However, Richards was never a stand-up before now. He was a sketch and improv performer. Setting aside the longstanding, friendly rivalry between stand-ups and improv performers, those are two entirely different animals. Improv and sketch performers, while walking their own high-wires, still operate under the culturally programmed shield of the constructed performance. They are doing characters, in a wee little play. It's a thin shield to be sure, but it completely changes the performer/audience dynamic. It's the blood/brain barrier of the nightclub world.
When Richards apologized -- a piss-poor non-apology -- he blamed "rage". That rage came from a lack of control, a feeling of helplessness before the hecklers. Those hecklers, weren't all the tough, the problem was they were right -- Richards was sucking. Hard. But that's not surprising, or even really a negative judgment on his talent or performance. He's not a stand-up. Whatever skills he does have, they weren't going to work at the Laugh Factory on a late show.
There's another layer here. It's one thing for Richards to go on stage with the audience having certain expectations of him, and being unequipped to fulfill those expectations in the format he'd chosen. But to have to deal with the knife-edge of audience control after a decade of being absolutely, unconditionally-given love as Kramer ... yikes. Thats got to be one toxic brew. Even more bilious to have had that attention and that love and the constant adulation and proclamations of genius ... to then not be able to grasp it again, to have these goddam proles cut you down, you sonuvabitches I WAS/AM A COMEDY GOD...
The human brain just isn't wired for fame. The lucky escape with their lives.
Class, please consult the finest text on this particular font of madness, Cintra Wilson's A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations. Discussions to follow.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Comics Geekery
There's an odd thing about Hollywood -- the city essentially shuts down between Thanksgiving and February now, and over a big chunk of the summer, AND with the Jewish holidays ... it is a miracle we manage produce even the low-quality swill we foist upon you.
That said, I need to finish up these two projects in the next week, or they get bumped back a considerable length of time. Seeing how we're already scouting locations for one, that would be bad. So I'll toss out some comics pimpage and 4GM stuff over the next few days, but otherwise things will be pretty light.
Interview over at Newsarama on how I'm taking over Blue Beetle solo as of issue #11. Over at BOOM!'s joint they have the reviews for the latest entry in their anthology series, Pirate Tales. It's a fine piece of work -- but their next one, Ninja Tales, is all kind of "sick" as the kids say. I think. Diggity. Their new Cthulhu Tales collection is also very creepy and possibly even nastier than the last. I don't have a story in that one, so I get to read it as a civilian and enjoy.
I'm a bit in love with these anthology collections, remniscent of how the pulps worked back in the day. I don't know if Ross will be able to continue them as he moves into a much larger business model (Warhammer 40k anyone?), but goddamit it's fun as a writer to take a single concept laden with all sorts of baggage and either explore or subvert it. I can honestly say I never, ever would have written the story I did for Ninja Tales without the spark of the anthology gimmick. Yet, easily my favorite thing I've written this year. Preview of the art for that story -- "Desert Sun" -- is what's at the top of the page. Ninjas. 1945. You do the math.
Oh, and Warren sent me the first two issues of his next project. This is why I both love and hate him. I've been talking with a couple other writers about this whole neo-pulp vibe, maybe doing a project -- and Warren just goes ahead, independently, and writes the shit out of rockets and ray guns and aero-battles. You will want to buy this, oh yes you will. Keep an eye over at his joint for when it goes on sale.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Underfunded
I'm an idiot for not reminding you that David Breckman's very funny comedy, Underfunded, is on USA tonight. There are not many backdoor pilots about the Canadian Secret Service out there.
As a matter of fact, I'm fairly sure this is it.
The reviews are excellent, it's a fine offbeat show and certainly worth your time. With luck they'll get a pickup off the ratings.
As a matter of fact, I'm fairly sure this is it.
The reviews are excellent, it's a fine offbeat show and certainly worth your time. With luck they'll get a pickup off the ratings.
Giffen on Layout
For the comic readers here -- Giff's got an article on Newsarama about how he does the weekly layouts for 52. A pretty great window ito the process of the guy who is one of the best in the business.
Purity Ball. I Said BALL. Singular. Geesh.
Pardon the downtime. As part of the liberal media, I was invited to the big "Terrorists and Sodomizers Victory Bash" and I'm still hung like an old boot. There was a moment when I realized, sucking back my fifth Stoli Embryonic Stem Cell shooter and doing Devil's Ash (that's cocaine cut with the ashes of burned Bibles confiscated FROM YOUR HOMES) off the asses of roofied veterans, a moment I realized "Hey, not as young as you used to be, this is gonna hurt,", but then Rosie O'Donnell and Neil Patrick Harris and Osama and Sadr broke out the edible burkas and assless chaps and bang -- everything else is a red haze. I was barely coherent enough to make it to Nancy Pelosi's Lesbo-Wiccan Black Mass in the morning.
Anyway -- thanks to Amanda Marcotte, your ewww factor for the morning. And I mean Ewww Factor Seven, Mr, Scott. A promo video for one of the Purity Balls out there, where
a.) Little girls dress up in prom dresses and go to a party with their Dad and swear to stay virgins until he gives them away to a man he approves of and
b.) Daddies promise to treasure and keep their virginity safe.
Sleep tight.
Anyway -- thanks to Amanda Marcotte, your ewww factor for the morning. And I mean Ewww Factor Seven, Mr, Scott. A promo video for one of the Purity Balls out there, where
a.) Little girls dress up in prom dresses and go to a party with their Dad and swear to stay virgins until he gives them away to a man he approves of and
b.) Daddies promise to treasure and keep their virginity safe.
Sleep tight.
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