Actually, that's kinda cool

From the ironic "There I fixed it" comes this intriguing combination. But it's more a goof than a kludge.

it's turtles all the way down

Of course, after you get a Bernard Favre Manually-Wound Watch Crown Winder for your fancy watch, you'll need to get a winder-winder, and metasoforth...

And you can't please some of the folks all of the time

You Can't Please Everyone - One Star Reviews of Classic Movies, Music and Literature.

I liked this - quite likely ironic - review of Are You Experienced?

Words cannot describe my intense dislike for Jimi’s guitar “skills”. This guy is a HACK. All songs sound exactly the same, the drummer is weak, does the bassist even exist? Listen to some REAL music that actually requires talent- like Nickelback!

Oh, it gets better (worse).

Orange Box

I hadn't seen one of these before, but here's a look at a black box flight data recorder, which as you can see, isn't black.

Please make it stop

Monday's snow storm coincided with a global warming protest outside of the gates of the coal-fired power plant that supplies much of DC's electricity. This morning, it was 16F.

I'm not sure that the forces of irony can likewise be harnessed to make it unseasonably warm, but it'd be nice. I suspect sincerity is a key ingredient, and no kabuki dance will fool them. In any case, the protesters would be better served, I think, to run their protests during the summer, when everyone has the A/C cranked to counteract the more programmatically-aligned sweltering humidity.

A boy named Sebastian

Hipster Baby Names.

From the Department of Not Quite What I Meant

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

...and I shouldn't have to wrestle with the concept of irony while I'm listening to Merle Haggard

RedStateUpdate coming to terms with Toby Keith's Obama endorsement.

You cannot out-parody reality

Not from the Onion: FTC Wants to Know What Big Brother Knows About You

Captain Pedantry

Not really Ironic, but still funny: Oh the irony: New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” License Plates Made By Prisoners

Which made me briefly look through the list of US State Mottos in an attempt to come up with something truly ironic, and all I got was that a lot of them are strange; Or they are dumb, or they are strange and dumb:

• Puerto Rico: "Juan es su nombre" ("John is his name")
• Maryland: Fatti maschi, parole femmine (Manly deeds, womanly words)
• Maine: Dirigo (Latin, I direct)

etc.

I am not a paper cup

Neither is this: "I am not a paper cup"

Deceptively Ironic

I perused 9 Words That Don't Mean What You Think (including perused), when I came to their number one word, deceptive. Go ahead and read it, and I think you'll agree, it's insane. Deceptive's meaning is deeply ambiguous, and well, deceptive. Which means that it is what it means, which it's not. It's a walking paradox. It is anti-ironic.

"Ultra-hip nostalgic retro-phrases, ironically evoking an earlier era of ten days earlier"

Don't taze me bro: September 16 was such an innocent time. By the way, tazer that guy. Tazer him a lot.

You cannot out-parody reality

Outsourcing the Picket Line (via)
By Keith L. Alexander
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 24, 2007; A01

The picketers marching in a circle in front of a downtown Washington office building chanting about low wages do not seem fully focused on their message.

Many have arrived with large suitcases or bags holding their belongings, which they keep in sight. Several are smoking cigarettes. One works a crossword puzzle. Another bangs a tambourine, while several drum on large white buckets. Some of the men walking the line call out to passing women, "Hey, baby." A few picketers gyrate and dance while chanting: "What do we want? Fair wages. When do we want them? Now."

Although their placards identify the picketers as being with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters, they are not union members.

They're hired feet, or, as the union calls them, temporary workers, paid $8 an hour to picket. Many were recruited from homeless shelters or transitional houses. Several have recently been released from prison. Others are between jobs.

[...]

Supporters of the practice consider it a creative tactic in an era of declining union membership and clout. But critics say the reliance on nonunion members -- who are paid $1 above minimum wage and receive no benefits -- diminishes the impact and undercuts a principle established over decades of union struggles.

No kidding.

Chuck Klosterman Can't Lose

I read Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Coco-Puffs yesterday. He's sort of a P. J. O'Rourke crossed with Nick Hornby. Or maybe it's Gregg Easterbrook crossed with Camille Paglia. Bill Simmons vs Tom Wolf? Whatever conveys the appropriate sense of Gen-X gonzo journalism. Complete with the, pardon my French, "fuck-patois" that is the bane my generation. Just a side note, but vulgarity is our free-love and polyester leisure suits of Gen X - a manifestation of our self-absorption whose shame will bloom in the fullness of time. At least in those who remain capable of shame.

ANYWAY, as the title indicates*, Klosterman is obsessed with sex, drugs, and coco-puffs, or to state the subtext directly: Death, boredom, and authenticity. I know this is the subtext not because I am clever, but because he writes that it so several times. He also calls nearly everything post-modern and ironic, and at the same time, I get the feeling he thinks those labels are ridiculous intellectual posturing. He's hipsterdom eating itself. He's fallen and he can't get up. Perhaps the saving grace, here, is his sense of perspective, which leads to humor. The book is eminently quotable:

I know nobody uses the term Generation X anymore, and I know all the people it supposedly describes supposedly hate the supposed designation. But I like it. It's simply the easiest way to categorize a genre of people who were born between 1965 and 1977 and therefore share a similar cultural experience. It's not pejorative or complimentary; it's factual. I'm a "Gen Xer," okay? And I buy shit marketed to "Gen Xers." And I use air quotes when I talk, and I sigh a lot, and I own a Human League cassette. Get over it.

So, what's the final score? Should you invest time in this gen-x navel gazing by some wildcat music reviewer? Chuck Klosterman Is His Own Worst Metaphor is a review of a subsequent book, but the same message applies:

Younger generations of Americans urgently need to learn to refuse their culture at face value, lest the stories sold by media conglomerates and advertising firms come to define them individually (more than they already do). I’m not arguing that a North Dakotan with a stack of KISS albums and a bong is going to single-handedly change the country. But he might be an enzyme for some sort of progression. And I assert as much knowing that Klosterman analyzes the significance of Morrissey’s Hispanic fan base, Val Kilmer’s uncanny politeness, and the reasons Goths annually coagulate in Disneyland (bingo players “gather”; Goths “coagulate”).

One interesting twist to all this may be Klosterman’s own melee with celebrity. Chuck Klosterman IV will serve as a benchmark on Klosterman’s own celebrity arc – he’s that much closer to the falling action on this ride to success. What personal crisis must follow? What could becoming a celebrity mean to someone whose purpose is to decipher the spaces inhabited by celebrities and their metaphors? According to his own measures, he’ll soon become a signal describing some cultural message. He’ll eventually come to exist as a living opposition, some breathing contradiction between his outward, abstract meaning and the guy who ties his own shoes every morning – a man antagonized by his own shadow.

His fate necessarily leads in one of two directions. Either: He successfully breaks from the abstraction (i.e., dies a fiery death in a Chevy Vega that swan dives from a Cuban bridge at sunset; Klosterman IV is reissued by Penguin Classics). Or: He successfully reconciles with his contradictory condition (i.e., becomes a conservative radio host; procreates with the urgent fury of Britney Spears’ secret garden).

However, I don't think that "young Americanss urgently need to learn to refuse their culture at face value, lest the stories sold by media conglomerates and advertising firms come to define them individually..." It's not like post-modern intellectual culture (the high-culture to the coco-puffs low) has anything better to offer other than nihilism and cynicism.

In another interview, Chuck Klosterman: Articulating the Unintelligible, the author begins by saying:

It is uniquely fitting that the man who is being called the voice of Generation X uses cultural debris the way a flasher uses a trench coat. Eloquence suddenly emerges from his deceptively chatty prose, imparting momentous meaning from sources that can usually be called humble. Chuck Klosterman's voice is compelling to the extent that he writes convincingly about the significance of cereal commercials. It isn't a case of making something out of nothing, the conclusions he arrives at are frighteningly substantial, somehow managing to be funny at the same time.

What fascinates me about Chuck is that every time he speaks it's like he's tossing out new material. The Klosterman process is operating constantly: A casual mixture of hedonic mirth and profundity that veers to the edge of neurosis and pulls back triumphantly. This is how he has managed , I assume, to write for Spin, Esquire, and ESPN while churning out a steady stream of book titles. I suspect that it would be hard for him to turn it off.

The tossing out new material description is apt. Klosterman is very much like a stand-up comedian trying out new material to see what sticks, which results in an uneven book. But still, even when he's off, there's still usually something there to chew on.

---
* "You can't judge a book by its cover" is misleading. Maybe you shouldn't reach a definitive conclusion, but it's a good place to start.

Super Bowl Rings

Craig Boreth wrote that jewelry is mostly bought by men for women despite men having no idea about what women want or like (other than bigger usually better). The upshot of his advice was to find a place with a bulletproof exchange policy and pretend, if need be, not to notice that she's wearing something else.

Anyway, with Super Bowl Sunday nearly upon us (old, but funny: Guess who had no idea that the Super Bowl was yesterday?), here's more evidence that men should just never buy or wear jewelry.

P.S., since the linking cherry is off: This is how bad the whole irony thing has gotten and The Jumping is Clearly Ironic. Also, If Only.

The Slave of Duty

Irony!
Huh.
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, or at least, not very much!

Humourous irony seems hard to pin down. We often use the word ironic to sardonically describe an absurd event in which someone has been crossed up by events or destiny - but loosening up the definition removes the role of language from it. At which point, anything that causes you a bittersweet chuckle becomes fair game, for instance, rain on a rainy day.

Ironic communication is a little more easy to pin down - when Socrates proclaims he knows nothing, he's in fact implicitly acknowledging his superior knowledge to the people around him who also know nothing, but don't know what they don't know (Rumsfield would approve). Sarcasm would seem to qualify, but I think most people would agree this doesn't quite rise to a high enough standard of contradiction to meet the definition of irony.

The Futurama episode I mentioned earlier goes through a progression of jokes in an attempt to find irony, and finally succeeds when the robot devil takes Leila's hand in marriage instead of physically taking it (which is what she expected). So, irony depends on destiny and misinterpreted words. Absurd events which merely countermand your wishes or expectations (rain on your wedding day/black flies in your chardonnay (?)) - no matter how wry, aren't ironic unless you can point to a double meaning somewhere. Even if you come up with a better (more symmetric?) coincidence, it's still not ironic.

A classic example comes from the Pirates of Penzance. Frederick, the slave of duty, thought himself free from his mistaken apprenticeship to a pirate (instead of a pilot) after he turned 22 years old. He resigns his position and takes up pirate hunting instead.

Ha ha, not so fast:

PIRATE KING: For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I've no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don't know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.

Through some singular coincidence (I shouldn't be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy)
You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year,
on the twenty-ninth of February;
And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you'll easily discover,
That though you've lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, you're only five and a little bit over!
RUTH. and KING. Ha! ha! ha! ha!
Ho! ho! ho! ho!
FRED. Dear me!
Let's see! (counting on fingers)
Yes, yes; with yours my figures do agree!
ALL. Ha! ha! ha! ho! ho! ho! ho!
FRED. (more amused than any) How quaint the ways of Paradox!
At common sense she gaily mocks!
Though counting in the usual way,
Years twenty-one I've been alive,
Yet, reckoning by my natal day,
I am a little boy of five!
RUTH and KING. He is a little boy of five! Ha! ha! ha!
ALL. A paradox, a paradox,
A most ingenious paradox!
Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!, etc.

RUTH and KING throw themselves back on seats, exhausted with laughter.

FRED. Upon my word, this is most curious most absurdly whimsical.
Five-and-a-quarter! No one would think it to look at me!
RUTH. You are glad now, I'll be bound, that you spared us. You would
never have forgiven yourself when you discovered that you had
killed two of your comrades.
FRED. My comrades?
KING. (rises) I'm afraid you don't appreciate the delicacy of your
position: You were apprenticed to us...
FRED. Until I reached my twenty-first year.
KING. No, until you reached your twenty-first birthday (producing
document), and, going by birthdays, you are as yet only five-
and-a-quarter.
FRED. You don't mean to say you are going to hold me to that?
KING. No, we merely remind you of the fact, and leave the rest to
your sense of duty.
RUTH. Your sense of duty!

The irony hangs on the unexpected definitions of leap-birthdays versus regular birthdays, and Frederick is thwarted by an over-literal interpretation of his age of release on his apprenticeship contract. N.B., the Kevin Kline Pirates of Penzance is pretty good. As is Topsy-Turvy.

Thus, irony comes about when destiny makes a word-play out of your life. We could have the Pirate King order Frederick to run down to the airport and buy a case of duty-free vodka for the upcoming weddings - how ironic except that we don't really care about the concept of duty that much.

And that is irony!

Lines from Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic" modified to actually be ironic.

A death row pardon two minutes too late... because the governor was too busy watching Dead Man Walking to grant clemency any earlier.

Rain on your wedding day... to Ra, the Egyptian sun-god.

But still, aren't these more absurd than ironic? My favorite bit of ironic humor is the Robot Devil episode of Futurama.

God is Beautiful

The fire marshal came through our building recently and gave us the thumbs-up, which is good since we hardly ever have fires. Well, at least not on purpose. The most memorable to me was the time I came in on a Saturday morning and the hallway was filled with smoke. It turns out that there was an electrical fire in one of the maintenance closets. It further turns out that the fire alarm system had caught on fire, and somewhat ironically, had not gone off. Ha ha, good one God.