A Moment of Science: Get Angry, Think More Clearly
In my mind, squinting your eyes and looking confused = anger. This is high quality acting here folks.
WEEKEND Watchers Podcast – The State of Comedy
In this podcast for The Indiana Daily Student’s WEEKEND, Editor Cory Barker and I discuss the current condition for comedy in multiple forms. Movies, TV, Stand Up and whatever you call Tucker Max’s book.
Originally uploaded on October 4th, 2009.
IDS Column: Obama wants to eat your kids
It’s two in the afternoon; do you know where your children are?
Perhaps they’re at school, hearing President Obama’s speech to students. Or maybe you kept them at home today, protecting them from the harmful rays Obama will be transmitting out of the talky box.
Yes, tremble in fear.
Until I build a time machine with the purpose of observing each president’s reign, I’ll wonder if politics were always like this. Did Pennsylvanians retreat into their log cabins when Benjamin Franklin stepped out on the public log pile to talk about his new invention made of logs? Did they plug their children’s ears with tiny twig logs?
If you oppose Obama’s views and want to teach your spawn proper values, the worst thing to do is shelter them from the media – unless you are trying to make an underground militia of soldier babies, in which case then maybe that’s a good brainwashing tactic.
Very few school kids care about politics and are much more interested in what new game came out that week or how one of the girls developed breasts over the weekend.
In fact, by making their kids stay home, conservative parents have inadvertently made Obama cooler. Red state children around the country must be screaming, “Thanks, Obama! Now I don’t have to do homework today, and I can watch Jerry Springer!”
According to the Department of Education, Obama’s speech “will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning.”
Has there ever been a time when kids enjoyed being preached at to work hard? Unless Obama turns his speech into a cover of Will Smith’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand” (with Joe Biden filling the role of DJ Jazzy Jeff), Obama will only seem boring and old. And kids hate old. That’s why they’ll never age.
Detractors are treating Obama’s message to students like The Big O’s going to whisper through the TV “If your parents are Republicans, they’re poisoning your food. Also, the Democrats have free PlayStations.” Then he’ll reach through the TV like “Poltergeist” and bite into them with his fangs. That night at the dinner table, they’ll declare their allegiance to socialism and eat the family crest.
As a youngling, I never understood why my father would listen to conservative radio like Mike Gallagher and Rush Limbaugh. He didn’t agree with anything those men said, and car rides usually consisted of him yelling back at the radio.
If my dad’s truck radio was self-aware, it would’ve felt humiliated every day the way my dad berated it. Thankfully life is not a Pixar movie. But Poppa Quandt tuned into those programs and forced me to listen to them so at least I can hear another side of the story. True, that other side sometimes played a song called “Barack The Magic Negro,” but that’s not important.
Parents have plenty of time to influence their children, but presenting your children with a variety of opposing views slightly insures they won’t rebel and become a complete opposite of you when they turn 18.
Originally published in the Indiana Daily Student on September 7, 2009
Chad Quandt Stand Up – Funny Bone Bloomington (9/16/2009)
A Moment of Science: Dog Mouth vs Human Mouth
The second in the AMOS series.
A Moment of Science: Caffeine Persuasion
The first in a series done with WFIU, the NPR station in Bloomington, IN. A Moment of Science has been a long radio tradition, with this being an attempt to transition into the video podcast realm. While I wrote a few other episodes, I merely act in this.
IDS Column: It’s a vagina, not a clown car
“TLC” has stood for many different things.
In the ’90s, it meant female hip-hop with condom wrappers used as fashion statements. For 50-year-old women baking pies, it means tender loving care. What we’re focusing on today is its other meaning: The Learning Channel, or as it should be called now, “Woah, Look At That Weird Family Channel.”
What once contained programming only a home-schooled kid could love has now become a circus of strange family setups. The tent pole of this carnival is the Duggars. Like some twisted Dr. Seuss book, the Duggars have 18 children.
That is not a typo. We’re biologically driven to make sure our genetic code carries on, but here we’re looking at insect-brood numbers of offspring.
Part of the Quiver Movement, which celebrates having families big enough to play full baseball games, the Duggars raise the question of when it’s appropriate to forcibly remove a person’s reproductive organs. It’s hard not to sound insensitive, as the reason for their multitude of moppets is faith-related, but at what point is a person’s right to practice their religious beliefs overridden by common sense?
I don’t want to physically stop these people, but someone needs to sit the Quiver families down for a nice chat. Dr. Phil, why aren’t you on this?
Michelle Duggar home-schools her kids, somehow teaching 7-year-olds as well as 17-year-olds. The quality of their education is doubtful, as even trained teachers can’t give adequate attention to every student in the classroom.
There’s only so much time two people can share with their kids. If the Duggars don’t sleep, that gives each kid a maximum of 80 minutes a day to be alone with their parents.
If nothing, the law of averages guarantees that one child in a huge family will be emotionally messed-up or at least develop an affection for music by Marilyn Manson.
“Octomom” became famous earlier this year when the single mother became pregnant with eight children in addition to the six she already had. While she became generally reviled in the media, she still became a media focus and developed her own reality show.
Any rational person would observe these related stories and learn from it, but there are unbalanced people who will look at these events and think that’s their ticket to becoming famous.
I can only imagine what the next eccentric family setup will be. Cannibals who eat one of their kids every year? A pastor and his demonically possessed family? How about “Brother, Brotha,” a show about minority kids with different dads?
It’s hard to champion a giant family like this. It’s offspring gluttony, as our world is already overpopulated. England has started to run out of places to bury bodies, and some American women are turning their ovaries into Sam’s Clubs.
China might be onto something with their one-child policy, which has reduced population growth by 300 million people in the past two decades. Well, except for that trend of abandonment happening with female infants.
We’re having trouble not screwing up kids with one or two siblings. Maybe President Obama can stimulate our medical economy by giving tax breaks on vasectomies.
Originally published in The Indiana Daily Student on August 24th, 2009
Interview: MUDKIDS
You might have came to the Buskirk Chumley for Dead Prez, but by the end of the night you were won over by MUDKIDS.
What you see if the aftershow interview with MUDKIDS as they take a few moments out of getting constant props from fans to talk with myself and IUSTV. MUDKIDS put up on a hell of a show, and were awesome and down-to-earth. Support them!
http://www.myspace.com/mudkids
