http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVo8SNlU9yE

the best mad tv skits ever:

1) It’s a Vancome Life

2) Laguna Biotch

3) Evil Oprah kills audience

4) Miss Swan in a Gay Bar

5) Cabana Chat

6) Terms of Imprisonment

7) Love of my Life

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjLPVwf-WaM

Well, that’s the tawdry detail to notice here…but perhaps not the interesting one.

The interesting one?  Or the bigger picture…hhhmmm….well there could be several of them, but one I wonder about, is whether people are actually getting dumber, even though they appear to be getting smarter.  I might revisit this in a later blog post where I will examine “5 hidden bubbles”…one of them being the bubble of professional authority.  As our lilting-voiced young hottie would no doubt agree – there are plenty of MDs who have very tedious to obtain degrees and yet don’t know wtf they are doing in the grand scheme of things.  They just prescribe whatever their hot young (female, generally) pharma reps tell them to prescribe.  I’ve actually seen this, twice last year, in a Chipotle that’s next to a hospital.  Hapless, dorky, 40-something doctors getting chatted up by a babe about the pharma company’s latest make believe drug.  OK.  Fine.  But here’s the rub…how do people like this guy in the video manage to see through the BS that is the modern medical-industrial complex, without seeing through the BS of Christianity (or the other religions) – which should be so much more obvious?   How can someone who links to a video about the evils of Monsanto also say on their facebook that they like Glenn Beck and Carrie Prejean?  (the latter particularly makes me think he doth protest too much)   I think our education system so stresses the details – cramming in so much material to pass the various state examinations – that people have lost the ability to synthesize the big picture, and see that patterns that appear in one area of human endeavors often appear, in the same way, in others.  For example, that the ridiculous fear mongering of the pharma industry (cholesterol will kill you) is ultimately no different that the ridiculous fear mongering of the fundamentalist religion to which he presumably prescribes. (having gay sex will get him sent to Hell).  It’s particularly sad when he said “god wouldn’t have put saturated fat in milk and eggs to kill us.”   It’s as though he’s learned to play poker with 1/2 the deck missing.  The truly scientifically aware mind realizes that evolution favored a balance of saturated and unsaturated fats, because that mix was the most thermodynamically and biologically favorable.  (you can make more things from unsaturated fats, but they are less stable than saturated fats.)

Of course, as someone who has known Harvard graduates who were jesus freaks, I know that the illusory order of religion just has a magnetic appeal to some people, and that’s that.   It’s old news. But I see more and more of this particular pattern of incongruity, and it’s troubling.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1138445/Janet-Street-Porter-Why-I-hate-Facebook.html

dial #45 for a crisis in the symbolic order

dial #47 for a hermeneutic conundrum

dial #82 for a psychoanalytical Weltanschauung

Every time someone on flickr comments “great capture”, John Berger upchucks a little bit in his mouth.

will the NYC electro-revival ever come to an end…?

I made a fake ID once, but I just drew it.

I’m so cynical about facebook. It probably has some checkbox: “Always make a sexual or racial minority appear in my profile’s top friends so that I can seem politically progressive”

I’m hip, I’m on myspace facebook, and I play accordion

sorry folks, he wussed out and took down the accordion picture

*- with apologies to Ja’mie King