From C to Shining C-

I maintained in an earlier post that the citizenry is not to be trusted because they're mostly ignorant boobs. Bill Maher agrees with me (and incidentally enjoys the same punny titles that I do... so I stole one from him). I've listed some of the statistics given in the video above, though I'd heard some of these before.

-----------------------------------

On the eve of the Iraq War, 70% of Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11

Six years later, 34% still do.

At a recent town hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his congressman, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”

A majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government or explain what the Bill of Rights is.

24% could not name the country that America fought in the Revolutionary War.

More than 2/3 of Americans don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade

2/3 don’t know what the Food and Drug Administration does.

Nearly half of Americans don’t know that states have two senators.

More than half can’t name their congressman.

The average voter thinks that foreign aid consumes 24% of our federal budget. It’s actually less than 1%.

A third of Republicans believe that Obama is not a citizen.

A third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence because it contains the words “Bush” and “knowledge.”

18% of us think that the sun revolves around the Earth.

Only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity.

-----------------------------------------
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor

The Tax Man Can

Before I begin my diatribe, let me admit up front that my yearly tax forms consistently make me feel like an economic dolt. My current understanding of taxes amounts to: "Fill out forms so government can send me refund for being broke." I use the H&R Block online tax thingy every year and I believed everything to be in order as far as my state and federal taxes were concerned.

Then a few weeks ago I received a nice little letter from CENTAX (Central Tax Bureau of PA) telling me that there was an earned income tax audit discrepancy for the 2006 tax year. Apparently I was delinquent in paying my local school district taxes. The tax is a meager 1% deal with a relatively minor penalty. All told, I owe $84. Not all that bad really.

What annoyed me was that I couldn't figure out why I owed school district taxes. One of Mr. and Mrs. Employers' favorite topics of social inequity involves the fact that school district taxes are paid by wealthy and responsible property owners, and they pay for the children of mooching and lazy renters to go to school without having to pay a dime. Being a lazy and mooching less-than-renter, I couldn't figure out why I would owe taxes.

One phone call later, I learned that this particular tax is levied against anyone who earns an income; the other larger tax applies to people with property. And you know what? That's fine. I have no problem paying my share of taxes. In my mind, I never consider my taxed money to be part of my income anyway. It's money that I never had rather than money that the government is taking from me. So fundamentally I have no gripe with CENTAX.

What annoys me to no end is that, once again, the bureaucracy has informed me that ignorance of the law is no excuse... pay up! Typically, if your employer lives in your community, the 1% is automatically taken out of your wages, but if you work in, say, West Virginia while your home address is listed as Kittanning, you have to know intrinsically to pay your local school tax on your own. Maybe everyone else learned in third grade that one must determine his or her own local tax status, but I never got that memo. CENTAX never sent me a letter telling me that owed them money. The local government never sent me a letter telling me to go see my local wage office. Quite simply, I was just expected to know to go pay my local 1% school district tax somewhere somehow.

I'll follow the rules when I know what the rules are. But don't keep the rules secret and then fine my ass when I don't follow them. I'm sure a lot of people learned that local taxes were their own responsibility, but I never did. I'm certainly not the dumbest waste of space in this state, so I'm sure plenty of other people screwed it up too. I half-suspect that they do it on purpose so that they can fine people when they fail to pay up.

----------------------------------------
"Let the bears pay the Bear Tax. I'll pay the Homer Tax."

For a Chance to Win Big Money!

So many television shows from yesteryear have been reinvented (Password, Press Your Luck, Family Feud), but there are so many game show gems from the past that I personally want to see again. I am an avid fan of the genre, and while some of these titles are obscure, I think they deserve some air time again. Give them a dark blue set with a visible metallic structure and let Regis Philbin host. I guarantee mad ratings.

Match Game: Why this one hasn't been redone is beyond me. Everyone loves washed up celebrities and suggestive and bawdy game show innuendo. For the uninitiated, a contestant would be given a statement with a word missing, and they would have fill in the blank and try to match that word with words written by six celebrity panelists. And the sentences would usually be wildly suggestive. For instance, "Violent Velma is so violent..." (the audience would yell "How violent is she?") "She's so violent that every night before bed she always wants to ______ her husband." The contestant would then give a nice family-friendly answer like "hit," but everyone got the joke. (another example: "Did you catch a glimpse of that woman on the street corner? She has the world's biggest _______.") And the best part of the show is that the celebrities simply screw off the entire time. There's really very little strategy involved, and the D-list celebrities they found were usually very happy to ham it up for the camera. I'm sure today a panel of Tim Curry, William Shatner, Brian Dennehy, and Kathy Griffin would work their magic. Hell, if Charles Nelson Reilly and Nipsey Russell weren't already dead, they'd be right there on day one.

Tic Tac Dough: I remember watching this game religiously, but I don't remember a lot of the rules. It's basically Tic Tac Toe, but in order to put an X or an O on the board, you have to answer some ridiculous trivia question. I imagine half its popularity was due to its incredibly groan-inducing pun of a title, but TV shows have succeeded with less. Look at Deal or No Deal.

Bumper Stumpers: I would be AMAZED if anyone else remembers this show. Contestants had to decypher vanity plates in various puzzle formats. (SK8BDR = Skateboarder for instance). I doubt this would succeed today, but I love odd word games, and this is my fantasy list, so I'm including it.

Double Dare: On the other hand, here's one that just about anyone who watched Nickelodeon at all during the 80s and early 90s remembers fondly. Back then this was relegated to a startup children's network on cable TV, but look what passes for Prime Time network television now. The Physical Challenges and ending obstacle course could be amped up, and you could call the whole thing Double Dare Extreme (or X-Treme for that added punch).

Name That Tune: This is another one that would never take off today, and honestly I don't know how anyone greenlit the program originally. This show was probably like hardcore porn for music nerds. I mostly remember the final round where the host would give some clue about a song, and the contestants would bid on how many notes it would take them to guess it. Some macho asshole typically bid it down to one note, though that was no guarantee that he or she would get it right. This show was balls hard... like Jeopardy for music majors. I'm not sure why my musically-ignorant five-year-old self became fascinated by the show, but in retrospect, perhaps it foreshadowed my later predilection for karaoke.

Classic Concentration: Like the classic children's game concentration but on TV. Match cards, reveal picture, solve picture riddle. This one used to be on back-to-back with Family Feud in the 80s, and it was hosted by Alex Trebek (back when he had his sweet Dago moustache). I've found a whole cache of episodes on YouTube, and there's much hilarity to be had in mocking the contestants for their repeated inability to remember the cards.

$100,000 Pyramid: This is the one I want the most. I used to take my lunch at varying times throughout the day until I found out that $100,000 Pyramid reruns aired at 1:00 every afternoon on the Game Show Network. I wonder if my boss ever considers why my lunch schedule has become so much more regular lately. As opposed to the Match Game, the celebrities on this show had bring their A-game. The normal rounds aren't all that difficult (though you do have to think fast), but the Winner's Circle must be like the ninth circle of hell if you're giving clues. I've seen categories like "Things that are Horizontal," "Vague Things," and "Things that are Cherished." I realize having Dick Clark host it today would lead to all sorts of unintentional and wildly inappropriate hilarity, but he took that game so seriously you would have thought he was proctoring the SATs. There was a brief attempt to bring it back with Donny Osmond about ten years back, but it flopped. I want a big one-hour sumbitch where they up the ante to a million dollars and take the categories to extremes. Let's see them get "Existential Things" or "Parts of a Metafictional Novel."

--------------------------------
"Forgetful Freddy was so forgetful.... (How forgetful was he??)... he was so forgetful that every time he tried to remember someone's name, he drew a blank."

Feeling Fruitier Than Usual

I love cantaloupe. It may be my favorite fruit.

Yesterday I cut up two whole cantaloupes. In less than 24 hours, I've consumed all of it.

I'm sad to see the cantaloupe gone. In fact, I'm feeling rather meloncholy.

---------------------------------------
Making objections to my lame melon puns is fruitless.

Caution: Genius at Work

As I hinted in an earlier post, I've been tinkering sporadically with writing a book. With ample free time, significant progress has been made. I've written three chapters, amounting to about 23 single-spaced Word pages, which would be somewhere in the ball park of 30 to 40 normal book pages. This doesn't mean that the writing is good or enjoyable... I'm just saying that it exists.

I've been working on it for probably the last six months or so, though my commitment often wanes or shifts to more immediate concerns (like the online class, sleeping in on weekends, and watching game shows). For quite some time, I didn't really want to tell anyone, figuring that I'd just be mocked mercilessly. "How's that novel coming, Hemingway?" "Get that publishing deal yet, Shakespeare?" And since the story had only developed into a pre-infancy stage, hell practically just a used condom stage, I really didn't want to talk about it.

I still don't want to discuss the plot in any great detail, mostly because it seems to change every time I write more of the story. "No, no!" I'll shout to nobody. "Eugene wouldn't do that, and Phoebe CERTAINLY wouldn't do that." So my outline shifts to suit whatever new character wrinkle I've worked into the narrative. For that reason, when you get right down to it, writing is really a colossal pain in the ass. Even though I've got 23 single-spaced pages now, I've probably re-written those pages three times. And they'll probably get re-written again as new stuff develops. Hell, I had an entire first chapter written before deciding that the whole thing sucked a testicle and chucking it into the discard pile.

Tasty Aside: I will hint that the plot was inspired by a blog post that I wrote about six months ago. Take that for what it's worth.

Aside from learning that revision is a cruel but necessary evil, I've taken other lessons away from this project already. For instance, characters are much better when they're wildly flawed. When I started, I imagined a group of totally awesome characters who were badass, witty, and got laid with alarming regularity. Quickly one realizes that you can only ride "total awesomeness" for a few pages before you run out of shit to do with it. So I splatter my canvas with heavy coats of arrogance, emotional turmoil, existential crises, stupidity, and just plain asshole behavior. Suddenly people do stuff that's a lot more interesting. The lesson seems obvious in retrospect, but when you're actually the one writing, the temptation to make all your characters exaggerated fantasies of how you wish you were is extremely tantalizing.

Anothing double-edged sword that I still have trouble wielding comes from using my own life as inspiration. Most, if not all, of my characters are based on people I know. Some of the characterizations are vague or simply draw on people's personalities while changing their life events. Others are complete ripoffs. Batmite, for instance, serves as the the direct parallel for one of the characters, and he wholeheartedly supports my fictionalized creation. He's just too damned colorful to pass up, and I mean that in only a half-racist way.

It should come as no great surprise that I'm creating a comedy. I enjoy making people laugh, and if I may say so, I think I'm pretty good at it in written form (though I envy people who can tell a well-constructed funny story in person). I still need to work on my character's inner motivations (when the narrator tells what the characters are thinking and feeling rather than indicating plot developments or backstory) and some of the dialogue. Dialogue is surprisingly hard to pull off convincingly because you want it to sound natural without including all of the "umms" and "likes," awkward pauses, and trivial small talk that litters real conversations. It has to sound real without being real. I should have been a physicist; it something sounds real without being real, it's probably just quantum mechanics.

Recently, writing this book has become something of a compulsion, and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I think about the damned thing all the time, and I'm convinced that I *have* to write it just to get it on the page. When I started it, I expected to either lose interest in a few days or crap out some trash to sell for a quick buck to a publisher operating out of an old Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips. But now I actually want it to be good, and I'm beginning to think I could actually do something worthwhile with it. Who knows? Maybe you might see JP (hopefully with a sweet badass pseudonym) as a published man in your favorite bookstore.

Or the plot could be reworked as the script for a B-grade skin flick. I think I might even prefer that option.

--------------------------------------------
"You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me angry!"