Alright… This is a catch-up post. I’ve been away, doing work on an internet radio show we’re hoping to have rolled out shortly. More on that soon, but for now, here’s some immediate business.
Terrible Advice
If you don’t know Bitterlawyer.com, here’s a perfect opportunity to discover it. I’ve done pieces with them on several occasions in the past and, aside from being great all around people to work with, they run the premier irreverent legal humor website online. Period. It’s a serious entertainment portal, with what I have to assume is substantial backing. Their spot-on sitcom, Living the Dream, is even streamed on Hulu. And no other legal humor site picks up interviews with everyone from Jeffrey Toobin to Tucker Max to David Baldacci. In the world of high quality, finger-in-the-industry’s-eye legal comedy, Bitterlawyer’s the shit.
I’m doing the first of a three column series over there starting this week: “Ask the Philadelphia Lawyer.” If you want terrible advice, ask away. The three inquiries we run with will get free copies of Happy Hour. If you’ve already got the book, give us the address of a fundamentalist to send your copy to. One with a heart condition.
An Interview
You can hear me interviewed tonight at “Q’s House:”
This week, a story of Sex, drugs, and rock music… that does not involve our host! We sit down with controversial author, The Philadelphia Lawyer, to talk about his book, Happy Hour is for Amateurs.
Further details here.
Stupid Expressions
A new piece, “Post Sex Ruminations,” will be up by the weekend. In the interim, here’s another chunk of material from the Twitter vault. I know a lot of people loathe that site – think it’s further degrading the already chimpanzee-level attention spans of the average media consumer. I don’t blame you one bit. But it’s not without its pluses, and one of them, a very large one, is the way it forces you to dust off forgotten bits of your vocabulary. One hundred and forty characters is a tight space in which to offer a complex point. Twitter makes you focus on language, and in that exercise, as you’re searching for ways to abbreviate, condense and shorten, cliches pop into the mind. And that might get you to thinking, “Why do we use so many idiotic idioms? Do people realize how moronic they sound?”
George Carlin was, of course, the master of linguistic humor. But he’s gone, and in his absence we amateurs are left to take up the mantle and at least attempt to ask, as he would, “Where did all these stupid fucking expressions come from?” Twitter’s custom built for that exercise:
- Seventy percent of happiness is lowering your expectations. Most of the other thirty is fucking someone attractive.
- “I could care less…” How do you even respond to this? “Congrats on avoiding Nihilism?” #StupidExpressions
- “…And God sent his only son so that we may rub carbon on our foreheads and refrain from eating certain proteins a few days a year.” #Lent
- “Going Rogue. Paperweight.” “New Moon. Doorstop.” #OneWordBookReviews
- “There are no atheists in foxholes.” Nor at Jihad. Or in altar boys’ pants.
- “It goes without saying that…” Well, apparently not. #StupidExpressions
- “Bureaucrats. The pubic hair of society. Must serve some purpose. What exactly, no one knows.”
- If you’re paying more than $20.00 for any treatment of premature ejaculation, you’re paying too much. #JimBeam
- Confidential to Katie-Louise in Biloxi: No, Kendra Wilkinson probably isn’t going to respond to that Tweet. Or the other 791 you sent her.
- Contrition (n.) – Act by which flattery of the fiction sinners have regrets beyond getting caught somehow strengthens the moral order.
- “Arguably…” What isn’t? #StupidExpressions
- “Bi-curious.” WTF does this mean? You research homosexuality? (”I’m a Civil War buff.” “Neat. I read about gay sex.”) #StupidExpressions
- If our govt’s so worried about subsidizing abortions, why doesn’t it subsidize free birth control for the indigent? Too logical?
- Service partner, copier, fax machine… Which of these is not like the others? #LawSchool #TrickQuestions
- “Thailand. It’s not a taboo here.”
- Starbucks to allow concealed weapons in cafes. Ban on tolerable music remains.
- Democrats considering plastic surgery tax to fund health care reform. Lovely. A surcharge on ugliness.
- Considering under Dubai law, delinquent debtors are imprisoned, I wonder, Is the country now a giant penal colony?
- Hearing yrs later that you had sex w/someone and failing to recall not only the act, but ever meeting the person. #SignsYouMaximizedCollege
- It’s not the whiskey. It’s your dick.
- “You want to know what I really think?” What’s the rest of this conversation been? A setup? #StupidExpressions
- Seth Godin’s insightful, but the tribes worshiping him are depressing. Gurus only exist in vacuums of curiosity and skepticism.
- Recent profits in retail are from cost-cutting, not revenue growth. “The consumer is back!” story is wishful thinking/piss poor reporting.
- “Jameson. Because there’s no good in recalling anything you fuck on St. Patrick’s Day.”
- “Everything happens for a reason.” Really? Explain child molestation. #StupidExpressions
- Nouriel Roubini is arrogant and cold, but that doesn’t mean his economic predictions aren’t right.
- “Google Fiber”? For occasional broadband irregularity? When the Net can’t dump shit into your laptop fast enough to keep your mind off work?
- “Without belaboring the point…” Too late. #StupidExpressions
- The crowd interested in examining illogic on both sides of a debate is 1/1000th the size of the one interested in arguing blindly.
- “Palin 2012!” #TheMayansWereRight
- “Bite me.” This insults the target how? And why? Isn’t it more an invite to something neither party’d like to endure? #StupidExpressions
- Bag the pendant. We’re over 18, and cleavage speaks for itself.
- Garlic farts and testimony on your personal relationship with Jesus. Two things best saved for an empty room.
- If you’re not voting your pocketbook, there’s a good chance you’re not voting your brain, either.
- “I’m going down the shore.” I hope the recipient enjoys it. What that has to do with beach, I have no fucking idea. #StupidExpressions
- It’s easy to vote your ideals, taxes be damned, from 20 to 25. To borrow from Roger Waters, that’s the “Bravery of Being out of Range.”
- Heard: “My dad? He’s in private equity.” Response: “Actually, I, uh, don’t have a condom… But I can pull out in time. Trust me.”
- “You only have one chance to make a first impression.” But endless chances to degrade it saying things like this. #StupidExpressions
- Nitpicking Obama’s every move does not make you a “True Conservative.” It makes you a fool, just like liberals who blindly attacked Bush.
- Do Player Hater Haters realize most Player Haters are actually just playing on a bigger board?
- “Sean Hannity. Reminding you, one broadcast at a time, where ‘Irish Need Not Apply’ came from.”
- Still using “FUBAR”? Let me update you. David Lee Roth left, then they got Sammy Hagar. Then he left and now DLR is back. #StupidExpressions
- GDP (n.) – A sky-eye view where a magnifying glass is warranted. Acr.: Gravely Deficient Predictor.
- “The grass is always greener elsewhere” because usually, it actually is.
- “He had this shit eating grin on his face.” Yes, that image certainly describes the cagiest mind in any room. #StupidExpressions
- Potentially liable defendant? All of them. Unfairly sued defendant? One whose retainer check just cleared.
- “Big Firm Litigation. Because you were always good at doing bigger kids’ homework for them.”
- Mad Men’s tension/attraction in a nutshell: Don Draper = Everything we’d like to be. Betty Draper = Everything most of us are.
- “Tripping balls.” More or less intense than “Tripping your tits off”? (And how the hell can guys even use the latter?) #StupidExpressions
- Problem with getting a law degree isn’t how hard it is, but how easy it is. Research this: “Barrier to entry.” Then this: “Glut.”
- Percentage of people vehemently behind either side of HC Reform debate who just want to argue or belong to a movement? 75.
- Percentage of people vehemently behind either side of HC Reform debate who actually understand the subject? Ten, fifteen.
- “He took his own life.” How? From who? He already fucking had it! (Is “ended” too exotic?) #StupidExpressions
- Economic analogy for procuring a private university Liberal Arts degree in 2009? Buying a new Bentley and promptly rolling it off a cliff.
- Economic analogy for procuring a law degree in 2009? Hitching a new Maserati to the back of that Bentley.
- Swallow. Nobody likes an amateur. #RelationshipTips
- “He’s ignorant!” No. He’s “an asshole.” You’re ignorant… as to the definition of “ignorant.” #StupidExpressions
- If you needed Tiger to be a moral exemplar, you need to stop focusing on his failures and start addressing yours.
- “Honestly?” I don’t know. Depends… Tell me the lie, then the truth. I’ll go with what’s more interesting. #StupidExpressions
Regarding “Everything happens for a reason”: most eloquent discussion of this ever is in The Brothers Karamazov.
PL: My favorite is the less elegant, but sledgehammer effective approach offered in Fooled by Randomness. Another great book touching on the subject is Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods.
I’ll never understand why people treat randomness like the 800lb Gorilla in the corner. I think it’s actually comforting. What’s more empowering than the notion you can fuck up multiple times and still, lightning might strike and make you happy, or rich, in the least foreseen circumstances? As Mike Bloomberg, and many like him, have said in interviews, “getting fired was a great learning experience.” Too much reverence for “maintaining” the status quo is fucking up our economy. It’s not cliche to argue our only way out of this trough is unleashing the entrepreneurs, the people who surf chaos. Instead we want to live in fables, see cycles everywhere… The recovery is coming. It always comes! Technically, semantically, yes. But what makes you sure it will look anything like the previous ones? And what if it doesn’t? What if this time it’s actually a slow motion, long term contraction of demand? Where’s that put us, Spanky?
Regarding Mad Men, I suggest reading The Last Psychiatrist’s treatment of the show (I’ll admit The Bunny turned me on to his blog and it really is amazing)
Links:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/10/don_draper_voted_most_influent_1.html
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/10/you_want_to_be_don_draper_you.html
PL: That guy’s a very funny writer. I have to get back to reading his site. Thanks for the reminder.
George Carlin is my hero. He had a genuine love for language that is sorely missed, especially in a medium like the Internet where you have endless window-lickers who can’t seem to string two words together without fucking it up somehow.
I don’t have any more stupid expressions to add to your examples, but one of my peeves is empty words/phrases used by people. I don’t know how much you get it in the States but here in the UK we hear a lot of “Basically, ” “Well, what it is…” and “At the end of the day…” at the beginning of a point for no damned reason. I tolerate it simply because it comes in handy as a verbal cue to tune out whatever’s coming up next because it’s entirely pointless.
Brevity is the soul of wit, motherfuckers.
PL: I plead guilt on the occasional use of “basically.” Terrible habit. But cure starts with acknowledgment. I am a sinner.
“At the end of the day…” has always caused me to envision a scorekeeper of some sort. “Well, Ed, it’s the end of the day. All accounts settled, margins called. Today you succeeded. You’re ahead $50 on your efforts, the boss is a little more likely to approve you for more than a COLA raise come January and you managed to bang the old lady and bring both of you to orgasm by 11:55. Good on you, Ed. See you tomorrow.”
I’m either too narcissistic or feeling too left behind (ripe old 26) to create a twitter account, so thanks for the greatest hits and allowing me to meet people outside and update my actions via verbal communication, while apparently not missing anything.
PL: You’re not missing much. Imagine a room full of 10,000 people screaming at each other randomly, mostly about nothing, with 500 or so actually having something to say occasionally volleying comments back and forth to one another.
The randomness problem reminds me of one of Herodotus’ writings. While one could always end up happy or rich because of randomness, you could also end up dying forsaken, poor, and completely miserable. So the only way we can know whether a person is truly happy is when they are dead.
PL: It’s probably the only time we’ll know anything for certain about anyone. Sadly, that knowledge will be limited to the fact that he’s no longer living. The human animal’s a twine of white lies big as a beach ball wound around a pea sized nugget of basal, intractable values.
On every single writing assignment I had in law school I managed to use the word “contrariwise.” No one ever called me out on using a fake word, probably because it’s perfectly cromulent.
…I’m starting to imbiggen my understanding of why I was laid off.
PL: My favorite is the Latin stuff. “Inter alia….” What? “Among others” isn’t good enough? “Sua sponte…” “On its own” or “Without request” insufficient?
“Sanguine” also drove me nuts. “I am sanguine we can resolve this…” Shut the fuck up. Just shut. the. fuck. up. If can’t muster some qualified form of ‘optimistic’ or even ‘certain,’ you’ve no business writing or speaking in English.
I just listened to the radio clip online. Is that the typical central Pennsylvania dialect?
PL: Christ no. I wasn’t allowed to speak that way growing up. I think my grandmother drilled that into my father, who drilled it into me.
Really enjoyed your interview on Q’s House last night. I especially like the statements you made about the “treadmill” near the beginning, and where you ranted for a bit about individuality and how people are unable to think rationally when they define themselves by whatever “group” they consider themselves a part of.
What I enjoy most about your writing is that you do champion people who are individualists, those smart and rational thinkers that scarcely exist anymore. I especially liked your post about George Carlin, and your assertion that he was “post-commentary.” I think that’s a good way of describing him. The work he was doing toward the end of his life was some of his best (and if he were around now, he’d have a whole lot to say). I saw him in 2006, and his act was brilliant–it made you laugh, but at the same time, the issues he was talking about were pretty heavy. You are right in that he was much more than a comedian. The audience there was almost stunned by how intense his criticism got by the end of the show because, while it was vulgar as always, his scathing views of the American condition actually kept you musing for a few days.
Two of my favorite sketches from that show, The Modern Man, and Coast to Coast Emergency (can’t locate that one) are brutally funny:
MM: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6J3OD4Z0UQ
It was even funnier when, after that Modern Man bit, Carlin just says: “You know what no one ever talks about anymore? Pussy farts!” The change from social commentary to a quick dirty quip was inspired.
I also saw in one of your stories, the name escapes me, that you talked about Neil Young with the same kind of reverence. Neil was definitely a guy who did exactly what he wanted, and who didn’t really seem to live the “rock star” life. He pretty much avoided drugs, and when he felt like making a bizarre album like “Trans” or even the ultra-depressing “On the Beach” and “Tonight’s the Night,” he did it, and did it damn well. There are sorely few musicians out there who can claim to be as much of an individualist as Neil. For some reason, when I think of a modern day “individualist” in the music industry, my mind always turns to Ryan Adams. Even though he did a shitload of drugs and wasn’t always successful at making albums in different genres, at least he tried to be creative with his music. When his music was crappy, it still wasn’t boring. And he’s a hell of a performer, even when he comes out piss-drunk and yells at the audience for not listening well enough.
As far as that Tweet about Tiger Woods, you’ve just described a host of Americans. And I don’t mean this from the perspective of “the media wastes time with this bullshit when they should be focusing on important things like health reform and unemployment.” A majority of networks do a very poor job of truly investigating”real issues” too. But, it’s a good point and speaks, I guess, to our nation’s obsession with Schadenfreude. When Anna Nicole Smith, a dreadfully unimportant person with a shitload of trivial problems, died, CNN spent weeks babbling about it. Of course, when Vonnegut, another great individualist, went in the midst of all that, no “news” network bothered to say more than a few words about him. If you’re looking to guys like Tiger for your morals, look elsewhere. Why anyone gave a shit is beyond me.
And Re: “Everything happens for a reason,” I want to hit something/someone whenever I hear a person utter that phrase. To me, when people go babbling about that, I figure they have a pretty limited worldview (like you said “explain child molestation”). If everything in someone’s life can be explained away by those five words, they’re not really thinking about much outside their comfort zones.
I can see why you weren’t cut out for the legal profession–you’re too good a writer and far too critical (in a positive way) to ever exist in that kind of industry. And coming off that assembly line with a liberal arts degree, expected by my “elders” to just move forward into some bullshit industry and continue the charade, I find your stuff pretty relevant.
PL: Thank you for the kind compliment. It’s flattering coming from someone with your analytical abilities and tastes in comedy.
As to the rest, I don’t have anything to say because I agree with all of it. My only comment would be, Let’s hope the copies of the book keep moving from hand to hand. I know it’s a cult thing and will never get huge because it raises issues people don’t want to look at, and pisses on a number of sacred cows for laughs. But everyone reads it is one more person forced to consider what you have, and I have, and that’s a very positive dialogue to create in people’s heads.
The ‘Ignorant’ one has pissed me off for years, like, absolutely livid sort of pissed off. The word is not synonymous with ’someone who was mean to you’.
Also, nice catch on the cost cutting thing. I just had a very interesting presentation from an automotive analyst highlighting how the auto companies were putting off the inevitable 9/11 related crash by getting incentive-drunk and lowering prices to unsustainable levels just to book revenue and keep the industry riding high.
Funny that retail’s trying the same thing.
PL: Nor is it synonymous with one who’s arrogant, aloof or dismissive. I notice it gets used by less educated people to describe superiors a lot. That’s the context in which I heard it most.
“He thinks he’s so important, but he’s not! He’s just ignorant!”
You’re lucky it’s him and not me, because if I were him I’d fucking fire you. Just for that gaffe.
You sound a lot like Bill Hader.
PL: I wonder if I can steal his voice-over work…
“What’s more empowering than the notion you can fuck up multiple times and still, lightning might strike and make you happy, or rich, in the least foreseen circumstances?”
Similarly, what’s more liberating than the notion that you could die at any time of a random brain hemorrhage? Such was the fate of one John L. Kelly Jr., hero to the modern gambler.
PL: This is why I’ve done much in my life to try to create damage that may present itself in the form of a massive crushing coronary, removing me from this mortal coil around 65, with no prior warning. No goodbyes, no knowledge it’s coming, just a huge crushing monstrous arterial blowout that drops me dead as a fucking doornail. “He was fine just a minute ago! What happened?!” He gut lucky. That’s what happened.
I’ve watched many relatives die in hospitals. If it comes to a prolonged illness, I’ll wait until I know my dignity’s about to be robbed and then take care of the job myself. Go out on your feet. It’s the least you can do.
Won’t have been “God’s will” either way, but I don’t want leave even the hint of the suggestion.
Similar to “Everything happens for a reason”, a phrase I’ve come to develop a great distaste for recently is “If it’s meant to be.” I’ve found this phrase is typically uttered in attempt to absolve the speaker of any responsibility for examining difficult choices, and instead place that responsibility in some nebulous higher power.
PL: It’s like “God willing…” Makes you want to laugh at the speaker.
I like the comment about nitpicking over Obama. Really I’d kill for another Bill Clinton at this point, regardless of how many fat chicks he porked.
PL: I’d vote Clinton for ten terms.