The Delicate Frontier

Last night's tweets;

Dough Thor frowns at no cards on a treadmill.
Beneath his beard is a spongy shark gut.
It's a dusty plastic egg bin to fill.
Aging improves vintage prizes somewhat.

Despite my body's apparent aversion to chocolate and coffee lately, I couldn't resist trying Starbucks' new Dark Cherry Mocha this evening. It's okay, though I kind of feel like I'm drinking someone's birthday cake. I got it without whipped cream, and it comes with sprinkles which, of course, sank right to the bottom and I haven't seen them since. I never understood sprinkles on beverages, but I guess it's a sign of the times.

I read an article on Huffington Post a couple days ago about how Howard Stern "unleashed a vicious attack on Gabourey Sidibe" of the movie Precious. The article, right from that opening statement, pretty thoroughly mischaracterises Stern's comments, which had been more along the lines of telling the young woman that she wasn't likely to get cast in another role, and, of course, he made some fat jokes. I distinguish this from a vicious attack because it's Stern's business to make fun of everyone, himself included, often for superficial details, and the fact that he actually seemed to like the movie and that his less jocular comments seemed aimed at Oprah Winfrey's foolishness in assuring Sidibe she had a career ahead of her, and pointing out that a lot of people resist accepting that it's unhealthy to be obese (not, as he pointed out, merely overweight).

But, of course, the people complaining are obviously total hypocrites anyway because ten minutes after Stern had made these comments he was making fun of a midget in a wheelchair because he didn't know eight times nine. You don't see articles about the people made fun of on The Howard Stern Show on a daily basis, Sidibe's different because by making fun of her, Stern's swimming against the popular current, which says we can only feel bad for the young woman or express feelings of unquestioning support for her because she was portrayed in a movie to have been in an abusive situation. This is one of the things I find so great about the Stern show--everyone's basically ridiculous in one way or another, and the reason productions like the Academy awards are so stiff and nauseating is because they're put together by people who put a lot of restrictions on what ridiculous things we're allowed to notice and find funny. People trying to create a reality where they're justified in taking themselves as seriously as they do.

Part of the problem is that artists, particularly actors, have to leave themselves emotionally vulnerable in order to access their emotions easily for their roles, which is brave and, I believe, essential for a quality culture, but it leads to a lot of hypersensitivity. Add to this fact that these folks are often surrounded by people who bullshit them to buttress their egos, and you end with people in delusional frameworks of support.

I finished up working on my comic early again yesterday and didn't know what to do with myself. I ended up playing a little Super Return of the Jedi, a Super Nintendo game I remember being somewhat addicted to. It's pretty silly, as you can tell from the fact that the little eyeball droid from the door to Jabba's Palace in the movie is twice the size of Chewbacca in the game and fires slow blue projectiles as the boss of the second level. But all the Super Star Wars series of games were actually pretty fun--they had a basic, side-scroller gameplay with slides (rolls for Han Solo), double jumps, a variety of blasters, and relatively nice dynamics for Luke's lightsabre. I love the double jumps, which make no sense--basically, you jump once and in mid-air you can press the jump button again and the character jumps again, as though there's an invisible platform, only this time doing a summersault. Again, absolutely senseless for a Star Wars game, at least for the non-Jedi characters. But in the first game I remember encountering it, Metroid 2, it made sense as it was an ability acquired from some alien technology found in ancient ruins on SR388. Metroid 2, for the Gameboy, has somehow managed to remain the best game in the series, in my opinion. Even better than Super Metroid, though I don't know why exactly. Maybe it's because there is no space jump in Super Metroid, which is what that jumping device is called. There's also a device you can get that turns Samus (your character) into a buzzsaw sort of thing whenever she does the summersault, which is something else the Super Star Wars games kind of lifted. Man, I'm in the mood to play some Nintendo . . .