Archive of entries posted on 5th March 2009

Smooth Criminal

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His Royal Weirdness, Michael Jackson, is touring again.

My reaction to the news was, of course, whoop-de-frikkin-do.

It’s not often that Michael Jackson makes the news anymore. Unless, of course, he’s paying off some kid’s family so they don’t talk about the buggering.

Used to not be that way, though. Michael Jackson used to be news.

He’d sell out concerts, sell millions of albums, perform or do backing vocals on a third of every record played on the radio, have major movie producers doing his videos …

That was a while back.

Then I got to thinking. When did it all come crashing down for Michael Jackson?

As I recall, it was in the early 1990s.

When he was young, he was a popular Black singer. And rich. He was even able to out-bid Paul McCartney for the Beatles music catalog.

Around the early 1990s, though, things went wrong. First, he seems to have turned White. And was accused of child molestation. And got hooked on drugs (mostly painkillers). And lost most of his money.

Since then, he’s been almost pitiful.

But something was nagging at me.

Then it hit me.

There’s a parallel with Barack Obama. Follow me on this.

Obama was raised by his White mother (his Kenyan father having left) until he was 10, then by his White grandparents until he graduated high school.

He went to Harvard, graduated, then moved to Chicago in the early 1990s. That’s when he became Black.

Around the time Michael Jackson turned White, Barack Obama turned Black.

It seems the world only has room for one Black superstar at a time. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying.

Will Jacko’s tour succeed? Probably not. Unless Obama turns White again.

Fun in the Car

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A couple drove 100 miles in South Africa with a spitting cobra in the car. That’s nothing. Ever try driving with a cat in the car? I did that from Florida to Idaho. The thing kept jumping on me on making a weird monkey squeak like it wanted something, and I was like, “You have two options: You either sit down and shut up or I pull over and let you free into the wild — and frankly, Nermal, you ain’t gonna make it out there.”

Of course, there was a dog in there too. And every once in a while the cat would take a break from pestering me to remember it hated the dog. She’d hiss and swat at the dog, and the dog would stare back in confusion like, “I don’t know what hiss means! Does that mean you want to play with me or that you’re angry at me! I don’t know what that means! Something explain a hiss to me!” And I’m like, “You two either fight to the death or shut up! I’m sick of you!” I’m guessing a cobra probably would have just curled up and left me alone most of trip.

Sir Stoopid

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I hear the British are going to knight Ted Kennedy. Does knighting have like any meaning to it anymore? Does basically the queen just go visit the zoo, sees a monkey do a silly little monkey dance, and say, “How droll. Let us knight him.” So she takes him back to the palace, pulls out a sword, and says, “I dub thee Sir Silly Little Monkey.” And then monkey goes crazy and tries to eat people’s faces because that’s what monkeys do when they’re startled by things like swords being pointed at them.

That’s basically it, right?

Some Folks Are Still Confusing “Not Very Funny” With “Racist” UPDATED 3-6-09

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Since I don’t want Eric Holder to think I’m a coward, I’m gonna talk about the “racist” email that got Staten Island Community Education Council member Salvatore Ballarino fired.

I’d like to show it to you, but – unlike the NY Post Chimp cartoon – it’s incredibly hard to find on the internet. Mostly what you get is the scary description:

The mock photo strip, sent Jan. 4 by Salvatore Ballarino, the borough president’s appointee to the volunteer board, features cartoon-like speech balloons drawn out of McCain’s mouth referencing lynching African Americans and equating African American babies with excrement.

The widely forwarded email also questions black fathers’ ability to support their families and states Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles are always smiling, because they did not know they were black. After each “punch line” the cartoon-like strip shows a photo of Obama’s face, positioned in such a way to make him look stunned and dumbstruck.

Here’s a fake-but-accurate version of the one I’m going to discuss:

Now, the joke that has the NAACP in a bilious tizzy is not particularly funny or even clever. It’s just a lame pun on the word “support” combined with a negative stereotype about black men. If that’s all Ballarino had forwarded, I could see their point.

But the cartoon only uses the joke as part of a larger gag. The humor here is the juxtaposition of two serious, somber, dignified men in a formal situation engaging in a conversation utterly unbefitting such a backdrop.

The humor value goes up if you believe that John McCain is a closet racist, which would give it a “funny because it’s true” bonus. For normal people it’d be funnier if the white guy in the picture were an ACTUAL racist, like Senator Robert “Kleagle & Exalted Cyclops” Byrd, but you aren’t gonna find a picture of THOSE two together chatting amiably, so THAT comic’s not getting made anytime soon.

But even though I think this cartoon has some non-racist humor value for a certain audience, I still think it’s too lame to forward.

Why?

Weak sauce punch line.

In a REAL multi-panel cartoon, the nonplussed Obama image would be the pause before the punchline, and not the punchline itself. Ending the way it does, it makes it look like Obama got “got” by the evil racist cracker. The point is to make McCain look like a jerk, not Obama look like a victim. It works better if Obama now makes some attempt to restore normalcy to a VERY awkward situation. Ideally, the 5th panel would reinforce the earlier themes of Obama being composed and dignified, and having McCain obliviously spouting an even more racially insensitive remark. For example:

Now, I’m not saying any of this is either appropriate for or amusing to a general audience. I’m just taking the time to look past the racist tree in search of a funny forest, sowing seeds as necessary to reclaim the land that was clearcut by humorless liberals.

I think it’s what Eric Holder would’ve wanted.

UPDATE 3-6-09

Reader Joe was kind enough to forward me the original email that Ballarino was fired for forwarding. I’m posting links to the images so you can judge them for yourself.

Family tree

Excrement

Picnic table

Stevie Wonder

Pity that the same MSM who plastered contextless Abu Ghraib photos everywhere doesn’t have the journalistic integrity to do the same.