Dane Cook? Seriously?

So I know that Human Giant is getting too popular to be cool now, but hey, I’m too old to be cool anymore anyway. So I was reading this old Rob Huebel post, and saw this in the comments:

Sandy says:

It’s about time! I am a fan of the original Saturday Night Live (I’m 44) and haven’t been able to find anything this funny in a long time (with the exception of Dane Cook). I will be a loyal fan. Thanks guys!

05/19/07 3:22 pm

The thing that I find odd is not just this one person comparing Dane Cook to the original SNL cast, horrific as that may be, but that Dane Cook has a big following. The guy seems to have a lot of dedicated fans who go on and on about how awesomely funny he is. They say he’s the most original comedian working today, and that he’s a genius. But here’s the thing: He totally isn’t. He’s a talentless hack, and the only times he ever actually said anything funny was when he was doing material he’d stolen from other comedians, and even then he didn’t do it as well. And as if his material being unfunny wasn’t bad enough, it’s also completely fucking generic, safe, risk-free relationship bullshit.

But why the big following then? I have a couple theories.

Theory #1 - Imminent Death Syndrome

The enlightened among you will surely know that Imminent Death Syndrome is:

A rare disease where those affected are on the brink of death, every day of their lives. People can live with this condition for over 60 years. Peers and close friends of the diseased will go to great lengths to make sure the person is happy in his/her “last moments” by making them famous or giving great attention to their non-existent talents. Famous celebrities that suffer from IDS include Juliette Lewis, Leroy Nieman, Jerry Lewis, Anne Rice, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Hawking, Quentin Tarantino (the actor, not the director), Hootie and 2 of the Blowfish, the man who draws Ziggy, the man who draws Family Circus, many famous cartoonists, and possibly Jeff Foxworthy.

Theory #2 - His Fans are Ignorant of What Comedy Really Is

Everyone agrees that Dane Cook appeals to a young demographic. Those kids today. They’ve probably never heard a Steve Martin album, wouldn’t listen to an old man like Carlin, and probably couldn’t handle the raw truth of Bill Hicks if they had even heard of him.

No, they’re a bunch of kids who stumbled across an HBO special or his myspace page, and he’s all they know of stand-up. They think that if you stand on a stage and say a bunch of shit, occasionally with comedic timing, and throw in some goofy noises, well hell, that must be funny! I mean, everybody else wouldn’t be laughing if it wasn’t funny, right?

But I think that’s too simple an explanation. These kids have surely been exposed to people who are actually funny. The aforementioned Human Giant for example. They’re funny and all the cool kids like them. Sarah Silverman has a great show on Comedy Central and just hosted the MTV Movie Awards. She’s hilarious. And although he’s a right-wing redneck tool, even Larry the Fucking Cable Guy knows how to tell a joke.

Which brings me to…

Theory #3 - His Fans Are Fucking Morons

When I was in high school, my friends and I used to tell jokes that weren’t really jokes at all. For example:

Q: How many pancakes does it take to cover a dog house?
A: Five. Ice cream doesn’t have bones!

We had a handful of these, and we’d tell them at every opportunity. They made no sense, but the key was to laugh hysterically immediately after telling them. The person on the receiving end of these non-jokes had two choices. They could be honest and say “I don’t get it” or they could laugh and pretend to get it just to fit in. Which do you suppose was the more common outcome?

I think this summarizes a good deal of Dane Cook’s popularity. He’s marketed himself as the hip new edgy comedian all the kids are into, and these stupid fucking pack animals, the same type I fucking loathed in high school, go along with the crowd because everybody’s doing it. The most important thing to be is exactly like every one of your friends, and hey, they all think Dane Cook is the shit! Seriously, we wouldn’t all be laughing if it wasn’t funny, would we?

Theory #4 - His Fans Are All Thirteen Year Old Girls Who Dream of Giving Him Their Virginity in the Back of His Tour Bus

Yeah, that’s probably it.

Nude Celebrities

I heard on the news today that Christie’s in London just sold an oil painting of Kate Moss nude and pregnant for an ungodly sum of money. Thing is, I don’t really give a fuck, I’ve never seen what the big deal is about her. Is it just me or is she really kind of not pretty? I mean I see prettier women every day just walking down the street. I really don’t get it. Maybe I’m out of touch with the average American male or something. Maybe they like their women bony and malnourished with no hips, small boobs and sunken facial features. Not me though. Call me crazy, but I like women to look, you know, like women.

So if I don’t give a fuck about Kate Moss, why am I writing this? Just to get cheap hits from people searching for “Nude Celebrities”? Well, OK, that’s part of it, but the main reason is the news coverage. They only showed a close-up of the face part of the painting and went on to say “we can’t show you the whole painting…because she’s naked!!” Well, I added the pause and excitement, but you get my point.

Oh yeah, that reminds me: The point.

How fucking uptight are we that we can’t see a nude oil painting on TV? It’s fucking art. It’s not like the thing was photorealistic or anything, and it’s not like it was in any way erotic. It’s a bony naked pregnant chick, fuzzily rendered in oil on canvas. God forbid America should be exposed to such debauchery. You know, I expected the new millenium to be cool. I’d given up on it being all flying cars and rayguns by the mid 90’s, but I never expected all this “new morality” bullshit.

Interestingly, the painting was painted by the great grandson of Sigmund Freud. I think he set out to paint a portrait of his mother but ended up with Kate Moss naked and pregnant.

In other nude celebrity news, apparently Debbie, excuse me, Deborah Gibson is posing in Playboy. Remember her? She had some MTV hits as a 17-year-old pop princess back in the thoroughly horrendous 80’s. She was the thinking-man’s Tiffany. Years later she changed her name to Deborah for an unsuccessful comeback.

Now she’s 34 and you can see her naked in Playboy. Well you know, she was pretty cute back in the day, but I’d say she’s about 14 years too late to be posing nude. I hate to be blunt, but nobody reads playboy to see naked 34-year-olds. Also, the last thing a guy wants to be reminded of while he’s spanking it is time’s ability to steal youth and innocence. Those pictures would say to me, “Remember when you thought Debbie Gibson was hot? That was 17 years ago you ancient fuck!”

Had she been in Playboy at 18 or 20, shit yeah, I’d be all over it. But you know, I’m 34 for fuck’s sake. My wife’s 27 and I can see her naked whenever I want.

But the pathetic part is, it’s all just a desperate attempt at another comeback. It’s timed to release with her new single which is called (wait for it…) Naked. What we have here is a former teen pop superstar (well, maybe not superstar…) grasping for relevance as an adult. And you know what? It ain’t gonna happen. Oh sure, people will look at the pictures, but it will be more out of curiosity than anything. “Oh look, there’s Debbie Gibson’s ass. Wow, she got old. ”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely nothing against 34 year old women, and I do not think that 34 years old is ancient. But you see, there’s fantasy and reality. In reality, I don’t want an 18 year old woman. They’re royal pains in the ass and listen to shitty music. But they’re nice to look at as long as you don’t have to, you know, talk to them or spend any time with them. When it comes to fantasy, which obviously is the domain of Playboy, you want young and mindless. And sorry Debbie, but that ain’t you anymore.

Now can we please get Britney Spears in there while she’s still young and hot?

Who Are These Idiots and Who Gave Them Internet Access?

Patrick Gaskill was certainly struck by Inspirado when he created his Suggested Google Alphabet page. Here you can see an up-to-the-second list of the most popular search terms per letter of the alphabet entered into Google.

Unfortunately, it only confirms that the internet has been taken over by morons.

Because Patrick’s page updates with every hit, what you see by following the link above may be different from what I list here, but that’s not enough to stop me from making fun of the most popular searches as listed on 1/26/2005.

A is for amazon
B is for best buy
C is for cnn
D is for dictionary
E is for ebay

OK, right off the bat we’ve got 5 instances of people searching for the actual domain name of the site they’re looking for. The URL for Amazon is www.amazon.com you dumbass. As my good friend Larry would say, “What’s the number for 911?”. Granted, dictionary.com isn’t the only dictionary on the web, but it’s certainly the easiest to remember, and it also happens to be the top-ranked result Google gives (as of now anyway).

F is for Firefox

OK, wait. Maybe the internet hasn’t been taken over by morons after all. It really does give me a warm fuzzy feeling to know that so many people are looking for my favorite web browser. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, run—don’t walk—to the Firefox website, download it, install it and never use Internet Explorer again. You need reasons other than some asshole’s recommendation? OK, you see, IE is a piece of shit. Do you have any idea how ridiculous it is to get a virus or pick up spyware from going to a web site? That that can happen boggles the fucking mind. It’s almost as if IE was specifically written to allow it. Firefox won’t fuck with you that way. It won’t even allow popups if you don’t let it. And if that’s not enough, tabbed browsing rules. And did I mention the shitloads of extensions and themes for customization? Oh yeah, it’s also completely free.

Another reason the F entry gives me a little hope is that until recently, the URL for Firefox was not www.firefox.com. It actually was worthy of a search! On the downside, they may be searching for that shitty Clint Eastwood movie.

G is for games

Yeah, I suppose. Have fun sifting through the 360,000,000 results!

H is for hotmail
I is for ikea

I don’t know whether to ridicule people who search for these or pity them. Oh wait, of course I do.

J is for jokes

Welcome to the information super-highway, a tool that rivals the printing press for revolutionizing communication. Let’s look up some jokes to tell at the office.

K is for kazaa

While the address for this is in fact www.kazaa.com, I’m hoping they’re actually looking for an early version that doesn’t fill your PC with spyware. Or maybe they’re confusing Kazaa and Limewire. Or maybe they’re actually searching for that shitty Shaquille O’Neal movie.

L is for lyrics

Is it just me or are lyrics sites fucking horrendous with these days? Thank gods that the fucking Harry Fox Agency sued lyrics.ch into submission years ago. Now instead of one good site we have a thousand little shitty ones all pushing spyware and popups. They also completely fucked up OLGA. I hope those fucking cocks at HFA choke on their mothers’ shit.

M is for mapquest

You’re searching for Mapquest when the address is mapquest.com? You know what? You’re too stupid to drive.

N is for news

Since there’s maybe 2 or 3 news sites (tops) out there, you’ll surely find exactly what you’re looking for by punching “news” into Google.

O is for online dictionary

As opposed to all the print dictionaries that turn up on the web.

P is for paris hilton

Oh, give me a fucking break. If you give two fucks about this spoiled little rich cunt, please get the fuck off the internet and back in your trailer you pathetic waste of skin. If you’re looking for her porn video, that’s even worse. This woman (and I use the term loosely) is the very definition of skank. Her snatch is likely a rancid cesspool of hitherto unknown variations of herpes and at least one heroin-resistant strain of chlamydia.

Also, you can’t tell me the number one search for ‘P’ isn’t ‘Porn’. I think this was some judicious editing by the folks at Google.

Q is for quotes

Because nothing else starts with Q.

R is for recipes

Yeah, fine. Too bad you can’t even make toast.

S is for spybot

If everyone were to heed the collective advice of the geek community and forsake Internet Explorer for Firefox, nobody would need Spybot. You do need to pretty much use Google every time you want to find it though, because the URL (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/) is impossible to remember and spybot.com, .org and .net are all owned by assholes filching on Spybot’s good name. So this entry is pretty awesome. People are using Spybot, which is good, and using Google for something that actually needs searched for. As Chief Gunnery Sgt. Hartman would say, out-fucking-standing!

T is for tara reid

Looking for the titty pictures I’m sure.

But T should really stand for Thunderbird to go along with F for Firefox. The only internet application more likely than Microsoft Internet Explorer to give you a virus is Microsoft Outlook (noticing a pattern here?). If you run Outlook, dump it immediately and install Thunderbird. It’s better anyway, it’s free, and it has built in spam controls. And extensions and themes, of course.

U is for ups

I’ll say it very slowly: double-you… double-you… double-you… you… pee… ess… dot… com… you… dumb… fucking… turd.

V is for verizon

Well, thanks to shitty web design, Verizon has made the list for V. Thing is, 9 out of 10 people are looking for www.verizonwireless.com, but verizon.com brings up local service, DSL, and other crap that maybe some people on the east coast actually give a rat’s fuck about. There’s a link for wireless buried deep on that page, which takes you to another page with more crap, which then, finally, has a link to www.verizonwireless.com. Here’s a hint to the dumbasses who designed the Verizon site: Go to Google and enter “usability“.

W is for weather

I’m sure that entering “weather” into the strongest search engine on what is a vast global network of computers delivering information in all languages to all corners of the earth gave you exactly what you were looking for—the weather for Toledo Ohio on the morning of 01/26/2005.

And um, incidentally, there’s www.weather.com.

X is for xbox

Damn, I was rooting for Xenology Today.

Y is for yahoo

Dude, seriously. You’re not really that dumb, are you?

Z is for zip codes

Yeah, I can live with that.

Now that this horse is obviously dead, it’s time to beat it.

Of the most popular search terms for the 26 letters of the English alphabet:

• 10 letters (A, B, C, E, H, I, K, M, U & Y) were searches for the main part of the actual domain name of the site that was obviously being searched for. That’s roughly 38.5%. The mind boggles.
• 4 letters (D, V, W & X) were searches that would have taken you to a site that probably would have given you what you wanted had you surrounded it with “www.” and “.com” in the address bar.
• 6 letters’ searches (G, J, L, N, Q & W) were very vague. Narrow it down people. Try “toledo weather” or “lawyer jokes” or “general tso chicken recipe”.
• 1 letter (O) was redundant with another letter (D).
• 2 letters (P & T) were for stupid shit that nobody should care about.
• 5 letters (F, S, V, X & Z) were actually for useful searches.

Yes, I know those numbers add up to 28. A couple letters (W & X) made it into two categories.

Now I must ask, are people really so dumb they punch “amazon” into Google rather than typing www.amazon.com into the address bar? I think that’s probably the case, but there are some other possibilities I’ve come up with, listed below.

#1: Google steals focus

If google.com is your start page (it should probably be everybody’s) if you open your browser and begin typing in the address bar, you’ll likely get part of what you were typing in the address bar and part in the Google search box, especially if you are on dialup. This is because once the Google main page has loaded, the cursor is automagically positioned in the search box, regardless of whether or not you’re typing. Pressing enter then submits to Google.

While this can be a problem, I think the likelihood of it accounting for painfully obvious searches is small. It could up the instance of searches for “mazon.com” or “w.yahoo.com”, but not “amazon” or “yahoo” by themselves.

#2: Major web sites hacking Google

The idea here is that Amazon, Yahoo, Mapquest and Paris Hilton could be running programs that automatically submit thousands of searches to Google in an attempt to up their ranking. I don’t think this actually affects the rankings (I could be wrong, I’m not fully-versed in Google’s ranking criteria). Rankings are adjusted by the number of times a particular result link is followed, but just bulk searching may not have an effect. Even if it does, I’m sure the folks at Google are smart enough to discount consecutive hits from the same IP block when calculating the rankings.

This explanation also completely fails Hanlon’s Razor.

#3: People don’t know what the address bar is or what it’s for

It sounds crazy, but there’s people out there who have their start page set to some search engine or another (hopefully it’s Google) and don’t know how to enter an address. I overheard a conversation between my wife and a another person once where my wife was saying “open Internet Explorer (this was in the pre-Firefox days) and enter ‘www.weather.com’…OK, now see the zip code box…?” They didn’t see the zip code box. Eventually we asked what they did see, and it was something along the lines of “Yahoo search results”. They were searching Yahoo for www.weather.com, unaware that a URL goes up in the address bar.

I consider this separate from the “fucking morons” theory because I realize that there are plenty of otherwise smart people out there who are clueless about computers, just as I am clueless about calculus and playing the harp. I’ve actually even seen computers come with the browser installed so that the address bar is hidden in a cheap attempt to force users to use some shitty search engine.

#4: The internet has been taken over by morons

OK, I think you know where I stand on that one.

As an interesting side note, I’m going to mention that almost a month has past between my first seeing the Suggested Google Alphabet page and writing this. In that time I don’t think any of the search words have changed. Interestingly, since that page links live to searches for the most popular terms, it will have an effect on the most popular terms and help to keep them popular. Ironic, no?

So there you have it. When I decided to write this, I had no idea it was going to inspire such virulent rage on my part. All I can say in my defense is that the site’s called Bile Duct for a reason and that I fucking hate Paris Hilton. And the Harry Fucking Fox Agency.

On the upside, if all these words are such popular search terms, I should get a lot of inadvertent hits. Yay!

Paul McCartney Superbowl Half-Time

OK, so I heard today that Sir Paul McCartney’s going to be this year’s halftime entertainment at the Superbowl. I always liked John better, but he hasn’t performed live since 1980.

But you know what I’d do if I was Paul McCartney? Yes, of course I’d smoke a lot of weed, but you know what I’d do if I was Paul McCartney at the Superbowl? I’d whip my cock out. I’d sing “Hi, Hi, Hi” and right at the part that goes “like a rabbit, gonna grab it, gonna do it ’til the night is done” I’d whip my cock right out, wag it around and keep right on singing. I mean, so many uptight Americans were traumatized by the sight of Janet Jackson’s crusty shriveled-up nipple last year, imagine their shock at the sight of McCartney’s veiny fuckhammer.

I would really love to see this happen. Not because of some long-standing desire to see McCartney’s tool, but because if so many Americans are so offended by nudity they should have it rubbed in their faces. Well, not literally. Unless they’re into that.

And it would be particularly sweet because McCartney was an obvious “safe” choice for entertainment. He should be offended. Rock & roll should never be deemed safe by the powers that be. Rock and roll is about rebellion, and what could be more rebellious than showing your cock on American TV? He can surely afford the fines, and what, he’d be banned from football? I’m sure he gives two fucks about American football.

So come on Paul, show some of that old rock & roll spirit and whip out your cock during the Superbowl.