Just when you thought your dog is just, like, the smartest little thing ever because she’s learning not to pee on the carpet…
(Hat tip to rm preston. In a comment at the Seven Impossible Things… blog’s weekly “7-Kicks” extravaganza yesterday, rm listed this as one of the highlights of her previous seven days. It would’ve been one of mine, too!)
In his standup-comedy days, forty-plus years ago, Woody Allen did a routine called “Mechanical Objects.”
It was a narrative about the highly mixed blessings of living at the tail end of the Machine Age, at the start of The Age of Electronicus. I found the following transcript of the routine on the Web; I can’t swear to its accuracy, but it conforms to what I remember:
I have never in my life had good relationships with mechanical objects of any sort. Anything that I can’t reason with or kiss or fondle, I get into trouble with.
I have a clock that runs counter-clockwise for some reason. My toaster pops up my toast and shakes it, burns it. I hate my shower. I’m taking a shower, and somebody in America uses his water. That’s it for me, y’know, I leap from the tub, scalded.
I have a tape recorder, I paid a hundred and fifty dollars for, and as I talk into it, it goes, “I know, I know.”
About three years ago I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was home one night. I called a meeting with my possessions. I got everything I owned into the living room. My toaster, my clock, my blender. They’d never been in the living room before. And I spoke to them.
I opened with a joke.
And then I said, “I know what’s going on, and cut it out!…”
And I spoke to each appliance. I was really articulate. Then I put them back, and I felt good.
Two nights later, I’m watching my portable television set, and [the picture on] the set begins to jump up and down, and I go up to it. And I always talk before I hit, and I said, “I thought we had discussed this — what’s the problem?” And the set kept going up and down, so I hit it, and it felt good hitting it, and I beat the hell out of it. I was really great, I tore off the antenna, and I felt very virile.
And two days later I go to my dentist in New York. (I had gone to my dentist, but I had a deep cavity, and he’d sent me to a chiropodist.) I’m going into a building in mid-town New York, and they have those elevators, and I hear a voice say, “Kindly call out your floors, please,” and I say, “Sixteen,” and the doors close and the elevator starts going up to sixteen.
And on the way up the elevator says to me, “Are you the guy that hit the television set?” I felt like an ass, y’know, and it took me up and down fast between floors, and it threw me off in the basement. It yelled out something that was anti-Semitic.
I thought of this story the other night while helping The Missus with a bit of the evening’s dinner preparations.
Like, one who insists on being in your lap as you work? Plays with the keys? The (ha ha) mouse?
Remind him or her who’s boss.
Instructions from aBowman’s site, where I found this (via the wide-ranging Froog):
This lively pet hamster will keep you company throughout the day. Watch him run on his wheel, drink water, and eat the food you feed him by clicking your mouse. Click the center of the wheel to make him get back on it.
Out for morning walkies, the dog owner says, aloud:
No.
(Very good. The dog needs to understand No, and has even at times hinted that she does so.)
And then comes:
Uh-uh. No way.
(Hmm. Well, all right: it’s said in the same tone as No, and immediately follows it. So yes, within the limits of plausibility, the dog may read into one’s tone the continued sense of disapproval, the establishment of and the insistence upon boundaries.)
But then things deteriorate, and the dog owner finds himself having said, a split-second too late:
Sophie, stop. There is not a single circumstance under which you may go down this neighbor’s driveway. You know better than that. Have I ever let you go down this driveway?
The dog stops pulling at the leash. The dog turns, looks back at the man at the other end of the leash. The dog tilts her head, quizzically.
That, according to Wikipedia, is how comedian Demetri Martin’s humor is “often referred to.” Hmph. That’s as may be.
Whatever you call the genre, I’m hugely enjoying his new show, Important Things, in which he takes a single topic and just riffs on it for a half-hour. His “important thing” this week was safety. In the excerpt below, appearing as a commercial pitchman for a nursing home, he assures us there will be no more lying about Tony Bennett (among other things). As soon as possible convenient.
In 1990, having finished the first (the blitz) draft of Crossed Wires — during whose composition I read mysteries almost exclusively — I stopped at a bookstore in South Jersey, hungry for something to read. My appetite of the moment was for a book, any book, which I’d been curious about for years but had never read. I wanted something substantial, preferably not overpowering (no Finnegan’s Wake, please). A classic, but one which I could carry in a hip pocket.
I departed the store with Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.
Many have had a similar chance encounter with the tales of King Arthur, and like me have said to themselves, “Hmm…,” and then gone on to investigate something more of the story, which leads them to more, and then even further to other related back alleys of myth and literature. The hobby seems so innocent at first, just a pleasant diversion — deluded (as such hapless folk are) into thinking it’s all “just” the story of Knights of Old, the Round Table, the Holy Grail, Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot…
Finally they emerge at the far end (if they ever do) blinking, as though they’ve just spent a week spelunking and emerged at high noon in the desert. (High noon, right. It wouldn’t much surprise us to be greeted by Gary Cooper, wielding a broadsword instead of a revolver: that’s how surrealistic the experience can feel.)
Suddenly they know more than they ever imagined knowing about odd stuff like metallurgy, pre-Roman Britain, the odd and quite mysterious turnings and mergings of one legend into another, medieval French Romances, ecclesiastical rumor and history, and… Wales.
…but I just had to share this. It’s suspenseful, in a humorous way. And it’s funny — in a suspenseful way. Or maybe it’s just me.
(Discovered at the Out of Character blog.)
In Kate’s post today, she tackles Valentine’s Day a couple days early. (Determined to beat the rush, perhaps. You probably didn’t know the Internet charges a premium on Valentine’s-Day blog posts about love and sex.) But her post’s title reminded me of this film.
In the clip below, Diane Keaton’s character, Sonia, seems bored of the manifold loves-me/loves-me-not/loves-her/loves-him/does-not-either details in her cousin’s monologue. Yet it turns out she was listening all along and offers an analysis which cannot be refuted, if only because it can’t be understood.
I’ll go out on a limb here: Twitter “tweets” are the Schrödinger’s cats of Internet phenomena. In general, they exist or do not exist as long as you ignore Twitter altogether; when you actively pay attention, though, each tweet instantly crystallizes into a state of aliveness (Whoa, How about that, Ha!, or Hmm…) or death — forgotten at once. (My own experience indicates that tweets, on average, have a half-life of about two-thirds of a second before the inevitable decay into memes, interstitials, youtubes, and other elementary particles.)
So I haven’t enthusiastically leapt aboard the USS Twitter yet. Life’s too ephemeral as it is, y’know? That said, I do like seeing what others get out of (and sometimes put into) it.
For example, there’s Jon, of the newly (to me) discovered Ransom Note Typography blog (subtitle: “Discontinue Use If Rash Develops”). In a late-December post, Jon exhaustively documents his favorite tweets from 2008. After a brief introduction describing his criteria for selection, he lays out his month-by-month catalog of several tweets per month.
Here’s a small sample:
[Read more…]
I do love a punchline — or a cartoon caption — which makes me pause for a split-second before making me snort. (Score another for the Bizarro strip.)