For those of you that don’t know, I spend the majority of my days VJ’ing for Frequency, an internet video show akin to radio’s Pandora.

While most of my work consists of combing the internet for various gems, I also occasionally get to create custom playlists to show off the site’s toolset for assembling video collections. Here are two recent ones I’ve compiled:

This one sort of defies description. It was assembled out of the most manic, random, and dangerously catchy of videos I’ve come across:

Videos that cause Psychoses

This other one is an uber-geeky collection of World of Warcraft themed clips…

The WoW Show.

Peruse, view, and let me know what you think. Bonus points to any custom collections of your own that you’d like to share.

And so, the ravenous sports media culture finds itself T +24 hours past their biggest scoop of the summer.

The anointed one, the most finely tuned athlete/behemoth ever to come out of Ohio has left his hometown team. Instead of staying put and playing basketball martyr, LeBron James has decided to join two of his closest athlete/behemoth friends to form a mini-Harlem Globetrotter team in South Beach.

So, for fear of having to return to baseball, the World Cup, and other summer sports fare, the sports media has turned its attention to the jilted Cleveland fanbase.

And surely, there is suffering in Cleveland. This is a city whose last championship of any kind came via the NFL’s Browns 46 years ago. The Cavs, themselves, have never gone further than LeBron has taken them, as they have never won a title of their own.

If we’re to believe the media reports, every Cavs fan is now throwing an extended tantrum. They’re burning LeBron jerseys, screaming obscenities at the basketball Gods, and planning LeBron heckling parties at basketball arenas all over the country.

Now, what I’m about to say may hurt a little, Cleveland, but it’s for your own good. Acting like a scorned teenage girl who just found out that her Twilight Team Jacob friends have switched over to Team Edward doesn’t cast you in a very good light. It’s not likely to make you a preferred destination for future superstar players. And frankly, it’s not fair, given the circumstances.

You had seven years of one of the most prodigious talents in professional sports history. He took a team of stiffs, of cast-offs, and made them into a first-class basketball team. He played injured. He didn’t rest.

Do you realize that the man has averaged over 40 minutes a game played over his entire career? Only three players in history have averaged more: Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson. Jordan averaged 38 minutes played a game. Kobe averages about 37. LeBron killed himself to put your team on his shoulders. He knew that leaving the floor would mean leaving a team unfit to compete out there, so on the floor he stayed.

At some point, the Cleveland ownership has to take responsibility for this. Here you have this transcendent talent, and you surround him with second-rate nobodies. This is supposed to secure your investment? The best player that the man has ever gotten to play with, in Cleveland, was the empty, aged husk of Shaquille O’Neal or an Antwan Jamison rent-a-forward.

The man never had a real point guard to play with, so he had to be the point guard. He never had a dominant post-player, so he had to do that too. He never had a go-to shooter, so he made himself the go-to shooter. Wouldn’t this tire you out? Can you imagine being an adult on a little-league baseball team for seven years? Wouldn’t the novelty wear off after a while? Wouldn’t you want to play in the adult league if given the chance?

This is, in many ways, like the end of a relationship. LeBron is like the girl that got away. You knew, in your heart of hearts that she was out of your league. You were a devoted boyfriend. You bought flowers and chocolate. You listened to her problems. You even spent three weeks at her parents house for Christmas instead of taking a needed vacation. But ultimately, she was a little bit too smart for you. She was probably way too good looking for you. You could only jealously snap and rage at the other potential suitors (especially when Bron went to play for Team USA) for so long before one of them stole her heart. It was a sick inevitability eating away at the pit of your stomach, but an inevitability nonetheless.

Now that it’s over, have a little class. She didn’t have to stay for seven years. She obviously loved you, despite your faults. To paraphrase Forgetting Sarah Marshall, “She tried to make it work. You have no idea how hard she tried. She took relationship classes, she talked to her mother, she went to therapy. She tried everything. You were just too stupid to notice.”

First posted on Technorati.

Greatness: Bought or Bred?, Tiger’s Scruples vs. Big Mac’s Deltoids, Philandering Ad Campaigns, Glorifying the A-Political, and Uplifting the Downtrodden One Category at a Time.

Download Mep Report #120

Now this is Robert Gibbs, not Obama himself (though the President has indicated his own ability to lay down the hammer when necessary), and this response is much milder than questions of this level of idiocy demand. And calling anyone from Fox a “journalist”–especially incompetent hacks like Wendell Goler (who had the gall to get visibly annoyed at Gibbs’ response), who are pretty much the only kind of journalist Fox employs–is admittedly a big stretch. But we’ll take small victories when we can get them.

Media matters is reporting that porky pundit Glenn Beck’s stock has dropped precipitously this year. The website attributes the crash to an episode in which Beck made made the error of attempting to engage in actual journalism.

As recounted by Jon Stewart, Beck wanted guest congressman, Eric Massa to be the whistle blower that finally brought the Malfeasant Progressive Cabal to its knees. Instead, Massa comically recounted his experience with tickle fights. Disinterested sets clicked off across the Real America that evening, and they still have not returned.

Perhaps we’ll have to wait for the next generation parody of a parody of a newscaster to re-capture the imagination of the Fox Faithful and finally usher in the Fourth Reich. Ah well.

Clea Can’t Get No Satisfaction; Greg’s Life in Three Dimensions; Jackie Chan and the Masochistic Dragon Swoon; Mep Report Rare Ostrich Steak Attack GO!!!!!; The World According to EPCOT; We’re Much More Trekkie Than You; and Sometimes Horrible Is In The Middle of Good.

Download Mep Report #119

Upon hearing of this morning’s devastation in Chile, I began to wonder whether all of this recent continental plate shifting in the news is connected. Is this, perhaps, the beginning of the Tectonapocalypse?

In a word: No. Haiti’s earthquake and Chile’s occurred on completely different plates, along completely independent fault lines. In fact, according to geophysics professor, Tim Dixon, the Earth gets a 7 magnitude earthquake approximately once a month, and an 8.8 range approximately once a year. Since humans, for the most part, don’t dwell in deep submarine caverns, or underneath the ocean floors, we experience few of these massive earthquakes firsthand. If your only source of information was cable news networks, however, you might begin connecting the dots and assuming that we’re in for some kind of “Pangea’s Revenge” disaster scenario.

One more thing about the Richter scale… I’d always known it was an exponential scale, but I didn’t know that each level actually represents a 3000% increase from the previous level. In other words, Chile’s 8.8 (were we to round off at 9) would be about 900 times more powerful than the 7.0 earthquake that rocked Haiti.

Given that information, one cringes at the potential devastation that is just starting to be reported in Chile. This could get very, very ugly.

Four days ago, Andrew Joseph Stack, an otherwise unremarkable software engineer in his 50s, committed an act of terrorism when he crashed a small plane into the Texas State IRS center in Austin. While many people are still processing this event and its potential ramifications, some media sources seek to bury this story and downplay its significance.

While it seems impossible to outright bury the dissemination of an attack of this kind, the story has been obscured in the barrage of celebrity/media/sports stories that mass media outlets usually prefer. Yes, the attack was covered in the New York Times, but the Times downgraded the front page in a matter of hours to celebrate Lindsey Vonn’s gold medal in women’s downhill skiing.

While the Olympics are certainly worthy of coverage, is one medal out of 24, really a more significant event than what could be considered the beginning of a widespread populist revolt? It seems as if the New York Times, along with the rest of the established media, are choosing to downshift into celebrity/athletic fare, and deny that the suicide bombing was at all significant.

First of all, I have yet to hear any relating of this attack to the buzzword “terrorism.” This is despite the fact that the attack had all of the hallmarks of terrorism. We have a suicide, we have a plane being used as a missile, and we have a political and largely symbolic target. The main missing element is the foreign culture to scapegoat. Andrew Joseph Stack was a white, American-born, non-muslim, US citizen. Without the ethic or religious aspects, it’s as if the Right Wing Media doesn’t know how to properly leverage this news to support their point of view. Though it’s not as if they haven’t made a clumsy attempt or two…

Note that while Neil Cavuto could have used this forum to decry the Obama administration for its tax and spend policy and for creating too much big government, he remains incredibly timid in this interview with Scott Brown.

What Neil Cavuto knows (as do his Fox News Marionettes behind the scenes) is that this attack could just as easily have been targeted at the office of a major software company or the capital building, or even a media outlet seen as upholding the kind of corruption Andrew Joseph Stack saw as penetrating society.

Of course I don’t agree with his actions, per se. I think the scapegoating of the IRS is misguided and plays into the hands of critics who call him nothing more than a deranged nut with a crudely scrawled internet screed. And, of course the IRS agent killed in the attack had no particular power to change any of the problems that Stack layed out in his statements. I’m also fairly sure that a more thorough examination of Stack’s life will yield a lot more personal problems than financial trouble. It takes more than poverty to drive someone to violent reprisal.

However, that probably won’t stop Stack’s symbolic value in the decade to come. Populist rage is a valid, though unfocused way of looking at the society we’ve built. When you concentrate a society’s wealth to the extreme extent that we have, you’re bound to find large swaths of people who want to shake that system up, or even destroy it entirely.

And this is the dilemma for the corporate-controlled mass media. It spends much of its time glorifying violence, prejudice, hatred, inanity, and greed, so long as those emotions are used to distract and entice people who are being bled dry of their savings and properties. When those emotions are concentrated and directed back at the source of it all, the mass media panics. Better to bury the story than to understand it. Understanding what happened might encourage huge structural changes. And there are few things our corporate overlords like less than huge structural changes that they, themselves, didn’t engineer.

Hey kids. Wanted to give you the heads up that Klaus Pierre will be screening his movie Little Klaus, Big World on the west side of Los Angeles on Saturday, February 20th, at noon.

It’s a private showing, so I can’t announce the specific location, but I do happen to have a few invitations I can give out for those who contact me via e-mail (russ@mepreport.com). Viva la Klaus!

Much as I hate privacy, I am starting to come around to the idea that Facebook and Twitter are the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of the Internet. Purely because I charge them each with half a count of the murder of blogging.

When I first started blogging in the year 2000, I resisted the term “blog”. I didn’t like its shortness, its seeming triviality, the idea that blogging was something blippy and insignificant. I liked “web log” or “web journal” or even “internet diary” and even though I had one of the terser blogs out there, my posts would still almost always dwarf the absurd 140-character parameters of a “tweet”. Yes, there was perhaps the frequency and occasional irrelevance of tweeting, but 140 characters doesn’t even let one express an idea.

What was neat about blogging, in part, is that it was a public and accessible way to get across ideas so almost anyone (within our societal advantages of ambient time and money, of course) could read them and potentially be impacted. While there were early murmurings of this decentralizing information and giving the power to the people, it was pretty obvious that it would (like any good revolution) just replace one elite with another. And thus the newspapers started to crumble and the blogging infrastructure and hierarchy started taking shape.

This was fine, though, because it didn’t obliterate the small blogs. Even though newspaper conglomerates ran small locals out of business (or, worse, just strip-mined their content to the lowest common AP denominator), the point of blogging for most people wasn’t to make money but to communicate. So you couldn’t drive the small bloggers off the tracks. And thus I maintained a real insight into the thought processes and daily lives of many of my friends.

Fast forward to the advent of Facebook. Suddenly, most all my friends stopped blogging. The Blue Pyramid, my impressively popular website of mostly online quizzes since 2003, dropped off a cliff in terms of traffic. Suddenly a maelstrom force had entered the Internet and was eating parts of it wholesale. As more and more got dragged into the vortex, corporations and new ground-floor dwellers started loading Facebook up with trivial content and applications.

What’s insidious about Facebook is the way it presents information. For the most part, it is micro-communication, though “status updates” have limits twice or thrice as forgiving as Twitter (I still frequently find myself going over, but whatever). But Facebook has a way of presenting information that makes it completely overwhelming and, resultingly, trivial. Unless one lives on Facebook, stays logged in and refreshing all the time (I know a couple people who do this, but not many), then whatever floats to the top of the feed is completely random. No one can digest more than 15-20 status updates at a time and those at the top are often from your 55th, 64th, 99th, and 401st closest friends – people you would never bother to keep up with so regularly otherwise. It is fragmentation at its finest.

Yes, you can post “notes” that are more like blog entries. Yes, you can scan one individual’s entire page, though it usually consists of blippy irrelevant “wall post” musings from other people, a few photos, and terse and sporadic updates that don’t provide half the regularity or depth of even the most cursory blogs. I’ll admit that Facebook does photos pretty well through its tagging system and that it’s easy. Easy easy easy. Just sign in and go. And, theoretically, all the content you want is in one place.

The problem, of course, is that there’s no content. It’s really easy to post “HELP HAITI NOW” in your status, but impossible to provide the nuance of a more troubling look at the country, like I posted last month or Russ posted here yesterday. And yes, you can provide links, but who really goes to a lot of other non-video links in Facebook? And the need for character limits in Twitter has given rise to another insidious practice, that of URL-shortening websites.

Most savvy web users hover their mouse over most any link before clicking it to ensure they aren’t about to go somewhere suspect that will destroy their computer. I’ve gotten a little lazier about this since I have Firefox set to prompt me to accept or reject every single site’s cookie and save my preferences site by site, but I still do it most of the time. When you see a “bit.ly” or a “tinyurl.com” instead of a real website, there’s absolutely no telling what’s behind the curtain. When they first came up with these sites, I was mindboggled they’d be acceptable in an era when so much paranoia about spam exists. But apparently the Twitterverse can dictate the terms of the Internet’s surrender.

But of course, these sites do something far worse than just force someone to click links on faith (which, given my experience with fellow Meppers, I am already loath to do). They break down one’s mental link between the content linked and the actual website featuring the content. After all, you got it on Twitter and bit.ly. That’s all you need to remember. Just keep going back to the wells of Twitter and bit.ly – no need to remember anything else.

Like cell phones making people forget the phone number of everyone they know, this is a pretty extreme centralization of the Internet. My Dad reminded me the other day to regularly save as much important Internet as I could, both my own and others’, because we can’t take for granted the depth, breadth, and accessibility of the Internet forever. Russ and I had a conversation about six months ago wherein we re-established that the Internet’s decentralization is the last best anti-establishment hope in our world. If we expect all our content to come through portals like Facebook and Twitter, if we stop blogging in favor of driveling our thoughts to finite character limits and hoops of unsophistication, we’re letting the centralization win.

And what’s so bad about centralization? It’s too easy for corporations to control. It’s too easy to buy two or five websites and end up controlling everything. I fear corporations like most people fear the government, but it’s all for the same reasons. Consolidation of control for less than noble purposes is always a threat to those who want better outcomes.

Here’s my translation of this post for those who can now only process in 140 characters or less:

Twitter and Facebook are destroying blogging and accordingly our ability to process sophisticated or nuanced content on the Internet.

Whew. Seven characters to spare!

On this bleak winter morning in a country seemingly coming apart at the seams, two heartening reminders (check out the poll results) that the internet will always trump mindless mass-media propaganda.

Image via Reddit user, hiddencross.

While American citizens are demonstrating their good will, as they do, on cue, whenever informed of a disaster of the magnitude of the Haitian earthquake, we largely remain oblivious of their own government’s direct role in the plight of one of the poorest nations on Earth.

As relayed by Truthdig’s Amy Goodman, Haiti never had the chance to become a self-sustaining, truly sovereign nation capable of withstanding a natural disaster. Not while it has been weathering a succession of imposed political disasters for the last two centuries.

For nearly a century and a half (from 1804 to 1947) Haiti was forced to pay over $150 million in reparations to France for daring to declare statehood, rather than remaining a loyal slave colony under French rule. These reparations, the equivalent of over $35 billion today, permanently entrenched the fledgling state in insurmountable debt.

The U.S, under the auspices of the World Bank and IMF were only too happy to lend Haiti money, under the conditions that it forcibly accepted subsidized US agricultural imports. Of course, Haitian farmers could not compete with the artificially cheap US crops (sometimes referred to as ‘Miami rice’) and a country which once sustained itself on its own food production, became an unwilling dependent on food imports. Before 1950 Haiti produced more than 80 percent of its own food and also exported food. Today it imports 75 percent of its food as a migration of farmers who abandoned their crops sought work in cities.

Of course, this doesn’t begin to speak to the US’s history of supporting bloody Haitian dictatorships, or of our military occupation of the island from 1915 to 1934. It is enough to say that we, very much intentionally, never gave Haiti a chance to compete as an autonomous economy, never gave it a chance to thrive, and never gave it a chance to develop the kind of infrastructure necessary to deal with a natural disaster.

After all, what sort of example would it set for the rest of the subjugated world to watch a former slave colony transform itself into a beacon of hope for other down-trodden, occupied, or enslaved peoples? That certainly could never have been allowed to happen. Imperialism would never have been the same.

Oops!

Yep.  It’s Sarah Palin’s hand, and those are notes from the EXACT SAME SPEECH WITH THE “OBAMA AS TELEPROMPTER GUY” LINE.

We here at The Mep Report are begging, nay, pleading with you, Sarah: the teabaggers need you.  The Republicans need you.  Your country needs you.  And most of all, and as always most importantly, YOU need you.  Please, please run for President. It would truly be a year of wonders.

I recorded some fantastically washed-out grainy video in an attempt to share this experience with you. Not only do the following clips give you a sense of the performances, they also recreate the crowd’s futile attempts to see anything amidst a standing room only mob. In any case, enjoy the festivities:

A truly unexpected performance here from the WWF’s Iron Sheik.

Here’s the Shins’ James Mercer covering Neil Young’s Don’t Let it Bring You Down…

Genius comedian Patton Oswalt regaled the crowd with his angry musings before an Aimee Mann set.

He then brought the house down with his Yoshinoya Beef Bowl routine.

Here’s Ben Stiller vamping on stage with a mysterious figure referring to himself as ‘Fabreeze Fabreeze.’

A vindictive Stiller returned during Tenacious D’s closing act with a giant drum set…

All in all, a very compelling night of entertainment.

Other fun volleys from Conan and NBC:

- Conan’s initial response to the attempt to move his show.

- Conan puts up the Tonight Show for sale on Craigslist.

- Hitler laments NBC’s decision.

- Former NBC castaway, David Letterman chimes in.

Yesterday, our Digital Overlords (Google Corp) released a new “superphone” that may change life on this planet as we know it…

As reported in TechCrunch, unlike its peers and predecessors, the Nexus One phone will not be plastered all over the media landscape. No one will have to compose a melodic ditty to make the Nexus One seem approachable and familiar. No one will hire John Hodgman to personally mobilize the techno-geek demographic. No one will film silhouettes of dancing hipsters who have found a preternatural groove thanks to the hot new electronic device clipped to their belts.

No, Google, the ‘do no harm’ corporation is sparing us the deluge. They just want to let us know that they have a new product, and that it’s pretty cool. So they’ll link a Nexus One tutorial to your YouTube page. They’ll gently point you toward a demo video on Engadget. But they’re not going to beat you over the head with the thing in the same way that their esteemed tree-fruit competitor might.

And whether they are aware of it or not, the geek masses are thankful for this.

While the phone itself promises little more than an incremental advance from smartphones already in the marketplace, the true innovation of Google’s Nexus One, is that it could be the first Big Market Gizmo not forcibly jammed down your throat by the mass media.

Say g’night, Billy…

Everyone’s favorite Emilio Estevez sibling was in the news today for allegedly “breaking several pairs of eyeglasses” in front of his wife during a Christmas tirade. The horror!

The BBC lead story also cataloged a series of “arm slaps” between Charlie Sheen and his estranged wife.

Oh, did I mention that Sheen also pinned his wife on the bed and threatened to have her killed? Perhaps I should have led with that tidbit.

Now, I realize that I’m not a Jesus disciple, and, as such, not privy to certain Christmas traditions, but in my limited experience, Christmas seems to be a totally appropriate time for eyeglass murder, arm slapping, and empty death threats.

Why, it was just last year’s festive season when I was in the company of a lovely and devout Christmas family going through their yearly tradition of accusations, hysteria, tantrums, ultimatums and eyeglass murder. Again, as an outsider I can’t point to the page in the New Testament where it mandates winter equinox crying fits and delusion, but I’m sure it’s at least symbolically presented in the text.

As a cat being chased around by a vacuum cleaner, I am both baffled and genuinely afraid of the havoc the holiday season is capable of wreaking. Every year, it seems to bring with it unnecessary emotional stakes and dire consequences for the people caught up in them.

And so, my choices seem to be to either bunker myself and wait out the dreaded period, or, reluctantly participate in someone else’s calendar induced-insanities. As such, this time of year trends anywhere from the mundane to the apocalyptic.

I find that the building up of expectations is one of the best ways to ruin whatever one is looking forward to. Rarely can any single event live up to the vivid imagination of the hopeful. Christmas, more so than any other happening I can think of (with the possible exception of a visit to DisneyLand), comes bundled with insane levels of expectations. A season of wonderment, visitations by mythical historical figures, spontaneous musical happenings, and unbridled avarice have been ingrained into the minds of Christmas goers from their earliest memories.

I question how anyone can have even a mildly pleasant time under these conditions. It would seem to parallel playing a game of catch in which the first person to drop the ball spontaneously combusts. What is initially a fun distraction immediately becomes a recipe for trauma.

And so, as I do in my more lucid years, I sit and try to wait this damned season out. I wait for the commercial mob rule and ramming-speed shoppers to pass, I wait for the families to reunite and unleash their pent up ingratitudes, I wait for the looped musical propaganda to quiet, and for the singing nitwits to cease. I wait for the psychedelic red and green landscape to pass over the horizon (and simultaneously wonder whether draping everything with red contributes to the aggravated and belligerent nature of the season), and I wait for the dead temporary pet trees to be returned to their waiting dumpsters outside.

And soon, soon there will be quiet. There will be no more unreasonable expectations (or at least no more than usual), no more pure fiction (back to the scaled-down lie of the everyday persona), and quiet — blissful quiet. In due time, the sun will stop hiding from the human collective insanity and begin to make the days tolerably long again. For, my Christmas is the return to normalcy. My anticipation is for the insanity to end and the singing to cease. My Christmas present is to return to a world that isn’t completely polarized (and paralyzed) by religious beliefs or familial traditions, and the best part is that my Christmas season lasts for 50 weeks a year.

Yep, that’s not a typo. If the story is accurate, Alvarez, a native of Uruguay, dropped three hundred smackers to make something which isn’t that far off from some of the material in Independence Day (with considerably less Randy Quaid). (Avatar, by contrast, cost four hundred million to complete.) Within a week he had offers from major Hollywood studios for his services, and ended up signing a thirty million dollar deal with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures. There’s been some heavy skepticism that someone could produce any vaguely professional film for $300, let alone something this impressive, but until I hear different I’m going with the story, for the cool factor if nothing else.

For the uninitiated, Wafflepwn is the YouTube handle of a newly-minted 16 year old internet celebrity. Over the course of a year, Wafflepwn has amassed tens of millions of video views and over 200,000 subscribers by broadcasting the flaily tantrums of his emotionally disturbed big brother.

The piece that initially put Wafflepwn on the map was an Internet Perfect Storm. Combining World of Warcraft-with self-flagellation, the video appealed to the gamer and voyeur alike. Created in the vein of other peer-humiliation videos (see Star Wars Kid), the “Greatest Freakout Ever,” represented much of the worst the internet has to offer.

After garnering over sixteen million views in seven months, the YouTube video has completely changed the lives of Wafflepwn and his Texas family. What was once a son’s privately embarrassing antics is now a revenue stream for the entire clan. As the sequels to “Greatest Freakout Ever” began to come down the pike, other family members began to participate in instigating the big money tantrums from their disturbed son. They filmed him cowering up in a tree, sent the family’s grandmother to paddle him, and gave him an obviously disappointing birthday party in the hopes of eliciting another breakdown. Wafflepwn’s new YouTube channel has even spawned a fledgling production company — “Freak Out Productions.”

While freak shows and carnivals have existed since the beginnings of human civilization, internet freak shows have emerged as their more viral, more accessible, and more lucrative counterparts. Any family with a camera and a computer now has a serious financial decision to make regarding the potentials of exploiting their children for instant fame and fortune. When compared to the huge cost and effort associated with family therapy or counseling, the financial incentives become clear. Why attempt to treat or help a problem child when they can be far more profitable to their parents as an internet celebrity monstrosity?

For Steven, the subject of these pieces, it is very hard to see a route to normalcy. A confused kid who exhibited anger management problems now is being simultaneously ridiculed and rewarded for his anti-social behavior. His value as a money-maker and an attention grabber come solely from his inability to cope with everyday situations. His tantrums have elicited far more attention than anything else he is likely to do for the rest of his life. Wafflepwn’s decision to post and promote these videos will have irrevocable effects on his brother’s path in life.

In his latest video, Wafflepwn himself is interviewed by a British camera crew. Wafflepwn contritely answers the producer’s questions as he is hit by the realization that his YouTube antics haven’t been all fun and games. He is just starting to have a sense of how big the world really is, and how the attention of the YouTube Mob can change the lives of the people around him.

In the latest Mep Report podcast, the Meppers discussed, in part, the ramifications of a world in which privacy is on the verge of disappearing. The Wafflepwn Phenomenon is a harbinger of the darker aspects of this world. It speaks to the powerfully exploitative forces that surround a beloved video sharing website, and the devastation that it is capable of wielding.

For more on the absurdist theater that is the American news media, check out this phenomenal piece on Truthdig, entitled, “Addicted to Nonsense.”

And I thought we saved this kind of commentary for the NASCAR TV crew.

I attended the midnight premiere of teeny-bopper sensation Twilight: New Moon, this morning. Having re-read that sentence after writing it, I am probably as baffled as you are as to why I agreed to go along with it. Suffice to say, I have a friend who is a big Twilight fan, and I didn’t want her to have to brave the crowd alone, so agreed to do a solid for her while also fulfilling a morbid curiosity to figure out what this Twilight phenomenon was all about.

And hey, I figured maybe there was an outside chance I could find something to like about Twilight. I mean, I love the song “Twilight” by ELO (which is initially what I thought the movies were a derivative of), I didn’t completely 100% loathe Underworld, another Vampire/Werewolf genre piece, and, way back in the day, I actually thoroughly enjoyed Interview with the Vampire.

Of course, I realize that the genre didn’t start with Ann Rice either, but there does seem to be a great deal more substance in these pieces as we trace them closer to their original source. The new genre of Vampire fare (including HBO’s True Blood) seem to be what happens when you make a copy of a copy of a copy. The whole thing gets incredibly fuzzy, and the quality drops off the table.

While standing in line amidst a throng of teenaged (and wistfully nostalgic honorary teenaged) girls, I asked my movie companion whether the traditional vampire rules applied to these Twilight vampires, and I learned the following:

– Twilight vampires are not harmed by garlic (heck, they are so chic they probably grow their own basil to make pesto for their vamp-dinners)

– Twilight vampires are not harmed by crosses (hard to keep up a proper goth look without them, I suppose)

– Twilight vampires are not harmed by stakes to the heart (this would piss off Van Helsing to no end)

– Twilight vampires are not harmed by the sun…

The sun? These vampires aren’t hurt by the sun? What exactly makes them vampires, again? Sure, they drink blood, but so does Billy Bob Thornton, and he ain’t no vampire either. I mean, there are quasi-precedents for this, like Blade, the Daywalker but even Blade was a huge anomaly in the vampire world, as he wasn’t 100% vampire.

You see, when Twilight vampires are exposed to the sun, they… well… they twinkle. Basically, when Twilight vampires have sun shined on them, they look like Mariah Carey. Jesus, could we soften up this monster legend any more? How about instead of fangs, the Twilight vampires have candy corn incisors, and instead of blood, they really lust after gazpacho soup.

The strange thing is, even after watching the entire movie, I learned almost nothing more about Twilight vampires that made any kind of sense at all. The movie is a perfect replication of the mind of a teenaged girl. The main character (a 17-year old girl) Bella, basically sits, and pines for her vampire boyfriend for 90% of the movie. She becomes depressed, she listens to her Ipod, she throws tantrums, she hangs out with the local neighborhood boy (the modern incarnation of Pacey), and melodramatically fakes suicide over and over in the hopes that her passive-aggressive vampire boy, Edward (Dawson), will come to save her. She sulks, she cries, she thinks about going to live with her mom, and then she goes off on a spontaneous (and random) jaunt to Italy to frolic with the tourists.

As expected, the movie was instantly forgettable — even now, details of the “plot” are rapidly falling out of my head. But, honestly, I can’t even say I disliked this movie as much as the Time Traveler’s Wife. Time Traveler’s Wife seemed harmful on several levels (in part by implanting the desire to marry abusive husbands). Twilight: New Moon is about as harmless as you can possibly get. And frankly, there are many movies from my teenage generation that mirror this plot exactly. Teenaged girl pines until she discovers a magical world of new powers and boyfriends?

Exhibit A: Teen Witch

Exhibit B: Labyrinth

Exhibit C: The male 80′s equivalent: The Lost Boys

So, yeah. I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that a money-driven sequel based on a tired genre brings absolutely nothing new to the table. What’s disturbing is that no one seems to expect any blockbuster these days to bring anything new to the table. Is it possible that our pop-culture is stuck in some kind of mobius strip of bad children fare, followed by bad teen-aged fare, followed by bad superhero blockbusters, followed by bad middle-aged life dramas? Christ, American media is depressing.

(Ahem… Warning for language… You may have to cover your virgin ears should you decline to be properly educated)

I’m just sayin’.

I know previous rants about our obsession with child kidnappings and the weird things people say as a result have been met with mixed reviews. But the fact is that our culture is far too smitten with child kidnappings and murders. And I blame the media.

It’s not 100% the media’s fault, of course. They just put the information out there and the idiot Americans consume the information. At the same time, if the media could put the experience of taking crack cocaine into equally addictive words, shouldn’t they somehow be held liable for the resulting consequences?

We have found the lowest common denominator. It’s news stories about child kidnappings and murders. These things, while tragic and terrible, are not news. Even less are they news because the very few wealthy attractive kids are the only ones you hear about.

Do your part by never speaking of them again, never clicking on another piece about them. Well, y’know, after this article.

So, it could have read something to the effect of:

“OMG stop whining uR LAM3 a$$ off. STFU.”

While some of us are tired of the same old formulaic nonsense, one must admit that this is a very impressive feat for a writing staff made up entirely of manatees.

Yep, old Rupie has decided he would be better off without the help of the search catalogs of the most powerful force on the Digiscape. The fickle browsing public probably won’t even buy into his Plutocratic Propaganda Machine if they have to have its content balanced with actual news sources. Only through full indoctrination (via paid web subscription) can the PPM live up to its full psychologically potent potential. And so firewalls must be erected. Rupie and Co. will happily wall-in their own unsuspecting readership brick by brick. Perhaps they’ll even ordain a few editorialists and build the New Church of Foxentology, while they’re at it. Better that than to expose themselves to the danger that is the Intraweb’s open exchange of ideas.

Professional skeptic and media rabblerouser, Bill Maher, willfully engaged the taboo this week when he expressed his doubts about the Swine Flu vaccine. Not surprisingly, his panelists reacted as if he suggested they eat a small child, live on set.

This is an especially courageous stance for Maher to take given the greater medical community’s open disdain for anyone who would question their products. Never mind that there is a body of evidence mounting that most currently cited vaccine efficacy studies are heavily biased and, no double-blind vaccine testing (against a placebo group) have ever been effectively demonstrated.

Never mind that in both 1968 and 1977, when flu vaccines were completely mismatched to corresponding seasonal outbreaks, the flu mortality rate didn’t rise a single point. Never mind that even though we immunize 50% more elderly people than we did 20 years ago, the death rate has increased nearly twofold.

Never mind that (as Maher cites) a typical flu vaccine contains mercury, chicken embryos and formaldehyde. Nope, there certainly isn’t a credible debate to be had on whether we should be injecting millions of people with that. Certainly not. Right Canadians?

Even the usually infallible Jon Stewart completely dropped the ball on this debate. Instead, he used shlubby Glen Beck as a strawman to avoid the real arguments completely.

The moral of the story is, never believe the glowing screen — especially when it tells you that you’d be a fool to question it. Do your own research and find your own answers. Either that, or willfully accept your intravenous chicken fetus.

I think that the Aviator Emu and his friend Alan Greenspan will be bringing you a lot more newsreel Mep videos in the coming months. We’re pretty excited about this new (old) genre of recording.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to book my tickets on the dirigible.

This unassuming top article from CNBC’s front page may look like it has insight. Instead, it warns some “perspective” buyers about their potential confusion.

Among their confusions might be what they’re called in the first place. After all, these are actually “prospective buyers”. CNBC’s spellcheckers must be as diligent as its critics of big business and shady stock deals.

Extra points for preceding the phrase “as to whether” with such a blatant typo and for the subtle messaging of the real value of American homes. Because those are pennies in the picture. Not dollars or even quarters – pennies.

I’d say more, but I have to rush out to get some perspective on buying a house for five cents with an $8,000 tax rebate.

I know I’ve recently been pimping Michael Moore’s Capitalism, but this video serves up the same effect in 8 odd minutes. The Prophet Bill Hicks would probably have referred to these two as “Impotent Silverfish Satan Spawn.” They represent the lowest form of human life on the planet. One can only hope that no alien species learns of humans through intercepted AVN broadcasts.

Let’s examine this afternoon’s headlines, shall we?:

Now, there are a ton of reasons to root against economic recovery in the US, ranging from hoping for a total collapse of capitalism to saving the environment to simply giving the country an unprecedented dose of humility. But to avoid flight delays? Really?

Also, let’s look at the context in which CNN so cleverly chose this horror story of the coming flight delays. Was it just a slow news day? Is there nothing else to report to Americans hungry for 24/7 news?

Let’s see… the seminal turning point in the war in Afghanistan, an upcoming movement on healthcare that has dominated the American political scene for the last few months, the first ever serious excavation on the moon via explosion, the Taliban claiming credit for the latest bombing… yeah, I’d probably choose the specter of increased flight delays that comes from more scheduled flights too.

What’s great about the article is that it’s not even news so much as basic logic. When more planes are in the air, it creates more traffic, thus leading to more delays. The same principle by which, uh, all traffic in the world has always worked, from horse and buggies to trains to cars. Spectacular.

CNN might as well have put a simple math equation as the top story of October 8th. It would probably be less intuitive to the average reader.

To be fair, there were also some colossal duds they didn’t pick for the top story, though it makes you wonder if CNN has any editing at all on their website. Levi Johnston stripping? Jennifer Hudson has a kid? Ted Williams’ frozen head? Since when does CNN stand for Celebrity Nothing News?

At least they also ran a feature on the avalanche video. We totally scooped CNN.

Here’s some interesting analysis from English language Russian broadcast, Russia today:

It should be noted that few domestic American news stations seemed to have any similar level of coverage of the event. Seemingly the Letterman extortion scandal is a far more important global issue.

Returning to the Lama, here is his acceptance speech:

And here is an older BBtv piece that I shot about human rights abuses that persist in Tibet:

The story here was that I had agreed to do stand up comedy last weekend, but wasn’t particularly in the mood for joke-telling (especially given that the venue was a standard comedian trap — a privately hosted party). So, instead, I decided to employ the audience as the cast and crew in a YouTube video.

The results were mixed. Obviously I had little control over what we ended up recording, but it was a promising experiment. I sort of like the idea of having strangers collaborate spontaneously on a web project. It’s very internet ethos-y. On the bright side, it may be an entirely new form of performance art. Fun.

Digg.com is one of the largest websites on the planet. Like many of its competitors in the social media arena, it doesn’t purport to create or provide anything of substance. Digg’s value comes in the community that it organizes and speaks for. In Digg’s case, that community’s function is to vote for the most worthy news stories of the day for more casual visitors to consume.

With the announcement of some prospective changes to its voting rules, is Digg capitulating to big money interests? Or has its slow march to corruption already rendered its original mission moot?

With its massive growth over the last five years, Digg has become a virtual kingmaker. One link from the Digg front page can send massive swaths of internet traffic to any given website at any time. This ‘Digg Effect‘ is one of the more powerful forces known to the internet. It can instantaneously promote stories, videos, or news items into super-viral memes that have the potential to reach millions of users.

With the advent of online ads, web traffic became a very real form of currency, turning Digg from a virtual billboard into a virtual ATM machine. Not surprisingly, the key to the Holy Teat of Internet Traffic became an incredibly valuable commodity. And the holders of such relics are especially susceptible to corrupting influences.

But, let’s not kid ourselves. Digg wasn’t ever a democracy in the truest egalitarian sense of the word. The site runners have always kept their ‘Feature Algorithm’ a secret. In other words, no one knows how many votes it takes to bring a story to Digg’s vaunted home page. No one knows how many down votes it takes to bury a story. No one knows why some stories seem to linger on the front page longer than others. As far as pure democratic processes go, you can rank Digg somewhere in the neighborhood of Iran or Afghanistan.

Even with its flaws, Digg was once a thriving community of diligent news consumers, constantly pouring over incoming submissions and voting especially compelling ones to the front page. This culture is no more. Algorithm changes have discouraged Digg users from being too active in reading and filtering new submissions. A shift in focus on socializing and befriending other users has lead to the creation of virtual Digg Voting Blocks. The results of this new policy has dramatically reduced the diversity of stories that end up on the featured page.
One study concluded that 46% of Digg’s front page is controlled by as few as 50 websites. Not surprisingly, these 50 websites represent some of the biggest, most well-funded players on the internet.

It’s hard to blame founder Kevin Rose and his inner cabal for Digg’s corporate devolution. I mean, if you were a kid who designed a network capable of leveraging insane amounts of traffic on behalf of a rowdy internet throng, wouldn’t you want some measure of control over the thing? Wouldn’t you set up secret features that allowed your staff to counter the rampant Digging of unacceptable content, or allow yourself a backdoor to throw a bone to websites that paid you to feature them? Wouldn’t you set up safeguards to prevent out and out revolt that threatened the livelihood of your virtual property? I think you would.

This is why democracies aren’t generally run by kids fresh out of a computer science program at UNLV. Thriving democracies have transparency; they have checks and balances, they have interest groups working to ensure that the interests of the few are communicated to the many. Digg has never had any of these protections.

Therefore, Digg has never been a true democracy. But it was close, once. Unfortunately it has slowly succumbed to the addictive brew of advertising dollars, strategic partnerships, and celebrity. So don’t bother raising a stink about the new proposed changes. And don’t expect to find this story on Digg’s front page any time soon. Its corporate overlords wouldn’t approve.

Image via MaximumPC

In a stunning turn of events this week, Facebook revealed that it now takes in enough actual money to pay for its own business expenses.

“There’s a myth that you can’t make money on the internet, these days,” said recently post-pubescent CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“As it turns out, all you have to do is become a social organizer for a virtual nation of 300 million, and keep them distracted with Mafia Wars while you sell off their personal shopping habits to retailers,” Zuck noted.

Here’s to hoping other internet entrepreneurs heed Zuckerberg’s message and find new and creative ways to engage (exploit) internet users, at large.

Two media giants combined forces today, promising to change our national film landscape forever. With the acquisition of Marvel Comics, Disney Corp has made a bold bid to incorporate popular superhero themes into its more traditional titles. Here is an exclusive sneak peak at some of its upcoming projects…

Beauty and the Thing is a tale of love between a young geneticist/princess and a rowdy, middle-aged pile of orange rock.

The Little Namor is the story of a young Atlantean Warrior Hero and his quest to rid himself of talking lobsters and guppies. This Atlantean Hero is not to be confused with his distant cousin, Deity of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment.

Finally we have the tale of a former drug boss and mafia don who finds a new life and cadre of underlings amongst the animals of the Serengeti as part of a stint in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Disney/Marvel’s, The Lion KingPin promises to enchant the viewer with its tales of drug trafficking, ritualistic killings, and friendship.

One of my new favorite toys is this online tool that allows you to indulge your wildest internet egocentricities. The tool seeks out your each and every Google-worthy act and unceremoniously dumps it into one of many pre-determined category bins, forever branding the nature of your service to the human race.

It’s so uncompromising and final… This pleases me.

And now, the Personas breakdown of the entire Mep staff. Apologies to Greg, who has a somewhat more common name than the rest of us (hence the prominent “illegal” heading in his breakdown).

In having a more complete picture of border activity, Fox hopes to inspire Starcraft-proficient gamers to remotely manage Border Patrol Resources to more efficiently swarm and destroy the MexMenace. THQ Software is also planning an upcoming release to cross-promote the Fox Map, entitled: Company of Heroes: Poncho Villa’s Revenge.

As per its usual protocol, the Fox Interactive Mexico Map (FIMM) will be posted on all Waffle House menu/placemats, Jon Deer Outlet Storefronts, and projected onto the faces of Wallmart Greeters.

In the inspiring words of map proponent, Sean Hannity,

“We must use every tool at our disposal to stop the brown people.”

Link via mediabistro.

My two favorite parts of this clip:

1) James makes his “I just took a verbal dump” face, immediately after uttering the C-word.

2) Alan Massengale almost loses his mind when he hears Worthy’s slip and can’t wipe the grin off of his face.

I want you Meppers to know that this video was incredibly difficult to find. HBO has been on a censorship rampage in trying to shield Buck from the humiliation of having his first talk show railroaded by the longtime Howard Stern co-host.

This was amazing to see live. You could tell that Lange was at least half in the bag, and that Buck had neither the charm, nor skill to stop him. To be fair, Buck was a particularly useless talk show host. He isn’t witty, engaging, or even particularly interesting. He has a job because he inherited his father’s pipes. That’s about it. I don’t think we’ll be seeing him in Bob Costas’ seat again.

A National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) press release announced today that Geraldo Rivera will be inducted into its Hall of Fame next month.

This would be a very nice accolade if it weren’t for the fact that Geraldo Rivera founded the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

In other news, the Moustached House of Douchebags Hall of Fame will announce this year’s inductees next week. Fingers crossed, Geraldo.

Enjoy the pandering for Twit sign-ups as his mom/spouse, Demi Moore, scolds him for getting too worked up in his electioneering.

In narrowly beating out CNN to the million mark, Kutcher will now undoubtedly hold a virtual monopoly on the dissemination of Twit-centric retellings of mongoloid celebrity Punkings.

Hooray.

Earlier this week in front of his weekly board meeting in the San Diego office, AP chairman, Dean Singleton, cried foul.

In complaining about the unlicensed use of AP stories all over the blogosphere, Singleton actually conjured up the old Network tagline: “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!”

Well, let’s visit the original context of that quote for a moment…

Why Singleton would want to conjure up the mental image of this speech, I have no idea. The ‘mad as hell’ speech came at a revelatory moment when one commentator realized the effect the mass media was having on society at large. Newscaster Howard Beale implored the audience to leave the television set and face the reality of their living room windows. He asked them to look outside and see the real world for what it is.

The whole thesis of Network was that corporate controlled media is a scourge upon free society. You cannot have a democracy, nor freedom, nor autonomy without a free exchange of information. Having one (or a select few) sources of centralized news is a direct and imminent threat to liberty and the evolution of thought.

Several responses have already cropped up to denounce the APs new official stance. And I need not pile on any further. These old world journalists are doing nothing more than re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Their world is over, and not soon enough if you ask me.

We are inexorably moving toward a much freer, nobler, more efficient system of educating ourselves about the world. We’re organically developing a system in which independent investigators and commentators can be found interspersed in every population, in every government, among every people on the planet, immune to retaliation and censorship through their sheer numbers. The old gatekeepers are dying off. The information will flow freely to anyone who wants to access it. No archaic laws or regulatory bodies can impede this movement.

To loosely quote Network again:

Mr. Singleton, you are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of information. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!

Here it is again, in all of its under appreciated majesty.

Here’s the last dispute (against MLB Advanced Media) that the Emu prevailed in.

I can’t match the level of obsessiveness it takes to devote one’s life to the fetishizing of these various objects and props. But hey, I’m sure something had to fuel Da Vinci and Newton, and Carrot Top.

Here we go again. Alex Rodriguez admits to substance abuse back in 2003, and the Cadre of Crusading Baby Boomer Moralist Sportswriters are again denouncing the current crop of MLB players (and the records they hold) as “tainted.” They are crying to the Baseball Heavens,

“Oh Mercy, Lawd! Take us back! Take us back to a time when baseball was played by the honorable and when records made sense! A time of purity! A time of nobility! We can’t stand the awful sight of these players who have no respect for basic rules and decency! Deliver us, Lawd!”

Let me now disabuse you of the notion that baseball (and its hallowed records) has ever been “pure.”

Exhibit A: The Negro League Era.

Let’s forget, for a moment, that some Hall of Famers like Cap Anson were so virulently racist that they refused to play with colored players. The more important point here is that for 60-odd years of baseball (1880-1947), there were no non-white players in the Majors. Do you think this might potentially skew ALL Major League records from this particular era? I certainly do. World class players like Satchel Paige (who reportedly threw over 50 no-hitters in the Negro Leagues) and Josh Gibson barely got a chance to put a dent in the history of MLB.

Exhibit B: The Black Sox Scandal

In 1919, the Chicago White Sox, considered easily the strongest team in the league, intentionally threw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. This story has been well preserved in the media through movies like Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams. This incident was a huge stain on the reputation of the league, and rightfully so. The greater point here, is that this was simply the most famous case of gambling affecting the outcome of an MLB game. Imagine how many dozens, if not hundreds of other games were controlled by the gambling elite and never reported on. This could call into question the results of decades worth of seasons.

Exhibit C: Wacky Stadium Design

It has always been part of the character of the national pastime that every city designs its own park to give it an extra degree of home field advantage. You’ve got the ivy walls in Wrigley Park, the short right field porch in the old Yankee Stadium, the Green Monster in Fenway, the cramped and acoustically weird Metrodome (I once described it as like watching eighteen guys play baseball in a living room). Now, I like that teams do this, and it certainly adds to the flavor of games, but it should cause you can throw stat uniformity right out the window.

Wade Boggs was a .354 career hitter at home (predominantly in hitter-friendly Fenway) and a .302 hitter on the road. So, is he a Hall of Famer, or simply just above-average? Depends on what field you’ve seen him play on.

Exhibit D: The Asterisk

On the final day of the 1961 season, Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s single season home run record, belting his 61st home run into the seats at Yankee Stadium. Baseball purists complained that since Babe Ruth had hit 60 in 154 games, and Maris hit 61 in 162 games, it wasn’t truly a new record. Well regardless of who you side with here, this does sort of pose a consistency problem for all records pre and post 1961 (the first year of the season expansion). Should we add five percent to all of the accumulated statistics of pre 1961 players?

So, I think we’ve established how ridiculous it is to talk about numerical consistency in any two disparate baseball eras. Let’s discuss “performance enhancers” for a bit:

Exhibit E: Maple Bats

For the majority of major league history, most bats were cut from ash trees with the rare exception of a hickory or bamboo selected by a player. Robert Redford crafted Wonderboy from a lightning-struck oak tree in the movie, The Natural.

Barry Bonds broke Maris’s home run record in 2001 with a specialty maple wood bat. Now maple bats are all the rage and comprise perhaps up to 60% of the bats used in the league. Players believe that the maple bats (which tend to be drier than ash bats) can make the ball travel farther. And, Major League Baseball seems content to allow this stat-enhancing change in equipment.

Exhibit F: Tommy John Surgery

Beginning in 1974, doctors found that they could replace a frayed or torn elbow ligament (the ulnar collateral) with another ligament from a knee, foot, or hamstring. Named after the first pitcher to undergo the surgery (who pitched to the age of 46), it has now become commonplace. Most players recovery from the surgery in under a year and can actually become stronger and throw harder after rehabilitation.

What I want to know, is where is the Baseball Purist objection to this? Anyone who believes that a player should get by on his God-given ability, without mechanical, chemical, or scientific help, should object to this procedure. Can you imagine how powerful someone could throw a ball with knee-strength ligaments in their throwing arms?

A Wikipedia article on this procedure reports that an increasing number of parents are requesting the surgery on their uninjured children in the hopes of increasing their performance. If someone can make a moral distinction between steroids and Tommy John surgery (other than that the rulebook allows one and bans the other), I would love to hear it.

Conclusion

And surgery is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. The upcoming revolution in sports science and genetics will create a new breed of professional athlete. Players will grow larger, faster, stronger, and play later into their lives. This trend is inevitable. Are we going to hem and haw every time someone breaks a record because they grew up in a world technologically different from the previous generation’s record holder? Are we going to demand that players subsist on a diet of liquor and hot dogs because that’s all Babe Ruth ate during his epic career? Where do you draw the line?

The point here, Baseball Crusaders, is that there is no line. Any comparison of two generations will be apples and oranges. Circumstances were different, morals were different, nutrition was different, environmental effects were different, ballparks were different, equipment was different, medicine was different. There is no consistency. There is only the ever growing, developing, and evolving game of baseball. It is a great game now and it will be a great game when it is played on the moon.

The only constant is that every generation’s players will do whatever is in their power to win. They will hide emery boards in their back pockets to scuff up baseballs, they will slide with their spikes out, they will take drugs, they will have unnecessary surgeries and transplants. They will do this because there are simply too many people willing to die for the lifestyle that they are afforded. That is the nature of competition. So stop being hung up on steroids, and try to enjoy the artistry in our national pastime.

By the way, the sound effect Hicks makes when he puts the mic inside his mouth is supposed to be the sound of pop stars selling out while fellating Satan.