Perfect Girl Exposed! (No, It’s Not What You Think), Shrooms Exposed! (No, That’s Not What You Think Either), Russ Wins at 12th Dimensional Chess, Jackie Hates Perfect Girl, How Long Does It Take to Write the Perfect Text, Always Carry the One When Calculating the Rapture, When Atheists Attack, and Storey Exposed! (No, It’s…Well, Maybe It Is What You Think).

Download Mep Report #127

Blogger, know thyself?

From The People’s View, a fascinating article about where the Glenn Greenwalds and Jane Hamshers of the world–you know, the ones who became liberal when a black man took office and dared to create and sustain progressive policies without consulting them first–get their respective bread buttered.  The next time self-described left wingers start throwing the term “corporatist” around within earshot, ask them if they’ve seen any investment disclosure statements from the Huffington Post lately.

Give a Man a Quarter and He Can Play One Game, Teach Him to Write in Basic and He Can Feed a Village (Really), They Don’t Make Video Games the Way They Used To (and Get Off My Lawn!), Russ Can’t Help Falling In Love…Again…, Is This the Text That Launched a Thousand Ships?, How Rabbits From Certain Places Can Help You Recover Your Voice, How Many Meppers Does It Take to Get One Mepper a Date, Angry Pictures are Angry, and Chemistry = Not Fat.

Download Mep Report #126

Greg Runs the Gauntlet of the Spa Castle, Uniforms Vs. Au Natural: Fight!, To Every Horde, Turn, Turn, Turn, The Horror of Red Bumperman, The Joy of Having One’s Skin Ripped Off, and Zombie Kings.

Download Mep Report #125

Not to take the debate back to Greg’s and my epic battle over the Rose Art Museum, but this example of modern art is where most such “art” belongs – in the landfill.

What’s great about this is that it’s so innocuously obvious. The trash collectors of Albuquerque are charged with keeping the city’s streets clean of refuse. They pick up anything that looks unwanted, needless, pointless, ugly. And to be honest, New Mexico (while I love it) is not exactly known for its aggressiveness in sanitation procedures. The workers involved must have really thought this thing was a blight to cart it away.

I mean, look at that thing. $50,000 for that? And that’s in New Mexico money, which would make it about $1.2 million in New Jersey. Sheesh. I’m in the wrong business. Anyone got some fiberglass and the retrograde imagination of a particularly uncreative four-year-old?

I’ve always felt the turning point in the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign was the moment when the sight of then-candidate Barack Obama after wrapping up the Democratic nomination was almost immediately contrasted with now-failed-candidate and angry man John McCain, in front of a sickening green background and performing to an audience which sounded more like a canned laugh track, giving a nasty, pitiful screed about the man who would trounce him in the election only a few months later.  One man represented the best of what America would like to imagine itself as–intelligent, broad-minded, appealing to the better angels of our nature–and the other represented the impossibly tired bitterness of a rapidly disappearing part of our society.  The choice, and thus result, was never more stark.

Fast forward twenty-six months, and we find ourselves dealing with a massive tragedy–not because of the number of people killed and injured (how many Iraqi and Afghani citizens have died every single day during America’s adventures overseas?), but because of what the attack says about the level and intentions of our political discourse and our overwhelming obsession with guns.  And just as before, we’re presented with a contrast.  On one hand we have the half-term governor of Alaska, whose defining characteristic is how little time she spends doing any one job, sitting in front of an empty stone fireplace (I assume most of the camera crew has already packed up and headed home) and describing how much it hurts to be a victim.  Not Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who lies in intensive care in an Arizona hospital after being shot in an assassination attempt, of course, but Sarah Palin, who has put aside her dog whistle for the moment to discuss her First Amendment rights (she’s left Sharon Angle to discuss the Second Amendment ones) and avoiding “blood libel” (I’ll leave it to her speechwriter to explain whether the horrifically inappropriate term was used out of intention or shocking stupidity.  I’m sure it’s unfair even to accuse the speaker of anything other than the best possible motivations, after all.)

On the other hand we have now-President Obama’s speech, invoking not the politically driven aspects of what happened (which I’ve discussed elsewhere) but the things which matter most at a time like this–what should ultimately bring us together.  While Palin spent the majority of her speech feeling sorry…for herself, President Obama spent the entirety of his feeling sorry for others–most notably the nine year old girl Christina-Taylor Green, whose only crime was in believing that she would be safe outside a Safeway with a member of Congress.  “I want us to live up to her expectations,” he said, in a powerful reminder of what ought to matter most to all of us.  One speaker appealed to her rapidly fading base, raging against the dying of their light; the other appealed to everyone, as he always does, as he always has since entering the American consciousness.

It was another reminder of how very different the two philosophies are, and another reminder of how very different our country would be had the first one–me first, guns second, and damn all the rest of you who don’t agree–won out over the second–others first, put away the weapons, and join together in common purpose to repudiate hatred.  It’s a contrast which Sarah Palin will never understand, for she lacks the interest in anyone other than herself to recognize it.  But although the conflict is ongoing, it is a limited one, for her supporters have already lost the war only they wished to fight.  Nothing made that clearer than listening to the rhetoric of an exceptional President again, for yet another time, soaring above violence and appealing to hope rather than despair.

As Robert Shrum put it: “At the end of the day, after listening to the president, we’ll know why he’s president and she never will be.”  It’s like comparing apples and oranges.  And as always, there simply is no comparison to be made between those things.

Beyond expressing my sorrow for the lost and injured and all those affected by this tragedy, I have little to say about the horrific events in Arizona yesterday except one thing.  Regular Mep readers / listeners will know all of us here put a high value on communication and the power of rhetoric; the two greatest speakers of the twentieth century (arguably) were Martin Luther King and Adolf Hitler, and I don’t think anyone needs a cheat sheet to determine which person pursued the good and which the evil.  What yesterday conclusively, definitively proves is that rhetoric is not an unalloyed good.  It is a neutral tool, and it has consequences. 

When a group of people, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, spew the same kind of language–”target,” “reload,” “crosshairs,” “bullets of justice,” and on and on–it is only a matter of time until the consequences are felt.  And calling for civility “on both sides,” when the simple truth is that one side calls for violent, bloody revolution and the other calls for immediate legal remedy, is a colossal and shameful cop-out.  Yesterday’s events are the absolutely predictable result of the dog whistles the Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs, and Sarah Palins of the world blow at every opportunity only to raise their hands in mock horror when something (vandalizing property, death threats, shooting 18 people including a federal judge and a congresswoman–execution style, in the head) happens as a result.

Don’t be fooled.  Don’t allow political leadership to make the false equivalency between the rhetoric “on both sides.”  No such equivalency exists.  Don’t allow pundits to claim “it’s a stretch” that publishing a map with crosshairs over specific people and waving around automatic rifles to get the approval of a gun-obsessed culture leads directly to violence.  It isn’t a stretch.  This is more than shouting fire in a crowded theater.  It’s taking a can of gasoline and a box of matches, setting them down next to the theater and giving the people outside a meaningful look before turning your back and walking away.

It’s criminal.  It’s evil.  But most of all it is absolutely, completely, utterly predictable, and the purveyors of such shameless rhetoric know it.  It is up to us and the rest of our supposedly civil society to call them out on it before they bring that society crashing down upon us.  Speech has consequences.  It’s time we acknowledge not only the effects of violence–but the cause.

Greg Gets a Mortgage (and Becomes an Adult), Russ Gets a Bear (and Becomes a Psychic), Storey Gets a Twin (and Becomes a Skeptic), Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Kimmel Destroy Society One Video Game at a Time, The Meppers Get Immersed, and Everything is Awesome In Sloooooowwww-Moooooo.

Download Mep Report #124

Hell yeah, I want my pony!

This article at The People’s View should be required reading for all those interested in discovering what some parts of both the right and left of the blogosphere have to gain in trying to destroy (fortunately unsuccessfully, I think) President Obama–or, more accurately, what they have to gain in upping the ante on false outrage in a public forum.  (Here’s a hint: it’s the same thing anti-corporatists are always claiming (often rightly) is the end goal of every politician.)  One wonders how much time MLK or Gandhi would have had for this kind of kabuki.

For further reading on Transactional Analysis, I recommend going to the source author, Eric Berne. In doing so, however, prepare to have your mind rent asunder. Fair warning.

In what is possibly the greatest unintentional cultural commentary of all time by a scientific journal, the Times reported today that the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has removed narcissism from its list of mental disorders, along with four others.

Narcissism, is defined as elitism, or indifference to the plight of others. Apparently, this trait has become so commonplace that it can no longer be deemed a disorder (unless you want to commit the entire cast of every reality TV show to psychiatric care — and perhaps you do). But more than that, it is a culturally valuable trait. It is a trait that is cultivated by every marketing and advertising executive in this country. Nearly every TV commercial for a luxury item is hocked by a coaxing narrator imploring the viewer to take more “me” time. Begging her to spoil herself; asking her not to compromise when it comes to comfort.

Our economy counts on our sense of elitism. The manufactured concept of ‘brand loyalty’ is totally dependent upon it. You want narcissism? Go to a Mac store and approach one of the awaiting tech hipsters poised to assist you at the “Genius Bar.” You want indifference? Ask your average citizen their feelings on the plight of the refugees of the Congo’s decades long resource war.

Narcissism is far too important to our way of life to allow therapists and psychiatrists the opportunity to discourage it. We’re beyond that now. We’ve got a planet to convert into microwavable mac & cheese, and we cannot have a populace of aware and empathetic citizens mucking it up.

Originally posted on Technorati.

Headlines Grate While Storey Updates, Bedbugs are Bed (Uh, Bad), Some People Call it a Unabomber…Russ Calls it a Beard (mmmhmm), Slide Whistles are Better Than Suicide, The Final Days of DAOC, The Second Coming (and Leaving) of Greg, Then Everyone Was a Jedi, and the Forecast is Partly Cloudy With a Chance of Apocalypse.

Download Mep Report #123

And frankly, the Dems and more traditional Republicans are both solidly on that team as well, if in a less screamy fashion.

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.

The Greatest American Five Fingers, The Teabag Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree for Rand Paul, We Like Ice Cream Because It’s ICE CREAM!, What if We Just Lightly Sear Them?, Lakers Fail at Immigration, Invading Arizona for Fun, Profit, and Golf Courses, Greg Roots For the Insurance Company to Win the Bet, and the BuddhaFather.

Download Mep Report #121

For the student or devotee of the game, baseball provides almost infinite legendary American tales. It has its heroes(the Babe, the Rajah, the Iron Man, or the Say Hey Kid), its goats (the Black Sox, Charlie Hustle, Big Mac, and the Billy Goat) and its share of historians and cultural custodians, whose job it is to chronicle present day feats that they might one day become the next generation’s legends.

Another name for these “cultural custodians” is Baseball Nerds. Baseball Nerds have existed as long as the players, and some haven even risen to prominence amongst the athletic demigods of the game. One writer and baseball historian rightfully dons the mantle as King of the Baseball Nerds, and until the 30 for 30 series, he had been languishing in semi-obscurity. This man is Daniel Okrent, the father of “Rotisserie” baseball, better known to laymen as Fantasy Baseball.

Download YouTube Video

Invented in 1979, it was the first completely engaging, ongoing game for fans of the national pastime. It provided the baseball fanatic a means to completely immerse themselves into the dark hobbyist’s womb of baseball statistics, trades, contracts, and futures markets. The proficient rotisserie baseball player has to be versed on the most obscure of baseball statistics for the most marginal of major league ballplayers.

The only hobbyist parallel that seems fitting is World of Warcraft (nouveau Dungeons & Dragons), with the caveat that baseball actually exists in the world. Imagine the level of obsession you associate with players of games like WoW, and then imagine that their games correspond to real life events.

It’s a world where the deeds of Orcs, Humans, and Elves were recounted in the Crusading section of your local newspaper. A world in which Shamans and Necromancers were called to testify in front of Congress for using unregistered runes on the battlefield. This is the level of interest and immersion possible in fantasy sports.

This meta-level game outside of a game has happily consumed the lives of an estimated 18 to 30 million people. It is an industry that takes in approximately $2 billion a year, and Mr. Okrent sees none of this money. So, let’s all cuddle up in front of the flickering video embed and watch the creation tale of the most obsessive activity known to sports fans. Perhaps, then, the internet at large will finally give the King of Baseball Nerds his due.

Originally posted on Technorati.

Entitled “Simcity 3000 – ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM,” the creation video relays tales of a three-year construction period executing Da Vinci-like designs scrawled on reams of parchment. Magnasanti sports a population of over 6 million, a crime rate of zero, no roads (mass transit only), and a flawless integration of commercial, industrial, and residential zones modeled after the Bhavacakra, or Tibetan wheel of life.

While some Reddit commentators dismissed the project as a “colossal waste of time,” others noted that it could serve as a juicy resume item for an application to an urban design or architectural graduate program.

In my view, the designs of Magnasanti may not be culturally relevant for centuries. In the year 2790, however, a post-apocalyptic survivalist clan may discover it amidst the debris of kitten piano videos and Star Wars fan spoofs on a salvaged YouTube server cluster found under the rubble of Mountain Viewtopia, the irradiated former capital of Googlestan. (Feel free to credit Dr. Laserfalcon when you inevitably steal this screenplay idea).

Or that may just be the effect the video’s epic theme music has on my brain.

Originally posted on Technorati.

So, yeah. Those strings of words were actually chosen by the computer, itself. HAL seems rather repressed. I’d leave those pod bay doors closed if I were you.

The Mep that Neither Begins nor Ends; How Improv Can Either Save the World or Destroy it; Murderous Shepherds and Other Little Known Cultural Legacies; Gladwell’s Advocate; Privacy – Destroyer of all Things; and Why Asians are Great at Math (but Terrible at Piloting).

Download Mep Report #118

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.

The first thing you may notice about this video piece is that Obama’s placement is jarringly off. Even in the closeups, he is presented as extremely left-of-center. Compare this to a more even-handed weekly address (when he was addressing America’s Christmas spirit):

In the Christmas piece, Obama is exactly centered on the screen, and makes several references to typically right-wing entities that he’s attempting to reach out to in the spirit of the holidays. In the Christmas piece, he mentions that the tree is imported from Uber Red State, West Virginia (while it could have just easily come from more moderate Virginia), and he makes several references to military families and bases throughout the world.

Here’s another address from October which addresses a much more conservative audience — small business owners. Obama is again more centrally depicted (though just a smidge left of center) as he attempts to bring in entrepreneurs under his umbrella of tax incentives and health care reforms…

When comparing the two older addresses with this week’s speech, it is clear that Obama is desperately trying to shore up his base. He is sitting to the extreme left-of-center of the screen. He is saying “For the love of God, I’m with you!” to the progressives and populists who have become increasingly dismayed at his too-friendly-to-Wall-Street policies. In a more recent address, he may have also offered a subliminal snub to his much maligned Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. Even the flags behind him (typical patriotic symbols) are pushed nearly out of the frame compared with the two previous pieces.

Amidst the skewed shot, the viewer’s eye is pushed towards the right side of the screen, where an end table is seen with a pile of books on it. Given the (intentionally) misaligned stacking of the books, the White House may be trying to convey that lawyer Obama has been spending sleepless nights pouring over the precedents and ramifications of the Supreme Court’s recent decision, as he foments a plan to fight back. This is to be taken in contrast with the earlier pieces, when a more family oriented-setting is depicted in the background (either a Christmas tree, or a dinner table with a decorative centerpiece).

The White House seems desperate to convince people that Obama is hard at work on behalf of the progressive constituents that got him elected. If it fails, the next Presidential Weekly Address may feature a pleading left side of Obama’s face, while a Goldman Sachs logo subtly burns in a nearby fireplace.

From the article on Truthdig:

“The iron goals of greater and greater profit, order and corporate conformity dominate their [corporate underlings] squalid belief systems. And by the time these corporate automatons are managing partners or government bureaucrats they cannot distinguish between right and wrong. They are deaf, dumb and blind to the common good.”

While the indoctrination described in the article is widely applicable, it is written specifically referencing the modes and methods of financial firms. In a way, these firms serve not only the nominal functions of their mission statements (the shifting around of funds and the recordings of profit) but they also operate to systematically erase the moral tendencies of their employees. They are, in effect, Universities of Evil.

These bodies finely sort through their employees and empower the least decent, the least human of their lot and grant them the equivalent of Evil Tenure. The recruits who are able to effectuate the most harm to the largest number of people are held up above their peers, lauded, given the highest marks, and put into greater positions of authority and job security.

These esteemed graduates then move on to contaminate other institutions (government structures or other corporations) with their hard-learned psychoses. These Bad Will Ambassadors then take up their wrongful place as the most esteemed members of our business community, and the idols of our celebrity and wealth-driven pop culture.

It is only through this hard-earned career path that Graduates of Evil can move on to post-Golden-Parachute life of corrupting children, inspiring sociopaths, and drop-kicking puppies.

So contact your local Evil Recruiter and see what the fuss is all about. With an advanced degree in Evil, you can learn the following marketable skills:

Soul Capture
Drinking Tainted Goats Blood
Puppy Punting
Doomsday Device Construction
Dark Portal Conjuring
Master-Level Dissembling
Apocalypse Creation
and Derivatives Trading

Call now! Operators (of the Dark Arts) are standing by!

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.

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.

Facebook Is Kind. Facebook Is Good. All Hail Facebook. When Even Foresight Should Have Been 20/20; Just War Vs. Just a War; Gilligan’s Island As Metaphor for War; Clea and Facebook are BFF; Storey Still Hates Privacy; How the Internet Saved and Destroyed the World At the Same Time; and It’s All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses a Thought.

Download Mep Report #117

The article indicates that there’s new evidence that children are born wanting to help others. The biological logic behind cooperation being preferable to competition is obvious, or at least was obvious to Americans prior to the Reagan years.

While I still fundamentally believe that the purpose of humanity is to overcome human nature, it never hurts to have a naturalistic argument for squelching capitalism. After all, if we imagine prehistoric humans hunting woolly mammoths, it’s easy to see that the person who carted off the whole mammoth to feed themselves alone probably wasted more mammoth than a person who shared it with the group.

In fact, the rest of the group would probably just gang up on the one person, kill him, and take his mammoth. The capitalists were eliminated in the old days.

Somewhere along the line, though, it looks like we become more manipulative in our actions. “As children grow older, they become more selective in their helpfulness. Starting around age 3, they will share more generously with a child who was previously nice to them.” I blame the scourging influence of television. Or, y’know, maybe the golden rule is naturally intuitive as well.

So next time you sell off all your stock in your company and shamelessly move your wealth to the Caymans while your investors suffer, don’t blame human nature. Either you were raised poorly or you’re just an asshole.

If you’re a British citizen with a vivid imagination, a glance at the 2012 London Olympic festivities could have you branded a trafficker of child pornography.

This week, her majesty’s lawmen passed the Coroners and Justice Bill 2009. An omnibus bill, the Coroners Bill affected many aspects of the British legal system. Most notably, it potentially criminalized the acts of the British design team that submitted their London 2012 Olympic Logo in the style of a cartoon character performing fellatio on the city of London.

Thanks to Coroners and Justice, any person found in possession of an indecent cartoon image of a child is subject to “..a term of imprisonment not exceeding 3 years. By extension, British officials have also criminalized the act of merely possessing such material, as it now makes all website owners (and visitors) who proliferated the logo hypothetically subject to jail time in Britain and/or Northern Ireland.

According to Limey Legislators, once the seed of corruption enters one’s head via the Intrawebs, this evil, pernicious, meme will fully infect one’s entire outlook on life, children, and the triple jump. Once the unsuspecting internet browsers mind is tainted by the LAist’s interpretation of the logo as “Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob,” the innocent bystander can no longer see the image as anything else, including a jazzed up font portraying the numbers 2,0,1,2.

Well done there. Those lads have certainly struck a blow against the corruption of children everywhere — hypothetical, Rorshachian, cartoon children, in any case.

Wondering what to be thankful for this Thanksgiving? How about being grateful you’re not this guy.

I’ve recently been working my way through the legendary TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” on Netflix’s instant streaming video feature. In one of the early first season episodes, a man lives through about 18 hours of unimaginable torture when he is paralyzed after a car crash and unable to convey to anyone that he is alive or conscious.

It’s probably the scariest episode I’ve seen yet, and it’s about 1/10,000th of the horror (in terms of literal time) experienced by the man who lived for 23 years while fully conscious but attributed to being in a fully vegetative coma. Granted, some of the horror of the episode includes the belief that he will be killed, while after a couple years, the Belgian coma man had to start believing he would just go on forever in that state.

But I’d argue that might be worse. With no one believing that you’re conscious, all you have is your own thoughts. No communication or contact with the outside world and, much more importantly, no one making any sort of effort to stimulate or entertain you. The greatest blessing you would get to interrupt this unending boredom would be scraps of overheard conversation that no one believed you could fathom.

If I ever fall into something diagnosed as a vegetative state, please get a second opinion. And leave the TV on in my room all the time, just in case.

On second thought, given the state of our modern media, better make it a series of books on tape. Whatever will be going on the next 23 years might be more torture than I want to witness.