I've been looking for this stupid clip since I started blogging.

Since someone finally uploaded it, I have to link it.

Content warning. But hysterical. This is the best three minutes of the movie. There's a great five minutes later on, and some decent parts here and there, but after this beginning, man, is the movie a letdown.

Kind of Related... The shoot-out from Open Range. Not sure it's worth watching on a computer -- the big picture and very loud gun sound effects add a lot -- but I think this may be my favorite Western action sequence, ever. Even better than The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly's three-way shootout or the shootout in the ghosttown being pummelled by artillery fire.

Posted by: Ace at 05:01 PM | Comments (64)
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Yeah.. . that clip was, um, how do I put this? Not good.

Ah, well, there goes my chance at a writing gig.

Meanwhile, Gutfeld's show is pretty strong. Alas, no writers.

Gutfeld's show makes a lot more sense for FoxNews than this other show. Gutfeld's show is, superficially, a talking-head discussion of the news, albeit mostly played for laughs. That's pretty much what FoxNews programming is, apart from Brit Hume.

This other show is a pure comedy show. (Well, allegedly.) As some have pointed out, though, the demand that it be a news show parody restrain them from making jokes about anything other than the actual news -- which is pretty limiting. As I think a commenter wrote on Hot Air, Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update could always go to an Operaman bit; this show really can't, because it's on an all-news network.

(Not that I'm eager to see what sort of "crazy characters" these guys can come up with.)

The show is basically a bad version of the worst of Tina Fey's Weekend Update writing. I got really annoyed by Fey, who seemed to think Weekend Update was primarily about "informing" the audience (with heavy liberal bias), and only secondarily about joke-writing. Unfunny jokes were her stock in trade, but not for lack of talent, really -- just because she was choosing her material not according to the comedy value, but according to the educational value.

Result? Liberals went ga-ga over her for her relentless didacticism -- like her, they wanted not gags but "teachable moments" -- whereas Jimmy Fallon got all the laughs. You know-- laughs. The thing Weekend Update was supposed to be delivering.

The new FoxNews' show is, because it is playing on an ostensibly all-news network, is thus compelled to follow Tina Fey's mistake, albeit with even weaker material.

Material so weak, in fact, that one suspects the writers are all liberals deliberately sabotaging the show, or so horribly out of touch with conservative opinion as to have no real idea what a conservative might find funny, or -- likeliest of all -- convinced conservatives are abject morons who will not get a joke unless it's seltzer-down-the-pants woca-woca-woca sledgehammer obvious.

Note to the 1/2 Hour News Hour's writers: We're conservative, not retarded. There is, I assure you, a distinction, though a subtle one.

I really think FoxNews has to cut out the over-the-top liberal bashing. Fair and balanced is becoming a rather transparent joke. When you're too obvious about your political leanings, people stop trusting you. Same mistake the MSM is making.

A comedy show on FoxNews can't be allowed to damage the entire network's claim of being fair and balanced -- like Jon Stewart, you have to be willing to go for a joke aimed at conservatives on occasion, too. Maybe the show features that, but the sneak preview clip is nonstop conservative pandering.

Which might be excusable-- were it funny enough to justify the damage to the FoxNews brand. But it's not. Not by a longshot. Apart from one smile (an article by Barack Obama entitled "A Life In Politics: My 18 Month Journey"), the sneak preview clip was simply cringey, wincey dreadful.

Suggestion: Throw an assload of money at former SNL star writer Jim Downey to take over as head writer. (He's responsible for those Gore-Bush debate parodies, I believe, and is somewhat conservative -- though not on wack-a-liberal autopilot when it comes to jokes. Both sides get theirs.)

You'll have to pay him an absurd amount of money because the word is out the show is radioactively bad, and you're going to have to pay him for the potential damage to his reputation.

Also, poach that Levy guy from Gutfeld as an anchor.

None of this stuff will happen, of course, and the show will probably be cancelled before it really starts, and it will be taken as an article of faith that conservatives can't be funny.

Inside Dope: An email chain going around has the verdict of the usual suspects that this show is only slightly funnier than the Holocaust.

At least Mel Brooks got a movie out of that comedic gold mine.

A Charitable Review... from Hog On Ice:

Sometimes a late-term abortion is not a bad thing. Seriously, this baby poses a threat to the health of the mother.

Thanks to Alex for that.

I suppose that all the internet funny guys are "just jealous." Well, jealous, yes, but "just" jealous, no. The consensus opinion is that Gutfeld's show is pretty amusing, for example. So if it were just a case of "we should have a crack at this," we'd be dissing Gutfeld too.

The show is, to use a word I haven't used in twenty years, heinous.

Second Thoughts: Watching it again, it's not as bad as I first thought. It's bad -- but John Steward pretty much sucks too, I think, and the average Leno or Letterman monlogue is not exactly bursting with comedic brilliance. SNL's Weekend Update has about three decent jokes per ten minute installment.

So maybe I was too hard on the show. Maybe it is jealousy and all that, and knowing I, along with about one tenth of the American population, could do better. It's not a show I'd watch, ever, but then, there are a lot of shows I won't watch, ever.

Enrique comments at Hot Air:

More frightening than AceÂ’s false flag theory is this: The writers are conservatives and are writing jokes that conservative Fox viewers will like.

And they might be right. ArenÂ’t most Fox News viewers in their 50Â’s? Most 50-year-old conservative people are traditional, probably religious, and would likely blanche at anything other than totally safe, obvious jokes.

This is grandma/grandpa humor. And IÂ’m betting that Fox News viewer demographics skew heavily towards grandmas and grandpas.

That may be true. I remember a lot of Leno's early-in-the-show comedy bits like the "Big Head Jay" stuff were real cornball crap. And yet his ratings were/are very strong, higher than anything a cable news channel could manage.

As they say, no one ever went broke underestimating the public.

Still, even if the wocka-wocka-wocka stuff sells, you'd think there'd be room to slip in gags above that level.

The one good joke in the segement -- Barack Obama's "A Life In Politics: My 18 Month Journey" -- could be expanded into a Ken Burns style documentary on his eventful life, with letters back and forth to his wife about just making it to the Senate floor in time for a bill to increase public awareness of the American cod fishing industry, for example. Playing into the Obama Messiah thing.

And I still think that any comedy show has to take a break from relentless wocka-wocka-wocka gaggery to get into the absurdist and unexpected. There just wasn't even an attempt at that here.

I realize they're on a short leash here, and we won't be seeing Sarah Silverman type gags like the "I stubbed my vagina," but still, ya gotta explore the studio space a little, right?

Posted by: Ace at 01:49 PM | Comments (102)
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Wow! Now this is what I call science!

New research findings now appearing online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology began with a professor's desire to understand why her husband often seemed to ignore her requests for help around the house.

"My husband, while very charming in many ways, has an annoying tendency of doing exactly the opposite of what I would like him to do in many situations," said Tanya L. Chartrand, an associate professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

...

Working with Duke Ph.D. student Amy Dalton, Chartrand and Fitzsimons have demonstrated that some people will act in ways that are not to their own benefit simply because they wish to avoid doing what other people want them to. Psychologists call this reactance: a person's tendency to resist social influences that they perceive as threats to their autonomy.

The team found that people do not necessarily oppose others' wishes intentionally. Instead, even the slightest nonconscious exposure to the name of a significant person in their life is enough to bring about reactance and cause them to rebel against that person's wishes.

Pretty obvious, but they did some experiments suggesting the obvious is actually the truth, which is, I guess, part of science's job.

Although the tests seem kind of dopey. Involving flashing the name of a nagger, subliminally, as subjects are asked to do various tasks.

The end of the story is pretty funny -- the woman takes it as evidence her husband needs to work on his knee-jerk domestic rebellions, while the husband takes it a confirmation that he just can't help his adverse reaction to being nagged.

Posted by: Ace at 01:36 PM | Comments (44)
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Hah, hah, hah.

Well played, NYT. Very well played.

Actually this isn't quite as stupid as it first reads. At least according to other MSM sources, Al-Sadr is criticized by his even more bloody-minded jihadist brethren for at least pretending to have some interest in political outcomes.

Still, it's a pretty stupidly negative spin -- it's like saying "Hitler's suicide may allow even more extremist Nazis to take power." Well, I suppose so; other Nazis were more willing to sign documents authorizing the Holocaust. But Hitler was the guy who held the whole thing together, and his departure from earth was a win for pretty much everyone.

So, yeah: Al-Sadr's cowardly flight may permit less crafty, less popular, less influential, less capable leaders to take his place, leaders eager to show the world just how satanically murderous they are without even the pretense of rationality.

Only the New York Times can spin such a possibility into a losing scenario for the US.

Oh -- and the headline identifies him only as a "Powerful Cleric." And doesn't even name him. So someone just skimming the headlines won't notice the sanguinary news.

The way they... surround a story.

Thanks to JeffreyH.

Question: Why hasn't this story even appeared on Drudge?

That's what an ex-blogger wants to know (for some reason, he wants his name withheld; what, he's afraid of Drudge?).

But it's a good question. It's big news, and certainly Drudge has hyped stories of lesser import with even less sourcing.

Did he just miss it? Or did I miss his linking to the story?

I would accuse him of deliberately ignoring blogger stories, except this really isn't a blogger story; it's been on CNN, ABC, and now the NYT (and I presume most other outlets have reported it as well).

The importance of Drudge is his ability to force a story the MSM doesn't want to cover very hard on to the front-burner. While the MSM is, indeed, reporting on this, it's not being played up very hard, and I'd have to think that a lot of people haven't read it. So why isn't Drudge doing his duty as media gatecrasher here?

Posted by: Ace at 01:18 PM | Comments (12)
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It's a bit too muddled to shout "Outrage!"

The professor claims to have been misunderstood, and that his thesis is more limited that his opponents would have it -- that he's saying some Jews engaged in vengeance killings against Christians (who, of course, had a history of killing them) and some of those killings were conducted in a ritualistic manner.

Which seems to me to be a reasonable guess. Pretty much if you tell me that any subgroup of any religion engaged in ritualistic murders at some point in history, I'm inclined to say, "Well, sure, of course they did."

The trouble comes with his evidence -- using torture-compelled "confessions" by Jews of drinking the blood of Christian babies, which hardly seems evidence at all -- and his title, "Bloody Passovers," strongly evoking the Blood Libel of Jews using the blood of Christian babies to make their Passover bread.

Going by the rule that if you're using very weak evidence, that must mean you have little strong evidence (or else why taint your strong evidence with crap "evidence"?), I'm going to call bullshit on the academic end of this book. I.e., I don't really strongly doubt stuff like this happened, but if you can't prove it, it's just a guess and you really shouldn't be publishing a supposedly rigorous academic treatise on the subject.

And it seems this guy is using the Blood Libel as evidence for his thesis -- the Blood Libel isn't being used to prove the Blood Libel per se, just being used to suggest "there must be some truth to these rumors and torture-compelled confessions," etc.

Seems like very sketchy ground.

Maybe he should have just used "ultra-sophisticated computer models" to prove his thesis, a la Global Warming.

The professor has asked his publisher to delay publication of the book, so that he can re-write and clarify the parts of the book accused of of spreading the Blood Libel.

This seems so out-of-line as to suggest bad motives. On the other hand, publish or perish -- and even if you run into a dead-end in your research, well, you still have to get a book out of all of that library work, huh?

Posted by: Ace at 12:49 PM | Comments (14)
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Cynical.

Murtha's new plan is to limit the number of soldiers available to Bush, thus "gradually" "limiting his options" in Iraq.

I agree with Bryan's main point -- if one wants to withdraw, force a withdraw. This chickenshit half-step does not protect the troops deployed, but ensures more of them will be killed for lack of adequate strength.

And notice the whole point of this exercise in willful manslaughter is to protect liberal Democrats against the political charge they don't support troops in the field. So their plan is to insulate themselves politcally against the chage they don't support the troops, while, you know, killing more of them.

No blood for oil?

They seem less firm on blood for cynical domestic political posturing.

Correction: It's Bryan's post, not Allah's.

Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (14)
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Well, they say cocaine.

The effects of love on the brain are similar to those of cocaine, according to a team that has studied scans of lovestruck people.

Romantic love could be an emotion as fundamental as hunger or thirst, according to the brain scans of young men and women who had fallen madly in love, or were lovelorn, by Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at The State University of New York at Stony Brook.

...

While participants felt many different emotions when thinking of the person they loved, they all had one thing in common – they all showed activation in the ventral tegmental area, the right posterodorsal body and the medial caudate nucleus of the brain, according to the journal Monitor on Psychology.

These dopamine-rich regions "signal satiation of deep needs", said Prof Fisher. "All basic drives are associated with the dopamine system, and so is romantic love."

Known as the motivation-and-reward system of the brain, the regions appear to be active whenever people get something they deeply desire – food, water, cocaine or perhaps just a girlfriend's phone call in the case of teenage boys.

Prof Fisher said: "Addictions are very powerful, and cocaine addiction is associated with dopamine systems." She also speculated that the increase in energy people newly in love experience may be due to a flush of dopamine.

...

Raj Persaud, Gresham Professor for Public Understanding of Psychiatry, who organised a Daily Telegraph online Valentine's experiment, said: "What this research is adding to is our understanding that love is one of the stongest of the basic drives – people when in love do extraordinary things."

Cute Valentine's Day take-away: Awwww.

Less cute take-away: Stupid accidents of brain chemistry conspire to make us do stupid things for no particularly good reason.

Thanks to Allah. Gee, I wonder which is his take-away.

Posted by: Ace at 12:07 PM | Comments (14)
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Lots of f-bombs. Joe Rogan and another comedian think Mencia lifts material; cuts of them doing the same jokes are offered for comparison.

A lot of jokes pretty much write themselves, though. I've seen Conan and Letterman doing the same exact joke about the some event of the day on the same night. Not lifting, just an obvious gag.

Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (35)
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OK, Ladies. Some of you didn't appreciate that "make me a sandwich" post I put up yesterday, so I have decided to atone. Today is Valentine's Day, after all, and I wanted to do something extra special for all of you wonderful women out there.

In the following clip, you will see rare footage of a public appearance by the short lived "Ace & Jack Comedy Team". Beset by Ace's Dean Martin-esque drinking, and my Jerry Lewis like appeal to the ladies, this project was doomed almost from the start.

Before it collapsed, though, we did have one fleeting moment of glory: A chart topping duet.

So watch our performance. As you well know, Ace is the one with the beard.

Happy Valentine's Day, Ladies! This one is for you.

Posted by: Jack M. at 06:02 AM | Comments (3)
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As they say, whenever Al Gore shows up to talk about how unbearably, deadly hot the planet is getting, bring your ice-chains and wear your longjohns.

It's offical:

God hates Al Gore.

Posted by: Ace at 06:20 PM | Comments (104)
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