Twitter is dumb.

Twitter is for writing in 140 characters, and is meant as a blog replacement. It has since found itself as a blog replacement. This isn’t all bad, but I think I’ve finally found a use for it myself.

It’s a place where I can:

1. Comment on what others have twat
2. Tell everyone (including brick walls) what I’m doing
3. Hair-brained napkin-outlines for future blog posts

I think that last one is more useful to me personally than anything else I can conjure up. Granted, I’ve only been twittering for a short time now, but if ever I’m stumped for what to write about, I can just dive into my twit queue and see how I should elaborate on what I’ve twat.

It shall be a public white-board for all to see and none to edit. It will be like a blog post preview if you’re a follower.

There are a couple things in the queue right now that are brief due to the 140 character limit, not because that’s all there is to say, so hopefully this will work out.

Cheap laughs. They’re called cheap because they can be gotten for very little effort. Cheap comes with a notoriously bad connotation because you think of a miserly old man sitting in the dark counting his precious pennies and clipping coupons. Why can’t it be something more positive like, oh I don’t know, economical laughs?

An economically effecient way to get more laughs out of joke, good or bad, is to introduce articles and plurals. Bonus points are earned if there’s a referential synonym in the form of a pun or social norm, but that’s a bit advanced for today’s lesson.

Let’s take something simple: Underwear. You could take the intuitive approach and simply use slang or slurs like tighty-whiteys, or skivvies, or simply BVDs. That last one technically doesn’t count anymore as Hanes and Fruit of the Loom are the big players underwear making game anymore. You could go that route, but before I divert, they’re already taking advantage of one of the rules: plurals. The rule they break though is being negative. I don’t care if you call me a hippie, but would you rather be wearing something called underwear or tighty-whiteys? Good comedy isn’t supposed to make someone feel bad, it’s supposed to make everyone laugh including the target.

So plurals enhance, but “Underwears” isn’t grammatically correct in any context, and in some cases can help, but since there is a correct equivalent we choose “underpants” instead. Instantly, “Underwear” has gotten funnier, and it’s not going to make anyone feel bad either. The next step is easy. Add an article and you get “the underpants!”

Now, I’ve gone around my elbow to get to my asshole on this one, but the formula is simple: Plurals and articles. If no equivalent plural is found, then just add an ’s’ and run with it! Even unfunny things can be made funny and if the plural changes the spelling too much, stick with the more ridiculous one. If the plural isn’t sticking, stand by the article addition.

• “I went outside to the orchard to pick the fruits.”
• “Coffee is good with the cremes.”
• “The birds are attacking me with the beaks!”

That last example shows the value of replacing the proper identifier with an improper one, namely from “their” to “the.”

I’ve just sucked all the fun out of comedy. You’re welcomes.

Some people just cannot speak. This is different than not being able to read, and realize illiteracy makes me sad. Not the same thing here. Not being able to infuriates me. People call in, and sometimes I really have to bend my brain into a weird shape to understand what people are saying. Accents can be difficult, especially native English speakers from other countries. South Africa is cool to listen to, but an Outbacker from Australia (is that the right term? I’m not Australian, but I am talking about someone from the desert, definitely not Sydney.*) is a bit weird.

The most common speech problem I’ve encountered is the “Swallowed R” or, more whimsically, “Wubble-yoos.” I don’t know if “Swallowed R” is the technical term for it, but this is my lay-term. Here are some examples of what I mean:

• R is pronounced “ARRR” not “ahwll”
• One, two, thwee, foall, five, six, seven.
• The quick bwoeln fawkes jumped ovahl the lazy dalg

That last one may not be fair or nice, but that’s an extreme case of Wubble-yoos. I’ll be cool here though, sometimes speech impediments can’t be helped and I don’t hold it against people with this issue – that’s not the kind of asshole I am. What does bother me is people being lazy about their elocution and enunciation.

Please, please, please (I can’t stress this enough it seems!) open your mouth and use your tongue and teeth to form your words, people! Just because you’re okay sounding like a four-year-old (I’m sorry, “foall-yeahl-ahld”), and those around you are used to it, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable outside your bubble.

Take a damn English course and get it right! Make it your second language, and if you still can’t swing it, make it your third language too. Language is important, and, while I understand the natural evolution of a language is to reduce muscle-movement complexity (look at Chinese), don’t push towards that harder! If everyone pronounced things how they felt, nobody would know what the hell anyone was saying!

*As I was writing the word Sydney above, a call came in and it was an American calling me via VOIP from Australia! How’s that for a coincidence? I asked him what the proper term was for someone from the Outback, and he said that one would say they were “from the bush.” neat!

Not really, but I needed a title for this article. Ame and I were talking recently and Lord Byron came up. I know very little about literature, let alone English Literature. I likes my grammar the ways I likes it, but when it gets into famous people, I stumble hard. Hell, even Shakespeare and Poe are out of reach for me. I do like The Raven though.

Anyway, I mentioned my favorite Lord Byron quote:

“Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; men love in haste but they detest at leisure.”

It’s cool, right? Ame told me that Lord Byron wrote his stuff as a sort of “Punk’d!” to the masses who take literature seriously, sort of like a, “Hah! I’m writing this crap, and you think it’s gold! Punk’d!” I tend to take what Ame says about literature as gospel; like I said before, it’s her bread ‘n butter and it was her major in college. So, those who know what Byron’s motivations were, can feel superior just as he to all the mouth-breathers of the world. I know I’m not, but I still can’t but help feel judged by a dead man. I like Bryon, dammit!

Why can’t something, even if intended as tripe, be good?

One interpretation of mine is Bryon was a narcissist and, to him, everything Byron was amazing. Byron was also smart, so he declared to at least one colleague what he was “really” doing, which was making crap for the masses to enjoy. Byron did his Byron thing, and people loved him. He sneered at their ignorance and smiled at his brilliance in manipulating the fools.

Or… Byron was insecure, but still a good wordsmith. He Byron’d it up and just said it was bad. When you set your expectations low and succeed, what a nice surprise!

Or! As a spin on the first hypothesis, he was aware of this possible interpretation and manipulated the world as one of the first, if not the first, post-modern poets. A meta-poet.

At the very least, two things: Byron is smart and dead (joke’s on him!); and it still doesn’t answer my question: If something meant to be bad is good, is it still good?

I say yes. Why attribute malevolence or benevolence to anything created? Why does it need that attribute? Would you hate a beautiful work of art if it were later discovered to be created by a pus-covered mud-man? Of course not. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not the creator. So what if Byron crafted his works to laugh at us? They still evoke emotions and it only makes him a gigantic asshole, no matter how brilliant or narcissistic.

Beholder, Grade 11 Beaurecrat: “Please don’t tell my supervisor I was sleeping!”

As a general rule, I don’t really care for lyrics in the music I listen to. I want to focus on the sound and feeling of the instruments and get caught up in the flow. Too often, lyrics get in the way for whatever reason and it really docks my appreciation of the song. It’s probably related to the odd habit I have of playing back in my head what I hear with delayed by a few milliseconds. As I write this, this is probably the root of a bigger auditory processing problem.

The plus side to this though, if I can’t understand the person singing or the language they’re singing in, then it detracts much, much less. If I can manage to get some Italian opera or J-Rock, I can just sit back and enjoy. Some languages “sing” better than others, and others are horrid. My favorite language to listen to when it is sung is Russian. Chinese is the worst language though, spoken or sung. Gross.

But I digress… far too much and often! I have a high threshold for lyrics, both in singing quality and how poetic it is to me. Both are subjective, so fuck you. The reason this whole rant comes to being is the Eagles’ song Hotel California. So very many people hate this song. I wish I could get in their heads and ask what it is about it that makes them hate it, but we’re on the Internet! Why ask when you can wildly speculate!

The lyrics. They are quite vague and most of the phrases have at least two surface meanings. It can be frustrating on a number of levels. One could be put off by the fact that the song makes no sense, or it’s a dream, or it’s a flying space hotel, or it’s actually Hell, or that we were all just punk’d like Lord Byron punk’d us all by making something that seemed insightful, when really he was just fucking with us.

The main riff. You know the one. You’ve heard Hotel Californiaa few times in your day. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” someone once said and countless others have quoted him on it. If you don’t love it, you’ll hate it. It’s repetitive

Me, I like both the lyrics and the riff. The riff is really cool and simple, and I personally like trying to dissect the words as it plays as well as liking the whole punk’d angle. I just use Hotel California because it really is a divisive song. most other songs are complete shit though. The lyrics are poorly written or don’t make grammatical sense. I have a pretty good tolerance for that offense because I can’ go around as a pot calling all those kettles black.

Off the top of my head is The Red Hot Chilipeppers’ By the Way:

Standing in line
To see the show tonight
And there’s a light on
Heavy glow
By the way I tried to say
I’d be there… waiting for

Waiting for what motherfucker!? Just finish your damn sentence. It’s worse that it appears in music because an unfinished phrase just grates on a person.

All this negativity though, let’s end positively, my favorite tracks are heavy on drums and guitars with tons of rhythm and adrenaline. There are always exceptions, but a first question, kind of a personal commentary on “yeah, but can you dance to it?” is “yeah, but can you frag to it?” Anything I can frag to, I can activity() to. Insert any verb in there, and I can do it to fraggin’ music. Death and Speed Metal come so close, but they have lyrics. The potential for failure is there.

What I think it boils down to is I just don’t get that excited for poetry. Ame’s gonna hate me for this, but I think it’s boring. Anyone can do it, but so very few can do it well. I think that’s the point here though – anyone can write lyrics for a song, but not all of them can be great. So why take the gamble and fuck up an otherwise decent track if your skills suck? Oh right, that’s the record labels. When was the last time a song was released without words? They happen, but very rarely, and it’s almost always something from Carlos Santana. You can’t frag to his stuff, but it’s always a lot of fun.