TurboFool (Neither, really)

So these videos have been flooding the skeptical community lately, but the latest parody from SNL brought it to the forefront for me again and I thought it was time to post these videos for myself. They’re both just too good, in very different ways, not to pass along.

First off, we have this, er, gem from ICP. Comments to immediately follow…

Okay, so let’s get the obvious out of the way first: holy fucking shit are these guys dumb. Listen, I have nothing against ICP. I also have nothing for ICP. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard their music before, but I know they have a huge, fanatical following, and I can only guess this is due to some level of talent. Heck, they seem to be able to put together a mildly catchy beat and rhyme words in this song, so I’ll give them that.

What they’re apparently incapable of is any level of truly intelligent thought. In this case they’ve decided to take all the majesty of the universe (and kudos to them for appreciating it) and boil it all down to magic. They go through a long list of random (and sometimes truly peculiar) elements of our world, and ascribe them to magic and miracles, as opposed to crediting them to everything we know they actually are. They also throw in UFOs, which is even more random, what with the lack of compelling evidence for their existence and all. Then again, they seem to have no interest in or respect for evidence.

See, according to Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, see they don’t want to talk to a scientist (it’s unclear if this is only on the subject of how magnets work, or on everything), because “y’all motherfuckers be lyin’, and gettin’ [him] pissed.” Apparently their definition of “lying” includes telling the truth based on cold, hard facts and evidence. Magic and miracles to them are the only truth, and anyone who bothers to explain it is clearly a “motherfucker” and is just trying to confuse their feeble minds. How deeply, deeply sad.

I strongly suggest you check out Rebecca Watson’s beautiful shredding of this video by theorizing a world in which one of these two Clowns isn’t a clueless dipshit and actually answers the other one’s questions intelligently. It’s hilarious and easy to understand, and manages to prove how badly people like these two “musicians” have been screwed by education in this country.

Now the new video that touched off my desire to blog about this one is SNL’s completely brilliant parody. Yes, yes, SNL’s been hit-or-miss over recent years, and I won’t argue that. But occasionally they hit the nail right on the head, as they did here:

The sad part is, the parody is not THAT much stupider than the actual video. Almost any of what went into SNL’s version could have been slipped into the original unnoticed. Their definitions of magic and miracles had THAT low of a threshold, that I wouldn’t have been surprised if clocks landed on their list.

Anyway, as funny as this all is, and damn is it funny, it’s just another wake-up call that if two people like this can manage to escape education on the simplest levels of science, our country needs a lot of help. Schools need to promote science at a much higher level than they are now, and the scientific METHOD most of all, so our future voters and leaders understand that science isn’t just a collection of opinions, but a technique for finding truth. As long as it’s believed to be an ideology, which it most certainly is NOT, it’s too easy for fools like this to consider it an optional opinion and dismiss it. And when they’ve got as many followers as they do, they influence a lot of minds to believe the same clueless garbage. Looks like it’s time to get to work, folks.

Oh, and for those viewing the auto-repost of this on Facebook, click the View Original Post link at the bottom of the Note to see this on my actual blog, with the embedded videos intact. Facebook doesn’t display them.

EDIT: Further courtesy of Skepchick, and specifically the comments, we have these gems:

• Apparently even MTV knows more about science than ICP.
• Cracked proves once again to be an invaluable source of humorous skeptical content
• And lastly, FuckingMagnets.com

Over the many years I spent as an actor, I accrued a pretty darn near decent list of credits to my name. If you’d like to see the entire list, please feel free to visit my IMDb page, but I warn you, it’s long and listy. My wife even noticed once that I actually had more credits than Julia Roberts (unfortunately for me, Julia kept working, while I… didn’t). While I did my best to collect video tapes (remember those?) of all of my work, this was mostly for the sake of posterity. Over time, though, the need to make a reel from those became more apparent. For most of my career it was pretty much unnecessary.  I was a cute kid who could act, so I gained a reputation quickly, and got cast frequently. As I got older, the cuteness wore off, and I had to fall back more and more on the acting skills, which are harder to prove via a headshot.

So, my manager helped me put together a reel which was then sent out to various people. If  memory serves me, the reel was wildly successful, spawning dozens of major film roles, multiple sequel reels, and became one of the very first viral Internet memes. But it was fun to put together, and during the editing process we actually managed to take a scene from a show I won’t name (I loved the job, so don’t wish to put anyone’s work down) and drastically improve the editing of one of my scenes. Pretty cool stuff.

Anyway, during an email conversation the other day, I was asked if I had a reel. I had to laugh at the above memory, as while sure enough, I’ve got one, it’s basically useless, what with it now being over ten years old (am I even ALLOWED to feel old at the age of 27?). I’ve changed drastically since then, and television has to some degree, too. Of course I also haven’t worked in the last four years, so I suppose it couldn’t be THAT bad. Still, it struck me that I should probably track down what I could that’s most recent, and edit together some clips.

Of course now, in this age of web 2.0, interactivity, YouTube, and the like, there’s no reason for me to put excessive time into editing together a single, classic-style reel. I can just as easily clip out my scenes from various jobs, put them in individual videos, and upload them. Then the viewer can pick and choose what they want to watch, and I can even make notes. So that’s what I did. Right here. See? I did have a point to this rambling.

Now I must preface this by stating that to call this a “work in progress” would be an insult to the word “work,” a slap in the face to the word “progress,” and actually a slight compliment to “in.” As of now this is made up primarily of a combination of my most recent work, and the low-hanging fruit of what I was able to piece together from easy-to-access resources. Over time I hope to delve into my older work (I DEFINITELY need to clip out my work from Freaks and Geeks), and put up additional posts, and maybe even an entire page dedicated to my digital reel. But laziness and impatience have won out at the moment, so I’m starting here. The following clips are in chronological order, which just happens to place some real fan favorites at the beginning and end. Lucky how that worked out, isn’t it?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This job was a real treat on multiple levels. I had recently become a HUGE fan of the show, so getting to actually cement myself as part of it couldn’t have made me happier. Also seeing the sets and various cast members was a rare chance to geek out over something I was normally quite jaded over. As for my scene, as you saw, it was a one-on-one with Sarah Michelle Gellar. Now, when I met her, I can honestly say I wasn’t half as excited as I was by everything else that day. The show, to me, has always been more about the supporting cast, so I was left feeling like I was SUPPOSED to be excited to meet her, but was easily twice as excited just to see Alyson Hannigan drive up in her Jaugar XK8. Still, I have to say she (SMG) was one of the most professional actors I’ve ever worked with. She made a lot of her own staging decisions, lighting, camera angles, and simply did her job flawlessly. I had a reputation for being especially professional, as well, so we knocked the scene out in two hours, which is pretty quick. And for what my daily rate at the time was, it was one of the best-paying two hours of my life. At first I got the vague impression that she was kind of rude, but as I worked with her I began to realize she was simply comfortable. She had no need to put on airs, and put most of her focus on the work. She cracked occasional jokes to crew members who seemed at ease with her, and everything ran smoothly. Overall, great experience.

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I was bored this evening (how unusual…) and decided to look up an old friend of mine, Samm Levine. I had the good fortune of working on three episodes of one of the greatest television series of all time, Freaks and Geeks. Samm played Neal which is a role I had actually read for initially, but can wholeheartedly agree received much better casting with Samm. Samm (who had to add the extra M since SAG already had a Sam Levine, much like Michael J Fox who has no middle name) is, without question, one of the funniest people I’ve ever worked with, and a genuinely nice guy. I worked directly with him on the show and have run into him quite a few times since, and he’s always great to talk to and endlessly entertaining. He’s heavily involved in comedy, and is even the youngest member of the New York Friars Club. He is also quite short which he has managed to make extremely useful.

So in my searching, I came across the following short film (and the pun is very much intended). It stars Samm as well as Seth MacFarlane (yes, of Family Guy fame), as well as several other talented actors. I thought it was extremely funny, and I had to share it with you. You, of course, being my imaginary loyal audience. That’s right, you know who you are, or at least would if a figment of my imagination could have cognitive thought. So enjoy:

When I stumble upon things like this on the internet, I can’t help but continually wonder why we have television shows like America’s Got Talent, which are simply littered with people who clearly have NO talent in comparison to people like this. These kids are amazing. Where’s the TV show that scours the ‘net for people like this and gives them the credit they deserve? Why do we perpetually reward talentless hacks on television (and the radio, and, and nearly everywhere else) when there are people who truly deserve to be heralded out there?The whole thing leads me back to the realization that in a very real way, television’s days are numbered. No, I’m not saying TVs are going away, or that networks are in any immediate danger. But the internet is absorbing more and more of the average person’s entertainment time, and for now, at least, the democracy that social sites, voting, digging, stumbling, and so on has created on the ‘net makes it easier and easier for us to find the truly GOOD content as opposed to wading through the garbage the networks think we want. And for some people, that’s more enticing than the TV craps shoot.

The internet also further fragments the entertainment into smaller, more niche markets that fit specific interests better than the everything-to-everyone approach network television constantly tries and fails with. It also gives us more freedom to enjoy uncensored, unedited, material that connects with our interests that the average network would be afraid to or barred from airing due to nudity, sexuality, coarse language, or strong political stances. This is both a plus and a minus, though, as it also makes it harder to make truly good money off of it, since a smaller slice of the market will be interested in it, and therefore production values are forced to be much lower, and advertisers may stay away completely from supporting some entertainment that pushes the limits of what they feel their main customer base could handle.

It also runs a noticeable risks of dividing us EVEN MORE. Watered-down, politically-correct, corporate/FCC-controlled television is almost inarguably damaging to culture, but is a world of entertainment divided into niche groups in which people can say safely tucked away from anything that doesn’t interest them really foster any personal growth or respect for others? I know since picking my topics on StumbleUpon my knowledge of atheism has increased drastically, while simultaneously my exposure to religion has dropped off quite a bit. Does the fact that I think I chose the right side mean it’s really okay for me to lose that connection to what the rest of the world is thinking?

In the end, I don’t see us replacing our hour-long dramas, or even our half-hour sit-coms with internet equivalents, but the internet is becoming tighter and tighter competition, and is providing us with forms of entertainment people could barely dream of before. And how long before the networks DO shift to seeing this as a much heavier source of revenue? As it is, most television shows are available for download via iTunes (yeech) or other less restrictive services, and now even for free in many cases on the network’s web site. If done right, might we eventually see the networks using this as more and more of a primary revenue stream for these shows, as standard television slowly becomes the secondary target for the outdated, technophobic generations?

I think one thing that’s going to be absolutely necessary to this transition is better integration of television and internet for the typical user. Yes, HTPCs (home theater PCs) are slowly penetrating the market and let you use your computer on your television with relative ease, but they’re still far too intimidating to the mass market, who like to sit down in front of a television that doesn’t crash, doesn’t slow down, doesn’t require use of a mouse or multiple programs to do one thing. But the current efforts like AppleTV or even the Xbox 360 have a way to go before you can pull it all off. Services like Orb are getting closer, making all of your media as well as many Flash video sites available from nearly anywhere, including game consoles. But we need to reach the point where we can, with ease, access any of these internet video services from any television with the simplicity people are used to getting from normal television, while simultaneously gaining all of the benefits of network television on the computer.

Anyone else want to weigh in on this? Is television in danger? Are we on our way to a world where the internet and TV are interchangeable? Is the whole entertainment industry behind the times and at risk of being overshot by forms of entertainment they never saw coming? Is the freedom and democracy of the internet about to be ruined as the big corporations take notice and overrun it the same way they did television and radio? Will the average joe be able to soon feel comfortable accessing their entertainment from anywhere in ways only us geeks previously could? Where are we going? What is that strange mark on my hand?