Jim Treacher's Blog That Is on the Internet

A stroll down... uh... that one street, what's it called?

(I dug up this old post from over a year ago to answer a comment below about my affection for the wonderfully evocative phrase "Eat a dick," and it didn't make me cringe too much when I reread it, so I figured I'd repost it here where people can actually read it. The more things change...)

Just watched a few days' worth of The Daily Show -- let's hear it for Tivo and friendless Saturday nights -- and three loosely related things stand out in my mind [Loosely related, that is, in the context of being on the show that week. Duh. -- JT]:

1. Paula Zahn's android chirpiness creeps me the fuck out. Why is anybody fighting over this woman? She didn't even have the decency to wear a skirt for her TDS interview, which would have been my only reason for not fast-forwarding through it after the 14th time she plugged her unwatchable morning show. (American Morning really does jump out at you from the TV listings, but I would have gone with Coffee Zahn.) "Cheerfully" insisting she's doing hard news, bragging about talking to Arafat's Deputy Secretary of Beard Trimmings or somebody. Grinning insanely the whole time. The lab boys at CNN need to snap open that panel in the small of her back and see if they can find the loose wire.

2. We bombed the living hell out of Japan a while back, we really creamed them, as I recall reading somewhere, and now they've made a dancing robot that can discern human faces and probably costs more than my last three cars put together. I call that progress. So, maybe it's not always our fault when something goes wrong with the world? Maybe people make their own choices? Maybe a culture can pull itself together after a loss more devastating than anything most of us can even imagine? Say what you want about the Japanese, they've obviously got their own ways of dealing with their feelings, but they're not blowing themselves up in pizza parlors because of shit that happened before they were born. They're not flying planes into buildings so they can get revenge on the evil American janitors and secretaries and lunch ladies who've been oppressing them, secure in the knowledge that their resulting afterlife will be a nonstop, doe-eyed-virgin-packed jizzfest. No, they've moved on. Yeah, okay, maybe these robots' descendants will one day destroy the human race. But those unstoppable steel-clad murder machines will be killing everybody, whether they're Jews or not.

3. Jon Stewart is amazing. Not since his first show back after 9/11 have I been so impressed with the guy. I've purposely avoided talking much about the Middle East in this online vanity press, not only because I'd just embarrass myself even more than I already do, but because the whole thing makes me want to hide under my desk with a bottle of cough syrup. And that's basically what he said too, except for that last part. The guy is for real. I mean, he managed to work an 18 Again reference into his plea for peace in the Middle East, and then apologized for making jokes about it, but it's either that or cry. And he made you understand that he's as distraught and disgusted over the whole thing as everybody else, but he's got to do his job anyway. Eat a big plate of dicks, Kilborn.

I'm not a historian, or a sociologist, or a political analyst, or an expert on pretty much anything, but... Look. We can make clones, we can make robots, we can make a leggy simulacrum of a human female and program it to read aloud from a teleprompter while smiling. We're on the verge of developing a machine that will enable James Lileks to compose a really good novel every night while he sleeps. Right now I'm wearing an amazing, super-absorbent adult undergarment that would have been undreamt of 100 years ago. We're pretty much forcing science fiction to try to keep up now. So, can't we come up with some sort of memory-erasing ray out of a Phil K. Dick novel or something? Wipe out the memories of everybody in Israel and Northern Ireland and everyplace else in the world where people are murdering each other over shit that's been going on for decades, centuries?

"Why the fuck do I have this thing strapped to my chest? Weird... Oh well. Hey, how you guys doing? You know, I could really go for one of those, what do you call it, the chewy things with the hole in the middle. You guys seem pretty cool, you wanna go get some of those? Just help me peel this stupid thing off first, it's chafing like a bitch."

Memor-Ray™, you could call it. Hell, just send it up on a satellite and shoot the whole damn planet with it. Bring on the amnesia beams, please. Worldwide do-over. I wouldn't mind not knowing my own PIN number if it bought an end to this shit.

Posted by Jim Treacher at June 1, 2003 09:20 AM