The fact that the final comment in this thread was written BY AN ACTUAL ROBOT is sort of perfect. Not only that, but it's about buying clothes online (sort of), so the robot comment is (sort of) on topic! UPVOTES!
Okay so I felt like 17 wasn't THAT crazy a number of different meds to take, and so I decided to try to get to 17 for one nervous lady off the top of my head:
First antidepressants -- since they're so hard to go off, if one stops working or doesn't work in the first place, it's pretty common to just keeping adding more and more. It's not that uncommon for a chronically depressed person to be on four or five. Then she has an anxiolitic, Klonopin, or Xanax, or both (one for daily use, one for panic attacks). Ambien to help her sleep, and maybe ritalin or something to help her "focus" (IT'S SPEED). I don't know if Provigil was around when the movie was set, but I bet she could claim to have "daytime sleepiness disorder" and score some of that too. So now we're at 10 scrips and I've only done psychiatric meds.
Because she probably also has physical complaints -- digestive issues, headaches, unexplained joint pain, problems with menstruation -- that could entirely plausibly be four or five more pills. In addition she probably takes prophylactic medications like Boniva and Lipitor and blood pressure pills . And doubtless she has some pain pills -- demerol, percocet, whatever -- either "left over from surgery" or obtained from a compliant doctor when she complained of attacks of pain which seemed to have no physical cause.
So by my calculation that's *at least* 17 different pill bottles in the semiotically and metaphorically charged medicine cabinet. Not implausible!
So a long time ago (maybe not that long ago? I'm not going to check) the was a videogum wmoat thread and someone suggested GONE WITH THE WIND, and I continue to think that this is a really good nomination. I think that people of OUR GENERATION (yo yo yo, my pokémons!) have this vague sense that GWTW is a Great Film, recognize its iconic images and famous quotations, and laugh when a reference to Scarlett O'Hara is the punchline to a comedy skit... but have never actual been told that all that "common knowledge" completely obscures the real point of the the entire film, which is to: (1) make people think that slavery wasn't that bad, (2) present white southerners as the real victims of the civil war, (3) present the Ku Klux Klan in a positive light (YES, REALLY), (4) black people are dumb, (5) women are dumb, I COULD GO ON. I would make for a great bloggity blog post!
As usual I am way way too late to this party, but it seems no one has mentioned the two things that I typed the LAST time Magnolia appeared in a Videogum comment thread (in the History of Violence WMOAT, last November!), which I will now cut and paste:
1) Magnolia is THE EXACT SAME MOVIE as Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, except Short Cuts is better and wittier and less mawkish and more genuinely moving and with better soundtrack.
2) William H. Macy’s character. Particularly in the light of Philip Seymore Hoffman’s character in Boogie Nights. I mean, I’m not saying that PTA insists on portraying gay men as subhuman caricatures, I’m just saying he’s never NOT portrayed a gay man as a subhuman caricature.
When I posted these observations six months ago, I got a lot of downvotes!
SO. There are obviously a metric tonne of reasons to love Videogum, but towards the top of my list is this: that almost whenever a completely incomprehensible viral video is posted, one that makes me say to myself, "I will never understand what is going on here," invariable someone in the comments says, in an utterly unpretentious and completely generous way, "For those who are confused, THIS is what is going on." And then we ALL become better, more informed, and broader-minded people! THANK YOU VIDEOGUM COMMENTERS.
YES. Or not even Judith Butler, but just, as this actually pretty terrific NYT piece just reminded everyone, "Thelma and Louise." It's not actually that hard to create movies in which female characters have desires that are unrelated to marriage and motherhood!
Now there has been 58 comments and no one has mentioned that Suddenly Last Summer (from which the bathing suit/boobs clips above was taken) is a HORRIBLE EVIL MOVIE. The message of the film is "Fags are disgusting and deserve to be killed." Worst thing Tennessee Williams ever did.
Incidentally, my best friend in high school used to call Cat on a Hot Tin Roof "The Sexuality Test." Because whether you're a man or a woman, either Taylor OR Newman is DEFINITELY going to cause some of tingly sensation in your bathing suit area. So if you are confused about yourself, just watch the movie, figure out which one(s) of the two is doing it for you, and self-define your sexual orientation accordingly. NEVER FAILS.
You know this is, like, a real thing in California right? (Well okay it's only for newborns, so you don't throw them in the dumpster, but still)
http://img695.imageshack.us/i/44816080fa0243cf71.jpg
Okay I'm way too late to this party, but I feel like I would be betraying my graduate degree if I didn't point out that the philosopher Henri Bergson gives what I think is a pretty useful account of why watching people fall over and hurt themselves makes us laugh, in his book Rire (Laughter). He thinks we laugh when a human body is unexpectedly revealed to be material, and not subject to will. The quote that everyone knows from the book defines the comedic as "something mechanical encrusted upon the living." The effect doesn't work, however, unless we can distance ourselves from the person being laughed at in order to perceive both the person and the material body, the living and the mechanical. If you are interested Wikipedia has an okay synopsis of the book that sounds like it was google-translated from the French (and thus is funny! Get it?)
I always thought that the falling-into-the-fountain-while-texting lady was secretly put up to it by a philosophy professor who needed the PERFECT example of the Bergsonian comic for his Humor Studies 301 seminar.
It is 1:30 am and I am writing about Bergson in my underpants. THANKS INTERNET!
I feel like when you were vomiting continually while watching The Bucket List on a boat in the Caribbean, you were actually, without knowing it, doing some pretty good performance art?
I am really bored and tired with this conversation, but seriously: this girl you know (or is she a "friend of a friend"?) clearly has a lot of problems, and is putting herself at risk by undergoing a serious medical procedure too frequently. Abortions can be *painful* and do come with risks! But what would you have her do? Ask her to pay MORE for her terminations? What difference would that make? Get "individuals or charities" to pay for her termination? Frankly, that's what happening already. Bring her babies to term? Given that she is obviously not at the top of her class when it comes to good decision making, that seems like a bad idea?
What this girl you knew in high school actually needed was: (1) better access to effective birth control, (2) some education about her sexual health that actually gets through to her, and (3) quite possibly a dose of self-respect when it comes to dealing with a (coercive?) boyfriend who is just as abysmal at making life-choices as she is. AND GUESS WHAT?! At least two of those things are THINGS THAT PLANNED PARENTHOOD PROVIDES. In fact, they provide FAR MORE education and birth control and sexual health screening and counseling than they do surgical terminations.
If you are uncomfortable with what this high-school acquaintance of yours was doing (and, as you describe it, so am i, and so is everybody), then what she needed was *more* Planned Parenthood in her life, not less.
All of these cocktails would be improved by including a bowl of cigarette lighters on the table. It's a conversation starter! (#ComeBackGabeandMaxAllisForgiven)
Wait so I'm confused. *IS* this a Tim and Eric thing? Because it sort of seems like it might be? This whole thing is making me feel very, very not in on the joke.
So, I badly want to say something about the similarity of the special-needs dance troupe's choreography to certain choreographic strategies that Mark Morris uses all the time. But I can't figure out a single place in my internet life to type it where it would be appropriate.
That's awesome! Is there any job at all that a monster DOESN'T do? Yeah I guess research dollars are always tight, and I certainly don't want the resources required to produce clean, elegant publicity materials to come out of MY $45-per-visit. (Also, I am seriously hoping you left off a zero! Otherwise I am calling the Bureau of Fair Labor Practices or whatever on your behalf.)
For reasons we need not go into I participate in some clinical research trials, and I think I can say with some authority that EVERY clinical trials unit at every research hospital in the nation could really use a decent graphic designer on staff. Everything they produce looks like this. I mean HONESTLY.
Writing without the verb "to be" is actually, like, A Thing. It's called "English-Prime" or more commonly "E-Prime" or E'. The wikipedia entry is here. However, it was invented by linguists as a way to reveal (playfully) the workings of the copula in English, and not, as your teacher would have it, a deeply misguided arbitrary rule meant to instill some other arbitrary rules (against the passive OR WHATEVER). I don't like your teacher.
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