The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Achewood => Achewood => Topic started by: wombat on March 11, 2008, 02:43:39 am
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http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=03102008 (http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=03102008)
Or just "Frosting: The musical"? Too many thread titles in this one.
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This whole strip is one big win.
I hope Philippe doesn't find out about it though, he might get upset. He's at that special age, after all.
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Maybe they took Phillippe?
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Two grown men (or cats) together at an amusement park. This is true love, people.
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I mean, Ray is right in one sense...
Beef IS being ten hells of ungrateful.
Also: I have lived in Los Angeles for, like, over four years and I still have never visited Disneyland. This is because driving in Anaheim was invented by God to show the devil that God could be meaner than the devil would ever dream of being.
When people are too evil for hell, they are made to drive around Anaheim in a rush hour forever. I have definitely seen Hitler stuck in a Yugo with no A/C on the Five a coupla fuckin' times down around there.
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Did Onstad take the fam to Disneyland recently? He said he's "on the road"...
http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=03102008 (http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=03102008)
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Hey, it's my favourite Teodor! Uncomfortable-bordering-on-disinterested Teodor!
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Too late, Philippe!
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I prefer "Doast Deef." An "Official Disney Fantasy Signature" is way too much like something they would actually sell.
Oh Walt, how we miss you.
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I don't know about the west coast version, but in Florida the actual Magic Kingdom is like the lamest of all the parks. How do you even spend more than 2 or 3 hours there? It's no wonder Beef isn't happy. He knows he could have been on the Back to the Future ride or watching the Muppets in 3d if only Ray had chosen a better theme park.
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I have been to Disneyland in California although I would never consider going to the one in Florida. I can't explain this except that the fact that it's the first and oldest one made it somehow a real place instead of a lame and vacuous theme park. And it was around the time they were threatening to shut down Mr Toad's Wild Ride and people were protesting this and I wanted to see it before it closed. (Did I ever close? I lost track.)
Also, the friend I was visiting needed someone to relive her childhood with.
Cort: You spend more than 2 or 3 hours there because of all the time you wait on line. But they've got a clever system that makes waiting on line seem more tolerable. I think it might involve airborne tranquilizers.
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yeah, for real, even my Cultural Anthropology professor whose job is to over-analyze everything admitted that Disneyland was pretty awesome.
Or, rather, he said something about how... seeing it through his kids eyes knocked the cynicism right out of him.
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The sad cartoon cat sees the truth behind the façade of Dinseyland: a corporate machine designed to create customers as young as possible, so that when they have leg tattoos and precious little snowflakes named Desteny they can easily outsource the indoctrination of the next generation to the parents.
Also hungover Avon ladies as a metaphor for sexual desperation with Peurto Ricans.
Best Achewood in a long, long time.
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i hate those people, mostly because when I see them I am forced to remember that I am not as much a fan of Average Everyday Americans as I like to think.
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Mr. Toad is still going strong. Last trip Asherbaby did the mandatory Dumbo and Mr. Toad rides.
In California, I presume? In Florida Mr. Toad was replaced with a Winnie-the-Pooh ride about 7, 8 years ago. With cars on tracks, painted flats, and animatronics--ride technologies that are totally 1960s.
And the Japanese version of the Pooh ride is completely whiz-bang and kicks ass, as much as anything involving Winnie the Pooh can kick ass. I feel like we talked about this.
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Mr. Toad is still going strong. Last trip Asherbaby did the mandatory Dumbo and Mr. Toad rides.
Oh good!
We did the Dumbo ride too. I remember the ride attendant was surprised that my friend and I each wanted our own Dumbo. I guess once you grow up you're expected to be better at sharing.
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Mrs. Haus said the strip was pretty much ruined for her by Roast Beef's use of the word "mongoloid." It's a word she takes particular offense to.
I've said I'd like to go to Disney World twice - one before kids, once after. Disneyland hasn't crossed my mind. It's not high on my list, though.
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Mrs. Haus said the strip was pretty much ruined for her by Roast Beef's use of the word "mongoloid." It's a word she takes particular offense to.
Perhaps "micro cephalic", or "consanguineous".
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Also: I have lived in Los Angeles for, like, over four years and I still have never visited Disneyland.
I lived in Memphis, TN for a year and never visited Graceland. Though I did apply to be a tour guide. I was not given an interview.
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oh, yeah, definitely. I am not proud of that part of myself. I really would like to think that I can overcome my biases and evaluate each person I meet as an individual... and I am great at that, I think, until I see a fat kid at disneyland and his parents are giving him a bacon double-cheeseburger and he's wearing a WWE shirt and OH GOD.
I am really good at arguing with people when they complain about "ignorance," saying that Ignorance is not a value judgement, it just means you don't know something, and the great thing about Ignorance is, you can fix it by teaching that person... and then I see that kid, and I just assume all kinds of things I have no right to assume, and all my not-ignorance goes right out the window. I am trying to get better about the way I tend to judge people at first glance.
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I lived in Memphis, TN for a year and never visited Graceland. Though I did apply to be a tour guide. I was not given an interview.
You didn't include a headshot did you?
Sorry :P
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My Folks took us on a trip to America when we were kids and we did Land and World and I loved it of course but what suprised me was so did my parents, just totally transforming into ten year olds in front of your eyes. A lot of people see places like disney as something fun and innocent being ruined by corporate culture but if you are willing to meet it half way I think it's still somewhere awesome and magical and it's all the more awesome because it exists despite it's own corporate culture.
I guess I'm just in love with the idea that there are still some places in the world that we have communally decided to say 'Ok, this is a part of the world where you can just be a happy stupid kid and believe all the crap that your cynicism disallows in the real world, also teacups!'
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I guess I didn't enjoy the magic kingdom when I was 11 was because I had no reference for most of the stuff. I can count the number of Disney movies I've seen on one hand, and the number of animated ones on one finger. So I had no attachment to Dumbo or whoever. But I did enjoy Epcot and Pleasure Island.
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Hey Mayor! In the Cali-Land they kept Mr. Toad but put the same Pooh ride you mention in place of the Bear Country Jamboree.
*weeps*
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We went to Disney World, pre-kids, in September 2000. September is THE best time to go. We didn't have to wait in line for anything, and the only time we faced a crowd of any sort was at the big Saturday night parade in the Magic Kingdom. The lack of lines made the Magic Kingdom itself, the whole thing really, much more palatable. I was taken aback at the number of things that absolutely hadn't changed since I'd been there as a kid in the early 80's, though.
I keep telling the kids we're going in 2011. I have to save up enough Hilton hotel points to get us a free room for a week though.
If you marveled at EPCOT back in the day, and are now disappointed that it's becoming all movie tie-ins instead of a positive vision of the future, you should read this blog:
http://epcot82.blogspot.com/
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Look at it this way: when wealth (say a collectively owned sulpher mine or something like that) comes to a tiny little third world island, the inevitable first response is for everyone to get fat, lazy, and happy. Fat lazy and happy is what people who have had hard lives sincerely and deeply want. They don't give a shit that it means they aren't going to live to be 95, they were never sold the idea that a perfect long life is something legitimate to expect.
Thinking that fat, lazy, and happy is bad is a sign that you're an educated aristocrat. If you think people are bad for having non-aristocratic values, well then...
My favorite quote from the 2002(3? I forget) banning of workplace smoking in New York was this quote from one of the pulp newspapers, from some janitor or something similar: "This law is for rich people. Rich people have happy jobs and want to live forever."
Whenever I start to look down my nose about contemporary country music, fatness, ugly T shirts, whatever, I try to think "My GRANDPARENTS went to college. I'm the freak here."
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I am glad that you said this. I came to the same conclusion earlier today, when I had this conversation with a guy I know, and he basically said something like "god, I just... I hate poor people, you know?" (he said this in a "joking" voice, but he was kidding himself if he thought he didn't mean it.)
That basically told me that my impulses are WRONG and I should suppress them rather than doing the "it's just my first impulse, I know maybe it's bad, haha" thing.
at the same time, there are a hell of a lot of things that Most People want to do that are not good at all. obviously a line needs to be drawn somewhere.
I'm pretty liberal and white and whatever, but I can only guilt myself about my lifestyle so much. I can only take so much "how dare you buy used clothes, you can afford new ones!" "how dare you think that you know what's best for other people!" "How dare you feel better about yourself for donating to a charity!" "How dare you think that punk rock is/was authentic, do you know that blah blah" before I am all liberal-guilted out.
I mean, it's one thing to say "it's a rich person's law" or whatever, but dying of lung cancer or emphysema or obesity-related health problems is incredibly unpleasant. I am not at all in favor of public-smoking bans, but, give me a break.
I realize it's a free country, and of course it's people's own choice. But the thread of "who the hell are you to tell me how to live my life!" gets old when the answer is "a motherfuck*ng doctor, I have spent my life studying the way the human body works. the human brain is not equipped to understand long-term consequences in a rational way, you're fuck*ng killing yourself."
Some people are trained or educated to understand certain kinds of things, and the whole anti-intellectual thing where people are snobs/elitists/jerks if they cite their knowledge gets real old.
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My favorite quote from the 2002(3? I forget) banning of workplace smoking in New York was this quote from one of the pulp newspapers, from some janitor or something similar: "This law is for rich people. Rich people have happy jobs and want to live forever."
Whenever I start to look down my nose about contemporary country music, fatness, ugly T shirts, whatever, I try to think "My GRANDPARENTS went to college. I'm the freak here."
This, especially about the smoking thing, that's an aspect of public-health measures that always kind of nagged at my brain and I couldn't work out why. It even extends all the way out to foreign relations, most of us under 70 have not known a real war (I'm being a bit dismissive of 'Nam here), virtually none of us have known a war in our own land. Starting from that point how do we expect people from countries where war and poverty is a way of life to share our values. We're a culture of ivory towers, or something, it's just we can only see the ones above us and each of us assume we live on the ground floor.
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I realize it's a free country, and of course it's people's own choice. But the thread of "who the hell are you to tell me how to live my life!" gets old when the answer is "a motherfuck*ng doctor, I have spent my life studying the way the human body works. the human brain is not equipped to understand long-term consequences in a rational way, you're fuck*ng killing yourself."
Some people are trained or educated to understand certain kinds of things, and the whole anti-intellectual thing where people are snobs/elitists/jerks if they cite their knowledge gets real old.
How does someone being a doctor make them qualified to make decisions for me about my life? And its not doctors who make public policy, its politicians, who are even less qualified to make decisions for me about my life. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they're not educated. People aren't wrong just because they disagree with you, or doctors, or politicians.
Three people close in my life have gotten cancer and all of them live healthy lifestyles. Of all of the smokers I know, none of them have gotten cancer. Continuing to smoke is bad for me and I understand that, thank you doctors for informing me of this information - but I'm old enough to make decisions for myself, so stop trying to legislate my decisions for me.
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Yeah, but we have a culture of treating imperical facts as some sort of moral or value based judgement. In a factual debate there is always a right answer and many many wrong ones. Smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for 40 years will give you cancer, a bottle of whiskey a day will give you cirrhosis of the liver, watching Big Brother will reduce your social skills to that of a concussed frat-boy. But when we enter into these discussions in a public context it seems 'respect' for another person's position overrides honesty. If a person is not informed about a particular subject (or has actively kept themselves uninformed) then they are less capable to make a decision than someone who is well informed.
This isn't to say that doctors or politicians or whoever should get to make your lifestyle decisions for you but people approach these debates as if the right to make a decision equates with being the best informed to make a good (read: healthiest or whatever as context appropriate) decision. If you want to make the decision to light up those camels every morning way to go but don't act like the person telling you it will shorten your lifespan is bringing some kind of moral judgement down on you, you just don't like the facts that they are presenting.
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Informing and deciding are different things. There can be a strong correlation with smoking and cancer, and that can be a fact, but Id prefer a world where people are able to make the decision to smoke, given the information, themselves - Not by a group of politicians.
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Exactly, people should be able to make their own decisions. But I get pissed off by the whole anti-intellectual thing.
But when we enter into these discussions in a public context it seems 'respect' for another persons position overrides honesty.
This is the thing. I think LFM said some stuff about this before, about how people on the liberal side worry so much about being Respectful while the conservative/republican side has no such worries. At the same time, obviously, they don't have to worry about being Respectful because the stuff they're saying often sounds good on paper? (I am tired and cannot think this through all the way, sorry.)
I just get tired of being sorry that I'm a pansy-ass college boy who knows things.
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Id prefer a world where people are able to make the decision to smoke, given the information, themselves - Not by a group of politicians.
Sure, I agree with you about that, there's a good Mark Twain quote to the effect that everything one must do to prolong one's life seems to make it not worth living. Being informed is the important thing but for too many people 'being informed' seems to equate to 'finding someone in a position of authority who agrees with me'. Everyone is entitled to their opinion but that's not the same as saying all opinions carry the same value.
Now I'm going to read over my last three posts and try to figure out if my logic is internally consistent.
Exactly, people should be able to make their own decisions. But I get pissed off by the whole anti-intellectual thing.
This right here. People don't want to hear that their behaviour may be self-damaging so they turn around and tear apart the people who are doing the telling thus turning a discussion about imperical facts into a moral argument, which is dumb.
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Ah, but here's the thing.
We are not talking about a fair playing field here, y'know.
If the government did not throw billions of dollars at informing people on how damaging smoking is, if they just said "hey, yeah, this stuff is probably bad for you" on a .gov website somewhere... it wouldn't mean anything and doesn't...
When the tobacco industry has billions and billions and billions to throw at lying to people about smoking and so forth.
If a tiger is about to kill a penis and you don't do anything, you are not being "neutral", you are tacitly siding with the penis through your inaction because the tiger's advantage is so ridiculously large.
"Informing" isn't enough when there's such a crushing amount of momentum coming from the other direction, ruthlessly and as lawlessly as possible because profit is the only concern.
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Not to mention horrible horrible shit like the TRUTH campaign (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheTruth.com) which is funded by tobacco companies and makes me want to smoke 10 cigarettes at once to distance myself from those obnoxious commercials.
See Also: those commercials with the kids singing as if they were in a musical about how bad cigarettes are. That makes me want to smoke one thousand times.
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Weve gone over the ridiculousness of anti smoking campaigns. I think the most effective advertising would be to show the effects every smoker feels, like loss of breath, coughing, smelly clothes, social ostracizing. This in comparison to trying to convince kids that every smoker will immediately get cancer and die of an asthma attack their wedding. To be honest, the fact that caused the greatest decrease in my tobacco consumption was data on the metastasis periods for lung cancer (decades). I dont like the idea that every cigarette is depositing a cancer unit in a 20 year CD earning HELL as a return.
Smoking used to be a relaxing activity I could do with my friends in a diner, now its just a damn chore.
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Not to mention horrible horrible shit like the TRUTH campaign (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheTruth.com) which is funded by tobacco companies and makes me want to smoke 10 cigarettes at once to distance myself from those obnoxious commercials.
See Also: those commercials with the kids singing as if they were in a musical about how bad cigarettes are. That makes me want to smoke one thousand times.
Don't those commercials exist because the government (justice system) bent the companies over a log and forced them to put out messages like that to counter promotional advertising (which seems really schizophrenic to me...but that's Tobacco in the US).
I dont want to think about my firm athletic body collapsing into itself like that. I think I understand the anti-aging craze now.
... the effects every smoker feels, like loss of breath, coughing, smelly clothes, social ostracizing ... I dont like the idea that every cigarette is depositing a cancer unit in a 20 year CD earning HELL as a return. Smoking used to be a relaxing activity I could do with my friends in a diner, now its just a damn chore.
Dissonance. Like returning to HSC, I think you know what to do.
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See Also: those commercials with the kids singing as if they were in a musical about how bad cigarettes are.
I've never seen that, but it sounds hysterically funny.
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So I agree that legislation shouldn't prevent informed and rational adults from giving themselves cancer. You want to chew tobacco and give yourself mouth cancer, awesome, you go do that. I nonetheless support laws forbidding smoking in many public places because it creates an environment which is not only unpleasant for those in the area who are not smoking but which the weight of evidence suggests increases their risk of cancer. As long as we're throwing around quotes, "the right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins".
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Here's my thing about smoking or riding a motorcycle without a helmet or other such "It's my life and I've got the right to risk if'n I want to" activities.
I think it's fine to engage in risky behavior, but only if you are willing to bear all the costs of that risk. The Kentucky legislature considered a helmet law a few years ago which would have allowed helmetless riding if you could show you had a fully paid up health insurance policy. Want to kill yourself smoking, OK by me, I suppose, but not if I have to bear the costs of your emphysema through higher Medicare/Medicaid payments.
Donne was right -- No man is an island. Pretty much everything we do affects everyone else in some way or another. It's such a delicate balance between individual rights and what benefits the group as a whole.
I'm a staunch defender of individual rights. The Bill of Rights is close to my heart. But with rights come responsibilities. If I were emperor of the universe and could restructure our political systems anyway I wanted, I'd keep the bill of rights (or some similar statement of individual human rights), but I'd also list a few basic responsibilities that everyone is expected to respect.
Here are the first three items on that list:
1. Everyone should pay their own way.
2. Everyone should clean up their own messes.
3. Everyone should educate themselves sufficiently to participate intelligently in government.
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3. Everyone should educate themselves sufficiently to participate intelligently in government.
I think you've defined concisely the minimum acceptable level of education for a modern American. Being the horrible elitist that I am, I can't imagine anyone not wanting to attend a 4-year college - the realist in me knows that this is not only not possible, but undesirable for some. Still, I think no one should be so ignorant that you wouldn't trust them to be a councilmember, or school board member; if not when they're 19, then when they're 50. High school civics is all well and good, but an astonishing number of people who presumably graduated can't describe the 3 branches of Federal Government, let alone reason why the system was designed that way.
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I work for a foreclosure defense unit at a public legal services. People in real need are remarkably good at gathering information about their world, regardless of their level of education. True ignorance (that is ignorance of things that will materially affect your life) is as much a privilege as grad school is.
But it comes down to this: nobody has ever or will ever grant me the authority to define right and wrong human behavior. There are extremes where most of us agree that stepping in and forcibly altering someone elses behavior is necessary, but this is allowed only by the fact that there are more of us than there are of them, not because we have, in any materially objective sense, some right to do what we're doing. I think you get a lot farther improving the world by setting a compelling and non-judgemental example.
But you really have to ask yourself, why do I care so much about some stranger's lungs? Or their taste in TV? Or honestly, given that they're one individual out of millions and millions, who they do or don't vote for. You're looking at a human being and only seeing incredibly trivial things.
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I think you get a lot farther improving the world by setting a compelling and non-judgemental example.
I would be really happy if I could believe that, but I've never noticed that it makes a damn bit of difference.
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Yeah, but does judging people? The question is what are you comparing it to.
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But it comes down to this: nobody has ever or will ever grant me the authority to define right and wrong human behavior. There are extremes where most of us agree that stepping in and forcibly altering someone elses behavior is necessary, but this is allowed only by the fact that there are more of us than there are of them, not because we have, in any materially objective sense, some right to do what we're doing. I think you get a lot farther improving the world by setting a compelling and non-judgemental example.
But you really have to ask yourself, why do I care so much about some stranger's lungs? Or their taste in TV? Or honestly, given that they're one individual out of millions and millions, who they do or don't vote for. You're looking at a human being and only seeing incredibly trivial things.
I'm not talking about judgment. I have my opinion about certain behaviors and you are entitled to yours. But when your behavior costs me money, I think I should have a voice.
Is smoking morally wrong? I don't know or particularly care. If providing medical care for people who have health problems as a result of smoking costs public dollars, then the public gets a say about the legality of smoking.
Another example: I don't see anything morally wrong with being addicted to heroin. However, if you have to steal my TV in order to support your habit, I have the right to complain.
Sure, do what you want as long as you don't hurt anybody else. I just think people get awfully short-sighted when it comes to thinking about whom their behavior is indirectly (but demonstrably) hurting, especially when it comes to things like smoking.