Gilbert Gottfried and the Discourse on Disaster

A Portrait of Gilbert Gottfried with a Dead Aflac Duck
on His Head by Dan Lacey (www.faithmouse.com). 
Used with permission of the artist.

As the world confronts escalating conflict and looming nuclear disaster, the Holy Prepuce has been ruminating on a more consequential matter: the Gilbert Gottfried sacking.

Why, exactly, did “tweeting” a series of earthquake / tsunami jokes get Gottfried summarily canned as the voice of AFLAC? Gottfried, after all, famously broke the ice at a post-9-11 Friar’s Club roast by recounting “The Aristocrats,” the classic improvised litany of incest, scatophilia, and a rotating menu of other horribles. So it’s not as if AFLAC was allergic to controversial material.

I suspect that Gottfried ran up against an unwritten rule of comedy: disaster jokes are not allowed to have identifiable authors.

The re-telling of disaster jokes is permissible because they are both ubiquitous and anonymous. Anyone of my generation could tell you, for example, how we knew Christa McAuliffe had dandruff, what “NASA” stands for, and why there were no showers on the Challenger. Elliot Orring’s “Jokes and the Discourse on Disaster” (1987) collects fourteen such examples, and I found no more than a handful unfamiliar twenty-five years after the Challenger explosion. Some were undoubtedly adapted from prior maritime or aviation accidents; several I have since heard re-purposed for Princess Diana or 9-11. Folklorists collect this material: Bill Ellis’s “A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes” (October 5, 2001) identifies twelve discreet “cycles” addressing a range of events including the Kennedy assassination, the Jonestown suicides, and the Lockerbie PanAm 103 bombing.

The universality of these jokes allows us to rationalize their creation as an instinctive defense mechanism with a plausible genesis in evolutionary psychology. The impulse to detach from tragedy through humor serves as a counterbalance to our empathy and attachment, traits essential to social animals but paralyzing if unchecked in times of crisis. Laugh today about yesterday’s sabre-tooth tiger attack and you pull yourself together to hunt mastodon, eat, and live to pass along your genes.

When these jokes seem to rise from the zeitgeist, the telling itself can become the primary gag, the observational meta-joke that human beings are sick bastards who find this funny. It works because we’re all in this together: I’ve heard this one, you’ve heard that one, someone like us must have come up with this; everyone’s responsible so no one is.

But when Gottfried tweets Japan jokes as a professional comedian, there’s him and there’s us. We have no ownership, no liability as the kind of people who think this stuff up. He’s the sick bastard who finds this funny, we’re decent folk who need to take a stand against this trash.

I also think Gottfried is a victim of the Comedian On Twitter syndrome. Social media’s low-cost marketing comes at a price for comedians: fans expect free, instant funny. And so the temptation is to brain-dump ideas that might otherwise never see the light of day.

Looking through Gottfried’s tweets, and putting aside any question of taste, most of them are poorly constructed and don’t really work as jokes. A few would be salvageable with editing. One or two seem to stand on their own:

I asked a girl in Japan to have sex with me. She said “okay, but you'll have to sleep in the wet spot.”

This would be a decent mid-set gag, a supplemental laugh on an established subject. It trades on a mixing of taboos: sex and disaster, but in an understated, minimally-graphic fashion. It turns on clever incongruities of type, number, and scale. And it’s a rather sweet homage to its “sleep in the wet spot” precursor jokes, those Sexual Revolution-era meditations on negotiating casual sex and its aftermath in that brave new gender-equal world.

Here is the best of the lot:

I was talking to my Japanese real estate agent. I said “is there a school in this area.” She said “not now, but just wait."

The central equivocation is actually a stroke of genius: the ambiguity in meaning is possible only in the apocalyptic conditions of this specific moment. Delivering the punchline in the agent’s voice furthers the uncertainty: Does she intend the meaning we perceive? If so, does she take Gottfried’s question so literally as to assume a flotsam schoolhouse would meet his needs? What is her attitude toward the catastrophe if she is breezily offering its consequences as a selling point?

The fundamentals are also solid: a classic setup-line-punchline, with a strong core incongruity between mundane and extraordinary elements. I award bonus points for the dependence on visual imagination, generating dual meaning through reliance on imagery highly specific to the present moment when footage of the deluge is seared into our collective consciousness.

Indeed, the imagery invoked softens the joke by substituting masonry for human flesh. Elliot Orring points out that a defining feature of the Challenger disaster was the “shield[ing]” of “the view of that human disaster miles above the earth . . . by flame and the opaque wall of the shuttle cabin,” whereas “beyond these speakable images of flame and falling debris lay the imaginable but unspeakable images of horrific trauma and mutilation.” Many Challenger jokes operated, Orring argues, by “forc[ing] us to confront what lies behind the speakable media images that are created or manipulated for our consumption.”

The disaster in Japan was not so antiseptic: cameras covered every angle of the destruction, making blanket censorship of death impossible. Gottfried’s text in some fashion works the reverse of a Challenger joke. Instead of laying bare an obscured mayhem, it renders the devastation more palatable by focusing on a cartoonish inanimate object, without speculation as to what could lie inside.

Pre-Twitter, Gottfried might have crossed out five of his ideas, tried the rest at a small club on a Tuesday night, and wound up with the “school” bit as the one piece of usable material. It’s an excellent joke, standing alone, whose merits may render the subject matter forgivable. But by surrounding this pearl with an unvarnished barrage of lesser attempts, Gottfried came across as desperate for laughs, and his use of the subject exploitative.

I’m a tough crowd.

Post-Polling Pornucopia

It’s time for another Holy Prepuce! Research Update, where the cutting edge of academic endeavor is distilled, digested, and regurgitated for your special edification. Today’s offering: “Changes in Pornography-Seeking Behaviors Following Political Elections: An Examination of the Challenge Hypothesis,” Evolution & Human Behavior 31 (2010): 442-446. In this article, authors Patrick & Charlotte Markey answer the burning question of whether backers of successful political candidates consume more internet pornography post-election than do supporters of losing candidates.

The authors begin with some background about the “Challenge Hypothesis,” which suggests that “testosterone levels in males tend to rise during competition . . . [to] support various reproductive behaviors . . . . Interestingly, individuals do not even have to be directly involved in a competition for their testosterone levels to be affected; spectators can experience similar changes. . . .”

The effect has been documented among male supporters of winning sports teams. A recent study also “found that following the 2008 US presidential election men who voted for the winning candidate (Barack Obama) had higher testosterone levels after the election than men who voted for a losing candidate.”

Thus, the authors hypothesize, “[a] sexual behavior that might shift following the winning or losing of a competition is the seeking of visual–sexual stimulation (e.g., pornography),” and following an election we should expect to see higher rates of pornography seeking in states that backed the winning side.

As it happens, the authors tell us, pornography is custom-made for the male brain:

Men’s interest in pornography is typically attributed to men’s evolved interest in sexual variety and multiple partners. As noted [in prior research], men tend to fantasize about a place where “sex is sheer lust and physical gratification, devoid of more tender feelings and encumbering relationships, in which women are always aroused, or at least easily arousable, and ultimately are always willing.”

And where is that special man-place? Why in the magical world of porn, of course, which--as helpfully explained for those (presumably female) readers unschooled in the genre--“typically depicts women engaging in casual sex without investment.”

For those wishing to experience this “pornography” for ourselves, the authors explain that it is available in “a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, film and video,” but advise that “however, currently, one of the most prevalent means of distributing pornography is the internet.” Readers unfamiliar with technical matters are offered the further suggestions that “[b]y simply typing a few keywords into a search engine (e.g., Google) it is extremely easy to search for pornography on the internet,” and “[f]or example, a person might type in the word ‘porn’ or ‘sex’ into the Google search engine when attempting to find pornography.”

The authors next detail their research methods, which utilize Google Trends data from the 2004, 2006, and 2008 US elections, data which can be drilled down on a state-by-state basis to determine the frequency of particular searches in a given time period:

The internet service WordTracker was used to determine which keywords individuals tend to use to search for pornography. . . by first providing WordTracker with a seed word relevant to pornography. For the current study the researchers simply used the word “porn.” WordTracker then searched the top 100 websites that rank highest on search engines for the term “porn” and extract[ed] additional keywords utilized by these sites. From this analysis, the 10 most frequently occurring, non-domain-specific, pornography keywords (e.g., “xvideos,” “boobs,” “tits,” etc.) were selected for the current study. . . . Google Trends was then utilized to determine the popularity of these pornography keywords.

And the results?

[T]he week after the 2004 presidential election Red states (i.e., the states that voted for the winner of the election) had marginally higher RSVIs [relative search volume indices] for pornography keywords than Blue states . . . . [T]he week after the 2008 presidential election Blue states (i.e., the states that voted for the winner of the election) had significantly higher RSVIs for pornography keywords than Red states . . . . [For the 2006 mid-term election], a regression analysis was conducted to examine whether or not traditionally Blue states (coded 2) had higher RSVI scores than swing states (coded 1) which had higher RSVI scores than traditionally Red states (coded 0). Consistent with the . . . hypothesis, a significant linear trend was found.

A key purpose of Holy Prepuce Research Update is to stimulate ongoing inquiry. For that reason I hope some among my readership will take up the authors’ exhortation for further research directed at some limitations of their study.

One such limitation is that backers of winning candidates

might have simply been happier and more likely to desire sex . . . [i]n other words, . . . changes in voters’ moods rather than testosterone levels [may] explain the observed changes in pornography-seeking behaviors[, a]lthough . . . previous research is somewhat mixed as to the relations between mood, interest in pornography, and masturbation.

Hence, “[i]t is hoped that future research might provide a more complete understanding of the mediators that explain why pornography-seeking behaviors tend to change following political elections.”

Another limitation is that Google Trends does not track the gender of users, and so it “would be informative for future researchers to utilize a different methodology that allows for the assessment of gender.” Nevertheless,

[g]iven the frequency that males use the internet to search for pornography . . . and the keywords used in the current study to operationally define pornography searchers (e.g., “boobs,” “tits,” etc.), it seems likely that the observed findings were driven by males.

And if I may suggest some avenues of further investigation myself: First, although revealing only “xvideos,” “boobs,” and “tits,” the article promises that “[a] complete list of the 10 keywords utilized for the current research is available from the first author.” Professor Markey may be reached through his laboratory at Villanova University, so please feel free to ask him for the remaining seven.

Second, as a resident of a blue state, I am proud to note that although red-staters displayed “marginally” higher pornography-seeking behavior after Bush’s 2004 reelection, we blue-staters delivered a “significantly” higher number of porn searches following Obama’s win in 2008. I theorize the following relationship: voting Democratic is but one manifestation of our depraved and comprehensive libertinism. Prospective testers of this hypothesis are invited out here to Gomorrah for a site visit.

An Open Letter to danah boyd (an Ethnographer Who Does Not Capitalize Her Name)

Dear Dr. boyd:

Congratulations on achieving position #1 in the "Social Media Ethnographers" tab of every reporter's Rolodex. As April's Facebook F8 conference approached, I predicted an electronic avalanche of danah boyd, and the media did not disappoint. Your ubiquity is confirmed to me not only by Google News search but also, no doubt dearer to your heart, by re-posted snippets of your wisdom bubbling through my Facebook "stream."

Now, if I may, a small anecdote:

I once attended the recital of an Arnold, Missouri dance school, and discovered that one of the older girls had listed herself in the program as simply "Essence." Essence was in several numbers, and for each one the billing read something like, "Mary Jane Jaworski, Erin O'Sullivan, Joanne Simmons, Essence." And I have to say, Essence was a pretty good dancer. But instead of thinking "how nice for this girl that she dances so well," all I could think was "you do not get to call yourself 'Essence' in the recital program of an Arnold, Missouri dance school."

Essence came vividly back to mind some twenty years later, as I encountered the following sentence in an October, 2009 CNN.com article:

Ethnographer danah boyd, who does not capitalize her name, said she watched the class divide emerge while conducting research of American teens' use of social networks in 2006.

Any insights I might have been developing on the subject of the article (socioeconomic stratification in social media use) flew through the windshield as my attention screeched to an abrupt "wait, what?" A quick reversing, then, again: "Ethnographer danah boyd, who does not capitalize her name." It was now time for me to Google you, because anyone who "does not capitalize her name" to the point of instructing a CNN reporter that she "does not capitalize her name" must surely maintain a personal website on which she she explains why.

And you do. Visitors can learn that you legally changed your name to "danah michele boyd" as the result of a "mental tangent" in which you pondered:

What's in a name? What's its worth? Why is it so valuable that it is to be capitalized? Down this path, i started thinking about names as descriptors versus separate entities. Isn't a name simply another unique adjective for me? A label? I am not my name; my name is simply another descriptor of me. Should i weight that descriptor as anything more valuable than the other adjectives used to describe me?

Well, danah, to begin with: no, your name is not "simply another unique adjective" for you. As it happens, names are not adjectives at all. They are proper nouns, which we capitalize in English probably to reflect the special attention that humans like to pay to other humans, the places they live, the groups they form, and the unique objects they create. Surely an ethnographer of social media knows that.

What interests me more is that your "mental tangent" was an outgrowth of an earlier decision to stop capitalizing the pronoun "I":

I was always bothered by the fact that the first person singular pronoun is capitalized in english -- i always thought it was quite self-righteous. . . . Ever since i was a kid, i was told that the world does not revolve around me, yet our written culture is telling me something entirely different. . . . i gave up on giving it such a special level of importance -- it is referring to me, right? I thought an attempt at minimalizing the individualization could start at home.

In order to test the sincerity of your belief that "the world does not revolve around" you, I suggest an experiment. First spend ½ hour or so poking around CNN.com. Then report back as to how many other names appearing on that site require explanatory parentheticals in order for editor, reader, and reporter to clarify that pretension, rather than slovenly proofreading, is at work.

Here is the list of people who get to spell their names without capitalization:

1. Celebrity poets of the 20th Century

2. Lesbian Vegetarian Canadian country music stars

3. Postmodern chroniclers of the Black female experience in America

Oh, I'm sorry... it looks like "ethnographers of social media" is not on the list.

Yours Sincerely,
Holy Prepuce

The School District in Fact Has the Ability To Remotely Activate the Webcam

In case you were still in denial that we are living in a futuristic dystopia, the Holy Prepuce invites your review of this class-action complaint filed Tuesday in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and brought to H.P.'s attention by longtime reader Superfecta.

According to the complaint, defendant Lower Merion School District this year instituted a "one to one laptop computer initiative," issuing each high school student with a personal laptop computer so as to

enabl[e] an authentic 21st-Century learning environment . . .[,] enhance[] opportunities for ongoing collaboration, and ensure[] that all students have 24/7 access to school based resources and the ability to seamlessly work on projects and research at school and at home.

All seemed well and good until the plaintiff, Harriton High School student Blake J. Robbins, was taken aside by an assistant principal who

informed minor Plaintiff that the School District was of the belief that minor Plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor Plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the School District.

Upon questioning by Robbins' father, the assistant principal

verified . . . that the school district in fact has the ability to remotely activate the webcam contained in a student's personal laptop computer issued by the school district at any time it chose and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam, all without the knowledge, permission or authorization of any persons then and there using the laptop computer.

Not surprisingly, Robbins and his parents think this practice violates their rights under the Fourth Amendment and various privacy laws, not least because

many of the images captured and intercepted may consist of images of minors and their parents or friends in compromising or embarrassing positions, including, but not limited to, in various stage of dress or undress.

Without knowing about the whole remote-activated-webcam aspect, one might legitimately wonder why educational dollars are being used to hand out free laptops to residents of Philadelphia's Main Line suburbs. Surely the money would be better spent in, say, Kensington or Strawberry Mansion. But with these new revelations, it starts to make sense. Aside from better teachers, newer textbooks, and functioning buildings, what do rich kids in America get that poor kids don't? Answer: the luxury of attending schools instead of mini-prisons equipped with metal detectors, rent-a-cops, and zero-tolerance policies that result in seventh graders being arrested for writing on their desks.

Obviously this inequality needed to be remedied by equivalently striping Harriton High kids of their dignity and privacy, but in a manner less offensive to Main Line aesthetics. Harriton kids can come to school safe in the knowledge that their gym bags won't be x-rayed, and that their marker doodling will be remedied with Windex rather than handcuffs. But... Teacher is watching.

Welcome Comics Curmudgeon Readers!

Wow--the Comics Curmudgeon gives me one shout-out for my Anti-Anthony Facebook Flair, and Holy Prepuce receives over 200 hits by 11AM! That's almost as many hits as I get in an entire weekend from Saudi Arabian users Googling "gay prepuce."

The Facebook links on the Comics Curmudgeon post seem to work for some readers and not others (apparently something to do with the transition to "New Facebook"); alternate links that should work are here and here.

Now that you've found your way to Holy Prepuce, please take a look around, maybe try out the random toke or topic links at left, and if you enjoy HP's sensibilities, please consider subscribing to the feed or joining the email list!

Aggravated Menace 2 Second Life Society

Holy Prepuce! seems to have taken a sober turn of late, which was never my intention. Just as I was preparing to subject the readership to more of the same (in this case a response to Linda Hirschman's Slate op-ed on reclaiming the morality of abortion in the Democratic platform), the Internets coughed up this thing of beauty.

The arrest of 33-year-old Kimberly Jernigan for attempted kidnapping, burglary, and "aggravated menacing" brought my original conception of Holy Prepuce! back to light. And that conception was to provide an outlet by which you, the reader, could gain insight into the astonishing range of expression given by fellow citizens to what Justice O'Connor once described as "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

Jernigan's recent journey into the mystery of existence began when she met a 52 year old Delaware man in the virtual universe of Second Life. This being Second Life, naturally the gentleman did not manifest himself in middle aged, mid-Atlantic human form, but rather as a lion. Based on my limited exposure to Second Life, day-to-day existence consists principally of participants selling each other virtual jewelry, then furiously bonking on "SexGen beds" during global warming seminars at virtual ski lodges. So it should come as no surprise that Jernigan and her leonine acquaintance soon commenced a romantic--and sexual--online relationship.

All was well and good until the couple agreed to meet in the real world ("First Life"?) and the flesh-and-blood Jernigan proved not to the King of Beasts' taste. Not a woman who gives up easily, Jernigan hatched an ingenious plan: she would kidnap her ex-lover, teach him the error of his ways, and start a new life with him "out West." For reasons not made clear in news accounts, Jernigan's initial attempt to abduct her ex at gunpoint from his Pennsylvania workplace proved unsuccessful. Her second attempt, which involved posing as a local postal worker, also failed. (Media accounts differ as to whether Jernigan is legitimately employed as a postal worker in her native Durham, North Carolina.)

Events came to a head on August 21st, when the former beau returned home from work and was startled to find a laser sight illuminating his chest. By the time police arrived, Jernigan had fled, leaving behind a pair of handcuffs, a roll of duct tape, and an adorable Corgi mix named Gogi, whose snout Jernigan had unceremoniously duct-taped shut. Borrowing a page from Jack Ruby's playbook, Jernigan had apparently brought the dog to the scene of the crime, then improvised after she realized his barking might foil the plot.

An all-points bulletin went out for Jernigan's 2008 Kia Rio, which Maryland state troopers eventually spotted at I-95's Chesapeake House rest stop. A BB gun and laser-sight-equipped Taser were recovered from the vehicle, and Jernigan was arrested following the classic "brief struggle."

My delight at these events is of course marred by concern for Gogi, who had the misfortune to be caught up in humiliating circumstances far beyond his understanding. (Fortunately the Delaware SPCA reports that Gogi is none the worse for wear following his ordeal, and is no doubt available free to a good home.) But Jernigan's saga revisits many beloved Holy Prepuce! themes, of which I had lost sight during this recent political bent:

• Virtual worlds begetting real-world violence,
  
• Lunatic kidnapping plots,
• Questionable behavior in general, and
  
• Pornography as the inescapable endpoint of technological innovation.

On this last point, may I just add that while I applaud the technical achievement, whichever animator programed Second Life to allow human/lion sexual intercourse really needs a different hobby.

High Stakes Softball at the FDOC • Brokeback Mountain ≠ Sodomite Recruiting Video

In a fit of nerdiness, the Holy Prepuce has added to the site a "random toke" feature. For those readers insufficiently puerile or pretentious to interpret H.P.'s direct allusion to drug culture and oblique reference to French obscenity, this means that if you click in the left-hand column where it says "[c]lick here for a random toke on the Prepuce," the site will redirect you at random to a prior Holy Prepuce post. (Feed and email subscribers will need to visit the website to make this work.)

But enough of the past -- what is tickling the Holy Prepuce right this minute? First, this article concerning "a startling list of alleged abuses and crimes" at the Florida Department of Corrections. The inmate abuse, kickbacks, and misuse of public funds are nothing remarkable for a state prison system. But worthy of note is FDOC's innovative personnel policy: the awarding of promotions based on home runs hit in the inter-departmental softball league! And how did department employees react to this policy? Why, just as anyone would adapt to an environment in which career advancement depends on slugging ability: steroids. Oh yes, and apparently each game was followed by an orgy.

Second, Heath Ledger's hasty addition to this year's "let's play John Williams music under a montage of everyone who's died since the last Oscars" reminds H.P. of the always-reliable Westboro Baptist Church, which picketed the actor's memorial services because of his role in Brokeback Mountain. According to WBC, Ledger's portrayal of a gay cowboy has rendered him a "fag enabler" and condemned him to an eternity of torment in Hell. (As this site has noted before, WBC believes Ledger will have a lot of company there, most recently the victims of the Northern Illinois University shootings, smitten by God because of a 2000 NIU "conference for fags . . . headed by some preacher who had a sex change operation.")

The thing that H.P. has never understood about the religious and other anti-gay opposition to Brokeback Mountain is this idea that the movie is some kind of recruiting commercial for gayness, ready to lead young Christian men astray. But if we take the film's plot as a sort of road map for the gay life that awaits young recruits, what is the take-home message? Basically that (warning: spoiler) your one carefree summer of mountaintop sex will be paid for with a lifetime of broken dreams, divorce, alienation, and either violent death or a middle age lived out in a ramshackle trailer, talking to your dead lover's cowboy shirt. This is an advertisement for the ways of Sodom?

Custom Holy Prepuce! Google Toolbar Button / Sikh Dream in Baltimore

Folks, I know it has been a while since your last pull on the old Holy Prepuce! lever, and for that I apologize. To tide you over, I present you with a new toy and a puerile delight.

The new toy is a nifty Holy Prepuce! custom Google Toolbar button that I geeked out and created.

Just click on this link to install it. (If you don't already have Google Toolbar, the link should install that first-- the toolbar itself is a pretty cool joint.) Once the button is installed, you can click on it to visit Holy Prepuce!, you can use it to search for HP! posts containing whatever text you enter in the search box,

or you can click on the adjacent arrow to pull down a menu of the last 25 posts.

Select a post, and there you shall be.

Now, for the puerile delight, I give you this article that I found in the May 25 edition of our local "India This Week." (Just read the first sentence.)

As Mrs. P. remarked, "I don't think that's what they meant."

Supreme Streaming Vids

Speaking of Internet video, the US Supreme Court has entered the YouTube generation by including digital access to videotaped evidence in an opinion. In Scott v. Harris, No. 05-1631, the Court rejected the plaintiff's claim that a police officer had violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizure by ramming his car into a ditch during a chase. In response to a dissent, the Court stated:

JUSTICE STEVENS suggests that our reaction to the [police chase] videotape is somehow idiosyncratic, and seems to believe we are misrepresenting its contents. . . . We are happy to allow the videotape to speak for itself. See Record 36, Exh. A, available at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/video/scott_v_harris.rmvb.

And, sure enough, the armchair jurists among us can follow that link, watch the police chase go down, and make up our own minds about its reasonableness.

Scholars are buzzing about this use of the Court's website and its larger implications for judicial transparency, inclusive democracy, etc., and that's all fine and good. But I'm just psyched because, sooner or later, the Court has got to take another obscenity case.

Girls Gone Wild in Zero G

Attention images.google.com searchers: By means of some algorithm that I do not understand, this humble blog post has become a top result for Google Images searches on the term "Girls Gone Wild." I have not seen a spike in traffic this large since the time I ran a post entitled "Kiddypics & Kiddyvids," detailing the bust of a rather-indiscreetly named Internet chat room. While I wish that my musings on religion, consumer culture, and the law could garner the same degree of interest as those on smut, I am happy for any increase in readership, and hope you will bookmark, fave, subscribe, or otherwise return to Holy Prepuce!

For those of you who are not late night cable television viewers (read: not new parents), and thus may not have seen the new "Girls Gone Wild" commercial, I am here to inform you that the latest installment of that oeuvre features a zero-gravity sequence.

Between community service sessions for his use of underage girls in previous videos, GGW impresario Joe Francis seems to have come up with the idea of sending some nubile young ladies and a camera crew aboard a "vomit comet." For those of you unfamiliar with aeronautics, this is an airplane that attains brief periods of freefall by executing a series of parabolic arcs. Typically this technique is used for astronaut training or scientific experiments, but in this instance the mission was essentially that of all previous GGW shoots: record the young "mission specialists" removing their tops, giggling, and fondling one another.

It's often said that the space program has led to some of the greatest technological developments for terrestrial use, and, after Velcro and Tang, this one clearly ranks near the top of the chart. It does, however, tend to detract from the pretense that the women featured in GGW are just ordinary mardi gras / spring break / fraternity party attendees who spontaneously expose themselves whenever they see a video camera. While it is possible that this group of young women would just happen be aboard the same flight as the GGW camera crew, would just happen to find themselves so overwhelmed by the experience as to spontaneously disrobe, and would just happen simultaneously to discover their long-suppressed same-sex desires, it does begin to strain credulity.

Wired Wednesday II: YouTube Drug Cartel Threat Videos

Six months ago, I reported on the alarming trend of internet affronts spawning real life violence. The morals of that post were, in brief, as follows: 1) do not allow your picture to appear on somebody else's boyfriend's Myspace page, if there is any chance his girlfriend's neighbor is a hitman; and 2) if you get into an argument during a multiplayer online game, do not provide your antagonist with your street address to "settle this in person."

To those morals I would now add the following: if you're a popular Mexican crooner, consider staying out of the narcocorrido, or "drug trafficker's ballad" genre. If you must record one, do not make a video mocking a particular drug cartel and threatening to kill its leaders. And if you do make such a video and it gets pirated on YouTube about a thousand times, and then the cartel you mocked starts posting explicit YouTube threat videos against you, consider cancelling your public appearances for a while. Valentín Elizalde didn't, and he paid the price. In fact, you can leave out most of the details and state the moral more generally thus: if a Mexican drug cartel goes to the trouble of making a YouTube video about how it's planning to kill you, that's often a clue that a Mexican drug cartel is planning to kill you.

Holy Prepuce! Is 1, but So 2.0 / Concerns of Police Survivors

This week marks (more or less) the first anniversary of Holy Prepuce! I like to think that the blog has evolved over these months; that it has become less about Deaf pageant winners hit by trains, and more a forum in which my views on habeas corpus and remote control internet sex toys are equally at home. Whatever this space's raison d'être, I thank you, faithful readers, for being along on the ride.

In honor of the anniversary, I have upgraded the joint to take advantage of some Blogger 2.0 features. (Having been honored as Person of the Year for my contributions to Web 2.0, it seemed a fitting way to mark the occasion.)

In addition to making cosmetic changes, I have retrofitted previous posts with "topic" designations, and provided a handy sidebar roster of these categories. So if, for instance, you want to skip over everything to do with Religion or Culture and get right to the Smut, just click on the appropriate link and Smut you shall have.

Blogger 2.0 also generates a stand-alone comments feed, which is http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

If you add this feed to your home page or feed reader, you can follow the lively comments discourse as it goes down. You can also add the feed to Feedblitz, and receive the comments daily by email. (If you don't already receive Holy Prepuce! posts by Feedblitz, you can set that up by clicking on this link -- check out a preview here.)

As always, the main blog feed is http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default And of course you can still read the blog at http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com, but that is so Web 1.0.

As my blogging time has been devoted to these administrative concerns, my actual content this week will be limited to this slim slice of the Prepuce:

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund recently held a news conference to kick off its fundraising drive for the planned National Law Enforcement Museum. On hand for the press to play with was a planned exhibit, a device known euphemistically as a "use-of-force training simulator." This is basically a more sophisticated version of such arcade favorites as Hogan's Alley and Police Trainer 2.

The Washington Post described the simulator experience as follows:

You're a cop. You've been summoned to an alley behind a strip mall that's a known drug hangout. You hail a man and two women lounging by an old car.

The man, a beefy guy in a plaid work shirt, gets belligerent and starts toward you. One of the women grabs his arm to hold him back, and as you focus on them, the other woman slips a pistol from her pocket and opens fire.

Bang. You're dead.

Now, I enjoy a game of Virtuacop 3 as much as the next man, but wasn't this news conference put on by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund? Is is possible that contributors to the fund might have become such owing to a "bang, you're dead"-type scenario involving a close family member?

Indeed, the Post reports that

Also present was Jean Hill, president of Concerns of Police Survivors, which supports families and friends of slain police officers. Hill is the mother of Barry Hill, a 38-year-old Harris County, Tex., deputy sheriff, who was shot seven times and killed while trying to arrest a car thief Dec. 4, 2000.

I wonder how Ms. Hill felt about the demonstration?

Museum planners also used the news conference to announce that the project "will feature a table bearing a manikin on which a simulated post mortem will be projected from overhead cameras."

I'm guessing they did one of those on Barry Hill, too.

Person of the Year!

Oh ye of little faith, who daily email to say, "Holy Prepuce, you will never be Time Magazine's Person of the Year," come now and repent! For as "Me," and thus, in the second person, "You," I am one of the select few chosen for this year's recognition.

Not only am I capable of anteceding a pronoun, but I would count myself a member of the "new digital democracy," to which this "You" refers specifically. As a blogger, I am apparently one of "the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing," one who "will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."

For all of you spoil-sports who say the editors copped out by naming such a large class of people, I would point out that the choice is not without precedent. Time named "the American Fighting-Man" in 1950, "the Hungarian Freedom Fighter" in 1956, "U.S. Scientists" in 1960, the entire world population under age twenty-five in 1966, "Middle Americans" in 1968, and all American women in 1975.

But this recognition of the great "You" of "Web 2.0" or whatever we choose to call the Internet these days has got me thinking. And what am I thinking about? That's right--porn. Because it occurs to me that Time is the same publication that in 1995 reported 83.5% of online content to be pornographic. Yes, the study on which that article was based has since been discredited, and a more recent estimate puts the number closer to 1%, but still and all, nobody can deny that there is an awful lot of smut out there.

Which means that, into the company of Gandhi, De Gaulle, Pope John XXIII, and yours truly, Time is impliedly placing the purveyors of "Sapphic Erotica," "Couples Seduce Teens," and "Big Sausage Pizza." The final site--I swear to God I'm not making this up--is devoted entirely to photo vignettes featuring unsuspecting pizza delivery men who arrive at girls'-nights-in, and are subsequently persuaded to introduce their members through the product.

I--we--stand on the shoulders of giants.

Wired Wednesday

As I have previously noted, the demands of my "real" job at times interfere with Holy Prepuce's core mission to provide complex analysis of the issues that define our age. This week is such a time.

In the limited time available to me, I will present a brief feature entitled "Holy Prepuce! Wired Wednesday," in which I update you on the latest advances in Internet culture and technology.

First, as I am neither under 25 nor Mark Foley, I do not maintain a Myspace.com account. As a result, I am generally unaware of the social customs peculiar to that site. But one cultural norm that has come to my attention is the prohibition against appearing on somebody else's boyfriend's page. In the sacred traditions of Myspace, this infraction is in fact punishable by death--as demonstrated by the recent behavior of one Heather Michelle Kane.

When the 22-year-old Mesa, Arizona resident discovered another woman's photograph on her boyfriend's page, she reacted as any self-respecting netizen might: she offered a neighbor $1000 to kill the encroacher. The neighbor informed a police detective, who posed as the neighbor's hitman buddy and asked Kane for a picture of the victim and a $500 deposit. Coming up with the picture was a snap--Kane just downloaded one from Myspace. The money was a bit trickier; Kane had only $400. After bargaining the detective down to $500 total, Kane handed over the $400 as a deposit and was promptly arrested. The moral of the story is clear: never trust a $500 hitman.

We turn next to an item from Northern Virginia. Critics frequently charge that online social interactions are divorced from reality--a detrimental crutch for those unwilling to engage in the emotional work that face-to-face relationships demand. Such theories are handily disproved by a 17-year-old Arlington resident and an 18-year-old from Centreville. (As of yet, their names have not been released by police.)

Apparantly the two met while playing an online game, and fell into an argument. Unsatisfied with electronic sparring, the young men agreed to meet in person and fight it out. The 17-year-old provided the 18-year-old with his address, and the latter drove the twenty miles to Arlington. The evening ended with the Arlington teen stabbing the Centreville teen three times in the chest. So let's not hear any more of this talk about online gamers' lack of real-world problem solving skills.

Finally, many of you may be familiar with such Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) as Everquest and World of Warcraft. In such fora, players around the world join together online in fantastical environments to slay dragons, form guilds, and develop parallel economies dependent on Chinese gaming sweatshops hawking virtual gold on eBay.

The latest trend appears to be free-form, user-defined environments not connected to "traditional" (e.g. Dungeons & Dragons-like) game elements. Second Life, the most popular entity in this sub-genre, is not even a game in the traditional sense, but rather a virtual world complete with nightclubs, shopping malls, and events hosted by such real-world entities as MTV, Major League Baseball, and the American Cancer Society.

And, it had to happen: Utherverse, Inc. has introduced Red Light Center, a pornographic MMORPG. The good news? Basic membership is free! But don't get too excited. As the FAQs explain:

Basic users have limited abilities and access in Red Light Center. They can choose a clothed avatar and roam the streets. However, they are barred from many buildings which are designated as VIP only areas.

VIP membership will set you back $20/month, but seems well worth it:

What are the advantages of VIP?

First and foremost, as a VIP, you are able to choose a naked avatar, which gives a whole new level of fun to the Red Light Center. Those avatars can have sex with other avatars and there are lots of positions to choose from.

In summary, online life is rich in its diversity, and offers many advantages. With our computers and sinulators, we may enjoy in our own homes opportunities about which our forebears only could have dreamed. Unfortunately, certain traditional diversions, such as hiring cut-rate contract killers or just stabbing people directly, still require forays into the real world. But by working together, we can ensure that technology will provide a brighter future for all mankind.

This has been Holy Prepuce! Wired Wednesday.

Sinulator: The End of History

My friends, we have reached the end of history. As evidence, I present to you the Sinulator. (Do NOT click on this link at work, and especially do not try out this demonstration at the office.)

What is the Sinulator? Only the definitive answer to the question "what is the ultimate purpose of the Internet?" It is a device that "installs in minutes and is easy to use"; one for which "the controls will work on just about anything (Mac, PC, Linux, Palm, WebTV, airport kiosk, etc.)." And what exactly will the Sinulator provide you with at said airport kiosk? Why nothing less than the capability to "call or email anyone anywhere and let them control your sex toy over the internet!"

According to the application for U.S. Patent No. 6,368,268, "Method and Device for Interactive Virtual Control of Sexual Aids Using Digital Computer Networks," humankind has hitherto lacked a means for performing this essential function:

A number of sexual stimulation aids or devices are currently offered that are controlled by a person for self-stimulation, or to stimulate a third party (the "recipient"). . . .

Stimulation devices have been developed that allow the operator to control the rate of stimulation, as well as other factors that affect the amount of stimulation imparted to the recipient. . . .

These stimulation aids, however, require that the operator directly engage the stimulation aid. Only several stimulation aids are known that allow the stimulation aid to be operated by a remote controller-type device, such as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,834,115 to Stewart entitled "Penile Constrictor Ring," . . . and U.S. Pat. No. 5,454,840 to Krakovsky et al. entitled "Potency Package."

Nonetheless, these prior art devices all have the disadvantage that the operator must be in close proximity to the recipient. . . . Thus, no system enables an operator to control a stimulation aid from a location remote from the recipient. . . .

Accordingly, it is a primary object of the invention to provide a system that permits an operator to have interactive control of a sexual aid used to stimulate a recipient that is remotely located from the operator.

Just in case the patent examiners might be confused as to the intended purpose of this device, the applicants provide the following scenario:

By way of example for illustrative purposes, one can envision that a user at the first user interface (10) is using a joy stick to control a stimulation aid located at the second user interface (30). An event might be the user moving the joy stick upwards, or pressing a button. If the stimulation aid is a massager, the movement of the joy stick upwards might generate a control signal to move the massager forward. If, on the other hand, the selected stimulation aid is a penile stimulator having a stroking mechanism, movement of the joy stick upwards may generate a control signal to increase the rate of the stroking mechanism.

And to dispell any concerns that a power surge or short might bring a Sinulation session to a shocking halt, the applicants reassure the examiners that "[t]he remote transmitters (14, 34) preferably are either radio or infrared links that isolate the associated stimulation devices (15, 35) from dangerous current."

The folks at Sinulator.com have done a nice job of transforming design into action, providing a variety of, ahem, "user interfaces", a clever web-based control panel for your airport kiosk needs, a utility by which "performers" can put the control panel on their own live-cam paysites, and a convenient portal to such sites.

But I have to believe that these applications scratch only the surface of the Sinulator's potential. I want to see interfaces for Blackberry, Ipod, Friendster, Instant Messenger, and, what the hell, Wikipedia. I want to look in my Gmail Quick Contacts list, and see custom status messages like "onln bt in mtg--pls use setting 3 or blw."

As a final note of reassurance, I want to make clear that the Sinulator "works great over dial-up," "has been tested to meet FCC standards for both Home and Office use," and "arrives in a discreet brown box."

Rusty Yates More Popular Than Kiddy Porn!

Back in March, I posted an item about the bust of a hapless child pornography ring that had brilliantly named its internet chat room "Kiddypics & Kiddyvids." Little did I know that my brief post of the same title would become this blog's number-one draw of visitors.

It turns out that each Blogspot post generates its own "permalink" webpage, and the post title becomes part of the metadata for that page. This is a lot of techspeak, but the upshot is that if you run a Google search for words that happen to match the title of a Blogspot post, that page will come up fairly high in your results.

From the highly-sophisticated Holy Prepuce! command center, I am able to track the search engine keywords by which visitors find their way to this site. And I have discovered that there are a lot of people out there searching for "kiddypics," "kiddyvids," and combinations thereof. Interestingly, the greatest proportion of these searches comes from the Middle East. While America sleeps, Holy Prepuce! is receiving hits--often dozens per night--from kiddypic-seeking Persians, Libyans, Saudis, and more. Of course, the joke is on these visitors, since the post actually mocks punters stupid enough to put such words on the Internet from traceable IP addresses. (That said, I'm doing the same thing right now, but hopefully the FBI will read the rest of this post before it puts an axe through my door.)

In any event, searches involving "kiddypics" and "kiddyvids" were the consistent leaders among my hit-generating terms until this week, when Andrea Yates went back on trial for the murders of her children. With renewed interest in the Yates family, another early post, in which I discussed the "trade-up" marriage of Rusty Yates to the former Laura Arnold, began to garner attention. Within a day, combinations of "Rusty Yates," "Laura Arnold," and "remarries" had eclipsed "kiddypics" and "kiddyvids" as the new kings of the search term castle. In case you are interested, here are the current Holy Prepuce! keyword rankings:

#1 rusty yates remarries
#2 kiddypics & kiddyvids
#3 laura arnold yates
#4 laura arnold rusty yates
#5 (tie) rusty yates laura arnold

kiddypics
#7 (tie) rusty yates new bride photos
kiddyvids
prepuce
#10 (tie) holy prepuce
laura arnold rusty
mostly gizzards
laura arnold yates pictures
rusty yates new bride pictures
paintball on espn2
rusty yates remarries
stockholm joy paintball
rusty yates laura arnold
us paintball championships
rusty yates laura arnold photos
rusty yates and laura arnold
laura arnold yates bride
rusty yates new bride
kiddypics kiddyvids

I guess there is hope for the world's children after all--apparently more people want to see them drowned by psychotic parents than featured in smut.

How 'bout that paintball?

Walking Directions

Ask.com has been promoting itself as a better alternative to Google, and while I cannot agree entirely, I must share one feature that I adore: the ability to toggle between driving and walking directions in the maps utility.

This feature is of course useful for getting around cities, since pedestrians need not obey one-way signs but have difficulty merging onto the expressway. But the real beauty of this option is that the programmers have not imposed any obvious limits on distance. Fancy a stroll from D.C. to New York? Start out towards E St. NW, amble along the Bear Mountain State Parkway, and 135 hours later grab a knish at the corner of Broadway and Chambers. Not ready to rest? Another 98 hours will have you walking the Freedom trail in Boston, after a scenic tour of the Pioneer Valley. And if you've remembered your passport, you can promener onward to lovely Montréal in just under 144 more hours, or to Toronto in 193.

It's just one more way that the Internet can help us beat our dependence on foreign oil!

#1 & #2 / Venetian Killer Robots

Still on the road, so two quick tokes on the Blackberry:

A) One of the things I enjoy most about Italian plumbing (and there are many): in an effort to conserve water, newly-installed toilets are equipped with a dual flushing mechanism. A smaller button releases a modest amount of water, and a larger button sets off a more voluminous flush that most Americans would regard as typical. The buttons are not actually labelled "#1" and "#2", but one knows that it is implied.

B) From "Rick Steves' Italy 2006", p. 69:

From the piazza, you can see the bronze men [on the clock tower] swing their huge clappers at the top of each hour. In the 17th century, one of them knocked an unsuspecting worker off the top and to his death--probably the first-ever killing by a robot.

Brian J. Doyle

This is not meant to be the Stupid Sex Offender blog, but I cannot let it go unreported that a deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security has just been arrested for sending pornographic videos over the internet to a Flordia detective posing as a fourteen year-old girl.

Now, I recognize that DHS is not technically a law-enforcement agency, and I realize that the boys in the press office may not be as up on investigative techniques as the front line operatives, but I would hope that any DHS employee would, at a minimum, understand the following:

1. The internet is not a good place to do things you want to keep secret from the government.
2. In the course of doing something illegal, you generally don't want to give out your real name, or brag that you are a deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security.
3. If you want underage girls to contact you for illicit purposes, it is probably not a good idea to give out your office or government-issue mobile telephone numbers.
4. Contrary to popular belief, there is not a hoard of early-adolescent girls clamoring for sex with 55-year-old men. If you meet one on the Internet, she likely has a badge and a fondness for the Bavarian Kremes.

I note also that the DHS released an official statement on Mr. Doyle's arrest, no doubt in response to a flurry of media inquiries. Isn't that just the way of things? You're getting ready to close up the press office for the night when the media start pounding at the door, and your damned deputy press secretary isn't answering his phone! Where the hell could that Doyle be? Probably on the internet again, that little dweeb.

RaptureLetters.com

You may or may not be familiar with the “rapture” concept in the American Evangelical Christian tradition--a reasonable description may be found here--but the basic idea is that, prior to the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth, and just prior to the seven-year horror show known as the “tribulation,” all saved Christians will be assumed directly into heaven. This is the premise of the wildly-popular Left Behind series of books, films, radio plays, etc., and is also, some would argue, a driving force behind current U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Well, in case you’re concerned that un-saved friends and family won’t know what’s happened to you after your car is found in a ditch with your clothes in a neat pile on the driver's seat, fear no more! www.raptureletters.com will send an email to your left-behind pals, announcing that good old holier-than-them has been assumed. And, as a bonus, the standard email (alas, you cannot edit it) will also give them some handy tips for getting saved themselves--it’s not too late!

I can’t tell whether these guys believe it themselves, or whether it’s just a moneymaking scam: the site is described as a “personal ministry,” and while registration is free, a donations page is displayed prominently after you register a name. According to the donations page, “Ninety percent of all donations [they] receive are used to further the kingdom of God and 10% goes toward administration costs.” I can’t figure out precisely what this means (any better than they can figure out whether “percent” is singular or plural). I do know that if I were running that site, “administration costs” would be my salary as webmaster, and “the kingdom of God” would coincidentally be located in my apartment.