Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Saturday, November 16, 2002
00:42 - Preaching Laughter	(top)
It's been remarked here and there in the blogosphere that comedians seem to be the public figures who most frequently exhibit that they have heads securely welded to their shoulders. Forget political demagogues and religious leaders; from the mouths of comedians does all-too-frequently come wisdom. Free of the strictures of political correctness, unafraid to offend any particular "aggrieved" group among their audience (who waives their right to be offended by the act of purchasing the tickets), comics get to say things that so many other figureheads with wide reach are muzzled from saying. I just got back from seeing a Lewis Black show at the Punchline Comedy Club in Sacramento with my folks. Black is the "angry comic" guy on the Daily Show and elsewhere on Comedy Central; I haven't seen much of him to date, but I'll have to keep an eye out for him in the future. Nothing quite beats seeing him from four feet away and at ankle level, with our dinner-theater table actually touching the edge of the stage. Anyway-- after nearly an hour of gut-busting material covering Halloween costumes, Enron-esque CEOs, candy corn, drinking water, his Jewish upbringing, and creationists, he suddenly dropped to a serious tone and posited that in life three things are really important: patriotism, faith, and humor. He said that the biggest reason that our current enemies are our enemies is that they've "been wandering the desert for thousands of years and never run into a knock-knock joke. ...Guess that's the price they pay for living in tents." He went on to claim that if only there were a tradition of humor in the Islamic world, nobody would have ever been able to stand in front of a group of men and say in all seriousness that if they blow themselves up in the name of Allah, they'd be met in heaven by 72 virgins. "They'd recognize it as the punchline of a joke!" I've said that kind of thing before here, myself; after all, I haven't seen a whole helluva lot of evidence for comedy and not-taking-oneself-so-damned-seriously in that community. Unless you count the cartoons of M. Khalil of The Arab News, which I don't believe fits the description of "humor". Anyway... on the drive home from Sacramento, I encountered what one of the featured comedians (whose name I can't remember) described in great detail having encountered the night before: an immense bank of fog-- "Tule fog", they call it-- that rolls off the Sacramento River and blankets Highway 80 all the way across the Central Valley. And when I say "blankets", I mean "fills with a palpable mass that light cannot penetrate". The Central Valley is our own little Midwest; it has Eppie's and Quizno's restaurants, which don't exist in the Bay Area, and used-car dealerships are closed on Sundays for church. But I didn't get to see any of that on the drive home. I got to see fog. It would be ineffectual to describe it in numerical terms: I could say how I could only see twenty feet ahead, or couldn't see past two of the reflectors on the edge of the freeway, and it would tell you nothing useful. It's only marginally more effective if I tell you that I couldn't see the approaching headlights of the cars going the opposite direction on the other side of the median, or that the only way I could tell I was going under an overpass was that the air and the sound suddenly and briefly grew thicker and darker-- after which the subtly changed light allowed me to see the beads of water gathering on my windows and migrating backwards. No, I think the only way I can convey what it was like would be to say how on a 75mph freeway, I was going about 60, hunched forward over the wheel, hands gripping it at the top, jinking back and forth as my vision-- which petered out after the second reflector, meaning that I couldn't tell whether the next reflector ahead would be in a straight line or a sudden curve-- told me to react on the basis that there might be a car right in front of me, or there might not, and I'd never see it until it was too late-- gritting my teeth and yelling Jeez! . . . Crap! . . . Fuck!! . . . into the night. I shot out of the fogbank with a whoof sound right at Vacaville, which I could tell because of the giant tall tombstone-towers on the sides of the freeway which advertise malls and the stores in them. And shortly afterwards, I was back in the mountains, and then I was back in the Bay. No wonder geeks like California. Travel fifty miles, and it's like you've traveled to a different state, only in virtual reality.