fuckphilosophy.com

(this one dates back about a month or so)

Why is a flattened bird funny? Imagine that: a flattened dried out bird on the side of the road, like a piece of jerky with feathers sticking out of it. Isn’t that funny? Or a squirrel. Funny, eh? It isn’t funny when they are still bloody and covered with flies, but when they are flat and dried out it is pretty funny, don’t you agree?  Well, if you don’t see how that is funny, then I will try to explain what is funny about it and then you can think it is funny too.

I don’t know if the following is actually why it is that a flattened dried dead bird is funny, all I know is that it has happened on occasion that I have walked past one and thought it was funny. It was just an intuition that there was something funny in there, but I haven’t tried to put my finger on what it is until now. I know why it is funny. It is funny for the same reason that ‘Bambi vs. Godzilla’ might be funny, or those stupid flash games where you see how many cute little bunny rabbits you can pick off. It is kinda like that. What is funny about that? I guess it has to do with cute things being subjected to savagery. Why is it funny to see cute things subjected to savagery? It wouldn’t be so funny to watch a bunny rabbit struggle while it is being attacked by a large snake. It might be kinda funny to just see a still photo of the bunny’s face sticking out of the snakes mouth though…right? It also wouldn’t be so funny to see a dried up flattened cat. But a tiny bird, like the the size of a parakeet or smaller? Now that is funny. I guess I still haven’t explained what is funny about that. In cute things, we possibly see this cute face as somehow disingenuous, or belying some sinister marketing ploy or something, and therefore one might get some pleasure seeing this revealed. But, like I said earlier, it isn’t just a will to deface cute things, but particularly small things I think. A panda bear can be cute, but a flattened dried panda bear, rigid like a table-top with black and white fur sticking out of it, that isn’t funny. My theory is that a little bird seems less real; it is just like a little wind-up toy. They are like little disposable pockets of meat, and getting run over is like popping individual bubbles of bubble wrap. We have this heavenly sunrise morning image where Edvard Grieg’s ‘Morning Mood’ is playing in the background and the little tweety birds are chirping outside the window. Play that youtube link, but now imagine all those birds as dried up and flattened on the side of the road. I don’t think I can explain it any better than that. If you don’t see that as funny, then I don’t know how I can help you.

UPDATE: I saw a flattened chipmunk today and it was at least as funny as one of those dried flattened generic birds (like the brown ones, or the ones with the white chest) with the non-distinct tweet.

I just realized something the other day: eggs are alive. Chicken eggs. The chicken eggs that you buy at the store. They are living things. This struck me. Maybe this is common knowledge and I just never cared enough to remember that bit of info. But I suspect that that isn’t the case. Rather, I’m guessing that either people don’t usually think about eggs in this way, or that they just don’t care and it is completely uninteresting information. My point isn’t an ethical point; I eat eggs all the time – I cooked and ate eggs as I was thinking about this. Like I said, this struck me as strange. Here is why: an egg is a single cell. One of those old dead healed zits that you pick off your face, that little packet of dead skin probably contains hundreds of cells at least. A chicken egg: ONE SINGLE CELL. In other words: it isn’t composed of smaller cells. It is composed of filmy stuff, different kinds of plasms n shit, some DNA and whatever else. And cells are alive right? Cells are the least unit of life, no? So it is a cell, like a big ‘ol metroid n’shit. And they are all lined up and lookin all identical n’shit sitting in the carton. Them cute little metroids. Anyways…

When I told people of my realization, a common response was, “No they’re not. They’re not fertilized.” To these people I’d like to say the following: get over your father, he didn’t create the universe. No, I’m not finished. You think that it is because a spermatozoon broke through that life was created? Is there something magical about sperm? Sperm is alive, right? Exactly. Ya’ll will agree that sperm is alive, but not eggs? That is some sexist bullshit. Now you know.

First of all Xavier: Renegade Angel is a animated tv show. It is animated like those little cinematic interludes in computer games (is it called machinima? do people use that term?). They are all 10 minutes long or so. They are from cable television somewhere.

The whole show is discombobulated mumbo jumbo that gravitates around mystical hippy trippy “philosophical” blather. There is this delusional surfer harmless hippy bimbo freak (who has the legs of Pan, 6 nipples, a beak and one of his arms is a snake) speaks with this weird quasi valley girl accent, and when the accent really comes through (which happens to occur on the word ‘life’), it echos. He is consistently getting his ass kicked by redneck assholes who tell him to “taste the pain!” Xavier is what would happen if you took a world conjured up by nymphy crystal worshiping stoners who probably met someone who claimed to know something about philosophy one day when they were high, and who have fractals and rainbow unicorn posters all over their walls. If you took someone from that world and stuck him in some redneck zombie town, that would be my poor approximation of the strange world of Xavier. (And the title/logo looks like a cross between some old arcade game like Zaxxon and the animated tv show Jem (G.I. Joe/Transformers for girls).)

There are many repeating themes that, for some strange reason, do not get old. It seems to get funnier and funnier every time some red neck dudes start picking on Xavier and telling him to “taste the pain”. Instead of getting redundant, the echoing “life…life…life” gets weirder and weirder, like repeating a word until it sounds like nonsense. It is brilliant because it plays on profundity (primitive spiritual wisdom, philosophy, druggy guru shit, etc), and creates something that resembles this profundity out of total ridiculous nonsense.

Here are a couple memorable lines:

“You’re going away for a long time bliss baby.”

“What the human intimance you doin’, freak, beastia-ulatin’ that skeeter?”

Philosophy is an annoying smudge that won’t come off of glasses that you can’t see without. Philosophy is also that annoying scratch that you can’t itch.

Here is a definition that came out in class the other day:

Philosophy is a good ratio of blabber to meaningful content.

Then the question was asked: what is a “good” ratio? I don’t remember what the answer to that question was.