that Joni Mitchell song where she sings ‘I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now’ - but it’s just a meaningless, unfunny, dumb-ass comment if you are clueless about that Joni Mitchell song. Or, in a different episode of MST 3000 we have the camera giving us a view of Washington D. C. from an airplane perhaps 2,000 feet above the ground. You can see the Pentagon and the Washington Monument and the Capitol dome, and maybe if you look real carefully you can see the Lincoln Memorial and the Watergate complex and the Kennedy Center etc., etc.. And then one of the robots says: ‘It’s Washingtonland!’ So this is funny because it’s like the robot is a little kid who knows very little about the workings of the government in Washington D. C., but is a kid who has been to Disneyland, and is very familiar with Disneyland, and Tommorowland etc., etc., which I suppose some people, like soldiers or patriots, big-time flag wavers like Bob Dornan or Oliver North, might find it tragic rather than comedic. The line ‘It’s Washingtonland!’ seems so wretchedly dumb-ass unfunny if you can’t just see millions of dumb-ass American kids who know all about Disneyland but know next to nothing about American history: George Washington, the Revolution against the British, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, The Federalist Papers, the checks and balances of the three branches of the federal government, the Bill of Rights, Frederick Douglas, Dred Scott, Abe Lincoln, the Civil War, Susan B. Anthony and the Suffragettes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Dubois, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Tupac, P Diddy, Snoop Dogg, the whole nine yards of World War II and the Cold War, Korea and Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Liberation Movement, you know, millions of dumb-ass American kids you don’t know anything about the whole panorama of Americana, but they know tons of stuff about Star Wars and Disneyland and who know whole encyclopedias about video games. If you have never heard of Judy Chicago, if you can’t place her as some avant-garde artist, then you won’t think it is funny when one of the robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000 says that some artist on the screen looks like a young Judy Chicago. I checked out Judy Chicago on Google Images. There’s a picture of her where the young Judy Chicago looks a lot like the young Beverly Garland. And now I’m thinking the guys on MST 3000 must have mentioned this similarity, as Beverly Garland movies where some of their favorites to parody, and they do mention Judy Chicago a lot, but it is only today, 2.5.17, Super Bowl Sunday, and I’m watching Lady Gaga’s performance in Houston – I always knew she was a superstar – and then there was the epic comeback, in the Game for the Ages, with Brady and the boys handing Atlanta the crushing defeat, snatching so rudely, like General Sherman’s army, snatching so rudely sweet victory from the Falcons’ grasp when they thought they had it in the bag – anyway, I finally discovered, on my own, independent of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the uncanny resemblance between the young Judy Chicago and the young Beverly Garland. This resemblance is one of those odd quirks of the universe, like Lincoln being shot in Ford theatre, and Ford being shot in a Lincoln – shot by Squeaky Fromm, that Manson Family member, like both Jefferson and Adams dying on the same day, July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, like Michaelangelo Antonini and that other film director, Ingmar Bergmann, dying on the exact same day, like Hitler and Napoleon both invading Russia on the say day of the same month, albeit in different centuries but with the same disastrous results, like Wolfgang Pauli dying in that hospital room in Zurich, room number 137, see his Wikipedia page for the relevant info here.…In one film spoofed by MST 3000, about these freshmen college girls majoring in Home Economics, it’s funny when one of the robots imitates the voice of a grumpy husband bitching at his house-wife about how much she spent on a dress, whereas if she was not majoring in Home Economics, if she was not set on a future where she is cast forever in the role of a house-wife, or if she would at least get a part-time job, then she wouldn’t have to listen to some husband bitching at her about the money she spent on a dress. This is not really sophisticated humor – some guy bitching about what his house-wife wife spends on a dress. This is not to say all juvenile humor is crude or vulgar or politically incorrect. Like in that one South Park episode where the little girl is being given an award for her good schoolwork, and then she stand up in front of the school and reads her speech: ‘You honor me..’ But she doesn’t pronounce the word ‘honor’ correctly: she pronounces the h in the word honor, so this is funny, because of the startling contrast, I mean the kid is receiving an academic achievement award though she doesn’t even know how to pronounce the word ‘honor’ correctly. So here’s some South Park humor doesn’t involve human excrement, so that’s sort of a triumph for a South Park episode. Or take that Monty Python skit where the first man comes in for a job interview and the guy doing the hiring, the second guy, looks at the application and says to the first guy: ‘I see here that your name is Mr. Tiger.’ And then the first guy says: ‘That’s right, Tiger.’ And then the second guy gets all terrified, and starts frantically looking around the room they are in, asking in a frantic voice: ‘Tiger, where?’ So this sort of silliness is funny because of the startling contrast: you’re expecting two guys wearing suits at a job interview to be pretty serious, but the one guy is being stupid in thinking that some ferocious 700 pound tiger might actually be lurking in a company’s human resources office. And of course if the actors weren’t natural comedians then it wouldn’t be so funny. So, this Tiger skit is neither crude nor Politically Incorrect nor highly sophisticated humor: you don’t have to know any songs from Joni Mitchell, which by now are getting to be pretty old songs, and you don’t have to know the name or the oeuvre of Judy Chicago in order to appreciate the humor. In this one Mystery Science Theater 3000, where the robots are dissecting a film about a heist at San Francisco airport – Pernel Roberts who played second fiddle to Loren Greene on Bonanza, was in it, as was, Clu Gulager – though he was on The Virginian, another classic TV Western, where of course James Drury was the big superstar. Tab Hunter was in the film being parodied by MST 3000. He was sort of the Robert Redford of B movies back in the 50s and early 60s. Anyway, the MST 3000 comments were pretty funny. There’s a shot of a big jet taking off, belching exhaust fumes, and one of the robots says, ‘EPA officials jetting off to the Paris summit,’ or something like that, which is very unfunny if you are clueless about, you know…
Wikipedia, in it’s article on Disneyland, mentions something which I had forgotten. When Nikita Khrushchev came to the USA the two things he most wanted to do, the two things that were on the Top of his List, were to go to Disneyland and to meet John Wayne. That’s sort of funny. I had read a book on the Rothschilds years ago and was super impressed with them. Wikipedia has a really interesting article on the Rothschilds. Paul Johnson, the great historian, tells us in it that one woman started to write a book on them entitled Lies about the Rothchild’s but then she found out it was impossible to know what was really true about them. Anyway, we’re informed that there are lots of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories surrounding them. Wikipedia has the most amazing articles on people like John von Neumann, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Norbert Weiner etc. This Wikipedia info on John von Neumann is just the most amazing stuff….If you say we should nuke the USSR tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say we should nuke the USSR at 5:00, I will ask why not at 3:00? He was speaking in 1950. I’ve read The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. I’ve read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Robert Conquest’s Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, so I sort of admire von Neumann’s ferocious resolve, but still, dropping H-bombs on both the guilty and the innocent is just not what any sane person should be advocating. Von Neumann was as responsible as anyone for making the bombs which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, on the one hand there is no doubt he was a towering genius, but then on the other hand, it is a hugely dumb-ass thing to be all in favor of nuking thousands of innocent civilians…I really should give some money to Wikipedia next time they hit me up for a donation.
I just wish money wasn’t so tight at the moment…Wikipedia says of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, one of the world’s greatest mathematicians / physicists, that he would descend the stairs in the morning and his kids would say to him: have you learned how to multiply multiples yet, papa? That’s really cute. Multiplying multiples, or what we now call the dot product and the cross product, in vector analysis, took a long time to perfect.
So getting back to this dumb-ass angle, can anyone prove that dumb-asses actually exist? I mean anyone can act like a dumb-ass. And anyone can say dumb-ass things. But this doesn’t make one a dumb-ass. A true, bone fide dumb-ass is someone who has no chance of ever wising up ever in his life. Look at John von Neumann calling for H-bombs dropped on the USSR. But you’re talking about a person who was absolutely not a dumb-ass when you talk about John von Neumann. Even in the enlightenment of the 20th and 21st centuries the unreflecting popular