[Note: inside baseball. Skip it if this kind of thing gets feeling all post-beating Rodney King – ed]
Presented without comment. Except to note that the terminal on which this was filmed may in fact be the very terminal through which SEK was outrageously molested by the many harassing emails I never sent him — and through which he and an LA DDA discussed the myriad legal transgressions I never committed.
Other than that, though, enjoy!
Awesome, isn’t it? It’s like “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” only with its trademark participatory irony and winking replaced by self-conscious prop placement (look at all those books! These dudes must be, like, wicked smart!) and unflattering haircuts.
Which doesn’t mean I didn’t laugh watching it. Because Lord, did I ever laugh watching it.
It was like meta going all meta on meta. With ludicrous cowboy hats and jowel-disguising beardlets thrown in just to make me profoundly grateful.
Honestly. I nearly came.
Are there no barbers in Irvine? Or orthodontists? I get the Emo glasses (sooo professorial!) but the rest is overkill.
Also, messy offices are only permissible if one is a STEM professor.
Orthodontics? On a ‘lecturer’s’ salary?
Not once you calculate in the cost of butt ugly eye wear.
The books?
Oh please, those are the ones the real, tenured, don’t-have-to-interact-with-undergrads professor types got for free and still didn’t think worth keeping.
If he’s parents had loved him, ThomasD, they would have straightened up that malocclusion when he was in grade school.
Office-wise, I figure he’s in a carrel in the library. The give away is that there are no obnoxious displays of his diploma(s).
The 2007 image posted by R.S. McCain doesn’t really do him justice.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xSmgGHetLCs/UWdt0nccKII/AAAAAAAAPlc/BzQfzVIQ4_8/s1600/Scott_Eric_Kaufman_UC_Irvine_2007.JPG
McCain is a man of honor. A more recent photo of SEK further into the “butterball douchebag” stage of his life cycle could potentially skew the readers’ perception in McCain’s favor. It’s the same reason hunters won’t shoot a bird on the ground.
On the ground is about the only way you can shoot a turkey.
Feathered, or metaphorical.
sek is like clippy
Except Clippy existed for a reason. A stupid, nonsensical reason, but a reason nonetheless.
Game of Thrones?
Robert Jordan called from limbo to say George R. R. Martin needs a fucking editor.
I stopped reading the book when the guy porking his sister, the queen, tossed the kid who caught them out the tower window.
Also, if you can fit your collection onto your shelves, you don’t have all that many books, really.
Some dweebs are badly in need of a fresh-air life. And, musculature.
Depends on how many shelves you have. My mother-in-law has bought us nearly a score of 6′-tall bookcases for the big room downstairs.
Though, we have bookcases elsewhere too, and we still haven’t unpacked and shelved all of our books. And she’ll be bringing a bunch when she moves in…
You don’t need shelves, you need stacks. And maybe a structural engineer.
If you have enough shelf-space, that just means you stopped adding to your collection.
That, or you’ve gone digital, I guess.
you need stacks
Now you’re talking!
Sounds fantastic, McGehee! You can have an actual library, with a sliding ladder to help reach the top shelves. Fireplace, leather seating and a dog. Okay, a nice oil painting of a dog since you have a home stuffed full of cats.
What was that, page 2 lol?
I wish I had your foresight. I stopped reading them when Martin decided a movie deal was more important than his readers.
I tried to watch it. Got a wonky connection and it froze up at exactly 1:55.
Once I stopped laughing I realized this is another mark in the “yes there is a God” column.
a 4-6-5-6-5-3-4 triple play
Because Satan Is a Yankees Fan
Notes for next Constitution:
Prosecutorial immunity (and sovereign immunity in general) need to go.
That’s a dick move. Jones’ fucking error was worse.
This, in the comments thread following a fucking hourlong commentary on some video rendition of a book series that may never be completed, is entirely appropriate.
No way am I wasting that much of my life. But for SEK, a fellow who absolutely loves to hear himself talk, it must have been orgasmic. Plus, he can loop the video and just keep listening.
Sorry. I had it playing while in the background and found I couldn’t stand it.
It’s like listening to Trekkies talk about characters and Roddenberry. And I consider myself a Trekkie.
So, do you like Kirk or do you like Pichard?
I’m not going to watch those videos. It just doesn’t look like anything I would ever want to have in my head.
Kind of like Army Wives. Some people might find it terribly interesting, but I am not one of those.
I watched the first season on game of Thrones and read the books. I liked the first two books. Afterward it seemed to slip away and the last book Dance of Dragons will probably be the last one I read since I stopped caring about 1/3 of the way through which condition continued until I finished the book.
To put it blunty the TV show is about 28% boobs and 12% dwarf by volume and I am currently (post Rome and the two Spartacus episodes I saw) rather tired of men saying the word cock gratuitously and with either a brummy or south London accent.
Kirk by a mile.
Kirk or Picard?
Gibby, hands down
Gibby — dunno how that other deal worked.
“Honestly. I nearly came.”
At least someone *almost* enjoyed that.
sek: Je ris de votre direction générale.
this is the third SEK thread I seen on the internet all weekend
two here and one at that McCain person’s internet site
Fat Trick !!!
does it suk to be sek
The books are hilarious. They always are. I so want the camera to zoom in on titles and they all be ridiculous,
The Hidden Life of Waffle Irons Hellen Keller,
Mastering the Bunny Slope Sonny Bono,
Chevrolet Corvette Convertibles to Die For Steve Irwin,
Bridges T. Kennedy,
The Vampire Sushi Chef Anne Rice, and so forth.
At at my own place I’ve given this some thought . The bookshelf delivery men were jealous, or pretended to be convincingly, and that was reassuring. They said they wanted to keep a few. LOLs all around, boy, those guys sure were funny. I filled them with my books that were stacked up all over the place.
Then these two other guys come over, and the new one went over to the book cases and studied the shit out of tthe titles. He’s read them but they were not making that much sense. I observed him awhile, briefly, then offered,
“They’re all pop-ups.”
“Oh.”
A whole wall of them.
But when the background for a video is a law library I suspect wall paper and if not that then cigar boxes. Nobody uses those law books. I never once saw any lawyer ever go up to one of those things, pull out a book and reference it. Not once. I asked them and they all go, “Yeah, we use ’em,” and I’m all, “B.s.” Its all electronic innit.
So what’s in the cigar boxes? Toys I bet. Sex toys. Paraphernalia. Drugs. The hard stuff. Booze and such. Lawyers are hard. Leather things. Handcuffs.
jocks and lawyers they all came to kick it in the sticks
I haven’t seen chemistry like this since those screencaps of chat rooms from To Catch a Predator.
You should comment more, bour3.
“this is the third SEK thread I seen on the internet all weekend”
There are thousands of threads about the Kartrashians, sparkly-vampire-boy and sparkly-vampire-slut-chick.
That doesn’t make them important, yo.
just wondering if maybe he might could be “trending” as the kids say
#nondescriptvan
#candy
I could only watch for about three minutes. There is only so much torture one can possibly endure.
Was anyone else wondering how much it would cost to pay these men to make future generations unemployable as well?
A nasty heroin habit would be a better career path.
Want to see just how vapid, clueless, and mindlessly bound to a horribly distorted historical/cultural context todays young up and comers are?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2013/04/13/tax-evaders-video-game-sheds-interactive-light-on-corporate-greed/
This guy made this “message” game that is a rip off of space invaders where you shoot down evil (named) corporations before they can fly off without paying their fair share of taxes.
The guy made this thinking he was an edgy free thinking subversive youth rebel. He is punk rock in the name of the man. He wants the revolution to happen on behalf of the interests of the current authorities. He is TIRED of the poor underdog government being cheated, and he is NUTTING UP to speak truth to…companies that are um…obeying the existing tax laws as written by the government. God damn it! His collar isn’t tight enough and his leash is too long so he went and exercised (or maybe more accurately exorcised) his freedom to make a video game with a message.
That message is apparently “Baaaaaaah…comrade motherfucker! If you ain’t a sheep like me, then you must be a goat!”
WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN THESE KID’S HEADS?
From your link, palaeo, we find this:
So, that’s 500,000 fewer SEKs?
Money well saved, by my reckoning.
I thought GE’s fair share was $0 for that year.
Also, how many teachers could we hire if our corporate tax rate was low enough that it wasn’t worth the bother of parking money overseas?
I tried to block out content for a vampire novel last summer. But it turned into a ‘renaissance mobster conan’ sort of thing and it frankly stopped making sense to me when the golem thing turned up and the vampire tried to fight it and realized that it was not going to go well when he tore it’s lower mandible off and it didn’t care and kept coming.
But the idea was to reclaim the vampire from being sparkly boy band things to be imaginary boy friend/demon lovers to stupid girls trapped in adolescence. My vampire would be a boy’s action vampire to satisfy the adventurous spirit of male adolescence. Stavros became a vampire during a war analogous to the crusades to become a sort of super soldier and the war was lost anyway, so he ended up wandering around until he settled in a town an haunted it for three hundred years.
Part of my vampire formula was that vampires only feed on human blood for 30 to 100 years after which they mature into a more powerful and patient form and lose all interest in human prey and instead start eating other vampires. The vampires are themselves dead people with a strange organism in them that rebuilds the body and mimics the thought processes from when they were alive to the point where they crave companionship or other things that it is not rational for a vampire to want.
The story of my vampire Stavros begins are he returns to the monastery where he was secretly made to be a weapon and locked himself in a tower and is writing his memoirs (or so he tells himself) and contemplating suicide (or perhaps faking his death).
Terrified monks and guards try to keep him trapped inside while he writes and he taunts them through the door and asks them for more quills and inks. They wonder if they should burn the monastery down just to get rid of him. Stavros is grieving because his human artist friend, who he has visited and secretly patronized since early youth, as a sort of pet and bowling buddy, has just died of old age and Stavros experiences a crisis of faith. He can no longer stand his lonely existence pretending to be a human, killing organized criminal types for money, and hunting other vampires for transformational food when he catches scent of one.
He wants his humanity back but he never really was human. This vampire thing has chosen the form and simulated the personality of a flawed person who simply cannot forever endure the life of a vampire and it is mentally failing. But a vampire has very strong instincts and so conventional suicide may not be an option.
Thus Stavros may need to hunt down a vampire who is stronger than him and find peace as the prey. And he starts to wonder if some of the vampires he has eaten let him win in the past and if this isn’t a sort of a post-biological senility senility process that weeds out those vampires who aren’t stable enough to make it to 500 or so.
And in the course of this Stavros is documenting about how he “became” a vampire, what he knows about other vampires, his adventures with his friend, being a supernaturally powerful rogue trying to fill the time between finding other vampires to eat, how he was grievously wounded and almost died and had to heal in a death like sleep for five years in a cave , how life and crime work in the city, how the world has changed in 300 years, fearing that he was responsible for the plague two hundred years ago, and that sort of stuff.
Anyway it was fun for a while.
I’m gonna go with… more.
A related questions is how many good teachers could we hire if we fired SEK?
I’m gonna go with… at least one more.
“Fat Trick !!!”
You owe me a keyboard.
(Pasta with squid in ink sauce if you must know.)
I bet if he was worried about being fired SEK might find a good teacher buried somewhere in there.
“so, how many teachers could we hire”
The thing is, we aren’t really hiring them. Da’ gov is. And I’m not sure that demand for them actually exists. What we need is more competition.
PUNK ROCKERS RAISING HELL FOR THE GOVERNMENT! QUESTION AUTONOMY!
QUESTION MARKS!
I’m not a fan of the vampire genre, but I did enjoy The Historian
If you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose between the Harry Potter series and the Bella and her boy toys series for my daughter to read someday, I think I’d thank you to pull the trigger and be about your business.
QUESTION MARX?
The Historian was a first-rate novel. I haven’t read Kostova’s second novel, though, because from the description it didn’t seem nearly as interesting.
That’s weird. I read it as well.
Was it marketed directly towards our type or something?
Think I grabbed it at O’Hare. Probably just based on the title.
I read Harry Potter. I rather liked it until they hit the tween years and started bickering and getting upset while people died around them. I dunno. I’ve read lot worse.
I tried reading part of a Twilight book after discussion on here last sumer I think, and my god it’s terrible. Meyer’s prose is not just poor, it is a farcical atrocity. Not just in a purple romance novel for teens sort of way. It’s just pointlessly visual and not at all interesting about how it portrays those visuals. It is haphazardly emotional to the point where I wonder if they are all wearing mood dials from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The so called characters are worse than serviceable 2D, they are formless puddles poured into bad stereotypes of social roles that constantly mutate as the author’s whim demands.
A lot of it is sort of like someone pissing in the corner of a round room because they don’t know that they can’t. You are expected to ignore all the strange contradictions because they have a fashionable purpose rather than a meaningful narrative purpose. The details are jewelry and they only clash if you like totally don’t understand fashion, okay? It’s all a checklist of stuff to win cool points with a not very observant or critical reader who just wants checklists of cool features instead of anything that might pass for thoughtful integration of characteristics into something that could inhabit a consistent fictional world without setting off crazy bullshit alarms a dozen at a time.
For instance: Edward is an 80 year old boy who was made a vampire in the teens and 20’s to save him from the flu of 1918. And he’s going to high school. Though he’s 80. That’s either twisted (he’s a creep) or pathetic (vampires have a form of brain damage and can’t grow past what they were when they were made). No, to Meyer it’s PREFECT and dreamy.
Or perfect even.
I ordered ‘the Historian’ from Amazon. Should be here by Tuesday it says.
It says something about the cultural rot that I love you so much, Ima gonna damn you to an eternity of undeath is an unquestioned success, doesn’t it?
I blame Francis Ford Coppola.
But the revised vampire premise of Twilight is that undeath is all sparkly in sunlight and athletic and healthily immortal. Sure, it’s a little hard to not eat people sometimes but we just eat animals instead after some dramatic face making giggle. And it’s very exclusive since if someone makes a vampire without asking the permission of the gothy Italian vampires those Italian vampires will come and kill the “undocumented” vampire with fire (no nerds). The old folktales are just jealous ugly nerd stories n’ stuff.
The Oatmeal’s take on Twilight:
http://theoatmeal.com/story/twilight
And the Kanamits were only here because they wanted to help.
In his backyard, under the persimmon tree.
It bears bitter, bitter fruit, but none so bitter as life without another SEK to love. O cursed fate, that God made but one of him!
Quiet, pwease, Pwoteins.
I’m hunting wacists.
*Shhhhh*
My theory:
The devil came to Stephenie Meyer and told her that he’d bring her millions of dollars if she just shit on a piece of magic paper and so she did. The magic page turned all that shit into lots of shitty books that could only have been written by a mindless expulsive greedy anus that cared nothing for mankind. The devil took the books with a long pair of tongs and put them into a hazmat barrel and wheeled it out to his van. Then he came back and thanked Meyer for her help and told her that the millions of dollars were on the way along with movie contracts and such.
And then she said, “Devil, don’t you want me to sign your contract?”
The devil, confused said “Er? What contract is that ma’am ? ”
Meyer said. ” Well, I’ve obviously just given myself over to the will of pure evil in exchange for riches and fame. Don’t you want to claim my soul? ”
“Eeew. Fuck NO! ” said the devil. ” How could you even…oh my stomach! And I just ate before I came over here too! What a vile image! Listen, lady, our business is done and I want you to stay far far away from me. Understand? FAR AWAY! You and that Cameron guy. And Ridley Scott with his stupid alien dick snakes. Why can’t you freaks just leave me alone? ”
Then he wisely got a restraining order taken out against her just in case.
I love you so much if you don’t worship me I am going to damn you to eternal torment is kind of a proven formula.
So glad you’re not a troll.
When the “Twilight” books were first en vogue with the tween set, my youngest son was in the eighth grade. He got so tired of the girls chattering about Edward and Bella and sparkle vampires that I bought him a tee shirt with the legend:
“And then Buffy Staked Edward. The End.”
I just call them like I see them.
Oh lord, I was gone all day yesterday …
at #1 & SIL home co-hosting baby shower for imminent arrival of grand-daughter in 5 weeks …
… in doing a bit of sampling of both vids above YEEGODS, if SEK lectures like he “hmms, haws, ahhhs” with the greasy hair and facial-hair affectation, I’d be surprised if anyone ever voluntarily picks one of his classes after enduring one lecture.
Who knew SEK was a comedy genius!
The Porky Pig reference was dead on. And I hate to say that, but I thought the same thing. I just refrained from commenting, not wanting to bring visual misfortunes into this.
Now that the cartoon pig is out of the bag, though, Jesus: get that guy a topcoat and send him about without pants and the resemblance would be truly uncanny. If not more than a little disturbing.
The Porky Pig Fan Club will be contacting you about denigrating a cartoon icon by comparing him to losers like these guys.
Palaeo, I’d read your vampire novel. Hell, I read all of mcG’s stuff and I’m waiting for more.
There’s an image showing a scene from one of the Twilight movies which photoshops Blade into the background.