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I just saw what this site’s rss feed looks like. You have my condolences. I cannot function without them.

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May 29:
I will mention Mad TV again. My mentioning this could not be too much worse than this entry’s original content regarding Ben Stein.
But that show, I’m not sad to see it go. I’m sad that I didn’t go. That I never was able to give it up. I did, for about three weeks, but then I watched it again and then the final show was the next one so I had to watch that one too, even though it was kind of bad. So many better things to watch, so many better non-watching things to do. Why did I return? What was I expecting? Why can’t I accomplish anything? Why would I take 80 pictures in one day, half of them of my television screen, approximately none of which I will do anything with? Why would I eat so many raisins that I felt ill?

Even when the show was good, was it ever that great? Great enough that if it was bad next time that the positive experience outweighed the negative? Great enough that I could confidently assume that it would not be bad next time? (yes, briefly, in 2005. This tapered off right about the time I started writing about it, requiring me to rebut myself, several times, and by now I am sadly quite used to being the butt of a but (and I should not have said that) )
Was I ever able to share it with one person who didn’t think less of me as a result of it? At least the indifference / scolding I got when I told people I watched Conan O’Brien had to face off against memories of presentations that I often sincerely enjoyed, and with some amount of consistency. Even when he was appearing in ads for Budweiser and the Milk Growers of America and encouraging the participation of an audience it increasingly seemed as if he had just a bit of contempt for I never quite felt dirty.

Yes, I only extracted this from a longer, worse, Mad TV eulogy I’m too indifferent to finish because it mentions Mr. O’Brien and I don’t want to risk having to reword that one part in the event he does something catastrophic on his new show that requires me to distinguish the old one from it. If he does something great it will be easier to delete this part.

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Ben Stein is not an economist. He’s just some guy from tv. Some guy from tv who fits the stereotypical perception of what a smart person looks like. Some guy from tv who had a game show about giving away his money. Would you trust an economist who gave away his money and/or a career to Jimmy Kimmel? He may have majored in economics at Columbia University, but he does not work in the field of economics, and by his own admission has not done that since the Lyndon Johnson administration, and he hated it. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was bad at it, but it certainly might. I’m sure he knows a lot of stuff, but I don’t reckon what he learned in 1960eh is 100% relevant to the financial issues us peons deal with these days, all the less so when it is filtered through a co-endorsement deal for the very worst provider of an outmoded method of television signal delivery* that he shares with Shaquille “I love em I don’t leave em I got a vysectomy and now I can’t breed ‘em and I was also Kazaam the rapping genie” O’Neal.
You can call Ben Stein an actor/writer/lawyer/game show host, but don’t just say “economist” and not offer any justification. Please?

Also, this is beside the point, but Ben Stein blames the theory of evolution for The Holocaust. Because, supposedly, scientists researched evolution and scientists also invented gas chambers. This idea almost certainly appeals to people who get offended when guns are blamed for murders and accidental killings done with guns. That’s a tenuous thread of logic.
Bad. Bad science. I don’t know where Ben Stein thinks tv cameras and glasses came from. “Science” is in fact a very vague word and you can attribute to it just about anything. You can even type it in capital letters with an exclamation point at the end and get an instant fanbase on the internet. It’s like the new “69″ except it’s actually a reference to a dopey song from over twenty five years ago. In that respect, I suppose, Ben Stein is older than science and knows what’s best for it. Who am I to talk about science, after all? I’m no economist.

I don’t need to go into this much because Ben Stein bothered me long before I knew that he had actual beliefs and opinions, and what they were. I always thought his screen persona was annoying, and discovering that this is actually his true self makes it easier for me to deal with; he hasn’t expended the creative energy necessary to create a character, or even what passes for one in a time when each and every creative person grew up surrounded by half+ century-old infallible merchandising icons who will not step aside for any reason (perhaps Ben aspires to be one?). He’s not trying that hard. He is naturally annoying. He thinks he’s so boring that anything consciously idiotic he does (rapping about how he dislikes Al Gore) or says (such as “cleareyes is awwwwsome”) while being boring is automatically funny, but it isn’t. He thinks that wearing a black business suit and Teddy Ruxpin shoes makes a statement, and it does. That statement is “somebody needs to throw a muffin at me.”

Don’t watch the video attached to that last link. There are plenty of things I could suggest to “you” to watch that would be better than that. I just had to prove that it happened. But at about four minutes, twenty seconds he starts with the “mo-fo” talk and then he tells some really awkward rap-thing about Al Gore not inventing the internet that he had to write on three different pieces of paper for some reason, that he couldn’t be irked to memorize despite it being short and basic and sort of terrible. Jon Stewart appears to be laughing, but there are different types of laughter and many of them are not good. This wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed to me when I first watched it (compare the dates and it seems probable that the memory of this interview in part inspired that other thing I wrote that I linked to somewhere in here), but it’s far from good.

If the best grime you can scrub up on a presidential candidate approaching an election, the bit that you save for last, is that he made some exaggerating statement totally irrelevant to his candidacy then you have misplaced priorities and I don’t trust you to do things for the right reasons. And Gore did help with the internet. He did not create it, he did not develop the technology, but he very much helped to ensure that it would be used, that it would be useful. In comtrast to Comcast, Ben Stein’s current president, which pretends it owns the internet from time to time.

What THEY forgot is that every generation has its REBEL! Of course in this situation it’s the Pat Boone generation.
I can just imagine Ben Stein saying to himself in a Ben Stein voice how hilarious he himself would look while dressed like AC DC. But in actuality it’s just embarrassing. I can see him and Lorne Michaels forming a comedy team that’s just them.

*I personally don’t find anything special about the current incarnation of satellite television, but I believe it has greater potential that it just won’t allow me to use due to arbitrary legal trash, yet I can see that changing. Cable service, on the other hangnail, relies on actual physical cables, going from your home to someplace else, and if you decide you don’t like the people who own the cables you have to get the things removed and then have a whole new set of cables put in, in the event you want to risk more cables. Or something like that. Most people won’t bother with that; it’s hassle enough getting the stuff installed to begin with, and cable companies use that knowledge against their own customers. But then satellite things are also such a way; I still need to have cords going from my television machine to the dinkity plastic thing that I don’t own stuck to my house. But it would be easier to wrap that up and send it back, and by the wuh I would if I was paying for it and the only person who used it.