Comic for Monday, July 21st, 2008

Posted: 6:45 am, Monday, July 21st

Alright, alright! It's Monday, which means I actually have energy and vim and vigor for, oh, about another ten hours before passing the fuck out and getting those big-assed Tim Burton eye-bags that I'm prone to these days. I'm two weeks from the end of the Fellows crash-training, and mostly am holding up OK. This means you're two weeks from getting somewhat "normal" entries again, and then comes September and fuck-all knows what will happen then.

Good weekend, everyone? Good weekend here. A little busier than I would've liked, all things considered, but I appear to be on track for an eleven o'clock bedtime, which is kind of crazy to think about, really. That does, of course, mean that there's not too many linky-linkies for you guys, though. To make it up to you, I will give you a chance to help me teach the future of America - I'm putting a lesson together (so about half an hour, forty-five, but I'd like to be able to trim it to 15-20 for interview/final exam purposes) about satire, using the New Yorker cover of the Homeboy. Any good ideas on modern satire that the kids would understand? As close as I've come up with so far is South Park's Guitar Queer-o episode, to show them that satire doesn't always have to be political, since I'm guessing a lot of them aren't up on their politics. (Hopefully, I will be pleasantly surprised on that.)

Shit, Dr. Horrible's down already? Good thing I caught onto that when I did.

By the way, here's last Monday's blog in a word cloud.

I can't believe "fuck" or some variation thereof isn't bigger.

Happy birthday, Drolett! Youse in the club of properly aged mature people now. Congrats on waiting 'til now to join, it was known as the old bag club until just under a month ago.

bullfrog

ad -- Monday, July 21 2008, 08:24 am

Satire- Since you're in the New Yorker anyway, you could look back on some of the Shouts and Mummers to see if there's anything worthwhile. Endless Simpsons episodes for satire, depending on what you're looking for. Oh, even better, do you have a copy of the Daily Show's "America"? The kids are well familiar with history books and will definitely get the jokes in that. Hope that helps.

Satire was always one of the hardest things for me to teach. It isn't necessarily that the kids were overly literal, but they had a lot of trouble developing taste-- anything that made fun of anything else was 'satire'. But that cover is an interesting artifact to have a conversation around.

You could show clips from Idiocracy or War, Inc or Borat. Colbert's entire persona is satire.

BF: I trust you saw this...

http://deadspin.com/5026950/tom-emanski-is-rolling-in-his-grave

Ouch Tree...painful.

I'd heard about, but so far no one had hated me enough to make me watch that. Crikey fuck.

Ah, America the Book... Good call, ad. I'm not so sure how this will go over tomorrow, but I figure the time to experiment is in summer school. Thanks.

You'll get to experiment every day and every class period starting in August. That's definitely part of the fun and one of the biggest things I miss.