(no subject)
Jan. 11th, 2005 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickOn the subject of how much it costs to eat food... one of the things I need to track better for the 2005 year is how much my damn food costs, including bought food not from the grocery store. (I mean like food from restera... restarau... Fuck it. Places you eat out. With waiters.) Probably better tracking of what I spend on food is a good idea and we can see how I'm doing with the figures expected for my country. I'm supposed to spend something like $1427 in 1993 dollars, and using the handy chart that the internet hath delivered unto me via the endless reach of google, we can see that this works out to about 1886.49 in 2005 dollars.
Today was the first going-to-the-grocery that I noticed in the new year. I'm not little miss observant, so I could well have grocery shopped already this year without paying attention. But today I went to the grocery store, damn it, and I bought food. Good for me. Grocery bill: 15.96, all of which was food. (Sometimes I buy stuff like cat litter and cat food and toilet paper and laundry soap and other not-human-food items. In the event that I buy that kind of stuff, I'll make a note of it and take it off the total.) Remaining food budget for the year: 1870.53 (Am I going to stop eating once I run out of food budget? Fuck no! Do I look stupid? That was a rhetorical question. Do not answer the rhetorical questions. Am I going to include stuff like fast food and Starbucks and so forth? Yes. Not doing so would be cheating.)
I'm not sure how to figure up the cost of pre-existing food, but tracking my weekly grocery bill is a start. Let's try that, it looks like fun.
Also, today, I ran into a really delightful comic parody and, as I've been thinking on parody for a couple of weeks, this is as good a time as any to go into it. (Yeah, I've been thinking about parody and yaoi bondage porn and the cost of food worldwide and the relative honesty of people as seen on YarnHarlot's page and also on What the Bagel Man Saw and on and on and on. Mind-expanding drugs would probably make my head explode at velocities exceeding the speed of light, so it's a good thing I've not done any. Pot, which doesn't count, makes me laugh at stupid shit and eat absolutely disgusting foods like pork rinds. I swear, there is a whole class of snack foods only sold to the stoned. What else could possibly explain Funyons?) Anyway. Parody. The comic I linked to is a parody of Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch... while funny in and of itself, the comic is a lot funnier when you know what it's riffing on.
Similarly, MC Hawking's song Entropy was quite enjoyable when I took it at face value... but it gained a dimension when I (finally) learned that it was based on Naughty By Nature's song OPP. The fan parody This is Otakudom is funny enough if you know something of anime fandom, but it's a hell of a lot funnier if you've seen This is Spinal Tap.
Because parody banks on the audience linking up the parody to the source material, it's a bit of a risk. Because of that, good parody should be funny or witty on its own merits so that if the audience can't manage to link it up to the source, they can still enjoy it on some level. The three examples listed above are all pretty fun on their own, but they're ever-so-much-more-so (in taste, the quality given by msg, the flavor identified as umami, is ever-so-much-more-so. Also, there was a really dreadful children's book that I read back when I was a child that used the phrase ever-so-much-more-so as sort of an emperor's new clothes thing. It was an odd book, really, sort of absurd and off-balance, and I remember absolutely nothing about it save the fucking phrase ever-so-much-more-so, an earworm that's lived for nigh on twenty-five years in my fucking brain. I don't know what it eats. Also there was a science fiction story about a... well, I'd have to call it a meme, a repeating motif that people saw everywhere, that propagated virally. What the fuck was that story? Google helpeth me not on these things...) when you manage to link 'em up to the source material.
Parody is an intimate humor, one that of its own nature has an in-joke, elitist quality to it. I'm all for it.
Today was the first going-to-the-grocery that I noticed in the new year. I'm not little miss observant, so I could well have grocery shopped already this year without paying attention. But today I went to the grocery store, damn it, and I bought food. Good for me. Grocery bill: 15.96, all of which was food. (Sometimes I buy stuff like cat litter and cat food and toilet paper and laundry soap and other not-human-food items. In the event that I buy that kind of stuff, I'll make a note of it and take it off the total.) Remaining food budget for the year: 1870.53 (Am I going to stop eating once I run out of food budget? Fuck no! Do I look stupid? That was a rhetorical question. Do not answer the rhetorical questions. Am I going to include stuff like fast food and Starbucks and so forth? Yes. Not doing so would be cheating.)
I'm not sure how to figure up the cost of pre-existing food, but tracking my weekly grocery bill is a start. Let's try that, it looks like fun.
Also, today, I ran into a really delightful comic parody and, as I've been thinking on parody for a couple of weeks, this is as good a time as any to go into it. (Yeah, I've been thinking about parody and yaoi bondage porn and the cost of food worldwide and the relative honesty of people as seen on YarnHarlot's page and also on What the Bagel Man Saw and on and on and on. Mind-expanding drugs would probably make my head explode at velocities exceeding the speed of light, so it's a good thing I've not done any. Pot, which doesn't count, makes me laugh at stupid shit and eat absolutely disgusting foods like pork rinds. I swear, there is a whole class of snack foods only sold to the stoned. What else could possibly explain Funyons?) Anyway. Parody. The comic I linked to is a parody of Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch... while funny in and of itself, the comic is a lot funnier when you know what it's riffing on.
Similarly, MC Hawking's song Entropy was quite enjoyable when I took it at face value... but it gained a dimension when I (finally) learned that it was based on Naughty By Nature's song OPP. The fan parody This is Otakudom is funny enough if you know something of anime fandom, but it's a hell of a lot funnier if you've seen This is Spinal Tap.
Because parody banks on the audience linking up the parody to the source material, it's a bit of a risk. Because of that, good parody should be funny or witty on its own merits so that if the audience can't manage to link it up to the source, they can still enjoy it on some level. The three examples listed above are all pretty fun on their own, but they're ever-so-much-more-so (in taste, the quality given by msg, the flavor identified as umami, is ever-so-much-more-so. Also, there was a really dreadful children's book that I read back when I was a child that used the phrase ever-so-much-more-so as sort of an emperor's new clothes thing. It was an odd book, really, sort of absurd and off-balance, and I remember absolutely nothing about it save the fucking phrase ever-so-much-more-so, an earworm that's lived for nigh on twenty-five years in my fucking brain. I don't know what it eats. Also there was a science fiction story about a... well, I'd have to call it a meme, a repeating motif that people saw everywhere, that propagated virally. What the fuck was that story? Google helpeth me not on these things...) when you manage to link 'em up to the source material.
Parody is an intimate humor, one that of its own nature has an in-joke, elitist quality to it. I'm all for it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-01-11 09:08 pm (UTC)In particular, I do not think that *all* parody is "making fun at another's expense" -- some of it is done more out of a sense of homage than out of some need to put down another's work. Look, for example, at the comic about shopping for polearms. Can you explain to me how that comic makes Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch less funny? (Assuming, of course, that you'll grant that it was funny in the first place.) In what way does Rich Burlew's assumption that the audience of The Order of the Stick is familiar with the works of Monty Python (the comic references not only the Cheese Shop sketch but also the Spam sketch, when the shopper goes off on glaive-glaive-glaive-guisarme-glaive and the shopkeeper notes that he's drifting into another sketch) demean their work? Shit, I'd think that someone assuming audience familiarity with my work would be something of a compliment no matter what they said about it after that. (Captain Jack Sparrow -- "But you HAVE heard of me.")
I'm loathe to discuss this further with you, though, because I suspect you really need to get back to your bridge. You don't have time to be out here with me... look, it's getting to be dawn. If you don't get out of the light, you'll solidify to stone until nightfall.
Look. Your prose is problematic. It doesn't match. It isn't consistent throughout, and because of that, I'm not sure what to make of it. What it looks like to me, though, is that you've curled up with a thesaurus. (They bite, you know.) The problem with using a thesaurus to sound smarter is that your elevator words, the ones you picked out of the thesaurus, don't match your ordinary diction. They glitter in your otherwise unremarkable prose like a handful of coins tossed in the gutter. They catch my eye, you see, and what they tell me is "I'm pulling big words out of a book to make myself look smarter."
Finally, while a little irony is good for the blood, you've gone a bit overboard there with the Current Music designation. That's pretty much what settled me on naming you troll. [It's possible, on further consideration, that what you have attempted here is a post parodying me ... but if it is, it's a piss-poor job. I know more than a few people who could flay me far more capably. Mitch? Want to give it a whirl?]
no subject
Date: 2005-01-11 10:50 pm (UTC)Your troll (and he is one, unless indiscriminate, blind chance truly led someone named McChic to a journal by "whichchick") reads more like a curbside knockoff of the Damon Wayans character who valued words strictly for their rhythm and heft than any sort of parody or sincere form of flattery.
The current music designation? My guess is he's retarded, and this is a sort of cargo-cult attempt to reproduce, chameleon-like, what he sees elsewhere in livejournal.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-11 10:52 pm (UTC)Mitch H.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-12 12:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-12 02:27 pm (UTC)Lot’s ‘o Love,
Troll
Current Mood – Cliquey
Current Music – Robin Trower – Bridge of Sighs