A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats . . . and also BLOWS BILL O’REILLY’S MIND

On January 4, 2011, on his television show The O’Reilly Factor, commentator Bill O’Reilly provided yet more evidence that one can be very successful, especially in television, without actually using one’s head.

O’Reilly’s guest for the evening—or at least for a short segment of it—was David Silverman, the head of an atheist organization that had bought space on a billboard in Huntsville, Alabama, that both invited residents to a regional meeting of atheists and described all religions as scams.¹ The latter part struck O’Reilly—and, to be fair, probably plenty of others in Huntsville, and a large percentage of however many people watch The O’Reilly Factor—as rude and offensive.

Whether it was indeed rude—and whether O’Reilly’s rather inhospitable treatment of his guest was any more appropriate—could be the subject of a long, energetic, and almost certainly fruitless debate that doesn’t particularly interest us at the moment. Suffice it to say that regardless of one’s point of view, the discussion between Silverman and O’Reilly probably managed to find a way to irritate or offend just about everybody watching, one way or another, without actually solving or illuminating a thing.

However, more important to us than O’Reilly’s interest in polite behavior—or at least his interest in witnessing it, if not actually participating in it himself—is the example he used, over the course of the conversation, as evidence that religions aren’t scams. After prefacing a statement earlier in the show by admitting “I know I’m not the smartest guy in town,” he then—in an apparent giddy rush to prove himself right—offers, as evidence of God’s existence, the fact that “[The] tide goes in, [and the] tide goes out.” According to O’Reilly, the tides are proof that God exists because “You can’t explain that.”

Bill O’Reilly’s argument, rephrased for convenience, is that because we can’t explain tides, God exists. According to his reasoning, then, being able to explain the tides would be evidence that God doesn’t exist. It’s actually somewhat fortunate for O’Reilly—not to mention very fortunate for God—that his logic is shit.

O’Reilly’s argument here is a sort of variation on the Argument from Ignorance—he’s essentially saying that if he can’t explain something, then it can’t be explained. While the flaw in this line of reasoning should be fairly obvious, please allow us to illuminate them anyway by using the same argumentative framework O’Reilly uses on the following statement:

“Yo-yo goes down, yo-yo comes back up. You can’t explain that.”

Here’s how the O’Reilly method operates here (and why it fails):

1. I don’t know how a yo-yo works. (This part, I’m sorry to say, is true.)
2. Therefore, nobody knows how a yo-yo works—not even those who dedicate their lives to studying, designing, and constructing yo-yos, assuming people like this still exist. (This statement does not logically follow from the previous statement, and is also demonstrably false.)
3. Therefore, yo-yos are magic. (This also isn’t true, and it also does not follow from the above statements.)

Ancient yo-yoing is apparently for real. Who knew?

The only thing that an argument from ignorance really has a chance at proving is—sorry, Bill—the “ignorance” part.² And indeed, tides are actually very well understood and have been for centuries; moreover, they can be easily explained to, and by, folks with little scientific expertise:

To put it simply rather than thoroughly, tides are caused by the gravitational pull of Earth’s moon and, to a lesser degree, the Sun. (While the Sun is far more massive than the Moon, it’s also some sixteen to eighteen miles farther away, and thus its influence on tides is diminished to about half of the Moon’s.³)

The sun and the Moon both affect the Earth’s tides; higher tides result when
the two pull in the same direction. All objects life-sized and to scale.

All matter is affected by gravity,⁴ and therefore everything on Earth—not just the oceans, but also dirt, pandas, tractors, pirates, and even Cream of Wheat—is influenced by the Moon’s gravitational pull. It’s been estimated, perhaps even measured, that the tidal pull of the Moon moves the ground beneath our feet by around a centimeter. However, as the oceans are mostly liquid,⁵ and thus much more malleable than solids (examples of solids: continental plates, tractors), it’s in the oceans that the tides are most noticeable; in certain places such as the Bay of Fundy, the difference between high and low tide can be as much as 55 feet.⁶ If the entire Earth moved to the same degree that the seas do, tides would be much harder to observe—but they’d still be going on.

In order to affect the tides, an object must be extremely massive.

So at the risk of patting ourselves a tad too hard on the back, we believe the above is a decent if very basic explanation of what causes the tides, and astute readers will note that the question of God’s existence⁷ is no more or less settled than it was two or three paragraphs earlier. We believe it’s perfectly clear that we haven’t offered any opinion whatsoever on the existence or non-existence of God, and simply hope that—whatever your opinion of God, organized religion, atheism, science, or The O’Reilly Factor—it’s clear to everyone that both God and religion are very fortunate that Bill O’Reilly is not their best or only defender.

Please check back soon; in a future installment we hope to reveal the fiendish sorcery responsible for elevators.

NOTES

1. If you haven’t yet clicked on the link above and are wondering, this is not hyperbole on our part. The word used on the billboard was indeed “scams.”

2. One has to wonder if O’Reilly is concerned about whether a high enough tide might tip Guam over.

3. All figures made up on the spot.

4. We’re pretty sure about this, although we have a hunch it gets disproved in at least one or two Star Trek episodes.

5. The ice caps, being ice, are solid, but they don’t amount to much, especially lately. Cream of Wheat, on the other hand, somehow appears to be simultaneously liquid and solid—go ahead and try to explain that, atheists!

6. We have no idea how big a distance this is, but we suspect it’s at least five or six times larger than a centimeter. 

7. We are aware that for many of our readers (not to mention our billions of non-readers), God’s existence is not in question. To be fair, though, to plenty of other folks, God’s non-existence isn’t in question either. So we’re just going to leave it exactly as we wrote it in order to irritate everybody equally.

The following is the relevant segment from The O’Reilly Factor. The host’s comments about the tide occur a little after 1:48.

Warp Time from the Comfort of Your Own Home!

     
Thanks to the relentless onward march of modern technology, you too can toy with time and the theory of relativity without the inconvenience and expense of having to approach the speed of light. Just sit down, relax, and follow these four easy steps:

1. Put the Allman Brothers’ Band’s instrumental “Jessica” on your iPod or CD player. 

2. Push “play.” 

3. Fourteen to sixteen months later, as the song comes to an end, push “stop.” 

4. Check your watch. Amazingly, only about seven and a half minutes will have passed! 

Preliminary research has suggested that similar effects are produced by combining The Doors’s “The End” with the  consumption of near-poisonous quantities of Everclear. Sadly, in recent years these studies have stalled due to the difficulty of finding volunteers healthy enough to subject themselves to repeated exposure to The Doors.

Fake Pandas for Sale

In one of the most stunning advances in bizarro genetic engineering since 1997’s pot-bellied elephant, northern Colorado farmer Chris Jessen has bred a miniature cow that sorta looks like a panda.

Our latest crime against nature. Possibly just a misdemeanor.

This made news not only locally but also across the country (in the Washington Post and Orange County Register, among others) and as far away as London,¹ which leads us to believe that either 2011 has (with this notable exception) started off in a spectacularly boring fashion, or that this weird little cow’s existence is far more momentous than one might suspect.

The birth of Ben, the miniature panda cow, is not Chris Jessen’s first encounter with shrimpy animals. His “hobby farm” is depicted in various brief articles as a sort of haven for wee creatures—not only miniature cows and donkeys but also an animal described by different sources as either a miniature kangaroo or a wallaby, which is, as we understand it, similar to an oversized miniature kangaroo, only smaller.

From what we’ve been able to learn from a casual stroll through the Internet, $0.75 to $1.00 per pound is not an unreasonable price if you’re looking to buy a fully-functional cow. Ben, however, may sell for as much as $30,000. This may seem like a lot, but it is certainly much, much cheaper than the trying to buy an actual panda, so one might consider this a bargain.

For a mere thirty thousand dollars—barely enough to make a down payment on a home in many parts of the country—you can invest it in an animal that kinda resembles a totally different animal. But wait—there’s more! While most bargain-basement cows are bred to produce milk or be delicious, the panda cow is said to “not have much practical use”—beyond, presumably, standing around chewing and crapping all day with flies on its eyeballs.

We’re not about to tell you how to spend your money—if Ben the Imposter Panda is the pet you’ve always been waiting for, knock yourself out. A delegation from China has already visited Jessen’s farm and was reportedly fascinated, so this weird little venture may well pay off. But unless Ben the Imposter Panda tastes exactly like real panda, or proves he can mimic adorably fat panda antics such as pantomiming kung fu or getting stuck in a tree, we’ll just keep saving up until we can afford the real thing, thank you very much.

100% authentic panda. Accept no substitutes.

NOTES

1. Capital city of Guatemala, according to our Geography Department.

Price on Freedom of Speech Raised to $500

Countless bumper stickers across the country remind us that “Freedom Isn’t [or occasionally Ain’t] Free,” and 2004’s Team America: World Police took this one step further by calculating the price of freedom to be precisely $1.05. Apparently, though, the good folks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have decided to up the ante considerably. On December 21, 2010, bus passenger and recent Milwaukee transplant Terry Duncan found out just how costly his freedoms were after he was fined five hundred dollars by an undercover police officer simply for speaking.¹

A few things worth mentioning here:

• Duncan was not acting in a hostile or abusive manner to the driver or his fellow passengers.
• Duncan was not threatening the president (or past presidents), which as we all know is a federal offense, even if the president in question, past or present, kinda sucks. Which he quite possibly does. Warren G. Harding, I’m looking at you.
• Duncan was not shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, which is considered a no-no if the theater is not, in fact, on fire.

What Terry Duncan did on that bus, simply put, was use naughty words. He wasn’t swearing at anybody, but rather was merely “engaged in a conversation when he let the expletives slip.” He said both “fuck” and “shit”² conversationally—perhaps as little as once each³—and received not only a ticket but also a healthy ration of smirking disdain from fellow passengers who, as accomplished legal scholars, are well aware that their Constitutionally-protected right to not be offended trumps others’ rights to free speech.⁴

We here at Bowling in the Dark tend to swear fairly often, but despite our personal flaws, we aren’t big fans of vulgarity. We’re saddened when we hear it from the mouths of children (except when it’s funny), and believe that excessive use of profanity is embarrassing and usually a sign of a limited vocabulary. But the unpleasant nature of naughty language doesn’t give us the right to control anybody’s language but our own.

An official statement from the Milwaukee County sherriff’s department addressing the matter claims that “people should be able to ride the bus without feeling intimidated by someone’s language or behavior.” Bus passengers interviewed after the incident tended to agree:

“You can’t swear. A lot of people don't like all the ‘f’ words and ‘s’ words around their kids, and there’s a lot of elderly people on the bus, and you have to respect your elders so, that’s what he gets.”—bus passenger Ebony Jett⁶

“I think he should have got [the ticket]. Kids be on the bus, families be on the bus. Nobody wants to hear that kind of language.”—bus passenger Jean Jones

“People should not get on the bus having to hear disruptive conversations. You can get a fine for that. It’s the law. You can’t do that.”—bus passenger Tiffany Coo

In the interest of giving equal time to opinions actually worth having, though, let’s hear from somebody who actually fought for others’ liberties instead of trying to whittle away the ones he didn’t like:

“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”—George Washington

We admit that General Washington didn’t specifically say “and that includes naughty words, too,” so it could be argued—albeit very stupidly—that he may actually have approved of stomping on certain folks’ rights when he didn’t like what he was hearing, despite having clearly stated the opposite. Fortunately, other smart folks have chimed in on the subject over the last 2,300 years:

“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”—author Salman Rushdie 
  <blockquote><a href="http://www.quotecosmos.com/quotes/15909/view">Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself..</a></blockquote><br> <a href="http://www.quotecosmos.com/authors/6322/Salman_Rushdie">Rushdie, Salman</a><br> Quote from <a href="http://quotecosmos.com">Quote Cosmos</a>
“The basis of a democratic state is liberty.”—Aristotle, 384 BC-322 BC

“The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.”—U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy

Salman Rushdie, as you should well know, has more experience than most anybody at being persecuted simply for expressing himself; Aristotle, while perhaps better known for having married Jackie Kennedy, also dabbled in education, science, government, philosophy, politics, and ethics,⁷ and is known for knowing a thing or two; and it could be argued that a U.S. Supreme Court Justice with more than three decades of judicial experience has a better sense of what’s appropriate, legally and Constitutionally speaking, than the Milwaukee County Sherriff’s Department or a bunch of schmucks on a bus.

But ignore all their qualifications if you like, and instead just boil down the comments from each group to their basics, and decide which attitude sums up what this country and its citizens’ attitudes on free expression should be. In fact, skip that first part; we’ve boiled it down for you:

1. “You must be allowed to say what you want, even if I don’t like it.”
2. “You can’t say what you want because I don’t like it.”

Or, to illustrate it a touch more crudely,

Figure 1.1: the two ends of the spectrum of opinions on freedom of speech. 

Pick a side. 

(Hint: the guy on the left is very unlikely to advocate killing the douchebag on the right.)

NOTES

1. We use the word speaking here for convenience; it’s a handy way to represent the much more cumbersome phrase exercising one’s once-Constitutionally-protected right to free speech.

2. If you’re offended that we typed out the words “fuck” and “shit” instead of a more family-friendly “f___” or Beetle Bailey-style “@$#!” . . . well, frankly, it’s a little surprising that you allow yourself to have unmonitored access to the internet, but nevertheless we sincerely apologize for having troubled you with language that, admittedly, can occasionally or even often be inappropriate or offensive. You’d be well within your rights to ask us to tone it down, and it’s quite possible that we’d oblige—we may be jerks, but we don’t like looking like jerks. On the other hand, if you think you have or deserve the right to prevent us from using this kind of language, you can go fuck yourself.

3. Duncan said he used “two words,” which could mean that he swore only twice or that he swore multiple times, but used only those two particular words—the articles we’ve found haven’t been particularly clear on this point.

4. Here we’re trying to use irony,⁵ but it’s a slippery concept that we can usually recognize but can’t really define and rarely use properly. If we haven’t pulled it off correctly, and you’re not sure what we’re getting at, contact us privately and we’ll send you a copy of our extensive notes.

5. Some might say that we’re not being ironic, we’re just being pricks. That’s probably fair.

6. We here at Bowling in the Dark have no way of knowing whether this person’s name really is “Ebony Jett,” but we promise you that we weren’t the ones who made it up.

7. No real footnote here, we’re just a bit giddy to see the words politics and ethics in the same sentence. It’s like spotting a unicorn.

Words that Changed the World

“Sverni svum, å lim yurpi berk yir diiskido. Yimmi sver, yåi bor skembe skir fjrni vir dihurgi. Yåi borsch nir fjurn dir di öön bork börk børk.”

Damn You, Steve Martin

It may be too soon, and perhaps a tad excessive, to blame the downfall of Western civilization on Steve Martin, but we reserve the right to say “I told you so” if and when the time comes.

Steve Martin is, by any account, a tremendously gifted comedian, actor, musician, and writer, having won an Emmy Award (in 1969, for his work on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour), four Grammy Awards (for his 1978 and 1979 comedy albums Let’s Get Small and Wild and Crazy Guy, and 2002 and 2009 musical albums Foggy Mountain Breakdown and The Crow), and a best actor award (from the New York Film Critics Circle for 1984’s All of Me). His novellas Shopgirl and the Pleasure of My Company have sold pretty well and been well-received, as have his humorously offbeat collections Cruel Shoes and Pure Drivel.¹ 

His sense of humor ranges as wide as his other talents, too; he’s equally at home with goofiness (note the bunny-ears photo above, or his King Tut music video from Saturday Night Live), satire (L.A. Story, Bowfinger), or sociopolitical analysis of race relations and wealth stratification in pre-recession 1970s American society (The Jerk).² 

For all his valuable contributions to society, though, Steve Martin may eventually be best remembered—or perhaps vilified—for popularizing, if not actually creating, a hand gesture more offensive than the fig, the bird, the arm of honor, or even the legendary Belgian Elbow: 

Air quotes.

Except for Chris Farley—who is only playing a character here³—what
we’re looking at is an awful mix of smarminess, insanity, and
ill-advised mustaches. Don’t be like these fuckers.

Steve Martin, according to author David Frum, used air quotes extensively in his early, wildly successful stand-up routines.⁴ Had Martin been less funny, less famous, or less likeable, the gesture may have died a quiet and well-deserved death, but, sadly, he was not.

It was hoped that having a roundly disliked public figure of approximately equal stature adopt the same gesture could counteract Martin’s influence and kill the air quote, but, regrettably, the ideal choice for the job lacked the motor skills needed to correctly accomplish the gesture.
  

“Blast these damned arms! That’s it, you bastards, I’m putting you both on my list.”

Despite our noble Nixon’s best efforts, air quotes not only survived but thrived in post-Watergate America. More recent attempts to defame the air quote, involving increasingly despicable participants on a global scale, have met with spectacular failure for much the same reasons.

“Is this right? No? Shit. I really suck at this, but it’s Israel’s fault.
I’ll figure out why once my anti-psychotics wear off.”

It would be reasonable to worry that air quotes are here to stay. Most troubling about this is that not only do people use them too often—especially in cases where regular human voice inflection and facial expressions do a better job of conveying meaning than extraneous pseudo-punctuation ever could—but also that the damned things simply get used at the wrong times.

There is a proper time to use what are called scare quotes: when you want to change the meaning of a given sentence. Here’s how it’s done. We’ll start with a straightforward sentence, explain it, and then show how scare quotes alter its meaning. Stop us if you get dizzy:

• Billy is a smart guy. This perfectly normal sentence implies (by which we mean “states”) that Billy is a smart guy.
• Billy is a “smart guy.” This implies that Billy is actually not a smart guy.
• “Billy” is a smart guy. This implies that the smart guy’s name is not actually Billy.
• Billy is “a” smart guy. This implies that Billy is actually multiple smart guys. You’re not likely to run into this state of affairs all that often, either in grammatical or interpersonal situations.
• Billy is a smart “guy.” This implies that Billy is smart, but that we know something you don’t about “his” gender.⁵

If your aim is to imply any of the above, use the quotation marks accordingly and you’re all set. Unfortunately, though, most people use air quotes for emphasis rather than to change the implied meaning of a sentence, which means that they’re unwittingly saying something far different than what they mean.

For example, let’s say you run into your all-time favorite singer, Bono,⁶ and want to tell him that you think he’s great. What you want to say is this:

I love your CD!

But instead, because you didn’t keep your hands in your pockets, what you said was this:

I “love” your CD!

Congratulations, jackass, you just told Bono that his CD sucks, that you hate it, and that you’re willing to go way out of your way to let him know. You’re the worst fan ever. He’s going to go home and cry himself to sleep on his huge pile of money, and probably throw away the macaroni-shell portrait you sent him.⁷

So the power is in your hands. It’s up to you to choose whether to begin to undo the damage done by Steve Martin and his wacky hands, or continue to follow his most misguided footsteps—acting like a smarmy prick, an musclebound asshole with a bad mustache, or a space alien masquerading⁸ as a pop musician—butchering unoffending English and making Bono cry. It’s all on you now. Don’t screw this up.

NOTES

1. I thought they were pretty damned funny, anyway. I don’t actually know if anybody else on Earth actually liked them, or even read them.
2. That’s what that movie is about, right?
3. I realize that Mike Myers is technically playing a character as well, but I would argue that Goldmember puts him safely in the “smarmy” list, and The Love Guru suggests insanity.

4. According to How We Got Here: The ’70s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life—For Better or Worse, 2000.

5. Did you pick up on what I was doing with the scare quotes around “his”? Nice.

6. You want us to believe it’s Bono, but it’s not. It’s actually Tiny Tim. Seriously, what’s wrong with you?

7. Yeah, we know all about that.
8. Until recently.

Why You Won't Find Us on Twitter

 

Because Twitter is stupid.

One of the many reasons why you should be embarrassed
to be associated with Twitter.

 
While I haven't paid much (any) attention to Twitter since its creation, my hunch is that the majority of what goes on there falls into one of two general categories: (1) events in which you are (or were, or will be, or want to be) involved, or (2) thoughts you’ve had, or heard from others, that you’ve decided are worth sharing.

First, the events: if anything that happens to you can be satisfactorily summed up in 140 or fewer characters, what chance does it have of being genuinely worth telling people about? Answer: very slim. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but the odds are good that most of the details from the average life that are worth broadcasting to total strangers are either completely made up or stolen from a movie. The following are some completely-true examples from my everyday life:

1. I once beat the Queen of England in a belching contest. She was kicking my ass until she got a bit overconfident and barfed a little.
2. I am in a ballroom surrounded by hundreds of monkeys in tuxedoes. I can’t tell which ones are millionaires and which ones are butlers. 
3. The penguins, surprisingly, are dressed quite casually.
4. I ate a whole lot of fiberglass insulation. It wasn't cotton candy like that man said. My stomach’s itchy.¹

Be honest, how often does a mundane detail of somebody else’s humdrum life really interest you? Probably not many. Your mundane details aren’t likely to be any more interesting to anybody else.
 

Second, thoughts: if anything you think can be satisfactorily summed up in 140 or fewer characters, odds are good that you’re a profoundly shallow thinker or just straight-up stupid.² There are notable exceptions to this, of course; some very clever people were also quite pithy:

1. I think, therefore I am. (R. Descartes)
2. The needs of the many far outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. (Spock)
3. If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you. (O. Wilde)
4. C is for cookie; that good enough for me. (C. Monster)

The obvious problem here is that you are not Rene Descartes or Oscar Wilde, and neither is anybody you know. (For that matter, I’m no Oscar Wilde either, although I do have this nifty blog and he doesn’t.³)

Thanks in part to the recent death of Mark Twain,⁴ the quality of wit in this country has fallen to the point that we’re apparently willing to believe that bumper stickers are clever. That probably helps explain (to some degree) the success of Twitter. And it’s not surprising that, given our country’s obsession with even the most run-of-the-mill celebrities, that plenty of people out there are just dying to know, say, whether Ashton Kutcher’s jock itch has cleared up yet. But those two still-pathetic reasons aside, I have a hard time understanding why we believe that it’s anything but embarrassing to circulate statements like, for example, “he might be f—— you but he’s thinking of me.”


. . . although that may be a bad example. The more I think about it, the more sure I am that it’s probably a direct quote from Oscar Wilde.

NOTES

1. Brick Tamland (Steve Carell), Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, 2004.

2. For the record, this shallow and straight-up stupid post weighs in at exactly 2,926 characters, not including the title or spaces. That’s way more than 140—put that in your ass and smoke it, Twitter fans!

3. Also, he’s been dead for 110 years, and I have not.

4. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, b. 1835, d. 1910.