America, You're Funny- Maps

I watched a little clip from Upworthy.com and it blew my mind!

In the western world, we are full of ourselves and that is no secret. What we don't know is that we even distort our projection of ourselves on the map. The map we have thought we knew is all wrong. It is great for travelling by sea but horrible for understanding the scale and relationship of continents and countries on earth. This has manifested itself for many travelers. This I found all the time when travelling around or south of equator. If the country is so small on the map, why are the distances so big? Why am I travelling for so long? Travel always takes longer than expected but it is because these countries really are bigger than what our schools and everything around us teaches us.

So if we are wrong about this, then what else are we wrong about?

Notice how the real Mexico is larger than Alaska, Greenland is actually not so big and Africa is really really giant and Russia is long as hell.

Picture used from http://www.wall-maps.com/world/peters_projection.htm

America, You're Funny- Religious Industrialists

In United States, if you are religious: Jew, Christian or Muslim, it usually means being conservative. It means being pro drilling, anti-green and anti-global warming. It is often living isolated from the drastic destruction taken by the capitalistic forces on the earth or participating in them as Bush did, and even when those forces have effects on them, it is to refuse to acknowledge man's role and instead blame it on God. 

     What kind of religion person is that? Taking the negative created by man and assigning it to the deity you worship? That is certainly worthy of blasphemy and hell. I'm sure God would not appreciate humans destroying the earth it created and even less so being blamed for it. 

      So religious folk, if you happen to come across this, remember, you believe God made this place and that means you ought to be the one driving a Prius, jumping onto oil derricks from Greenpeace ships and leading the charge to save the earth because if not you, then who else can God trust with this earth? You love him most so shouldn't you love his creation most? And in that case logically, shouldn't you protect it most? 

     Unless that is you worship him for selfish reasons and only use his good will when it suits you and take advantage of his creation without regard for why it was created and that there are other people in this world that God may have wanted to experience life and earth as it was created before you. 

Bullies and Jokers at Comedy Palace

At elementary school during recess, there were always two types of funny guys on the play ground. There was the witty and funny one that everyone loved and the bully. Sometimes the funny guy would get picked on by the bullies, but he always knew what to say and alleviate the situation. When a bully made fun of someone, he always found a way to crack a joke about himself or something funny and make peace. Whereas the other one, that one made fun of your name, or made fun of your ethnicity, he may have been larger or smaller than you but he always got laughs at one person's expense and he or she was the bully and their way of control of the world was through sheer terror and emotional derision of others. This person may have had deep seated wounds and they would ignore them by creating unnecessary wounds in others that were never there to begin with and usually with things that that person had no control over such as their physical appearance, their ethnicity or their socio-economic level. Tonight at the Comedy Palace in Clairmont there were both.

I've been to Comedy Palace a couple times. My first time I saw a fight between a giant fat guy and a small Mexican kid. The fat guy was attacking the little guy because the little guy had tried to rape his wife and had been under restraining order. It was a funny situation and I had never seen anything since. I still like coming out to the Comedy Palace to see my buddy Feraz Ozel put on events and bring talent to San Diego. It's great because it he's a Pakistani-Afghani and he brings out Jews, Blacks, Latinos, Asians to do comedy on one stage. All that matters is that you're funny. It's like UN if UN actually worked.

  So today, I got a bunch of friends together for what I thought would be a good and peaceful comedy show. 

It started off well: after great laughs by the hosts Bijan and Feraz, Feraz introduced three comics. First up was Robert Weems from Atlanta. He had a great set about how few blacks there are in San Diego and the few that are here, are extremely poor and he made some great jokes about how age changes sex for men and women.

     The comedy set was finished off by the headliner Erik Myers who had to stop every once in a while to let the audience breathe. He was so good in creating laughs out of his life and his observations with his physical but rapid tempo humor, that we never pitied his sad moments but laughed with him and bar napkins collected our tears of joy. I would highly recommend him to anyone.

   Before Myers was a Gay, British, Persian Jew by the name of Matthew Noriel and his style was fast paced, well prepared and always kept you on your toes. His comedy similar to that of many comics but his observations about the funny in the gay and Persian scene were never offensive and very  interesting and always funny.

     In between Noriel and Weems however, was that one kid who is funny so long as he is not making fun of you because he is making fun of someone else. Faraz introduced Josh Nasar by explaining that Nasar was filming his set for Comedy Central and so he asked people to refrain from talking and heckling. It all seemed fine and as Josh Nasar came on stage, he immediately gave off the vibe of trying and lack of preparation. You could see the pressure was on him and although the jokes may have been funny at some point, tonight they were falling flat. 

He got some forced laughs by repeating over and over how horny he was, and then some jokes began to land and he started to climb up and peak our interest as he opened up a joke with how much he likes the black ladies; he had the crowd hooked, and then he fell. 

He fell hard and there was no way to save himself and he knew it. How did he fall? He said that black women’s tits smell like EBT cards and vagina like Henessey. The misogynistic, classist and racist comment had an immediate effect on everyone. I could see all the way from the back that the black woman at the front was hurt, shocked and angry at the same time. The place fell silent. Nasar tried the Kramer from Seinfeld trick and project, he flipped off the crowd and yelled “Oh you’re judging me now!! You’re judging me now!” Then he said something else mildly racist and mildly amusing and then taunted us by saying “see, you’re the racists, you laughed at that.” When in actuality, the entire room was uncomfortable and tried to laugh, in disbelief of what just happened.

     As Nasar’s set went on, it became clear that it was not a badly worded joke, but it was all his jokes. One misogynistic joke after another. He was nervous. He would turn around and talk to the brick wall behind him, then turn towards the crowd and talk awkwardly without the mic, then with the mic. He would stop and start. Everyone felt terrible and we tried to laugh at his cheap gimmicks of yelling loud and hitting himself on the head with the microphone: basically copies of copies of copies of copies of past comedians. 

You wanted to say something but you couldn’t. For me it was hard, I’m friends with Feraz and I felt bad but what do you say to a bully? At this point I realize that all the other kids on the play ground don’t laugh with the bully because they agree, but because they are now afraid to be the ones bullied next.

   But there was a girl at our table. She is a recent Philly transplant and say what you say about Philly, but they do not put up with bullshit. As one joke putting down women after another came out, she could not hold it in any longer and she said it: “You’re the worst!”

    Everyone heard it but decided to pretend as if they didn’t and Nasar tried to move on with another terrible joke. So she said it again: “You’re the worst ever!”

    That got his attention. The king was naked. So what did the king do? He attacked. Nasar called her a cunt, he said she must have been :raped and abused as a child". As if that is the reason why she did not like his humor. That if she had never been raped or abused, she would be perfectly fine with his jokes.  This was full on Kramer, this was Michael Richard happening right in front of us.  

Nasar did not care if something had indeed happened to her as a child, he wanted to wound and he did. And did the place stand up for her like they did during Michael Richards’s rant in New York? No. They cheered him on, like a school yard full of kids making fun of the poor and taunted little kid, letting the bully be a bully.

Then something happened, the king volunteered us the source of his misogyny. He broke down and told us of his break up. He told us how his fiance cheated on him. He told us that to show her his undying devotion, he did something enormously stupid and tattooed her name on his calf while she cheated on him and broke off engagement. He was the idiot and he was going to take out his anger and frustration on all women. The king was naked.

Well Josh Nasar, I haven’t been raped or abused as a child and I found your jokes tactless, misogynistic, racist, and not at all funny. And if I had been raped or abused as a child, I would have found you even less funny and even more offensive.

I’m sorry I didn’t find a way to make Nasar apologize, I’m sad that the crowd sat there and watched him say horrible things and laugh along and do nothing to stop him. I appreciate Bijan coming up to my friend and whispering in her ear:  “You’re not a cunt, I’m sorry.”

      Nasar, I hope you let go of your demons, and do the right thing and apologize to our friend,  apologize to women, apologize to black people and stop being a bully. You’ll be a lot more funny.

Terrorism/Cowardism

Terrorists... that word has lost its meaning. When civilian men, women and children are killed and blown up everyday, it is no longer terrorism because everyone is numb and it is not war because they are not fighting anyone. It is a massacre. Those perpetrating this are pure killers and cowards. What are their political ends? What kind of politics can be done at the but of a gun? Violence is what happens without politics and these people are simply killing to get their way and no one even knows what that is. They are just killing by inertia because it is what they know, it is what they have been doing for over a decade.

What is sad is that no one cares. 5000 have died this year in Iraq from bombings in markets and mosques alone. Who are these victims? No one knows. What is the effect on their lives. No one knows.

I'd like to create a website, where family members can post pictures of their loved ones before and after. These people are important, they exist and we all need to see them to remember them to do something about it, and the cowards need to see them too and remember who they are doing this to.

Anyone want to help?

Flying from Tijuana

This is for the cheap people of San Diego who think they can save a few dollars by flying out of Tijuana. So here is why it is a stupid idea: time and money. Time you will waste and money you will not save.

Time:
Getting to Tijuana airport even from downtown takes about two to three hours. Then on top of that transit time, you need to arrive there about two hours early. So going from the San Diego airport you're wasting four hours just one way!

Money:
So to get to the airport will cost gas and cab money and possibly bus money which is about $50 one way. Both ways it will be about $100. Then when you arrive in Tijuana, as a non-Mexican national you have to pay to fly and that is about $40. So in the end you will waste eight hours and $140 which is probably how much it would have cost to fly from San Diego Airport except you don't waste the eight hours. 

America, You're Funny: Domestic Spying

The apathy over domestic spying should be abhorrent. Having had a President resigning less than forty years ago for spying on Americans for political gain, we are acting as if it is perfectly fine to spy on Americans. The apathy is amazing and maybe the real problem is that we're on an overload of crap from the government and the power elite. After all the scandals and all the b.s. and two wars and all the lies, we just don't care anymore. There are 300 million of us and fact is, most of us  feel that we won't be affected. Or at least we don't think we will. We are having children and old women finger frisked to get on a plane for God's sake! So if we don't care about the scandals or old ladies frisked, then we don't care about the spying, we don't care about the shooting and we don't care about the crisis. What we do care about however is how Miley Cyrus dances and if that asshole or bitch checks our phones.

Update: 

There was a pipe bomb in San Diego, again (the other one was a few months ago.) Less than a year ago two brothers detonated a bomb in Boston and before that was the Shoe bomber which is why we now take off shoes at the airport and after that was the underwear bomber which is why TSA now images us with harmful rays to see us naked.... 

What has NSA done to make us safer? It spies on Angela Merkel.....