Does Lorne Michaels have a monopoly on sketch comedy?

Someday, in the far distant future when I become funny, I would like to write things like sketch comedy. I prefer the absurd and things like satire, and I've watched enough that, on some level I think I have somewhat of a grasp on it, although maybe I'll just end up being a real life Neil Hamburger of comedy writing. I grew up watching Kids in the Hall and Saturday Night Live, and I love stuff like Mr. Show and Tim and Eric. Although 30 Rock isn't technically sketch comedy, it has the absurd elements and jam packed with genuinely funny jokes wrapped up in a satire about working behind the scenes on comedy. Most recently, I just started watching Portlandia and it's funnier than I thought it would be. And it's produced by, guess who, LORNE MICHAELS.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorne_Michaels#Selected_television_credits here's a complete list of the tv shows he produces, not including the huge list of movies:
-Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour
-Saturday Night Live
-All You Need is Cash
-Mr. Mike's Mondo Video
-The New Show
-Sunday Night
-Kids in the Hall
-Late Night with Conan O'Brien
-The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch
-The Colin Quinn Show
-Suns and Daughters
-30 Rock
-Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
-Portlandia

I suspected Mr. Michaels had a stranglehold on comedy towards the American East Coast, but apparently I was being naive. Why is this one guy so involved? Does he have all the right connections? Is he the only person with money that cares about making comedy?
Most people I know don't even classify Saturday Night Live, Lorne's franchise, as actual comedy. A clever New York article written back in 1995: "there's more ailing Saturday Night than any particular personnel defections: The show that once broke all the rules is now obsessed with maintaining its internal pecking order, from where people sit in meetings to how much airtime new cast members deserve...And when it's as bad as it can be, and people still act like there' snothing wrong, then it's sort of like a fuck-you to the audience --'We don't have to be good, because we're Saturday Night Live!' It's like the post office. 'What are you gonna do, deliver the mail yourself?'"
It may or may not be remarkable how little has changed since that article was written. I actually ended up watching Saturday Night Live recently as Tina Fey was the star, and with my current 30 Rock obsession I was hoping for some sort of weird parody sketches or maybe just some exceptional jokes like when certain big stars come on. Alas, you could watch any random SNL episode and get the same feel. Laugh about once for every hour of it you watch; definitely not time effective if you have anything better to do. But really, that seems to be the whole point of the show. Its a bunch of filler for people with crying babies to pay half attention to or any other depressing imagined scenario where a person would find themselves in front of their TV late on a Saturday night. Like David Letterman or any other talk show, they just barely provide enough entertainment to escape the problems of your own life or maybe just fill the room with the voices of other people.


One thing that does impress me about SNL was the costumes. One sketch had Tina Fey as the little mermaid as Osama's corpse fell down the sea on top of her crab friend. Kind of a funny idea, or maybe Disney has some sort of stake in the show??? A separate sketch also referred to Pirates of the Carribean - maybe Disney movies are just really safe pop culture references. ANYWAY what impressed me so much were the little mermaid costumes - something like 8 people had huge, brightly colorful exagerrated costumes that really looked great. The sketch didn't last 3 or 4 minutes, and that was the entire life of all those costumes! I guess they could reuse the costumes at some point, but making costumes sets for just a couple of minutes of airtime is really impressive, since it must cost a lot to have all of that made on short notice.
Considering the half ass appearances to the writing and acting in the show, it doesn't quite add up that props, costumes, sets, etc. would be so top notch. Although compared to celebrity salaries its probably still chicken scratch. The comedy industry seems like a complicated Byzantine political landscape, where success is defined less by a persons' raw ability to be funny in favor of a more holistic set of qualifications: how easy they are to work with, seniority, who their friends are. All I can conclude from what I've read is Lorne is on top of it because he is the best at this portfolio of skills, and he is always hungry to expand it at every opportunity. He eat sleep and breathes the industry. The man is dedicated.

I think we can all relax about SNL being as bad as it is with all of this in mind. In a recent interview with Tina Fey, she lists things she learned as head writer from Lorne Michaels. #1 on the list: Producing is about discouraging creativity.

Canada's Leader Debate 2011

Being as obsessed as I am about politics it is no surprise I tuned in to the Leader's Debate tonight, featuring the 4 major parties. Nothing too surprising or exciting happened, and I actually found myself tuning out towards the end with very little conflict or drama. Some of the one on one debates, particularly the ones with Duceppe were just some policy agreement. Except of course when he was vs. Harper at the beginning, immediately putting a shot across the bow challenging Harper on the most recent Conservative scandal, where the auditor general questioned 50 million dollars in spending on the G8 summit. As usual, Jack Layton seemed to perform the best out of anyone with some very good points made, challenges issued and shots taken on both Harper and Ignatieff. Gilles was sidelined pretty much most of the rest of the debate, and I've been told that he tries much harder during the french debate because obviously more Quebecers will be tuning in to that. Ignatieff, while an intelligent debater and a pretty smart guy that I can respect, did drop the ball a couple of times, able to issue smart arguments but failing to put an emotional punch when he was agressing Harper.

Steven of course played his normal role of prudish miserly grandmother, chastising the other party members for not supporting him and mindlessly repeating his droning argument that he wants to continue his "work" even though he was found in contempt of parliment and routinely hides things from parliment and taxpayers, and has a party composed of corrupt and dishonest hypocrites. He constantly ignored direct questions and repeated his mantras, hoping the Canadian public is too dumb to pay attention to his invalid arguments.
Like I said, Layton was great in my opinion. I really had no heart for the NDP until I had seen him in the 2008 debates - he does a really great job and stands apart from the two major party cardboard cutouts. He made some great points, like "What happened to the old stephen harper who wanted to come to ottawa and clean up government?", kept on track in answering the initial debate questions with straightforward answers, and even stuck up for Elizabeth May getting left out of the debates and made a good argument for proportional representation:

The Bloq and Green party got about the same amount of votes but the green party didn't get any seats, proportional representation can more accurately represent Canada's ideals and wishes for government. I agree that our government needs real fundamental change in how it is run. Stephen thinks the answer is a majority government, but that will just help him ram his agenda through and will end up pissing off a majority of Canada in the end. A system where more views are represented, and where parties are FORCED to work together to form policy that works for everyone. Possibly even a component similar to Switzerland where citizens are able to regularly vote on important issues and keep their parlimentary representatives in check and more accountable for policy decisions. We can all agree that the world has been changing too much to think that old ways of doing things are still functional, and besides it would also be pretty awesome.

YouTube Trends

Recently YouTube revealed their new service, Trends (www.youtube.com/trends), as daily insight into new, most shared and most viewed Youtube videos. While some people might disregard this as another way of self-aggrandizement of popular culture and another method of slipping advertising into your daily life, I was fascinated by the possibilities of a Google trends type analysis tool for YouTube videos.

Well, it turns out it's not as cool as all that unless some massive additions are still in the works. The orientation video on the splash page is little more than a glossy overview with some really, really terrible autotune singing. And the link to YouTube charts (as well as a few other areas of the site) hasn't been activated yet. However the most interesting thing I've found is in the top right corner, called "Discover Video Trends Near You...", a misleading site where you can actually browse the most viewed or most shared videos Globally or by major cities or countries. Most shared is the default search, so make sure you change it to most viewed using the link on the upper right of the interface.

You can also have it cross reference across the 3 locations you select to find how many of the top viewed/shared are in common between locations. I consistently found that all of the US cities and Canada had 7-10 of the top 10 listed videos in common with the Global results, whereas on the other side of the world (Japan, Hong Kong, Russia, etc.) often had 0-2 of the top 10 listed in common. This might be because of language difference (although the UK had 2 in common last I checked) or maybe people in Canada and US use YouTube more and internet users in other countries are more likely to use some other kind of video service. Or it means that people in the US and Canada are more likely to check top viewed results when browsing for videos to watch. At any rate, it is interesting to see what people in other countries watch for entertainment, even if it doesn't always make much sense to me.

Fate vs Free Will

About a week ago I had this dream about fate, free will, future telling and time travel. At the time it seemed revolutionary like I had discovered something noone had thought of. After I woke up and thought about it some more, I decided it was all very obvious and contrived and not at all useful. But, eventually I wrote it all down anyways. It is possible there was something more important that emerged as a result of these points, but maybe it is forgotten, perhaps for the better of all mankind. Who knows what actually conceiving all the implications of time travel would do to our adorable little monkey brains.

What is a Marine Protected Area?

Awhile ago I watched a CBC news program that featured David Suzuki and then Environment Minister Jim Prentice take a tour of the Gwaii Haanas Park. In the words of Jim Prentice: "Protection will extend from mountain tops to sea floor" The area is protected, according to the Parks Canada website, in 10 Kilometers offshore from the park in every direction, a total of 3,400 square Kilometers. This seems pretty extensive and good for the environment. But after mentioning this to my ecology professor Dr. Reimchen, the entire work seemed to upset him.

"It's a farce. The problem with the proposal of these Marine Protected Areas is that it doesn't include a ban on commercial fishing, which is entirely the problem why the area needs to be protected in the first place."

When I consulted the Parks Canada website further, this seemed to be true, at least in a lie of omission. Nowhere in the description of the Marine Protected Areas, or any information specific to the Gwaii Haanas Park, does it mention what exactly creating the MPA does or what it changes. From the Parks Canada website:

"A National Marine Conservation Area is a type of marine protected area managed by Parks Canada. The objective of the National Marine Conservation Areas Program is to protect, and conserve, for all time, marine areas that are representative of Canada's oceans and Great Lakes. The idea is to balance protection and sustainable use. The program is also intended to increase public understanding, appreciation and enjoyment of our marine heritage."

As usual lots of talk without saying anything. They state an objective without any concrete rules or regulation, because, well, there probably aren't any.

Are you liberal? Like veggies? Are you sleepy?

One of my favorite topics is Sociobiology. So favorite, that I got an honors degree in it. Along the same vain as this is Evolutionary Psychology. I've always had an academic interest in parts of psychology, although it can be a bit fluffy at times, and as my friend Joe once said "Be wary of any Psychology majors, everyone that's in Psychology is there to self diagnose." Taking this cynical (but believable) viewpoint hasn't stopped me from learning about psychology, and I was very interested to find out about a Psychologist called Kanazawa, inventor of the Savanna Principle and Savanna-IQ interaction hypothesis, related to the field of study of general intelligence (g).

I started reading about him in this article with the provocative title "Smart People Do More Drugs -- Because of Evolution". The article overviews his theories, along with his most recent conclusion, that smarter people do more drugs because many of them are novel evolutionarily speaking. This is just one application of his Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis.

The Savanna Principle states that the environment that our ancestors participated in and which our brains developed and evolved around is very different from the environment we live in today. Kanazawa's example is how we perceive the color of a banana, which looks banana color under any level of natural lighting (sun or moon, day or night) but does not look the same under man made sodium vapor lights, because of how new they are evolutionarily speaking.

He goes on to apply the theory of General Intelligence to his explanation of the difference between our present day cognitive capacity and how it could have evolved from our ancestors. Much of our brain's evolution took place during the Pleistocene Epoch (~10,000 years ago), and was an incredibly stable time period for humans, where most were hunter-gatherers on the African savanna their whole loves over many many generations. Although most problems could be solved by genetic hard wiring and did not require a lot of conscious thought (hunger, finding mates, living within a social group), novel problems did occur that required improvisation and abstract thought. A good example he gives is a lightning strike, which people would rarely have to deal with since lightning never strikes the same place twice. They would have to figure out how to escape or stop the spread of fire, and make decisions whether they would have to move or rebuild where they were.

The problem solving skill that could be applied to novel problems, is referred to as General Intelligence and evolved out of the necessity to deal with infrequent but life threatening problems. This had to have happened regularly enough to be selected for, and was first postulated by Charles Spearman. He stated that variations in intelligence test scores could be explained by two factors:
1) Individual ability making a person skilled at a task
2) A general factor that governs performance on all cognitive tasks

General Intelligence is now more important in our current environment than ever, because everything is now evolutionarily novel and cannot be as easily dealt with by instinct.

The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis states that: less intelligent individuals are more likely to acquire evolutionarily novel situations, and more intelligent individuals are more likely to acquire evolutionarily novel preferences and values. As one example, Polygyny (a man with more than one female partner) would be evolutionarily familiar since it was more common in the past, but monogamy is relatively new evolutionarily. Evidence Kanazawa has collected indicates men with a higher IQ are more likely to value monogamy than those that scored lower. Using this llogic, he also theorizes that people with higher IQ prefer:

-Liberalism to conservatism
-Being awake at night (night owls) instead of being awake during daylight
-Vegetarianism
-Disinterest in evolutionarily familiar crimes such as theft and physical assault

I've read most (maybe all) of Kanazawa's papers, and there is a lot of repetition. Maybe most scientists do this, but it seemed particularly apparent, and I've read a few papers. He has a lot of supporting study data to back up his claims, but people in the fields related to sociobiology need to tread carefully. The science as a whole was virtually quashed out when Arthur Jenson suggested that there was a genetic correlation between race and intelligence. I couldn't help but thinking of this while reading Kanazawa's papers, and definitely if nothing else smacks of some personal bias by his position taken in how he analyzes the data.

The only real argument I have is with the idea that intelligent people always prefer liberalism to conservatism. Politics being much more complicated than black and white, we also see many intelligent people in political control of conservative party. If the conservatives were less intelligent, would they not be less fit to govern and manage government services and obligations, and also less able to compete with liberal parties during election times? There is also the issue of social and economic conservatism as two different aspects within the umbrella of political alignment and were not considered in his analysis. Like many scientists before him, he seems to be drawing grandiose sweeping conclusions with only bits of isolated data.

Saucyyyyy

I was out of tomato sauce and so went to buy some more. Being a cheap ass, I find Ragu to be most affordable. Only thing is, my regular flavor (which is also the cheapest, some flavors are more expensive) Tomato and Basil, was "light" tomato sauce - 33% less calories. Still having one of my old bottles I was able to do a side by side comparison:

Regular sauce: Water, tomato paste, tomatoes, soybean oil, dehydrated vegetables (onion, garlic, parsley), basil salt, natural flavor, spice, tomato puree, calcium chloride, citric acid, sulphites. May contain milk ingredients.

Light sauce: Tomato puree, water, diced tomatoes, diced onions, sugar, salt, garlic powder, calcium chloride, dried parsley, dried basil, spices & spice extract, citric acid. May contain milk ingredients, sulphites

Seems like the only difference is instead of adding soybean oil as filler, they add sugar. The light sauce has 0g of fat, while the regular sauce has 4.5g (per 125 ml). The regular sauce also has 11g of carbs, with 3 being fibre 5g being sugar and 3g of starch. The light has 12g of carbs with only 2g fibre 9g sugar and only 1g starch. The light sauce had a higher daily recommended intake of Vitamin A and the regular was higher in calcium and iron.

The light sauce definitely tasted sweeter and was much more runny. The soybean oil probably also helps thicken the sauce and hold it together better. I don't really like eating sugar in everything that goes in my mouth, so I'm probably gonna stick with the regular sauces.