Open letter to Seth McFarlane

Because boring sunday evenings are perfect for throwing tantrums!

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Dear Seth,

You are a colossal asshole and you suck!
You and the rest of the talent less idiots who pass for Family Guy writers are the world’s most formidable morons!

Enough with the shit-pile that Family Guy has turned out to be!! I used to be a big fan of the show but now I’d rather stare at my shit stew in the toilet for 30 mins than sit through an entire episode of the abomination that has become Family Guy. You guys are not even trying anymore and it is unbelievable that the show is still airing.

You started of ok dude (albeit shamelessly). When you ran up to your friends to say, “guys…I have an idea for a show. It consists of a crazy family with a stupid dad and a level-headed mom and kids who…” why didn’t any of them stop you with “That sounds a whole lot like The Simpsons you unoriginal bum”? However I gave you a pass. Thanks to Led Zeppelin, plagiarizing something to make it better is a little okay in my book. Not that Family Guy was head and shoulders above the Simpsons but whatever. It was a comedy show and it got me laughing so I was not going to hate it on principle.
Your fascination with decades old American pop culture at first intrigued me, then amused me and very soon started irritating me to no end. If you are a comedy show, you have to say something funny. Simply breaking into your obscure childhood reference does not work. If you miss your childhood so much, get some friends who grew up with you, go to a bar and reminiscence. Don’t force everyone else to join your boring party!
The vague annoyance and animosity I was feeling for your show was perfectly captured by Southpark’s ‘Cartoon Wars’. Seth Mac Farlane, that is how an intelligent adult cartoon looks like and should look like. Southpark has managed to address every legitimate and crippling criticism of your show and yet you do not have the intellectual honesty to make any changes.
Your “this is just like the time...” jokes are the worst offenders. I am not even addressing the ‘they are unrelated to the plot’ criticism that SP has levied against you. Once again, your show is a comedy show and I do not care how you spin a story as long as you make it funny. But those jokes are not even funny and they drag on for way too long. And this bears repeating, they are NOT FUNNY. When you show a clip of Peter running home to fall down mid-route and hurt him self and go “aah” for a full 1 minute, I feel like stabbing you. When you repeat the same fucking thing with Lois instead of Peter in another episode, I feel like stabbing myself.

I could have simply stopped watching the show instead of throwing this tantrum. But somehow with Family Guy you have managed the biggest bait and switch in the history of TV shows. Every week I am inexplicably motivated to watch a new episode in the hopes that I will actually break into a smile (I gave up on laughing a year ago) and every week I am disappointed. Yet I keep going back for ‘old-times sake’. This has been happening for over a year now and only today did I fully appreciate how much of my life I have wasted in this comedic anticipation! I deserve a kick to the head!

Your other show ‘American Dad’ is just ok. How did you even successfully pitch it? God knows why your creativity cannot take off without the impetus being “let’s start with a crazy family”, but judging by the way Family Guy has turned out, I’m betting American Dad will start stinking very soon.

Here’s a very serious suggestion Seth. Stop Family Guy completely and salvage some respect. Redirect all your efforts to American Dad and hire better writers. That way, maybe in a few seasons it can come close to being a reasonably funny show. It is tough but at least you would have done the right thing!

In conclusion I will say this.
Carlos Mencia : Comedians :: Family Guy : Cartoon shows
If this doesn’t knock any sense into your head, I do not know what will!

Sincerely,
A well-meaning hater.

PS: Your Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy also sucks. Blue Harvest was good though.

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It is amusing that searching for 'clouds showing the finger' on google images has such a straightforward result!

On Objectivity/Subjectivity

One of my beliefs is that objectivity is an illusion.

Objective: of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers

Subjective: characteristic of or belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent of mind

The definition of the word 'objective' invokes a notion that there are some hard 'facts' that can be perceived as being objective and the perception of such an 'objective' entity is immune to any sort of individual thought. This I feel is inaccurate. It is impossible to experience any phenomenon without individual interpretation. The general trend in determining what is objective seems to be nothing more than labeling the opinion of a 'subjective multitude' as being objective. If a majority of people perceive an object, phenomenon, or condition in the same way, it is deemed to be the objective interpretation. In any discussion that pertains to the determination of whether or not something is objective, what we consider are the opinions of others. That alone makes it highly subjective.

The most obvious manifestation of this view seems to be in the social construct of the human race. We have a number of so-called ‘self evident truths’ that are the objective pillars on which society is built. Truths like ‘murder is wrong’, ‘everyone has the right to pursue happiness’, ‘all men are equal’ and other such ideas all have an air of absoluteness that is supposed to be independent of individual interpretation. I do not agree. I strongly believe that every such idea has evolved from a collective mind of humans (from trial and error of course) and has been elevated to an objective status after societies have found them to be extremely important for the existence of a stable and steadily advancing civilization. Our day to day laws fall in the same category and are formed in exactly the same way except that most are not grandiose enough to be elevated to a higher stature. “Thou shalt wear thy seat-belt while driving” doesn’t exactly have an inspiring and divine all-encompassing ring to it.

The biggest threat to a view like this would be scientific facts (gravity, fields, forces, evolution). A common understanding seems to be that there exist cold scientific facts that are as objective as possible and the goal of any scientific endeavor is the attainment and understanding of this knowledge. At the risk of sounding like a colossal idiot I very apprehensively say that I do not agree with this view either. Throughout history, even after the age of reason, ‘scientific facts’ that were thought to have been backed by mountains of experimental evidence have been disproved (or at least revised, eg: Newton’s Laws of motion) time and again. It seems preposterous to think that at some point in time we will arrive at the final and absolute explanation of a phenomenon and such an explanation can be labeled as an objective fact.

The generally accepted notion is that the universe is deterministic, that it is governed by absolute objective laws and all of our theories and their revisions are just iterations before we end up at this “truth”. I very well understand that a majority of scientists are smart enough to realize that theories are meant to be critiqued and revised. What seems ironic to me is that a mode of thinking that does not encourage rigid dedication to any theory as being absolute has as its ultimate goal, the discovery of the absolute laws of nature. Historically, classical physics was thought to be one such absolute explanation with no improvements needed. Yet, quantum physics was discovered. Is it justified that when/if we discover the grand unification theory we will call it the ‘absolute truth’ and accept it unflinchingly? Of course, one could argue that it is just a matter of semantics, but the majority of the human population does believe in absolute truths (be it from a religious god or Einstein’s god i.e nature) which is what I am addressing.

My point is that at some level even the so-called absolute scientific facts are largely ‘mass subjective’ and not purely ‘objective’. I have a belief that there are no such absolute truths and everything we make of the world around us is the result of a collective understanding and acceptance (much like the ‘Borg’ from Star Trek :P). I will admit that I do not share the confidence of the applicability of such a non-objective view of the world in the scientific realm as I have in the case of the social realm. I have a vague uneasiness about this and I cannot figure out why. Must be some ‘purpose of life’ thing!

This fruit, it has lead poisoning!

The last post has made me very disappointed in myself. All it had was just two lines. This is being dangerously close to twitter territory and that is unacceptable! I want to apologize sincerely for the transgression. I briefly became what I hate, a self absorbed asshole who thinks that his stream of consciousness is so interesting that it has to be shared with the world. In the future I will do everything possible to keep such inane and mind numbing thoughts to myself.

As some sort of redemption I want to share this cover of the simple yet beautiful Led Zepp song called “Tangerine” (or Orange for you desis :P). It is meant to be played on an acoustic but it has been more than a year since I last played on an acoustic and I need to retrain my fingers. I am at the end of a Led Zepp phase and having re-discovered a lot of their amazing songs I did not want to wait to learn and record this.

To say that Jimmy Page is a maestro is an exercise in redundancy.
Also, I will not be offended if you stop listening from the 2:47 mark!
Enjoy!

Dilemma of the Day

The problem with people forwarding you April Fool articles is that you do not know if they get the joke and find it amusing enough to share OR they really have become the fool! How does one figure out which is the case so as to respond the right way??
One of life's many mysteries!