There are monsters in Montauk! On Tuesday, Gawker posted a photo of this amazing beastie that turned up on a beach in Montauk, New York on some undisclosed day in the recent past (or future):

I’ll agree that this is a strange looking thing. Is it a monster? I’m guessing it’s a dog who’s been bashed around in the ocean a little bit. Gawker, in their infinite insider wisdom, assumed it was viral marketing:

This is an actual monster, some sort of rodent-like creature with a dinosaur beak. A tipster says that there is “a government animal testing facility very close by in Long Island,” but unless the government is trying to design horrible Montauk monsters that will eat IEDs and fart fire at bad Iraqis, we’re not sure why they would create such an unthinkable beast. Our guess is that it’s viral marketing for something.

As I’ve noted before, I am entirely sick of the Internet. Why can’t a monster on a beach just be a monster on a beach? I think my generation, being raised on TV, is somewhat skeptical of ads. The generation below us, or maybe even the generation below that (I lose track of where we are at this point), sees marketing efforts everywhere. I don’t see how it couldn’t affect your view of everyday reality.

Or maybe it’s just Gawker, and by extension, the hip New York media world. I had some good times living in New York, don’t get me wrong. But the “I am not impressed with anything you do” attitude did get to me after awhile. In LA, people at least pretend to be interested in what you do. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I will take fake kindness over real rudeness any day.

Via Google News:

US President George W. Bush on Wednesday drew on surging fuel prices and growing public support for offshore drilling to reiterate his call for Congress to allow the practice in order to curb an energy crisis.

“There is now a growing agreement across our country that the government should permit the exploration and development of these offshore oil resources,” Bush said after a meeting with his cabinet to discuss energy.

So many things about this story drive me crazy. First of all, this has nothing to do with the story itself, but the way Bush presents his opinions as fact is a constant source of frustration. “There is now a growing agreement across our country that the government should permit the exploration and development of these offshore oil resources.” What that says to you, the isolated individual, is “everyone thinks this is a good idea but you.” It’s a classic bullying tactic to make those who aren’t of the same opinion feel like they’re weirdos, or they don’t know what they’re talking about, or it’s useless to fight against because you can’t stop the tide of growing agreement.

Meanwhile, the only place where there is actually growing agreement is that high gas prices suck ass. We don’t give a damn where the oil comes from, as long as our cars can continue to be propelled forward in the manner to which we are accustomed. No one is thinking, “please drill offshore! But if there’s more gas found in Texas, we don’t want it!” We’re thinking, “holy mother of god I just spent 25% of my income to fill up the tank! Where is there more oil? Offshore? Sure! Great! Give it to me!”

And this would all be well and good if we really knew that drilling offshore was going to give us cheaper gas or decrease our dependence on foreign oil. Not that it would be an optimal situation, but at least I could understand that somewhere in the back of his mind, Bush might have the best interests of the country at heart. However:

But analysts say that renewed offshore drilling would have little impact on gas prices anytime soon.

It would take at least a decade for oil companies to obtain permits, procure equipment, and do the exploration necessary to get the oil out of the ground, most industry analysts say. And even then, they add, the amount of new oil produced would probably be too small to significantly affect world oil prices.

This is not a political issue. It’s not a situation where Democrats say it’s going to take the oil companies at least a decade to obtain permits and procure equipment, while Republicans say they would be able to drill instantly. It is a fact that it’s not physically possible to set up these oil rigs in less than a decade. Now, how many members of this vast new swath of Americans who support offshore drilling do you think understand that even if we started working on it today, our gas prices would continue to climb for 10 mother freaking years?

So, obviously, offshore drilling is a crock, and the American people should know this information. How is it presented in our original, unbiased news story?

Earlier this month House Speaker Nancy Pelosi derided Bush’s offshore drilling plan as “a hoax,” stressing it would neither reduce gas prices nor increase energy independence, and instead urged Bush to bring some of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve stockpile to market, a move Bush rejected.

You catch that? Nancy Pelosi is deriding it as “a hoax.” She has her opinion, Bush has his. Who could say what the reality is in this situation? Certainly not the press!

And don’t even get me started on “clean coal.” If you want to know the facts, check out this fascinating article from Rolling Stone.

Okay, so now that Obama has proven himself to be an elitist dickhead who wastes his time caring about what people are thinking in other, less important countries like Europe, it’s time for the media to test his military mettle. McCain already passed the military knowledge test by being a prisoner of war. When countries take prisoners of war, they always choose the soldiers who display the strongest historical knowledge and aptitude for diplomacy, so the Vietnamese already vetted him for us.

The thing that’s really hurting Obama’s chances to become president today is his mistake in refusing to support the troop surge. The surge is working, and Obama didn’t believe it would, and therefore, Obama doesn’t know much about how to win wars. Everywhere he goes, he’s being asked the question, “Everywhere you go, you’re being asked the question, ‘do you regret your vote on the troop surge?’” Obama responds, “hey, I just kinda blew the mind of the entire world and single-handedly recaptured all of the goodwill that the Bush administration pissed-away over the last 8 years, can you cut me a little slack, maybe?” And the reporters say, “so how ’bout that boner on the troop surge deal, huh?”

Today I typed the question “did the surge work” into Google, because I’m not entirely sure at what point it was determined that George Bush’s decision to send more troops to Iraq in 2007 has solved the problems we were facing in that country. I remember when, just after Bush landed on the Mission Accomplished carrier, Democrats liberals were asked if they regretted their opposition to the war in the face of this obvious victory. That, I remember. I remember when Iraqiis voted for the first time, and Democrats liberals were asked if they regretted their opposition to the war in the face of this obvious victory. But I don’t seem to remember the moment when it was determined that this time, we are, without question, finally on the right track.

The first article that comes up is this one. It’s very interesting, but it’s on a site called “antiwar.com,” which leads me to believe they might have some sort of a bias. I went to the New York Times to see what they had to say about the matter, and all I got were two articles (here and here) talking about how McCain and Obama are “sparring” over whether or not the surge worked. If it’s a he-said, she-said sort of deal, than this does not help me understand why Obama has been asked about his wrongheaded position with the sort of incredulity reserved for Holocaust deniers. The Washington Post was equally useless — all I could find were opinion pieces where writers claimed the surge was working and offered little in the way of facts.

The only real fact I can find is that “levels of violence are at a 4 year low.” I don’t know how many attacks there were 4 years ago or how many attacks there are today. I don’t know if that means attacks on Americans, attacks on Iraqiis, or both. I don’t know if an “attack” includes all forms of violence, or if it only refers to bombings or shootings.

I do know that in addition to the troop surge, part of our strategy involved paying Sunni insurgents money to join our noble struggle:

September 9, 2007 — American forces are paying Sunni insurgents hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to switch sides and help them to defeat Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The tactic has boosted the efforts of American forces to restore some order to war-torn provinces around Baghdad in the run-up to a report by General David Petraeus, the US commander, to Congress tomorrow.

Petraeus will tell Congress that there has been great progress at a local level in Iraq following a surge in the number of troops this year, but little sign of political reconciliation.

So that strategy has seemingly worked pretty well. I also know that the “al-Qaeda in Iraq” that we’re fighting over there didn’t exist before the war started, that we still have about 8,000 more troops in Iraq than we did before the surge began, and that just a couple of months ago, General Patraeus said the Iraqi government was still not ready to stand on its own.

I guess the answer to my question, then, is that the surge has (probably) succeeded in not necessitating another surge. As long as our goal wasn’t to make the country safe, rebuild its infrastructure, withdraw our troops, or win the “war,” the surge was part of an excellent strategy that is meeting with great success, and I, for one, am ashamed that the Democratic candidate doesn’t have the guts to admit he was wrong.

I just did a search for myself on Cuil.com, the new search engine developed by some ex-Googlers. I did not figure as prominently in the returns as I should have, and for some reason, this image comes up as the cover of my book I, An Actress:

I did find one link I hadn’t seen before, though. This website was kind enough to link to a post I wrote awhile ago that I totally don’t remember writing. And if I do say so myself, it was hilarious! I had to follow the link to prove to myself that I was the one who wrote it. Somewhere in time, another version of me is chuckling to himself, thinking about how much of a nice surprise the future me is going to have when he stumbles upon a link to this post and realizes he was the one who wrote it. Thanks, past me! Good job!

Some super classy behavior was on display today in the Senate:

Today was a historic first for religion in America’s civic life: For the very first time, a Hindu delivered the morning invocation in the Senate chamber — only to find the ceremony disrupted by three Christian right activists.

The three protesters, who all belong to the Christian Right anti-abortion group Operation Save America, and who apparently traveled to Washington all the way from North Carolina, interrupted by loudly asking for God’s forgiveness for allowing the false prayer of a Hindu in the Senate chamber.

Hindus … aren’t those the guys who worship elephants with twelve arms and stuff? Well, guess what, pagans … YOU JUST GOT SCHOOLED BY THE POWER OF JESUS. Freedom of religion does not give you the right to believe that elephants have twelve arms. It just means that you can worship Jesus anyway you choose.

I’m just going to post this article in its entirety, because it’s the most important news that’s ever been heard by anyone and you must read it immediately.

FORMER NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell - a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission - has stunningly claimed aliens exist.

And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions - but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as ‘little people who look strange to us.’

He said supposedly real-life ET’s were similar to the traditional image of a small frame, large eyes and head.

Chillingly, he claimed our technology is “not nearly as sophisticated” as theirs and “had they been hostile”, he warned “we would be been gone by now”.

Dr Mitchell, along with with Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard, holds the record for the longest ever moon walk, at nine hours and 17 minutes following their 1971 mission.

“I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we’ve been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real,” Dr Mitchell said.

“It’s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it’s leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

“I’ve been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it’s been happening quite a bit.”

Dr Mitchell, who has a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering and a Doctor of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics claimed Roswell was real and similar alien visits continue to be investigated.

He told the astonished Kerrang! radio host Nick Margerrison: “This is really starting to open up. I think we’re headed for real disclosure and some serious organisations are moving in that direction.”

Mr Margerrison said: “I thought I’d stumbled on some sort of astronaut humour but he was absolutely serious that aliens are definitely out there and there’s no debating it.”

Officials from NASA, however, were quick to play the comments down.

In a statement, a spokesman said: “NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe.

‘Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinions on this issue.’

I love that NASA considers the statement “we have made contacts with aliens” an “opinion.”

#1 - Didn’t we declare an end to Communism at one point? What part of it did we defeat, exactly?
#2 - Is John McCain still running for President?
#3 - Who are we at war with? It’s not Iraq, so it must be the people who are at war with Iraq. Is that really an army, or is it just a bunch of loosely affiliated people with guns? If so, can that really be called a war? And did we ever actually declare war, or did we just decide to call it that at some point?
#4 - When a program crashes in Windows (daily) and a message pops up reading “Windows is checking online for a solution,” does it ever find that solution? If so, will it tell you about it, or does it prefer to just keep the information to itself?
#5 - How are the two biggest mortgage firms in the U.S. called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Are those nicknames? I can’t think of any other national organization with a first and last name.

I’ve been living in Los Angeles for about 2 1/2 years now, after spending 8 years in New York City. At first, the switch was dramatic. New York has exactly 3 days of pleasant weather every year, while LA has 3 days of unpleasant weather. New York has naked cowboys harassing tourists in Times Square, while LA has people in frighteningly homemade-looking superhero costumes harassing tourists in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. New York has Puerto Ricans, while LA has Armenians. And so on.

As I’ve settled in, I’ve discovered a few things about LA that only become clear to people who have spent a lot of time here. If you ever make it out here for a visit, please print this guide out; it just may save your life.

1. There is no good time to go to Trader Joe’s. Trader Joe’s is a West Coast-based grocery store chain that feels like a food co-op gone corporate. Its employees are mainly twenty-something hipsters who wear Hawaiian shirts and often look like they’ve cut their own hair with garden shears — but in a fashionable way.

Outsiders often make the mistake of assuming that Trader Joe’s is a high-end, expensive grocery store, in the same league as Whole Foods. This is a mistake. Trader Joe’s products actually tend to be cheaper than their name brand counterparts. If you do not live near a Trader Joe’s but you know something about the chain, it is that they carry an inexpensive brand of wine known as Charles Shaw, or “Two Buck Chuck” as it is know to out-of-state visitors who would like you to think they are not out-of-state visitors.

Trader Joe’s, at least the one in Los Feliz, where I live, is always busy. Because I’m a freelancer, I have often attempted to beat the rush by showing up at odd hours of the day. The parking lot is just as packed at 11:13 AM as it is at 5:30 PM. The aisles themselves are incredibly small and difficult to maneuver a grocery cart through, although, having come from New York, I’m pretty well accustomed to navigating impossibly tight spaces. If you need to go to Trader Joe’s and you find that it’s packed, take my advice and DO NOT leave the parking lot, thinking you’ll come back at a better time. Trust me, there is no better time.

2. People in Los Angeles have no standard of measurement for entertainment. In Los Angeles, you are either “being entertained” (watching a piece of entertainment) or “not being entertained” (not watching a piece of entertainment). It is impossible to watch a piece of entertainment and not be entertained.

For example, let’s say you go to see a mediocre movie, like Made of Honor or 27 Dresses. While you are in that theater, you will get the sensation from the crowd’s reaction that it is the most daring, original piece of entertainment that has ever been produced. People will be curled up in fetal balls of laughter. Complete strangers will smack you on the back in joy.

This actually happened when Sarah and I went to see Little Miss Sunshine. Now, I thought Little Miss Sunshine was okay, but the word I would use to describe it as “cute.” Judging from the reactions of the people surrounding us in the theater, the word they would have used to describe it is “revolutionary.” The woman next to Sarah, a complete unknown to us, grabbed Sarah’s arm at one point and, gasping for air, screamed “This is SO CRAZY!” If I didn’t know better, I would have assumed the audience was filled with cavemen who were just seeing moving pictures on a screen for the first time in their lives.

3. There are actually six different rush hours in Los Angeles. They are:

• The going to work rush. (6:30 AM - 10 AM)
• The going to lunch rush. (11 AM - 2 PM)
• The returning from lunch rush. (2:30 PM to 4 PM)
• The coming home from work rush. (4 PM to 8 PM)
• Saturday.
• Sunday.

If you must drive, your window of opportunity is Monday-Friday, 10-11 AM or 2-2:30 PM. Any other time, you’re better off walking.

4. People in Los Angeles are not flaky, they’re just extremely hopeful. In Los Angeles, people will say, “let’s get together for lunch sometime next week.” You are not a true Angeleno if you let reality cloud your response. Your response should be based on what would happen in an ideal world in which you had unlimited amounts of time and everyone loved everyone. So you say, “Yes! Let’s get together for lunch sometime next week.” You will not be held to it, and they will probably never call you, anyway. Everyone wins!

5. Everyone in LA has his or her own private monitoring helicopter that is constantly flying overhead, making sure everything’s kosher. At least, that’s the best explanation I can come up with for why helicopters seem to be flying around my neighborhood on a tighter schedule than subway trains.

6. Driving drunk is a terrible idea, but calling a cab is an even worse one.

So, I’m going to try a little experiment, and I’d love it if you, my friends, would help me out. I would like to get more traffic on my website. As you’ll see at the bottom of this post, I’ve added a little code that puts funky little icons at the bottom of all my blog posts. For those of you who aren’t in the know, these icons are your way of telling random Internet strangers that you enjoy what you’re reading. For instance, the icon on the far left leads to Digg, which is a site that compiles user submitted articles. If you like something I’ve written, please click on this button and send it to Digg in the hopes that others will come back to the site and read it, thus creating a snowball effect that will end in my complete mastery of time and space. If you do not like what you’ve read, please send me an email calling me a twat.

There are other little icons down there too, but I don’t really know what any of them mean. I’m sure they all link to awesome sites where nerds can turn other nerds on to nerdy inside jokes that will soon be turned into coffee table books. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, feel free to click on the rest of the icons and see what happens. Chances are good they all lead to some kind of registration form.

A lot of people have been asking me lately: “Hey, Dinsmore! What do you think about this whole Obama New Yorker cover?” (Full disclosure: no one has asked me this question.)

Well, here’s my take on it. The New Yorker, of course, has the right to print any damn cover they please, and I would disagree that it’s either tasteless or offensive, as both of our presidential candidates have proclaimed. (Note: I would highly doubt that Obama actually felt offended and I can guarantee that McCain didn’t). If they painted Obama with a bone through his nose, dancing around a cauldron full of steaming babies, that I might agree is offensive, because that would reflect negatively on an entire race of people. This cover doesn’t play on racial stereotypes (unless somehow I missed the new stereotype that African-Americans are Muslim terrorists), it plays on the identity of the candidate himself, which is fair game for political cartoonists.

The question for me isn’t whether it’s offensive … the question is whether it’s funny, and that’s where I raise my objections. In order to be funny, a cartoon must have context. Now, as a right-wing cartoon, this is perfectly good satire. The message it sends is “ha-ha, Obama’s going to come into the White House and terrorize our country with his wicked, anti-American beliefs.” But dig this: the only thing about the cartoon that tell us it is poking fun at this attitude is the fact that it’s on the cover of New Yorker. This tells me that the New Yorker has such a high opinion of itself, it assumes everyone everywhere already knows its political viewpoints.

And that’s the part that offends me. That the editors of the New Yorker (and, to some extent, New Yorkers themselves) believe themselves to be so important that the only audience worth speaking to is the insular crowd that already understands their in-jokes. If you don’t get the joke, then you’re not cool enough to understand both the political context of the Obama-Muslim rumors and the meta-context that the New Yorker would never actually believe this. It is too complicated. And if you have to dig through that many levels to get to the heart of the joke, then the joke is not funny. As a learned scholar on humor, this is my decision, and it is final.

This is a lesson I had to learn the hard way. As I’ve mentioned before on my blog, I made a joke at my wedding that silenced the crowd. Sarah and I went up to thank everyone at the reception. I grabbed the microphone and said, “I’d like to thank you all for helping me to finally realize my dreams of starting my own baby factory.” Now, I will go to my grave thinking this was a pretty funny joke — and that a man who has just spent $30,000 dollars on a party has the right to make any joke he wants and receive at least feigned laughter in response. But it is only funny if you know me and know that I would never actually mean it. And a wedding, I learned, is not the best environment for irony. A gay wedding, maybe. Two men making that exact same joke at their wedding? It would kill. If I have any gay readers who are planning to get married soon, please, give it a spin and let me know how the crowd responds.

Sarah and I had a discussion the other day in which she asked me, “why should the telecom companies be prosecuted when the president was the one who broke the law?” And it’s a good question which is, I think, being used by a lot of people to justify giving them immunity. Glenn Greenwald answers this question in a very thoughtful way today, and I encourage you to read it if you’re interested.

The basic point is that, even if the President asked the telecoms to give up our private data, it was still against the law. I’m sure a lot of people think, “if George Bush asked me to break the law, I wouldn’t have a choice.” But in this country, when given the choice between breaking the law and honoring the request of your president, you are obligated to obey the law. George Bush doesn’t have the power to break the law, and he also doesn’t have the power to force other people to break the law. Now, I’d be scared shitless if I had to disobey a presidential order, but the telecom companies are vastly more powerful than I am, and they knew full well going into this mess that the were breaking the law. Maybe they had great reasoning behind their actions … but if this FISA bill passes, we’ll never know, because they won’t be obligated to explain their actions in a court of law.

So anyway, read the article, and if you’re moved enough to do something about it, please visit this link to call your senators and urge them to strip retroactive immunity from the FISA bill. I made the calls the other day, and it was totally easy. You don’t need to know a lot of impressive facts and figures … just follow the script given on the website, the Senators’ assistants will note your opinion, and you will have had the say you deserve as a member of a Democracy. And that’s the last I’ll say about it.

Happy Independence Day!