Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Tim and Eric on Marc Maron's WTF podcast talk about Irony, awkwardness and being in on the joke

VIDEO: Tim And Eric, It's Not Jackie Chan (Original)
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast: Episode 536 - Tim and Eric
MARC MARON: (23m) It was essentially that. It was the lameness that was hilarious. Intentional lameness.
TIM HEIDECKER: Intentional stupidity that you have to be on the same page with the idea that I'm not really suggesting that as a name
MARON: Of course and he got that immediately and history is made
HEIDECKER: Irony, that's the word. You all have to be on the same page that we're all f*cked and most things are garbage. Most products, whether its movies or TV shows or books are mostly garbage and mostly patronising to us
I've been in trouble the last few weeks with group emails. You create a shorthand with people where there's an understood context in how to interpret each other. You take things with a grain of salt and don't accept everything at face value. It's an invisible language between friends. When you expand the circle like you do with group emails, sometimes it gets lost. The two people who seem most at odds get the code but everyone else takes it seriously. The tone shifts, it gets weird.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

"Everydayness": Heidegger on death and Kevin Garnett playing a midseason game in Charlotte

<< crossposted on '30 Home Games' blog
An aging Kevin Garnett VS Charlotte's Cody Zeller.  
What does champion NBA power forward Kevin Garnett have to do with influential thinker Martin Heidegger? Authors Daniel M. Klein and Thomas Cathcart in their humorous book on the philosophy of death finds a way to explain Heidegger's often complicated ideas via a basketball analogy
Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates:
Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between
Ch 4. Heideggerty-Dog, Ziggity-Boom, What You Do to Me
Look at it this way: Say you're Kevin Garnett and this is Game 7 of the NBA Finals. You're going to play with way more intensity, way more energy, way more life, than in one of those dreary Thursday night midseason games in Charlotte. Heidegger called the latter "everydayness," and he put it down as the ultimate drag. So let's face it squarely, Daryl, this -- right here, right now -- is Game 7 of the Finals, and what a joy it is to be here!

For Heidegger, the worst possible news would be that our souls are immortal. That would condemn us to a never-ending string of those Thursday night games in Charlotte.
My only quibble is the use of Garnett for the example. He's arguably the most consistent and unfailingly intense player currently in the L.