Hello, everyone. Due to a rapidly upcoming wedding a full blog post from yours truly will be delayed a few days. That said, my plan was and is to cover the idea of intertextuality, which YouTuber Nerdwriter1 summed up so well in a video he released recently.
While I will likely refer back to it in the post that will hopefully go up Sunday at the latest, I thought it might be good for anyone interested to watch his six-minute segment as a primer of sorts.
MILD TO EXPLICIT SPOILERS FOR STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS,JURASSIC WORLD/PARK, THE MISSION IMPOSSIBLE MOVIES, THE HOBBIT FILMS, STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS, SPECTRE, SMALLVILLE, AND WATCHMEN.
Apologies again for the lateness, and here’s to my being able to contribute to the discourse on this topic sometime this weekend.
I just got home from a mini get-away with a few of my best friends. While I had the best of intentions when it came to prepping this post ahead of time, here I am, a few hours away from when it should go up, feeling completely braindead. Rather than offer a poor attempt at the topic I had in mind, I thought I would bring you all along on my procrastination journey.
Step 1: Set up Your Space
It’s hard to focus when your work area is a mess. The night is still young, so you might as well start things out right by straightening up your desk.
Step 2: Find Some Snacks
Obviously you are going to need sustenance to continue. You aren’t going to write anything of quality on an empty stomach.
Today I watched the first episode of my favourite online cooking show equipped with the answer to the question that titles this post: “What happened to Josh/Epic Mook on Epic Meal Time?” It was a sombre occasion, and the burden lay heavy on my heart as I was witness to the EMT crew create a pizza enchilada, a “chicken from a drawer” enchilada, and a Baconator enchilada, all without the help of their most handsome member. Yeah, I said it, and before this blog post is done I’ll say it again.
Last I covered one of the Epic Meal Time guys leaving I was almost an entire year late, but I’m much more up to speed this time around. This time around I can actually refer refer back to a tweet that Harley “the Sauce Boss” Morenstein himself made just five short days ago:
I lost a teammate today. We will cherish the memories. Josh has moved on from EpicMealTime but will always be Epic pic.twitter.com/4N2rp3joJr
Seeing how I love to pretend that binge-watching comedy sketches counts as research, I decided to follow up on last week’s post about Amy Schumer with a post about Key and Peele.
I find a lot of Schumer’s work funny because I can relate to it. It’s not quite the same with Key and Peele, since I am neither black, nor male, nor American.
Although sometimes their characters aren’t male either.
Even though I have little in common with Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key, I do find their work hilarious. They do a variety of flawless impressions and have a much wider range than Schumer, who generally sticks to one (albeit very funny) schtick.
Like Schumer, they also take on some very serious social issues in their comedy. Since they are both half-black, Key and Peele often touch on the way racism affects the lives of black or biracial individuals. Below, I’ve included three racial inequalities that Key and Peele do a great job revealing via their sketches.
Key and Peele often subvert this “threatening black man” trope in their sketches. In “Flash Mob” and “White Zombies” Key and Peele play non-threatening black men who are mistaken as dangerous by the white people (or white zombies) around them.
Similarly, “Solution to Racial Profiling” mocks the racial double-standard that fames black youth in hoodies as “thugs” while their white peers are described as “misunderstood”.
One of their more serious sketches, “Negrotown,” addresses police violence directly, by imagining a world where police violence and racial profiling no longer existed.
A few weeks ago my brother sent me the following video and asked if I could write about it on the blog. He challenged me to defend academia and promised that he would respond by commenting on why this video resonated so deeply with him. So, although I agree with many of the comments Dave from Boyinaband makes in his video, I’m going to offer you several reasons why our education system can be, and has often been, a good thing.
1. Our education system was designed to promote equality
In his video on the history of education, Salman Kahn explains how our contemporary education system was shaped by ideologies that valued class equality. According to Kahn, the Prussian education system, despite its faults, insisted on providing public education for all citizens. Meanwhile, even the “Committee of Ten”, the group of educators who originally introduced standardized curriculum, were motivated by their belief that economic status should not prevent students from having access to “higher order” skills. Standardization of curriculum meant that every student would (ideally) have access to the kind of information that was once restricted to the elite.
I enjoy a pretty broad range of music. It’s not just severe differences in genre [from Joshua Radin’s “Winter” to “Squeeze Me” by Kraak and Smaak], it’s stuff that spans several generations. From Elvis Presley to The Mamas & The Papas to Marvin Gaye, all can be my go-to depending on the day and my mood. In fact, it’s that appreciation for tunes through the decades that helps me enjoy so much of what’s on the cdza [or collectivecadenza] YouTube channel.
This isn’t a Fame Day post, so I’m not going to regale you all on why it’s so great. What I am going to do, however, is direct you to the very first video I saw by them. It’s called “History of Wooing Men”:
Culture War Reporters 