Everyone knows...cops always have the best pot.

This is Penn's essay:

I've stopped swearing. I'm 42 years old and from the time I was 16, I talked like carnies and rockers and truckers and sailors. I tried to talk like all the cool people, using obscenity for every part of speech. It seemed like a ticket into a special group of outsiders. I never used hard obscenity on stage, but I was always trying to slip expletives onto the radio (you do know that the FCC is unconstitutional on every front, right?). But in daily existence, I talked trash.

Several months ago, I went to see Slash's Snakepit at a venue in Vegas. He played his guit-box like a ringin' a bell. I was enjoying the show. After the third selection, when it was time for Slash to welcome us, he said, "Welcome. We're really glad to be back in the USA. We were in South America and those people didn't understand us. It feels good to be home.

But, he didn't use those words. I don't have a tape, and I wasn't taking notes, but the words he said were along the lines of, "Oh # man. How you #ers doing? It is so #ing great to #ing be #ing back in this #ing coun-#ing-try. #, man, #. I mean, #. #, man, #. I mean #. Down there, well, #, they #ing don't #ing speak #ing English, man. #. #, it's so #ing great to #ing be here.

In the previous quote, "#" stands for the favorite root word of all wise-cracking, sophisticated, modern folk (it also drove my spell checker nuts). That magic word can be used for every part of speech (yes, its function can even be Conjunction Junction).

I sat in the balcony wondering if I sounded like that. I started becoming more aware of swearing. I had an epiphany -- I realized no one thought I was talking like a carney. They thought I was talking like a mall kid. Nowadays, who knows how carnies talk? It's like tattoos. They used to mean you were on the bally, in the joint, or on the sea. Now, tattoos and swearing just mean you've been to Tower Records. Even mall T-shirts proclaim the magic word.

I still use all those words, even the "C" one that still has some small amount of integrity and magic. However, I only use them for their literal meaning. If I'm talking about real sex, I don't talk baby talk. You won't catch me "making love," "doing it," or even "screwing." But I don't use obscenity as empty modifiers or even as a sexy synecdoche.

My decision to stop swearing is not a moral position. It's not to be polite. It's not to fit in. Quite the opposite. It makes me say what I mean and that's often not polite. Not swearing takes my rants off auto-pilot. Not swearing makes me think. It gives those words their original magic in their literal meanings. It makes them sexier when I'm talking about sex.

I started stopping swearing with some friends. It's difficult, but it's pretty fun. We say more of what we mean. We've started making it clear whether we're displeased with someone for their morals, their style, their hygiene, or their looks (all valid reasons). We no longer label them all with one compound body part metonym. We've become more precise. There's more information.

When someone is talking nonsense, it's bolder, more aggressive, and less acceptable to say, "No, that's not true," than to shout a friendly, ho-hum, reference to bovine fecal matter. Not swearing is not the right thing to do. It's not the classy thing to do. It makes the truth plainer and that's rarely soci ety's view of polite.

There is a downside. Last night I banged the little toe of my right foot hard on the door jam in the middle of the night. I had nothing to say.

On the other hand, Penn wrote an article about trying to stop swearing:

http://pennandteller.com/sincity/penn-n-teller/excite/swear.html

I'll defend anyone's right to use profanity, and I occasionally use it myself. I only object to overusing it. Why? To retain it's ability to shock. My pet peeve is people who use the most intense swear words available - like "motherfucker" or "cunt" when talking about their friends. My reaction is "Uh...you've just wasted the most intense swear words available to describe a friend. What do you have left to call an enemy?"

Penn's essay points out that if you try not to swear, it forces you to say what you mean. In a political debate, it's easy to say that your opponants arguement is "bullshit" - it's a lot more difficult to say "no, you're wrong". Because then, you have to say why they're wrong.

His opinion matters because he's a filmmaker, and that this statement directly contradicts those who wrongly claim that Moore is "just in it for the money".

My wife literally cannot hear this without tearing up.

In a little while from now,
If I'm not feeling any less sour,
I promised myself, to treat myself,
And visit a nearby tower ..........
And climbing to the top,
will throw myself off,
In an effort to, make clear to whoever,
What it's like when you're shattered .......
Left standing in the lurch,
At a church where people saying .....
My God, that's tough, she stood him up,
No point in us remaining .......
May as well go home,
As I did on my own,
Alone again, naturally.

To think that only yesterday,
I was cheerful, bright and gay.
Looking forward to-
Who wouldn't do- the role I was about to play.
but, as if to knock me down,
Reality came around,
And without so much as a mere touch,
Cut me into little pieces.
Leaving me to doubt, Talk about God in His mercy,
Who, if He really does exist,
Why did He desert me?
And in my hour of need,
I truely am, indeed,
Alone again, naturally.

It seems to me that there are more hearts,
Broken in the world that can't be mended,
Left unattended, what do we do?
What do we do?

Alone again, Naturally.

Looking back over the years,
And whatever else that appears.
I remember I cried when my father died,
Never wishing to hide the tears.
And at sixty-five years old,
My mother, God rest her soul,
Couldn't understand why the only man,
She had ever loved had been taken.
Leaving her to start, with a heart so badly broken,
Despite encouragement from me,
No words were ever spoken.
And when she passed away,
I cried and cried all day,

Alone again, naturally
Alone again, naturally.

Radiation, but only of radio waves - the type that are constantly washing through you all day, every day.

Brilliant songwriter.

Hey, he knows the history of the web, and Tim Berners-Lee! Not something that most folks bother to know.

The worst part of the loudness war is that kids are growing up thinking that this is the way music is supposed to sound. I'm a huge fan of Kate Bush, and her recent album "Aerial" is beautifully mastered, and has a wide dynamic range - literally everything from birdsong to guitars and and drums. And I've actually heard people complaining that the album wasn't "loud enough" to hear on their headphones while exercising.

Ignoring the fact that some music was mean to actually be paid attention to rather than serving as wallpaper for your life, there are things one can do:

Get more efficient headphones
Get a louder player
Download CDEX and Audiacity to rip and compress the music to your heart's content.

Thankfully there are still artists in this world who produce their own music and pay attention to the way the final CD sounds.

When I was 15, I spent a long evening trying to talk a friend out of joining the Hare Kirshnas the next day and failed. I'm 47 now, and a few years back he looked me up to thank me for trying. He had given his inheritance to them, which had supported the local group for a while, but eventually it ran out and the members had to take regular jobs and give the money to the group. Eventually he came to the realization that he was wasting his life, and could work at a dead-end job and not have to share a bedroom with a bunch of other guys.

"Rock stars have kidnapped my son."

I hope, after his mom is safely dead, that Cameron Crowe releases another special edition of Almost Famous with a different commentary track. The last one featured Crowe and his mom. I can't think of anything more mortifying than watching a thinly fictionalized version of yourself lose his virginity while sitting next to your mom. I want the real dirt on where all these stories came from. Rumor has it that the "I'm a golden god!" scene actually happened with Robert Plant.

I fear that this work - created by graduate students - will be sold to profit the university for the exclusive use of some dreadful company like Salient Stills, and the product will be priced at $15,000 and will only be affordable by networks and intelligence agencies. Meanwhile, the grad students get nothing other than a degree and a job offer from the company that bought the technology. Please, please, please...open source this code. The end result will be far wider spread usage of the techniques. I can imagine a huge number of uses for these techniques, uses that will revolutionize video...but none of them will have any chance of ever coming to be if it is closed source and if the University sells this to one company. This is YOUR work, why should the Uni take it and sell it?

We met Kate's plane in New York (she arrived at JFK via the Concorde). This video had just come out. I introduced myself, she was gracious and charming, and all my wife could think to say was "I thought you cut your hair!".

Here's one I shot - my niece Shelby singing the same song. Here's a link to her high E:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6106253036872361247#3m55s

Not perfect, but then she was a sophomore and only had a year and a half of training. And Emmy Rossum couldn't even hit it.

I enjoyed the movie, until the moronic ending where scientific knowledge was equated with religious belief. And they utterly stacked the deck to make that seem rational. The best review was Penn's - http://pennandteller.com/sincity/penn-n-teller/excite/contact.html

The best bit:

The movie was rocking along. Even though it was fiction, it was just like Carl -- pro-science to the bone.

Then it all started falling apart. Why didn't Jodie permanently lose the newage -- rhymes with "sewage" -- hippie after he tried to keep her from fulfilling her dreams for his own short-sighted horniness? That started to bum me, but it was the ending that finally broke my heart. The end of "Contact" asserted that belief in something tangible by a single person is equivalent to belief in god, and that the reality imagined by saints is the same as scientists understanding something they can't explain to lay people.

That is evil, utterly evil.