Sacha Baron Cohen is one of the funniest people in existence. Of course, he’s British.

He’s best known for his character Ali G – here’s a sample of his style. Ali G is of a peculiar ethnic group that seems readily recognizable by Brits, but almost wholly unknown here: a hip-hop-obsessed lower class Londoner with a middle eastern background who identifies with the urban culture of the US without ever actually being a part of it. He’s also a complete idiot, has next to no grasp of the english language, and is obsessed with sex. Ali G means well, and has a sort of harmless, clueless innocence that makes his interviews with unwitting participants highly entertaining – the best interviewees are the patient ones who don’t know they’re in on the joke and also think that it’s possible for an adult man to have the mind of a 5 year old.

Cohen also has a character called Bruno, a German eurotrash fashionista who thinks that everybody is gay (or should be, like him), and who thinks that fashion is the most important thing in the universe. He uses Bruno most effectively to highlight the everyday homophobia in the US, and to strip other fashionistas of any recognizable humanity.

But my favorite character is Borat, who is making the news these days. Borat is a reporter from Kazakhstan, learning about American and British culture with the innocence of a back-woods rube – except his back woods are the forgotten remains of the Soviet Union, where poverty and ethnic violence are the norm.

Also, Borat is utterly utterly clueless. He washes his face in a toilet. He brings chickens in a suitcase on a New York subway. That’s funny, in a slapstick sort of way.

But it’s the less politically correct opinions of Borat that make him stand out as a brilliant fish-out-of-water comedy vector. He’s virulently anti-semetic, referring to Jews as having horns, claws and being born in eggs. When touring the bedroom of a show house, he asks the salesman where the wife’s cage is. He lists one of his hobbies as “shoot dog.” He asks a dating service to find him a girl who “is tight, like a man’s anus.” He asks a group of wine tasters if the black man in a suit who brings them a bottle of wine is their slave.

Sure, all that stuff is funny, and it is also pretty incredible that his interviewees don’t seem to realize what’s really going on.

But the best part of Borat is when he finds people who agree with him. In one of the videos I’ve linked below, he gets a hunter to admit how much of a shame it is that they can’t hunt Jews. Borat isn’t just giving us a silly, uneducated moron to laugh at, he’s holding up that wonderful comic device, the mirror, and showing us that while we might laugh at Borat’s outlandish cluelessness, we’re probably living next to home-grown Americans who feel the exact same way that he does. Cohen’s a comedian – Borat isn’t a real person, and there are probably blessed few Kazahks who actually agree with him, but the Americans he finds can’t make the same claim.

I think it’s going to suck.

I’m skeptical of superheroes depicted in non-comic media – very few movies and tv shows get it right. It’s not about super powers and special effects – it must always be about the people, just like any good story.

Already in the first five minutes of this show, I’ve witnessed hamfisted exposition (“But you always wanted your father’s approval!”) and a big factual gaffe, repeating a long-disproved myth, that can be resolved in a single, simple google search.

Sure, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be bad – one should never judge a show by its pilot, let alone by the first few minutes of it.

But I hardly ever watch TV anymore, since I can’t help but think I have something better to do. Sure, that probably means playing another fucking video game, but still – I have a hard enough time crafting decent stories of my own to waste my time absorbing somebody else’s shitty ones.

ADDENDUM:

Of all the color schemes to pick for your black-haired flying character to wear, don’t pick these two.

There’s another show that’s kind of covering that territory.

So yeah, I can explain.

See, my sink drain was clogged. Like seriously clogged. Nothing was moving through that thing. I poured two bottles of Drain-O down its gullet, and I even tried the super power jet can thing that is supposed to blast the clog to hell and back (or to France, if you’ve seen the commercial). The Drain-O didn’t do a damn thing, and the super power jet can thing only succeeded in spraying deadly chemicals in my face.

This is a theme in my life (or my house). The drains are clogged. All of them. Chemical corrosives (or whatever the hell that stuff is) just weren’t cutting it.

Thankfully, I had Lindsay and my mom on the case.

Lindsay acquired a device that looks like a rose stem, except without the rose. You jab that sucker down into the drain, twist it around a little, and pull out whatever icky stuff was clogging it.

It worked wonders on my bathroom sink. Now the drain, you know, drains.

The kitchen sink was another story. My mother suggested a simple plunger. She even took me down to the basement to show me the plunger she uses – it is small and compact, like a sawed-off shotgun, except for clogs instead of zombies or something.

I acquired one today, and went at that clog like nobody’s business. Two pumps, and the drain made a loud sucking noise, and the water drained out immediately. Apparently, bits of plastic had worked down into the drain over the last few months, an effective barrier against Drain-O and its deadly chemicals.

Even though I’ve been keeping my dish use very limited (because I knew I couldn’t wash them en masse), a few extras built up. But because I don’t have a drain stopper, I had to put a mug over the drain and place the bowl atop it, to keep the drain closed. Thus, while it looks like my sink was full of dirty dishes, it actually wasn’t.

But that’s not where the drain misery ends.

I was leaving the house, and happened to go through the basement instead of the front door. I heard a dripping noise. I followed my ears, and saw that the ceiling was pissing. On the dryer.

I ran upstairs, pulled everything out from the cabinet below the sink, uncorked my corked drain, and noticed a single pinprick of light shining through a tiny hole in the sink. The sink is metal. I don’t get how that happened.

Anyway, the monument to dirty dishes is now dismantled and is now more of a monument of sorta scattered around forks.

Not as charming.

This is my monument to dirty dishes. It’s an art project.

You might have heard.

That road you see is the primary artery that takes me to and from the downtown region of Pittsburgh. Where I work. Every day.

The detour goes all the way around the site, and all the way around other sites, and pretty much makes you go a few miles in the wrong direction before looping around and joining the main road again. Imagine all of this, but with Pittsburgh’s topography – not a single straight road, not more than a mile without going up or down a hill.

I have to wake up about 45 minutes early in order to get to work, now, and I similarly return 45 minutes later than usual.

It could be worse, though. I could have been under the fucking stuff when it poured over the highway.

Bad asses exist mostly in pop culture – in books, movies, comics, tv shows, etc. They are not necessarily heroes, and not all heroes are bad asses.

For instance, Indiana Jones is a hero, but he’s not a bad ass. He mostly gets by on luck and intuition – you rarely see him get out of a sticky situation without some generous help from providence.

Luke Skywalker is also a hero, but he’s not a bad ass. He has a staunch moral stance, and that impedes his ability to engage in true acts of badassedry.

This is the first entry in a series I’m doing called Lessons on How To Be a Bad Ass. The bad ass is my favorite kind of hero – there is a lot of overlap over multiple genres and media, from the hard-boiled detective to the costumed vigilante.

How to be a Bad Ass: Lesson One: If you’re attacked, you don’t respond with equal force, you respond with superior force. This could also be called “taking a knife to a fist fight.”

The Punisher personifies this in the comic world – he kills the bad guys. Punisher is probably the worst name for him, because punishment implies behavior adjustment. He doesn’t try to teach the bad guys to not be bad anymore, he shoots them.

Normally, I would cite more pop culture characters in order to further illustrate my point. But today, I don’t need to.

See, Susan Kuhnhausen is a real life bad ass.

She’s a nurse. She’s 51 years old. Police describe her as “a large woman.” She is currently going through a divorce from a husband who apparently wants to reconcile.

But he had a funny way of going about it: he hired a hitman.

In the early days of September, Susan came home from work to find a man armed with a claw hammer. This man pounded her on the head with the hammer. Repeatedly.

But Susan didn’t go down.

They fought. She got the hammer away from him. He bit her. Repeatedly.

She put him in a choke hold and strangled him. To death.

She ran to the neighbor’s house, and they called the police. They came to her house and found a dead hitman, with a day planner in his bag incriminating her estranged husband.

A reporter asked Susan’s neighbors how they were comforting her.

“You didn’t need to calm her. She’s an emergency room nurse. She’s used to dealing with crisis.”

That’s true, but that’s only part of the story. See, Susan’s a fucking Bad Ass. She didn’t just subdue her attacker, she killed him. She didn’t need a weapon to do it, either. Hammers? Keep the hammer. All Susan needs are her goddamn hands.

Read the article here.

Vox.com is a neat, little Livejournally thing that I’ve begun using: http://jamesforeman.vox.com

It’s pretty neat, and has a lot of potential. For instance, you can integrate your Flickr.com photos, post your book, movie and music collections – all sort of cool things.

If the community takes off, I think Vox could be sweet.

Right now, it’s invitation only, but I have 4 of them left. Leave a comment or send me a message if you’d like to join!