So, I just looked up 'Tibetan singing bowl alarm clocks', 'alternate nostril breathing', 'gratitude journaling', 'bulletproof coffee' and 'intermittent fasting'; and they are all apparently real things...
I don't get it seriously, this lady has too much money, only helps herself and others who fund her addiction to premium and unnecessary products. She has a highly inneficient life basically focused on fads and things sold to people as scams. She and her husband don't communicate enough. She has a psychological condition that allows her to feel empowered and with this inneficiency. She convinces others with unusual amounts of money in a cult like fashion to buy her product. She continues to profit, and she brags about this pyramid scheme that she isn't even at the top of.
this kind of satire is actually very common (they're just making fun of a entire subculture by condensing as much of it as possible into a single extremely over-the-top person), but mcsweeney's always takes it to the next level.
> After years of research, I have engineered the most efficient possible workout, which is a single, 100-pound kettlebell swing, followed by four and a half minutes of foam rolling.
> To make cleanup more efficient, I have seven Vitamix blender pitchers, which I clean all at once on Sunday evenings. Best $1200 I’ve ever spent. So much time saved.
> We have also adapted our own version of the Nonviolent Communication protocol, which allows us to express all of our needs, feelings, fears, and experiences from the day in a loving exchange of five sentences each. (To learn more, check out my husband’s wonderful book, The Four Hour Relationship.)
This is the 12-parsec problem. Jokes that work within the reality of their subject matter work. Jokes that have to go however slightly out of the reality of their subject matter to work, never work for the people you would think would most like them. Star Wars was cooking along making all its little references to Flash Gordon and so forth and then along comes this line of dialog that was not even meant as humor, whose only obvious reading is a complete misuse of the word "parsec" [1]. Which practically the whole audience had a problem with. (I want to say "literally the whole audience" and this here is how I'm trying to get away with it)
I have only once successfully told a joke to a medical professional that had to do with medicine. I make a lot of jokes that are meant as satires of ignorance, and that audience always just wants to correct the ignorance (which is a good thing).
[1] The line is technically using the word correctly but you have to know 40 years of Star Wars lore to know why.
Well put. I usually think of "The Big Bang Theory" as an example of this taken to the extreme.
> The line is technically using the word correctly but you have to know 40 years of Star Wars lore to know why.
That Han skirted closer to a black hole than anyone else, and that's why a unit of distance is appropriate? But I'm not sure if I've ever seen a canonical source for that, it's just fan rationalization :)
I suppose it's better than the "Han is trying to brag, but he's an idiot" rationalization, which is a bit hard to swallow considering he's otherwise a fairly capable pilot.
FWIW I had found a source[1] that said George Lucas gave this rationalization on the Blu Ray commentary track. I found it by a search on "12 parsec Kessel run". Is this a retcon-level waving away of a groaner after the fact or what GL was actually thinking when he typed the line?
This is great. I've got some relatives that love this garbage and there's things in here I hadn't heard about. I can picture the author being totally surrounded by this shit :)
