Over at Liquid Egg Product the Mascot has produced, directed and starred in a Halloween Holiday Classic. In the comments, I write:
Seriously dude, I know you’re loyal to Donnie and all but someone with your combination of churtful yet charming snark, slender physique, immunity to criticism, babe magnetism and tolerance for tasteless violence and gore would fit RIGHT IN with most of the Hollywood crowd.
Churtful? CHURTFUL??? I think I meant to say cheerful, then thought to change it to hurtful, and LOOK WHAT HAPPENED! Ma, I done a good thing!
Cheerful and hurtful. And snarky. Yes, that's Hollywood these days. And Washington. And Brussels, for our European readers. You pay for the privilege of going to the movies and finding out THEY are using YOUR money to insult your values and your beliefs, you pay 20-30-40-50+ percent of your income (how high does it go in Europe? About 25 in America right now, but just wait, my American friends, do you think with a $1 trillion ++ deficits year after year that will hold?) to politicians to tell you you're too stupid, you poor sap, to know what's good for you.
You pay, they play and churtfully enjoy the privileges (root-private laws) of being the elite.
Speaking of the elite, Liz Vicary has been on a tear lately, see people who hold views that contradict mine are stupid (part 2) which purports to show through some truly pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that atheists are (of course) more intelligent than all those God-believing idiots:
It just seems so bizarre to me that otherwise intelligent people can believe there is a man in the sky who controls things. And this leads them to kill each other, wake up early on Sunday mornings, wear funny necklaces, talk to themselves, and not do fun things like have sex and eat certain delicious foods.
There's a sophisticated argument. Since atheists like Hitler, Stalin and Mao never kill anyone, and since it's obvious, for example, that those religious types don't have sex, all that sort of thing would presumably end if people would just go atheist and bring about the peaceful, sleep-late-on-Sunday sex-filled paradise they so richly deserve.
Idiots.
But seeing as that was "part 2," let's go back a bit to part 1--have you ever thought that conservatives are all stupid? wherein Ms. Vicary consults some completely different pseudo-scientific gobbedygook purporting that "Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated." I'd like to quote more but do go read her post, which consists almost completely of the article's introduction. The commenters do a good job of questioning the premises, so I don't have to. Remember, if it doesn't pass the "smell test," check your premises.
The funny thing is that with E. Vicary you never know whether she really believes this stuff or she's just playing with the audience. Look at the blog URL...that's the secret of her success. She writes for Chess Life and gets in movies and stuff, and I toil away here, unpaid except for the warmth of my Dear Readers' comments. So, I must say, kudos to her. She's actually a Raven in disguise.
I do hope she was kidding about this one.
One of the commenters there is, coincidentally (really? - ed.), ChargingKing, who recently asked for some link love in regard to my previous post. Here it is, because Chris Harrington is an intersting person and writer, and we played some good games in the old days in Reno.
It's intrguing to me that he seems to be passionately appealing for moderation and middle ground in his comment: Doesn't it ever wear thin fighting and creating conflict? As a philosophical kind of guy I would think Chris would appreciate the Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis process as described (if not in exactly those terms) by Hegel. It is great conflicts that create great discoveries--just like in chess. Fighting and creating conflict are the chessplayer's bread and meat. Just, after it's over, let's all go have a beer, like those conflicting liberals and conservatives do (when we're not looking).
To bring this whole thing back around to the important point, I'm being CHURTFUL here, okay. Cheerfully hurtful. If you would be so kind as to go forth now and use it over and over and over, with full attribution and links to Robert Pearson's Chess Blog, I would be much obliged. I am hoping to see it show up in text messages all over the world by next week.
UPDATE: Churtful is in the Urban Dictionary as a variation of the verb churting "The act of being dull, boring, kind of grey, and specifically draining to the person that is having to listen to you." As you can see, this has nothing to do with my own brilliantly original coinage and we will speak of it no more.
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