Mr. Armstrong, please fill out these forms if you want to be allowed into Hawaii.

Not liking Tina Fey or Bossypants is the new liking dog fighting.

Tina Fey has a new book out. And while we haven’t read it, there are some cultural rules that have been chiseled over the Ten Commandments, so you pretty much don’t have a choice: it will be funny; it will be the best thing a comedian has ever written in an actual book; if you don’t like it you must be a smoker or an addict or a midwestern conservative; if you get it from the library that’s even better, because Fey is pretty much an angel and doesn’t need or want the money, she really, truly, just wants to help; and she cannot, ever, get too much exposure a la the dad of that adorable Suri, or James Franco.

Unless of course she hosts the Oscars but doesn’t write the material, and shows up drunk, or disinterested, and then realizes how bad it’s going and grows despondent. Then we’ll get sick of her and say enough is enough…but that can’t happen for another year…so what will it take? When will Tina Fey become too much Tina Fey? When will we give Amy Poehler the tiara and thank Fey for her reign and set her on the shelf next to Orlando Bloom?

The truth lies in this office.

The underlying premise of the show Mad Men is that anyone can start over and/or do whatever they want at any time. (Or so the characters think.) One of the lead male characters lives under an assumed identity, and even when he is discovered, and outed, it doesn’t matter; his boss simply quotes a Japanese proverb claiming “A man is whatever room he is in.” It doesn’t matter who a man was…it matters who he is, right now, in this room.

Another character had a baby with no one knowing it, including herself, and promptly gave it up for adoption. The aforementioned male character finds her in the hospital after her absence from work worries him, where he tells her to get back to the office because “This never happened. You’ll be amazed at how much this never happened.” Reinvention, restarts, and rebirth work themselves through the subplots and storylines of each of the characters, and the consequences of their actions are as seemingly superfluous as the marketing copy they produce. They rebrand themselves as if they were one of the products hiring their Madison Avenue advertising firm.

In season two, as the previously aforementioned lead is dining with another of his many extra-marital conquests, he realizes she is as slippery, and reinvented, as he is. He asks how she came to be the agent and manager of one of the highest paid comedians in show business, especially when it is obvious that she actually shouldn’t be (were she not either posing as the comedian’s wife or sister, as the situation warrants). Her response was as Mad Men as any of the employees of the firm; “This is America. Pick a job and then become the person who does it.”

Is America really that wide open? Can we all become anyone we want to be, or anyone we are willing to be? Is it a noble or desirable thing to reinvent ourselves into something totally different, or hide what’s true about ourselves, or even discard the truth, with no regard for who is peripherally affected? When is the reinvention a con, and when is it a resurrection? What would you be…or are you one of the rarities who is actually what they want to be where they want to be it?

Maybe she just thought they were really ugly puppies. Is that so wrong?

The unwritten zenith of ludicrous and inconsequential vocation (in the minds of Americans) that anyone can choose, besides a congressperson, is a movie producer. Producer credits are becoming as cheap and easy to get as Courtney Love tickets, and while no one knows what a producer does, exactly, everyone knows that, whatever it is, it doesn’t need to be done. Much like Congress. But congresspeople and producers are too innocuous to hurt the rest of us. That job belongs to the racists. Racists hurt everybody, even kindly yet mildly-annoyed bloggers. But as bad as racism is, the only philosophy or worldview ever devised that could possibly be worse than racism is animal cruelty. If you hurt a dog you will be judged in a layer of Hell that is occupied only by Hitler, Simon Cowell (eventually), and New Jersey Housewives (now) (they’re in New Jersey, am I right? Ba-Zing!).

A new video (we won’t link it, but the article does) of just such a person has set the world on fire, and mobilized the hacker community into a singular, tunnel-visioned grassroots movement, with motivation unseen outside of perverts and stalkers. In the video, Little Red Riding Hood is seen hurling a bucketful of puppies, one by one, into a Bosnian river. 4Chan hackers around the globe let go of their Mountain Dew and Oatmeal Cream Pies and set to finding the girl by pinpointing the YouTube account which posted the video; this is the same group who identified the woman who tossed a cat into a garbage can in England as Mary Bale of Coventry. (Sorry, Mary. But you did the worst thing ever done. You threw away a cat.)

But how and why did this become the most despicable thing to do? Why do people care more about pets than they do about victims of natural disasters, or political atrocities, or packs of tweens at the mall? Why are we more obsessed with bringing this happy girl to justice than we are any African leader, or than we are with seeing full restoration come to the country of Haiti? Would we care so much if, instead of a girl, she were a madam? And instead of animals, she was discarding overused and second-hand women trafficked from the other side of the world on a container ship? Would greasy nerds stop at nothing to track her down then?

The Tea Party wants to return to the good old days. If they mean the days when Glenn Beck wasn't on air, invite us to the party.

In the latest installment (as of 1 September 2010) of The Conversation, where New York Times columnists David Brooks and Gail Collins quip online about recent issues or events between their more serious and critical columns, Brooks admits that he not only attended the Glenn Beck Tea Party Rally in Washington, D.C., on the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous I Have a Dream speech, but that he also actually had a good time. We at the Pub thought the most pertinent part of the discussion came when Collins gave her assessment of the anger in the Tea Party movement:

Here’s my thought for the day. The Tea Party people say they’re angry about socialism, but maybe they’re really angry about capitalism. If there’s a sense of being looked down upon, it’s that sense of failure that’s built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers. Capitalism is also a system that lives off of change. When people say this isn’t the America they grew up in, they’re right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

Is Collins right? If she is, and if you think you are old enough to have seen shifts in your pieces of America, what is different about it? What was it like when you grew up, and what is it like now?  Does the American experiment, in even its darkest corners–or does capitalism, in its even darker alleyways–really inherently foster that much change? Or do you side with the following David Brooks answer, that “God and Mammon are intertwined?”

I guess I’d put it this way. Every society has to engird capitalism in a restraining value system, or else it turns nihilistic and out of control. The Germans have a Christian Democratic set of institutions, enforced by law. The Swedes have their egalitarianism. Since the days of Jonathan Edwards, we have developed a quasi-religious spirituality that informally restrains the excesses of the market. God and Mammon are intertwined. Many people feel that the values side of this arrangement is dissolving. Both the government and Wall Street are leaping into the void, to bad effect.

What’s your code? Hipsters wear shrink-wrapped tees proclaiming similar codes of conduct also emblazoned across the over-sized tees of video gamers, bragging (untruthfully) that all their lives exhibit the discipline and structure of certain sets of unbending, proven, canonized rules, distinguishing the strong from the weak and the right from the wrong; the pirate code, the samurai code, the soldier code, the athlete’s code, the gamer code, even the celebrity code. So what is your code, and what 5 rules, if you had to boil it down to a mere 5, mark (or should mark) a life that actually adhered to it?

The whole issue, on both sides of the aisle, is eye-raising; Many think it’s an affront and a travesty to build a worship house of Islam near the Grand Poobah of Moslem atrocities.* Others think it’s an affront and a travesty to deny any religious freedoms to any group within the borders of the Grand Poobah of religious experiments, regardless of hidden motives or agendas. Irrespective of the camp into which people fall, or jump, the issue is so polarizing and tense that emotions get toked and fed even when calm statements are made by one of the calmest presidents in the history of the United States:

As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.

Even moderates, accused of “employing a clever little dodge” in affirming the right to build the mosque while questioning the wisdom to do so seem to be getting observers all riled up, while others offer up examples of “what Obama should have said” about the whole endeavor.

So are you riled up? Do you care either way about this? Do you take the Ground Zero Mosque as an insult? Or perhaps more interesting, what do you think of the proposed venture to put a Moslem gay bar next to the mosque; Funny? Poor taste? Irony? On point? Do you agree with opponents that Islam is masquerading behind religious freedom while calmly seeking to undermine American principles (whatever those are), or is everyone masquerading behind their own subjective sets of standards, or fears?

*That’s relative, of course, depending on where you live; Ugandans or Somalis or Sudanese or Kurds or Serbs or Indo-Chinese might beg to differ.

Bieber is German for Einstein, true or false?

A Justin Bieber-less internet is now possible thanks to the wonderful new Firefox add-on that deletes all references to the pop star. We can actually now rid ourselves of the prepubescent crooner and all references to him on the web, despite idiot tweens, despite inane tweets, and despite parents that are too tired to care anymore so they just give up and hope his voice cracks hard enough to stop all this. So rather than stewing in our own blood that someone so stupid could be so popular, now we can just delete him.

Where the sam-hill is the Ashton Kutcher add-on? Or the Michael Jackson add-on (too soon? We don’t care! We want the add-on!) Or any number of others that could be applied to any number of other media annoyances that incessantly bombard us; Who would you like to see deleted from the internets? Whom have you had it up to here with? Or is that healthy? Is that too dangerous a thing, to be able to ignore references and ugliness and pan-flash celebrity that we don’t like, and click forward to what we each subjectively find important or useful? Should Justin Bieber remain on our screens to remind us just how awful and broken and difficult the world is?

Yes. This guy did sound-off on how uncool Russia is.

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote this in reflection on the recent spy-swap between the USA and Russia:

The good news is that someone still wants to spy on us. The bad news is that it’s the Russians. …

Look, if you had told me that we had just arrested 11 Finns who were spying on our schools, then I’d really have felt good — since Finland’s public schools always score at the top of the world education tables. If you had told me that 11 Singaporeans were arrested spying on how our government works, then I’d really have felt good — since Singapore has one of the cleanest, well-run bureaucracies in the world and pays its cabinet ministers $1 million-plus a year. If you had told me that 11 Hong Kong Chinese had been arrested studying how we regulate our financial markets, then I’d really have felt good — since that is something Hong Kong excels at. And if you had told me that 11 South Koreans were arrested studying our high-speed bandwidth penetration, then I’d really have felt good — because we’ve been lagging them for a long time.

But the Russians? Who wants to be spied on by them?

Were it not for oil, gas and mineral exports, Russia’s economy would be contracting even more than it has. Moscow’s most popular exports today are probably what they were under Khrushchev: vodka, Matryoshka dolls and Kalashnikov rifles. No, this whole spy story has the feel of one of those senior tennis tournaments — John McEnroe against Jimmy Connors, long after their primes — or maybe a rematch between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston in their 60s. You almost want to avert your eyes.

Is the United States really that uncool? Some Pub regulars recently overheard a rather heated discussion between a few patriotic youngsters sitting at a pool-side table. The initial question being debated was “Would you rather have a super power or be an American?” A few of the youngsters were incredulous that any of their friends, people they actually know, would rather have a super power than U.S. citizenship.

So who is right? Has America really become that uncool? Are Americans not worthy of real spies from a relevant global power? Or are they so cool that you assume that everyone else still spies on the U.S., while it’s only the hapless Russians who get caught? And what is the coolest place (outside the United States) that you would choose to live if you had to?

"I'll teach you for not understanding my rap career or my scalp odor!"

We aren’t sure what’s what. Who knows whether Joaquin Phoenix is really that cracked out or if he is building a character for an ultimate role? He could be merely creating buzz for an alternate persona; a weird, pseudo-cultural, pseudo-fringe, desperado-savant. Or he could just be another disconnected doofus who can’t rap.

Maybe Casey Affleck’s documentary on Phoenix will shed some light on these questions. I’m Still Here is an insider’s look (Affleck is married to Summer Phoenix, Joaquin’s sister) at the retired actor-turned-rapper. And it is not flattering. The movie shows Phoenix snorting coke, having a sexual encounter with a publicist, and buying hookers, not to mention what the LA Times called “a stomach-turning sequence in which someone feuding with Phoenix defecates on the actor while he’s asleep.” Add this to his already much-maligned appearance on Letterman, during which Letterman tells Phoenix that he is sorry Phoenix didn’t show up:

Far be it from us to judge an eccentric actor whose childhood trauma included hippie parents and a famous brother who overdosed in a place called The Viper Room. Things were tough. Obviously, mistakes were made. So we can grant him a misguided mulligan. But this reinvention leads us to ask What’s your reinvention? If you could start all over in a new persona, not just a new career, what would your persona be?