The Lazy Self-Involved Man-Child Steps Up

On Facebook today, I came across a video displaying Seth Rogen, the raunchy comedic actor, making a speech in front of the senate. To my surprise, it was not a stand-up routine, but instead a heartfelt speech about Alzheimer's. His wife Laurie's mother has been battling the disease for years, and he has decided to use his fame and status to help the cause. He started the Hilarity for Charity program in 2011, where he and his actor-friends go on comedy tours to raise money for the disease. Although their most recent fundraiser raised half a million dollars, Rogen still felt he could do more, and decided to take his cause to the senate. 

He spoke on Wednesday, February 26, in an attempt to erase the stigma around Alzheimer's as well as increase government funding. He was able to use his comedic talent, to draw in the listeners, as well as become a YouTube sensation. He opened by saying he was aware that "this has nothing to do with the legalization of marijuana" and even asked the Chairman if he had seen his major film "Knocked Up". The audience loved it. He made hysterical references to the new television show House of Cards, and also called himself a "Lazy Self-Involved Man-Child". While making everyone, even the chairman laugh, he brought very real, and frightening statistics to light. He stated that Alzheimer's is the only one of the top ten deadliest diseases in the U.S that has no cure or prevention. Rogen also claimed that it is the most costly of all the those ten diseases. 

Cost is a very important part of this issue, and not enough work is being done to reduce the financial burden on families. Luckily, there are some people, like New Triers own Allie Harris and her mother who started a website called http://www.alzcaresource.com/ which not only lowers the cost of necessary products, but donates all the proceeds back to Alzheimer's research. Rogen admitted that if America didn't love his "Genitalia driven comedy" he would not be able to financially support his mother-in-law. 

While I find it fabulous that Rogen has stepped up like this, it is slightly terrifying to think that in order for a cause to become known, it needs to have a celebrity as its face. A medical expert could have made an even more convincing, factually sound argument to the senate, yet the public would never have known about it. With Rogen making the speech, countrywide publicity is achieved. Although it is sad to know Americans are so celebrity oriented, it is nice to know how much of a difference one person can make. Rogen's speech puts pressure on other Hollywood icons to step up, and make a difference. 

Short. Sweet. Popular

For those of you frequent YouTube watchers, I'm sure you have heard of or watched Vsauce. Vsauce is a YouTube channel run by Internet personality Michael Stevens. Vsauce produces short, 5-10 minute videos about various interesting science, cultural, and technological topics. These videos range from titles like :What if everyone JUMPED at once? to Will we ever run out of new music? to Is your red the same as my red?. Although I'm sure these titles do sound interesting, do they sound 5-million-views interesting? That's right, many of Vsauce's videos have 5 million plus views. How does he get so many views on his short videos?

That question is what I have been asking myself ever since my friend Ian showed me these videos. My initial reaction was there are just A LOT of science geeks out there, and Vsauce is just one of the many suppliers of this demand. I decided to compare his YouTube page to National Geographic, the best science magazine of 2013 voted by peer editors according to Allyoucanread.com. I was shocked to find that Vsauce has well over 3 times the total YouTube subscribers that National Geographic does. So once again, I'm left wondering: "What is so appealing about Vsauce videos".

My second and final assumption goes back to an earlier blog I wrote. This post was about how Americans need to have their video games instantly, and how game manufacturers have taken advantage of that. Maybe just like our need for immediate game gratification, we as Americans need immediate knowledge gratification. It may be possible that the reason Vsauce has 11+ million subscribers and is one or two videos shy of having one billion total views is because he has kept his videos short. People see a question like Why do we kiss? as a video title and want to hear the answer within 5 or so minutes. Vsauce provides them with that. This is just a hypothesis of mine, and I'd love to hear any and all reasons for popularity you all can come up with.

Toofer? Nah, Fivefer.

After The Office, 30 Rock, and How I Met Your Mother all concluded or ending this month, I decided I needed a new, easy-to-watch, non-animated comedy. The golden globe results lead me to start watching Brooklyn Nine Nine, a winner of two globes. As I watched the first few episodes, I couldn't get the idea of Television Tokenism out of my head. As I stated in a previous blog, "Tokenism is the inserting of minority characters in an attempt to create diversity"(Previous Nolo blog post). 

We talked a lot in class about different kinds of characters that create tokens. Mr. Bolos showed a presentation that discussed the token character in the aforementioned 30 Rock named Toofer. Bolos' hypothesis was Toofer was code for "Two for One", meaning they filled two Token roles in one character. These roles were the "black guy" and the "smart guy". Brooklyn Nine Nine took this idea to a whole new level. 

One of the main characters in BNN, Captain Ray Holt is the epitome of Token Characters. He embodies FIVE token characteristics we discussed in class. First, as you can see from the image, Captain Holt is black, but making him black was not enough for these writers... so they made him gay too. Notice the prefix to his name: Captain. He is the highest-ranking officer regularly shown in the show, making him the authority minority as well. I'm not done. 

As shown in the picture above, Holt is clearly frowning. Right? Wrong. The longest running joke of the show is that NOBODY can tell Holt's mood by his facial expression, thus, making his a mystical minority as well. Fox couldn't possibly make him anymore more of a Token character right? Wrong again. He is also always the best-dressed man, another aspect token characters usually embody. Holt is constantly yelling at the main character for not wearing a tie. 

30 rock thought they were being obvious with Toofer, but Brooklyn Nine Nine just blew them out of the water. Captain Ray Holt, played by Andre Braugher, is the most obvious token character in any media I have ever seen. The only thing Fox could have done to make it anymore more obvious was to name him Captain Fiverfer Holt. 

BEAAUUTTTYY

While sitting in Little Red Hen, waiting for the next delivery, a blast from the past waltzed right through the door. Jay Zimmerman, or "Jay the Ump"(pictured to the right), is the main little league baseball umpire in Glencoe. He umped just about every single game I played in from 2nd to 8th grade. Jay the Ump was notorious for screaming "BEAAUUTTYY" (short for beautiful) every time he called a strike. All the children would attempt to impersonate his famous saying, but nobody could quite capture the charisma Jay had. I could say a lot of things about this Glencoe celebrity, but his most important quality, is that he LOVES baseball. He loves baseball so much that when I used to get walked, he would ask me "You wanna hit?" and then let me stay at the plate until I got a hittable pitch.
Anyways, he walks in the store, immediately recognizes me and asks me if I still play ball. After making small talk for a few minutes, he proceeds to tell me about how I never should have quit baseball. Granted, I had a pretty nasty curve in 7th grade. He told me about how kids these days quit too easily, and stop playing a sport just because.
He blames televised sports for this change he has seen first hand over his 30+ years as an Umpire. Jay's theory is that kids can now create sporting memories by just watching their favorite professional team play. At first, I thought this is just a generational gap, and this old man doesn't understand television, and therefore blames it for baseballs downfall over the past few years. But then I began to think about it, and how I heard earlier that day that this years Super Bowl had 115.5 million viewers: the largest viewership of any televised event ever. I researched it more and found that the record has been set four times in the last five years, proving television viewership is definitely rising. I began to think:  what if these seemingly unrelated trends were actually correlated? Does the heightened access and viewership of professional sports cause children to be less interested in participating themselves? 
The bolded question above cannot be answered without the raw data of the  Glencoe Baseball Association's (GBA) enrollment over the past two decades compared to youth viewership of professional baseball. Unfortunately, I do not have the access to this data, but I'd love to hear some people's opinion.
And by the way, for all the old Glencoe Baseball players, Jay did tell me that he believes the key to baseball is the "ready position". In case I had forgotten the thousand times he stopped the game to tell at the left fielder to maintain it.