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Amy Winehouse: Sobered to Death!
What is the only thing more dangerous than washing down a quart of vodka with a gallon of gin? NOT doing that exact thing.
Amy Winehouse, VOICE of a TENTH of a generation and general pile of human mess, did not die as a result of the excesses of a lifestyle that made her biggest hit so ironic and adorable. She was MURDERED by SOBRIETY! CAPITAL LETTERS EXCLAMATION POINT!
According to “family sources” the shock to her body of not being pickled in delicious alcoholic beverages was just too much for it to bear, and after sucking every possible drop of life giving booze from every tissue in what was left of her musculature, her addled frame simply seized, unable to handle being separated from the only form of liquid inside it and tragically took the life of our precious, precious flower. To try to give you an example of what to compare this to, just imagine a car without oil, a Hybrid without hippie urine, or a Sheen not filled with Tigers,
You see, the family is saying that despite reports of Amy indulging in a 72 hour drink-a-thon prior to her “surprising” death, that the real reason for her demise is that she’s a stupid fuck. Their words, not mine. See she was supposedly instructed to gradually decrease her alcohol intake from “Norse Myth” levels to “Roman Orgy” levels and so on down the drunken scale, to carefully reduce the levels of fun in her body. And the woman that said “No, no, no.” to previous offers of assistance (according to FAMILY MEMBERS) told medical professionals that it’s all of nothing. She either never stops drinking or she never stops never drinking. And her family’s well reasoned hypothesis is that the sudden halt of personality swallows was too much of a shock to a self ravaged system.
And really, their “logic” is hard to argue. Alcohol is, after all, one of the essential building blocks of life. The human celebrity is composed of 62% alcohol, with the remaining 38% comprised of mainly amphetamines, opiates, cannabis and an over inflated sense of self worth and misguided feeling of invincibility. Exact amounts vary on a case by case basis. So asking a celebriwreck to abstain from alcoholic consumption, is tantamount to telling the Earth to go fuck it’s oceans. And then where would this fine planet of ours be? A shriveled, brown, husk of it’s former glory. Just like Amy Winehouse.
Now again, just to be perfectly clear, that’s not ME saying that; that’s “family sources”. I would never say such things, because I’m mostly not a lunatic. But I’m also not an alcohol doctor, so I don’t know, it may be entirely possible that suddenly stopping killing yourself could kill yourself. I’m not qualified to say one way or the other. The same way I’m not qualified to say that Amy Winehouse was a liquor fueled zombie who cruelly had her life source yanked away from her by “professionals” and “people who cared for her well being”, causing her to dry up like a neglected tin man, before falling over, shattering into a cloud of crusty, dehydrated slivers and being blown away on the breeze like a Spider-Man villain. That’s not for me to say, that’s for HER OWN FAMILY (according to a “source”) to say, which they have, in not so many words…
So what have we learned then from this brave, flimsy song drinker? Hmm? Well, we’ve learned that if you have flushed your system of all vital fluids and replaced them with 300 proof drinky fun times, apparently it’s better to quit gradually, allowing your body the opportunity to replenish your juices as the fermented happy liquids fighting the endless struggle of keeping you upright while simultaneously trying to knock you down, are being drained.
Secondly, if you have a family who in interview after interview kept telling who ever would ask them “It’s not a matter of if she’s going to die young and tragically, but when. If only there were something that I could do, because I apparently care ever so much, but alas, there isn’t.” and you expect them to have any sort of rational reaction to the “sudden” and ”unexpected” news of their relative passing, then you’re going to wind up with them blaming not being shot with bullets as the most likely cause of sudden acute deadness.
And third, and I think most importantly: as long as you keep drinking, you will never die. So pour me another glass of immortality juice and let’s party like if we ever stop it’ll kill us!
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For all of your rickety, primered, windowless comedy needs, visit:
vanfullofcandy.comWhat is the only thing more dangerous than washing down a quart of vodka with a gallon... more-
- VanFullOfCandy
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- 10 months ago
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Biased Measurement, Suicide and Weighted Averages
When I'm involved in a conflict between people, or just a discussion with a overly passionate person, I quickly start checking the quality of their claims; first I begin to evaluate the measures they are using. Most uncomfortable moments in life are directly attributed to inappropriate quantification of things. A teaser to illustrate an image in your mind of what I mean is, “you're a dirty whore!” or even “you're a stupid good for nothing and will never amount to anything!” When I hear claims, especially inflammatory, I think first about the definitions to see if they are accurate; whore – a person who exchanges acts simulating procreation in exchange for remuneration of some sort. I ponder, can we establish the criteria, and if not it discredits the person uttering the offending words. Generally when the inaccuracy of a claim's shown, it diffuses its potential to do damage and prevents escalation of tension. I would also wonder how they define “dirty” and would ask for clarification. It could mean soiled with the earth, soiled by garbage, or human sweat; perhaps they mean dirty relative to a set of specific moral values. These are measurable, and can be tested for accuracy, and objectively refuted when appropriate to defuse a difficult situation.
When we are initially learning about measurement, we count, we shade number lines, or color an area. We find out about nuances like Ordinal, Cardinal, Existential, Nominal. We think they’re only good for statistical use or study of natural science. They are in fact part of our every day life, but they become innate and are taken for granted. If average people were to think about them deeply or at least accepted them as valuable tools which can be used to defuse tense situations by verifying truth and rejecting false claims, then maybe they would be used more often, and fewer hardships would exist in the world.
So accurate and unbiased measurement is a very important part of all things in life. A main reason why good measure is important is we tend to act based on an accepted measurement. If “you are a dirty whore” turned out to be true, then eviction may be the resulting action, but what if it was a biased claim based on false evidence and bad measurement techniques? The eviction would still take place. Only when it is shown to be untrue that the “defendant” would remain a member of the residence. One of the best parts of the American existence is that we strive to never convict the innocent. People that get into rash situations are often not evaluating their assumptions to see if they're unbiased measurements.
Though it seems that testing of statements (antecedents) only applies to conflict between entities, it also applies to inner conflicts for individuals. Through the course of my life have been close to some deeply troubled people and was with them when they went from a suicidal state, to rational and hopeful state of mind. The last four people I talked out of suicide were stuck in a heavily biased, dark view of all things. They had made a sufficient number of determinations about their life and the lives of many other people around them that they became hopelessly stuck. Invariably the determinations were wrong and were based on a collection of biases that all needed to be questioned, but to the person in distress all the determinations were inarguably true.
“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive,
but what they conceal is vital.” –Aaron Levenstein
In these situations a person finds themselves correct about a great many of their determinations, and any argument you make with them about their position is likely to be subjective enough to not change their mind, but take a moment to think about the quote above. They are statistically taking a position that says, all life is intolerably bad and will never get any better. Based on what they are looking at it appears to be true, but they are only looking at the suggestive part that the bikini is revealing, not the vital part that it is covering up. You have to take them on a guided tour of their own mind and show them that the many other memories refuting their evidence for suicide. Present evidence from your own life that refutes their case; foster an “I can do it so you can do it” spirit. Test their ability to measure things as bad or good; they may have a black or white scale where truly there are only shades of gray, and they are likely screening out other points of view that would discredit their claims. Also, people often think they can predict the future really well, but when you ask them what their historic accuracy record is, or at least what their current predictions of the future are, they can easily be shown as a very biased and hopelessly inaccurate estimator of the future. If you can clearly show that they are not able to determine future events, you can get them to leave the proverbial ledge and go with you to get ice-cream or something pleasant while you begin to sort out the rest of their troubles.
A final note to make here is that many people don't possess good skills for decisions under risk, that or they have some emotional bias on a specific class of decisions that prevent the rational thinking.
“The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense
reduced to calculus.” –Laplace, Théorie analytique des probabilités, 1820
All decisions under risk boil down to a up-side of a choice, and a likelihood of the upside, and a downside with it's own likelihood of happening. When a ordinary person makes a decision they innately calculate this to find an optimal payoff as Laplace indicates above; they do not even have to be good at arithmetic to do this, it's just part of being a mammal. Things can go wrong in the mind though, and people tend to forget parts of the model; most typically the forget the likelihood part. A gambler type ignores probability and sees only the upside. A pessimist type ignores the probabilities and sees only the downside. They make irrational decisions because of not fully weighing the decision. The pessimist may have gotten that way from a some bad experiences with slander, a tragic loss of a relative in a motor vehicle accident, or even a horror story so vivid and frightening that they cannot be rational about their decisions. Let's look at friendships and the pessimist, and you can interpolate things for the gambler, and other daily life decisions.
A pessimist sees risk from friendships as well as the gains, but is focusing on the risks. They know of the devious nature of some people who will take private conversations and turn them into a popularity commodity to trade at the hairdressers shop. This is certainly a possibility when taking on the risky decision of making friends with new people. The up side of a friendship is they will listen to you (and if they are a good enough friend), notify you immediately when you are about to do something you will regret later. The likelihood of the gossip slipping into a trusted friend circle is small, and the likelihood of the true friend is great, but the pessimist is too focused on the potential damage from gossip to think rationally. Their long term friends go through life changes and move away or have less time, and our pessimist does not replace them with new friends due to their improperly weighted risk of harm. It doesn't take long before they are alone in the darkness of their own mind. What they needed in their thinking was a good academic dose of weighted averages. The massive gain from friendships, times the probability of good people summed with the potential negative from gossips times the small probability of them equals the expected payoff (weighted average) of the friendship decision under risk. If that is any positive number they should forge ahead at making friends. Even if some bad friends did filter through, it's possible to fix the damage they did.When I'm involved in a conflict between people, or just a discussion with a... more-
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- 1 year ago
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Coming Clean
A short-form documentary on one mans story of recovery from drug addiction.-
- SpencerRoberts
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- 1 year ago
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What IS Willis Talkin' Bout?
Ben Hoffman sits down with former "Diff'rent Strokes" star Todd Bridges to discuss his new autobiography, "Killing Willis." Topics include Gary Coleman, drug addiction, and a baseball bat up the butt.
infoMania is a half-hour satirical news show that airs on Current TV. The show puts a comedic spin on the 24-hour chaos and information overload brought about by the constant bombardment of the media. Hosted by Conor Knighton and co-starring Brett Erlich, Sarah Haskins, Ben Hoffman, Bryan Safi and Sergio Cilli, the show airs on Thursdays at 10 pm Eastern and Pacific Times and can be found online at http://current.com/infomania/ or on Current TV. And make sure to check out our facebook profile for special features at http://facebook.com/infomaniaBen Hoffman sits down with former "Diff'rent Strokes" star Todd Bridges... more-
- Ben_Hoffman
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- 2 years ago
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When Novelists Sober Up
"In America William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald were the Paris and Britney of their day, caught in the funhouse mirror of fame, their careers a vivid tabloid mash-up of hospitalisations and electroshock therapies. “When I read Faulkner I can tell when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with ‘Tender is the Night’,” said Hemingway, playing the Amy Winehouse role of denier-in-chief. He kept gloating track of his friends’ decline, all the while nervously checking out books on liver damage from the library; by the end, said George Plimpton, Hemingway’s liver protruded from his belly “like a long fat leech”.
In fact none of these authors would write much that was any good beyond the age of 40, Faulkner’s prose seizing up with sclerosis, Hemingway sinking into unbudgeable mawkishness. When Fitzgerald went public about his creative decline in Esquire, in a piece entitled “The Crack Up”—a prototype for all the misery memoirs we have today—Hemingway was disgusted, inviting him to cast his “balls into the sea—if you have any balls left”. Today, of course, “The Crack Up” would be shooting up the besteller lists, and Fitzgerald would be sat perched on Oprah’s couch talking about his struggle and his co-dependent relationship with Ernest, proudly wearing his 90-day sobriety chip, but in the 1930s, the recovery industry, then in its infancy, was regarded by most with the enthusiasm of a cat approaching a bathtub.
“AA can only help weak people because their ego is strengthened by the group,” said Fitzgerald. “I was never a joiner.” Certainly, if what you’re used to is rolling champagne bottles down Fifth Avenue beneath the light of a wanton moon or getting into the kind of barfights that make a man feel alive, truly alive, the basic facts of recovered life—the endless meetings, the rote ingestion of the sort of clichés the writer has spent his entire life avoiding—are below prosaic. Richard Yates professed to find AA meetings impossibly maudlin: “Is just functioning living at all?” he moped, claiming he could not write a single sentence sober. His fall was even more vertiginous, and emblematic of the 1950s; like Kerouac, he was to write one masterpiece - then nothing.
Only the advent of rehab, in the 1960s, interrupted this fall—enforced incarceration flattering the writer’s sense of drama, the Kafkaesque me-versus-the-system fable playing out in his head. John Berryman sat in rehab looking like a “dishevelled Moses”, his shins black and blue, his liver palpitating, reciting Japanese and Greek poets and quoting Immanuel Kant. When he found out the doctors around him were serious he buckled under, declaring himself “a new man in 50 ways!” and affecting an ostentatious “religious conversion” which he proceeded to pour into a series of poems to his Higher Power (“Under new governance your majesty”). Ten days after leaving he found he needed a quick stiff one to get the creative juices flowing again and downed a quart of whisky. “Christ,” was all he could say the next morning.
From which we can conclude that the writer who can be most grateful he never has to get sober is Salman Rushdie. Minimalists tend to do better than maximalists. Flinty and workmanlike seem to win the day. It is the self-proclaimed geniuses who suffer. Writers of long sentences seem to do worse than the writers of short ones—Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s endless clauses being the epitome of the drunken style. Comparing yourself to Tolstoy is a bad sign. (If it has to be a Russian, Chekhov is a much better bet.) Americans do much better than Brits (a recent biography of Kingsley Amis lists drinking under “Activities and Interests”). Americans from the north seem to do better than Americans from the South. Prose-writers fare better than poets. If you are an American poet from the South, you might as well walk into a bar right now. And don’t, whatever you do, write a novel about recovery.""In America William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald were the Paris and Britney of... more-
- St_Alia_10191
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- 2 years ago
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List of 'stone-cold sober schools' released
Following is a list of the top 20 "stone-cold sober schools," according to Princeton Review's survey of 120,000 college students.
1. Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
2. Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.
3. U.S. Coast Guard Academy, New London, Conn.
4. College of the Ozarks, Point Lookout, Mo.
5. Grove City College, Grove City, Pa.
6. U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colo.
7. U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Md.
8. Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.
9. Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, Calif.
10. Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich.
11. U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y.
12. Wesleyan College, Macon, Ga.
13. Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Needham, Mass.
14. City University of New York-Queens College, Flushing, N.Y.
15. Webb Institute, Glen Cove, N.Y.
16. Berea College, Berea, Ky.
17. Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Ga.
18. City University of New York-Baruch College, New York.
19. Simmons College, Boston.
20. Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pa.Following is a list of the top 20 "stone-cold sober schools," according to... more-
- Bigdog_mike
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- 3 years ago
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Being With Yourself
The Best Self-Esteem Money Can Buy...and, it's Free!-
- Hanala
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- 4 years ago
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Meth in Montana
Butte, Montana serves as a case study to illustrate the devastating effects of methamphetamine on communities throughout Montana.Butte, Montana serves as a case study to illustrate the devastating effects of... more-
- ezracooperstein
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- 5 years ago
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The Average Family
A young girl from Venice, California, introduces us to her version of family.-
- LisaThompson
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- 5 years ago
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