Tom Lennon • Freelance Writer: comedy and pop culture

Freelance writer specializing in comedy and the geekier end of the pop culture spectrum.

Latest Stuff

Erratum

After all that trouble I went to last night writing a fairly lengthy post about the late anti-Establishment comic George Carlin and his Supreme Court-baiting Seven Forbidden Words, I actually committed a hideous typo and missed one out. I know this because I received a text message this afternoon from my pal, the macaroon-chomping Friend of Garfield Jez Higgins. It read:"You missed a word, you cocksucker!"Thanks for that, Jez. I'll amend it accordingly.Nice of you to include the missing word, too.

The Magnificent Seven

George Carlin was part of a very fine and very respectable American tradition - that of the painfully funny and dangerously smart freethinking foul-mouth. Many of my heroes belonged to this tradition, and it seems like most of them are now dead. Comics like Carlin and Bill Hicks - and writers like Robert Anton Wilson - didn't just tell jokes or write comedy, they moulded neuro-linguistic smart bombs with a time-delay fuse, designed to perplex you for months or even years as you find yourself thinking hard about why you laughed so hard in the first place.Carlin wasn't that well [...]

George Carlin is Dead

1937-2008Shot. Pass. Feck. Can't. Crop-duster. Melonfarmer. Tits.You did it so much better than any of us.Rest in Peace.

Insane in the Membrane

All that talk in my previous post about meaningless corporate jargon reminded me of an incident that happened some years ago, whilst I was working for that aforementioned company that was so prone to wholesale crimes against language.At one point in the early 2000s, a phrase that was doing the rounds in the business world was 'sanity check'. According to Wikipedia:"A sanity test or sanity check is a basic test to quickly evaluate the validity of a claim or calculation. In mathematics, for example, when dividing by three or nine, verifying that the sum of the digits of the result [...]

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