History Report

From a brilliant essay in The New Yorker by Simon Rich:

“They met in College, which is a place people used to go to after high school to drink alcohol. […] Instead of matching with someone through a dating app and sending a series of nude photos to each other before eventually meeting up for sex, you would meet them in person, before doing anything else. This meant that when my Great-Grandparents went out for the first time, they had no idea what each other looked like naked.”

A note about the link above. Many (most) of my favorite magazines –New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker– are behind paywalls. So I finally gave in and subscribed to Apple News which gives me access to 300 publications for $13 a month. If you are a subscriber the link above will take you to the essay. If not? There’s no free ride. Sorry.

Bad Lip Reading: The House of Representatives


So many questions. How long does it take to produce one of these? How many voice actors are used? How many of those do more than one voice? Are there out-takes? (God, but I’d love to see those). Do they video the production process? If more than one writer, do they have writer’s meetings?

I took a beer-fueled swing at one of these back in 2006 (think “Really Bad Lib Reading”). A few years later I had a go at a MST3K homage.

Does the ‘funny’ come first?

Bad Lip Reading has an informative Wikipedia page but it doesn’t answer one of my most burning questions. The dialogue/monologue has to be funny nonsense. And it invariably is. But the words always match the lip movement. I’m inclined to believe the funny comes first but the perfect sync seems equally important. 

Bad Lip Reading is the creation of Kennedy Unthank: “Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics and hermeneutics. He doesn’t think the ending of Lost was “that bad.”