In the music genre:
Third Eye Blind’s Semi-Charmed Kind of Life is about addiction to crystal meth. It’s often played as a light-hearted, upbeat kind of look at life.
The Police’s Every Breath You Take is about a stalker/obsessive boyfriend but is often seen by the clueless as an endearing love song.
Man, it was sad to read that. A lot of dearly departed posters. I even miss lissener.
Both *Ulysses *and Finnegan’s Wake. Lot of damn nonsense, if you ask me. While studying *Ulysses * in grad school last spring, I was often tempted to ask the professor if the whole thing wasn’t either a load of self-absorbed shit, or an elaborate practical joke. I refused to even buy Finnegan’s Wake; I finished my semester paper early, turned it in and quit going to class before we got to it.
Oops, posted before I saw **Birdmonster’s ** post. Well, anyway, glad to know I’m not alone.
I agree with the notion that Paul Verhoevan’s entire Hollywood career was one gigantic whoosh. Robocop and Total Recall were the last movies he even tried to take partially seriously. Starting with Basic Instinct he’s been sticking his thumb in the eye of both the Hollywood studio suits that gave him the money to make movies and the moviegoing public, and laughing at us for being such idiots.
There’s a man with a lot of stored up hate for humanity. Look over his movies, and you’re not going to find a decent human being in any of them. They’re all either scheming villains, corrupt assholes, or cardboard cutout “heroes”.
Not the greatest whoosh of all time, but still… I fondly recall an argument with the librarian when I was about 15 years old, after discovering that Philip Jose Farmer’s Tarzan Alive! had been shelved in the Biography section. I kept trying to convey why this was so obviously wrong-- because it’s Tarzan?! The librarian simply pointed to the book’s Library of Congress number and patiently explained that this proved the book was Non-Fiction.
You think the fake browser windows and the “click for more detail” voiceovers were intended completely unironically by Verhoeven, then?
I’m with Baldwin. Starship Troopers isn’t a good movie, but to claim Verhoeven didn’t intend it as a satire is just silly.
That’s sweet. Why don’t you tell Lissener that directly?
-FrL-
I was 16 when Starship Troopers was released and much more interested in Denise Richard’s breasts than any social satire.
Denise Richard’s breasts never made an appearance (however, Dina Meyer’s did :eek: ), but I was treated to one of the funniest parodies of action movies and war movies ever.
Verhoeven knew exactly what he was doing and I could tell that at 16.
Metal Machine Music for the win.
You must have read a completely different book. Unless of course you equate any kind of service (especially military service) to Nazism, which it seems you might. The discussions about service and how it was made part of the society was the opposite of Nazism. In the book the system was put in place in answer to a totalitarian regime which used the service and patriotism of it’s youth for their own ends (Nazis). The system as it was in the book was the answer to that (180 degrees from how it was portrayed in the movie). You couldn’t be more wrong.
According to Mad Magazine, Stonehenge.
The Trojans would probably say that big wooden horse the Greeks parked outside their gate turned out to be a big one.
D’oh! Seriously, I thought he was gone!
Canada as an eco-friendly nation. But I guess that’s a supreme PR job, rather than a whoosh.
Rico was an ass, Dizzy is WAY hotter. Five minutes into Basic and I’d be saying, “Carmin who?”
The Piltdown Man hoax.
How was that a whoosh?
Well, wasn’t there Barnum’s fake of the Piltdown Man? 
IIRC, just about everything Andy Kaufman did was a whoosh. His act went over the heads of many. Even when he revealed he had cancer (in all seriousness) people thought he was putting them on.
If I recall correctly {and I’m open to correction on this; it’s been a couple of years since I read it}, the political system began when a bunch of military vets returned from a disastrous World War to find a shattered society preyed on by spivs, criminals and black-marketeers, got pissed off, hung a few people from lamp posts, and began reforming the political system on military lines, based on the patriotic and self-sacrificing civic virtues instilled by military service. That could just about have been written with a straight face after WWII, but after Vietnam Heinlein’s fetishisation of the military as all that was good and noble about society began to look distinctly queasy.