Category: Culture

Out With The Old!

old

It’s a brand new year, time to show a little healthy intolerance for all the crap that has somehow become cool in our world.  This is the stuff we all put up with for no apparent reason — even though most of it is just a pain in the ass.  Here’s a very short list to get started.  (And you’ll be surprised just how good it feels to finally overthrow the tyranny of the mob.)

Loudmouth Vegans — Nobody really cares what you eat (see item #2) but announcing what you won’t eat every five minutes is just being a self-righteous jerk.  Think about it: when a vegan comes to your house for dinner, you serve vegan, but when you go to a vegan’s house for dinner, they never bring out a steak.

Social Media Food Photos — Nobody really cares what you eat.

Selfies — Submitting photographic evidence that you don’t have any friends doesn’t make you interesting.

Tiny Houses — The sun is shining.  Leighton and Bryce are happy.  They just bought a 300 square foot (100 metre) house.  They’re going to live there.  Next winter when the fog, rain, snow, ice and wind come and they have to dismantle the kitchen every time they want to go to the toilet, Leighton and Bryce are going to kill each other.

Torn Clothes — Would somebody please tell rich, white people that the reason they can dress themselves in rags is there’s a bunch of kids in Bangladesh working 14 hours a day in penal servitude?

Roseanne — Resurrecting the Connor family is a gutsy cash grab, but here’s a news flash: the 90s are over, and Dan is dead.

Lena Dunham — She’s the first celebrity to make a career out of apologizing.  However, when she mentioned that she wished she’d had an abortion just so she could know how it feels — well — that kinda tells ya where her mind’s at.

Twitter — Boy, did that little bit of fun go to hell in a hurry!

Hashtag Everything — (see above)

Tattoos — The only reason these middleclass badges are still around is it hurts like hell to get rid of them.

Man Buns — The saddest fashion trend since Hammer Pants swept the neighbourhood.

And finally:

Wearable Apple Crap — Paying a ton of money for a watch that you can barely see — that tells you stuff 99.99% of the people on this planet don’t care about — is living proof that Mr. Barnum was right: there is a sucker born every minute.

Christmas On Pause

mickeyWe interrupt this traditional, sugarplum Christmas to bring you some stuff that is currently going directly to WTF? without even pausing at OMG!

Research Shows Man-Flu is real — No it isn’t; I don’t give a rat’s bum for your research.  Here’s the deal.  I’m a man; I recently had the flu.  It was the regular, one-size-fits-all, everybody-gets-it flu.  I was in the hospital with a bunch of women (we were all contagious together) who had the flu — the regular, one-size-fits-all, everybody-gets-it flu.  They handled it much better than I did.  Why?  ‘Cause man-flu is what men do when they need to catch a break from the constant pissin’ contest that is masculine existence.  (God!  Why do women always need an explanation?)

Some six-year-old earned 11 million dollars last year — That’s correct.  There’s a kid out there named Ryan who plays with toys every week on You Tube and earned 11 million dollars last year doing it.  However, just to clarify, the pre-schooler himself didn’t actually earn 11 million dollars.  (There are some serious child exploitation laws against that sort of thing.)  His parents did.  Either way, turning an ordinary childhood into an annual eight-figure money-maker is quite an accomplishment.  In my neighbourhood, the woman at Starbucks (who’s invested several years and a lot of money into two degrees in microbiology) is pouring coffee for minimum wage — plus tips (that she has to share with the guy who washes the floor.)  I guess it’s all a question of marketing.

The Minister of Happiness in India is wanted for murder — Staggered by the irony of that, I still have to ask the question: “How come we don’t get a Minister of Happiness?”  We’ve got any number of useless government departments, wasting tons of money on crap we don’t need.  Why not throw some coin at a Department of Happiness?  What’s it going to cost, anyway?  Some balloons?  Streamers?  Lemonade?  Maybe a juggler?  It’s something to think about it.  Anyway, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh created the Department of Happiness last year and put Lal Singh Arya in charge.  Unfortunately, nobody bothered to background-check the guy, and now Lal Singh Arya is accused of murdering an opposition politician back in 2009.  He’s disappeared, and the authorities are looking all over the place for him.  (They might want to try looking in the Tickle Trunk.)

Walt Disney just bought FOX — Mickey Mouse, the squeakiest clean rodent in history, is about to give Rupert Murdoch (the Sorcerer of Sleaze) a boatload of money.  (Several boatloads, actually.)  These are the end of days, my friend — the End Of Days.

And now, back to our regular Christmas programming: the best rendition of the worst Christmas carol ever.

Black Friday And The Rocket Man

rocket-1027577_1920Unless you live in a cave on the northern slopes of the Himalayas, you know that yesterday was American Thanksgiving and today is Black Friday.  Black Friday (for all you cave dwellers) is a strange American retail phenomenon that’s slowly circling the globe.  A number of different countries — including mine — are starting to cash in on Black Friday’s consumer spending frenzy.  Personally, I don’t see the attraction, but I don’t have a philosophical problem with people beating each other over the head once a year to save 50 bucks. (I kinda figure it’s like The Purge with credit cards.)  My point is nobody but Americans could a) think up something as silly as Black Friday and b) make it work.  Let me demonstrate.

There’s a guy in California who’s going to launch himself into the air on a homemade rocket to prove that — wait for it — the Earth is flat.  Wow!  Think of the irony!  And this isn’t some Star Wars wannabe, blogging from his parents’ basement.  Oddly enough, Mike Hughes, a 61-year-old limousine driver, has already “slipped the surly bonds of earth.”  Back in 2014, he managed to build a rocket, get it airborne (with him in it) and soared for a kilometre or so through the skies of Arizona.  Unfortunately, what goes up must come down, and when Hughes’ DIY project did, he ended up in the hospital.

Aside from the fact that this is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard of (and I’ve heard a lot of stupid stuff in my time) I do believe this is a quintessentially American story.  The thing is, Mr. Hughes, dumb as he might be, actually did built a rocket and actually did fire himself into the sky.  Now, question Mikey’s tenuous grasp on reality all you want, but any way you slice it, that’s a hell of an accomplishment.  And this simple tale of one idiot in California is a deep look into the American character.  They are a dynamic people.  They don’t really care what their government, science, mathematics, the natural laws of the universe and sometimes even common sense tell them, ordinary Americans truly believe that — if they work at it — they can do anything.  And then, incredibly, they frequently do.

So, while people all over the world are chasing the American Dream of a 50-inch-Big-Screen-TV, I’ll just say this: “Good luck, Mike Hughes — and Godspeed!”