Category: Social Media

What Ever Happened To Ordinary?

ordinaryI love the 21st century.  I love it that I can talk to people all over the world.  I love that my Japanese car was built in France — from Polish parts.  I love Google and Wikipedia.  I love the one-click universe.  I love it that, when I order a pizza, it gets to my house faster than the police would.  Well, maybe not that so much … but … I do think it’s cool that the person at the other end of the telephone is thousands of kilometres away, but he instantly knows my name and remembers I want extra garlic.  The point is I love all the bells and whistles this century has to offer … but … there is one serious drawback.  You can’t get regular stuff anymore.  Ordinary is just not available.  Here are a few examples:

Telephones — I have no idea what half the stuff on my telephone does.  I touch the wrong icon, and suddenly I’ve got a live-stream street scene from a village in Bhutan.  If they made an ordinary telephone that just made telephone calls, every old person on this planet would buy one.

Water — Last time I checked, there were at least a dozen different brands of water for sale.  People!  It’s water!  The only choice you’re actually making is the shape of the plastic bottle.

Ice Cream — What ever happened to Chocolate, Vanilla and Strawberry?  Do we really need Mungo Jerry Berry?  Wasabi?  Bacon?  This isn’t ice cream, folks!  It’s some kind of mutant milk product, foisted on an unsuspecting public who think they’re getting something other than a lethal dose of chemical flavouring.

Coffee — It’s impossible to do that many different things to a beverage.

Toothpaste — Every brand from Aquafresh to Sensodyne has a least 8 different versions, four different flavours and any number of different purposes.  You can have cavity control, tartar control, bad breath control or holy-hell-that-hurts control.  In the age of bone graft implants, you would think dentistry could come up with a single brush-your-teeth-after-every-meal toothpaste.

And finally:

Cars — The only purpose of the automobile is to go where you want it to go, stop where you want it to stop and go backwards if you went too far.  That’s it.  Cut out all the other crap — like power windows, heated seats, 3 surveillance cameras, 9 cup holders and a video uplink to the Mars Rover — and you could make an ordinary car that ordinary people could afford.  Plus, you could probably power it with your brother-in-law’s electric lawnmower motor.

I Don’t Understand Fútbol

footballLike most North Americans, I watch fútbol (soccer) every four years.  I go World Cup crazy like everybody else on this planet, but when it’s over, I go back to regular sports … mostly football (football) and hockey.  It’s not that I don’t like fútbol; I do.   As a spectator sport, it’s got it all.  The joy of victory, the agony of defeat, sweat, testosterone, talented young men doing incredible things with their balls, wives and girlfriends so hot they could resurrect the libido of a dead man, and, of course, billionaire owners, buying and selling players like it’s a Zanzibar auction.  Which brings us to the reason I’m even talking about fútbol in the dead air of August.

It’s all very complicated, but here’s the decaf version.

There’s a player called Neymar (apparently, really good fútbol players are only allowed one name — i.e. Ronaldo, Messi, etc.) who’s changing teams — from Barcelona to Paris St-Germain.  No big deal, right?  Except this involves buying out his contract.  And get this!  His contract is worth 222 million Euros (263 million dollars!)  WTF!  That’s more than the entire payroll of the New York Yankees — the winningest franchise in sports history.  It’s more than the national debt of Haiti.  It’s unbelievable!  Hell, there’s probably a lab in China where you could have an entire team biologically built — from scratch — for that price.  I’m not kidding!  Not only that, but once he gets to Paris St-Germain (PSG) they’re going to pay him 40 million Euros a year to play.  That’s over €100,000 a day — every day — including Christmas.  Double WTF!  But — for serious grins — when the lawyers showed up with a suitcase full of money to purchase Neymar’s services, the Spanish League initially wouldn’t accept it.  They said it violated Uefa’s Financial Fair Play rules.  Financial Fair Play?  Guys, the cash in this contract could feed every man, woman and child in Mali for a year or more.  Financial fair play has nothing to do with it.  Besides, think about it.  Uefa’s governing body is FIFA; these are the boys who could give shyster lessons to the Russian Mafia.  Trust me!  They wouldn’t know fair play if it bit them on the bum.

Actually, I have nothing against anybody making as much money as possible from their talents.  So, despite the fact I think it’s obscene, if PSG wants to pay 40 million Euros for a kid to kick a ball every once in a while, I have no objections.  Good on ya, Neymar!  The reason I don’t watch fútbol is I simply don’t understand how it works.  I can’t follow all the different leagues, all the different teams and all the different games.  I never know who’s doing what with whom or why.  So, I wait — and every four years, when people start waving flags I recognize, I cheer — ’cause that’s what I understand — like most people in North America.

Truth

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Despite what philosophers and college sophomores try to tell you, Truth is not an elusive beast.  It’s not some shy chimera, hiding in a morally ambiguous forest, feeding on tender buds of nuance and leafy shoots of supposition.  It’s not semantically ambivalent.  It’s not coloured in a million shades of grey.  It’s not a matter of opinion.  Nope! None of the above!  Truth is real.  It’s big.  It’s bold.  It’s etched in stone.  And I can prove it.  Here are some hardcore facts — no ifs, buts, or maybes.  This is Truth, and it’s happening all around us.

The square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

There are three kinds of people in the world — those who understand math and those who don’t.

Your family always knows which buttons to push because they installed them.

Rock Bottom has a basement.

Paris is always a good idea.

The distance between loser and lover is sometimes measured in tequila.

Pregnant women are smug.

If you keep your clothes long enough, they might eventually come back into style — but by the time they do, they won’t fit.

A low-cut neckline beats a bad hair day every time.

The probability of red wine getting spilled on white carpet is directly related to the cost of the carpet, not the cost of the wine.

The only birthdays that actually matter are 18, 21, 40, 50 and 60.

And my favourite:

Everybody wants a sensitive man until the sonofabitch actually shows up.