Category: Social Media

I Call Bullshit

We live in desperate times when the combination of an omnipotent social media and slipshod education has produced a generation whose philosophical IQ is measured out in clichés.  I call bullshit!  Let me demonstrate with a random selection of the trite musings running around the Internet these days.

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The meek shall inherit the Earth — Yeah, I know it’s biblical, but in 2017 some Wall Street investment broker with a roomful of lawyers is going to contest the will.

Age is only a number — You ever notice the people spouting this nonsense are all under 35?

That which doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger — Clearly, whoever thought this one up was never hit by a bus.  When they haul you away from that little mishap, you’ll wish to hell the bus hadda finished the job.

White Privilege — Why am I being arbitrarily profiled because my ancestors happen to come from Northern Europe?  We have a name for people who judge other people by their racial ancestry. . . .

Everything happens for a reason — Do you really think the universe cares if you fall down the stairs?  Google Copernicus, ya moron!

Do what you love and the money will follow — I want to see the person who’s going to pay me to eat Doritos™, drink Pepsi™ and binge-watch Netflix™.

Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans — This is nothing more than a bad excuse for never making any plans in the first place.

You have to look through the rain to see the rainbow — You’re at a bus stop on a deserted highway.  It’s 9:30 at night and pissin’ down rain.  You haven’t seen a bus, a car, a person or a stray dog in over an hour.  Three bikers pull up and ask for your wallet.  Oh, look!  There’s the rainbow!

If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade — This might be true if life also handed you a pitcher, some water, sugar and something to stir it all with, and — BTW — one lemon isn’t going to make very much lemonade.

And finally:

Money isn’t everything/Money can’t buy happiness — I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor: take a wild guess which one I prefer.

Feminism Doesn’t Stand A Chance

equality1Like it or not, folks, despite our best efforts, here in 2017, feminism doesn’t stand a chance.  Gender equality might be a wonderful ideal, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon because men and women don’t get killed, dismembered or injured the same way — in the movies.  The fact is, as long as we maintain our Neo-Victorian attitude toward violent entertainment, gender equality will remain a distant dream.  Let me explain.

Shooting — When minor male characters get shot in films, their guts are splattered across three walls, half their chest is missing and their arteries are pumping enough ketchup to sicken Dracula’s sister.  If the action’s close enough, they fly backwards through a plate glass window, bounce off the windshield of a car and end up in the gutter with their head caved in.  When minor female characters get shot — actually, minor female characters seldom get shot on camera — but if they do, it’s usually because they’ve caught a stray bullet that causes nothing more than a vague look of surprise and a spreading red stain.  (FYI, the recovery rate for female characters from lethal gunshot wounds is astronomical.)

Fire — When men get set on fire in film, they run around, flaying their arms and screaming like a berserk barbeque briquette.  Women are instantly incinerated — no fuss, no muss and very little clean-up.

Torture — When men are tortured in the movies, they’re hanging by their thumbs.  The bad guys are punching the hell out of them while simultaneously zapping them with 500 volts, hacking away with a machete and blowing cigar smoke in their face.  There’s tons of slobbering and swearing and crying and hollering, and this goes on for at least three scenes — while the good guys are racing to the rescue.  Women, however, seldom get past the sinister music and the initial scream of anticipation before the camera cuts to the next scene — where they’re found half-naked in an isolated wooded area (shallow grave optional.)

Dying — When men die, there’s no coming back.  This guy’s been shot 4 times, stabbed, hit by a truck, blown up by 2 mortars and a grenade and dropped off a 12-storey building.  His face looks as if it’s done 12 rounds with a K-Tel meat tenderizer, and both legs are either missing or bent around like a Bavarian pretzel.  He’s coughing and spewing and spitting up god-only-knows-what while he vainly struggles to choke out his last words.  When women die, they are normally on their back, their head comfortably resting or cradled in the arms of … you get the idea.  There’s a tiny smear of blood from the corner of their mouth and they say something like “I’m so cold.” before their head slumps sideways and their eyes close — makeup completely intact.  Honestly, I’ve fallen asleep with more fanfare than that.

Let’s face it, people! The only time women get any screaming-ass agony in the movies is during childbirth.  And if that isn’t the final sexist kick in the head, I don’t know what is.

It’s sad, but until men and women get their heads blown off with some kind of equality in movies, feminism will remain merely a hope and a promise.

Dogs Are From Heaven – Cats – Not So Much

dog-1812002_1280Recently, I had an opportunity to hang out with a couple of really cool dogs, Murphy and Charlie, and after a few days of watching their various antics, I, like every pet owner in history, began to wonder what they think.  I certainly hope in the future humans discover a way to communicate with other species.  That way we might finally understand why cats hate us and dogs are the perfect pet.

I’ve got nothing against cats, BTW.  One of my favourite pets ever was a cat: Diega, who’s now in the Witness Protection Program.  (It’s a long story for another time.)  But let’s be honest: cats are adorable on Facebook, but try living with one.  Even dedicated cat people have some bloodcurdling tales to tell – mutilated mice, slimy hairballs and deep childhood scars from “kitty has pins in her toes.”  Sound familiar?  Dog people never talk like that.  They never say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with Rover.  He just won’t eat anything but imported French dog food.”  Dogs will eat anything.  They eat crap that nobody else would even look at.  A dog’s motto is “Go to the bowl: good things happen.”  Meanwhile, a cat will turn up its nose at free-range $25.00/pound,  hand-ground salmon.  Then, not an hour later, it will go out in the alley and kill a totally scabby, diseased sewer rat and drag it home as snacks for the whole family.

But that’s the difference between dogs and cats.  Dogs are straight-ahead, and cats are devious.  If a dog’s mad at you, he chews your shoes.  However, if a cat’s angry, it’ll wait for two or three weeks and then, in the middle of the night, have outrageous, screaming sex, right outside your bedroom window — all night.  Then it will show up five minutes before dawn and want to cuddle.  That’s not cute; that’s malicious!

Personally, I think cats hate us because they missed the first 50,000 years on the domestication train.

Way back, at the dawn of evolution, when humans ran in packs, dogs did, too.  The two species must have encountered each other somewhere along the trail.  Humans probably thought, “Those guys aren’t very good to eat, and they’re really difficult to kill.  So let’s leave them alone unless we’re desperate.”  Dogs probably thought, “Those guys have puny little teeth and they can’t hear or smell worth a damn, but they kill a lot and they never eat everything they kill, so let’s hang around and pick up the scraps.”  Over the course of hundreds of generations, the two species got used to each other.  Humans discovered that dogs were really good at finding food.  All hunters had to do was follow the pack to get to the good stuff.  Dogs, on the other hand, figured out that even though humans were pretty much useless, in close, they were kick-ass dangerous and could bring down the big boys — like mastodons.  All a smart puppy had to do was bark and snarl and keep the prey at bay until the humans got in there with their pointy sticks.  Then it was Happy Meals™ for everybody.

Plus, humans had fire, which, thumbless, a dog could never master.  And fire, under control, was just the ticket for a frosty canine on a cold winter’s night.  Meanwhile, as dogs crept closer to the fire, humans found that, after dark, with their superior smell and hearing, dogs were the perfect burglar alarm.  It made sense to let them cuddle up to the warmth if they wanted to.  Over the course of a couple of hundred more generations, humans and dogs became inseparable.  They lived together, hunted together, their kids played together and they all ate the same food.  So it was only natural dogs and humans became BFFs.

Cats, on the other hand, were Johnny-come-latelies to domestication, and they’ve never really gotten over the special relationship humans have with dogs.  They see it as an insult to their self-diagnosed superiority.  Remember, cats didn’t start hanging with humans until the Egyptians turned them into gods for killing rats.  That little theological faux pas went directly to the feline ego and has been stuck there ever since.  These days, cats still think they’re gods almighty, and being cats, they want the lion’s share of human attention.  When they don’t get it, they go looking for revenge.

Of course, this is only my theory — which I’m never going to be able to prove.  Unfortunately, I’m not going to be around when humans and dogs develop two-way communication and we humans can finally just ask dogs, “What the hell’s wrong with cats, anyway?”