Category: Thoughts

Friday! Random Crap On The Internet!

TSG has the complete text of the new Barry Bonds lawsuit, alleging psychic damage, dog theft, and a conspiracy involving selling steroids to nuns. (Serious angle: the man filing the suit is already in prison, but should probably be in a mental institution instead. The incarceration nation rolls on.)

The Onion talks about a 2nd-grade production of “Equus.” Pretty good. Not as funny as the Girls Gone Wilde bit from Cat & Girl, though.

The NYT pans High School Musical 2 with much hilarity. In a particularly classy touch, they mock the fake-tanned actors while alluding to Olivier. See also Zac Efron, Please Stop Tanning, a blog dedicated to the tween heart-throb and his growing addiction to tanning.

This video of a Japanese waterpark is going around like mono.

Everybody Loves Tweaker Girl

From Salon’s review of two books on meth:

Each era gets the drug it deserves — or seems to, after the fact, when viewed through the smeary lens of pop history. Hence Coleridge and the other 18th century Romantics with their laudanum visions; Rimbaud and Verlaine sipping absinthe in 19th century Paris; the acid-tinged 1960s; coke-amped 1980s and the 1990s’ sunken-eyed, vampiric heroin chic.

Methamphetamine, a drug that embodies a Platonic ideal of paranoia, perfectly suits out national mood, when sleep-deprived employees are afraid to get off the treadmill of work for fear they’ll fall even deeper into debt, and sexual titillation seems both omnipresent and joyless. The erotic vampires who populated pop culture in the late 1990s and early naughts have given way to zombies stumbling or wanking or fucking their way through the detritus of the early 21st century in recent films like “28 Days Later” and “Shaun of the Dead.”

I’m not sure I agree, but I’m having a hard time articulating why.

“I Deserve It” (rant in which I get neurotic and bitchy about money)

Updated, preface: yes, this is, as my brother says, “some self-righteous shit.” I know. I know my money-guilt is crazy.

NYT on buying new boobs on credit: “She said she pays $178.01 monthly to the finance company and does not know how long it will take her to pay off the debt on her credit card.” “I financed my car. Why shouldn’t I finance my face?”

Well, the answer is that you really shouldn’t have financed either, unless they’re going to bring in more money than you spend on them. If it’s on credit, it should be an investment. In other words, unless you’re a stripper, cosmetic surgery is out. Unless a car is the only way for you to get a job, you shouldn’t finance a car. Unless you’re a limo driver, using a loan to buy something nice instead of paying cash for a beater is a big mistake.

“I deserve it” and “I want it” and “I can get a loan for it” are not valid reasons to buy something on credit. If you can only afford it by going into debt, you can’t afford it.

(In my mental landscape, frankly, they’re not valid reasons to buy something at all, even if you have a giant wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket. I’d feel far more comfortable if I was able to buy only what I could prove was absolutely necessary for myself, and then use the rest to buy things that are absolutely necessary for people who don’t have them. I don’t do that. I can’t seem to make it stick, but I feel torn about every expenditure that is above the level of bare necessity. You might think that my internal financial thoughts are full of misery and gloom and guilt, and you’d be right.)

Especially “I deserve it.” I hate it when people say that. First off, no, you don’t deserve to have a perfect nose. There are all kinds of things people do deserve, but a cute button nose is not one of them. Second, when you say you “deserve” something stupid, it cheapens the things people really deserve, but don’t get. Freedom of speech. Health care. Clean air and water. Education in non-segregated, well-funded schools. Third, whether or not people deserve something is almost entirely unrelated to whether they get it.

You get things if you are lucky and/or diligent, or in the case of credit card debt, foolish. Mostly it’s down to luck.

Welcome to reality, kids. Life isn’t fair. How did you manage to grow old enough to get a credit card and use it to purchase shiny new toys without noticing that you lived in the real world and not in kindergarten?

Bad News On The Money Front

Subprime mortgage troubles have blown up hedge funds in the US, UK, Australia, France, and Germany, due to an ongoing run on hedge funds by holders of rapidly depreciating mortgage-backed securities. The Fed is making the incredibly unusual move of stabilizing the market by purchasing them. The dollar is sinking slowly, and China has threatened to make it sink much faster if the US keeps playing chicken with Chinese imports. Flippers are in trouble.

Not fun for anyone, but it could be a healthy turn of events. If we’re lucky, this signals the beginning of the end for America’s second gilded age.

Fun With Libel And Slander!

Apparently one of my new job skills is “near-libel.” That is, implying something nasty without saying it directly, or managing to quote someone else doing the libeling. My review of the latest travesty from VH1, “The Pick-Up Artist,” has an example:

It’s a pretty reasonable premise: Find eight guys who just don’t know how to act around women, and give them lessons. “Beauty And The Geek” managed to make the geekiness-makeover work. But “The Pick-Up Artist” makes it stupid, sleazy, and exploitative.

More than the usual VH1 reality show, I mean.

First off, where “Beauty And The Geek” had some balance, requiring contestants to learn from each other, “The Pick-Up Artist” is focused solely on the failings of men who can’t “get” women. Second, and most important, all the advice is pointed toward techniques from “The Game,” the borderline-misogynist manual that tells men how to bed women with the techniques of a used car salesman. In fact, the show is hosted by the man who more or less invented The Game.

He wears a purple-furred bucket hat, charges big bucks for weekend seduction seminars, and calls himself Mystery. He and his sidekicks J-Dog and Matador are the sort of guys whose nicknames should alert potential partners to the fact that they’re sleazebags. That, and the way they approach seduction as a male competition in which women are merely the method of keeping score. And the fact that they just look like they’d give you herpes and then never call you back.

In other words, “The Pick-Up Artist” is about turning shy men who don’t know how to relate to women into sleazy men who relate to women as prey. Great job, VH1. What’s next? Will it be a show based on The Rules that teaches women how to lure men into a loveless marriage, or one in which you explain that women can generate interest from men by participating in wet t-shirt contests?

In this example, the almost-libel is the herpes joke. I didn’t say he had herpes; I merely said he looked like an inconsiderate sex partner. Close, but an important legal distinction.

Which makes me wonder… why is herpes the STD everyone makes jokes about, anyway? Is it because it’s icky but not really dangerous? If so, why not joke about crabs, which are equally harmless and equally icky?

I also wonder if my high-school English teachers would be proud of this use of my writing skills and the way I made herpes a metonym for reckless sexual promiscuity. Probably not.