I'm back..and enough about that.
So I want to talk about how dumb we are now. As a country.
Now I'm a firm believer that things are NOT worse than the good old days. Our problem is that we just hear about it faster and in greater volume. There were creeps kidnapping kids 75 years ago, we just hear about every missing kid almost instantly. Or say some random guy kills his wife/girlfriend/lover and suddenly it's on the cover of "People." Guys killed girls back in the day, we just didn't get to see all the pictures on the internet a week later.
But I kind of think we're dumber than we used to be. All you need to do is watch a few hours of television or open a laptop and let the great tidal wave that is the internets wash over you to start to wonder if our fellow man isn't doomed to eat paste.
For example: as many of you know, I like sports. So I have my television tuned to ESPN more often than not. And a commercial getting a lot of play right now is, um, something about anti-perspirant (not very effective, I guess). Anyway, in the commercial, some guy I should know on some survival show I've been told I should watch is testing the effectiveness of the product by making normal office schlubs wear meat shirts (the Lady Gaga for Men line of clothing, apparently). And then, the survival guy has his buddy release some wolves, that then chase the fleeing men down and catch (and offscreen, devour) two of the men. The last man survives, because, according to the survival guy, sweat is like gravy to wolves (who knew?). And our survivor is not sweaty. So, see, if it works in those conditions, it'll work as you try to pick up that hot drunk woman at the bar. But! But that's not the dumbest part of the commercial (oh, no, it gets dumber). The dumbest part is, at the bottom of the screen, the ubiquitous "Do Not Attempt."
Do Not Attempt!
Cuss word alert: Are you fucking kidding me?!?
Do not attempt? You need to warn me not to test my deodorant by putting on a shirt made of meat and running from wild wolves? Thank you SO much for the warning because I was totally going to do that. Right after I tested the effectiveness of my mouth-wash by eating a giant pile of dogshit and making out with my wife.
There's two reasons for such a soul-crushing warning:
1. The makers of the hygiene product are so afraid of being sued that they make sure even the dumbest people won't try what they saw on television...or
b. The makers of the hygiene product just know that everyone that sees the commercial is dumb.
And I'm going with b.
The reason is because of the other dumb thing that has made its way into my head: "Friday."
If you have not experienced this phenomenon, here's a few words: Don't.
Okay, just one.
This is far and away the most horrible song ever. Satan would play this on his iPod all day long, over and over, in Hell, were it not for the fact that he probably hates it, too.
But the thing of it is, it's everywhere. I discovered it after seeing articles about it in two or three different places. After reading a few articles, I had to hear it for myself and good lord do I wish I hadn't. The song, on Youtube, has something like 70 million page views. 70 million! Of course, 89% of the people hate it, so maybe there's hope, but really, it's our fault something like this exists.
(Let me be clear here...Yes, the girl is only 13 and I really shouldn't be mocking 13 year olds. But her parents shelled out thousands of dollars to buy the song, record it, create a video, and post it online. No one made them do that. No one made the young girl record the song. So since they made the decision to do it, they're fair game.)
(As another aside, there's an old saying that if you put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand typewriters, eventually one of those monkeys would type up a Shakespearian play. Well, this song, clearly, was written by one monkey who got trashed on banana schnapps and wrote the song on the wall with his own feces.)
The dumb part, to try to get back to my point, is that people mistake 70 million hits and a picture on the first page of Yahoo as fame. Like they've arrived. Throw your little girl on the You Tubes singing the worst song known to man and she's famous...except she's not. She's just on the internet. I'm on the internet! I'm just some goofy guy who can type and gets mad at stupid stuff. I'm not famous. I'm never going to be famous. Sure, we're talking about this girl, but that doesn't make her anything. It's just that things happen easier now, faster, and that's made us dumber. We mistake now for arriving. It took Elvis years before he became ELVIS. It took the Friday girl 35 seconds to upload musical murder.
There's a point in here someplace, and I think I'll probably pound away at it some more later, but anyway, that's my triumphant return.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that baseball starts tomorrow. So go White Sox!
