Category: No Politics Friday

Sometimes I am so proud of my (graduate) alma mater.

The good folks over at Jezebel have brought some much needed attention to an op-ed in a student newspaper by Yale Reardon on the topic of "Rating Girls." That's an archived link, as the newspaper took it down for reasons that will rapidly become apparent. You know, that "How hot on a 1 to 10 scale" thing that bros do in movies and apparently in real life. Some of Mr. Reardon's literary gems:

2. A two is not much better than a one. She is god awful ugly as well. No matter how many drinks you have, she won’t look hotter or thinner. All of her friends are busted as well. Thankfully a two does not have any confidence either so spotting them out is rare.

4. Here is where it gets interesting. Even the coolest bro’s from time to time will slip up with a four. A four is always fat; there is no getting around that. If you happen to fall victim to a four, I feel you. This is the kind of girl that must be kicked out of your place at 5:00 am. If you happen to crash at her place, you get out of there no later than 4:00 am. A boiling hot shower is needed immediately after.

9. Now we are talking. A nine has her life handed to her. She dates only good-looking rich dudes. She can ignore any guy and he will come back to her. She doesn’t need a personality because her face & body make up for it. These make ideal girlfriends and will get you mad bro points out the wazoo.

Charming. I would bust out the IU fight song in a fit of pride if I knew it.

He states, "One of my favorite things to do with my friends is to argue about what number a girl is." Well, one of my favorite things to do with my friends is make fun of backward-capped assholes who travel in packs and talk about women this way. Subscribing to the truism that two wrongs rarely make a right but usually make a funny, here is a much more useful scale – a precise, scientific analysis of Bro characteristics with attendant ratings of Bro-ness.

1. This is the bottom of the barrel. Minimum of two Livestrong bracelets. Loud, obnoxious assholes who have to pay people to hang around them. As adults, all Ones will be convicted of exposing themselves at a playground.

2. A two is readily identified by his popped collars, garishly branded polo shirts, and crippling insecurity. Has never had consensual sex. His favorite band is the Beastie Boys. Conversation topics are limited to college football, college basketball, and beer. Usually named Chad or Nick.

3. While the Two is a meek, self-loathing creep, the Three is an aggressive predator. Attempts to put his junk in anything that stops in front of him, including stray dogs and mailboxes. Has a vanity license plate of his frat nickname, i.e. "Chugs" or "P-Dub." Refers to all women as "bitches." Insists that lots of people and objects were or are "asking for it" regularly.

4. A Four is a fat guy who has never been seen without his backwards baseball cap. Women occasionally pretend to be interested in talking to him in exchange for free drinks. Fours are the subject of all of the best binge drinking stories in their respective frats, and they will brag endlessly about their power-barfing prowess and willingness to urinate publicly even though the cop was totally like right there.

5. The Five mentions the amount of money his dad makes in every single casual conversation. Wants to get an MBA and take over his dad's dealership but can't pass Calc 102. Calls his professors "Bro" and offers them money to boost his grades at the end of the semester. Regularly and enthusiastically gives high fives.

6. Sixes go through an entire Value Size pack of tanning coupons in one week. Appear to be wearing blackface at first glance. They work out 6 days per week, but have bizarre, hunched posture because they only do bench presses and bicep curls. The average Six has at least four nicknames for his penis.

7. A Seven is convinced that he is hilarious but he mostly just repeats lines from Will Ferrell movies. Thinks you totally need to hear this comedian named Dane Cook. Wears one of those faux-handmade looking twine necklaces sold in giant bins at the checkout counter in Hollister. Routinely asks others to "Do (him) a solid."

8. An Eight is a hyper-masculine type who lives in constant fear of his Bros discovering how far in the closet he is. Constantly talks about how much he loves "poontang" and desperately hopes that none of the dudes in the house will look at the browsing history on his Mac G5.

9. Nines are the high-class white supremacists. When someone overhears him telling jokes about black people he will demand that they "Chill out." Has never spoken to a Latino person who was not serving him food or holding a rake. The odor of Tag Body Spray becomes overpowering at this point on the scale; self-contained breathing apparatuses may be required to interact with a Nine.

10. The Sistene Chapel of assholes. His speech has devolved to an incomprehensible mixture of "dude", "bro", and grunting. Total bro-mageddon. Bronito Mussolini. President Brobama. Emperor Hirohibro. Wolfgang Amadeus Brotzart. Brosama bin Laden. C-3pBro. Edgar Allan Bro. Drives a tricked-out Ford Brocus. Bro v Wade. The Broman Empire. Gin and tacbros.

Please print this chart and keep a copy on your person at all times for use as a field guide.

Mark this date, for it is the date upon which this site sinks to the level of mocking a 15 year-old kid. While I am legally required to remind readers that neither Ginandtacos.com nor its parent company, Nordyne Defense Dynamics, accept legal responsibility for the views expressed by the author, I'm pretty sure you will feel morally justified in mocking this kid too.

So, this is real. He was 13 when the book was released:

Well, he has one of the foundational aspects of being a wingnut pundit down pat: looking like a smug little asswipe on a book jacket. Here he is at the same age addressing CPAC. See how long you can listen to his voice before you want to grab him by the skull and squeeze it like a zit until the horrible noise stops.

There really are only a couple of outcomes for this kid by the time he hits his 20s.

1. He has dropped out of college, survived two or three suicide attempts, and plays bass in a Fear cover band. Whatever royalties are still rolling in from his books go straight to his drug habit. He is photographed doing pint glasses full of blow off of Maggie Gallagher's nude back. Eventually he mainlines a speedball and dies.

2. He is in a psychiatric hospital, and half of the conservative AM radio hosts are in prison, when the scope of the molestation to which Rush and Glenn are regularly subjecting this kid comes to light.

3. In between paid appearances at megachurches around the country, he is hanging around truck stop bathrooms hooking up with guys he meets in chatrooms on adam4adam.

4. He is in prison, having (choose one: murdered an abortion doctor, blown up a Federal courthouse, mailed anthrax to Keith Olbermann).

5. He seamlessly blends into the right wing noise machine, becoming an asshole indistinguishable from any of the other assholes once the "cuteness" and novelty of his age wear off. The Macaulay Culkin of the pundit class, if you will.

Now that I have had some fun at his expense, in all honesty the little information available about this kid just makes me feel sorry for him. Between the homeschooling, the self-hating Jews-turned-Fundamentalist Christians parents, and the supplemental education at "The Classical School, which teaches from a Christian Biblical perspective," it is pretty clear that this kid didn't have much of a chance. He probably showed considerable intellectual gifts early on and rather than nurturing them, his parents chose to brainwash him. That's what is so creepy about the video clip, as is the case with all precocious "stage children." He looks programmed. You can teach a monkey to do a trick and it will perform on cue, but that doesn't mean it knows what it's doing or why.

The quote "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." has been attributed to numerous sources over the years.
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I don't know who said it but it sums up comedy quite accurately. Especially stand-up comedy.

I have performed in front of large groups of people in several different contexts throughout my life – teaching (which is remarkably like doing stand-up) a few hundred disinterested undergraduates, playing in bands, and comedy – and there is nothing quite as intimidating as the latter. When you fail, you fail hard and, more importantly, you fail alone. In a band, if the audience is not into it (which was not uncommon in my experience) you turn up the volume, look down at your instrument, and keep going. Or you focus on your bandmates and just have a good time together. With comedy if you suck, you have to stand there and bask in how much you suck.
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You see the disinterested looks and hear the brutal silence. Then you start second-guessing yourself, trying too hard, and collapsing within yourself like a dying star, crushed by the sheer magnitude of your own suck. And people are staring at you, excepting the ones too mortified to watch you experience ego death on stage. The experience offers some of the highest highs and lowest lows without much middle ground.

My friend DJ (of the fantastic IfIHadAHiFi, and yes, that's a palindrome) writes for several alternative media outlets around Milwaukee and he recently struck gold with "The Ballad of Johnny D," recounting the spectacular failure of a novice comedian. It is your highly recommended reading for the day. Johnny's ineptness is nothing short of amazing, yet you can't help sympathizing with him (or empathizing, if appropriate). I imagine the people in the room with him simultaneously could not wait for him to shut up and really hoped that he would rattle off one half-decent joke to salvage some dignity from the evening.

DJ usually kills it, but this one was both funny (and not for the reasons Johnny D would have preferred) and poignant. I mean, we have all been in an audience to see something this bad or worse. And we usually think about ourselves – "This is horrible and I am suffering" – rather than the person whose self-esteem is dying before our eyes. It's doubtlessly an unpleasant experience for all involved, but the only way to avoid it is to stay home. Bombing, and bombing hard, is the inevitable consequence of putting yourself out there. Johnny D sucked, but he might learn something from it and improve. Given the high likelihood that he will not, I still salute him for having the nuts to give it a go. Most people avoid bombing by refusing to expose themselves to the possibility.

When I began teaching I noticed that the endless stream of textbook promotional materials always referenced "Texas Editions." Seriously, everything came in standard or Texas versions. I had not the slightest idea what this meant. I assumed that Texas Edition meant it was the re-written with fewer polysyllabic words and more pictures. Perhaps they would replace the chapter on political parties with a picture of Ronald Reagan and partial transcriptions of the Chuck Norris film Missing in Action. I am somewhat ashamed to admit this, but it is true.
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In reality, of course, they're regular textbooks with an extra chapter to cover a bunch of Texas state government stuff mandated by the state legislature. Texas textbooks are about to get even dumber, but don't be too concerned about the Texas Board of Curriculum's unique version of reality.
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Texas will continue to get special textbooks and the rest of us will get books that have, like, history and stuff in them.

This is just the latest incarnation of an old American tradition of naming big, stupid things after Texas.

People in Texas are proud of how big and stupid they are, which makes it even funnier for the rest of us. With their extra-giant Texas trucks and Texas Whoppers and planet-sized Jumbotrons and crippling obesity epidemic, Texas is like the dopey fat kid in every low brow 80s comedy.

Share with me your favorite experiences having to do with Texas or Texans. Let's leave the last President out of this in an effort to be something other than depressed.

The only funny story I have involves being in El Paso. And in El Paso, the joke is on everyone.

Mousetrap was one of my favorite games when I was young and, I assume, would still be pretty awesome as an adult if I threw caution and recommended age limits to the wind and started playing with children's board games. So you can imagine my delight upon seeing this. It's quite real, shot in one continuous take. Allegedly it took two months to build.

Yes, the song blows. Yes, that's the dancing-on-treadmills guys. Yes, that kicks as much ass the 10th time one sees it as the first.

The funny thing is that it probably cost a grand total of about $50,000 to produce and yet it entertained me far more than any of the crap with eight- or nine-figure production costs that passed through theaters in the past year. But I suppose that's not a bold statement in a year in which Jeff Bridges was named the best actor (for some movie I've never heard of) and the big, groundbreaking news out of the Oscars was that they nominated a fat person for an award.

This is a roundabout way of saying that either I am getting older and harder to please or movies just aren't very good lately. There was a time not terribly long ago that I saw a few dozen movies annually, ranging from shit-gets-blowed-up summer action garbage to art house fare. This past year I think I saw about five movies, two of which starred Meryl Streep and which I attended under protest. Lately it all looks the same – same actors, same directors, same tired plots, etc. Is this what getting old is all about? Saying "I've seen this all before" and meaning it literally?

Among other obscure and unrelated interests I am an avid coin collector when my finances permit. As such I'm inherently interested in the aesthetic qualities of money. Although it reeks mildly of jingoism, I happen to think that the U.S. has the most attractive banknotes on the planet. I'll concede how badly we're outclassed, particularly by the Chinese and Australians, in terms of coinage. But American money, if you'll overlook a tautology for a moment, just looks like money should look. There's something classic and timeless about those bland green bills.

Sadly the challenges of modern technology necessitate that we make our money progressively uglier in the name of security and anti-counterfeiting measures. The $50 and $10 successfully incorporate red and blue without looking too ridiculous, but the new $20 and $5 bills bow to the global trend of plastering purple and other garish colors on currency. Soon I am afraid the "greenback" is going to end up looking like the monstrosities becoming regrettably common around the world these days:

To me, this does not look like money. The first ($50 Australian) looks like a Disney gift certificate. The second (Lebanese) looks like an IHOP place mat. Nevertheless the sad reality is that banks are hard pressed to stay a step ahead of the technology available to counterfeiters. Some countries, Australia included, have abandoned paper and are using plastic polymer banknotes. I've had my hands on a few and it's…different. Weird. But given its advantages in durability and security I expect that they'll be replacing most paper currency in the next decade or two.

Another vaguely creepy invention slowly working its way into banknotes is a nanotechnology called Motion which implants a ribbon with 650,000 tiny lenses that create the impression of movement. Sweden's 1000 Kronor is the first to use it and it is reportedly being adopted in the upcoming revision of the $100 Ben Franklin. It sounds like a plain old hologram, but I've held one of these and it's mind-blowing.

It is costly technology but has to be goddamn close to impossible to copy. Then again we've said that about a lot of security features – embedded threads, for example – yet the world is flooded with $100 "supernote" counterfeits so flawless that even the Secret Service can't reliably detect them. Because the Treasury argues that it would take nation-sized resources to produce counterfeits this good, the government has long accused North Korea of being the source of Supernotes. There's quite a bit of evidence to support that, although it is questionable that a technologically backward sinkhole like that could produce such good work.

For all the bells, whistles, and Sesame Street colors we're adding to money, though, the hardest parts of American currency to replicate rely on technology that is over 200 years old. The paper, produced exclusively for the Treasury Department since 1805 by Crane & Co. of Massachusetts, is made of linen and cotton (no wood pulp involved) and is very tough to replicate. Second, the bills are printed with an ancient printing technique called intaglio. It leaves raised ink on the bills, making bills produced with common printing techniques smooth and easy to spot. But as hard as these features are to replicate, someone out there is doing it. North Korea? Russian mafia? Iran? It doesn't matter. Whoever it is, we'll keep making changes and hope they can't keep up.

I'll console myself by stockpiling a few greenbacks before we go all plastic and day-glo, and I'll try not to prejudge the concessions to new technology. I'll find a way to love the next generation of banknotes – as long as Rep. Patrick McHenry doesn't get his way and bump Grant from the $50 in favor of…oh, go ahead and guess.

I have a public service announcement for people who are considering, or may consider at some point in the future, travel to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina: do not travel to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
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I can hardly decide what to do with my free time: Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede, Ripley's Believe it or Not Aquarium, Medieval Times, Magiquest (which looks like it might be responsible for a lot of parental suicides), a NASCAR theme park, the Carolina Opry, one of two enormous factory outlet malls, or sitting in my hotel room silently weeping, cutting myself, and contemplating gorging myself to death on a $9.99 all-you-can-eat fried batter buffet.
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It's a tough call. I dread having children solely out of fear that I would have to take them someplace like this, up to and including Disneyworld if Myrtle Beach turned out to be insufficiently plastic for his or her tastes.

In celebration of all of the good, happy, and not-even-remotely negative things in the world, I present, in no particular order, a picture of an infant hamster eating corn, the 1982 Super Bowl halftime show by Up With People, and a tiny toddler interacting with a 200 pound Newfoundland dog.

I hope this has been informative happy. Ecstatically so!

It's difficult to overstate the percentage of entertainment for people in my age group that consists of finding someone more pathetic and mocking them until we feel better about ourselves. It's an intersection of three factors: basic psychology, the vast opportunities provided by the internet, and the fact that most of our lives blow. Go ahead and canvass the 25-35 year olds in your life. See how many of them are unemployed, temping, minimally employed, or working but drowning in student loans. Hitting 30 and realizing that you have absolutely nothing nudges one toward the crueler end of the comedy spectrum.

Like People of Walmart, aka my favorite thing ever. It's an extraordinarily popular website based on the very basic premise that "At least I'm not that guy." It's not something we're proud of, but let's not kid ourselves. When you've spent 9 hours in a cubicle before walking home to your fourth-floor efficiency that you can barely afford, a self-esteem boost and a hearty chuckle (well, we tend to cynically snicker) are in order. After mailing out 75 job applications – for jobs that 500 people will apply for – it seems logical to say "Man, this job market is really a HOLY SHITBALLS WHAT IN THE NAME OF GOD IS THAT???"

Haven't cleaned your bathroom, washed the dishes, or done laundry in three weeks? Well A&E has a neat little show called Hoarders, the sole purpose of which is to make you feel like less of a slob. You'll feel slightly better about failing to take out the garbage for a week or two when you see a woman who lives waist-deep in back issues of Life…and better still when the people cleaning out her kitchen find a dead cat beneath twenty years of pizza boxes.

These are but two examples. It's a sad trend, I suppose, but that doesn't stop me from participating (at least in People of Wal-Mart; I'm not much of a Hoarders fan yet despite Scott N.'s noble effort). Are we bad people? Probably. Is the popularity of this kind of entertainment surprising? Of course not. There's a very good reason that so much TV and so many of the most popular websites falls into the "reality" category. It certainly doesn't depict our reality, and that's the whole point. Show us someone else – someone dirtier, dumber, poorer, and preferably fatter – who makes our phenomenally disappointing forays into adulthood feel like something short of complete failure.

Which brings us to Fail Blog, appropriately enough.