While I’m sure that some of my more deranged readers fantasize that I watch it over and over, I’ve actually never seen the movie “Red Dawn
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Low Self Esteem
Frank J. says that we should pity the pirates, and ask ourselves why they plunder us:
…for a change, let’s really look at pirates. You may just see how they are the victims in all of this. That may seem ridiculous to you. After all, aren’t they the ones taking hostages? But ransoming hostages is just how they make their living. Do you get angry at an IRS agent or a lawyer for just doing his job? The issue is why pirates find pillaging and plundering their only options.
It’s not going very far out on a limb to say that pirates suffer from low self-esteem. They often have inferior prosthetics, such as hooks and peg legs, and that alone makes them feel disconnected from “normal” people. Then there is the scurvy and the inevitable depression that comes with it. Throw in the addiction to rum, and it’s obvious to anyone that we have individuals in severe need of help. Just look at a pirate’s choice of a pet: the parrot. It’s an aloof animal that does nothing but repeat the pirate’s own words in a mocking tone. If that were not enough of a cry for help, there is also their habit of burying treasure. It’s like they don’t even feel they are worthy of the fruits of their plundering and murder and thus deny it for themselves.
We have to help them. Do it for the children. As one commenter notes, pirates are people, too.
Bye Bye Birdie
Former Detroit Tiger Mark Fydrich has died in a freak accident. I remember living in Michigan and watching him pitch, those many years ago.
Lileks Went To Disney World
Again. Here’s an amusing Retweet Theatre on the subject. More extensive coverage of the expedition can be found here and here.
Next, The Iliad
If Homer’s Odyssey had been Twittered.
The Glamour Of Star Trek
Thoughts from the glamour maven.
New Space Libertarian In The Blogosphere
I first met Terry Savage almost thirty years ago when I first drove out to California, looking for jobs in the aerospace industry as I was on the verge of graduating from Michigan. He was one of the founders of OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Space Industrialization and Settlement), the Los Angeles chapter of the L-5 Society (now National Space Society), and offered me a place to crash while in Redondo Beach. I’ve kept up with him, on and off, ever since.
He’s finally decided to dip his toe into the blogosphere, and started a new blog associated with his first (but hopefully not last) SF novel
Coon Hunting
…Detroit. It’s the other other white meat.
Why I Read Lileks
For grafs like this:
I bought some taco shells before leaving; the clerk, an immense creature who resembled a six-foot soft-serve ice cream treat, asked howr you. I said “damp.” She gave me a look of such unbelievably bovine incomprehension I almost apologized for not saying “fine.” It was almost a warning: don’t get fancy. We don’t take to fancy here. That’s one of the reasons I don’t go to that grocery store anymore. They hired the clerks from the cast party of a Fellini movie and ran them through a Hee-Haw filter, then eliminated the ones who were so antisocial they had fewer than three tattoos of their children’s names on their arms.
I can’t wait to see the novel.
Can’t Spell Crap
Ben Shapiro follows Eric Holder’s advice, and talks bravely about race:
rap isn’t music; rap culture is disgusting and degrading; rap creates racial stereotypes and revels in them.
First, rap isn’t music. Music has three elements: melody, harmony, and rhythm. Rap is all rhythm, very little melody, and virtually no harmony. Cultural relativists who say that Eminem is like Mozart make Barbara Boxer look like Einstein.
Second, rap culture is disgusting and degrading. Not every song, of course – the culture as a whole. It values the basest elements of human nature, from promiscuous sex to maltreatment of women to sickening violence. It’s no wonder that rappers have the life expectancies of fruit flies: by the time they’re 40 – if they hit 40 – there’s a good shot they’ll have shot somebody, been shot, been busted for hard core drugs, or acquired an STD (see this short list). The millions they earn from gullible white kids in the suburbs who just want to seem cool end up flushed down the drug/sex/fancy car toilet.
Third, rap culture creates racial stereotypes and revels in them. Many rappers (including Ice T, who now plays a cop on television) target the police for special hatred based on their alleged discriminatory tendencies. Meanwhile, rappers kill each other in gang rivalries … and then have movies made about them (see Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. – and T.I., who was involved in violent altercation with rapper Lil’ Flip and Ludacris’ manager Chaka Zulu). It provides ammunition to racists who wish to slander all black men as rap-loving violent misogynists, and it encourages ignorant and disadvantaged young black men to become rap-loving violent misogynists. Lovelle Mixon may have listened to late Beethoven string quartets when he wasn’t busy committing felonies, but somehow I doubt it.
Somebody had to say it. Of course, I thought the same about much of disco, at least to the degree to which it was music. I have no interest in “music” in which the percussion carries the melody.