Predator Press
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On Sunday, Terri came across this great little story on
Joshua Bell and we spend a good hour "buzzing" about it: this guy lays a hat down at a subway station and earns $32 in forty-five minutes.
Now the fun comes in when you find out he's one of the best violinists in the world, and a few days prior had sold out a show at the paltry sum of $100 per head. The violin he used? Well I'm guessing he wanted to get a really old one so he could fool his audience, and "beater" violins are hard to come by: this one set him back $3,500,000.
For "non-readers," a good YouTube distillation of it can be found
here, and the site
Hoax-Slayer asserts the story's truth.
Anywho, boom: switch to Monday Night.
While sifting through blogs a thought crept into my braincase, and I'm particularly aware of this because of the rarity of the event:
Why is that Joshua Bell story so interesting? Is clever irony that difficult to find? What makes a good post or story in the first place?
I decided to make a little log of little things -good
or bad- that caught my eye as I surfed. I'm not going to link them up as some of them aren't particularly flattering, and I'm far too young and beautiful to die.
But here goes:
Hip Hop Hats:
Are you "positive" you are wearing your clothing correctly?
According to GQ, a properly-placed cap faces the same direction as your toes -unless you were horribly disfigured in a car accident and your toes don't point forward. In this case the bill should be on the same side as the zipper on your pants.
If your toes were horribly disfigured in a car accident and you're wearing
parachute pants you're pretty screwed. Start listening to country music instead: those hats are generally invertible.
The Title "Our Journey To Forever":
That slays me. You know how you brain skims lines and finishes sentences for you? While the page loads my brain reads "Our Long, Long,
Long, Long Journey ..."
The word "long" isn't even
in the damn thing.
This title sounds
excruciating; when I visit, I half expect to see skeletons with backpacks scattered around a cobweb-covered egg timer.
If we have 'forever,' I'm just going to chill here for a few thousand years.
Don't wait up.
The Title "A Mother of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow":
I'm no master of the use of the comma, but this gives me a mother of a headache. You know, the one you inevitably get while watching sci-fi stories about wormholes and stuff?
Okay. Is there only one mother, or are they three different ones? Can 'mother of tomorrow' get me lottery numbers? What if you had the baby the day
before yesterday ... who was the mother then? If it wasn't you, how can you be a mother
now? What happens to the 'mother of tomorrow' if the ‘mother of yesterday’ decides to wear a condom instead? Can 'mother of tomorrow' beat up 'mother of yesterday' due to better technologies, or would 'mother of yesterday' murder 'mother of tomorrow' before she even knew about it? If 'mother of tomorrow' kills 'mother of yesterday,' mother of yesterday won't exist tomorrow -thus, 'mother of tomorrow' has no one to kill when the scenario arises: what happens then? Is yesterday's tomorrow today -so this whole thing only lasts for a total of three days- or is today tomorrow's yesterday in perpetuity? And if mothers are so good at time travel, why the hell do my socks keep disappearing ... ?
The Terms "Pinay" and "Pinoy":
If my mom said "We're going to the boardwalk, and I'm going to push you around in a stroller with a pinay on top," I would be, like,
cool with it. But then I would think
Man my mom is weird. And then I would think
I couldn't even fit in a stroller, could I? And then I would think
WTF is a "pinay?"
Well it turns out "Pinays" aren't those shiny colorful things on a stick that spin in the wind. Those are
pinwheels. This whole time I figured maybe a "pinay" was a pinwheel that spins clockwise, and a "pinoy" is one that spins, you know,
counterclockwise.
But actual "Pinays" are very heavy in contrast, and often accompanied by large contingents of "Pinoys."
Well good
luck getting those on a factory spec stroller.
Mom is just plain 'ol racist and mean.
The Overly-Optimistic Idea Of How Cute Your Kids Are:
Okay, for the last two years we’ve seen a huge surge in stay-at-home mom bloggers. Fine. But moms are notorious for thinking their kids are the “cutest thing” -I think it’s a primitive biological survival trick by Nature so's most of our species is fooled into not leaving them in prom trashcans.
Darwin, I love you ... but
yikes, man! Some of these kids have big freaky bulging eyes and that trailer park dentistry where the heavily-gapped teeth seem to whirl and snag in impossibly horrible different directions.
-I don't know how people can
sleep with one of those creepy drooling bald things crawling around the house.
Catchy Graphics:
Okay this one requires an example image. Check this out:
Kewl, huh? A powerful, scantily clad-sorceress with decorative intimidating entourage accessories: at first blush this says
"Tremble before my blog, ye misogynist dragons!"
-But wait.
Ummmm .... okay. I'f she's preggers, it has to be from the weird blue guy on the far right of the lineup: her +6
Mace of Eye Burning would have likely worked on all the others 'cuz they all actually
have eyes. As a result her Child Support will arrive only sporadically, and often in the form of alien heads and pelts.
But if she's
not preggers it gets exponentially more complex; wouldn't one of those big scary thugs at some point question her powers -powers that have thus far failed to conjure her up even a Nordic Track?
Well which
is she now, a shameless mystical warrior space floozy or a soon-to-be-behemoth, Coors Light guzzling magical fraud? I don't know. But I've come to your blog to be
entertained, not to be exhausted by speculation on this woman's brazen equivocation and loose morals. At least she'll be too busy skulking around dungeons to make a blog that I gotta see her kids on.
Still, it
does beg the question of what medieval trailer parks might look like. And in a universe utterly devoid of El Camino hubcaps, what in the world would she use as a candy dish? A shield maybe?
-Okay, screw it. This is flat-out the best banner I've ever seen, and I'm "bookmarking" this site.
Anywho the "moral of the story" is sure there's a lot of mind-numbing stuff out there. But don't be one of the 1000 plus people that rushed past Joshua Bell while he's playing his heart out: if any
one of them took pause to consider what they might be missing, they coulda bashed him upside the head with a tire iron and grabbed that $3,500,000 violin.
-A violin I could have
easily fenced for sixty cents on the dollar.
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The reason this comes up now is because it’s a matter of National Security: I recently caught Australia skulking up and down the West Coast. It wasn’t doing anything particularly suspicious -in fact at first I thought it was Kirstie Alley; it just rented a boogieboard and tooled about in the surf. But in retrospect I’m almost sure it knew I was "on" to it, and it was trying to look nonchalant.
Exactly why Australia has been sneaking around isn’t quite yet clear, but it has a long history of subtly messing with us with acts such as the “Coriolis Effect”; the Coriolis Effect -first proposed by famous mobster Don Coriolis- suggests that Australians often amuse themselves by flushing their toilets the same moment we do, thusly causing ours to back up.
One only has to see a few photos of the well-decimated and uninhabitable Australian landscape to realize that St Louis, nay, America doesn't deserve a similar fate: an Australian invasion deeply offends my national sensibilities, and I won’t take the inevitable sneak attack lying down.
