It's been a long stint since I've last put my fingers to the keyboard, and and longer still since I subsequently put my ramblings to the virtual page, so this is long overdue. I guess when you write all day at work, it's hard to find the motivation to continue the process after hours and without the remuneration I've come to know and love to spend. I needed to write something. So I thought to myself, what do I know well? What comes easiest to me? The answer was obvious: loathing. So here are the things that having been pissing me off lately. Allow me to get them off my chest and onto your facebook walls.
The National Spelling Bee - For some reason unbeknownst to me, this is a televised event. Worse still, it's aired on ESP-fuckin-N. Now, I don't know what the rest of the letters stand for, but I know the "S" is for Sports, and I know that anything that doesn't involve a ball or a stick isn't a sport. (Maybe if someone threw balls at the kids or hit them with sticks while they tried to dodge-spell their way to the podium, I'd watch--but that's probably illegal in their youth age group...Thanks a lot, Obama!) Now ESPN has shown plenty of games lacking in sticks and balls before (and I don't just mean the WNBA finals), and I can let that slide, but it has to be entertaining. (I looked it up by the way, that's the E in ESPN.) The X-Games are inherently cool, I let poker tournaments slide because Bond made them awesome in Casino Royal, and watching enormous Slavs throw kegs 90 feet in the air in the Strong Man Competitions are nothing if not hypnotizing (and an inspiring way to solemnize a prematurely terminated happy hour), but seeing a group of my coworkers crowded around the office TV, watching a kid named Gokul spell "flibbertigibbet" is the beginning of the end of this once-great network. Naturally, I promptly made fun of aforementioned coworkers and demeaned their interest, to which they responded under a noble defense of the kids' passion for words. I call bullshit. These kids' pageant-mom upbringing undoubtedly exiled them to their rooms with a dictionary and a pad of paper and didn't allow them to eat dinner until letters A-K were memorized. The only difference between them and Dance Moms is that their word-smithery will be completely useless in their adult lives. Autocorrect has already lowered the minimum required I.Q. to type a coherent sentence to a whopping 3 (I drunkenly passed out on my keyboard and Word deduced that last paragraph from slamming my nose onto the "H" key), and by the time these kids are semi-developed adults, the iPhone 18 will be able to telegraph their thoughts directly into someone's head--no Latin root needed. At least the Toddlers in Tiaras will be able to get a job at the airport Deja Vu. Looking at you Honey-Boo-Boo, save me a dance. (Kidding, just making sure you're still paying attention.)
Dogs, Mothers, and the Blind - What is the first information you consume in the morning? Probably facebook or CNN? Maybe a quick click over to PornHub? As I'm laying out my Strunk & White and letting my first coffee cool, I'm looking at Adweek's news feed (mainly because HR blocked my access to PornHub). As such, I read, watch, and analyze all the advertisements that you all know and love (people love ads, right?). This is great in that it gives me a firm grasp on the zeitgeist of what's being produced in my industry, but it also makes all too apparent the patterns in strategy, which marketers research, find, and subsequently exploit to get you to love their brand. And that pattern is: He with the most shares wins. (Not shares as in stock, mind you. Shares as in how many of your friends' walls have you plague with their drivel.) We're all guilty of it--myself not excepted--and that's fine, but when you notice the common themes between all the videos, you begin to see how much of a ploy for your likes they really are. Dig: A guy at a marketing company sits in a brainstorming meeting and looks at the client's notes. Let's see...they want a viral video with 2 millions views in the next 3 weeks. They want it to have "sharability" and engage customers to their social pages. Bring on the shares! So what do millennials like... A gal chimes in: rescue stories! A guy looks up from his Instagram feed: dogs! The intern pipes up: gay rights! Smash cut to the presentation: Okay so every time customers tweet our hashtag, we'll rescue a gay dog! The project lead stares blankly back at him: But what does that have to do with the client, Craftsman Tools? The presenter, now with a crazy look in his eyes: Nothing! But think of all the shares!! This, I believe is how some of these videos are contrived. It's cuteness at its most pandering--the equivalent of luring customers, with candy, into the brand van. Next time these brands try to extract your awh's with their mad-lib-eske template of a campaign, tell them to take their thumbs-up, and stick it up their assess.
These Damned Ducks - As a proud UW Alum, I have to disclaim that I am not, in fact, referring to the spoiled-rich, green and yellow student body down in Eugene that have somehow managed to make the Cougars a less appealing lightening rod of hate to our Purple and Gold rivalry. Rather, I mean literally these damned ducks that come up from the lake to my driveway everyday. These foul foul lounge about in front of my car and prevent me from leaving for work on time in the morning. If I was 9 inches tall on a good day and a 2 ton, combustion engine was inching at me, bumper nearly touching my stupid, beaked face, you bet my sweet feathered ass I'd be high-tailing it back to the water. But no, these ducking birds (sorry, damned autocorrect) just turn to the side in the most arrogant of bluff calls (is that enough bird puns yet?). There was a time when animals feared us humans. In the glory days of cavemen, when we were still climbing to the top of the food chain, anything with a face that saw us ran the other way. Everything was potential food and we'd be damned if we were going to let that rabbit eat our grass and NOT be dinner. (Every few weeks--and when there are enough inebriates in my system--I like to honor these ancient times by eating a slab of raw meat and go clubbing.) But now animals have no fear of us. And I blame the vegetarians. Even the neighbor's cat is a pussy (sorry, one more). Didn't cat's used to fuck up birds on the reg and leave nasty corpses on your doormat? All this one does is sit on my bathroom windowsill and watch me take my morning dump. All I know is my great, great, great, ad nausium cave-granddad, Zog, wouldn't have let a living meal make him late for the nightly campfire, and as soon as my crockpot warms up, neither will I.