Unless you’re in middle school, which I could foresee of some of the readers of this site are, you can recall that subtle territory wherein the “everybody’s equal” mentality of kindergarten started to dissolve in favor of, ”Wait now. That more popular kid is getting far more attention from the suddenly appealing females,” or, “Hold up now. That nerdy weakling is doing far better than I am with his grades,”  or, “That… that kid dressed in black that’s both unpopular and of medium intelligence – that kid with openly neglectful parents that seems to be getting really, really into satanism and buying a small army’s worth of assault rifles – seems to have an awful lot of maps of the school.”

At this point of your life you began to pick up on a sense of individuality, even if you chose to give up your burgeoning sense of independent thought in favor of more traditional or ‘normal’ ideas. You started developing your political ideals. Your sense of humor also blossomed. Humor that, if you’ve ever endured a conversation with me that was longer than 10 minutes, has become far more abstract than it was a few decades ago.

I wanted to cry when Bon Iver became mainstream, but crying is so mainstream.

Shit, I was in Williamsburg Brooklyn for the first time in my life last night, and if what I saw there wasn’t a dress code and lifestyle based on a maladapted sense of self-deprecating humor, then I have no idea what was going on. By some certain measure: ironic humor is clearly alive, if not unwell and malnourished there.

I’m digressing because I need to mention that I loathe hipsters, but it’s not completely off topic. This particular episode of Southpark really highlighted the desperate need to be recognized that seems to be present in the your average meme-er. [that's 'meme-ist,' fuckhead -ed.]

They’re funny, I know; and I love running gags and stuff, but has anyone else picked up on the downgrade from the Warhol 15 minutes to a 30 second prolonged fart clip or single shot of your buddy imitating an inanimate object? Do you know where memes come from? Well, Wikipedia sure does. And it’s easily the laziest way to get an answer across. It’s the desperate hope that something you’ve done will live on, and in this case it’s just in the form of a jpeg.

Yes, because when I invented Memetics, what I really wanted was for idiots to use it to graph My Little Ponies on D&D alignment charts.

Is it some small, morbid, concern that I have that the advent of memes, in the social media sense, is also the iconic sign that we’re finally hitting a point where an ever larger number of people are again realizing they’ll never be more than silly cogs in a malfunctioning machine? It’s like Billy Corrigan saw this shit coming in ’99, and dressed in an attention-gettingly-appropriate way for the video:

Let’s have a nice quick round of applause for musicians with unignorable substance abuse problems, and then I’ll get back to my point.

I’m constantly hearing people over 50 that I know comment that the world is in its all-time worst condition ever. It isn’t that I have a distrust of the opinions of most baby-boomers (though I might), it’s that there’s a very large percent of our population, born between ’46 and ’64 that doesn’t have a grasp on proportion. I’d far sooner say that bad news sells, and since every news corporation is in danger of closing down, they have to announce as much bad news as possible to stay afloat.

By proxy, with more news and information sources available on a daily basis, the people still under 25 have always grown up knowing a constant flow of information, much of which has been deflating their concept of individuality or importance. And thank GOD, because we just didn’t need another generation of boomers. There. I said it. I think we’re also finally hitting the turning point on Social Darwinism in the means of establishing the hierarchy in classroom vis a vis lateral evolution. I can go on a bullying in popular culture tirade another time.

What kind of faggot doesn't know basic C++? Gunk gunk.

What I’m seeing in all of this is a post-goth indifference to the world as expressed through a poorly understood grasp of humor and irony; it is exemplified in everything hipster, but iconified in the pan-sub-culture knack for memes to appeal to everyone. I’m not a cat person, but I’ll troll through cat memes for hours, just because the affectionate jokes appeal to my distaste of the creatures.

Me? I write articulate, verbose social commentary with complex puns, and I feel like I’ve left my mark on the universe. But I’m smarter than you are, so I don’t have to make a video of taking turns dry humping a sofa with my friends, or riding something precarious over, on top, or near something more precarious, and then post the video after something somehow goes wrong.

Is this a good thing? If you’ve ever seen the Darwin Awards, and then watched a video with someone overtly stupid, acting… stupidly, you’ll agree we’re at least thinning the herd. Do I need to experience another wave of the black background 6 framed ‘this is what ___ thinks ___ does’? No. No, I do not. However, if this helps keep nitwits in line and taper back the sense of entitlement and self importance that MTV has been so content to cater to since the first season of ‘Real World’ then I’m totally OK with it.

 

Shut up, kids. Daddy is trying to forget he ever adopted you.

You know what I’ve realized? In the mind of Splinter as concerns the Ninja Turtles, not two fucks was ever given. Cracked already points out that in the original comics, Splinter only created and trained the turtles for the sole purpose of revenge acing a guy who pissed him off a long time ago. I’m not even talking about that. I’m talking about the feel good family “comedy” cartoon of our childhoods, the one that was supposed to be about ugly geek love and family friendly decapitation of machines with decidedly sharp swords. In trying to retrofit Eastman and Laird’s dark-assed story of ultraviolence into Saturday Morning camp, someone George Lucased and forgot to shoehorn in the part that shows Splinter actually gives a shit about his young padawans.

Think about it. Splinter never even bothered to learn the Turtles’ names. He named them after artists whose names he already knew (which is the equivalent of naming them after the Gospels), then dressed them up like infant quadruplets in order to avoid a mildly humorous Jesse Katsopolis moment…

If you kids take off those shirts for any reason, it's blood test time again. And this time, I'm going to have the doctor use the big needles.

… only this time the kids are stronger than you and trained in deadly weapons, so pissing them off is a no-go. “You. You wear blue, all the friggin’ time. Even while you sleep.” It’s like a scene from Reservoir Dogs, only a sheltered teenage mutant doesn’t know to fight back when you assign him purple for the rest of his natural life. And remember, the late Eighties was a couple of decades before Sam Jackson made an attempt at making purple bad. This is all not to mention the underlying tones of racism, considering Donatello was the black one, and black people stereotypes always look good in purple.

And don’t  call me your son if you have to label me with the first letter of my name to remember who I am.

"You told me M stood for 'most loved'!"

They already have suspiciously 2-dimensional personalities that make them easy to tell apart, especially for someone who considers themselves a parent. Why not take them out and toss the pigskin around, for one afternoon, and get to learn who they are by their hopes and dreams, not just by what ways they are able to reduce a mutant warthog into a steaming pile of intestines and Kanye glasses? At least Mario and Luigi were adults, and apparently chose to label their hats like summer camp underwear. There’s only four of these guys!  A human child would feel like the forgettable son of a redneck drunken retard if he had to wear his first initial on his belt buckle for identificaiton purposes in his own house.

If that wasn’t bad enough, think of this: The theme song was probably just a full-band, stylized version of the pneumatic device Splinter sang in his head every time he needed something from any of the turtles. “Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh Leonardo something Donatello does machines! Hey purple guy, the trimmer’s busted and I got a backup of shit caked fur going on here to match Bruce Vilanche’s  dildo. Seriously, it’s either you now, or FEMA in a couple of hours.” For all we know, the whole series is just from Splinter’s perspective, and he is just so one-minded about his revenge complex to realize his “family” is composed of seriously intricate characters, teenagers with vastly nuanced  personalities and ambitions. To him, they are just vicious attack dogs, and the pizza budget was like the Alpo budget of the sewers.

This isn’t unprecedented, as it turns out the entirety of St. Elsewhere happened in the head of one startlingly dramatic autistic kid’s imagination. I also have my suspicions about the broad stroked comedic characters of Boston Legal all being from Jerry “Hands” Espenson’s skewed, confused perspective, as evidenced by the fact that he made up the theme song.

It isn’t all that unrealistic to consider the rat (an animal that in every other personificated incarnation is the very epitome of untrustworthiness) crammed the entire five years of his experience with his reptilian wards into a framework of how each one of their shortcomings was going to prolong his biblical vengeance plot.

And who was always the first dude to send the Turtles into mortal danger, without a thought? Sure, he trained these kids up to be ruthless killing machines, and they always came out alive. But against a Technodrome? Don’t we have an army for something like that? With, like, missiles and drones and anything other than nunchchucks? By the middle of the series, Shredder’s ambitions have gone from petty crime and civilization crushing mayhem to simply dining on turtle soup, just once.

"Dear Jesus, before these turtles came around, I was just a normal criminal. Now I know what it takes to make a man a semi-canibal. Could you just cut a nip a break, here?"

Splinter sets up these kids to be the primary focus of a remarkably well-funded psychotic organization, to the point where a disembodied alien has to come down and tell Shredder to calm the fuck down and focus on the task at hand. It takes a serious amount of indoctrination to make four teenagers drop the XBox controller long enough to get out of the house, let alone make themselves the personal nuissance o

Pizza-shaped marshmallows. Because pizza was what was cool about TMNT.

If a group of people that have the technology to tunnel through the Earth and set robot armies against entire metropolitan areas. Well done, Splinter.

It seems superfluous to point out the merchandizing this asshole rat signed off on for his minors, considering the lengths TLC likes to remind us parents these days are capable of going to pimp their children to the public. But yeah, pizza shaped marshmallows. “I only said I liked pizza once, Master Splinter, I’m really more of Chinese foo – -” “Shut up, pizza is your thing now. You are contractually obligated to eat two pizzas a day for the next decade, so choke it down like it’s He-Man’s dick, and pretend to be hormonal for April’s tits while you’re at it. Homo cartoons don’t fly in the 80s, bitch.”

Putting all her eggs in the "bullying completely eradicated by 2017" basket

Ah, Christ! Look out lady! There’s a disembodied head latching onto your tit!

Oh, camouflage. Stick with the style, little man. You’re going to need it in middle school.

You keep dressing like my favorite fap cartoon, you have my vote in November.

The threat is that Kim Kardashian intends to become a politician. What the fuck ever, at this point. Has our political discourse over the last decade or so been any more intelligible than a drunken four-way bitch fight on E! over who used the last tampon?

Not for nothing, she’s better loved than Gingrich, smarter than Bush, she isn’t overtly evil, she has a nicer, thicker ass than Hilary, she has… just an outstanding record with minorities…

And if she doesn’t quite know as much about business as Mitt Romney, being only a mega-mogul, she at least hasn’t had the ethics center of her brain completely removed. Wouldn’t it be cool to have legions of 16 year-old girls and 13 year-old boys know who the hell the mayor of Glendale, CA is? When was the last time we could boast that? 90% of these kids don’t know who the Vice President is.

The problem is, Kim, I have watched you getting railed. Thousands of people have watched you having sex. It was boring. If you can’t rustle up enough passion for the brother of someone who was famous in the 90s, how is your electorate to believe you won’t go into a coma the moment an aide says the word ‘budget’?

Complaining about an objectively attractive woman’s inability to keep her clothes on is like asking the waitress to take your meal back because there are more chicken wings than you paid for on your plate. Still, I am almost positive the American public has what their media overlords like to call ‘standards’ when it comes to their politicians. Not the kind of standards that would allow them to distinguish a man whose job it was to fire hundreds of poor, hapless bastards from a job creator. Not the kind that demands we not torture people and giggle girlishly at the same time. Nay, their standards keep people whose underwear bits are regularly, intentionally displayed for general consumption from holding jobs higher than, say, alderman. Which is a shame, because nothing keeps a politician honest like knowing everyone watching her make a speech is, in that very moment, intensely aware of the size of her nipples.

In Malaysia, sure. In Italy – with a champion like Berlusconi, try not to have some Prime Ministerial dong slapping your children in the face every time they sit in front of a monitor. Indonesia. India.  And my favorite, Taiwan.

Even in China the black guys get all the good, famous sluts? Dammit! Oh, those are his pants... Sign my petition for better hidden surveillance equipment in China?

But in the US, no. There isn’t is a chance the headless horse having his knob slobbered in this video like an epileptic bulldog’s chew toy by Marilyn Monroe might be JFK, but posthumously, that only serves to frost his already musky legacy with the baby batter of true patriotism. The only living American politician with a confirmed sex tape is John Edwards. His career is doing splendidly.

All in all, it is probably a good thing your twat ruined Kim’s chances at a political career. Because she just publicly said she “respects Rick Santoro.” There are two horribly wrong things nestled in those three words. One of them is not ‘Rick.’ On the other hand, she does seem to understand the Spanish-language comedy hour that is American politics:

On the red carpet at the WHCD, Kardashian teased her fans should “stay tuned” to find out more about her political aspirations.

Go for it, babe. You’re a natural.

This... feels strangely familiar. Can't quite get my mouth around it...

"I really don't know what color my eyes are because they change all the time. My eyes are like a bright crystal blue or like an icy bluish-gray, except when I'm real angry, then they're like green or hazel and, like, sometimes my eyes are a real dark turquoise with flecks of sage and cinnamon orange." SHUT UP!

Upon further reflection (less than 3 seconds, I have a brain), I realized it was the dumbest proposition since sour cream in vending machines. But for the sake of pretending to care what other people think, I gave the justifications of the 22% (!) of respondents that said that baggy pants should be made illegal (I was pleased to see that nobody that identified as atheist answered ‘yes’) a perusal.

Deep007: “Its disgusting ..and therefor INDECENT…lock em up and horsewhip em”
POWERSHAKER: “Ohhhh! You mean that thug look? Yep! It should definitely be illegal, because only punks wear their jeans like that if you ask me.”
nothingbutthetruth: “That kind of dressing is disgusting! Why don’t they design pants with the butt part cut out them.”
Godess of RaNdOmNeSs: “its very awkward!!!! i once saw a guy with his pants LITERALY at his knees…………no joke ………..he had batman boxers?!”

Yes, but what size was his dick? If you don’t know the answer to that, then how can it be illegal? Are you just taking out your frustration at not being able to identify the Batman symbol on people generally minding their own business?

The only reason anybody has for criminalizing pants is aesthetic. That is, people are dressing in a manner differently from them, and they think it is a little ugly, so forced conformity is the only answer. Some call it disrespectful. How? Disrespectful because you can’t pull it off?

This young gentleman simply has the posterior structure for this hip style.

Also, take a look at those shorts. Color- or design-wise, are they any different from a pair of madras shorts from the Old Navy? In fact, I think this fellow is wearing too much clothing. Maybe if your unreasonable societal standards didn’t smother him, he wouldn’t be forced to air out a layer on the hot summer city streets.

Frankly, I like being able to immediately tell who the idiots are as I walk down the street. Imagine if every time a guy picked your daughter up for a date, he voluntarily wore a tee shirt that said, “I am likely to physically abuse your daughter, and for that matter don’t have much in the way of future economic prospects.” That’s what saggy pants give all of us normies. If everybody dressed like everyone else, who would we point and laugh at. Fat people? Because I think we may be outnumbered sooner or later on that front.

The point is, you can’t just criminalize things because you don’t like to look at them. If that were true, all of these things would be strictly illegal:

That shirt retails for fifty bucks, speaking of things that should be illegal.

Why does a hypothetical by some deranged netizen with nothing better to do warrant a turn on Scumbag Style. Because apparently, it isn’t just a hypothetical. Last year, real actual lawmakers across the country started passing real actual laws banning baggy pants. For real. Actually. Laws that include fines of 200 to 500 dead presidents and up to a fucking year in jail. For not knowing how to operate a belt. Here’s a completely real thing from Flint, Michigan:

Not only is this terrible grammar, this is terrible oppression.

It’s a good thing our cops have unlimited budgets and resources to bust kids for not going out of their way to wear an extra layer to ensure their sense of style does not interfere with existing indecency laws.

Next on the chopping block: dancing. And we all know what that leads to. That’s right. Kevin Bacons infecting our barns.

Since polls on blogs aren’t useless at all, what do you think? Should baggy pants be illegal? Or are you not retarded?

*Update: Turns out it’s bullshit, anyway. Alert reader Mike fired over the Snopes account, which is generally considered far more trustworthy than your average white person looking to call someone a faggot. Thanks Mike!

The guy had two choices. He could accept his position and hang out sewing Jordans for American kids during the day, and cap it off with a twelve hour shift of mining gold in Warcraft. OR, he could evade a bunch of 24/7 guards, scale a fucking wall, and hitch a ride to Beijing to get some sweet sweet asylum in the American embassy, single-handedly making Hilary Clinton’s life a million times more difficult than it already was, being a woman and all. Oh, yeah, and this one man pissed off the Chinese government so much he got a buttload of words banned from Chinese internet – - words like, I shit you not, ‘blind man’ and ‘The Shawshank Redemption.’ The guy is a super-hero.

Which begs the question, how bad must sighted prisoners all over the world feel that a blind guy was able to do what literally 99.5% of them are unable to accomplish? I mean, what is it about our prisoners that is keeping them from getting out of what is arguably the worst situation anyone can possibly be in?

I have never tried to hop a fence with my pants below my ass, but I imagine it presents some challenges.

Oh. I guess if they focused some of the attention they devote to having sex with each other to the pursuit of freedom, they might be able to do almost as much as one blind Chinese guy. But hey, if you care more about non-consensual gay sex than freedom…

These last couple of weeks I learned that one cannot live exclusively on the internet, that one must interact with human beings, maintain something resembling employment, and take legally mandatory vacations in Nicaragua. I shit you not. But it turns out that doesn’t really matter, because while I was gone, none of you motherfuckers did anything of any importance anyway. GOP Primaries, CISPA, John Edwards, Lindsay Lohan playing Liz Taylor (just because they both had addiction problems doesn’t mean a non-actress can play a great one) – - it’s all just one big holding pattern because for the last two weeks the world has been utterly uninteresting.

How do I know? Because instead of going out and tossing the pigskin around, you were all bitching about things nobody would ever care about otherwise:

No Tards On Facebook Didn’t think mental retardation was genetic? Check out this poor kid’s mom. Brought to my attention by my buddy Cait, there’s an actually retarded petition going around, which has already gotten more than its requisite signatures, demanding Facebook not censor pictures of children with disabilities. Seems some woman posted pictures of her 7 year old son, who has Down Syndrome and is participating in his first Special Olympics, and the pics got flagged and removed. Because ignorance of how the world works never seems to stop people from throwing drooling mongo-fits. This woman must envision some poor bastard sitting behind a FB super-computer, individually investigating each of the millions of flags received every week, and making moral judgment calls on behalf of the entire corporation. And not, you know, an algorithm built into the servers that, so as to not have yeasty twats all over Facebook, just aces most of the items flagged as offensive to be on the safe side. I’m sorry, young Cole, you may be able to long jump with the best of the Gumps, but you’ll probably drown in the tub before you leave your mom’s care.

Mitt Romney’s Idiot Wife I’ve only half been paying attention, so you must have heard that Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen said that single mother and professional millionaire Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life, implying that perhaps a woman with more money than a Jewish movie producer with a Bilderberg weekend pass that has never held a job in the public sphere may not be the ideal spokesperson for women in the workplace in these harsh economic times. A poor choice of words, perhaps, but one that can be easily deciphered by anyone with half a brain and a Dan Brown book. But since the average woman that votes Republican in the US doesn’t have half a brain, conservative media was able to convince stay-at-home moms that Rosen meant that raising kids isn’t hard, and they’ve birthing kittens all over my news feed ever since. They still won’t drop it, weeks later, clinging to it like Chris Christie to the last package of Double-Stuff Oreos in Road Warrior times. Because having a full time nanny and maid staff, not to mention money to hire the most responsible 15-year-old babysitter in Ripley’s, is exactly like what single mothers working two jobs go through. Ann Romney recently said, “I love the fact that there are also women out there that don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids.” Rosen was absolutely right, and if you don’t stfu about what Fox News wants you to get upset about, you might miss what they’re sneaking past you while you shit yourself over nothing. This is nothing but manufactured controversy, because the Republicans have nothing real to bitch about, as Obama is doing his fucking job for once.

Spiritual Affiliation and Porn We all know that fundamentalists hate on porn to such a frightening degree they are often able to do something about it. Now a couple of idiots over at American Humanist are insisting that secular humanists ought to hate on porn too, because it objectifies women, depicts them as things to use for gratification, blah blah blah bullshit spouted by people who don’t know what they are talking about. Now, this kind of argument has been debunked so many times I’m out of fingers and toes and penises to count them on. But I want to take issue with the idea that the viewer of porn, whilst focusing on the sexual act, is not taking the woman’s personality into account. On the contrary, I personally find pornography boring if the woman does not express any emotion or self in the scene. How does she feel about being double penetrated while hanging upside down with a piss funnel in her mouth, I’d like to know. If she doesn’t react, how can I tell if she is enjoying it or not, and adjust my self-ministrations accordingly? If anything, it is more often the man (in traditional porn) that is used as the anonymous stand-in, good only for his cock and grunts. And even if it were true that porn removes the woman’s self from the equation, must all art include every aspect of the subject? Wouldn’t that severely muddy the result and make it, in effect, not art? Would it make you happy if she wrote an treatise about her experience afterward (because they do that sometimes, in adorably terrible grammar)? Go read Jenna Jameson’s book about being rich, and ask her if she feels exploited.

Tim Tebow’s Penis Inexplicably demonized infidelity dating service Ashley Madison (Huffpost of all outlets calls it an “incredibly sleazy dating service… sinking to new lows) is offering a million clams to any woman that can factually disprove Tebow’s claim that he is a virgin, ignoring the real mystery of why anyone claiming to be a man would ever advertise the fact. Frankly, my boy R-Gronks has the right idea by offering to claim it for him. The only way to prove a dude is a mary is for a chick to give him a shot. When he has no idea what he’s doing and blows in her hand, we have a loser! Anyway, if Tebow’s myriad chokes on the field aren’t enough evidence he isn’t pumping his anxiety into a supermodel or pop star like a respectable NFL quarterback, you don’t know the definition of empirical. Easily solved, stfu about it.

Hey, for all we know, the lack of real news featuring real people I could have mocked is due to the fact that good things were happening. Alaska Airlines stopped serving bible passages with in-flight meals, and Kansas’ personhood bill failed because women live there. We’re not all pessimism and dick jokes here. Well done, you guys.