(That’s what the hospital bar is for.)
<p> Sometimes it’s funny!</p>
I wasn’t invited to Shakespeare in the Park so I ate all the Shakespeare off the bookcase.
To say I love this article (as well as the Ehrenreich book it mentions) would be an understatement. I have never cared for the relentless “positivization” of our culture, where one can be socially ostracized and even ridiculed for even suggesting that this might not, in fact, be the best of all possible worlds, or that things can only get better from here!
The Dark Knight Rises… Again. And again. And again.
Okay, here’s my problem with “The Dark Knight Rises” - IT’S THE SAME DAMN MOVIE AS THE LAST TWO. Let me break it down for you: Evil terrorist has plan to throw Gotham into chaos to prove some philosophical point about human nature. Police dismiss threat, Batman gets bad rap making initial (and failed) attempt to foil villain using new toys. Batman has crisis of confidence, while at same time girl he’s falling for gets tangled up in villain’s plot. Finally, with Gotham near destruction and the clock ticking (THERE’S ALWAYS A FUCKING DIGITAL COUNTDOWN TIMER!) on total chaos, Batman digs deep, beats the villain in a final showdown where he nearly lays down his life, and ROLL CREDITS.
Christ, I mean, at least the original “Star Wars” movies had ostensibly different plots as part of a larger arc, even though “Return of the Jedi” had a LOT of similarities to the original. It’d almost be an insult to THAT, the crappiest movie of that trilogy, to call “The Dark Knight Rises” the “Return of the Jedi” of this series… especially since, in this movie “strong women” play the part of Ewoks.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “as pretty as an airport”.
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports ane full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the
departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.
Douglas Adams, The Long, Dark, Tea-Time of the Soul (My mind turned to this passage as I read the latest tweet from @insightlabs as I packed for yet another flight)
SOUTHERNERS DON’T HAVE MANNERS.
No, what they have is “the ability to be incredibly phony, while sober.”
There, I said it. I’ve lain the gauntlet down. I’m sick of hearing from friends who have the misfortune of Southern upbringings that they, unlike us New Yorkers, have “manners” or are somehow “nicer”. I’ve had enough experience with them at this point to know that it’s just a last-defense line of self-flattery, since lord knows they can’t claim industriousness, appreciation of diversity, or a (relatively) enlightened political culture.
You see, friends, I’ve noticed something. Southerners will act very polite in public, while sober, and do their best to avoid offense, and even attempt schoolmarm-like correction of others’ discourtesies or rudeness. They will claim to be your friend, to sympathise with your troubles, and want to remain friendly and in touch.
We all know, that just like a studio executive in L.A. it’s all a front. They never have the intent to follow up with you, they care no more for you than for the housekeeper they yell at on the weekends, and they certainly don’t give two shits for your troubles.
While a New Yorker (or, indeed, most northeasterners) would simply tell you such, up front, as a courtesy to your valuable time; you must wait to see the Southerner betray you, ignore you, or avoid their commitment to you. Or wait until they’re drunk. Then just watch as their promise to buy you a round of drink evaporates, their feigned interest in you, as a friend or romantic prospect, gets forgotten in favor of someone even less of interest, but clearly better than you… and wait as they eventually concede that all of their phoniness, all of their lies, are just in service of this charade they call “southern hospitality”.
Sorry, you degenerate sub-human quasi-Americans who owe your entire modern existence to Northern air conditioning technology and taxes spent on highways: you don’t have manners. What you have is a culture of lies and phoniness… and some of us think honesty really IS the best policy. So, suck it.
