Short Takes 5

This is short takes, what, five now?   Well, lets started then…

What is it about the internet that engenders such… absolutism (yes I am going off on the internet yet again, and doing so on the internet no less)? By that I mean what about the internet has raised an entire generation into thinking (if that is the appropriate word here) that if something is not on the net it is therefore not real?  An example is this issue with the 1990 movie I Come In Peace aka Dark Angel and why it’s title was changed post 9/11.   The reasons (which I go into on a RadioDrome so I will not do so again here) were something I read in a print magazine back in 2001 or 2002.   Now, for whatever reason that print explanation never made it’s way onto the internet so I am told I am just making things up because my detractors can not find this information in a google search, therefore if it’s not on google, it’s not true.  See what I mean? How they can’t be bothered to go and find the print issues of Scifi magazines from that time in an attempt to prove me wrong or bolster my claim, nope, they spent 40 seconds on google and nothing showed up so I am lying.   There are also those that will say it is MY responsibility to find the article in question and show them… bullshit, I don’t have anything I need to prove to you, you are the ones that are attempting to take me to task, it is YOUR responsibility to prove me wrong, not for me to have to prove the righteousness of my claim.   MORONS.   I just love the culture of stupidity that the internet brings to the surface.  If something is not on the net then it just CAN’T be true. Same with those idiots that think everything has to get videoed, those “pics or it didn’t happen” retards.  To this culture, then internet has all and knows all, if it’s not on the net, it’s not real. I can’t stand today sometimes…

I made this joke on facebook recently “If the next Doctor Who has down syndrome, will he have a Re-Tardis?” and I got some pretty nice hatred for it which leads me into this next short take… when the fuck did specific groups become off limits for humor?  George Carlin had a great bit on how rape is not funny, but that does not mean you can’t still joke about it.   Rape is not a funny thing in the least… but a properly structured rape joke with no real ill intent CAN be funny, same with my joke above.  I thought it was funny, some others found it funny, some found it straight out offensive.  Look, down syndrome people, retards, gays, blacks, whites, women, kids… everyone can be made fun of, being part of a class does not shield you from the scorn and ridicule that we all open ourselves up to every day.   You are not this precious little eggshell that must be protected and sheltered, you are part of the human collective and you can have humor thrust at you the same as everyone else.   I take many jabs at those I disagree with and they take many jabs back at me, fair is fair.   I have developed a pretty thick skin when it comes to these things and in reality I think some of the shots taken at me are quite funny.   So was my joke up there offensive or over the line?  I don’t think it was, I think it was just a bad pun and made me smile…  it’s no worse than my crack about “If Bruce Wayne were gay would he be fruit-batman”?*

Wal-Mart, what is it about Wal-Mart that attracts the ugliest people in the world (Walmartians as Henry Rollins aptly calls them).  I like to avoid Wal-Mart whenever possible but there are times when they are the only option for getting a prescription or some other need… and that is when I seem to have walked through a portal into a Dark Brothers nightmare filtered through a Rinse Dream sugar high**.  I can go to just about any other store in my small town (about 10,000 people) and see what you would call “normal” people, then you go to Wal-Mart and all of sudden you have stepped back about 3 evolutionary jumps.   It’s scary man.   Can someone answer for me this?  Why does Wal-Mart attract these societal rejects?   It can’t be the prices thing, Target is almost the same price-wise and they don’t seem to get invaded on this level.  Is it a kind of genetic attraction where if you are missing a base pair then you have a predisposition to shop at Wal-Mart?

The value of the past is something that is either taken for granted today or greatly overinflated.  I am a collector of many things including comic books (past entries in this column should have made that clear) and I have noticed a stark increase over the last decade of what I can only call the “it’s old that means it’s worth like a million bucks” syndrome.   You go to some resale shop or the like and you see an “old” comic book from that way back time, 1978 and it’s priced in the range of $20… for a Spider-Woman number 1.  As I stated once before, I like Spider-Woman alot, she is one of my favorite Marvel characters, but her 70’s series is worthless on a collecting level.*** What is it that makes someone think that something only as old as the 70’s is automatically a valued collectable due to it’s age and nothing more?  I see this all the time when it comes to just about any sellable item… it’s old so it IS worth a ton of money… no it is not.  Value is based on two things, demand (how many people want the item) and supply (how many of that item there is on the market).   I would say that 9 times out of 10 one of those two things is lacking far down the scale.  You people need to start to realize that the value of a collectable is not a fixed thing nor is it based on age, it is based on those factors above so stop trying to sell me comics that I bought off the newsstand when I was a kid as some kind of holy grail for comic collectors.

Reality TV!!  Yes, we have to talk about this again.   We have to look back into the fact there is no reality on TV and surprisingly less on Reality TV then elsewhere.   I know people, to this day, that swear up and down that Operation Repo, Pawn Stars, Real Ducks Of Kitchen Wars or whatever are actually real.   I tell them (and show them where applicable) just how faked these things are… to no avail.  I have family that sits and watches Pawn Stars on the edge of their seat completely ignoring me when I tell them there is a producer under the table telling Mr. Clean there and the seller what to say.   These things are all rigged people, how many times must you be shown the emperor with no clothes before you see him as the naked schmuck he is?  There is no reality in reality TV so why does the majority of our country latch onto this notion that what they are seeing is indeed real?  Is it some kind of hidden voyeurism desire bubbling to the surface?  Is it willful ignorance of the reality (or lack thereof) of reality TV?  Is it just grand mal stupidity?