Clearing out the back 40..

1. I ran across this blog some time ago but for some reason I forgot about it but what fun. Check out Stuff White People Like. Here is an example:

One of the more interesting things about White people is that they love singing comedians.

This style of humor involves a person or group singing a song but rather than singing about something serious, it has funny lyrics. It’s not any more complicated than that, but white people can’t get enough of it. Weird Al Yankovich, Tenacious D, Sarah Silverman (sometimes),
Flight of the Conchords, Dennis Leary, and Adam Sandler are all excellent examples of the genre.

It’s a pretty good idea because when you have jokes that aren’t that great and music that isn’t that great, you can mix them together and create something that will entertain white people.

or

Water seems like a fairly simple concept. You turn on the tap, put glass underneath, and drink. Sadly, it is not this simple for white people.

On the whole, they are unable to put a glass under a tap and just drink. In fact, this is such a strange concept that the city of New York had to launch a rather large PR campaign to show white people that it was possible to actually drink the water that comes out of the tap!

2. And courtesy of Daily Dose of Architecture is this picture which is part of a series of Tokyo buildings photographed by viggio.

3. And there is Elliot Spitzer. Now I was originally going to avoid spending precious brain cells contemplating the fortunes of a man I would not let through my front door but there have been a couple of interesting views of this thing. I had previously defended the slithery Larry Craig on the entrapment aspect of things but I never quite put the boots to him for the hypocrasy.

What gets me about these scandals is not that people engage in these activities but that they have so badly mismanaged their own lives. As Melissa Hughes suggested in this weekend’s Globe and Mail in an aptly titled article Duh, What were they thinking maybe our leaders are just stupid. Perhaps they really aren’t as smart as everyone thought.

And then there was David Brooks at the New York Times who chronicles the rise of typical alpha gorilla charmers suddenly facing a middle age crisis of the inner soul and being unable to attend to it gracefully because they lack the skills. The whole article is worth reading; but here, a few choice words therein:

I don’t know if you’ve seen a successful politician or business tycoon get drunk and make a pass at a woman. It’s like watching a St. Bernard try to French kiss. It’s all overbearing, slobbering, desperate wanting. There’s no self-control, no dignity.

These Type A men are just not equipped to have normal relationships. All their lives they’ve been a walking Asperger’s Convention, the kings of the emotionally avoidant. Because of disuse, their sensitivity synapses are still performing at preschool levels.

Ultimately though one wonders why it is most often those campaigning on platforms of law and order, or moral hygiene, that end up in these disturbing situations. Not only because they appear to be doing exactly what they are publicly fighting against but also it indicates a massive lack of accountability. Whether or not they personally felt that way, many people voted them in on those ideas, and handed over controls of funding, and paid their salaries expressly because they represented something. Spitzer’s apology was pathetic; he said that the incident “violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong”; there is no acknowledgment of the crime against his constituency. He likes to think it is a private matter. It’s not.

The upside of these events is that maybe the right wing law and order types will start making the laws a little more humane because they seem to be the ones having the trouble staying on the straight and narrow.