Sunday, January 27, 2008

Keepin' it real

congratulations to the nation's first hip-hop mayor, king kwame, for keepin' it real. KB, you've held on to your ghetto fabulousness throughout a term and a half. it's so great to see you keepin' up your ways. you gots a rep to uphold.



DEEEEEETROOOIT

Friday, January 25, 2008

Sticks and Stones

seems lately words have gained significant strength in their abilities to send people a-fluttering and set them up in arms. i call it the pussification of america. the old saying "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me" has gone by the wayside just as quickly as the venerable golden rule.

these days, everyone is offended by everything, people say stupid shit to get a rise out of the people who are offended by everything, and then offer a half-assed "apology" because the people who are offended by everything complained just enough that the offender or his/her employer comes under just the right amount of heat.

dana jacobson of espn has been disciplined for her "insensitive and vulgar" remarks about the university of notre dame.....made at a fucking ROAST! and of course kelly tilghman was suspended for two weeks for saying that other golfers should want to lynch tiger woods in a back alley so they can win. ya know, 'cause ms. tilghman is a racist who wants nothing more than to string "nigras" up in trees.

jon caldara, a local radio guy on 850 KOA in boulder has come under tremendous fire for using the term "bitch-slap." progressnowaction, a super-duper liberal activist group (and presumably comprised of WASP-Y/JAP-y housewives) has begun an online petition to coerce the host to apologize. naturally, the conservative host has refused and i, for one, think--gulp--he's right.

bitch slap is a fairly common term nowadays. you hear it all over tv, in the movies and in song lyrics. and it wasn't even directed truly at one person as an insult to his/her manhood/womanhood/character. the term was used to describe the beatdown hillary got from obama in the most recent Dem debate. now, this is not to say using such a term--particularly on public radio--is proper or condoned in anyway, but to express such outrage over a non-racial, hardly misogynistic term is borderline ludicrous. surely there are better ways to exert energy and more worthy causes of justice to be pursued by progressactionnow....

....like lambasting john gibson, a talking head a fox "news," for his indescribably heartless, callous and generally indefensible comments about the death of heath ledger. i'm certainly not one to mourn the death of a celebrity for more than a passing "eh, that sucks. i can't believe it," but even i am appalled by mr. gibson's unrelenting inability to be tasteful and tactful. sure, he's a fox-style conservative (to hate for the sake of hatred), but even he must be able to separate the actor--who had a family--from the gay cowboy character he once portrayed...3 YEARS AGO.

the constant give and take of offendees and offenders has exploded in recent years. i always cringe when i hear my elders talking about the "good ole days," since most of the stuff they had back then sucked. but the one thing they did have back then that today's society has an epic lack of is a thick skin.

it used to be that someone would say something mildly offensive, and he'd be passed off as a bigot or a moron. today, even the slightest hint of un-pc, potentially offensive-if-taken-a-certain-way material will elicit a flood of unnecessary outrage from oversensitive pansies with far too much time on their hands. thank you, tiger woods, for manning up and showing that insensitive remarks are only insensitive if you're overly sensitive to begin with. sticks and stones make break my bones, but your words make you a douche bag.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

New Rules

thanks to the magic of OnDemand from Con ass, i was able last night to catch the season premier of real time with bill maher that i'd missed last friday. the set was new, the jokes were old and the panel was its normal self. but the show, the show wasn't quite the same. i'm guessing it has something to do with (if not everything) this whole "writers want to get paid" thing, but there was a glaring absence at the end of the show....no "New Rules."

NR was, hands down, my favorite part of billy boy's show week in and week out. now it's been replaced with a segment called "blogga, please," which if you couldn't tell is some lame spoof on n*gga please (i hate writing the word. the * makes everything better, just ask barry). it was also dumb. the segment is an email version of a call-in show, where viewers can send in questions to the panelists or bill himself. needless to say, people with keyboards are dangerously stupid.

i miss NR and hope it makes a return when the writers get their shit squared away with the man. in the meantime, i guess that means that i'm free to use NR as my own without fear of repercussions. hehe. ya know, cuz HBO execs and bill himself read RAOG religiously. how else do you think they write the show? duh.

as always, blogo-friends, suggestions are always welcomed.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

In the News

i read the news today, oh boy.

and really, it's the same shit with different titles. a lesser man would be discouraged by all this. not me. i find the subtle humor, ridiculousness and, often, irony in the news regardless of the source.

in the news today, marion jones, the olympic champion, is going to jail for check fraud and perjury. the check fraud case is just dumb. i would guess that with endorsement money and purse winnings, jones was doing okay for herself. naturally, that wasn't enough, so she wanted to cheat people out of cash. stupid. but the perjury charge? that's just gold. like others in her profession, marion lied to cover up her cheating. and her excuse? you guessed it, she made a "mistake."

in the imaginary interview i had with marion jones, i asked her which part was the mistake: accidentally falling onto the steroid needle? mistakenly winning gold medal after gold medal, meet after meet, and earning endorsement contracts? lying about lying, and then lying some more? or was the mistake that she just got caught? and just as you'd suspect, she did it all to "protect her family." of course. those poor souls would just be devastated if they'd known they were related to a fraudulent lying cheater.

on the news today...our weather is wicked cold. like chicago cold. makes me wanna pack my shit and head to phoenix (only to complain how much i hate it there once i arrived) or LA. some place warm. but hell, it's winter. it's supposed to be cold. so why do the newscasts insist on putting one of their "meteorologists" outside to report that it's cold when i could just as easily open my front door and find out for myself? or, like when they post a reporter roadside to tell us that the road conditions aren't great. i know i'm routinely shocked to find out that the roads are slippery after it's snowed and when the temperatures are sub-freezing. of course, i'm simultaneously amused by this as well since half of the newscasts these days already report shit we already know (smoking is bad for you, bad foods make you fat, etc.). high comedy, indeed.

lastly, apparently teacher absenteeism hurts learning. i'm pretty sure that in a million years, i'd never have figured that out. groundbreaking, truly.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

New Year, Same Me

i seriously just realized, literally 10 seconds before beginning to write this, that i haven't posted anything in 2008 and figured that that's a pretty heartless thing to do to my (ever growing) fan base. only problem is, i really don't have much to write about, since nothing in my world at the moment is actually set in stone, much like last year.

there's the possibility of moving to pittsburgh. there's a chance i'll get accepted to CU and stay in colorado to go to school. there's a chance, now that our VP of new business is leaving due to medical concerns (good luck, O) that i'll be made director of new business and client services. there's a chance that if that promotion were to happen that there'd also be a nice raise, an added commission structure, and possibly a quarterly bonus system on top of that.

i have a stress echocardiogram slated for friday morning. so, there's a chance that this time around there'll be no "there was a slight abnormality we should keep an eye on." next week i have my interview at CU-Boulder (and i have to wear a suit? ew), so there's a chance i'll nail that one just like i did thunderbird and pittsburgh.

and i'm playing soccer again (finally), so of course, there's a good chance that the injury bug will bite me again soon and said maladies will begin a pilin' up on my old creakin' bones. but it's totally worth it. possibly.

anyway, welcome to the new year everyone. may it be filled with different and better experiences and more possibilities than the last. it's possible mine will.