1. Texting
FK: Can u shoot a me T and Js addresses and #s? PK’s digits 2? Tx.
PL: Fuck u. Call me 4 them.
It’s not that I’m too self-important to text. It’s that you’re self-important enough to think you don’t have the time to talk to me, but I should feel compelled to stop whatever I’m doing and type out a reply to you. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re single, middle management and if my watch is right, it’s Saturday afternoon. What’s the emergency, Spanky? Need to run out for fish food? Heated game of Everquest? Pick up the phone. Practicing speech might remind you how to meet women.
2. Walks for Cures
Why I would want to sponsor somebody to walk somewhere?1 And why does anyone think they’d need that hook to get me to donate to a cure for Cancer or AIDS? Do they think if they merely knocked on my door and asked for money I’d say, “Sorry, but I’m pro-cancer. The lines at 7/Eleven are already way too long.” Is this approach based on market research? Have people told them in the past, “Well, I’d really like to donate, but only if you and a hundred of your friends agree to walk somewhere in identical t-shirts. And ribbons – I’d really like it if you could all wear matching ribbons of some sort.”
3. Stories about “Struggles” with Drugs
When I was a kid people “used” drugs. Then Reagan came into office and suddenly everyone was “abusing” drugs. Now everyone’s “struggling” with them. People write 500 page tomes about it and we all obsess over how to cure the problem while the answer is right under our noses. Clearly, the more people are exposed to drugs, the less facility they have with them. If we’ve gone from “using” to “abusing” to “struggling” with the stuff, why slow the progression? I say speed it up. Legalize them all now and in five or six months people won’t even be able to find their drugs. Steven Leavitt and I are cooperating on a book about this – Peter Tosh, Contrarian Economist.2
4. The Manipulative Pricks at Buick
Is anyone really expected to believe that Tiger Woods gets out of his Gulfstream IV, crosses the tarmac and hops in a Buick? Like any other thirty-something savvy with the interwebs, I fancy my humor post-ironic, post-absurdist and infused with a tremendous appreciation for second and third generation snark (including all European varieties). Still, even I can’t handle that much straight-faced suspension of disbelief. Are the ads a “so bad it’s fantastic” situation, like Jeff Koons or Dr. Phil? Or a “pedestrian chic” pleasure like boxed wine or $14.99 designer macaroni and cheese entrees? Am I supposed to buy a Buick for the same reason I’m supposed to find Andy Samberg hysterical, laugh at “LOLcat” emails or consider the Beverley Hills 90210 reunion a cultural event? I don’t know, and it makes me nervous. I fear any day the hipsters next door are going to pull up in a Buick minivan, roll down the window and shout over Creed’s Greatest Hits, “Awesome, wheels, huh?” Will I laugh? Suppose I do. Suppose I guffaw, heartily, and it turns out I’ve misread the earnest as the droll? Would they be insulted I thought they were the sort who’d buy a car to be post-post-ironically funny when in fact they just liked Buicks? I’m not sure I really like these people, but I also can’t afford to lose them as friends. Who would I have edamame and Shiraz with on Sundays? It’s all so overwhelming. I feel confused, scared and bewildered. Just like my senile grandfather who, ironically, drives a Buick.
The pricks are playing mind games with us, I’m sure of it.3
5. Juno
I liked this movie. It’s the main character I couldn’t stand, and all the people who told me I was an ogre for thinking she was annoying. “How can you not like her?” “She’s so precocious.” “So sharp.” So irritating. The kid spends seventy percent of the movie flipping off obnoxious barbs and references like some unholy spawn of Janeane Garafalo and Dennis Miller but she’s too shy or inexperienced to ask Michael Cera to wear a condom? I’d beat a child like Juno. Simply on principle.
6. Michelob Ultra
Bad people drink bad beer and nothing proves that axiom better than Michelob Ultra. There’s no sensible reason for any decent person to quaff this swill. It has less alcohol content than most breath freshening gum and the taste of skunked Perrier. I can only assume the target market is anorexics, ex-frat goons embarrassed about bursting out of their Dockers and the sorts of creeps who don’t like to drink but want people to think they do. Zima had more dignity. Just order a Diet Coke and stop embarrassing yourself.
7. Instant Messaging
BJ: Hi. How are you?
PL: Good.
BJ: Good.
[BJ is typing]
Glad to hear that.
[BJ is typing]
So am I.
PL: Good.
BJ: Good weekend?
PL: Yes, good.
BJ: Great.
[BJ is typing]
Mine too.
PL: Great.
BJ: Yes it was.
PL: Good to hear.
BJ: Good times.
PL: Great.
BJ: Real good times.
PL: Good to hear.
BJ: Great weather here.
PL: Yes.
BJ: Love good weather.
[BJ is typing]
Yours good?
PL: Great.
[PL is cocking hammer and pressing revolver to his temple]
———-
1 Maybe through fire.
2 Leavitt doesn’t know this yet.
3 I think it’s a form of “Double Un-ironic Marketing,” an insidious new construction. At this point, we’re all accustomed to the existential angst accruing from “Double Ironic Marketing” – that shame you feel in pretending to like something because it’s so cheesy liking it is understood as an ironic joke while actually secretly being un-ironically fond of it. The DUM school puts a new twist on the DIM school’s exploitation of insecurity. Instead of feeling guilty about liking something cheesy, the target is made to feel bad about the fact that he felt bad about liking the thing – as though he should have been big enough to have admitted really, actually liking it all along. This leaves him bewildered as to how many people considering the item at issue actually really like it, and convinces him the only way to avoid looking unintelligent or weak is to assure them he feels no shame about liking it by overtly celebrating it. Laughing at “Hotel California” while thinking Don Henley was a hell of a lyricist and secretly hoping no one turns the station = DIM. Singing along with it, aping all of Henley’s overwrought inflections, perhaps even daring someone to guess what “colitas” are = DUM.
bit o’ Carlin in this one.
PL: Bit of him in everything I’ve thought since I was old enough to understand his stuff.
Definitely, but for one exception. Texting is acceptable if used for mass dissemination of information. For example, handling logistics for a bunch of musicians, it’s simply easier and more efficient to send a mass text than to call everyone up with the time to be there, the location and the dress.
PL: Oh God, yes. I have no issue with it for those purposes. It’s those demanding, terse texts that drive me nuts.
Her mind is tiffany-twisted, she got the mercedes bends
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys, that she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget
So I called up the captain,
‘please bring me my wine’
He said, ‘we haven’t had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine’
And still those voices are calling from far away,
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say…
*points at PL, takes a swig of his Pabst Blue Ribbon*
PL: “He was a hard-headed man
He was brutally handsome, and she was terminally pretty
She held him up, and he held her for ransom in the heart
of the cold, cold city”
Shudders down my spine. I’m immediately transported to the wasteland in Gatsby…
How did Joe Walsh ever wind up in that band?
Re footnote 3: Whoa (in a keanu-like way). I think that I not only followed that convoluted and meandering screed, I think that I may actually agree with it. Lawyers dwell on small details, indeed.
PL: Now that… That is a Henley tune I’ll always love. I can’t figure out why, but I have to listen to the whole song every time it comes on.
A very fitting line considering the upcoming election. Shades of ’80? Just a few, perhaps?
“I can only assume the target market is … ex-frat goons embarrassed about bursting out of their Dockers”
Hey now! That hit close to home.
Official truth: Zima, Mic Ultra and clear beers (remember that bastardization?) are verboten.
I follow Frank’s advice, “Heineken? F*&k that
s%@t! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”
PL: Oh, man… What a great character. Oscar worthy, wrongly overlooked.
well Buick is a GM marquee, so all their sales are probably due to loyalty (old people) or accidental sales (women thinking that it’s some kind of class)
PL: Cadillac’s a marquee. Buick’s a landyacht manufacturer for the going-into-Hospice-next-week set.
if it wasn’t for instant messaging i would have never discovered this blog. text messaging is a great way to get a hold of a dealer when they’re in class or at work. everything else, you pretty much nailed (except i’ve never seen juno, it looked obnoxious).
PL: I have no issue with substantive IMing. I do that myself. It’s when your third cousin sees you on Google and starts sending pointless one word IMs that I start losing my mind. And this is a rant…
In reference to footnote #3, I submit this link = http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/02/03/50-irony/.
Post irony irony is what all the cool kids are trying to be into…
PL: Say what you will about irony, it’s a great way to save money on clothes.
What beer would you recommend for a broke-ass college student such as myself?
PL: Malt liquor. More bang for your buck. I used to love Colt 45 and Mickey’s Big Mouths.
What I’d really recommend, however, is Jim Beam. It’s cheap, inoffensive and gets you where you need to be in a hurry. Beam and Milwaukee’s Best compliment each other nicely. MB is not to be confused with Old Milwaukee, mind you, which is vile.
Seems like there’s a bit of Klosterman in #4 and the accompanying footnote. Not that I’m complaining. Mostly I find myself thoroughly confused but nodding along with each point. Well played, sir.
PL: That section is part of a larger bit I wanted to do on how snark will inevitably eat itself.
Few people know how to actually wield snark, or even what it is. I have a theory that half the people writing what is supposed to be snarky humor don’t even realize why the stuff is funny, and half the people reading it don’t see a joke but are afraid to raise the issue. In the disconnect we have piles of alleged satirists and social critics spitting the equivalent of random words and armies of people nervously feigning amusement in response.
It’s really pretty funny. The net’s supposed to be the place where everybody’s free to say whatever they’re thinking from the cloak of anonymity and yet so many of the people writing on it are utterly paralyzed by fear of not sounding as smart as the anonymous masses around them.
The situation has an Andy Kaufman vibe to it… Nobody knows who the joke is on, but everybody wants to think he’s in on it.
What would we do without all these jerks, anyway?
PL: A lot more?
I lit a cigarette at a cancer walk once in college. Didn’t go over so well. Great way to piss off the “walk” folks in no. 2. What would be the equivalent at an AIDS walk, I wonder? Or a Lupus walk for that matter?
PL: The funny thing is, when they’ve come to the door and asked, I’ve given money. But I don’t want any involvement with the gimmick. Just take the cash, and good luck.
Mich Ultra’s water content is so high the kegs froze at a friends bar. Isn’t every cheap american light swill already watered down enough? It’s also stupid to attempt a drunk on those things. By the time you pound enough to get sauced, you’ve consumed enough calories to get bit off your normal brand.
As far as texting goes, it’s definitely a good mechanism for entertaining drunken one liners to friends. “I just fucked a girl that’s big enough to play for Chicago’s D-line” and “[name] says you’re going to fuck an amputee. Awesome.” are recently in my inbox.
PL: On the texting, everything has it’s upsides. On the MU, it’s Coors Lite for people who think Coors Lite is too heavy. I see no upside there. Just drink vodka. Three doubles and you’re as loaded as you could ever get on MU, with half the calories.
SNL has castrated Andy Samberg and his Lonely Island cohorts. Have you ever watched their pre-SNL stuff like their web series The ‘Bu or their unaired pilot called Awesometown? He really was hilarious back then.
PL: No. I’ll take a look. Thanks.
I like texting because phone conversations end up being like your Instant message example. I’d rather take the extra time to type something out then have to listen to ‘what’s up’ and ‘whats been goin on’ conversations that drag on.
PL: I use inflection to get a lot of points across. Texting bugs me because one has to be a literalist half the time.
No, Andy Samburg is shit. It doesn’t matter to me if his non-SNL work is fucking comedic gold; all I have to do is think of ‘Andy Popping Up In the Frame’ or ‘People Getting Punched While Eating’ and I want to choke the little bastard moppet to death. Fuck him–thanks PL.
PL: He does suffer from what I’d call “Jimmy Fallon” syndrome. More “precious” than funny.
I just want to know if you’re the kind of punk who’d charge me for your autograph, if so, I’d like to know before I order the book, i’m cool with buying you a beer in order to get it, i’m just not cool with giving you money for your handwriting. That, in my humble opinion, is the difference between fans and groupies.
PL: You don’t have to buy me anything for it. All I ask is that if you like it, push the product to others.
I almost pissed my pants reading number one. I once remember trying to tell a girlfriend that it wasn’t healthy to rely on texting as a basis for our communication. Suffice it to say it was over soon after I called her a six year old for not knowing how to call like a grown up*. Good times.
*I texted the message
PL: It gets a bit goofy when you see 50 year olds doing it.
Though I have to admit, texting allows one to be a lot more direct than he’d be speaking in person or talking on the phone. I feel cheated that I had to lay rap on girls to have sex where now, apparently, you can all but schedule orgies via text and MySpace and Facebook. Getting laid was always a game of numbers, and you were always limited by logistics. Now that’s gone. I’m bitter technology evolved so slowly. Very, very bitter.
Texting- exactly on forgetting how to talk to people. I was visiting my kid at her school and running across campus. EVERY kid either has a phone in their palm texting or an iPod stuck in their ears or a phone at least stuck in their ears. How will this generation ever meet anyone at all? they aren’t even looking at each walking around.
why mention Zima in the pas tense? i still have two cases in the basement.
PL: My wife and I have text sex with ours. Once you get past all the stopping and starting, you can get off in about about forty five minutes. Maybe a half hour.
The Brown Zima? It’s the Louis XIII of light malt liquors.
I’d like to remind everyone of the immense flirtatious power that is the text message. Just by ending every other statement with an ellipsis, I can give even mundane thoughts highly suggestive connotations…
If this one little tool is all it takes to make college girls jump me, then I say to you all, “Truly this deserves to stay.” But maybe you anti-text crusaders are just troglodytes who no longer enjoy women…
May God have mercy on your souls.
PL: I can’t think of a single argument against this position.
When I was reading the part about struggles with drugs, It was being spoken to me in Carlin’s voice. Especially at the “I say, speed it up.”
PL: We’d all do well to keep that voice in our heads facing the absurdity we’re seeing and will see more of in the coming months. This is a strange, dark time to be alive. On some levels, it’s all irrelevant to me. I have minimal direct exposure to the “bad craziness” amuck in the country right now. On another level, I can’t help thinking these market convulsions and the ridiculousness of this election are all just peripheral issues, diversions we embrace to avoid the real conversation we need to be having about why all of this is happening.
Bill Maher put it neatly the other night. “What does this country produce anymore?” It’s one thing to produce little more than new credit vehicles and bubbles in a small country with minimal entitlements. We have 300 million people, and that number’s online going up. As we fret and get angry at Wall Street for feeding us the money to perpetuate our overleveraged lifestyles, we get further and further from the real issues on the table – a toxic mix of overpopulation and unrealistic expectations.
Carlin would have pointed the finger all over the place in this mess. From the borrowers to the lenders to the people who’d elect a president or vice president based on whether they think he or she seems “folksy” enough for them. When I hear someone on the radio say with absolute certainty that Barack Obama is a Muslim I don’t feel disgust for people like Karl Rove or Lee Atwater.* I feel embarrassed for the country in general. If people are dumb enough to believe it, I can’t fault anybody for selling it to them, be it a political message or a subprime mortgage.
Carlin picked the wrong year to leave. He was about to be gifted a pile of material to work with bigger, broader and sillier than anything he had before.
*I am not a registered Republican or Democrat. I don’t support either party and have equal respect for both of these candidates.
Texting can be the only effective form of long distance communication in loud bars or clubs
PL: Semaphore.
Did you know that the url to this entry is 8_things_that_n.phtml? Is that an error?
PL: No. It was 8 originally. Editing thing.
The Further We Go the Rounder it Gets….what happened?
PL: Up by end of week. Finishing right now.
Hell, Natty Boh Ice has more dignity than Michelob Ultra. That’s what we drank in college, or Beast Ice on a good night.
PL: Rainier… Now that was disgusting.
Apropos of Nothing, who says that modern poetry is Not Relevant?
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-praised effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs…
Clive James, via Gawker. http://gawker.com/5056296/literary-schadenfreude
PL: That book sold quite well, you elitist, socialist bastard.
As usual, a great post. I’m looking forward to your book.
In #3, did you mean the economist Steven Levitt?
PL: Yes. Nice catch. Thank you.
This submission is exactly why I started huffing nitrous baloons at lunch… Other than the word “LOLcat”, I didn’t understand a word of it. I’m finally reaching the apex of psychological insularity and dadaism as a concurrent life ethos and work style. PIZZA! PIZZA!
PL: Bullshit. You started huffing nitrous at lunch because the firm stopped buying liquid paper.
“Rosie, why do I always see you in the supply room?”
“I never have enough… toner.”
“You have your own printer?’
“…At home, yes.”
“The same industrial grade ones we have here?”
“Uh, yes.”
“A six year old model?”
“Have you ever had Steamed Hams?”
“Of course I have. I’m from Utica. What does that have to with anything?”
I just have to thank you for #1. I flatly refuse to text. My reason being, if I want to know something from someone I will pick up the phone and call them. That is, after all, what the phone is for. If I want to email I will get online and write out an email with appropriate grammar and spelling. When people text me I delete the text, call them up and tell them they are costing me money because I don’t have texting in my plan and I would rather they just called me. There is a reason I have voicemail . . .
PL: Happy to speak for you. I used to do that with email. I hated being “set up” on email. I’d read the email then walk down the hall and discuss what the person sent me, face to face. Seemed to surprise them, like they wanted to say, “Hey, you;re supposed to answer in kind, so I can have a record of what I was setting you up to say.” But they couldn’t say that to me, not while I was sitting in a chair in front of them.
I’ll talk via text cause sometimes I can’t be arsed with all of that hey-how-are-ya and okay-talk-to-you-later bullshit. Happily, most of the people who’re happy to have significant exchanges via text are the same people I could never be bothered having an entire actual conversation with if there were any way to avoid it.
Where I draw the line, though is this: if you say it via text, for the love of God don’t demand your message receive consideration, let alone a reply. Text is for frivolities too inane for verbal discussion. If you need a reply with any degree of haste, say it in a way that means I can’t escape providing you with one. Particularly as NZ’s cellular network is such that I might not even get your text for a good six hours.
PL: I have to see your country. I talked to someone who lived there for a while who told me the mountains are astonishing. Damn plane tickets are a fortune, though.
I address the text issue by not answering or calling back instead. I just don’t like typing on a phone.
texting is for when your professors or bosses dont let you take calls in class or meetings
and buicks are huuuuge in china. all the communist party bosses get driven around in them
PL: As to Chinese motoring habits, they also have “execution vans” in China. It’s like a bookmobile, only instead of books, they dole out lethal injections:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-06-14-death-van_x.htm
China’s a neat culture, but they have some issues. I’m hardly surprised they’d dig Buicks.
“50 year olds doing it,” it seems that the text is now the mark of ons’s “tech creds.”
Every nit wit, that I have forgotten, sends me a text just as soon as their kid shows them the basics.
They don’t get a reply. Why swerve off the road? It is like responding to spam.
PL: I sent texts like crazy when I got my last phone. Mostly photos of birds, street signs, etc… Then I got the bill.
The Buick craze started in Taipei in the early 90′s. Cadillacs were considered too American by the Taipei hotshots; Buick won by default.
I should not complain. If one has to be squired around that impossible city in an automobile, a Buick beats the hell out of a Nissan.
The big draw back is the image. The hookers at the Wine Bars doubled their price on punters that were seen exiting a Buick.
PL: Any place a Buick gets a person higher grade ass is a town where I’m taking a shitload of saltpeter before the plane touches down.
I find texting to be a popular form of non-committal(no clue how to spell that word, I’m drunk). A phone conversation can last for 1/100 of the time needed for a texting conversation, but is actually personal. You can stop texting replies whenever, but in a phone call you are forced to reply or make up a dumb excuse to end the conversation. Society has gotten too politically correct for my taste, people are afraid to say no, or what they really think, it’s quite pathetic in its own way.
PL: True. That’s the reason most offered by my friends. “I don’t want to talk to you.” Which is why I always respond to their texts with phone calls.