Uberfluff

 
 
It's going to be hard to get at my point here without coming off like an incredible jerk, so I'm not even going to try.


I hate the way our culture deals with charity now.


I'm not going to claim that there was ever a time when people were more tasteful about their charitable endeavors and did things like give anonymously and such.  I'm not a fan of "good old days" pronouncements, as I tend to feel that humans have always been selfish assholes.  But there had to at least have been a time when people were less awful about it . . . or at least had a better sense of shame at their own self-glorifying efforts.


Obviously, I'm thinking here about Haiti specifically, but it really goes for just about any human tragedy in modern culture.  We have a bunch of people who have experienced something horrific, and who are in great need.  Various organizations mobilize to meet that.  People are moved to donate to these efforts.  This is good.  


Here's what's not good:  like a vulture, George Clooney (and whatever celebrity feels like patting him/herself on the back that day--but almost always Clooney) immediately jumps into the press with big announcements about his incredibly generous celebrity fundraising endeavor, and all of a sudden, everyone is running around making self-congratulatory speeches about their charitable intentions.  (Like the couple who decided to donate the food budget from their wedding reception to the Haitian earthquake victims.  Lovely gesture.  Doing interviews about how generous you are and how much you hope other people are inspired by your example?  Tacky and annoying as hell.  Accepting thousands of dollars in donations to your own  wedding after announcing your charitable act to the world?  Makes me suspect your intentions in the first place.)


I guess what really annoys me about the celebrity bandwagon is that you can almost see the thought cross the face of our many Clooneys: "Those poor people in Haiti.  I'll give them the most valuable thing I can think of--my time and attention."  The self-satisfaction involved is so high that you begin to wonder if people aren't secretly rooting for natural disasters to give them an opportunity to make a big public splash about their own thoughtfulness.  Ugh.  I thought that charity and generosity were supposed to be the one time you didn't think of yourself first.


(On an unrelated note: there's a new Daily Fluff today.)
 
 
Honestly, I kind of like spoilers.  I don't take it so far as to read the last page of the book first (both metaphorically and literally), but my theory has always been that if the writing/acting/etc. is good enough, then knowing the spoiler doesn't really ruin anything.  I'll give exceptions for works where the surprise twist is really the basis for the whole story, but let's not get carried away.  The Sixth Sense has a twist ending.  Raiders of the Lost Ark does not.  


Which leads me to the thing that annoys me about spoiler paranoia.  There are some people who don't ever want to know the ending to anything . . . just in case they might watch/read it some day.  I think there should be some kind of statute of limitations on spoilers wherein if something has been out more than 3 months, than it's all on you to avoid finding out what happens.  No hysterical shouting and whining when someone talks about the end of the Harry Potter series or the second season of Lost.  I swear that I've been on internet message boards where someone got her panties in a bunch because people were talking about the end of Citizen Kane.  Really.


Oh, and if you're out there Ms. Spoiler Nazi, Rosebud is his sled, Darth Vader is Luke's father, and Bruce Willis is a ghost.  So suck on that.
 
 

With today's Daily Fluff focusing on Sesame Street, it seems like a light kiddie theme is appropriate for the blog today.  So it is with a great big scoop of "Hmmmm," that I present the world's first Hello Kitty-themed hospital.  (In Taiwan, of course.  Thanks to K for the link.):

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Because nothing says, 'Don't worry about the fact that your newborn is in the NICU,' like a cartoon cat with a giant head and no visible emotion.
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Despite years of therapy, John was never able to explain the source of his fetish for dressing kittens in tiny dresses.
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What's really amazing is that the catheter bags are shaped like little Hello Kitty heads too.
Confession time: I actually really like Hello Kitty stuff.  I can't help it--it may be genetic.  I may or may not own various Hello Kitty accessories.  But I don't think that there's any commercially available product that I like enough to choose to be surrounded by it while in labor.  Seeing it in a maternity ward just seems like a cruel reminder that you're about to push something with a giant head out of a comparatively small opening.  So no, not soothing at all.

 
 

The anti-smoking people want me to start smoking.  That's the only explanation I can come up with for their relentlessly irritating ad campaigns.  They're secretly trying to drive me to tobacco use by being preachy, inaccurate, and over-the-top.  And I don't even like to smoke.  But I would if it would stop smug 20-something "Truth" people from entering my living room and preening about the evils of big tobacco.  I'll take evil corporate guys in suits over smug pseudo-hipsters any day.

It was bad enough when they were just being hysterical in documentary format with their little pieces of man-on-the-street performance art.  The damned things were ironic about everything except the fact that they were being as manipulative with facts and statistics as the big, evil tobacco companies they attacked.  But all of that paled before the new Syke 9 campaign.

Where to begin?  Well, there's the fact that most people stopped saying "syke" in the mid '80s sometime.  Well, except for my sister.  And then they did weeks of ads where they didn't even hint that this is about cigarettes, instead giving us an energy drink that advertises like Axe body spray.  If it weren't for the obvious allusions to cigarette smokng in later ads, I'd be convinced that they were trying to warn young men about the dangers of overusing cheap cologne.  And a worthy cause that would be. 

And all of this in a pathetic effort to make it seem like smoking isn't cool and opposing smoking is.  Nice try guys, but you should have had a nice long chat with the anti-drug folks before sinking millions into an ad campaign the primary purpose of which is apparently to get me so annoyed that I throw something at my flat screen TV, permanently damage it, and become so depressed that I skip right past tobacco and start on heroin.  It is impossible to make cigarette smoking or drug use appear uncool via commercials, cartoons, dramatic school presentations, or short films.  The Force is too strong in them to be affected by the lameness that is the PSA.  The only way to really pierce their cool aura is to grab a 43 year-old meth head, complete with missing teeth and oozy complexion, and have her introduce herself to children individually.  (While chain smoking Marlboro Reds, of course.)  Don't let her talk though--other than mentioning how much she loves getting high and smoking cigarettes.  You don't want her sharing about the time she did lines with Keith Richards and undermining the whole project.


 
 

Despite many years of effort and analysis, I still do not understand men.  And nothing makes me feel this lack of knowledge more than watching Bridezillas (or Jon & Kate Plus Eight or any number of TV dating shows).  What I don't understand is why there are so many men who are absolutely willing to put up with--hell, cater to--a woman who is (and I think this is the only accurate word) a complete and total emasculating bee-atch.

Being in a normal relationship, where I'm expected to show a modicum of respect and consideration for the other person's feelings, the whole thing is very confusing to me.  And I admit to being a bit jealous.  Did I miss a class or something?  I had asthma in high school and missed a few weeks of school.  Was that when we broke into groups and learned how to get a guy to spinelessly agree with your every whim and not raise the slightest objection when you override and belittle their every wish?

The easy answer would be that the guys in question are all pathetic losers who feel like they can't do any better.  And while I'll grant that is probably occasionally true, it's too universal a phenomenon to be true in every case.  Is there some kind of grand cultural emasculation of men going on in our country and this is one of the symptoms of a larger problem?  (Make no mistake, I do consider it a problem.  Because I have to deal with these women too, and never having anyone around to tell them to shut up makes it very difficult when you run into them in everyday life. Case in point: I went to a concert this weekend with a very high B-to-nice-chick ratio.  And it was very difficult to be near the stage, dance, and so on, with so many high maintenance girls demanding cattention from their sort-of dates.  Not to mention that the guys they're with are always super-tense and ready to fight with almsot anyone.  Not a physical fight, of course.  They're more of the, "I'll sue you for that!" type, but still, it's very annoying.)

So I guess what I'm getting at is that if you're a wussy kind of guy, you really need to sack up and stop putting up with that crap.  You know, for the good of society and stuff.

 
 

Credit for this actually goes to Snickers, who sent the link to the best poncho ad ever.  Admit it, you're thinking about getting a poncho right now, aren't you?

 
 

I almost mentioned this in the last update to Our Issues with Top Chef, but I think it applies beyond food--though food is definitely the easiest example.  It's the authenticity thing.  To my disappointment, one of my favorite contestants on Top Chef went home last night, and while his dish was being judged, one of the judges (a Brit judging Miami cuisine by the way, which I'll gloss over here, but which is irritating in its own right) commented that another version of the dish was, "more authentic."  This wasn't a contest to make a more authentic meal, however.  It was supposed to be about tasting better.  So the authenticity issue really annoyed me.

In most hobbies/areas of interest there is some version of this authenticity issue.  In music, it's often more about who has "sold out" their sound or style.  But the essence of the debate remains the same.  In one corner, there is the view that authenticity imparts a special quality to something and is desirable for its own sake, and in the other corner, there's the view that it doesn't matter at all how "authentic" something may be as long as it's enjoyable.

Personally, the authenticity fetishists make me a little crazy.  I can understand the virtue of perserving authenticity, but it shouldn't be elevated over enjoyability.  If I told you that I had two plates of lasagna/punk bands/Hong Kong style action movies and that one of them was really authentic and one was really good, and that it could be that one plate/band/movie was both authentic and good or it could be that only one was authentic and the other was good, and you had to pick which one attribute you would rather have. . . well, there are definitely people who would take the promise of authenticity over the promise of enjoyment.  And I just don't get that.  Heck, I think the entire concept of authenticity is something of a red herring, as it's half PR and uncertain as hell.  Who decides what's authentic, after all?  It's not something that can really be measured, and it can be debated to death.

Bottom line: why strive for purity over quality?  They're not even close to being the same thing, and the fact that something is popular but not authentic is not (in itself) a reason to dislike it.  (Which opens a whole other can of worms about deriding popular taste, but that will have to wait for another day.)