Does Anyone Remember Laughter

Does Anyone Remember Laughter?

 

Do you remember when this blog used to be funny? You neither huh. I know its been awhile, but just hang in there. Look, it’s summertime, and sometimes I like to pretend like I have a life outside of this blog. I just need a little ME time, OK. It’s not like I don’t still deliver at least one thought-provoking essay every week.

 

My economic advice column: On The Money; Economic Advice for the 99% offers the kind of sound economic counsel that you won’t get from other pundits, the kind of advice you need to make sense of our current economic crisis, and make the decisions that will determine your future. Even though I can’t think of a more absurd or ridiculous subject than economics, I’ll admit that not everything about it is hilarious. You should read On The Money, every week, because the future is at stake, and some things are more important than a cheap laugh. There’s a little extra economic advice that’s On The Money.

 

Still, I really don’t want to lose those readers who don’t give a fuck about the future. Many of you can barely muster enough enthusiasm to get through today, let alone tomorrow, and you look to this blog for a bit of laughter that provides sweet relief from the misery of your pitiful lives. I know how you feel. I mean, I don’t really know how you feel, but if you read this blog regularly, I can’t imagine that you are a happy, well adjusted person. So I sympathize.

 

But really, what do you do for me, besides suck up my creativity? Could you leave a comment, or click the fucking like button once in a while? Is that too much to ask?!? Statistics tell me that over six-thousand people a week visit this site. Every fucking minute of every fucking day, someone is looking at this site, just sitting there, impassively, expecting me to entertain them, or inform them, or provide them with a photograph of a tattooed penis, on demand, 24-7-365, and they want to see new material every week. Even that’s not enough for them, they want new funny material every week.

 

So do I! Do you think I like going through my day without chuckling to myself about something silly. Lately, I’ve been too busy playing with my Bratz drum machine and Barbie keyboard to think of anything funny to write about. Does the irony in that statement count?

 

I have a list of unfunny projects that I absolutely have to get done this summer. I’ve got to split a few cords of firewood. Humor doesn’t help me there. Hatred, rage, and resentment go a long way toward getting that firewood chopped, humor, not so much. You don’t want to know what goes through my mind when I chop firewood, so I’ll keep that to myself.

 

Even the TV networks go into reruns in the summertime, but people still watch them. So cut me some slack. I’ll bet you’ve missed a few good posts in the last 15 months. Here’s a few pieces that I like, but really haven’t gotten the play I think they deserve.

New Courses HSU Should Offer

SoHum Vacation Guide

How to Party Now That the Party’s Over

And please, keep coming back for more.

 

On The Money; Standard of Living

On The Money;

Economic Advice for the 99%

Standard of Living

 

People make a big deal about our “high standard of living”. Just last week local blogger Eric Kirk invoked the “high standard of living” in western Europe as evidence of the unrivaled superiority of the democratic system, as though democracy were an economic system rather than a political one, and completely ignoring the environmental impacts of the European lifestyle. Apparently, to Kirk, a high standard of living, regardless of how fleeting, or how high the price paid by the rest of the world, is the sole measure of success, but what do we mean by “standard of living”?

When was living standardized? Can’t we customize our lives individually? Do we have standardized tests to measure our standard of living? If so, how much do we “live to the test”, so to speak, just to artificially elevate the results? …and what do we mean by high? I know how high I have to be to reach my standard, but that’s a very personal thing. My partner Amy hardly smokes any pot at all. Does she have a lower standard of living than I do? If so, I think we’d all be better off with more people like Amy and fewer people like me, rather than the reverse.

Amy is a smart attractive woman who takes care of herself, me, two cats, two snails, our home and a few non-psychoactive potted plants that I would never bother with. She takes no drugs, has no interest in mass media, the internet, or fashion. She cherishes her interactions with wild plants and animals, enjoys living close to the earth, and has learned to do so responsibly.

I, on the other hand, am a fat, bald, multi-drug addicted middle aged white guy who spends his time thinking unclean thoughts about Bratz dolls, playing with electronic children’s toys and filling web servers with pointless blog posts about it. I can’t wait to try those new “bath salts” I’ve been hearing so much about, and even though about 80% of my waking thoughts revolve around sex, I still find it easy to blather endlessly on subjects I know nothing about, and I expect everyone to listen. Clearly I exemplify a higher standard of living than does my partner Amy, but who would you rather spend your time around?

While raising our “standard of living” has opened a Pandora’s Box of previously unimaginable new opportunities for fat, bald, sex-obsessed, drug-addled white guys with huge egos, like myself and Eric Kirk to amuse ourselves, those gains have come at tremendous cost to bright, good-looking people who know how to live on this planet without fucking it up, like Amy.  In fact a rising standard of living is always marked by the extirpation of healthy good-looking people who had quietly lived, in the same place where their ancestors lived for tens of thousands of years, without depleting their resource base, and by the rise of fat, bald, white egomaniacs who shamelessly exploit everything, and for whom, sustainability is, at best, an abstract concept.

Fat, bald, white egomaniacs, around the world, all live pretty much the same way. We all want anything we see any other fat, bald, white guy with. We think its great to live in a world where every fat, bald, white guy gets to have anything that any other fat, bald white guy has, so long as he has enough money. That’s what we mean by “high standard of living”.

On the other hand, the people who inhabited this world before this new “high standard of living” all lived differently. They all developed cultures adapted to the peculiarities of the places they lived. Nothing about human culture was standardized, but all of it was sustainable.

In the “high standard of living” world of fat, bald, white sex-obsessed egomaniacs, we have building codes, a general plan, and college educated, taxpayer funded eggheads who are full of advice, but none of it is sustainable.

This is why we should value our “high standard of living” over the rich diversity of our human cultural heritage. For unless we exterminate what remains of human cultural diversity, exploit the Earth’s natural bounty, and sacrifice generations of our own progeny in the name of our “high standard of living” fat, bald, white egomaniacs with money will not be able to use economic extortion to compensate for being so sexually repulsive.

There’s a view of our “high standard of living” that’s On The Money.

Barbie v Bratz

Barbie v Bratz

 

For a middle-aged guy, I spend a lot of time prowling the toy section of our local thrift stores. As you can imagine, “Barbie”, the Grand Dame of Mattel’s gigantic toy empire, remains a ubiquitous presence in the racks of pre-abused toys I regularly survey. The last time I visited the thrift store in the Manilla Community Ctr, I found a a clear plastic shoebox full of naked Barbie dolls. They must have had at least 30 naked Barbie dolls in that box.

 

Of course, that many Barbie dolls would not fit in a shoebox if they were all facing the same way. Sure, you could fit 30 pairs of Barbie doll feet in at one end of the box, but the boobs of thirty Barbie dolls would surely topple over, and spill out at the other end of the box. So, to fit them all in the box, these Barbies were stacked head-to-toe in a kind of multiple 69 configuration. I’m not sure whether it looked more like a big-haired lesbian orgy, or an all-blonde mass grave, but lets just say that the image of that shoebox full of naked Barbies has stayed with me, perhaps a bit longer than I’d like.

I’ve always found Barbie a bit disturbing. I’ve seen “Superstar; The Karen Carpenter Story”, and I’ve seen some amusing, if not inspiring dioramas, starring Barbie, assembled by an artist with a dark sense of humor, but, I’ve never seen Barbie dolls look quite so disquieting, as they did in that shoebox a few weeks ago at the Manilla Community Ctr. Thrift Store. I don’t think that’s a great way to sell Barbie dolls, personally, but whatever. What’s done is done. I guess I’ll shake it off someday.

 

That’s how it is with Barbie. I can’t say she’s unattractive, but everything about her is just a little creepy. Besides the fact that her boobs are too hard and pointy, there’s something just a little psychotic in her facial expression. She’s trying too hard. Barbie always looks phony, and just a little too ambitious. It’s not a good kind of ambition, if there is such a thing.

 

Barbie’s expression says “I know I’m beautiful, and I like to go on dates, but I’m in love with Jesus, and I’m saving myself for marriage.” Or, that she’s a perpetual beauty pageant contestant, trying desperately to convince us that she’s perfect, until that day she killed 14 people in a Starbucks in San Diego. You can see it in her eyes, she’s looking right at you, but doesn’t see you at all. She’s in her own little world, totally focused on trying to live up to her own unrealistic expectations of herself. Who wants to spend their time around that? Not me.

 

I understand that Barbie was originally marketed to middle-aged men of questionable taste, such as myself. Apparently, Barbie dolls, then called “Lili” dolls, clad in only a negligee, became a popular item, sold in bars in Germany in the 50s. Named after a sexy, sassy, buxom young female comic strip character of the same name, “Lili” dolls hung from rear-view mirrors all over Europe. The 50′s era design explains Barbie’s pointy, 18hr, cross-your-heart bra, missile tits, but I still don’t like her.

Original Lili doll

Yes, Mattel really hit pay-dirt when they started marketing this sexy plaything to young girls. You can’t argue with success. My survey of Humboldt thrift stores tells me that Barbie has achieved complete market saturation. If there is a little girl in America who does not have a Barbie, its only because her mom forbade her from having a Barbie. As a result, she will grow up obsessed with Barbies and collect them compulsively.

I’m sure lots of little girls grow up without playing with Barbie dolls, but at least they always knew that Barbie was available to them. Hell, I even played with Barbie, once or twice myself. I seem to vaguely recall helping Barbie drive her Corvette over a cliff at some point in my distant past, and I still want one of those new “Video Barbies”. Have you seen “Video Barbie”?

 

Video Barbie has a video camera in her neck, a TV screen in her back, and a serial port between her legs, so you can upload the video you shoot with Barbie to youtube and facebook with your computer. I’ve made enough documentaries to know that very few people ever get entirely comfortable in front of a video camera. I’m not sure they’d be any more comfortable with a middle-aged man pointing a Barbie doll with a tracheotomy at them, but its worth a shot.

 

That pretty much sums up how I feel about Barbie, but the Bratz dolls are another story all together. I like the Bratz. I really like the Bratz. I mean, I know they are too young for me, and I don’t, like, know their names or anything, but I think they are cute, and not in a fluffy kitty sort of way.

 

Bratz dolls never fail to turn me on. The Bratz dolls aren’t as stacked as Barbie, but they have cute figures, and they like to show off their belly buttons. I don’t think Barbie even has a belly button, but what really gets me about the Bratz dolls, is the way they look at me.

 

I can’t help notice them looking at me. They’re eyes are at least three times as big as their boobs, and they look at me the way real women never do, at least not when I’m rifling through a shelf of stuffed animals at a thrift store. Then I notice the Bratz luscious full pouting lips, almost as wide as their own hips, and I can’t help but think to myself, “I’ll bet these Bratz give memorable Bjs.”

 

So, when I found out that Barbie was suing the Bratz for copyright infringement, I immediately sided with the Bratz. The lawsuit seemed ridiculous to me. Bratz look nothing like Barbie. The Bratz are so much hotter than Barbie, so much cooler than Barbie and so much more appealing than Barbie. How could that bitch even think they were copying her? “She’s just jealous.” I thought.

 

I was shocked and heartbroken when the ruling came down and Barbie won the trial. Apparently, Barbie, or more accurately, Mattel, spent big bucks on the research and development of the Bratz, but because Mattel determined that Bratz dolls were only going to hurt sales of Barbie dolls, Mattel shelved the Bratz project. A Mattel employee, Carter Bryant, who worked on the Bratz project, and obviously became as smitten with them as I am, jumped ship, and started his own toy company, MGA Entertainment, launching the Bratz himself, and going head-to-head with Mattel in the super-sexy teenage doll market. That’s how the Bratz were born, and that’s how the Bratz almost died.

 

After the trial, the judge ordered that all Bratz dolls and toys be removed from store shelves. That didn’t effect thrift stores though. I continued to encounter Bratz in the thrift stores pretty regularly. By the time of the trial, literally billions of units of cheap plastic Bratz crap had spread to every corner of the globe. I know that globes don’t literally have corners, but suffice it to say that enough Bratz products had been manufactured by that point to form a distinct layer of Bratz sediment in the Earths fossil record.

 

When I would see Bratz dolls in the thrift stores during that time, they reminded me of just how corrupt our criminal justice system really is. Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abdul Jamal are still in prison, the drug war continues unabated, and now this. The Bratz became a symbol of injustice and oppression to me. That flawed ruling only made me love the Bratz that much more.

 

Even so, I never wanted to own any of the Bratz dolls. I’m not that kind of guy. I like the way they look, and I like the way they look at me, but I’m not the possessive type. I just like that they are around, and its nice to see them at the thrift store once in a while. I’m not a collector, and I didn’t try to make money off of people’s fond memories of them, as Bratz dolls became more scarce over time. So, I cheered when an appeals court overturned the trial verdict, and ordered Barbie to pay the Bratz $310 million. Last I heard, Bratz had taken 40% of the “fashion doll market” away from Barbie. Woo-hoo!

 

Now, I hope the Bratz crush Barbie once and for all, and if there’s a god in heaven, please don’t ever let me see another shoebox full of naked Barbies ever again. I know that this whole Barbie vs Bratz thing blew over last year, so this is by no means news. I’m excited about the Bratz today because I just bought my very first Bratz electronic toy.

 

I found this Bratz brand, pink and black electronic drum machine, that looks like a giant padded training bra, in the Garberville thrift store for $1. Looking online, couldn’t find any evidence that anyone else has ever circuit-bent this model of toy before, and I could only find one picture of it online, in an Ebay auction, used, for $9.99. I’m eager to explore the untapped potential of this sexy, somewhat rare, Bratz padded drum bra, and I look forward to having the Bratz in my growing circuit-bent orchestra soon.

For sale on Ebay, $9.99

Postscript: Having spent a while looking at pictures of the Bratz in preparation of this post. I have to admit that these mantis faced Bratz creep me out every bit as much as Barbie. I think I may need to see a fashion doll trauma counselor, but I still like my new drum bra.