Everything I need to know about America I learned from YouTube

I'll have a double chili nihilismdog to go

I'll have a double chili nihilismdog to go

It’s true, though. It’s not like America is complicated anymore.

Back in 2001 (nearly a century ago, if you don’t think about it too hard) the New Yorker published a truly ground-breaking article on the ways that Powerpoint (itself around and changing worldviews since 1987) was reducing the American capacity for original thought.

PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people… The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.

But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion—an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion—about the way we should think. It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.

and, as anyone familiar with human interaction or communications theory could tell you, the way you get information about the world changes your concept of the world, and that in turn changes the world in which you live, if you do in fact live and not just exist. And what does this have to do with burgers, YouTube, and America? Plenty, my friends, plenty.

Think about this: the greatest technological success story of our time is Twitter, which limits what you can say to 140 characters; or we can equally say that it gives you 140 characters of void to fill with existential screaming. Some people have to pad to make the word count.

You thought I was kidding, didn’t you?

Think about the Tea Party, and think about exactly how deeply its members are thinking about the most important issues of the day. You can’t say their politics are not heartfelt, but you’d be hard-pressed to defend this particular capito-populist tribe as an intellectual movement. They make Pat Buchanan look like Bill Kristol. On the opposite side, a relatively intellectual President had to dumb down his message to single-word talking points; not much room for nuance when it has to fit on a Shepard Fairey poster.

 

Shepard Fairey Barack Obama

Shepard Fairey does Barack Obama in words of one or two syllables

And of course, popular culture is debased to the point where the Kardashians have not one but two television series among them, simply because sister Kim has a sex tape and a legendary caboose. It’s not exactly Witness to Yesterday, my friends.

So, yes, everything you need to know about the USA right at this moment, you can get from two brief YouTube videos and twenty or thirty minutes of cogitation thereon.

Here is the greatest scene from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle that does not have Neil Patrick Harris in it:

Now that immigrant can-do-ism and aspirational capitalism have been explained, it’s time to take on geopolitics, and who better to tackle that nest of vipers than Team America, World Police?

That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

Operation Global Media Domination: The Cusack Effect

 

GO on, John, rt anything!

John Cusack will rt anything!

 

I was gonna let it go. Gosh, you know raincoaster by now: never one to make a fuss over a celebrity, or drop a name (which reminds me, I owe a blog post to my old sparring partner and blog buddy, Boris Johnson, Mayor of London).

But.

I.

Just.

Can’t.

You know how it is when it’s over; when something that you once counted upon, day in and day out, dries up and crumbles to ashes, then blows away, leaving nothing more than a giant hole in your stats chart?

 

 

Google, didn't we once mean something to each other? I'm even using Chrome!

Google, didn't we once mean something to each other? I'm even using Chrome!

 

Yeah, like that. So that’s how it’s been chez raincoaster lately, now that Google has dumped me (in an apparently bottomless pit). But I’m not bitter. Not me! No, I’m completely SO over that.

And you know how a situation like this, a dumping followed by a deep depression (just LOOK at it! like I spend hours a day doing…but I’m OVER it, I’m telling you!) can often lead to what is known as a rebound relationship? Well, I’ve got one, and it’s even better than Google and its millions of mindless robots. It’s got a mind of its own (to say the least, and I’ve said a great deal more on the subject from time to time).

Well, I’ve found my rebound: John Fucking Cusack. Suck it, Google. Even The Sister dm’d her congratulations; it’s like I got engaged or something!

 

That’s right. The Artist Formerly Known as Shockozulu, John Cusack, who is being followed by 262,116 people, is Following 85 people.

One of them is me.

Then he rt’d my post about Paul Newman three times and this happened.

 

The Cusack Effect

The Cusack Effect

 

Can’t touch this.

Best. Facebook. Thread. Ever.

Best Facebook Thread Ever in history

Best Facebook Thread Ever in history

Thanks, Archie, for the image!

and for those of you who prefer text: (I have the feeling this will go around the internet a couple of times)

Continue reading

Dry Spell

Those of you who have been following the ol’ raincoaster blog for some time will know that I’ve been on a largely raw vegan die(t) for three months now, with the result that I’ve gone from an XL to an L and no, it was NOT worth it.

It was most particularly not worth it because I had to give up my beloved cocktails; in fact, I believe I only consumed alcohol one day in the month of July and that was my birthday. In August I gave myself a few more “days off” and enjoyed some wine, but it must be said that in this, as in most things in life, Dean Martin had it right.

Dino is my hero

Listen to Dino; he KNOWS!

“I’d hate to be a teetotaler. Imagine getting up in the morning and knowing that’s as good as you’re going to feel all day.”

Well, exactly.

So, how does it feel to be a neo-teetotaler in Lotus Land, when one knows all the best bartenders and they all know it’s a Negroni, up, when you walk in the door unless it’s cold outside and then it’s probably Jack Daniels or if it’s been a very bad day, Champagne? Well, it doesn’t feel good. Have you ever been the only sober person at a blowout? That’s right: it feels like a bad dream. It feels, in fact, just as depicted in this incredible documentary, 28 Drinks Later.

And, lest we forget, here are some words of wisdom from Diogenes:

“What I like to drink most is wine that belongs to others.”

Spring Forward: and throttle someone!

Harvey?

Harvey?

Blah, blah, blah. Oh, they’re all “reach out and touch someone” right up till you try to put a personal spin on it, like in my headline, and then it’s “oh, somebody needs a little time-out!”

Yes, she does. And she would like to take it at a hotel on Mustique, thankyouverymuch. You know where the Paypal button is.

In related news, apparently I function as a human voodoo doll, and the doctors at Mount St. Joseph’s are actually using me to get back at award-winning actress and international star Marion Cotillard. Behold:

This is what they did to me:

The Damage and yes, it hurt about as much as it looks like it hurt like

So, that’s about four inches long and three across at the widest part, and a week later it looks much the same. Those dots you see aren’t pores: they’re where the freezing went in. Over and over and over. And yes, it still hurt.

and this is what happened at the same time, somewhere in France; coincidence? Hardly likely!

It's just a little prick. I mean, he's not GREEK or something

As MichaelK reports over at DListed:

While being awarded the Order Of Arts And Letters in Paris today, the French Minister pricked Marion in the chichi and pretty much made her nipple bawl blood tears.

The poor woman has tried to protect herself the only way she knows how: by getting in some spares.

Marion Cotillard is just being sensible

I shoulda thought of that myself.

I wonder what she did to piss off the boob docs? Other than stick with her original, home-grown set. I mean, she’ll never get anywhere in Hollywood with those measly flesh pimples!

In any case, and only tangentially related to the above, I’d like to bitch about my new doctor for a second. God knows what happened to the old one; perhaps he was shanghai’d by the Meerkat Army in an attempt to learn the secrets of Operation Global Media Domination (what, whaaaaaat? I’m perfectly sober! Why are you looking at me like that?). That would explain why the hematologist who was on the case the year I had to take off work to battle Hodgkin’s Disease is also missing. Perhaps they ran away together? Won’t their wives be surprised!

So both the doctor I’ve been going to since shortly after puberty and the doctor who treated my cancer have vanished in the last year. And my new doctor is a lovely, lovely person with execrable taste in office decoration (think Dolores Umbrage by way of Olde Russia) but, apparently, absolutely no juice in the medical community.

Socialized medicine works like this, in case you didn’t know (this is where the “social” part comes from, not really the payment system, no matter what they tell you): your doctor needs to refer you to a specialist, so s/he calls up the ones s/he knows socially or who owe him/her favours and s/he gets you in fast if, in his/her opinion what you have needs quick action. And what I may have includes The Big C, and I am something like three years overdue for my checkup.

And I have been waiting since October for a referral to a hematologist, which is entirely too long. When I needed a biopsy the first time, it was a week’s wait and then the head of St. Paul’s thoracic surgery performed it (leaving, may I say, the faintest scar the universe has ever seen; the man is a genius with a scalpel). I mean, I know it takes time to get an appointment with a specialist, but they haven’t even booked the appointment, which is typically six months out from the time of bookage. I’m about ready to take up a station outside the Burrard Medical Building and ambush the next person I see coming out of there wearing expensive shoes, just on the off-chance they’re a specialist.

Oh, and the clinic that set up my tests of last week promised to get the Cancer Agency to set up another biopsy, and it’s been a week and I’ve heard nothing. I mean, it’s not like their calendars only go two weeks ahead. Time to give them a ringy-dingy, methinks, before I have to stalk the Cancer Agency too, and who has time for that?

I mean, my time is valuable. More valuable to me than theirs is, quite frankly.

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