Ultraparadoxical

“Success” in America has less to do with actual talent than any time in recent history.  We have forsaken competence, responsibility and intelligence in our country and replaced those attributes with shallow illusions of each.   It has been all around me lately in my workplace, in popular entertainment, and watching the government in action.  It aggravates me at times but mostly I just join in with a sense of apathy and embarrassment.  Incompetence and stupidity are part of every day life and in some aspects is accepted and embraced as a positive thing.  I cannot speak for much of the past as I have only experienced the last 30 years personally but it seems to me like talent, perseverance and commitment used to be things that guided Americans.  Now attitudes seem to be different. read more »

MTV really upped the douchebag ante with their newest reality show, Jersey Shore.  Apparently a producer over at MTV decided that The Real World was just not trashy enough so they looked deep into the armpit of America and found a bunch of self proclaimed “Guidos” and “Guidettes” to live together for a few weeks at a beach house in Seaside, NJ.  It is painful to watch at times but I was intrigued.  I don’t pay too much attention to most reality TV but if something is really absurd I usually check it out just for the shock value.  If reality shows were drugs, I would go directly to the crack pipe.  This show is a metaphorical monkey cage at the zoo (sadly, none of the Guidos threw their own poop at each other – maybe that is in a later episode).  For those of you that missed the initial episode here are the characters you missed: read more »

I was watching the Bears game on Sunday Night Football witnessing Jay Cutler throw shitty passes and then pout about it on the sidelines when something happened…

I was only half paying attention to the game and half surfing the web because I knew that the Bears were destined to shit another winnable game away.  That’s not the point though.  With only a few minutes left in the 4th quarter NBC decided it was a good idea to show a slow-mo replay of Devin Hester’s bare ass.  I did a double-take – then almost a spit take… then rewound it just to make sure that I had really seen that happen. read more »

For this edition of Top Nine Friday I wanted to examine a television show that has been close to my heart ever since I was just a youngster playing with GI Joes and avoiding getting my ass beat by my older brothers.   That show is MASH… just kidding, I hate that fucking show.  Just hearing the first few notes of the opening song of MASH makes me wish the Korean War never happened, just so that show was never made.  Anyways, the show I am really referring to is The Simpsons.

I watched that it religiously all through grade school and into high school.  Then it became syndicated and I was able to watch it every day.  This continued through high school and even into college where the 2 hours that the reruns played were dedicated solely to Simpsons viewing.  In college my house would literally shut down during this time of the day.  To be honest though I have not watched a new Simpson’s episode in a few years and disavow all knowledge of any new episodes being created after 2002.    My hours of couch time spent watching this show has given me an encyclopedic knowledge of any Simpsons episode from seasons 3-13 (the early episodes have not aged well).  So in honor of Marge Simpson appearing on the cover of Playboy I will examine the best of the best Simpsons episodes from those years: read more »