God's Own Crunk

Musicals aren’t my thing – I’m a Ballet Man. Although I normally sit in the so-called Golden Triangle on the floor of Tulsa’s PAC, I have sat in the Mezzanine on occasion, and from there, I can see every blue/white screen in use on the floor during the production of whichever classical ballet I happen to be watching. Because I’m not a violent man, I grin and seethe and bear it; were I a violent man, I believe either draw-and-quartering or head-on-a-pike would be the appropriate treatment of people who light up their SmartPhones while everyone else is trying to enjoy, without distraction, the beauty of the production. Kevin Williamson found a nice medium – after intermission and a woman who wouldn’t stop using her phone, well, he grabbed it and tossed the fucker across the room. The man deserves a permanent seat on the board of the National Endowment of the Arts:

I had a genuinely new experience at the theater tonight: I was thrown out.

The show was Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, which was quite good and which I recommend. The audience, on the other hand, was horrible — talking, using their phones, and making a general nuisance of themselves. It was bad enough that I seriously considered leaving during the intermission, something I’ve not done before. The main offenders were two parties of women of a certain age, the sad sort with too much makeup and too-high heels, and insufficient attention span for following a two-hour musical. But my date spoke with the theater management during the intermission, and they apologetically assured us that the situation would be remedied.

via Theater Night: Vigilantes 1, Vulgarians 0 | National Review Online.

Just saw this ad and am still howling. Best line? “Aren’t you a little young to have an iPhone?” to a woman in her 40s.

I’ve seen the ads in question making the rounds – yep, they’re completely asinine:

Firstly, the claim is just flat out wrong. It’s unconstitutional to ban books, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with American law knows. Little Red Riding Hood is not “banned,” it’s just — stupidly — not allowed in some schools. Schools, if you will, are “Little Red Riding Hood-Free Zones.” Which reminds me of something: Oh, yes! Guns are banned in schools, too! You try walking in with a copy of that book under one arm and that “assault weapon” slung over your other shoulder and see which your teachers take away from you.

via The Mendacious and Manipulative ‘Moms Demand Action’ | National Review Online.

I don’t trust any group with “Moms/Mothers” in its title. The original is MADD, and what started out as a campaign for stricter DUI laws has turned into a neo-prohibitionist movement – they don’t want people to be able to drink anywhere. 

My assumption is that using Moms/Mothers in one’s activist group lends it both a gentleness and a firm moral authority, yet when I hear it in these groups names I think of nothing more than shrill nags bent on taking away freedoms they’re not comfortable with. Whether it’s guns, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, vidya games etc, there is a neverending supply of Moms out there crusading for this or that. Other than MILFs, I have no use for them.

Just caught a Cymbalta commercial, a drug aimed at depressed people who are suicidal or who may become suicidal. Well, I say people – the accurate descriptor is “women.”

My count – relevant regarding the ad – 17 women suffering from depression, and two males who – I guess – are supporting them. Most of the women are my age (38) some slightly younger or older. This is unofficial – I noticed the ad and did a mental count. This, like everything else I offer here not cited, is anecdotal. The ad, not me, brought up suicide.

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I have no idea why Nick Gillespie’s post about a Bill Maher rant got under my skin … but it did.

Maher’s rant regarded libertarians going crazy and ruining libertariaism, how it’s turned into a functioning political party for Objectivisits or some such thing. Here’s what Gillespie had to say:

But for anybody interested in growing the influence and impact of liberatarian ideas, it’s worth thinking about the ways in which the libertarian identity fails to move a guy who is anti-prohibition, anti-empire (belatedly!), pro free expression, and pro-much more that falls in line with a libertarian perspective. For better or worse, a Venn diagram of Maher and libertarianism is going to show a huge amount of overlap on things. The same is common among right-wingers too, where many people agree with libertarians on anywhere from 50 percent to 90 percent of issues but recoil from any association with the label or the beautiful, clean-smelling, super-smart, and just-swell folks who self-identify as libertarian.

It’s occasionally nice for readers to know where I’m coming from before I start getting all accusatory. As a child, my favorite books were the series The Boxcar Children, about a group of orphans who live in a boxcar, are models of industry, thrift, self-reliance and mystery-solving – TBC is the book series to introduce your 3rd or 4th grade to in order to teach them about rugged individualism.

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I’m going to take this in a different direction, but this was a fun read:

So if you can’t get any work done because you can’t stop checking your Twitter, Facebook, texts, e-mail and Tumblr: It could be worse. Nevertheless, the stress of constant and infinite connectivity — we’re all RAM and no hard drive, all present and no history, all one-liners and no reflection — will continue to have consequences.

via The texting dead – NYPOST.com.

Much of my work is field-based, although I occasionally go into an office. One of the things I silently note as I walk through any office is how many computer screens have Facebook open (most people in my company have two screens at their desks now, and I’m convinced one of those screens is dedicated to Facebook). I’m not management and I’m not vindictive, so this isn’t a situation where I’m making mental notes of who’s actually working and who’s not, it’s just something I notice.

I recently got a very, very good promotion at my job. It will mean a higher pay grade – important at bonus time – a lot more money, a lot more travel (which I love) etc. I am good at my job, but by the metrics we’re graded on, I’m an average employee, with one exception: I work my ever-loving ass off. I don’t say that to make myself sound good, it’s literally what I’ve built my reputation on and it’s how I – a man who has zero political skill and comes off as intimidating to a great many people – I have managed to survive and flourish in an environment I’m not naturally suited for.

I have had some very low personal moments over the last 7 years, yet my company has given me the time I need to get my life in order in part because of how hard I work and the “sacrifices” I’ve made over the years for work. Everyone has their thing – work is mine, and I prefer it that way.

On my current team, for example, there are two exemplary employees who are amazing at what they do – they also have families, so their day starts at some point after 7 and ends at some point between 5 and 6, Monday through Friday. It’s all they can give to the job, and it’s all they should have to.

I’ve always worked hard. I am the typical “live to work” person – I don’t have a family to come home to (don’t want one, mind you), and I don’t deal well with idle time. So I work as much as I can. When my unit needs someone to work Saturday or Sunday or holidays or what have you, I always volunteer. I have no interest in management, it’s just something I enjoy. My management team likes this about me, but that’s not why I do it. I don’t ever ask off around the big holidays (July 4th is the only major holiday I’ve ever scheduled vacation around), and I usually request big vacation at times when no one else wants it – October and February.

What’s this have to do with Smith’s piece?

I don’t think that people who work in cubicle farms understand how bad it looks to have Facebook – and it’s always Facebook – open all the time. My company has a very liberal policy on such things, and I’ve never heard of anyone getting in trouble for it.  But to me, it just *looks bad*.  At the same rate, maybe the only people who have a poor opinion of this practice are psycho work-first people like myself.

My personal maxim has always been simple: Work like you’re not owed a job, and avoid people who avoid working. It’s served me well, even if I’m doing well in a career I’m not naturally suited for. I’d like to think if more people understood what kind of message having Facebook open during work hours on a work computer on work property, more people might begin to understand why they’re not getting ahead. That sounds passive aggressive, but it’s not. Having a social network open while your’e surrounded by people you spend nearly a fourth of your year with is just strange – there is nothing on Facebook that’s that interesting.

This makes me sound like a grumpy old man, which I’m not, so I’ll stop now.

CH blogs from DC and has an urban mindset, which I respect – I come from a mindset where it’s nice to see womynz who aren’t fat, in pajamas and have a mild strain of ambition:

While general universal female attractiveness rules still mean that a randomly chosen typical 6 will not have as many, or as high quality, sexual marketplace options as a randomly chosen typical 7, there can be individual exceptions to this rule resulting from men’s particular preferences along minor, mostly cosmetic, beauty metrics. For example, a blonde 6 might get a man that both she and a brunette 7 want, simply because the man has a particularly strong preference for blondes. But that blonde 6 will likely lose out to a brunette 8 because the difference in facial beauty and how that appeals to universal primal male desire is great enough to overcome the individual man’s relatively weaker idiosyncratic preference for blondes.

via Female Beauty From 5 To 7 | Chateau Heartiste.

Trudat:

 A system where feminine behavior is rewarded and masculine behavior punished and/or drugged into compliance, liberalist/feminist scholarship is taught, higher male cognitive variability is binned (on the low end) and ignored (on the high end), and where the presence of men in the teaching ranks is discouraged.

via More Evidence That Grades != Academic Achievement – The Spearhead.

The last graf of Mark Steyn’s latest is, for me, the most relevant:

“Fiscal conservatives” recoil from this kind of talk like homophobes at a bathhouse: The sooner some judge somewhere takes gay marriage off the table the sooner the right can go back to talking about debt and Obamacare without being dismissed as uptight theocratic bigots. But it doesn’t work like that. Most of the social liberalism comes with quite a price tag. The most reliable constituency for Big Government is single women, for whom the state is a girl’s best friend, the sugar daddy whose checks never bounce. A society in which a majority of births are out of wedlock cannot be other than a Big Government welfare society. Ruining a nation’s finances is one thing; debauching its human capital is far harder to fix.

via The Death of the Family – Mark Steyn – National Review Online.

In my extended family, we have a “situation” of sorts: a perfectly nice, lazy relative of mine decided she was lonely and the lustful arms of so many lovers wasn’t doing the trick, so she decided to get pregnant and have a child.

I’m not a moralist, but within those confines of family conversations I’ve raised hell about this – what can be done? Nothing it seems – I’m not going to ostracize the kid, and since I don’t host Christmas, I can’t blackball the girl. I’ve been scoffed at repeatedly for using the term “bastard.”

Again: this was no accident, it was intentional act of what used to be called “white trash,” something my family is not.

In her own goofy way, she’s clearly smarter than I am – she’s no doubt done the calculus and realized that a kid can give her several years of life where she has to work little, and even the more conservative women in my family have upbraided me for pointing out that a member of our clan – a clan that’s never taken anything from anybody – has voluntarily brought a child into this world that will be taken care of monetarily by grandparents and taxpayers. She has given us a bastard, yet, it’s quite rude to point this out.

A father? Who needs a father?

So, without so much as a high school diploma and not a whiff of the work ethic that defines everyone else in the family, she has brought life into this world intentionally, a life she cannot support on her own. I wish the kid well and will probably go out of my way to help him, because his mother sure as hell won’t do anything that won’t directly improve her own lot.

This is America in the 21st Century. Enjoy the decline.