Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Archive for the ‘Stupidity’ Category

Anyone that’s ever had Internet access, an e-mail address, or returned to their car after a long night at their favorite nightclub knows that unsolicited bullshit comes in a wide range of formats, tones, and levels of quality. I’d hate to admit it, but once in a great while, I’m actually impressed with a good piece of spam. It’s like they almost seduce me into opening the e-mail with a vaguely familiar sender’s name (cleverly culled from my own list of contacts) or a tantalizing subject line.

But most of it, as you know, is total liquid-diarrhea. Using the number 3 in place of the letter E is usually a dead-giveaway (e.g., “Get ur r3bat3 today!!!”).

Pretty much the same not-bad-to-terrible range exists for Internet banner ads and pop-ups. On one side of the spectrum are the cutesy animations and legitimate advertisements. On the other side are the self-loading videos, loud “congratulation” alerts that you “won” a prize, and things like the sidebar ad below.

I’ve seen this one around a few times, in a few different places. See if you spot anything weird about it:

Exactly. You don’t need to live in the Greater Los Angeles Area to know pretty much everything you need to know about Compton. Anyone that’s ever heard a Dr. Dre song, just driven through Compton, watched the fuckin’ news, knows that Compton doesn’t have a whole lot of people that look like Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s wife.

I went to Compton and all I got was this lousy redhead.

Note to spammer(s): do your homework. Believe me, I know that some people are stupid. But people aren’t that stupid. We know who lives in our immediate vicinity and, more importantly, who doesn’t. According to my top-rate sources, the city of Compton, California is 1% white. And, frankly, close to 100% of that 1% is made up of shut-ins over the age of 80 that are too frail to run for their lives.

So, unless the photo of your “Compton Mom” is 50 years old (and colorized), I’m willing to bet she lives somewhere else.

You can tell a lot about a person by what kind of shit they choose to stick on their car. Whether it’s a political statement or a stick-figure roll-call of their family members, the car owner is telling you that this thing is sufficiently important to them that they want to advertise it everywhere that car goes.

That’s a bold statement.

But even in the world of bumper stickers and decals, there are classes. Near the top of that list are the semi-enlightened, semi-clever political statements that actually mean something, things like “Can you spare a little social change?” and actually hilarious, semi-original puns. Bands logos, indecipherable country abbreviations, old campaign stickers, and countless miscellany occupy the vast territory of average. Below the fold, you come across the semi-ignorant, but relatively harmless, political statements like “Don’t steal. The Government hates competition.”

Things go South pretty quickly as you work your way down from there. You run into the old, embarrassing 9-11s, like “These colors don’t run,” the generic “Support Our Troops” ribbons, Jesus Christ fish, and other shitty religious conversion attempts. At the very bottom is the boundless universe of the completely idiotic and insane (mostly gun references).

Somewhere in the bottom half of that list, right above “Powered by Deeez Nuutz,” is Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes fame) peeing on something. Anything. And, if you’ve been on planet Earth over, say, the past 10 years, you know that Calvin has peed on nearly everything, from “La Migra” to the Los Angeles Lakers to—and you knew it was an eventuality—Barack Obama’s head.

But I’m realizing that Calvin is, more times than not, peeing on shit that I like. And, frankly, I’m fuckin’ tired of it. Maybe it all means Calvin is a right-wing, Laker-hating, illegal immigration apologist.

Or, it could mean that he’s just a pawn in this twisted game. Led astray, it’s time to reclaim his-ass and make him pee on shit that actually deserves it.

We’ll start with this one:

I’m no lawyer, but I could have sworn there was a difference between committing a crime outright, and being lured into committing one.

Despite that, law enforcement agencies all over the country have instituted the practice of using “bait cars” to fight rampant car theft.

The idea is simple. Cops modify a nice car—usually an Escalade or other ghetto-irresistible ride—with monitoring devices (cameras) and tracking technology (Lo-Jack). Then they sweeten the deal even more by loading the car up with nice shit, like an iPod and some Luther Vandross CDs. Sometimes, they even leave the keys in the ignition. After that’s done, they drop it off in an area where lots of cars are stolen. And wait.

Needless to say, these are the ingredients for some hilarious ghetto antics. In fact, there’s an entire television show devoted to playing footage of people trying to explain themselves to police before being hauled off to jail. You hear shit like, “I was just moving it out of the way so I could get my car out,” or “this is actually my cousin’s car. He knows all about this.” Of course, they don’t realize we’ve all been watching (and hearing them) steal the car all along. I’ve enjoyed more than a few laughs at these poor idiots’ expense.

But I nearly shat my pants (not in a good way) when, during a routine evening out, I spotted this sign in a parking garage here in LA:

Say what? This shit is real? The bait car instantly went from a playing-in-the-background-type-of-show to some real shit in my life. I mean, however unlikely, I could have conceivably been seduced by the bait, and ended up on the very show whose actors I ridicule. I was shocked and pissed.

Look, I’m all for fighting crime, especially crime that puts my insanely in-demand car in any kind of danger. But, what’s next? Where will it end? A bait twenty bucks falling out of a douchebag’s acid-wash-jeans pocket?  A bait just-underage girl? A bait set of answers to the test?

I say that if cops can bait us into committing crimes, we can bait them into thinking they’re fighting crime.

“Oh, sorry Mr. Officer, I didn’t really snatch her purse. Laugh out loud. See, this is Julie, my friend. And we’re just rehearsing for our hipster wannabe-legitimate-theatre play. And, by the way, we were also taping the whole thing. You’re going to be on TV!”

I was relieving my pockets of their collections of fresh restaurant napkins when I received a message from a reader with this story. It’s about how this Polish woman is suing an Egyptian hotel on the grounds that her daughter got pregnant while swimming in their pool.

Magdalena believes the teenager conceived from stray sperm after taking a dip in the hotel’s mixed pool. She is now seeking compensation from the hotel…The mother is adamant that her daughter didn’t meet any boys while she was there.

Unlike everyone else, I’m not so quick to judge Magdalena and her fertile daughter as complete frauds, or as perpetuators of old, unfunny jokes about how stupid Polish people are. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. This woman is a goddamn genius, one that’s obviously schooled in the ancient world. She’s single-handedly revealed a dirty trick those sneaky Egyptians have pulling for 3,000 years. I’ll explain.

Everybody, especially if they were around in the 70s and 80s, knows that there used to be a condom brand named Ramses. What a lot of people don’t realize is that it’s (appropriately) named after Ramses II, an ancient Egyptian pharaoh (1279-1213 BC), who fathered between 160 and 200 kids (with various wives, of course). Without getting into the whole thing, he was basically one of the most kick-ass pharaohs of all time, earning himself the moniker “Ramses the Great.”

Young Ramses smiting some foreigners.

I, like a lot of other people, always questioned how Ramses managed to father so many kids, especially late in life. Sure, he had lots of wives, but in those days, most of your kids died at birth. And, if you’ve seen what he looked like at the end, you’d wonder too.

But thanks to Magdalena, now we know. He used the old Egyptian pool trick.

Ladies, let's take a little dip in the pool.

Even though the “observational,” complaining blog entry is near the bottom of the list, the absolute lowest form of wit nowadays is the portmanteau.

The once-great art of combining two or more words to make a new, useful (and occasionally funny) one–that gave us such gems as brunch and smog–has been beaten to death by a generation of digital-age text-messaging pop-culture clones and online wannabe-comedians.

I can hardly go to my favorite overpriced hipster cafes and online destinations anymore without witnessing one person’s “clever” combination of someone else’s two words into a single Frankenphrase (portmanteau intended).

I think the most common manifestation of this is adding the prefix man- or bro- to an otherwise conventional word, presumably to add a clever masculine twist to a word with a feminine or neuter connotation.

Overused Man Suffix + Innovation = Mannovation

Overused Man Suffix + Menstruation = Manstration

Overused Bro Suffix + Romance = Bromance

Overused Bro Suffix + Brazilian Wax = Brozilian Wax

Needless to say, the permutations are endless. The other day, its clever name almost lured me into watching a TV show called Manswers.

Urban Dictionary, a once-hilarious collection of slang terms and street dialect has degenerated into a bloated collection of these things. Recent “words of the day” include:

Double freeture – when you sneak into a second movie at the multi-plex.

Yellular – the loud voice people tend to use on their mobile phones.

Carcolepsy – people’s tendency to fall asleep in the car.

Canniversary – the one-year mark of your involuntary unemployment.

So, next time you’re tempted to get a cheap laugh by astutely combining two words into one, remember: you’re probably a dumb-ass.

If you haven’t already heard, everyone’s favorite in-and-out-jail relative—Uncle Pennybags—is coming to the big screen. That’s right, Monopoly—the board game—is becoming a movie.

Apparently, the raid of a 1980s-kid’s room for movie ideas (GI Joe, Transformers) isn’t over. Instead, it’s moved from the toy box to the top shelf of the hall closet (the family-fun-night section). Rumor has it that movies based on Candyland, Risk, and Battleship are also in the works.

I just won second prize in a beauty contest. What have you accomplished lately?

I sort of doubt that these movies will accurately represent the board games on which they’re based. If that were the case, you’d walk out of the Monopoly movie six to eight hours after you entered, regretting you could never recover that time, and stealthily emptying your pockets of the $500 bills you embezzled while you were “the bank.”

So, even before the thing gets made, I already know where I’ll be on opening night: at my humble green house on Baltic Avenue, mourning creativity’s long march to the gas chamber. Rest in peace my old friend.

The past few concerts I’ve attended have revealed to me that things I was foolishly chalking up to an unfortunate succession of isolated annoying incidents are, in fact, disturbing trends. Whether these trends apply to all public events or only concerts is still unclear.

1. People trying to record the entire thing so they can post it on their YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, or whatever-the-hell-else.

I’m not sure what these people are thinking, or how they’re able to suspend their arms in the air for 90 minutes (especially when they’re obviously and profoundly out of shape), but a full 25-33 percent of the people were doing exactly that at last concert I attended. Do you think these people ever ask themselves: How good high can my production values be if I’m recording this on my LG Storm 3000 cell phone held erratically over my head?

And...cut. That's a wrap.

2. Puddles

There’s nothing more unnerving than a wet or sticky floor—especially if you have no choice but to marinate in it for hours. This isn’t actually a new problem. But lately, it seems to be getting out of control. Let me give you all a piece of advice, from experience: don’t put your nice-anything under your seat at these things. Unless, that is, you want it smell like a cocktail of cocktails. I don’t know if there’s some unreported epidemic of vertigo, or if beer vendors are experiencing an unusual bout of generosity, but there oughta be law: lids (and straws) for all drinks.

Last I heard, there's store called Lids.

3. Dramatic increase in requests for audience participation.

Dear artist: I didn’t pay you (and a pimp with the street name of “Ticketmaster”) many-many rupees to come and sing myself. I came to listen to you. After all, you’re much better at it. Trust me: if you do a good job tonight, I’ll sing the whole car ride home. Just imagine if you paid good money, let’s just say, to watch me type this blog entry. Then, somewhere in the middle of it, I shout “everybody!”, and hand you the keyboard to start writing. Exactly.

What the audience should say, in unison: "No, really, it’s okay. You sing."

Maybe I copied this idea from somewhere else–I don’t know–but this is the premier, collectors’ edition issue of Ethnic Avenue’s series R.I.P. Creativity: A Slow, Public Death. If you’re a nerd, put it in a cellophane sleeve and find a safe place for it in your mom’s house—you may be able to pocket a nice profit on eBay in a few years.

It’s hardly a secret anymore that creativity, by any objective measure, has gone completely to shit in recent years. If you haven’t taken the time to notice—between watching (the sometimes multiple) remakes of Transformers, the Hulk, King Kong, GI Joe, Knight Rider, Battlestar Gallactica, and countless others—you’re part of the problem. But, there’s so much biting going on these days, that no one single person could possibly catalog it. Even Wyclef Jean, the former emperor of stealing other people’s good ideas, is floating face-down in the sea of cheap imitations.

What do you mean you remember us from the 80s? We just landed.

The latest nail in the creative coffin is the remake of V, a science-fiction mini-series that, from my foggy recollection of the re-runs, was alright at best. Sometimes I wonder if some studio exec woke up Rip-Van-Winkle-style, after 25 years, with an issue of TV Guide from the 80s resting on his chest. Thinking it was some revelation from above; he merely took all of the descriptions to work and started making them again.

That’s the only reasonable explanation.

The no-holds-barred contest for who can best dupe the American public has intensified in recent years. Since we’re getting dumber by minute, the fight isn’t even fair anymore. They’re hitting us from all sides.

The newest entry in the long list of lame-marketing-gimmicks-that-actually-work goes by the name of “table-side guacamole,” the pride of a restaurant chain that goes by the name of Rosa Mexicano (coming to a major city near you).

The premise is simple. Scattered throughout the dining room is a series of wooden carts with a medley of the ingredients in typical guacamole: cilantro, onion, salt, chilies, and, of course, avocados. Before you even settle your full weight onto your ass cheeks, they ask you if you’ve “been here before.” If you make the mistake of saying no, they proceed to tell you about their house specialty—guacamole “made fresh, right before your eyes.”

Would you like your ingredients all served separately?

In exchange for $12, someone will wheel one of the carts to your table, mash a couple of avocados into a bowl and mix together a fresh batch of guacamole. When try it, you’ll immediately realize that this doesn’t taste like any guacamole you’ve had before (unfortunately, not in a good way). You’ll feel like you’re eating cilantro, onion, salt, chilies, and, of course, avocados–but each separately.

Like anyone that’s ever looked at a cookbook in their life can tell you, it’s essential to let the flavors in guacamole–or any other condiment, soup, or meat dish–meld. To brag that you make your guacamole fresh at the table is like bragging that you serve all of your food cold.