Anyhoo, since I got into the habit of predominantly blogging at work when I was at the Rabbit and since they would likely frown upon that now in Schaumburg, I haven't been the good little blogger you all know and love. And when I'm at home, I like to eat, drink and nail my wife (not in that order, Krishni! Ha ha! Obviously!), so I've been lacking in the updates. My apologies. Dedicated Bonzer T fan Mary Kate whined to me about my slacking journalistic skills the other day so I knew I needed to pound something out.
Thus, allow me to reintroduce the old "Thoughts from my Mind Grapes" gag:
1) I've been told--by the people I constantly text--that my mind is made for Twitter. I get it: I text a lot of stupid shit and by definition texts tend to be about the character limit of a Tweet. In reality, I should have a Twitter page. It would make an enormous amount of sense. But anyone that is on the receiving end of those texts knows that a solid 50% of those mind-grape droppings would be thousands of little nails in the coffin of my eventual Senate campaign. Seriously....the hypothetical Mike Jacklich Twitter page would be incredibly offensive to most of the population.
That and I think the annoying back and forth retweeting is hard to read and follow. Christ, just text each other. Why do you need to have the conversation in public accompanied by something called a "hashtag"?
In other news, I'm old.
All of that said, I have an inquisitive mind and love it when data is presented in a new and interesting way, a way that helps folks learn new stuff. In that respect, have you heard of Tweetping? Tweetping is a real-time update of tweets as they happen across the world. It will collect--big brother style--every tweet as a person sends it, ping a little dot on a map and continue collecting new data. You can even see the tweets as they pop up--briefly--and you'll see a running total on the bottom of the page broken down by continent. If you let it run long enough, the dots will layer on top of each other so it appears that the world has been left on the kitchen counter too long and has grown a fuzzy fungus:
This is mesmerizing. I let it run at work the other day for a couple of hours and was impressed by the dedication of the Filipino people to tweet at 4am. I strongly recommend you watch that for a while. Even if what we are doing is tracking millions of self-obsessed people, there's something oddly soothing about it.
2) So, I thought Tweetping was the best thing the internet had ever produced. A mere 3 days later, I discovered this:
The video is titled "Rapping for Jesus" and features two 60-somethings dropping N-Bombs in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. This is the single best thing the intenet has ever produced, and likely ever will.
I am not being hyperbolic.
There is some debate on the internet on whether this video is the real thing. Honestly, I don't know. The odd thing is that the rap isn't bad. I mean, it's bad. Really, really bad. But musically and lyrically, it's pretty good. Clearly, the whities that wrote it have an ear for such things and some amount of musical training. If it's real, it's pretty much the inspiration for Marty and Bobbie Culp on SNL:
"Bobbie and I once faced the terrors of tripping on pot."
The internet chatter seems to think that no one could be so tone-deaf as to think that recording a pro-Jesus rap that includes the line "Jesus Christ is my nigga"--over and over again--could be for real. It just seems too delightful to be true. But I think it's the real deal.
I'm old enough to remember a time when older people thought it was a good idea to try and aim a message at the younger generation by rapping said message instead of speaking to kids in an honest manner. This was a real thing. Commercials, TV shows, the radio...any audio platform old white dudes had, they thought they could sell more mattresses or oil changes or potato chips or whatever by rapping their message instead of simply describing the benefits of their product. It was a genuinely embarrassing time to live. It was also the single worst thing about America in the 90's.
Though Rodney King would likely disagree.
I get it; I understand that some people seem to think the video is a fake and is one big parody of a time we'd all like to forget. Here's why I think it is real:
I have never--in my life--seen a parody this good. It's like Anchorman mixed in with the Dewey Cox Story. If this video is a fake and the participants are not dead, I want them to make more videos parodying anything and everything. To be fair, if the video is real, I want more as well. I want to download that song from iTunes and add it to my "Happy" playlist. I want to keep this video running on a constant loop during bad days at work.
I hope for Jesus' sake--and Dr. Dre's--that these folks are still alive. I'm sure their Grammy is forthcoming.
3) Speaking of Christians, don't even get me started on this bitch:
"Hatin' Fags for Jesus since 1973"
4) Finally, we have that Carnival Cruise ship that was stranded adrift after a fire in the engine room disabled all power and forced the passengers to--among other white people problem horrors--drink ice-less pina coladas and poop in a bag for 5 days.
While I'm sure the experience sucked--the less that is seen of my poop the better--can we maybe get a little perspective here? All we have heard from the media is the "survival" stories of people camping out on the decks and having to pee in the showers and the sewage seeping into the walls and the carpets of the lower decks. Yes, that sounds like an awful experience for all passengers involved. You know who we should really be talking about here? The (likely) Filipino and Indonesian staff whose job it was to collect the passengers droppings and be yelled at by the drunken tramp-stamped passengers and--I feel the need to stress this again--had to collect the drunken tramp-stamped passengers rum-soaked shit in medical waste bags. All with exhausted smiles on their faces. These folks are the real heroes.
Allow me a quick Carnival Cruise-related tangent: after my glorious wedding to my gorgeous wife, she and I went on a Holland America Line Caribbean cruise. Holland America, as I have blogged before, is a lovely and luxurious cruise line aimed at a significantly older demographic. Because I had travelled so often with my kick-ass Godparents, I had a little bit of standing with the company so we honeymooned with HAL instead of a more age-appropriate cruise line. We had a blast, met a really great couple in our age group and drank and ate our way across the crystal blue waters of Jack Sparrow's territory. It was wonderful.
However, at one of the ports, we docked next to a Carnival Cruise ship. We shared a dock, the two ships separated by only about 50 yards of concrete, if that. And let me tell you, the clientele duality was HI-larious. On one side of the dock, you had octogenarians with canes in pleated, pastel pants and big hats disembarking with umbrellas for shade and those enormous virtual-reality sunglasses the block out all but the most intense, focused light.
"Let's get some saltwater taffy before we die."
On the other side of the dock, it was like spring break for venereal disease. We saw women in sandals and bikinis stumbling back to the ship armed with full bottles of rum and a beer bong. We saw shirtless dudes yelling profanities from the dock to their backwards-capped friends on the ship's balconies. We saw more exposed tramp-stamps than, well, any other place on earth.
I don't like to use sweeping statements generalizing an entire group of people but I mean this when I say it: Not a single passenger on that ship had class. These were the types of passengers Carnival Cruise ships attract. They want the young and tattooed and the horny. Not saying it's a bad way to do business--I'm sure me and my dudes would have loved an opportunity to go on such a cruise ten years ago--just calling it out for what it is.
I'm not saying that the passengers on the poop deck (yeah. I said it) last week got what they deserved. I'm just saying that it couldn't have happened to a better class of people.
I'm sure the hazmat team will have to scrub down that ship from top to bottom. But really, I hope they do that after every Carnival Cruise.
Gonorrhea doesn't just spread itself, you know.
