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April 14, 2005

Broad strokes

Roxanne has graciously invited me to play the latest blog parlor game.

Behold, the Caesar’s Bath meme! List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice."

I'm unclear on the task, so I'll just have to play twice as hard. Maybe I'm supposed to list 5 things adored by my friends but only liked by me, or maybe I'm supposed to list 5 things loved by my friends and hated by me.

Admittedly nice things that my friends overrate:

1. Impressionism
2. Pirates
3. Poetry
4. Foreign policy
5. The Lord of the Rings

Things my friends overrate for no good reason:

1. Yoga
2. The Second Amendment
3. Sex in the City
4. McDonald's french fries
5. Maureen Dowd (Slumming at an old folks home?)


I invite Scott Lemieux of Lawyers Guns and Money, Orac, and Belle Waring to go next.

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Comments

I'm confused. With the first five, you're saying that you like those things, or at least don't dislike them, but your friends go absolutely apeshit over them? Otherwise I'm not sure the difference between the two lists.

Auguste, I thought it was pretty clear, myself.

List 1: "5 mediocre things adored by my friends"

List 2: "5 stupid things my friends adore"

I hear you on yoga. That's an hour of my life I'll never get back that would have been better spent reading or fucking or something.

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Why pick on Dowd?

I think the original post was unclear. I rephrased it.

Pirates are not nice. They steal, rape, and pillage. They're the opposite of nice, and always have been.

Yeah, but how about vampire pirate comics?

Yay, someone else who doesn't get what the big deal was about Sex and the City. I feel marginally normal now.

First five: wrong.
Second five: correct

So is it the Tolkien books that are nice-but-overrated, or the Peter Jackson films, or both?

The Pirates haven't won the series since '79. They are very plucky for a small-market, low -payroll team, but they can't ever keep any of the talent they develop. Your friends are fools to be excited about them. Frankly, I am rather astounded by this. They just aren't one of those franchisses that develop a big following outside their home area - inside it either for that matter.

2. Pirates

Duh. Everyone knows ninjas are where it's at.

Television
Cinema
Pasta
Lager
REM

Oh and Cocaine

Not only the most overrated, but the most obnoxious: ringtones. As a cell phone Luddite, I'd like to shoot anyone whose phone makes a noise at all in a public place; why not just get a phone that vibrates? As if that isn't bad enough, these human cattle want to "personalize" their lack of consideration, like they're doing us some kind of favor by assaulting us with more *original* noise pollution. I guess they have something in common with the pimply 16-year-old penis envy victims who think their loud car stereos are performing a public service for their music-deprived neighborhoods.

I went ballistic for the first several weeks after those T-Mobile commercials came out (you know, the ones where Catherine Zeta-Jones yelled "Stop!" and then gave a cell phone to some idiot in a wildly inappropriate setting so he could annoy everybody else).

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