Dumb, Illustrated

Irony, Illustrated

While we wouldn't go so far as to say that discussions of the definition of irony are widespread enough to call it a burning issue, certain kinds of people keep talking about it. The definition remains as slippery as always. This photo, for example, might better be described as poetic justice—although poetic justice does often involve heavy doses of irony.

We tried using Google to look up illustrations that would explain “poetic justice,” but all we got was nine billion pictures of Janet Jackson. So we’re afraid that you'll just have to settle for looking at a picture of a Klan guy on fire.

Odds are about 100% that this image is staged—something from a TV show or movie—but we comfort ourselves with the belief that at one point or another, it's happened in real life. One can always hope.

This Post Brought to You by Indignation, Irony, and Hypocrisy

Among the many benefits of being a citizen of the United States of America in the twenty-first century are that:

• we are the beneficiaries—assuming we’ve taken advantage of it—of twelve years’ worth of free schooling¹ in an educational system that, while perhaps not the best in the world, is certainly better than the alternative.²

• we have unparalleled access—thanks to a nationwide network of public libraries, bookstores, and an internet filled almost entirely with deftly phrased, mature, and well-researched philosophical discussions, to thousands of years’ and millions of pages’ worth of the human race’s most compelling, challenging, enlightening, and thought-provoking political and philosophical thought.

• we are spiritual descendants of a distinguished intellectual tradition that began with luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, and thrived for centuries until it was unceremoniously murdered by Philo T. Farnsworth.

So with all that in mind, it wouldn’t be odd to expect Americans to engage in well-spoken, well-educated, thoughtful political discourse, would it?

(Crickets chirping)

 

Suck it, Jefferson. You knew it would come to this.

On my drive home from work the other day I spotted a bumper sticker that read “If you voted for Obamtard, thanks a lot, ASSHAT.”

My second reaction³ to this was disgust and dismay that this is how real live grown-up Americans—educated adults, most of us, with literally hundreds of thousands of hours’ worth of opportunities to practice shaping and polishing our thoughts to convince and inspire—are choosing to express their political views these days. It’s like we’re going out of our way to prove that putting power in the hands of the common people was a tragic, hilarious mistake, that the best we can do to express a difference in political opinion is to resort to name-calling and using language better suited for a bathroom stall.⁴

My first reaction to the bumper sticker was “what a dickhead.”⁵

NOTES

1. Or more than twelve years, if you flunk a couple of times. Hey, why not? Free school! And by “free” we of course mean “paid for by everybody, so not actually free, but sort of like free if you’ve had just the right amount to drink.”
2. That alternative being, for the sake of our argument, “not going to school and being a big fat idiot.”
3. Yes, second, not first. Keep reading; I promise it’ll all make sense. Or at least, it’ll make as much sense as any of the bullshit you typically find here.
4. “Asshat” is, I admit, not true bathroom-stall language—it’s far from being in the same league as f-----, c--ks-----, w--r-, --t--a--, or s--d---h-e--er. On the other hand, it’s a stupid, tired, overused term, and you’re a total f----- if you use it. Knowledgeable sources have described the term as “the douchebag’s ‘douchebag.’ ”
5. For what it’s worth—not that it’s necessarily any of your business—we didn’t vote for President Obama, and given the chance to do it over, we’d not vote for him again.

And Now, One Reason to Dislike Hockey Players. Or At Least the Crazy Ones.

To be fair, we have never heard of this happening anywhere else on Earth, so we choose to view this as less of an indictment of hockey players in general and more of an exhibit that even people that seem perfectly normal on the outside can, on occasion, do something absolutely batshit crazy.


For more information on this especially bizarre story, follow this link to the article on Deadspin.com, which includes gem of understatement:
 

As it turns out, Rogue Squadron has won every game this year in which one of their players didn’t poop inside an opponent’s equipment.

A Typesetter’s Nightmare

Scare quotes and Comic Sans. Shit like this makes it really hard for me to believe that the whole world isn’t out to get me.