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yeah... so remember that time when I bought a car, and then the transmission dropped, so I took it in to get it fixed and drove a the worst piece of crap loaner ever, and then I got my car back but it wasn't fixed, so I was back to driving the loaner again, and it started smoking profusely every time you drove more than 100 yards, and then I ended up without my own car for over a month, and when they finally called to say my car was fixed (again), the loaner car dies one minute away from my work, so I have to get it towed and get ANOTHER loaner car to go pick up my real car and take the loaners back, all while dealing with some phantom bug problems in my new apartment which was causing all my clothes to be in garbage bags strewn about the apartment so I can't actually move around the already tiny space to make dinner or to find a blazer in the morning before I went to work? Yeah... I remember those times. Like they were today.
Oh. They are. I almost forgot, I was too busy waiting for the tow truck to arrive.
To Whom It May Concern:
I just opened up my bag of Starburst, and to my dismay, I only found four pink ones! This was, of course, very sad, since pink ones are my favorite. There were a total of 92 starburst in the bag, making a paltry 4.3% of the bag pink! Broken down further, 14.1% were yellow, 29.3% were red, and a whopping 52.2% were orange! Sad, indeed. What could possibly account for this disproportionate bag of starburst, I wonder? Oh well, I still like the red ones. :-)
Still Chewing,
-Matthew Good
I'll post their response, assuming it's worth posting, as soon as I hear back from them.
“Useless Is Interesting”
A Failed Attempt at an Entertaining Article
By the ghost of Matthew Conrad Good
The printed word is NOT funny. Not, if I may further explain myself, my printed words, anyway. Of course, you’ve got guys like Douglas Adams and Dave Barry who make it really hard to stay quiet in a library… Heck, even John Donne will make you to stifle inappropriate laughs, assuming you understand certain references involving compasses and fleas (or if you have that particular type of misguided mind, as I do)… But somehow when I try tricks like that it just comes off bawdy.
And that, my friends, is why the “Entertainment” sections of ALL newspapers, major and minor, are not particularly entertaining. In fact, this article is probably not causing its readers to riot. Printed words are good at ideas (which is why humans have felt it necessary to burn many of them over the course of history), but they aren’t very good inciting the youth (which is why Rock ‘n Roll is more commonly cited as the impetus behind much of the social change that the 50’s and 60’s saw than the beat poetry of Alan Ginsberg. The kids just wanna dance).
So newspapers have no other choice than to do what I am doing right now – which is to talk about fun until it is no fun anymore. There are a number of reasons for this.
Firstly, the purported “serious” arts have a long-standing tradition that requires layers and layers of critical review in order for us to be able to understand (or even take seriously) the thing itself. Like the rock strata covering dead things in the earth, an art is only important if it is so buried in carbon and time that it has become a fossil. Pop culture, seeing how this works, immediately and necessarily splits into two factions: those that desire that time-honored, museum-like credibility, and those that want absolutely nothing to do with it, until the end of time. They usually end up in museums, too.
The other reason is that the kinds of people that read articles about music and movies are the kinds of people who actually want to read articles about music and movies.
And that brings us to snobbery - which is an odd mix of humor and pride and cynicism and patriotism. But snobbery is also a complete side-effect of thinking too much about fun things. The irony in this is that this article is also a direct result of that very same thing. Snobs, feel free to laugh in your proud, cynical, patriotic way.
One of the prevailing theories of our universe (as I understand it, having had no solid cosmological training whatsoever) likens it to a 3-dimensional game of Pac-Man. In this universe, you are a yellow dot, capable of going left on and on into eternity, but somehow you can never leave your very small world. You and your yellow-dotted self wonder aloud about this… “Odd,” you say. “If I keep going long enough in one direction, I eventually come back to where I started.”
Which is where all the logical arguments I seem to make end up – exactly where I was trying to get away from. That’s not funny.