Damned if I Know Why They Named It That

Posted on April 17, 2005 in Folly Watch Memes

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.”

The preceding meme came from Elkit who named cigars, Oasis, “reality” television, blogging, and 192 K MP3 recordings as her five. I suspect that I am not supposed to do the meme unless I have been given it, but it was just too good to pass up. But I’ll pass it on to three people nonetheless: Bill of Prairie Point, Shelli of Blogging Naked Goodness, and Stu Savory should be good victims candidates. (I won’t tell if you steal it.)

My five are:

1. Survivor. Everyone talks or writes about this. I cannot go anywhere without hearing the latest about this television program. I don’t care about a bunch of goo-goos who are stupid enough to go to some isolated jungle or wasteland just to show off their gym-trained biceps and Spencerian sense of ethics.
2. Giant Pickup Trucks. I drive a Nissan Frontier. It has more cargo bed space than any of the Ford or Cheby — er — Chevy behemoths that share the parking lot in the Condo with. Yet my neighbors love to “buy American” which means buying the most wasteful, pretentious, and conspicuously consuming dinosaurs ever seen on the face of the planet since the last face to face comet rendeavous. I hate these creatures which resemble a woman with a tragically large butt fitted into styrofoam take-out containers. They are every bit as bad as Hummers. I am thinking of printing up bumper stickers that say “Proud Supporter of Osama Bin Laden and Islamic Jihad” and sticking them on these street dragons.
3. The Crystal Cathedral. This has to be the sorriest excuse for a shrine that I have ever seen in my life. Imagine a beached whale as designed by Picasso or Calder left to rot on the streets of Garden Grove, California. Imagine hubris incarnated as a collapsed office building. There you have the Crystal Cathedral, not all that different from the Drive-In Church which sired it.
4. Slam Poetry. Some in my set think that this is the cutting edge. More like a blunt rubber eraser thrown repeatedly at the ears until the audience cries uncle. It only goes to show how desparate even contemporary poetry readings have become: they must pander to the high school set who often join the offenders at the open mike to inflict their own versions of badness upon us. Each and every one of them strives to save us from the decrepitude of contemporary poets (such as myself) who won’t use rhyme or iambic pentameter or cliches.
5. Million Dollar Baby. This is the best cinematic answer we can come up with in response to Terri Schiavo? Give me a break! Clint is saying “if you’re ruined in the body, you should just be taken out and shot like a horse”. Great acting or not, this is the worst choice for Best Picture ever. When will Hollywood realize that Clint Eastwood is about as deep as a drying up puddle in the Mojave Desert and appreciate some real film-making?

It was tempting to include Ahnold and Dubya, but that would have been too easy.