Get it? Got it? Good? Erm, Not So Much…

16 April 2008 | 8:02 AM

I like to think of myself as a pretty open-minded and empathic person. While I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, as the old axiom goes, I am at least casually aware of what’s going on in the world around me, particularly in that rich fabric of oh-no-they-didn’t we like to call the popular culture. That said, there is a long list of things which, while I understand from an academic point of you, I will never really “get”. Maybe it’s a function of my rapidly advancing years, but it feels like that list has been growing at a faster clip of late. Why, just in the past two weeks, the popularity and/or very existence of these things alone has left me with an Excedrin-written-all-over-it style headache:

• American Idol
• celebrity political endorsements
• videoconferencing technologies in the auto-lane at the bank
• bukakke
• the Brain Hemorrhage
• wearing adidas flip-flops with white socks
• Wisconsin divorce law
• k.d. lang
• constant Twittering and/or Tweeting
• Taco Bell’s “Cheesy Beefy Melt” (also, the fact that someone decided to call a product “Cheesy Beefy” anything and yet still has a job)
• gigantic chairs in movie theater restrooms
• the bag-boy at the local grocery who’s a spitting image of Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, right down to the iron hair and the flat, menacing tone in his voice
• inter-mammary intercourse
• Microsoft Windows
• making a pilgrimage to see a Pope nobody actually likes give a speech at Yankee Stadium
• one-bedroom houses

Believe me, there’s a lot more to the list, but frankly those topics alone have made my brow furrow and my head hurt for the past week as it is.

Posted by Andy in Navel Gazing