The Dress that Broke the Internet

It's blue.

I'm Sorry Internet, I Already Knew All 14 of Those Things About The Golden Girls

Earlier today I came across one of those clicklist things that one sees from Buzzfeed/Reddit/Upworthy/Moviepoopchute/etc. which seem to be all over the place these days.  This particular one was titled '14 Things You Never Knew About the Golden Girls'.  Being mildly interested and enormously distractable, I clicked on it and was mildly disappointed to discover that, contrary to the promise made by the title, all 14 of them were things I was already totally aware of.*
*Well, OK - 13.  In fairness I was unaware that Bea Arthur had been in the Marines.  But it's not like that's particularly surprising.  I mean, you might as well have followed that one up with 'Rue McClanahan was 78% water'

Bea Arthur was kind of a pill - check.  Estelle Getty had stagefright (and continued to not be Myrna Loy...  Sorry again about that one...) check. Gay housekeeper written out after the pilot - check check check.  (To be fair, this was probably less about the character being controversial than it was about the character being in no way funny.  If you wanted a sitcom full of characters that weren't even remotely funny in the 80s you were already being taken care of by Full House, so there was no need to keep him)

So what conclusions can we draw from this?

1: I have reached the end of the Internet.

Sadly, I can - off the top of my head - think of at three horrific types of fetish pornography that I have (thankfully) never personally seen, and while I'd like to believe otherwise, I can't bring myself to think that they aren't out there somewhere.  So we'll rule that one out.

2: I have some sort of freakish accumulation of Golden Girls related knowledge

Not so far as I am aware.  Or at least not any more than any other pointless TV info.  For the comprehensively obsessive infodump we'd need to be talking about Doctor Who.  or Buffy.  OK, or Angel - but that was a spinoff and so it totally doesn't count separately.

3: The Internet is a nest of lies.

Yes.  I knew there had to be a simple answer.

You Don't Have to Have Knees to Jerk

Perhaps I should rephrase that...

Everyone has one or two of those automatic responses that they've picked up one place or another.  For example, the irresistible urge to immediately shout 'Polo', the moment you hear the word 'Marco'.

I bring this up because I was recently indulging in one of my favorite pastimes - reading through the comment threads on far right wing reactionary websites for the sake of bathing in the ignorance.  I came across an opinion piece written by America's Favorite Drama Queen and Macrame Enthusiast, Bryan Fischer. 

This was notable primarily because they'd actually labelled it as opinion, as opposed to the rest of the opinion on the site that they had mislabeled as 'fact' and 'news' (a common problem in news sources today).

In the piece, Mr. Fischer put forth his argument that the struggle to continue being allowed to hate people for being different was the most important struggle of our time.  He continually referenced that he was struggling directly against the forces of 'Big Gay'.  (Yes, it was capitalized.  Like Big Tobacco, but with better outfits and more Axe body spray.)

The sombre mood he was no doubt intending to convey was slightly undercut by the fact that ever single time I read the words 'Big Gay', I immediately thought 'Al'*

*I'm certain most of you already know the reference.  If not you should Google it at this time to get the maximum out of the visual.

And so what Bryan intended as a scathing call to arms instead left me picturing the head of the American Family Association wrestling with Big Gay Al.  In pudding.  While wearing speedos.

You are welcome for that mental image.

I'm sorry, they're doing what now?

I'm trying to decide is the existence of the Internet is a sign of the progress of our society, or a sign of it's imminent collapse.

It began with a blog entitled - 'Sports Balls replaced by Cats'.  Which was exactly what the name says.

Someone has taken the time to lovingly photoshop sports photos, removing the athlete's balls (easy there Shriner...) and replacing them with cats. 

Now, I don't actually have mad photoshop skills (or indeed, any, photoshop skills) so I can't say for certain what sort of time commitment that such an endeavor involves, but the fact remains.  Someone of there is spending their time doing this.

And someone else is running a blog dedicated to nothing but showing picture of men taking up too much space on the subway.  Which seems curiously specific to me.  (Apparently it recently featured some guy off of Game of Thrones, which I refuse to emotionally invest in until I get some sort of reassurance that George isn't going to die before he gets around to finishing it.)


The jury is in, people.  It's come down firmly on the side of imminent collapse.

In Defense, it WAS an awfully nice sofa

I should warn those of a delicate constitution that there may be a bit of unsavory backstory in today's column.  I'll try to keep it as classy as possible...

So, many, many years ago - back when the internet was just beginning and places of employment generally speaking didn't have any sort of HR policy regarding internet usage - all sorts of things that are unthinkable now just sort of went on without anybody being too bothered about it.

Case in point - 

Back at the time I worked for an organization that I'm going to go ahead and not identify for what will shortly be obvious reasons.  My immediate manager at the time - similarly veiled in secrecy for similar reasons - was bored one day and started playing with the newly created AOL login that he had just set up.

*Note for the young, to whom this probably all seems incomprehensively bewildering - Internet Service Providers (ISP's to the tech-savvy) were a whole different kettle of fish back then.  99% of the people who even HAD access to the internet did so via America OnLine - who sent out CD-roms (themselves a strange new item- earlier they used Floppy Discs - which by that point were no longer floppy) in the mail at a rate of approximately 4 billion a day to every postal customer in the Country. 

Being of a certain persuasion, and having little to no reason not to, one thing sort of led to another and another manager in a different department shortly thereafter received an interoffice e-mail featuring a photo of hardcore gay pornography with the caption 'Isn't that a fabulous sofa?'

   Hard-core man on man action not pictured

She, being also of a certain persuasion (and not particularly prone to being shocked by such things) responded by tracking down her own graphic image of two ladies engaged in their personal business with the caption 'It needs a lamp like this to go with it'

I'm also not going to picture that.

 

He responded with hot group action and a lovely matching end table.  She followed with trans-action and a really quite nice coffee table, and so on and so forth until by the end of the day they had assembled what one must admit was actually a quite stylish living room set without ever once mentioning or acknowledging the extra-curricular living room activities also pictured.

This kind of throws the day a co-worker and I spent far too long looking on line for a picture of Rene Auberjonois dressed as a porkchop* into perspective, now doesn't it.

*No, I don't remember why we wanted such a thing, but it turns out that no such photo exists.