in San Antonio’s La Villita this afternoon. What beverage ought to be drunk in celebration from these goblets, and by whom?
Humor
Mainstreaming Anti-Israel Prejudice…and Anti-Semitic Stereotypes?..among the “Casual Left”
The replacement for Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” is named Trevor Noah. His Twitter stream has revealed some…interesting…”jokes,” like this one:
South Africans know how to recycle like Israel knows how to be peaceful.
Apparently, the Israel-is-an-aggressor meme has oozed its way into the popular consciousness to the degree that Israel is stereotypically non-peaceful in the way that dogs stereotypically dislike cats. I expect this sort of thing will go over quite well with the audience (generally left-leaning, I feel sure) of The Daily Show. They will also probably like this one:
When flying over the middle of America the turbulence is so bad. It’s like all the ignorance is rising through the air.
…although perhaps this won’t go over as well coming from a non-American (Noah is South African) as it would coming from a suitably hipsterish American.
St. Patrick’s Day and Journalism
I’m going to combine two posts here that don’t sound like they’d go well together – “Day Drinking” and lazy journalism. There was an article by Stanley Bing (the pseudonym of an executive who writes for Fortune magazine) who happens to 1) be an actual business executive 2) writes effectively (and hilariously). While I can’t find the exact post I am paraphrasing below:
Whenever I see anything written about my company in the popular press, it is generally incorrect. Thus I must conclude that most of what I see written about other companies in the press isn’t right, either.
Business Insider is a great resource that I read on my iPhone most days when I have a few minutes to kill. They have some original content and re-post from other sources. Recently I read about the “five biggest” St. Patricks’ day celebrations (parties) which was a typical “puff piece” article for them – you can see it here.
The only problem with this article is… that it is lazy and wrong. Our own correspondent Dan happened to be on the ground in Las Vegas for St. Patrick’s day last year and he said it was “Chicago on an inter-galactic scale” which I believe since Dan has been at a ton of drinking events through being a sports fan forever. I am having trouble verifying this on the ol’ intertubes but it is the kind of event where “hey, the Chicago River is green, we can trot this story out every year, there we are done” but the massive scale of Las Vegas means that if you have a drinking event they can just pour out of the hotels and onto the streets (that they shut down) and go crazy and drink outdoors. Probably the only way to officially verify this is to send Art Mann out to Las Vegas as the ultimate decider…
Onto Chicago for St. Patrick’s day… we had a beautiful day and so everyone was out in force. People were lining up per usual in the wee hours (many bars open at 6am) for a long day of drinking here in River North.
I loved this outfit… a drunk gumby up at Paris Club!
Our Need For Categorization
I am an enormous fan of “top lists” and almost any sort of categorization. If it is the top 100 guitarists, the greatest bands, a type of warship, or anything else – I like to see it in a category and classification that can explain trends and try to cut through complexity by organizing the data into different groupings.
Sirius XM radio stations are a great example of categorizations. Recently on a trip with Dan and our friend Brian we had the station stuck on “Hair Nation” – and then we started thinking through the different stations and how Sirius has chosen to allocate music across each of them.
Some bands are solidly “Hair Nation” – Poison, Warrant, LA Guns, and everything else with spiky hair and all about having a good time. While Dan is more “Hair Nation” – I am more on the “Boneyard” station, which has a big overlap with Hair Nation but a whole host of songs that aren’t on Hair Nation, such as UFO and older heavy metal like Judas Priest.
We started to have a mock “debate” in a snooty English style of “Dear Sir – I beg to differ with your classification of the band Skid Row. “Monkey Business” is more of a hard Boneyard song while their ballads of course could reside properly within the confines of Hair Nation.”