Tuesday's Turds

Change

So I was just visiting a blog from long ago when I decided to leave a comment. And then I thought better of it. And then I realized that I used to think of this person as a friend and later, as someone who was not interested in being a friend at all to me. And so I sat there wondering if I should comment or if perhaps they would not care for me to. And then I realized that I waste time on a lot of people who don't make me feel especially welcome. And I began to wonder why I do that? Why do I spend one minute of my time on people who don't seem to care if I stop by and aren't even nice enough to be my friend on Facebook or Twitter or some other website that barely involves any real contact at all? Why don't I just write these people off and drop them from my world altogether? I don't know, but a change is coming. I can feel it boiling up inside of me.




Police

I just saw an ad for yet another new cop show on TV featuring pretty people playing cops who go around beating the living crap out of anyone and everyone who gets in their way. It's called "Chicagoland" or "ChicagoCode" or something. Basically, according to the world of TV, there are the cops and then there are the 'bad guys' and that means anyone who isn't a cop, reporter, prosecutor, or woman. So if you're some guy standing on the sidewalk working a hotdog stand and the TV cops come along, expect to get the shit kicked out of you because you're a 'bad guy' and therefore not a human being. I get the impression that the writers of these shows have never been roughed up by real cops or had anyone they care about beaten and tortured and sent to the hospital by overzealous and unaccountable real cops because if they had they might hold a slightly different view of a world filled with bad cops*. And that's what most of these TV cops are, bad cops. We don't need more of this.

I remember a brief period when I was a kid, the baby boomers had gained so much experience dealing with bad cops that, once they began to come into power, they altered laws governing how police treat private citizens to such a degree that many people felt the cops had their hands tied behind their backs because suddenly they had to respect a few basic human rights among the citizens. On television many shows wouldn't even allow their TV cops to carry guns (CHiPs) or really rough anyone up to any great extent. It was the age of Charlie's Angels and love taps that took a man down without any real harm or indecent assaults to the genitals. That didn't last long, though, and today we live in a world where it seems like things have gone too far the other way. Way too far.




Football

We're in the heat of the NFL playoffs leading up to the Superbowl, the biggest game of the year, and I'm already sick of watching football. Despite this football fatigue, the NFL corporate bigwigs are pushing to add 2 more weeks of games, which the players themselves don't want. And whose grand idea was it to move the Pro Bowl to the week BEFORE the Superbowl? Clearly anyone playing in the Superbowl can't play in that game, so that removes many top players from that game. Sometimes I think every corporate and political leader in America is high on crack.




Politics

For the past few years there has been a long overdue revolt among conservative voters against their own Republican Party. It couldn't be more obvious that the leaders of the Republican Party are totally out of touch with and often opposed to the views of their voter base. Following 2 devastating defeats in a row in national elections where conservative voters sent a crystal clear message to their party that they were not willing to accept the treacherous douchebags being offered to them in place of actual leaders, the voters grew fed up and formed the Tea Party, a movement more than an actual political party, which assembles disgruntled voters and mobilzes them to action. They kicked out many "party men" in congressional elections, booting the Republican leadership approved douches and replacing them with a third-party candidate from out of nowhere, often winning the overall election due to the fact that their candidate more accurately reflected the views of the voters than either the 'chosen' Republican candidate or the Democrat. Despite all this, the Republican Party leadership remains primarly a Log Cabin affair, with the same good old boys and girls being chosen for the more important positions, such as Speaker of the House and especially the Republican Party leader himself, previously held by a guy almost no one had ever heard of and then replaced with another guy no one has ever heard of. Meanwhile, their Speaker of the House, Mr Crybaby Boehner, continues to very cynically and shamelessly play his "I feel your pain" female-appeasement card by dressing himself in pink and crying like a blue-eyed infant every time the cameras are rolling, just to show how terribly sensitive and caring he is. Clearly this man has higher aspirations. He obviously believes that the key to achieving greater positions of power for himself is to sucker emotion-focused female voters into thinking he is a delicate flower who could substitute for Oprah if she should ever go on vacation. To the rest of us he is a good indication that the cleanup of that particular political party isn't nearly done yet. Perhaps the Republican Party leaders and the few males still left in the Democratic Party could get together and form a new party, the Metrosexual Party, with their official party color of pink, and devote as much time and energy as they please to tearful appeals to Oprah fans while the rest of us focus on the actual issues.




Exercise

I don't know what to make of this, but four days after my last pump class workout I am still walking like a testicular cancer patient because my legs are so sore. I had complained repeatedly here and elsewhere about my trainer not really doing what I hired him to do. This intense pain combined with my lousy performance in pump class seems to support my view. Its ridiculous the shape I'm in after working out so much over the years. If I can survive this class I think it will help me a lot.




The Blog World

Blogs come and blogs go and why I'm still here I do not know. I've noticed that truly spectacular blogs often inspire new blogs written by their real-life friends, but those supplementary blogs seem to flame on and then burn out much more quickly than the original that inspired them. And then there are the supernovas, the blogs that burst onto the scene, dazzle us all with their newness and unique perspectives, and then just as quickly shut down. There are so many great blogs that have come onto the scene and inspired us over the years, only to eventually retire and walk away, leaving a hole in our blogrolling hearts in need of filling. After almost 7 years of this I have begun to feel that some blogs simply cannot be replaced. Those blogs tend to be written by people who are remarkably unique and likeable. And then there are the other blogs, like mine, written by dysfunctional people who seem to inspire as many haters as fans, if not more, and yet continue to creep along for reasons that make sense only to the blogger themself.

A fellow blogger had suggested to me that the name of my blog, Nude Memphis, actually drives a lot of potential readers away as it creates the impression of being a porno blog. I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm betting most of you aren't still reading at this point and thus won't see or respond to this question, but I'd like to know what you think about that? Should I drop "Nude" from the title of my blog?




And speaking of nude, what the fuck is this shit?

EL GUINCHO Bombay from MGdM Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.

* Bad Cops - I just want to make clear that I do recognize the existence of both good cops and bad cops. We need good cops and good laws. Unfortunately, recent developments in our laws have done nothing to encourage more good cops, but plenty to create a lot more bad cops. Our lawmakers have been totally absent on issues in need of authentic leadership and decent legislation dealing with many very real problems. Even many veteran cops have voiced concerns about a lot of things going on today and Lord knows the medical community has.