The Scene and Herd

Working for BlogTo has been tons of fun. I get to go out to eat cake at least once a week. Plus, I get to take Alyssa with me. We have a good time. There’s just this one problem with the whole BlogTo experience – the comment section. People can be so mean. It’s demoralizing. Rather, it used to be demoralizing. I’ve become desensitized to stupid comments and this is of concern, because it makes it difficult for me to discern which comments are legitimate. Some of them are completely worth my while to read. In short, a few shifty comments are making it difficult for real comments to be heard.

Word on the street is Jason Kenney has the same problem with Canada’s refugee system. Apparently there are so few restrictions on who can claim refugee status, that a number of Mexicans have been taking advantage of it and making illegitimate claims. Then they get to hang out in Canada while their case is sorted out. The system is so overwhelmed by the fake refugees that the real refugees can’t get their case heard in a timely manner.

So Kenney has decided to slap Visa restrictions on Mexico and the Czech Republic. I disagree with this move, to say the least. It’s already hard enough for those guys to get out of Mexico alive. But the system is broken and Kenney is trying to fix it. Aside from making the system more of a priority (i.e. hire more people), I can’t offer any solid ideas.

Thankfully, most news reports have wide-open comment sections, where regular people can offer their own solutions to the refugee problem. “Let’s expand the visa requirement to anyone seeking refugee or immigrant status and refuse entry to anyone with improper documents,” suggests one lofty individual, who obviously doesn’t even really understand what a refugee is. Someone else proposes we put them “on the next plane home if they don’t pass even basic muster.”

I appreciate this last guy’s optimism. I have no idea who he is is, but I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and call his idea well thought out. In fact, I think we should apply his solution to all comment sections. Before someone may leave a comment, they have thirty seconds to explain why they deserve to leave a comment. If they have too much to say or get nervous or can’t articulate or have just had a really bad day and can’t think straight then tough luck. They don’t get to make a comment. They get to bring their cursor to the upper left hand corner of their browser window and click “back” to the page they came from.

Lady Gaga is interesting, evidently.

Sometimes she walks around with no pants on. She wears funny make-up and dies her hair and says raunchy things. And Marilyn Manson has a crush on her, which proves that she’s interesting. So why am I so bored by her all the time? When she was obsessed with that purple teacup and carrying it around all the time, I thought to myself, “fascinating,” but my mind forgot that it was interesting two seconds later.

I got bored in spite of myself.

I purchased The Velvet Underground and Nico one short year ago and really listened to it for the first time. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of peace and gratitude, like going back in time to the motherland to thank your ancestors for some solid culture building. But there was nothing interesting about the album. The Velvet Underground is too pervasive to be interesting, practically in our blood. I was born in 1982 and this glorious artistic movement is inherently known. Praise God. That’s cool, right?

The best part about being born after the 1960s is getting to be born after the 1960s.

Lady Gaga doesn’t get that, which is why she bores me. “Warhol said art should be meaningful in the most shallow way,” she told Maxim. “He was able to make commercial art that was taken seriously as fine art… [and] that’s what I’m doing too.” She let the cat out of the bag.

Lady Gaga’s antics are boring because they were interesting. She is contemporary but her art is not. Don’t worry if she does not immediately compute. She’s confusing, right? And don’t worry if you get bored in spite of yourself.

From the first paragraph of The Globe’s obituary this morning:

Robert S. McNamara, the cerebral former U.S. secretary of defence who was vilified for carrying out the Vietnam War, then devoted himself to helping the world’s poorest nations, died today.

Mercy, that’s heavy. I wonder when McNamara made peace with the idea that his obituary would hold more references to Vietnam than his penitent work with poor countries. Speaking as someone who has zero connection to Vietnam, I admire McNamara for trying to pull it together at the end there. He knew his reputation (soul?) was permanently tarnished, but still tried to make good. Most powerful people with guilt on their heads maintain a fake innocence with gusto, and a bad attitude ‘till the bloody end. 

Which brings me to the Chris Brown fiasco. It’s been on my mind. 

Chris Brown could not understand why he was not allowed to perform during the Michael Jackson tribute at the BET awards, and I think that’s weird. His confusion is confusing. He beat up his girlfriend. Why hasn’t somebody (Chris Brown’s lawyer/agent/mom, I’m looking at you) told him that people don’t like that sort of thing? Assuming his participation was nixed by Jay-Z, Brown twittered, “Jay-Z is mad childish. Never keep a person from paying there respects.”

Aside from the fact that he wrote “there,” (always troubling when an angry person does that) is it not totally bizarre that the Rihanna incident seems to have slipped his mind? It only happened a couple of months ago. McNamara had Vietnam on his mind for forty years. I expect Chris Brown to mull things over at least until his community service is finished. I think that’s fair, if not exactly proportionate.

I expect this from Brown for the simple reason that I think everyone should at least have as much class as Robert McNamara, and hopefully a bit more.