I just wrote roughly 3 pages of stuff here and then erased it. It was a list of things that people either love or hate; things that extricate applause or groans, but rarely silence. Birthday cake, talk radio, Republicans. Stuff like that. 1,300 words in I realized it was a) not really all that thought provoking, b) not really all that true, and c) kind of a stupid thing to spend 1,300 words on.
Not that this particular corner of the web is reserved for things most people consider worthwhile. It's definitely not. (A brief skimming of the "Shark Bites" entry will confirm as much.) But we have to have standards, because someday all of this will be read by alien archeologists trying to figure out what the heck happened here.
So my second list of the day will be "Things I Want to Say to the Alien Archeologists Currently Excavating the Remains of Our Long-Dead Planet."
- While it doubtlessly hastened our total destruction, MTV is not a fair sampling of the human condition. Especially The Jersey Shore. In fact -- except for Ken Burns documentaries and the Food Network -- cable television as a whole will likely be a waste of your time. It was certainly a waste of ours.
- While we're all quite pleased with ourselves for creating the Internet, none of us are particularly proud of what you're going to find there. If the Internet were an actual place, it would've been shut down long ago. No city would keep a business open that made getting your mail easier, while simultaneously luring people into dens of gambling, pornography, and Justin Bieber videos.
- The best chefs were French, the best engineers were German, the best poets were English or Italian, and the best vodka is Polish. The Russians will dispute all of this, and if the Irish hadn't invented whiskey this list may have been very different.
- If you aliens possess the technology to go back in time and warn us about Celine Dion, please do it. We had no idea.
- You might think them geniuses, far ahead of their times. However, the people who talked the most about aliens coming to Earth were considered by the rest of us humans to be dorks who lived in their parents' basements and never actually had girlfriends. The fact that they were right about you guys is a total fluke.
- A careful study of 21st Century architecture will give you the impression that we worshiped shopping and football. 100 years ago this would have been untrue; now it sort of depends on what you mean by "worship."
There. That should point them in the right direction. This wasn't a waste of my time at all.
