Sometimes it's easy to be brilliant--all you have to do is have a great idea that is simple to execute and go ahead and do it. So go do it, Internet! For the kids, so they understand where we came from.
Thanks for the simple brilliance, Videogum/Internet--put another fur in your cap and keep up the good work.
Milestones are meant to be reached, right? Congratulations, Internet--that is the only bright side I can see in this travesty:
That piece of garbage was viewed 126,558,675 before I ever heard of it. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
There's no way around the fact that I feel dumber for having seen it, I worry that some innocent people out there might have seen it and unwisely viewed it as successful comedy worthy of imitation, there's no stopping it now, and it irritates me that the guys who made it have no doubt profited in some manner as a result of its creation.
On the other hand, it has ostensibly shown a lot of people a good time since its release--only 29,869 people officially DISLIKE it (please ignore the fact that only 24,299 people bothered to officially LIKE it).
Maybe this video is what America craves. Maybe the entertainment provided by this video is the reason generations of hard-scrabble immigrants bled to death tilling our soil and shaping our skylines. Maybe 2011 has ushered in the zenith of mankind's presence on Earth and not its nadir.
Kids today really need to get tougher skins or they'll all be dead in five years and the world as we know it will slowly draw to a close, Children of Men-style.
A 14 year-old girl hangs herself because the friends of her alleged rapist were tormenting her?
Numerous high-school kids killing themselves because kids make fun of their sexuality?
Kids so afraid to go to school because they are getting bullied that they drop out, go into highly-medicated therapy, get even more depressed, and kill themselves later?
I love to break it to you, kids, but this shit has been going on since the dawn of human society. Deal with it, just like everybody has done for millennia. You are not special, this is not a new and more potent form of torture that the human psyche is unable to withstand.
You think it's awful that people make fun of you in the school cafeteria? That you get text messages that say "Suck my dick, faggot!" or "U R a lesbo LOL!"? That mean people write mean things on your Facebook page that you can immediately delete? Oh, no! Your life is so unimaginably difficult--nobody else could possibly understand because cell phones and Facebook and fags weren't around when they were kids!
I know I will one day be gleefully banished to Hell by a vengeful God for laughing at these videos every time I see them, but I just can't help myself--they're hilarious.
Little Girl Owned by Trampoline:
Little Girl Owned by Swing:
Little Girl Owned by Bench:
And THAT'S why you don't put floppy hats on your little girls, parents!
"Our backs ache, our skirts are too tight, we shake our booties from left to right."
This is the controversial cheer that a Michigan cheerleader's mother objected to recently. This objection got her daughter kicked off the squad and straight onto the stage of Good Morning America.
The kicker: The former cheerleader is only 6 years old.
SIX YEARS OLD!
For whom do six-year-olds cheer? Six-year-old football players? The Catholic Priests Charity Football League?
Even more importantly, however, how does this cheer make any sense? Who wants to hear about people's problems? Their backs ache? Whose doesn't. Their skirts are too tight? Stop getting so fat!
Boring...
Or are these cheerleaders trying to say they are always on their back getting it from football players and their skirts are intentionally too tight because they're trying to show off the hot bodies they spend all day creating by not eating and ditching class to do bikram yoga and smoking cigarettes across the street?
Oh, wait, I just got it--these six-year-old girls are CHEAP SLUTS who really, really, really want their football-playing sex-partners to win the game against their other football-playing sex-partners who go to first-grade at a nearby rival primary school.
Or so their coach wants us to think, for some reason--probably because she thinks it's "cute."
When I was a little(r) boy, I only had three nightmares that I can remember, but they were all recurring and fierce.
One was that I was suspended in the corner of my bedroom, up near the ceiling, inexplicably moving outward as if attached to a rocket bound for outer space. I would wake up in a sweat, repeating the words "It's so far away!" until my mom got me to stop by knocking me unconscious with a miniature baseball bat stored on my bedside table for that precise purpose.
Another was that I would be forced to play Monopoly every second for the rest of my life, which just sounds like the worst thing ever. Should we use this on terrorists, or is it worse than waterboarding? Somebody read this for me and let me know--I need to go feed my gerbils.
Anyway, the third nightmare involved a three-fingered woman. This woman didn't really do anything other than exist, but that was enough for me. Something about an elderly woman missing two fingers was enough to make me scream in my bed "The three-fingered woman!" until my mom pulled out that bat again.
I have no real explanation for the first two, but the genesis of this last, rather odd nightmare was the movie Cloak and Dagger (1984), which is about a boy, Davey (E.T.'s adorable Henry Thomas), who spends a lot of time playing video games and living in a fantasy world of spies and high-stakes intrigue, accompanied by his cavalier imaginary hero, Jack Flack (Dabney Coleman). He lives in a fantasy world because his mom is dead and his father (Dabney Coleman) is a pilot who is never around. One day, a dying man gives Davey a Cloak and Dagger video game cartridge and he suddenly finds himself the target of real-life spies with real guns.
The plot, in pictures (thanks, Internet!):
Davey plays with action figures in his room, alone as usual
"What's this? Why did a dying man give me this game?" -Davey
"When I beat all the levels, cuz I'm a nerd, I find secret military documents." -Nerd
Dads never understand children
"Your Dad doesn't believe you, but I do--we gotta save the world!" -Jack Flack
"Wait--I AM your Dad and I just saved the world! He has been your hero all along."
Awwwwwwwwww...
At some point in the middle there, Davey is warned to be on the lookout for a spy who is missing two fingers. When he gets to the Alamo (what is it about the Alamo that made it so popular in the Eighties?) for a hand-off, things don't exactly go as planned and the three-fingered woman rears her ugly...hand...
That isn't exactly as I remember it--I thought the ole bag wore a tailor-made three-fingered black leather glove--but, regardless, you can see why this would scare a little boy every time he saw it (I watched the movie multiple times, against the wishes of my mother I'm sure).
I guess when you live in fear of something for as long as I did, your mind tends to get a bit creative with the details. Anyway, I'm proud to say I haven't had this nightmare in many days and I am damn proud of myself.
