These pages mirror my Facebook status updates.
The necktie, perhaps the goofiest article of men's clothing, is traditionally justified as adding visual interest to an otherwise drab outfit. In practice, lots of neckties are just as drab as the rest of the outfit they're worn with. I feel like this is a microcosm of a lot of culture. Customs start out with a purpose, albeit a stupid one, and then even this purpose is lost.
A dictionary of the right-wing lexicon:
DID YOU KNOW? The official bird of New York City is Pizza Rat.
Greenhouse gasses love us so much that they're giving us all a warm hug.
I went to a sex shop and they categorically refused to sell me any sex. I intend to write a strongly worded letter of complaint to the CEO of sex.
Anti-circumcision crusaders who use the word "intact" to mean "uncircumcised" suggest confusion with another, more drastic surgical operation on the male genitals.
FreshDirect, the website I buy groceries from, has a "Black History Month" section where various commercial food products are advertised that allegedly have a connection to black history. It's hard to write parody of the contemporary social-justice movement and its entanglement with capitalism because it's already a parody of itself.
Peer review? But I'm peerless.
I notice it every time somebody says "I've not" instead of "I haven't", or "I'd not" instead of "I hadn't". It sounds really weird to me, and everybody else acts like it's perfectly normal. I think I came from the standard "I haven't" universe and then ended up in this crazy alternate "I've not" universe by mistake.
Exceptions in the Clean Air Act allow states to nominally meet national standards for air quality while actually having much worse air than the prescribed limits on a good number of days each year. In other words, air quality in the US is great, except for all the times it isn't. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/16/epa-local-governments-dont-report-air-pollution-wildfire-smoke-data-across-us
It's often prudent and fair to ask people to cite their claims. But here are some examples of things that you probably shouldn't reply to by asking "Source?":
The pizza place by me set up their indoor tables and chairs again. Only now do I really feel like New York has recovered from the pandemic.
According to aggadah, as collected in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, God declared "O what a pity that Adam was not able to observe the command laid upon him for even a brief span of time!" To be precise, no more than two hours elapsed between Adam being told not to eat the no-no figs and eating them. My man must have been trying to speedrun the Fall.
By now we've all had a good laugh about conservatives protesting that being banned from Twitter for transphobic remarks is like being sent down the memory hole by Minitrue in 1984, a novel written by a socialist. (Well, except the people who make these complaints don't say the word "Minitrue", because they never read the book.) The novel they should be referring to instead is Fahrenheit 451, judging by how Ray Bradbury said in a 1994 interview that the story "works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can't say certain things. The homosexual groups don't want you to criticize them. It's thought control and freedom of speech control." Lest you suspect that this then-74-year-old man had become set in his ways and was simply rejecting a new modernity that was leaving him behind, he explained in the same interview "There isn't anyone writing right now that's any good, except me."
The names of Internet companies that I find most difficult to say with a straight face:
"…the death of a loved one is not something to 'get through.' It is something that never goes away, and you learn to live with it, like a cancer, or a career in sketch comedy." —Timmy Williams (2021)
There's a new technology threatening the livelihoods of artists, who are understandably upset. Some people, who have no artistic skills whatsoever, have the audacity to claim that the images they've produced with this technology are works of art. But to the educated mind, it's clear that this "photography" will never be art. You're not exercising any skill—you're literally just copying images that already exist. How can that be art?