To build on your point, Silver Tyger Girl, there is no phrase in any movie more inane than Yoda’s “Do or do not. There is no try.” And anyone who thinks that’s profound needs to see Buckaroo Banzai a few dozen times.
Works of James Joyce. Narcissism combined with crosswords and anagram addictions.
Its NOT the “American game”-its boring and slow…it was made for TV commercial breaks. Ditto golf-watching a golf match is a snoozfest-I woke up once, and felt i didn’t miss anything!
Speak for yourself, friend!
Preach it, brother. Every time I read a Great Classic of Science Fiction it’s a total toss-up - is it going to be awesome or is it going to be dated and a little tedious? The Stars My Destination? Awesome. Foundation? Kinda boring. “Scanners Live in Vain”? Awesome. “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktock Man”? Great title, not a great story.
The Brazil football team; at World Cups it’s embarrassing how commentators fawn over them when you can tell they don’t genuinely believe they’ve seen anything out of the ordinary in the game that’s on*. I think lots of football fans secretly prefer Argentina.
*However I think that Ronaldinho free kick was deliberate and therefore was a moment of real genius.
Some people have suggested sport as a whole here as a sacred cow - I personally don’t think it is since there have always been millions of people everywhere happy to say that they don’t like sport. No one sees a dislike of sport as being controversial unless they’re an idiot.
I, too, am confused by this…
Anyhow, I have tried and tried to get what people see in Dylan and The Beatles and it completely escapes me.
Kiss, Devo, the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones are/were all one-trick novelty acts
Kevin Smith: looks and dresses like a 12-year-old boy and really believes his “work” is great stuff.
I don’t like the Daily Show. Every ONE of my friends watches it religiously and is always surprised when I say I don’t. I don’t have anything against Jon Stewart, he’s pretty hot in a jewish way, but that style of comedy just doesn’t appeal to me. Ditto for all of his “correspondents”- Mo Rocca, the angry guy whose name is Black, etc. It’s like social satire for dummies, no subtlety, everything is meant to hit you over the head.
Also, Dave Eggers sucks. Me me me me me. It’s all about me, and when it’s not about ME, it’s about this poor sudanese refugee, which makes me more aware of the world than you are. Me me me me. Ditto for Jonathan Franzen.
I also find Starlee Kine a really bad writer/segment producer and she talks like she has a constant sinus infection.
What the fuck does this mean, exactly?
Lou Reed - can’t sing, mediocre, uninventive guitar player, and in a career spanning forty years he wrote two decent songs (and one of them was vastly improved when it was covered by Cowboy Junkies.)
the Velvet Underground - Andy Warhol’s greatest ‘living joke’ - he found the worst, most hopeless band he could scrape up, boldly announced that they were his favorite band, then watched in delight as every wannabe hipster fell all over themselves praising the band.
the Ramones - A novelty act, not innovative or artistic in any sense of the word; merely a vehicle to cash in on the mid-70s fad which was…
punk rock in general - anybody can crunch three chords, anybody can scream (not sing) lyrics & insults, anybody can show off ‘attitude’. Being ‘punk’ is a handy excuse for legions of untalented bands to claim legitimacy they don’t deserve - they say they’re ‘raw’ and ‘uncompromising’ when really they simply suck.
Lead Zeppelin. Their lyrics sound like a room full of cats with their tails caught under rocking chairs.
Yet every classic rock station has to “get the lead out” every night. Here is a hint. Trying getting the lead out, and not playing those wankers for a week or three.
Yeah, I was kind of 
on that one, too. What are you getting at there, NightRabbit?
Indie rock. No matter how you slice it, it’s two guitars, three chords, and four verses of nebbishy drivel about relationships.
F. Scott Fitzgerald sucks. Yes, that includes The Great Gatsby.
Regards,
Shodan
Fresh Air, and particularly Terry Gross. Not only about her style of speaking, where every sentence ends on an up note as if it were a question? It’s the lack of intelligent follow-up questions. If she has anticipated an answer (or knows it in advance) she may have pre-written a follow-up, but if confronted with something surprising, way too often it just falls on the floor and she goes on to her next prepared question.
I’ll fourth the disdain for televised professional sports. I don’t mind the college level and below so much. As a form of entertainment, it’s yawn city for me.
Pretty much all rock music, with the three guitar chords and teenage angst up into the forties (and embarrassingly further sometimes). This includes all follow-on and later popular types of “music” like rap and stuff.
I’ll third or fourth the disdain for the boomer generation, of which I am one (I know, you had me pegged as older). What a bunch of self-satisfied, entitled twits. Who apparently raised a generation of the same or worse.
And finally, everything Disney. All that pre-packaged cutesy-pie sentimentality makes me want to puke my guts out. Especially those posters around recently for some show about the “Disney Princesses” or some such. If I had kids (which I thank all the powers in the universe I don’t) (and so do those non-existent kids) Disney would be a topic for scorn, derision and laughter in our house. Currently Disney is studiously ignored. I even regret having mentioned the name three times in this paragraph.
Roddy
Mohammed Ali was an over-rated boxer
H.L. Mencken was not the champion of liberalism vs. fundamentalism that so many people today think he was. Yes, he was very witty, and pithy, the kind of curmudgeon that you tend to think of like an old uncle who says outrageous things while everyone just smiles and pats his head. He was a great nemesis of religion in general and religion in politics specifically. But the man was a downright serious authoritarian in other aspects. He championed the Kaiser. He championed Hitler publicly until the truth of the atrocities of the Holocaust became known. He was antisemitic (in the peculiar way that antisemites will occasionally have “pet Jews” that they like personally, while still excoriating Jews as a race) and generally unapologetic about it beyond the “I have Jewish friends” trope.
He was a decent journalist, a great editor, an occasionally brilliant essayist, a mediocre but prolific and influential literary critic (he MADE Theodore Dreiser), a thorough semantic distiller (I’m going to borrow “The American Language” from the library this afternoon). But he was not the Great Liberal Defender that people today take from his reporting on the Scopes Trial.
Bastards! :o