What is the entire world pulling your leg about?

Mind if I borrow that? I’m colorblind and my wife mentioned the glasses. I’m actually really nervous about trying them (if I ever had the opportunity – I’m not searching them out). I’ve lived forty-eight years without them. What if I try them and they fundamentally alter the way I see the world? Then, I go back to my regular colorblindedness… I just don’t know. I’m also nearsighted. I got glasses when I was ten years old. I can’t go without them or contact lenses or the whole world looks blurry to me. Would I feel the same about these color-correcting glasses?

As I’ve said before: Maybe he just had really weird looking models.

Richard Lewis (for those who remember him)

A Confederacy of Dunces

Just god-awful and boring. You can put something together where almost every character is unpleasant and make it work (see Breaking Bad), but this just left me cold. How is this the “funniest book ever written”?

You’re of course welcome to the line. And to the other stock reply I use, when I’m chock full of the same sentiment you go on to mention but people are urging me to do whatever it takes to experience the wondrous world of color: “I don’t know what it’s like for you, but all of my favorite experiences have taken place in the dark.”

(“Also, I enjoy black-and-white movies; or, as I call them, ‘movies’. And you like classic black-and-white movies, right? Don’t you pretty much forget it’s a black-and-white movie after, like, the first ten minutes? Or do you just spend two hours griping?”)

Eating pineapple makes semen taste, well, presumably, like pineapple juice.

It does. How do you think they make pineapple juice?

I don’t have much good to say about modern art but I must concede that Cubism does have a point: it tries to display the essence of a theme rather than a specific instance of it. Compare Woman Descending Stairs with this multiple exposure photo for example.

Picasso died before his time. He would have LOVED computer-generated imagery.

Yeah, It’s not like pineapples grow on trees.

They don’t, actually.

I think I might take some weekend and seed the internet with the notion that eating coconut makes it smell like coconut body wash. Seems like an easy sell.

I know.

Most things, really. You’re all a bunch of weirdos.

But more specifically: Religion.
I mean, you only have to think of any of their ideas for a few minutes before the flaws present themselves, and then any further and it completely falls apart at the seams. Crossing your fingers and wishing real hard doesn’t make fantasy real.

Obsessive sports fanaticism.
I totally get why people like to play sport, and to watch sport. The entertainment value it has is self-evident. But beyond that; the tenacious attachment to a team; the aggressive behaviour; the scrutiny of statistics; the assumption everybody else likes sports really, even if they say they don’t, and at least have a team they root for. It’s bizarre. And scary.

Food snobbery.
I guess it’s just people loving something a lot and wanting others to enjoy it too, so ultimately an altruistic thing, but I find anybody insisting I eat something or have bad taste in food to be invading my privacy, patronising, and rude. No matter how often I ask people not to involve themselves in my eating habits, they just can’t stop themselves, and I really don’t get it. It’s my stomach, fuck off.

I know. Sometimes I wonder what my home planet is like.

This one is part of my popular food triumvirate.

  1. Bacon. I’m not interested in foods that have a high fat content and the fattiness is blatantly obvious when the food is eaten (Exception: buttered popcorn). Bacon is Exhibit #1. Why would I want to eat something that tastes essentially like burnt fat? And I REALLY don’t understand bacon being cooked with foods where the strong bacon taste obliterates the taste of the other food - specifically-bacon wrapped filet mignon and bacon-wrapped scallops. Those are two of the tastiest foods around - why adulterate them? Even if you like bacon, there are plenty of mediocre foods you can mask with bacon instead.

  2. Alfredo sauce. Another food that just whacks you over the head with its fattiness. Too rich, and not in a good way.

  3. Black pepper. Another food that overwhelms whatever it’s in - and I can’t stand the stuff. I just don’t understand the appeal. And recipe after recipe has pepper in it…why?

I get mildly annoyed when one of my favorite foods goes viral. I’VE ALWAYS LOVED KALE I SWEAR.

Mustard on hot dogs. It’s fine, but ketchup’s better.

Yeah, what’s going on with that? Is the “mustard only on hot dogs, ketchup is for troglodytes” hangup a particularly American thing? Where I’m from (not America), you’re supposed to put ketchup *and *mustard on hot dogs. Ketchup only is fine, too.

It seems like such a strange and arbitrary thing, and one that fits the OP really well. I am waiting for the “gotcha” with that one, a little bit.

Yeah? Well, explain Rothko to me.

He’s awesome. What more do you need?

Personally, I can’t really help you beyond that. I would still have loved Rothko even if he wasn’t famous. I know that, because I didn’t know that he was famous when I first saw his paintings. I just thought: “Whatever the heck that is, it’s beautiful.” I had the same thing happen with Malevich, too, BTW.