My husband rode me to school last week on the bike. I got stopped about 6 times by idiots trying to hit on me (lame enough) before I could finally hit the bathroom, get into class, and sort out my laptop. Some dude spies my helmet next to me and decides to get friendly: “I don’t want you to think I’m hitting on your or anything (my :rolleyes: meter goes off the charts), but I think chicks that drive* motorcycles are totally hot!”
“Actually, I rode on back.” It’s great. Every time they get hit with that realization, it’s comic. I think I need to hire a guy to follow me around with a slide flute for these moments.
The stuff I see when I’m actually up front is even lamer. Guys driving busted-up four-banger wannabe racecars trying to race all the time - you know the type, they’re the epitome of lame, usually with spinner rims on their faded red 1992 Honda Civic. I usually rev my engine a bunch, then watch them lay down rubber as I cruise off the line at a whopping 25mph.
I can’t name any names or places here, but bear with me. There is a radio show that has been going on for a very long time. You’ve most likely never heard of it. It is hosted by a woman who is the embodiment of everyone’s most embarrassing-but-oblvious mom. Only this one has an ego to match.
On this show, she brings students from local schools to talk about issues that she thinks are important. The problem is, the students she brings on are there as punishment. They are failing so badly in their classes that if they don’t show up, they don’t get the credit that would put them at 51% for the term. Consequently, they are the least-informed, least-interested, least-interesting, most vocabulary-challenged bunch of kids you could find. They often don’t know each other, and have no idea what the topic will be until they get there, and then they have to talk about it. That makes for stimulating listening, I gotta tell ya.
Most of the show consists of this woman, who is poorly-spoken and partially-informed, attempting to steer these hapless kids into expounding on why they agree with her virtual monopoly on the airtime. She thinks she’s famous. She acts like it, too. She is lame. Her show is lame. The name of the show is ridiculously lame. The premise is lame. The guests are lame, and the audience, or lack thereof, knows it. Everybody knows it but this woman. That is so lame.
Still, somebody allows it to continue eating up airtime that could have something interesting in it. Like the radio equivalent of the test pattern. And that’s what’s really lame.
I heard a wise man once say, “You ride a motorcycle, but drive a Harley.”
Corollary: all the red Ducati monster driving people in my neck of the woods are lame. They’re the new Rebel Fashion Accessory for middle-class guys with sagging guts and a midlife crisis.
Two preppy white girls are walking through the mall with an older woman. The girls are engaged in a gripping conversation about “bitches” in the best Compton/South Central accent they can manage, approaching a Starbucks when one suddenly sticks her hand in the other one’s face, saying “hey yo, hey yo, hold the fuck up.”
She then turns to the older woman, and in her sweetest big eyed white girl “aren’t I so adorable” voice innocently asks “grandma, can I please have five dollars for a Frappuccino?”
That was pretty lame.
Another pretty lame story came from when I was a kid working at a video rental store. The assistant manager was something like 40, also painfully white, reciting Dr. Dre lyrics to a poor woman who had the misfortune of asking him to elaborate when he told her he was a musician. Oh Jesus, my freakin’ teeth hurt to think about that one.
Ugh. Look what I found on eBay. A 1972 International Harvester Travelall with 20 inch bling rims. In fact, the link to the auction reads: “1972 International Travelall 20 inch rims.” As if someone looking for a Travelall - a classic piece of American auto history, much sought after by International enthusiasts - would be happy that those rims are on it.
It seriously breaks my heart. I’m praying that whoever buys that thing will take those hideous wheels off. It’s likely - International drivers and poser gangsters are not two demographics that often mix.
I’ve heard thunder talkin’ up a storm
Rattlin’ my windows and knockin’ on my door
But I’ve seen lightnin’ blow a cypress tree in half
The thunder’s busy talkin’, and lightnin’s kickin’
It ain’t the smoke, it’s the fire that gets the burnin’ done
If it wasn’t for the bullet, nobody’d fear the gun
It ain’t the bark, it ain’t the growl, it’s the bite that hurts
Thunder’s just a noise, boys, lightnin’ does the work
aka, a real cowboy gets it done without all this blathering.
When I lived in Florida, many people of a working-class exurban and rural Confederate cultural orientation, whose skin in the area between their heads and shoulders reflect light in the in the wavelength range of about 625 to 750 nanometers, would have large stickers bearing what they thought were witty short phrases mounted across the top of the front window of their trucks.
Seen on a jacked-up Ford F-350 crew cab pickup with duallies:
I AIN’T COMPENSATIN’!
Another favorite was on the back of a Nissan Sentra seen in a barrio-like neighborhood in Denver. Stretched across the back window, in a large Old English typeface, was the word “CAR”.
Can’t forget the powder blue Dodge Aries sedan with spinning rims I saw in Las Cruces, New Mexico a few years ago.
Reminds me of the Honda element. The marketers expected it to appeal to the young hipsters. Apparently, they’re making an unexpected number of sales to the empty-nesters.
The lamest think I’ve seen lately happened while driving into work the other day. The car behind me was inches from my bumper, swerving onto the shoulder on our right & occasionally into the opposite-direction lane on our left. Over the course of about 15 minutes he passed me and several other people in no-passing zones, always getting 1 car length ahead at a time, diving in and out of traffic.
Well, soon enough he’d got out of sight & the commute proceeded without further excitement. A half hour and 20 miles later I pull up to a stop light & who should be sitting right next to me?
I pointed and laughed until the light changed - he drove straight & I turned left. I’m not sure if he got the joke.
There’s a guy around the corner who drives a Honda Accord. He’s replaced the original chrome badges with ones that say Jeep and 4 X 4. He was two characters away from a cool pun. If the badge had said 4X4X8, that’s the correct dimensions for Accord (a cord) of firewood. He has recently added a bumper sticker. “You wouldn’t understand, it’s a Jeep thing.”
A few blocks from here, there’s a new, very expensive neighborhood. There might be a house or two under a million, but I doubt it. None of the houses have mailboxes out front. There’s a big bank of stainless steel locked mailboxes down the street, and that’s where everybody’x mail goes. You pay a million bucks for a house, and you have to walk a half mile to get your mail!
You Dopers in SoCal may not understand, but $1M gets you a mighty fancy home here. You might have to substitute $3M to get the drift of the story. (I don’t mean any offense.)
I dunno. I think both of these are rather amusing. The first requires at least some minimal ability on the part of the 350 owner to make fun of himself (because, honestly, if he was completely serious, and didn’t want anyone to even think that he was compensatin’ would he really put that on his truck?).
The second just appeals to my sense of generic minimalism. Because if you’re gonna put a big-ass decoration on something, why not stick “car” on your car and iron-on “shirt” on your shirt and name your yacht “Boat”?
It’s a 
He has recently added a bumper sticker. “You wouldn’t understand, it’s a Jeep thing.”