Category: Pop Culture

‘Alternate Reality Gaming’–in Spades REPRINT

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

From February 22, 2016

As you read this, remind yourself that our country boasts the biggest, costliest public education system ever devised by human beings.

Here is some of what we get for it.

A dot on a map of New Jersey called “Ong’s Hat,” in the heart of the Pine Barrens, has fascinated people for years. What kind of town would have a name like that? Patty and I went there once, just to see it for ourselves. But there was nothing to see: just a lot of trees and a little-traveled road.

And then one Joseph Matheny in the 1990s invented an Internet game called “Ong’s Hat,” billed as “the secret to interdimensional travel.” And it took off.

“Alternate reality gaming” fans flocked to Ong’s Hat–which, remember, is nothing in particular–looking for a secret laboratory where rogue scientists discovered a way to visit parallel universes: not to mention the parallel universe now inhabited by some of these gamers. The most popular local legend had it that the place got its name from a man named Mr. Ong who, exasperated by a fight with his girlfriend, threw his hat into the air and lost it when it got caught in a tree. But now it was seen to be the nexus of a lot of far-out, conspiratorial goings-on. Gamers even went to Matheny’s house in California to peer through his windows, trying to spy out clues to the secret.

Finally, having decided that enough was enough already, Matheny discontinued the game in 2001. But a lot of people didn’t believe him when he said it was only a game that he’d made up. Sort of like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle refusing to believe Houdini’s admission that he had no genuine magical powers. “Yeah, right!” said Doyle.

Just this morning my editor, Susan, and I were talking about people who can’t seem to understand that science fiction isn’t real; and then Patty read me this article about the Ong’s Hat game which, for some, mutated into a full-blown delusion.

There is no interdimensional travel. There are no starships capable of faster-than-light “warp speed.” No time travel, no evidence that anything like a parallel universe exists, no Slender Man–and there was no secret science project headquartered in the nowhere that is Ong’s Hat.

And they say we’re credulous for believing the Bible.

Maybe we should’ve spent more time in college.

Ignorance and Superstition, in My Own Hometown REPRINT

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

From July 24, 2014

On my hometown “Community Calendar” yesterday, the following two items:

It’s time again for the “annual Animal Spirit Guide Event,” featuring “Our clairvoyant medium.” Have you ever known a medium who did not claim to be clairvoyant? Also, “your Animal Guides will assist you in answering questions about any area of your life.”

In the next town over we have a meeting of the Citizens Climate Lobby, “a national grassroots organization working to build political will to address the challenge of climate change.” They try not to call it “Global Warming” anymore.

My town calls itself “the Brainy Borough.” There’s a rumor that the spirit of a cabbage worm gave it that nickname. We’re spending over $30 million this year to operate our four schools, just about everyone here is college-educated, or going to be–and we’re going to ask the Great Squirrel Spirit, “Should I unload this stock, or hang onto it a little longer?”

As for the Citizens Climate Lobby, “grassroots” means “funded by George Soros” or some other villain. They must think we all just fell off the potato truck.

But the presence of these two items on the same page teaches an important lesson.

When you desert the living God, and reject Jesus Christ the Savior, you don’t just stand there from then on without any god at all.

No–you wind up in the clutches of a false god; and the biggest false god of them all is the State.

“Pay higher taxes, sign away your liberties, and obey us in all things, and our experts will protect you from the dreaded Climate Change.”

Falling off the potato truck is bad enough.

Falling away from God is worse.

A Candy Bar in Poor Taste REPRINT

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

From October 31, 2013

Would you believe it? There is now a Hunger Games Chocolate Candy Bar ( http://www.vosgeschocolate.com/category/vosges-wild-ophelia-hunger-games-chocolate-candy-bars ).

If memory serves, The Hunger Games is about a nasty world where most of the people starve while the ruling class wallows in debauched luxury, and once a year a bunch of teenagers have to kill each other off in a kind of lethal Survivor game: the last one left alive wins a food supply for his or her district.

When I saw this product, I asked the clerk behind the counter, “Are these people serious?” He replied, “It’s advertising; and advertising’s always serious.”

You can always buy a chocolate bar; so what is it, really, that they’re selling here? A chance to identify with the parasitic ruling class? Or a chance to feel solidarity with the downtrodden common people?

Maybe my sensitivities are too nice, but I can’t help thinking this little marketing gimmick is in rather poor taste. If I had written The Hunger Games, I think I would object. I mean, I write about all this misery and suffering, and you name a freakin’ candy bar after it?

The times we live in are not only evil. They are inane.

Satan has a lot of real idiots working for him.

P.S.–I was wonder, what comes next, after the Hunger Games candy bar? My wife suggests 50 Shades of Grey… licorice whips.

 

This Book Has Got Me Cranking! REPRINT

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein: 9781585427123 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

From June 3, 2021

 

I spend hours every week studying the follies and deficiencies of our public education system, the costliest ever created in recorded history. I know it’s awful.

But just one chapter into this book–The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein–had me shaking my head and muttering to myself.

It’s far worse than I thought.

Bauerlein, a college English professor, realizes something I realized years ago. The single worst thing about public school is, it makes your age-group peers the most important people in your life. That in itself was one of the worst ideas ever. But now, says Bauerlein, social media and a plethora of electronic gizmos have made an atrocious situation horrifyingly worse.

Kids and teens now live in the moment, cut off from the past, never pondering the future, unable to look any farther than their own little social media bubbles–obsessed with what other kids are doing, saying, playing… And they know… nothing.

All those boxcar-loads of money spent on “education,” and they come out of college knowing bloody nothing. They’re fixated on their peers in the social media. They never look beyond it. No history, no civics, no literature, no nothing. Maybe they’ll read a comic book now and then. And watch TV.

The author bases these claims on the results of many authoritative studies involving hundreds of thousands of school and college students.

What’s to worry?

Well, they can all vote, can’t they? And they’re always ready to Protest For Social Justice. Because it’s expected of them. Because their peers do it.

It is literally the march of ignorance.

I’m going to review this book for Chalcedon, so I have to read the rest of it. And I think I’d better pray harder! We are talking about creating a country full of conformist know-nothings who will not be able to sustain a constitutional republic. I’m a political scientist, I know these things, trust me: you can’t have a republic of idiots.

The Lout in the Gym REPRINT

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

From  January 7, 2016

I wanted my exercise yesterday, so I went to the Y to play some basketball. “You should know, we have no heat in the gym today,” they told me at the desk. I said I’d work hard and generate my own eat.

Well, they weren’t kidding–there was no heat, and the gym was very cold. That’s why I was the only one in it. But I worked myself hard, and the cold wasn’t cold enough to make me stop.

By and by another guy came in, and he used the other basket. And then a third man entered the gym.

He brought some kind of gizmo with him, set it up on the bench, and began blasting the gym with really loud, really crummy “music.” Just like it was his gym and he was the only one in it.

This is what you get when people are raised by comic books and video games. This lout, this oaf, goes shambling through life unaware that there is anybody else who ought to be considered. He is oblivious to the presence of others. The only way he’ll stop doing something is if someone makes him stop.

You see more and more of this lately. There are now yobbos who double-park on the busy main street of my home town, creating traffic jams for everybody else. They park wherever they feel like parking. They play their “music” at you. When they walk their dogs, they leave the neighborhood decorated with little plastic bags full of faeces. They toss their fast-food scraps into your garbage can. They aim powerful floodlights at your bedroom window all night long. They talk on their cell phones as loud as they can in restaurants, in movie theaters.

Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong and our culture is in good shape.

Where Not to Go for Information REPRINT

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

From October 20, 2013

 

Over years of fishing in Barnegat Bay, NJ, my wife and I caught hundreds of small sharks which we and everybody else called “smooth dogfish.” But were they really smooth-hounds? Could they have been the young of another kind of shark? Curious to find out, I consulted the Internet.

So what’s wrong with that?

A question-and-answer site called “Cha-Cha” blithely informed me that there are no sharks in Barnegat Bay. Yup, that’s the answer from the high-tech oracle. That the answer happens to be completely, 100% wrong would not be noticed by someone who had never fished in Barnegat Bay.

Above the stupid answer, among the ads by Google, was an exhortation to “vote for Peter Barnes,” Middlesex County, NJ, Democrat, because “He believes tax money should be used to fund education instead of CEOs’ retirement packages.”

“To fund education,” translated into English, means to pump colossal sums of money into the teachers’ unions, who will continue to support Democrat politicians by funneling union dues into political campaigns.

So the ad is no more truthful than the phony phacts on Cha-Cha, and certainly no more informative.

Or have we reached the stage in our cultural development where “to inform” means “to provide with false or incomplete information”?

P.S.–They were dogfish, all right. As my wife reminds me, they have the flat, shellfish-crunching teeth of dogfish. So I didn’t need the Internet for this, after all.

The Wacky World of Hate Speech Rules REPRINT

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

From December 22, 2016

A German newspaper, “Suddeutsche Zeitung,” has been examining the labyrinthine rules and formulas by which Facebook decides what to delete as “hate speech” and what to let stand ( http://international.sueddeutsche.de/post/154543271930/facebooks-secret-rules-of-deletion ).

Please don’t expect a detailed explanation from me! It has to do with hate speech creating “an environment of intimidation and exclusion in which people don’t want to share.” There are, as usual, “protected categories” of people, about whom it is not permitted to say anything not nice–unless it’s combined with an “unprotected category.” Or something like that. The example used in the article is… Forbidden: “Irish women are dumb.” Allowed: “Irish teenagers are dumb.” Because women are a protected category but teens are not. I think. It gets kind of complicated, and more so because of certain “bizarre mathematical formulas” employed.

The problem here is that, in our age of political correctness, nobody’s allowed to say anything that might offend somebody else–which rules out almost anything you might ever say. But at the same time, Facebook needs to make money, which it can’t do if its customers aren’t allowed to express an opinion.

The bigger problem is that in the absence of any immutable standard (a Biblical standard, for instance) of morality, no one can ever be quite sure of what is right and what is wrong. And we cannot look for immutable standards of morality from wordly-wise numbskulls who go around prattling about “your truth” and “my truth.”

Again we see a simple truth: there is no Heaven without God at the center of it.

Another Morning in the Doctor’s Waiting Room REPRINT

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

 From June 9, 2014

We don’t have television in our home, but it’s always waiting for me at any doctor’s office. This morning it was the eye doctor.

His TV is always turned to morning talk shows featuring as guests fifth-rank celebrities I never heard of. “And now let’s give a great big welcome to Bajja Bajuvnik from Facebook!” And the audience goes wild. The co-hosts are always some undersized white woman who talks faster than I can hear, and a hulking big athlete with earrings. And of course there’s always a Musical Guest to perform real loud music that I really hate.

Most of the commercials seem to be for antidepressant drugs that could kill you if you don’t watch out, according to the long disclaimer.

You might not need those drugs if you didn’t watch these shows.

In an effort to tune out the TV, I picked up a magazine–New York, the magazine for libs ‘n’ progs who want people to think they’re cool.

A couple of ads jumped out and caught my eye. One was for “Must-Have” sunglasses. Must have? Is there someone out there who needs to get a life?

Another asked, “Are you gorgeous, handsome, young, super-successful and rich… and you don’t have a head-turning woman in your life? If you are, we need to talk.” This was for some “model-quality introductions” service, illustrated with head shots of women who were supposed to be beautiful but actually looked kind of creepy. Maybe they were cyborgs.

Ah, our wonderful popular culture!

Praying to Another Idiot REPRINT

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

From September 4, 2014

Liberals ought to just stay away from religion. It doesn’t come naturally to them; and when they try to imitate religious practice, the results are often grotesque. Like, for instance, this:

A socialist in Venezuela has composed a prayer to the country’s dead dictator, Hugo Chavez. You read that right: a prayer. She has recited it in public. Let me quote it.

Our Chavez who art in heaven, the earth, the sea and we delegates, Hallowed be your name. May your legacy come to us so we can spread it to people here and elsewhere. Give us your light to guide us every day. Lead us not into the temptation of capitalism, deliver us from the evil of the oligarchy, like the crime of contraband, because ours is the homeland, the peace and life forever and ever. Viva Chavez! (http://news.yahoo.com/venezuelan-socialist-party-swaps-god-chavez-prayer-202222347.html )

She recited this blasphemy in front of a banner painted with the likeness of the dictator. I hope the link works, because you gotta see this. Remember, the artist who painted it was trying to make Hugo Chavez look good: probably his life depended on it.

Take a good look at that image. Would you even think about buying a used car from that man? Is it possible to imagine a more unworthy object of veneration than this fat, coarse, squat, toad-faced little tyrant?

Well, okay–here in America we’ve got Democrats and university professors and the nooze media who have on various occasions likened a nasty little commie to a god, while at their national convention, on world-wide TV, they loudly booed the real God’s name. So we don’t have to go back to ancient Rome, or down to Venezuela, to find idiots worshiping one of their fellow idiots as a deity.

Again we see that G.K. Chesterton was right: when a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t just believe in nothing; he’ll believe in anything.

Even Hugo Chavez and that other commie.

Memory Lane: Spring Shoes REPRINT

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

From January 7, 2017

For years I’ve been looking for these, and the closest I could come is this video. Actually, the “Diet Helper” shoes demonstrated by this pair of sages very closely resemble what I have in mind.

My friends across the street always seemed to be the first to get really weird toys that defied our efforts to play with them. Stilts, for instance. But weirdest of all were these shoes with great big springs under them, that were supposed to help you bound around the playground like a kangaroo.

They looked like they should work exactly as expected, but no! We tried and tried, but all that ever happened was, we fell down. Maybe we weren’t heavy enough for the springs. Otherwise, the shoes sort of fit. You just couldn’t go anywhere in them, except down.

Sixty years later, I would love to give them another try. True, the pogo stick was my true art form. You shoulda seen me pogo-stick up and down the bleachers on the football field, up and down the cellar stairs. If my mother could have ever seen that, she would have taken forceful action, if she didn’t keel over in a faint first.

But spring shoes? Oh, to locomote like a human super-ball! Fond dreams of youth…