I hope you all had a great Christmas! I had a great trip to Denver, but then my whole family got covid for Christmas! The wife and daughter got it first, and it caught up to me on Christmas eve. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t in church on Christmas eve.
So since I’m not yet back on my feet and capable of providing you the top-shelf snarkery to which you’ve become accustomed, I thought I’d declare this to be “Throw-Back Wednesday,” and re-post two stories I enjoyed writing about last January:
From 1/27/23:
In my recurring “Find A Mirror!” series, this week’s entry comes to us via a would-be Olympic athlete named Sha’Carri Richardson. Her trouble is totally unrelated to the silly apostrophe in her name, even though it does violate one of the well-known rules found in wisdom literature the world over.
(Don’t get into a land war in Asia. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Don’t invest with a leftist weirdo like Sam Bankman-Fried. Never use an apostrophe in your first name. Etc.)
The last time we saw Sha’Carri, she was getting tossed off the US Olympic team for smoking weed shortly before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Rather than, you know, preparing for the Olympics WITHOUT smoking weed. Which sounds just crazy enough to work!
Full disclosure: I can’t say that I ever saw her in any Olympic stories or coverage, because football is not in the Olympics, while many goofy sports are.
(Although there is that one cool sport where people ski around with rifles on their backs, and then stop and shoot things, and then ski some more. Ever since the Finns cleaned up in that event in the 1930s, and then punched above their weight against the Russians in the Winter War, I’ve got a soft spot for that event.)
(Okay, I just looked it up, and it’s called the “biathlon.” Which is what I’ve been mistakenly calling Bruce Jenner for the last several years. Boy, is my face red!)
Where was I? Oh yeah.
If you search Richardson’s name online you’ll find a lot of pictures of her during various races and workouts (between bouts of weed smoking, presumably), and you may notice that her hair was often either orange or yellow.
I only mention this because I am deeply offended by cultural appropriation, and unless there is a Skaarsgard or Hrothgarsdottir in her family tree, she should be ashamed of herself. (Yes, I’ll say it: she’s the Lizzie Warren of pot-smoking, non-Scandinavian sprinters.) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
But Richardson’s latest problem has nothing to do with her vestigial apostrophe, or her racially offensive hair color. It all stems from her advanced case of NUSS (Narcissistic Un-self-aware Snowflake Syndrome), which went from dormant to active on an American Airlines flight on Saturday.
I know what you’re thinking, and let me stop you right there: Obviously, I normally wouldn’t be able to diagnose a stage-four NUSS case without spending some in-person clinical time with the patient.
But in this case, Richardson recorded herself throughout the incident, in the delusional belief that she was 100% correct, and that everyone who viewed her video would naturally side with her. (That belief is actually one of the 7 recognized symptoms of NUSS that you’ll find in the DSM 5. You can look it up.)
Anyway, our video opens with Richardson making a selfie video on the plane, as the recorded message saying,“turn off personal electronics” is playing. (Classic NUSS-ster move!) A passing male flight attendant reminds her to turn off her phone in preparation for take-off, and she immediately NUSSes out on him: “I’m recording me, but you jumped in my video, so I caught you because you jumped in my video. You’re harassing me at this point, so I think you should stop.”
Over the next ten minutes she escalates, getting louder and more profane as other passengers make it clear that they don’t agree that she’s the fixed point around which the entire solar system revolves.
She also gestures dramatically with her boxcutter-length fake fingernails (NUSS Symptom 4), and compulsively flutters her small-badger-sized false eyelashes (Symptom 5).
When the captain finally gets involved and orders her off the flight, her first question is, “Is [the flight attendant] going to be removed off the plane as well?” Then she asks if the captain can come to her seat so that she can make him “understand the situation.” (Symptom 2) She also insists that the flight attendant is at fault because he “invaded [her] privacy” by intruding on her video. (Symptom 3)
Also, she informs one of her fellow passengers that, “I’m still a superstar, and you’re a regular person.” (Symptom 1: NUSS Symptom Bingo!)
As she finally leaves the plane, many passengers applaud.
Now generally, receiving applause creates one of life’s most enjoyable moments.
For example, during my career as a professor, I would often receive rounds of applause, and not just because my funny and thought-provoking lectures weren’t forcing anyone to miss a connecting flight to Dallas. And even when my students would hoist me on their shoulders and carry me out of the classroom chanting, “Simp-son, Simp-son!” they weren’t applauding the fact that I was leaving the building.
Sure, maybe those tales are slightly exaggerated, or maybe in some cases – technically speaking – “imaginary.”
And maybe some of the polite applause I often received had something to do with the fact that I had total power over my students’ grades, so they were like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
(And that’s how you score in the category of “Puritan Sermon References” on Jeopardy, people.)
Still, it is a major red flag when you meet several hundred people for the first time, and 11 minutes later they are cheering as you are forcibly driven from among them.
Therefore, Sha’Carri Richardson, you need to…
Find a Mirror!
From 1/23/23
The British Museum has tragically succumbed to advanced wokeness, having recently decided to stop using the word “mummy.” To spare the feelings of easily triggered 3000-year-old cadavers, I guess?
“So what do I call a mummy?” you’re not asking, because you’ve got a life to lead and you’re not an imbecile.
The proper term now is either “mummified person” or “mummified remains.”
Ugh. Are we going to going to have to discuss mummy pronouns next?
Even the National Museum of Scotland has joined in the insanity. One of their spokeswomen said that they either use a mummy’s individual name (if known), or else “mummified, man, woman, boy, girl or person.”
Which opens a whole ‘nother can of worms. (Sorry: a whole ‘nother can of “soft-bodied invertebrates belonging to the phylum Annelida.”) (See? You learned something here today, didn’t you?) (Also, when you read “soft-bodied invertebrates,” how many of you instinctively thought of Jerry Nadler?)
Anyway, all phyla aside (Boom! Irregular Latin plurals for $1000!), why don’t the insensitive clods in Scottish and British museums consider that saying “mummified man or woman” could be mis-gendering them?
And you cannot say, “I judged based on the mummified phallus on that mummy.” Because if academics have taught us anything lately – and the jury may still be out on that – it’s that women can have phalluses too. (Yes, I could have also said “phalli.” Don’t get pedantic with me when I’m on a roll.)
Now where was I? Oh yeah.
When you read “mummified phallus,” how many of you instinctively thought of either Bill Clinton, Dick “nobody calls him ‘Richard’” Durbin, or Richard “everyone secretly calls him ‘Dick’” Blumenthal?
Okay, this first item has gone totally off the rails.
But only because extending the woke lunacy to the point of trying to protect the feelings of people who have been dead since before Bernie Sanders got out of middle school is so ridiculous.
Even if you accepted the premise, though, here is a short list of things that mummies would be more worried about – if they could worry about anything – than being called “mummies”:
a. Being associated in any way with Imhotep Pelosi.
b. Whether these burial wrappings make their butts look too big.
c. Having had their brains scrambled and removed with iron hooks, leaving them with the cognitive function of AOC.
In related news, I will be calling a press conference tomorrow announcing that we should no longer call dullard politicians, “idiots.” Instead, I decree the favored alternatives to be either, “Idiotic Person,” or “Person Stricken with Idiocy.”
Or, in the case of Joe Biden, “Idiotic Remains.”
Okay, I’ll be back on my feet and writing new stuff again shortly. But in the meantime, don’t forget…
Hamas delenda est!