The Caesar’s Bath Meme
- Behold, the Caesar’s Bath meme! List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice.â€
Via Celia at Sweetly Pazzo comes another one of those pass it along memes all the kids are so crazy about these days. She didn’t pass it to me, tho, and that’s good. Call it my kneejerk anti chain - letter reaction, but anytime something like this is officially passed on to me it’s a guarantee that I will not do it.
So, since this meme was NOT passed to me, I’ll take a stab at it.
1) HBO series
I know some of them are tremendously popular. In my own home I’ve got rabid Sopranos and Deadwood fans, and careful readers of this blog will remember that this fandom is so intense, when in NYC a few weeks ago we took a 4-hour bus tour of Sopranos shooting locations in New Jersey. Ehh.
I’m not saying these series are worthless or bad. I’m just not into ‘em. The last TV series on any channel that hooked me was Six Feet Under, and that fascination didn’t even last through to the end of the first season.
And another thing: I’m all for the use of profanities wherever and whenever desired, both in real life and on television, but the way the HBO shows relentlessly include the F-word goes so far beyond what’s typical in real life that IMO it becomes just flat-out annoying.
I understand that the massive overuse of profanities on Deadwood [where the best character is aptly named "Swearingen"] is an intentional thing meant for humorous effect, and yeah it does make me laugh sometimes, but not enough to overcome my boredom. I always have the urge to act out a Homer Simpson moment: it would be very satisfying to go over to the TV and pound it with my fists while shouting “Be funnier!”
2) Phones
Yeah, it’s such a cliche at this point why even mention it, but Jebus H Christ! Is there no relief from phones? Is there nowhere we can be free of the eternal everpresence of the goddamn fucking telephone? Not to mention the morons who must use their phones at all hours of the day and in every possible location. I’m sorry, but a person whose idea of acceptable multi-tasking is to make an important business-related phone call while taking a [long, noisy] dump in a public restroom forfeits the right to be treated with respect by myself and any other member of the human species.
I hate telephones. Hate them all.
It doesn’t matter how cool your phone is, or how many things it can do. Doesn’t matter if your phone lets you play Tetris and text message your Aunt Trixie at the same time that you’re bluetoothing for anonymous sex with strangers and photographing your friends undressing in the locker room at the gym and then emailing the pictures to the FBI while you download ringtones of Dark Side of the Moon that come complete with a laser show.
It just doesn’t matter. Phones are evil. Destroy them. Destroy them, I say! Let us return to the happier, saner days of the pithy ten-word telegram.
I’m sure this raging hatred has absolutely no correlation to the fact that a major part of my job for the past 2 and a half years has been answering 50-70 phone calls per day. No no, I’m sure that has nothing to do with it.
3) The Friday Random Ten thing
Some of the most revered and adored links on my blogroll engage in this meme regularly, so I know I’m disrespecting them by saying this, but I’ll say it anyway:
Folks, I don’t give a shit what you’re listening to. The only list that could possibly interest me less is what you had yesterday for breakfast lunch dinner and between meal snacks. I’m thrilled about your breadth of knowledge and your wide-ranging tastes and the depth of your familiarity with every musical style in existence, but if you want me to read your blog, keep it to yourself.
Excuse me, must go do some parenting. Back later with the remaining 2 items…
****
A-a-and we’re back. Allrighty then, here’s the rest:
4) Anime, Manga, Hentai, etc.
Don’t get me wrong about this subject. To some extent, where anime is concerned I feel like I’ve done my time over the past three decades, at several Minicons here in Mpls and at three Worldcons. I’ve spent a night or two curled up on the floor in some dingy hotel suite with 20 or 30 other geeks watching episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam or [Space Battleship] Yamato or Kimba the White Lion or Speed Racer, to name only a few. So it’s not like I never saw anime before, or don’t like any of it. I love Princess Mononoke and enjoyed Spirited Away. Where else could I have witnessed several scenes of a giant slug vomiting uncontrollably?
But as for most other examples of this artform: it’s all just so excruciatingly tedious and non-engaging, I boggle at why on earth the stuff’s so popular. Or maybe I’m not seeing the interesting and creative aspects of these stories because I’m so put off by the goddamn freakin’ awful style of drawing faces. Every single humanoid character, no matter what age, has the face of a four year old child. We must find this child and give her her face back! Ba dum bum! Sorry.
And don’t get me started on hentai.
**NAIF ALERT!***NAIF ALERT!***NAIF ALERT!***
Okay, yeah so I’m naive. The world is a big ol’ stinking cesspit and the quicker I get wise to that the better off I’ll be, yadda yadda. Okay, I’ll try to understand how the big bad world operates, but I’m gonna need a little help here.
Will someone please explain to me why so many alleged human beings find sexual gratification in images of females being dominated, humiliated, raped, tortured, and brutalized? Of course, hentai doesn’t have the corner on that market by a long shot; just try to find any comic porn from Europe or Japan or the US or anywhere that doesn’t focus on this particular, very popular stock in trade.
Well, these are cartoons after all. Comic porn thrives because it’s a safe place where every feverish forbidden fantasy can be fleshed out and made real in some sense, so it can be confronted and dealt with. Laid to rest, as it were. But why does so much of it involve the inflicting of pain? Pain and suffering. Always, or practically always. Here comes the naivete again, but what is erotic about inflicting or suffering pain? Umm, silly me, I thought sex was supposed to be fun. For everybody involved. How is pain fun? I reject pain as entertainment, especially when female public figures are involved [think of the Freep wankers out there giggling over their massive stockpiles of photoshopped Hillary porn]. I don’t like it even when the scenarios involve female public figures whom I can’t stand [Paging Ann Coulter! Paging Michelle Malkin!].
Agree with me? Right now you have a unique opportunity to put your values to the test.
***THE FOLLOWING LINK CONTAINS UNFILTERED ADULT CONTENT***IF YOU REQUIRE WARNINGS ABOUT SUCH THINGS, CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED***
Go read this and then come back and tell me whether or not you enjoyed it.
What I find so particularly revolting about hentai porn are the depictions of pain and fear and suffering [which are apparently considered almost essential to getting the viewer off] drawn ever so carefully, as always, on four-year-old-child faces. Not that the images would be any less repugnant if the females had adult faces, but by putting pre-pubescent child faces on the bodies of brutalized females, hentai porn plumbs depths of depravity previously undiscovered. Undiscovered in my world, anyway. Would that those depths had remained undiscovered– but there I go being naive again.
And what was it that led me into those particularly dank alleyways of the Internets, where I acquired such unholy familiarity with cartoon pornography? You may well ask, and I may well tell you.
For the past 6 years I’ve been working on an, umm, extended piece of historical fiction [Note to self: It's a novel,you pinhead! Why are you so freaked about calling it what it is? It's a N-O-V-E-L. Go on, say it!].
The events of the… uhh… historical fiction… writing exercise… thing…[NOVEL, bugwit!] take place in the years between 1920 and 1950. One of my characters, a GI serving in the Phillipines during WWII, at one point reads something called a Tijuana Bible. Now, I knew that Tijuana Bibles were little books of cartoon smut that were favored reading amongst our fighting forces. They contained explicit drawings of cartoon characters having sex — Popeye and Olive Oyl, for example. But I had never seen a Tijuana Bible, and I wondered: just how explicit were these cartoons?
So, I started by Googling “Tijuana Bible“… And the rest is history. Comic Porn history, that is. Watch your step there, gentle reader. The footing gets a little …sticky.
5) I got nothin’ for #5
So does there have to be a #5? Hasn’t this post gone on far too long already?
Basta, then. G’wan, get outta here, ya wild kids, ya.
So much for the Caesar’s Bath meme.
Tild sez: C’mon kids. Do what I did. Accept Sid as your personal Caesar!
Posted: April 30th, 2005 under General.
Comments: none
For an all but forgotten and surprisingly modern comic study of the uber-rich mingling with the proletariat, set yourself down in front of the tube on Monday April 25, at 9:45 PM Central Time for 
The day after that, Tuesday April 26, watch Letterman and, if there’s a pan of the audience you might just get a peek at Yrs Truly and hub, the indefatigable Leland “Buzz” Meeks. I’ll be the middle-aged yet still compellingly attractive big fat tub o’ goo wearing bifocals plus a second pair of glasses on top of my head. 
I won’t be posting much for the next few weeks. My last day at my current job is this Friday the 29th, and with no new job on the horizon, I need to kick the employment search into high gear.
Marriage is the most sacred of all unions, except when it isn’t.