Day: June 22, 2009

The McBournie Minute: Pop should represent the populus

There was a time when I considered myself up on all the latest happenings in pop culture. I knew all the big players, all the latest news and gossip, and I knew it all because I could read the celebrity magazine headlines while my mom and I waited to put our groceries on the belt and check out. I was probably seven.

Since then, I can safely say I have focused more on what, rather than who, is cool. I pay attention to certain types of music and certain genres of movies. I watch certain types of shows with certain ads aimed at my demographic. Slowly over the years, it seems I have drifted farther and farther out of contact with what is “fresh,” as the kids say these days. I think.

I realized just recently that basically all of what we define as pop culture is really just what the females of the species find interesting. Let’s run down a few of the latest headlines, shall we? Continue reading The McBournie Minute: Pop should represent the populus

You know what we mean

English majors all look the same.When it comes to sentence structure and self-editing, it’s painfully obvious that most people around us don’t care. We see it in places of business, in advertisements and on the entire Internet.

Sometimes, yes, we’re nitpicking when we point out your errors in written communication. We still “knew what you meant.”

Maybe we were acting like Grammar Nazis all along: rounding up your mistakes, relegating them to ghettos and then eventually exporting them to slave labor camps where your misplaced apostrophes were worked to death, medically-experimented on and gassed before they were cremated and buried in mass graves. Perhaps you weren’t exaggerating at all.

Of course … it only took one typo to set a man convicted of possessing over 100 grams of cocaine (who is also wanted for weapons violations) free.

Giant robot to fight for America’s freedom, not actually all that giant

A man in America is constructing his own gargantuan piloted robot, no doubt to repel an invasion by nefarious foreign powers with their own mechanized monstrosities. And by foreign power, I totally am talking about Japan.

U.S. Army mechanic Carlos Owens put his skills to good use, developing freedom’s last hope since 2004, starting from a scale model made of wood and later moving up to cold, unfeeling metal. America’s defender is powered by a complex (but freedom-infused) network of hydraulic cables and cylinders, and stands 18 feet tall.

18 feet might not sound like much compared to the nearly 60-foot-tall Gundam at Odaiba, but Owens’ masterpiece possesses several key advantages even at this early stage. That complex (freedom-infused) hydraulic network allows the machine to move its arms and bend its knees, allowing it an unsurpassed degree of agility. So far we only observed the Gundam twisting its head, likely to gaze across the seas at its rival. Advantage: no one, since nothing is complete.

Clearly, the next step would be to place “Neo” before every country’s name, and flee to space. Everything after that will be epic.

Let’s face it, it’s tough to beat Vietnam

When it comes to killing off dolphins, few do it better than the southeast Asians. Some of you may remember all the way back to January 2008, when some fishermen from Bangladesh caught a rare Ganges River dolphin in the Ganges River (of all places and beat it to death, then dragged it through the streets.

Now, it seems our, um, “allies” in Vietnam are on the case. We don’t know what exactly they are doing to their dolphins in the Mekong River, but whatever it is, it’s working. Environmental groups that hate humanity say that there are as few as 64 of them left.

Good job, guys! We’re are on the verge of yet another victory. Keep up the good work and we’ll see you when this whole crazy war is over.