Items! Hot Off the Skiddle!

Item 1! Following the timely intervention of my internet buddy Count Fosco, please take 1.5 minutes to watch this rather bizarre video by hip-hop-cum-electronica impresario Kanye West:


A message from kwest on Vimeo.

I can't improve on Fosco's Write-Up of the video, but I would still note that what this really reminds me of is when my friends and I were about 14. For a class project involving architectural models, a group of my friends created "The Tom Selek Memorial Building, In the Heart of Costa Rica!" It featured "The Leather Dome: A Dome of Leather, With Nightly Def Leppard Laser Shows!" and "The Grease Vats: Bathe in Grease!" and "The Imagination Dock: Pretend You're Somewhere Else!" Don't forget that "The Backwards 'S' Stands for 'Quality'!"

In other words, when you're already rich and famous and bored, your sense of humor may shift to the kind of nonsensical cultural melange of clever high-school freshmen.

Item 2! Everyone ought to read Savage Love every single week. I agree with 90% of his advice and he's almost always hilariously on-point. Also, it's nice to read about people and their completely retarded sex problems.

More to the point, following Obama's use of Rick Warren at the inaugaration, Dan Savage ran a contest for a definition of "saddlebacking" (from Warren's Saddleback Church or Ministry or Temple of Doom or Mountain of Power or whatever...) After tallying the votes, the result is in:

"Saddlebacking: sad•dle•back•ing \ˈsa-dəl-ˈba-kiŋ\ vb [fr. Saddleback Church] (2009): the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities."

Well played, Mr. Savage. I'm doing my part to up the google page rank of the definition site.

This makes me think of my blessed (ha, ha) youth. Simply put, none of my homies got pregnant, because all of my homies were raised in a left-leaning, educated environment with real sex education and we all knew that sex was a good thing but that teen pregnancies and the HIV were bad things. Hence, trips to Planned Parenthood at 16 for the free condoms.

Meanwhile, the Palin children are out there spawning and getting dumber by the generation.