NPR Writer Apparently the Head of the Etiquette Gestapo

NPR - Listen to the conversations around you — colleagues at the office, customers in the coffeehouse line, those who serve you, those you serve, the people you meet each day. "Give me a tall latte." "Hand me that hammer." "Have a good one." Notice anything missing? The traditional magic words "please" and "thank you" that many people learn as children appear to be disappearing. Lisa Gache, co-founder of Beverly Hills Manners in Los Angeles, has noticed the gradual vanishing of courteous language. She blames the casualty on the casual. "The slow erosion of the 'magic words' in our everyday vernacular," says Gache, who coaches people to be more civil, "has to do with the predilection toward all things casual in our society today. Casual conversation, casual dress and casual behavior have hijacked practically all areas of life, and I do not think it is doing anyone a service." Other polite phrases also seem to be falling by the wayside. "You're welcome," for instance. Say "thank you" to someone these days, and instead of hearing "you're welcome," you're more liable to hear: "Sure." "No problem." "You bet." "Enjoy." Or a long list of replies that replace the traditional "you're welcome." Instead of saying "thank you," people say "got it." Or "have a good one." Or, more often, nothing at all. And in lieu of saying "no, thank you," reactions such as "I'm good" are increasingly common.

Dear Writer, stop being such a god-damn etiquette snob.  Our bad, didn't realize that our modern diction was so offensive to your old-world sensibilities. Didn't realize that you didn't have your 21st Century English Diction thesaurus on you when I responded "no problem" after you thanked me.  Sorry, we really just figured anyone bright enough to be able to write such a well thought piece would have no issues communicating with us commoners. 

This column is just insufferable and out of touch, words and customs change, get with the times. These people aren't being impolite, they've just changed their etiquette to match societal expectations. Not everyone has the time to say, "Hello, how are you today," in fact I've never uttered those words. It's "How's it Going," or "Hey,"...Actually, it's not even "How's it going," it's more abbreviated, like "zit going." That's it, that's what you're going to get. And it's not being rude, its just, there's over 300 million people in this country, and most of us are just very busy. We've got shit to do. If we spent all day adhering to out of date social norms we'd never get anything done...Pining for the old way of greetings and salutations is like pining for the days of hand written letters as a form of communication, written with a feather and an ink-well, obviously. 

While we're at it, I'd like to propose another change, another societal leap forward, lets stop saying "bless you" after people sneeze, it's getting out of hand (and not because we've shortened "God Bless You" as the writer of this column probably laments).  It's to the point now where if you hesitate a second in blessing someone they get all holier than though on your ass, demanding blessings. Easy, settle down folks. I believe you asked me to bless you, I'm not obligated. Slow    Your     Roll.  Plus, it's the only bodily function where the people around you are expected to behave according to your expectorants. If I burp, I get disgusted looks (maybe a laugh) but have to excuse myself, if I fart, I'm forced to pretend it wasn't me and look for a stranger to blame it on, but if I sneeze, suddenly I'm the next prophet with people bowing before me and blessing my health. It doesn't make sense and it's time to stop.

Or it's food for thought anyway. 

Tip-Off Time! My Region by Region March Madness Picks

Yes, these are a day late. No, it's not because I was afraid you'd steal them, sometimes I'm just lazy.

Lets start with the South:

Fairly straight forward, with the exception of Duke, I hate Duke and I look for the first chance to knock them out every year. This is often done at the detriment of my own bracket, no matter, a grudge is a grudge and I'm morally obligated to pick them to lose. I've also never been a fan of Notre Dame if you're wondering, either. Weird, because I'm white, right? I've never fallen for the cult Caucasian thing when it comes to rooting for the fighting Irish, it's just always felt like they're out of touch and living in another era, they just don't do it for me.

On to the West:

By far the most difficult portion of this years bracket, and the one most likely to have a bunch of scribbled red "X's" all over it after the first weekend. Three of my personal favorite surprise teams were stuck in this bracket, Florida, Memphis (who got absolutely shafted with that seeding), and New Mexico. Throw in this years Mid-Major darling Murray State, and you've got the potential for landmines everywhere, in fact in a few cases you just have landmines facing off against landmines. No one wins when to landmines get into a knife fight, no one. What I'm saying here is, this sub-bracket is going to be fucked no matter how you fill it out. Whoever makes it out of the West the least-scathed, will probably win your pool. It'll also probably be a girl, which is why I had the fiancee fill out a bracket last night, for insurance purposes.

On to the East:

"Oh, big surprise CW, you took K-State and Vandy like everyone else in the country." Shut up. I'm very aware of who I am, and I'm nothing if not a follower of trends, so this should shock no one. For the lower half, I had the hardest time not taking Florida State over OSU, they're my darling heading into this tournament, if you follow me on twitter (which I know you don't) you saw me last week lobbying that they were as good as any potential 2 seed in the country, and I still believe that. The problem is OSU is as good as any 1 seed, so you see the conundrum. By the way, in case you're wondering, I chose West Virginia solely on the Merits of Country Road, it's the best bar song in history. I'm not even kidding, about the pick or the FACT that Country Road is the best bar song in history (I mean, it even gets them going in Bangkok). 

Finally, to the Midwest:

Let's just state the obvious, I'm a huge North Carolina fan. While this is certainly a flawed team, they're also the most talented team this side of Kentucky...Now that that's out of the way, I'm actually really, really looking forward to two potential match ups here, the 1993 NCAA Championship rematch (This Time, It's Personal...19 Years Later) of Chris Webber's One Shining Moment, and the potential Roy Williams V. Kansas Elite 8 Heavyweight Bout...There is nothing that gets me going more than seeing Roy fired up in a post game press conference. He controls the room as the king of passive-aggresivism, and it's a fantastic watch. You can bet your ass it'll be on full display before and after a potential match up with Kansas.  On to the bottom half (sick segway, right?), things get a little wacky with Belmont and NC State. I picked them both for two reasons, A) Because I actually think they're both much better than their seeds suggest, and B) For some illogical reason I always remember previous years brackets being blown up in the lower right region. So yes, I'm partially basing my picks based on team's locations on a sheet of paper. 

On to the Final Four:

Chalk, Chalk, and more Chalk. All season long there has been a group of 6-8 teams who just stood out above the rest...in fact, until somewhere after mid-season there really wasn't even a consensus #1 over all, just a bunch of really good teams that were clearly better than the rest of the pack. Kentucky managed to separate themselves from this pack a little but for the most part the pack was intact throughout the whole season. I think a strong case can be made for Wichita State making the Final Four, Florida State too, but I'm not going to pick them. This whole NCAA season has been about this core pack of teams, and who would rise to the top come tournament time, I think we're going to finally see that sort itself out.

The Finals:

I kind of alluded to it in that previous paragraph, but Kentucky is just this years team. This is Coach Cal's year (insert joke about later vacating his year here). Plus, I'm nothing if not self loathing and superstitious. I can't simultaneously love North Carolina and pick them to win the whole shebang...I can't handle that kind of disappointment if they lose...that's right, I'm hedging my rooting interest against my bracket for sanity purposes. 

Anyway, there you have it, it might not be the most logical bracket, and it probably won't win any of the pools I'm in (again, that's why my fiancee filled one out too), but god help me, I'll beat Barrack O'Bama.

Iranian-Americans Petitioning New Bravo Show, The Shah's of Sunset

Fox News - They’re rich. They’re spoiled. They’re Persian. Which means Bravo’s latest reality endeavor, “The Shahs of Sunset,” has Iranian-Americans up in arms over the stereotypes they claim it perpetuates. So much so, in fact, that petitions are circulating in Iranian communities to have the show yanked off the air. The program, which premiered on Sunday night, follows a group of six Persian-American socialites in Los Angeles as they navigate love and life with what seems like bottomless checking accounts. The show is produced by Ryan Seacrest, who is also the executive producer of “Keeping up with the Kardashians,” and the various spin-offs of that venerable series...The show’s focus does seem to be on the characters' frivolous sides. Golnesa 'GG' Gharachedaghi, who is being heralded as the next Kim Kardashian, is a 30-year-old trust fund baby who uses her father’s credit card to buy designer clothing and vehemently argues on the first episode that she does not like “ugly people.”..Another, which has collected 500 signatures on Change.org, argues that the show promotes racial stereotypes. One signer of that petition, Shepard Jacobson, commented: “The show wants to present caricatures of Iranian-Americans. This is not entertaining. Rather, it is racist and only encourages others who do not know Persians in our American society to feed into the worst kind of stereotype, rather than showing a new generation of ambitious yet hardworking Iranian-Americans.” 


Hold up...Racist? Can something really be racist when it's portraying one particular extended family's wealth and extravagant lifestyle, am I getting that right? So portraying a bunch of filthy rich Persians as your typical Hollywood Hills celebutants, basically as obnoxious an American subset as you can find, is racist? I would have thought that was the most welcoming sign possible for Iranians. Like, "hey, you can act like the white spoiled brats out here and we'll make you famous too!" No? I would have thought racist would be filming the father of this clan involved in money laundering schemes in some dark basement with possible terrorists or something, not following the day to day drama of his daughter and filming her presumably many Mani-Pedi dish sessions. That line about "worst kind of stereotype" is an absolute joke. The worst kind of stereotype would involve the show insinuating that the family is funneling money back to Iran to fund their Nuclear Weapons research...but as far as I can tell that's not going on here.

It's not racist people. If anything we were being more racist before this show. I mean there wasn't one degrading show about Persians on American television prior to this, that was a travesty. Whites had The Real World, The Challenge, The various Kardashian franchises, The Jersey Shore, the Teen Mom franchise, Real House Wives of New York and LA, the list goes on. Blacks had the Bad Girls Club (on Oxygen, I'm sure you've never heard of it), Real Housewives of Atlanta, and Basketball Wives. It's about time the Persians got into the mix.

Plus, its on Bravo, which is basically E!-light these days. People aren't exactly watching these shows for intellectual curiosity reasons. We're not trying to glean some societal insight into the every day life of real Persians. We're watching junk television and trying to feel better about ourselves because even though these reality people have more money than most of us can ever dream of, they also tend to be dead inside, and that makes us feel good.

So spare me the racist petitions, the claims of injustice, and any other bullshit PC complaint you have. This show is as American as Apple Pie and white trash, and Persians should be proud.

Jermaine Jones Being Kicked Off Idol for Hiding Criminal Past

TMZ - Jermaine Jones will be kicked off "American Idol" Wednesday night, after producers learned he concealed the fact that he was arrested twice last year and has outstanding warrants ... TMZ has learned. As we first reported, producers discovered Tuesday that Jermaine had lied about his criminal history and that triggered the decision to confront him on camera Tuesday afternoon. We're told one of the incidents involved violence, which was particularly troublesome to producers. He also lied to cops by giving them fake names both times he was arrested.

First off, if you're following Idol this season and don't want any spoilers, don't read the title to this post or look at the picture above...

But since I'm guessing you've already done both, you might as well follow along as I spin a little tale of an American Idol Conspiracy Theory. 

Yesterday, when I first heard that Idol would be kicking someone off for their criminal past my mind immediately raced as to who it could be. I skipped right over all of the black contestants as years of white guilt have taught me to do (because obviously if I assume that it's the gigantic hulking black guy first, I'm a racist), so I pinned it on one of the older blonde girls, maybe one of them had a crystal meth problem, who knows? 

Wrong. It was Jermaine. And then my mind started turning. "Wait a minute, Jermaine's the one they initially cut, and then brought back to create the "Top 13," even though he sucks." And I mean, really sucks. Sucks so bad that I've fast forwarded after listening to the first 30 seconds of each of his last 3 songs. Yea, it's a nice deep voice, but unless you're singing the theme song to some Disney animated movie, there's just no place for that voice. I couldn't figure out why the judges kept him. 

Until yesterday, it all makes sense now. Feeling pressure from rivals The Voice and Simon Cowell's X-Factor, the Idol producers needed to do something to set themselves apart, and that's exactly what they got here. A chance for a twist and a surprise shake up when they have to send one of their own home for criminal transgressions and outstanding warrants (and Jermaine, if you have outstanding warrants, maybe entering a nationally televised competition isn't the best way to hide yourself). Boom, you've just hijacked the news cycle for at least a week, obliterated the voice, and stolen the "edgy" title from X-factor in one move. 

And you would have gotten away with it scot-free, if it wasn't for this one blogger with a wild imagination. 

RIP, Encyclopedia Britannica

HuffPo - "The Encyclopaedia Britannica", the world's most famous print encyclopedia, has announced that after 244 years in print, it is no longer going to make new physical copies of its flagship publication. The 32-volume, $1,395 edition that the Chicago-based company put out in 2010 was its last; future versions will live entirely online. 

Oh, Encyclopedia Britannica, I hardly knew ye. You came into my life at a very confusing time, old world standards for knowledge were still in high regard, and yet there was this new fangled form of information, the CD-Rom.  

Beg and save as little CW might I never could convince my parents or save up quite enough for the full collection of those beautiful leather bound books from antiquity. Sure after saving like, 10 months of chore money I could have afforded a few off-letters, maybe a Q, a V, and possibly an F or something like that, but I was never getting any of the star letters, the S' and T's, and A,B,C's of the world. Those were out of reach, and frankly, with the welcoming of Encarta's CD-Rom based encyclopedia, unnecessary. 

Our chances for crossing paths never came any closer. Yes, I'm pretty sure my high school had a set from like 1978 hidden in the back somewhere, but by then I'd even ditched Encarta, the internet was everywhere at that point and things would never be the same. 

So long Encyclopedia Britannica, and thanks for the years of knowledge you purportedly contain. I may have never read you, but my intellectual curiosity leads me to such claims as, "I always wanted to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica collection." You were also my first career aspiration, as nothing seemed higher than door to door Britannica salesman. Families everywhere spurned door to door Mormons and Jehovahs, turning them and their "literature" away, but you always took time to at least listen to the Britannica man, because you knew the wisdom he held.

Woman Rescued After She "Accidentally" Fell into Trash Chute

DUNWOODY, Ga. (NewsCore) - A Georgia woman was rescued by firefighters Sunday after she became trapped head-first in a garbage chute. The unidentified woman accidentally dropped her cell phone into the chute at her apartment building in the Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody, and became stuck between the first and second floors when she tried to retrieve it, WXIA-TV reported. Police said trash lodged in the chute prevented the woman from falling into the compactor at the bottom.

Come on lady, just tell us the truth. We've all wanted to take a ride down one of those chutes once in a while. You can't tell me your phone accidentally flew down the trash shoot and you happened to comically fall end over end into it an expect me to believe it, can you? Just come out with it, I have no problem with it, every time I see one of those gigantic trash chutes coming out of a building I can't help but think of how much fun it would be to jump through it. 

There's an easy way to get down to the bottom of this woman's story too, just check the dumpster. If the dumpter's been prepped with soft garbage, cardboard, and maybe packing shells if they were available, then she was 100% just trying to cross something off her bucket list. 

If that's not the case, well then she's a walking looney tune...Daffy Duck never even got himself into situations this outrageous.

Entire Arena Football Team Fired At Dinner at the Olive Garden

Yahoo - The owner of the Pittsburgh Power fired all 24 members of his team during a pregame meal at an Orlando-area Olive Garden. With AFL players set to strike before the 2012 season opener, owner Matt Shaner reacted first, cutting his entire team hours before kickoff of a game against the Orlando Predators. Mid-statement, all the players got up and left," former Power center Beau Elliott told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "Every player got up and left while he was still talking. There were 15 to 20 angry, large individuals." The AFL Player's Association was calling for an increase in the $400 game checks paid to most players on each team. The union demanded a 300 percent increase in the minimum salary. AFL owners countered with a $100 raise.

Let me just say this, the owner of the Pittsburgh Power, this Matt Shaner guy, is straight gangsta. I mean, there are power moves, and then there are POWER MOVES. This is probably the coldest move I've ever heard of. Firing all your employees in the middle of the Olive Garden's endless breadsticks and salad? Ruthless. 

I just imagine Shaner just watching all the salad bowls come out, the bread sticks hit the table, he's got an evil, Montgomery Burns like grin on his face, watches to make sure they've all taken a bite or two out of their first stick and then boom, drops the bomb on everyone.  "Bread sticks good guys? Good, glad to hear it, by the way, your greedy asses are all fired, but please, eat up, the salad and bread are endless."

The thing I don't get is the players leaving. I'm working under the assumption that the team was paying for this meal, no? Fire me all you want, but you should know that I'm not leaving this chair until they physically have to roll me out of the restaurant. The one thing you do not do is leave a bread stick behind, those thing are delicious. 

Tide Detergent is What's Hot on the Street: Record Level Tide Thefts Baffle Police

NEW YORK – Law enforcement officials across the US have been left baffled by a crime wave targeting an unlikely item -- Tide laundry detergent. Theft of Tide detergent has become so rampant that some cities are setting up special task forces to stop it and retailers like CVS are taking special security precautions to lock down the liquid. One Tide thief in West St. Paul, Minn., stole $25,000 of the product over 15 months before he was arrested last year. "That was unique that he stole so much soap," said West St. Paul Police Chief Bud Shaver. "The name brand is [all] Tide. Amazing, huh?" Tide has become a form of currency on the streets. The retail price is steadily high -- roughly $10 to $20 a bottle -- and it's a staple in households across socioeconomic classes. Tide can go for $5 to $10 a bottle on the black market, authorities say, and some thieves even resell it to stores.

You know who is really going to have egg on their face after this story, the CEO's of rival detergent companies like "All" and "Cheer." I can just picture the executives at these companies being called into board meetings or shareholder meetings and having to answer to questions like;

"Tide's shit is so good hoodrats and junkies are stealing it just to resell it, meanwhile our product is just left sitting there on the shelf. What's your 5 point plan for raising our street cred and becoming a form of ghetto currency?"

And there's just no answer to that, Tide has just got the game on lock. Yuppie housewives and maids with the family credit card just stocking up on Tide, raising the price, forcing the rest of us to either steal it or make the tough decision between eating dinner or washing our clothes (seriously, $20 for detergent fellas? Is the main ingredient regular unleaded gasoline?).

But seriously for one second, are there any black market Tide dealers in the Boston area? I'm definitely interested. 

 

Quite Possibly the Best Used Car Sales Commercial Ever

Cuban Gynecologist, American Auto Salesman, Either Way You're Fucked.

I have a feeling that joke would have gone over a lot better if he was a proctologist, just assuming I'm getting a few angry woman e-mails after that one, oh well.

You know what I like about this guy, he's direct and to the point. He's not bullshitting around talking about comfort zones, cup holders, and auxiliary ports, he's got Car!, Motorbike!, and he used to have a guard dog. It's a pretty simple sales pitch, you need a car or motorbike, he'll sell you one.