The only answer, ever: annihilate the human race

Last night Jenn started watching season two of Tiger King, and I couldn’t stop myself from bitching and complaining about it the whole time. That’s not entirely true, I barely even tried to restrain myself. I just let it fly because I feel so strongly about it. Anyway, it was all so thoroughly depressing because there were multiple levels of shameful shit.

First, I was pissed at all of the characters at the center of the Tiger King saga. Almost all of them are gutter vermin with zero regard for anything but their 15 minutes of fame, and EVERYONE’S fame in the show is built upon the foundation of cruelty to animals. It makes me sick that so many people are so cruel to animals — and for such fleeting and materialistic purposes!

Then I was pissed at the makers of the docuseries because I remember in the first season they made a tiny 10-second “keeping animals in captivity is bad” PSA at one point, which I thought was woefully inadequate. The whole series just made a spectacle of exotic animals and didn’t focus at all on the conditions the animals were kept in or their health, so I knew that 99.9% of people watching the show were going to be like “whoah, I didn’t know you could get a tiger in Florida, let’s go buy a tiger, babe.” And guess what, I was right. The second season showed how the big cat businesses in Florida boomed after the release of the first season of Tiger King — massive lineups of slack-jawed idiots, eagerly throwing down money to see exotic animals in prisons, all because of this stupid tv show.

I almost wanted to do something about it, like start some sort of social media campaign against the makers of the show, but then I realized that if all the slack-jawed idiots weren’t happily supporting something as cruel and thoughtless as big cat shows in Florida, they would find something else just as cruel and thoughtless to support. The cast of idiots in Tiger King and the makers of the show are certainly part of the problem, but the real problem is that most humans don’t have any problems with these kinds of things, because they don’t care about anything except being entertained and eating greasy food. It’s because of this same reason that people keep burning fossil fuels, dumping plastic in the ocean, waging wars over religions, hating every who doesn’t look the same, eating at McDonald’s, etc. To be a braindead zombie consumer is the rule, while anything else is the exception. So it’s hopeless. Utterly hopeless.

And that’s why I can’t bother fighting Tiger King. Even if Tiger King got shut down, the mutant hordes would find something else just as morally bankrupt and exploitative that they could mindlessly clamour for. So no, the solution isn’t ending Tiger King, it’s ending the human race.

This sentiment sounds vaguely familiar…

Tiger King and bidets

Fuck man, I can’t believe how popular Tiger King is right now. Every time I look on social media or talk to friends, there it is. I wonder if the guy who made that series is rolling in dough right now. Hmmm, more likely the studio that financed him is rolling in dough, now that I think about it. I wonder what the pay structure is for Netflix though, like do they buy the right to show something with a flat fee, or do films get paid per viewing? I bet there are a bunch of different options, and Netflix and the studio figure out something they are both happy with.

Anyway, on one hand I’m really annoyed that everyone is making casual, semi-inside jokes about Carole Baskin or whoever because that’s just annoying. It’s like they’re passive-aggressively saying “look at me, I just watched a hip TV show so I must be pretty hip.” But on the other hand, it’s rare that I get into something at the same time as other people, so I find it a little exhilarating when it happens. It’s neat to feel like I’m part of a wave of something going on across the continent. It was like this with synthwave/chillwave/retrowave a few years ago. So yeah, mixed feelings.

Btw, I’m still nuts about synthwave/chillwave/retrowave. I’ve especially been enjoying it lately. There’s something about the juxtaposition of listening to music that makes you feel joyful while in the middle of a fearful, stressful time — like a pandemic when you can’t see your friends or do normal things. I don’t know how to describe the feeling but it’s like partying as the world burns or something like that. I wish I could describe it better but that’s the best I can do off the top of my head.

A micro trend I am fully excited about though is the Shawnigan Lake bidet trend. Bidets are hot in this town right now, hot, and I’m taking a lot of credit for that. See, Jenn and I listened to a Stuff You Should Know podcast about bidets several years ago, and after that Jenn casually mentioned she wanted one. In typical me style, I made a mental note of that and bought one ASAP, and then gave it to her for xmas. Yup, a bidet for xmas. Sounds like a shitty gift (lol) but she loved it. Ours is just an attachment that goes under the seat but it has a hot/cold temperature adjustment, and a joystick (that’s such a weird word) to move the nozzle around. We’ve had it for a few years now and are big fans of it, and at a campfire earlier this month three of our friends mentioned that they had installed bidet attachments or were waiting for one in the mail. And now old Sassy boy himself just told me he got one too. I’m thrilled this is catching on because a) if you got feces on your hand you wouldn’t wipe it off with paper and say “good enough,” so why is that acceptable for your back door, and b) we were the first of our friends to get a bidet so yup, we’re pretty “far out” as the kids say these days.

I’m a real cool guy.

what did we do before podcasts and documentary series?

Several years ago, Jenn introduced me to This American Life. I had heard the term ‘podcast’ before that but didn’t know what it was. I assumed it was some weird, annoying millenial thing, and I still stand by that to a small extent — who chose the name podcast, and why? The word ‘pod’ is gross, and makes me think of insects or human clones hatching out of gooey eggs.

Additionally, ‘pod’ was used for Apple’s ipod device — maybe that’s where it comes from, because you would download podcasts for your ipod? I don’t know, and I don’t really care, because ipod is a stupid name too. ‘Pod’ is a gross word, why is it so fucking popular now? And why are we putting i’s and e’s in front of every fucking word these days? Iphone, e-bike, e-cigarettes, fucking hell.

Back on track…well, not really: ‘cast’ is another popular millenial word that I don’t like very much. Podcast, chromecast, ‘cast’ from your computer to another device. It’s like people are obsessed with jumping on the trend of absurd buzz words these days, and also that we forget we already have plenty of words that already describe various things adequately. I think people just like to make new names and words because it makes them feel cutting edge.

You know what, fuck it. While I’m on this tangent, I’m also going to complain about the tech industry and its use of gross or weird words across the sector. Seeders, leechers, raspberry pi, cocoapods (pod appears once again), javabeans, jelly bean, marshmallow — terrible. I guess lots of product names are stupid but tech stuff tends to have a special gross/sweet food thing going on and it really rubs me the wrong way.

Jeez, I really went down a rabbit hole there. What I wanted to say before I got wildly sidetracked is that I was amazed at a lot of the stories Jenn and I heard on This American Life. They were so crazy and interesting that I couldn’t believe they weren’t already common knowledge — how did this shit not end up being front page news back when it occurred, I wondered. Then she got me into Radio Lab, which is also great. More mind-blowing stories and information I’d never heard of was introduced to me.

Then some documentary series started to pick up on the same thread. The genre really blew up with Making a Murderer and was followed soon after by The Keepers, Evil Genius, Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez, and some others I’m forgetting. Now, like the rest of North America, Jenn and I are watching Tiger King, and once again I find myself wondering how a story this bizarre was not already widely covered in the mainstream media. Shit, each of the main cast of characters involved in the Tiger King story could be the subject of their own documentary or podcast, they each have that crazy a history. It’s stupefying that they all ended up crossing paths in the same place, at the same time. Maybe that’s just the southern US though, I don’t know.

This is all to say that I’m really grateful that the people behind those documentary series and podcasts (btw, I vote to call them ‘internet radio shows’ instead, or online audio show, something like that). Truth really is stranger than fiction, and as it turns out there is a mountain of worthwhile, fascinating, non-fiction stories out there, just dying to be shared with the masses. This is a trend I actually like, unlike modern language crazes.