weep for humanity

this blog has countless lines and laments about the public. i'm forced to work with huge sections of it and pretend to care about their allergies and birthdays, travel woes and what-not. as i've gotten older it's gotten easier, but it takes its toll nonetheless.

over the last weeks i've had a couple too-close encounters with kids between the ages of 10-16 who behaved like savages. all were with their families and in groups of about 6. what children that age were doing in a place that costs $100 per person for dinner is another point entirely, but what they were all doing in a place in which they had no idea, nor enforcement, of how to act was truly shocking. yelling, hitting each other, cross-talking to the point of shouting, poking other staff members to get attention and whims met... exhausting and appalling. parents, aunts, uncles all blithely carrying on like the cherubs were charming little victorian models of seen and not heard.

you also know much of my teeth-gnashing finds fault in the modern ubiquity of reality tv. hours and hours of programming that must be filled with an ever lowering levee of stoopidness. as a kid, i howled with laughter at the gong show and match game, but the unkown comic was in on the joke, ya know? now it's people fiercely fat, ignorant, with a sense of entitlement simply busting at the seams. watching even little snips makes me uncomfortable and weirdly sad.

as if i needed more evidence, the internet offered me this today. this clip must be watched all the way through. it's another simon cowell project and the brit version of american idol, i suppose. the moon-faced obese girls, folds of fat flopping over their belts and spandex and uggs, unable to stitch together a coherent sentence, never mind explain why they'd like to be on the show. their "singing" is shockingly bad -- like william hung she-bangs-bad -- but unlike hung, who rode his 15 minutes pretty well, they are rude to the audience and boorishly insolent to the panel of judges. they go from bff's to fist-throwing enemies within 6 minutes, in view of millions on tv and their parents backstage.

i weep anew for everything that this video proves to be true.