The most uninteresting segment in the world

I just got done watching a segment on College Football Gameday that was so atrociously bad that I am purposefully breaking my writing sabbath to rake it over the coals.  Yeah.  It was that bad.

The feature revolved around Baylor University quarterback Robert Griffin III.  Griffin the Third is the next Peyton Manning for all I know- but from the amount of effort it appeared that they put into the spot, he might as well be the next Cooper Manning.

No no, I'm totally fine with the fact that I developed spinal stenosis while both my brothers went on to lucrative, Super Bowl-MVP winning careers in the NFL.  I love living in New Orleans and trading energy.  I don't blame God at all...

They led into it by telling us how much of a 'free spirit' Griffin is.  The actual spot borrowed the Most Interesting Man motif, right down to the music, grainy film quality, and the narrator- or maybe it's his brother who apparently has some Pharyngeal disorder.  I liked your first story better.  No offense to RG3, but if he truly is the most interesting man in college football then the NCAA has a personality crisis that goes far beyond the mere lack of knowledge of the Force.

Let's review the list of qualities that ESPN felt qualified Griffin 3.0 to be "The Most Interesting College Football Man":  

Might be the fastest quarterback in the history of football- Hey this isn't the dark ages.  Might be?  Why settle for woulda/coulda/shoulda?  We could actually find this out!  Simply run all of the quarterbacks in history through a series of speed drills, use a complicated mathematical formula to plug the numbers into, and voila- we could know for sure.  But don't try to sell us on speculative qualities- we get enough of that crap from Washington.

Participated in the US Olympic trials- as a 17 year old- Nadia Comăneci scored a perfect 10.0 on the uneven bars during the 1976 Actual Olympics.  At 14 years old.  So basically there have already been kids doing what he did except they did it better and younger.

Graduated early from high school and college- Well that's certainly quite a feat, but I'm sure there are tons of students that have accomplished that.  It either means he is really smart or took really easy classes, or some combination of the two.  I'm not sure if that makes him Most Interesting.  Or even marginally interesting.  Most smart people tend to be boring, and if he just took easy classes, then he probably doesn't have a very wide knowledge base from which to draw his topics of conversation.  

Wears goofy socks- I suppose that's pretty interesting.  I admire a man who can wear kids socks and get away with it.  What really makes this interesting is that Griffin said that each pair of socks "has a story".  Yes Robert, I'll bet they do.  Let's explore some of those stories, shall we? 

Once, when I was a kid, there was Sesame Street, and this blue monster and he just ate cookies.  HAHAHAHAHA

Once, a booster bought me a smart phone...um, I mean, my mom bought me a smart phone, and there was these Angry Birds, and they killed pigs.  HAHAHAHAHAHA

Once, when I was a kid, there was a dog, and he was stupid but everybody thought he was a great detective.  HAHAHAHAHA

Once, when I was a kid, I learned the dangers of toxic waste thanks to these turtles that turned into pizza-eating ninjas.  HAHAHAHAHA

Proposed to his girlfriend using a song that he wrote- Thank you, breath of fresh air.  Proposing to your girlfriend using an original song has probably never been done.  Ever.  Oh wait, what's that?  There was a guitar involved?  Woah!  I've never heard of that sort of thing happening.  Sorry Girlfriend, I was incapacitated by the sheer overwhelming sensation of all the innovation and I didn't catch what you said.  You mean he proposed while you were walking on the football field?????  Who could have ever imagined a football player proposing on a football field?????  While singing a song- that he wrote!!!!!  That is just too cutting edge.  My brain can't process this much creativity in one sitting.  I need to go lie down.

He has thrown more touchdown passes than incompletions so far this year- Please.  That's just a statistical anomaly.  Sure, it's interesting- but that's not something that makes Gryffindor himself more interesting, because technically any quarterback could have accomplished that.  I mean, Peyton Manning could have done that- would that have made him the most interesting man in college football- or any demographic, for that matter?

Actually...

I'm sure that Robert Griffin III is a very interesting guy.  But I think that because of individual make-up of each person, from their unique genetic structure to their environmental influence, everybody is interesting in their own way.  I just wish that ESPN would have made a little more effort to make Robert Griffin III feel like a really unique individual, instead of telling us he was off-the-charts interesting and then showing him putting on kids socks (which is only mild-to-moderately interesting) and listing off a series of accomplishments that happen all the time.




PIC- Cooper- http://www.sptimes.com/2004/11/07/images/large/C_1_cooper2_197601_1107.jpg

Cookie Monster- http://i.ebayimg.com/t/12-24M-SESAME-STREET-BLUE-INFANT-SOCKS-COOKIE-MONSTER-/05/!BuHOHu!!mk~$%28KGrHqQH-DQEv0t1byytBL-+BT7D3w~~_35.JPG
Angry birds- http://www.quertime.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/red_yellow_green_black_angry_birds_socks.jpg
Ninja turtles- http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Q1rDMQBQL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
Scoobie doo- http://assets.lolquiz.com/4b2e384591513.jpg
Peyton- http://c553622.r22.cf2.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/p1_manning2.jpg

Care for the day...but what of our future?

Let me just start off by saying that I love capitalism. I love the free market. Globalism? Huge fan, pleased to meet ya. Internet, technology, having entire segments of the economy devoted strictly to my entertainment- can't complain (although I still find time to do so). Life has never been this easy.

And so obviously I'm writing about why it all seems wrong to me.

The other day, I had a realization of sorts. I've spent the past 5-6 years (with some time off in there) having some sort of direct care work as my primary means of financially supporting my family (other than student loans....eek!). Basically, I have been receiving financial reimbursement (essential for continuing on with life as I've known it) for spending time with other people's children. So in exchange for my time that I'm not spending with my own children, I have helped raise other people's children. So that I can "make it"- whatever "it" means.

What an odd concept. I don't mean to deride daycare- it's necessary for some people so that they can keep the jobs that provide them food and shelter. Lord knows we've had to tap into the Babysitter Pool so often our figurative toes are shriveled up like prunes. But it's frustrating that this economic system that I admittedly am very fond of is responsible for destroying human existence.

Wait, what? That's right. I said it. Boom. Human life the way that God/nature intended it has passed through the digestive tract and now only contains bits and pieces of its former glory.

I think if we were to try and look this a little objectively, we'd acknowledge that we're probably supposed to be a little more like Tarzan and a little less like Wall-E. Instead, we live in an economic system that has distorted the human existence. We are no longer a part of an ecosystem that is symbiotic, but rather we have become the parasites. Except that we have completely bypassed consumption for survival and gone straight on to consumption for the sake thereof.

Sometimes I wish that technology as we know it had never developed. I wish that I was a menial laborer in a small clan somewhere in a rustic setting. I wish that I was playing some sort of simple game with my children instead of finding a new show on Netflix or teaching them how to play Angry Birds. Actually, it'd be pretty cool to play real life Angry Birds, now that I think about it. Using a sling shot to shoot birds at various wooden structures? That's amazing! Oh, someone's at the door. Look, it's PETA. Fudge.

I know that there's probably a degree of 'old days nostalgia' in my wishful thinking. Life wasn't easy back in ye olden days. Life expectancy was shorter. The chances that your children would die before they hit five years old was so much higher that it's a wonder that any children lived past five years old. Not to mention the dinosaurs and lack of oxygen in the atmosphere and the poop on the streets and...okay, I better stop before I convince myself that it's much better to have access to heating, indoor plumbing, and home entertainment centers.

I hate to beat a dead horse (actually, I don't condone the beating of any dead animal. I don't need anymore PETA involvement) but I look at the upheaval in the Middle East, and the crisis in Japan, and I wonder just what the heck I would do if something like that happened here. I have virtually zero survival skills. I exist on food that is packaged for me, preparing it thanks to the instructions that it comes with. I have never hunted, and I'm not sure that I could gut/skin a deer without passing out from wussyness. Shoot, I can't even make a fire without some matches, kerosene, and a weeks worth of the New York Times. I can live in the conditions that have been created for me to live in- but if those conditions are removed, I am effed.

A while back, I touched on the idea of overpopulation (an idea that I still mean with all of my heart to address with empiricism)- and I think that for me, overpopulation has more to do with this style of life that we've created than it does with the number of people that our planet currently houses. Sure, the planet could probably be fine with the number of people that it currently houses- we just need to drastically overhaul how we do everything.

And isn't that what this whole Washington budget/government shutdown thing is about? We have a finite amount of resources that we're trying to allocate, and there isn't enough money to go around, and so there needs to be sweeping changes made, except no one is willing to make the changes because it means a drastic overhaul of how things are done. That's why I believe that overpopulation is a problem- because we are, by and large, unwilling to cut out the things in our society that contribute nothing to our survival other than comfort and pleasure. At least our descent into hell comes on a shiny new roller coaster!

Can somebody just throw a bucket of water at my face (only the water is secretly some sort of acid that melts things)? What a world, what a world indeed.

I'm not trying wax doomsdayical here. After all, the events unfolding in our world today do that well enough without the humble musings of this tiny blogger. But I feel like I am the little pig who tries to keep safe from the big, bad wolf by building his straw house on the sand. Eventually, the whole thing is going to come crashing down and I'm just left there with a goofy grin on my face and a hungry wolf all up in my grill. I have hope for this world, I really do. But right now, it just seems like a fools hope.