This Is Just Stupid!

How many hours per week do you spend watching television? How many hours per week do you spend watching dumb Internet video clips, checking out the latest Lolcats from the icanhascheeseburger site or communicating about nothing on Facebook? Current theories from leading writers on the issue suggest that the latter activities are a sign of human progress whereas if you’re stuck passively watching TV then you’re living in a wasteful time of the past.

A major voice in this discussion is Clay Shirky, the NYU professor and bestselling author featured in the video at the top of this post. Shirky promotes a simple argument: doing something is better than doing nothing. This means that if people have the time to sit around and submit different photos to LOLcats then at least they’re doing something rather than passively taking in television entertainment. As long as we are rich enough to afford to have some leisure, we should be using that leisure time to do something creative.

That’s definitely a sound argument. It’s certainly better to engage in some act of creativity, however stupid, than to do nothing at all with our time. However, is Shirky’s argument that this is a true sign of creative progress really correct? Or is it simplifying things too much? Is it really smarter and more creative to contribute something to a site like RateMyPoo instead of watching an important historical documentary? Shirky’s argument is definitely interesting … and appealing to those of us who want an excuse to enjoy our LOLcats every day. It just might be a bit simplistic in its approach to defining human progress.

Darth Vader, the famous character from the Star Wars series, has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Psychiatrists and psychologists working together in France have taken the time to deconstruct Darth Vader’s personality traits by picking apart the movies that he was a character in. Their determination that he suffers from borderline personality disorder is based in part on the following things:

• He vacillated between idealizing and degrading his Jedi mentors.
• He showed anger management issues and excitability.
• He acted impulsively.
• His permanent fear of losing his wife suggests serious abandonment issues.
• He may have disassociated from himself in certain scenes.
• He had paranoid thoughts.
• He changed his name to Darth Vader symbolizing an identity problem.

The study that led to these conclusions surely took a lot of time by the professional researchers. They had to watch the movies multiple times, dissecting them and discussing them with an eye towards identifying Darth Vader’s personality traits. Why is this stupid? Well, just for starters:

• Darth Vader is a made-up character, not a person.
• There probably isn’t actually enough personal history available for the character to make an accurate diagnosis and psychiatric recommendation for him if he were a real person.
• The study is given serious enough attention to have it published in Psychiatry Research. It is about a Star Wars character.

The argument for the benefit of this study is that it can be used as a teaching tool to help new students learn about identifying bipolar personality disorder. But does that really justify the time and credibility issues involved with giving a psychiatric diagnosis to a movie character?

People say stupid things all of the time. They say things that are racist when they don’t mean to do so. They say things that are just plain ignorant. But we typically overlook what they’ve said. Or we realize that the context they said it in explains why they said it even if we don’t think they should have said it in the first place. In other words, we don’t like it but we let it go.

But we don’t let it go when famous people say something stupid. If a celebrity or a politician makes a stupid comment, we highlight it and give it media attention. And then we make them apologize for it. These public apologies for stupid comments are now the norm from a PR perspective.

For example, young actress Kristin Stewart recently compared the intrusion of the paparazzi into her life to the experience of being raped. For victims of rape, that’s an offensive and ignorant comment. However, we all know what she meant. Instead of just letting it go, non-profit organizations against sexual violence rallied with an outcry against her. She made a public apology.

Another recent example comes from politics. South Carolina senator Jake Knotts called another politician a “raghead”, a clear racial slur. Yes, this is terrible. Yes, he should apologize to her. But when he was forced to apologize he included in his apology that the slur was just a joke. That’s not a real apology; it’s an excuse. And it doesn’t make him look any better to the public eye.

Making celebrities apologize for the stupid things that they said is just plain stupid!

Eating contests are a bit of a strange thing. People sit down and consume large quantities of food in a very short period of time. They do it not because they enjoy the taste of the food but because they want to eat more food faster than the other people at the table. It’s not very good for your body but it’s a past time that some people love.

Still, there are some eating contests that are just plain stupid. The food is gross. And it’s really not good for you to consume it in large quantities. Just for starters, here’s a look at seven stupid eating contests that have got to be bad for your health:

1. Butter. It can not be good for you to sit down and eat plain sticks of butter but that’s exactly what competitive eaters do at butter eating contests. Winners may eat as many as seven sticks of butter in just a few minutes.
2. Mayo. Yes, there are people who eat plain old mayo straight out of a bowl. And they eat more than one bowl. Quickly.
3. SPAM. This just isn’t an ideal food to eat in large quantities. It doesn’t taste good and it’s not good for you. But there are people who eat literally pounds of it in ten minutes or less as part of competitive eating contests.
4. Cow brains. Competitive eater Tokeru Kobayashi has actually consumed eighteen pounds of cow brains in fifteen minutes. Disgusting!
5. Deep fried asparagus. It’s not really healthy to eat anything deep fried in large quantities. At least asparagus is somewhat healthy but can you imagine eating more than a full pound of it each minute for ten minutes straight?
6. 21 pounds of grits. That’s right, the current world champ for one grits eating contest managed to eat 21 pounds of grits in ten minutes. It can’t be healthy to put 21 pounds of anything into your body in that short amount of time.
7. Haggis. Think about eating sheep’s organs inside of a sheep’s stomach. Now think about eating several pounds of it in the next ten or twelve minutes. Yuck.

Bento is a takeout box of Japanese food. It’s become increasingly common in the Western world. It’s convenient and tasty. Usually it’s a rice-based dish that may include seafood or other types of meat as well as vegetables. And sometimes it’s decorative.

Bento boxes can be arranged in ways that turn the box itself into a work of art. You can arrange meats and vegetables with different colors to create abstract works of art as well as realistic pictures. And that’s exactly what the people running the Rock My Bento contest are hoping that you can do.

The contest asks people to create Bento designs that are inspired by your favorite band, your favorite song or your favorite album cover. For example, you might love KISS and create the entry shown above that Susan Yuen created. It’s made from rice, seaweed and a number of other food products. The real kicker, though, is that the tongue is made from bologna.

Winners of the contest do get a payoff – free bento cookbook as well as their choice of a CD from Amazon. So it’s not an entirely stupid contest. But it sure is weird isn’t it? Who really wants to eat images of their favorite band? Especially when your favorite band is KISS?!

We want our mobile phones to be able to do almost everything for us these days. We want to use them to video conference with our business partners from the other side of the world. We want them to serve as entertainment devices that replace our DVDs, CD players, game systems and cameras. We want them to locate where we are and then provide us with detailed information about what’s around us and how to get where we would prefer to be. And cell phone handset makers have satiated all of these desires. But is one company taking things a little bit too far by meeting the needs of a niche market of people who might want their mobile phones to replace their electric razors?!

That’s right; Chinese handset manufacturers have come up with a product called Shave Mobile that serves as a cell phone and an electric razor in one. It’s marketed as a product that is ideal for the frequent traveler who wants to minimize the number of devices that he carries with him but who needs to always have a clean shave.

The $100 phone is a real phone with some of the standard features that you may desire on a basic handset. It has a respectable 2.6” touch screen, 506 kb of on-board memory with the option to extend that with MicroSD cards, a small 2mp camera, FM radio and even Bluetooth. It just happens to also have a built-in electric razor that slides out of the bottom of the device. Perhaps this sounds like a good idea. But then you think about putting your mobile phone close to shaving cream, water and loose facial hair and you might want to think again.