Anyone else notice how "global warming" has magically morphed into "global climate change?"
UPDATE: Yes, someone else noticed.
I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. I mean, I spent most of this week positively twisting and turning in my bed at night, unable to sleep. Every time I came close to even remotely dozing off, I heard the words “nappy headed hos” clang in my brain like klaxons.
As I’ve often noted here in the past, I have a responsibility as a marginally humorous ThunderJournalist to have an opinion on everything that makes the news cycle, and if there’s one thing that dominated the news cycle this week, it was Don Imus and his infamous slur against the Rutgers women’s basketball team. As I’m sure most of you were, I was astounded, because seriously. . . who the heck is Don Imus?
Well, it turns out, according to my research, Don Imus is a “Shock Jock,” a term used to denote a radio personality who uses crass jokes and statements intended to push the boundaries of good taste and discourse in the hopes of building a solid listening base. This came as a bit of a surprise to me because, ever since high school football, the term “Shock Jock,” was used to denote an athletic supporter that had been smeared with ICY HOT.
BELATED SIDENOTE TO MY FORMER FOOTBALL TEAMMATES: Ha, ha! Not funny, guys! You know who you are.
Anyway, Don Imus, a “Shock Jock,” who apparently peaked in influence sometime during the Nixon administration, decided to make one last gasp for radio fame by calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed hos,” setting off a firestorm of criticism decrying Imus’s statement as both racially derogative and a slur against women in general.
It was at this point in the drama where I found myself unable to sleep at night because, honestly, Imus’s critics were correct. Surely, the term “nappy headed hos” was going to set back race and gender progress for at least the next decade, if not longer. How could Don Imus have been so thoughtless, so inflammatory? How will women, and black women in particular, be able to recover from this ill-conceived verbal insult to their gender and race?
Perhaps ironically, it was radio itself that put me back at ease, and by the end of the week, I was finally able to fall back asleep. I believe it was the musical group, the “Black Eyed Peas,” who first started me back on the path to nocturnal slumber. I was on my way to work when I heard it, that tribute to gender equality and non-objectification of women: “My Humps.” It was so liberating, so empowering, I found myself singing along:
“What you gon' do with all that junk? All that junk inside that trunk? I'ma get, get, get, get, you drunk, get you love drunk off my hump. What you gon' do with all that *ss? All that *ss inside them jeans? I'm a make, make, make, make you scream Make you scream, make you scream.”
What more powerful antidote to Don Imus’s hateful screed can you ask for? This is a bra-burning, equality-empowering musical powerhouse, and since it hit #3 on the Billboard hot 100 awhile back, I’m sure it found the ears of millions of impressionable young women.
Not to be outdone, I then heard the heartfelt ballad by Akon (with Snoop Dogg) entitled “I wanna love you,” and again I found myself rapping along:
“Money in the air as mo’ fell. Grab you by your coattail, take you to the motel, ho sale. Don’t tell, wont tell, baby say ‘I don’t talk, Dogg unless you told on me’ - oh well. Take a picture wit me, what the flick gon’ do, baby stick to me and I’ma stick on you. If you pick me then I’ma pick on you, d-o-double G and I’m here to put this d*** on you.”
It practically brings a tear to the eye, doesn’t it? Not since Shakespeare penned “Romeo and Juliet” has such a romance been envisioned. And this song held the #1 spot on the Billboard hot 100 for two whole wonderful weeks!
So, to Don Imus, I say “Good bye, you hateful bigot. You and your race/gender stifling rhetoric are not welcome in the public discourse any longer. Don’t forget your hat on the way out the door, Sir!”
And to the Black Eyed Peas and Akon, I say, “Keep spreading the Gospel, dear minstrels. You’re a credit to your craft, and a shining beacon for female and race progress now and into the future!”
This week will go down in history as the week in which the term "nappy headed hos" became the catchphrase of 2007. I expect Hostess to come out with a new snack treat called "Nappy Headed Ho-Hos" within the next couple of months.
Thanks to Don Imus, I can walk down the street loudly and randomly shouting "Nappy headed hos!" and people will automatically blame Don Imus.
This morning, I awoke in my usually groggy state of half-awaredness and went through the morning ritual of poking contacts back into my eyes and jamming a toothbrush into my mouth.
The morning ritual, it occurred to me, was one successive act of facial penetration after another, culminating in the Q-tipping of the ear canals following the shower. It's no wonder I look defeated each morning, what with the abuse I'm about to put my face through all over again.
At any rate, this morning my contacts were giving me more problems than normal. Maybe my eyes were particularly dry, or I just didn't put the contacts in quite right, but for whatever reason, they kept hazing over and trying to eject from my corneas.
Well, as I staggered sleepily and nakedly down the hallway to the bathroom, my right contact finally freed itself, at which point I enacted the patented "freeze, don't move" pose all contact wearers are no doubt familiar with. It's almost an instinctual reaction: you feel a contact flutter free from your eye, and you stop dead short, like you just noticed a Vietnamese booby trap and don't want to trip the wire.
I started wearing contacts when I was back in high school, which was a time in the evolution of contact lens technology when contacts were worth roughly the same as the Crown Jewels. If you lost a contact lens, you were going to find that errant lens if it was the last thing you did. Otherwise, you'd be dooming your parents into indentured servitude for life after they ponied up the dough for another pair. And you could be darned sure your mother would never let you hear the end of it. Maybe I'm projecting here.
Nowadays, contact lenses are practically given away, but old habits die hard. So it was, at 7 a.m. today, I was down on all fours, naked, inspecting the hallway floor like Sherlock Holmes looking for footprints. After about five minutes of intense floor scrutiny, even the cats seemed interested in lending a paw. Finally, I had to concede the lens was nowhere to be seen anywhere on the floor.
Using my powers of deductive reasoning, I came to the conclusion the contact lens must have then attached itself to me. This has happened before. I've found contact lenses clinging to my chest hair, and on my arm, and even once on my chin. Contact lenses can apparently adhere to anything. So, I logically reasoned the contact lens had to be somewhere on my body. But where?
Did I mention I was naked?
Without painting too obvious of a picture, I caught a glimpse of my missing contact lens clinging to my most favorite bodily area.
The question was whether I really wanted to salvage the contact lens at that point, or just crack open a new box and cut my losses. It was one of those defining moments that would help me further understand who I was as a person. Was I a defeatist? Was I a conservationist? Was I wasteful? Or was I clean? Was I the type of guy who could pluck a contact lens off his manhood and put it right back in his eye? Or was I the kind of guy who would shake that contact off into the toilet and opt for a fresh lens?
I'll let you decide what course of action I opted to follow.
I don't care what that nappy headed ho said. Just get him off the news cycle already. Jeez.
Oh, wait, the Anna Nicole baby DNA results are supposed to be announced today. That should do it.
UPDATE: Man, I'm good.
