My Hobby

One of my hobbies, and I don't have many of them, is to go to Amazon.com. Now, I'm certain that most people go to Amazon.com to shop for books, music, DVD's, shoes and other such items. I suppose it's possible to have the rare individual who, while looking for a mythical one-breasted tribe of female archers, mistakenly stumbles upon the amazon.com website. Of course, an individual who was this nerdy and didn't know what amazon.com was would be a contradiction in terms and would likely be sucked into some kind of vortex created by his or her own self discrepancy. These individuals are therefore a non-issue and will not be dealt with any further.

As for me, I go to Amazon.com to infuriate myself.

I take it by your shocked silence that I have completely baffled you. Why, you ask, would someone purposely infuriate themselves and, how, you ask further, would one go about doing this on Amazon.com?

These are two good questions and I will answer them in the order I received them, except backwards. In order to infuriate onself on Amazon.com one must only look up something one enjoys, respects, or/and loves quite a bit. For myself I'll choose Bob Marley's Legend album, his best-selling greatest hits album. Then I'll skip over all the reviews with their five and four star ratings until I get to a one starrer. Then I'll read it. Then I'll get angry. Observe:

""Sit Down! (Siddown!) Shut Up!
It's not about your rights.
Sit Down! (Siddown!) Shut Up!
Oh you awful Whites!"

And so on, through song after song -- a lot of preachy Caribbean whining and racial aggression by the most self-righteous of all reggae "artists." One only wishes that Marley had made it into Oxford (he tried, but affirmative action programs were not what they are today and he was quickly eliminated from the pool) in order to learn the Queen's English. ("Dem sho big words, mon!") Some of his music is faintly catchy, in its own way, but one only wishes that Marley had teamed up with an intelligent lyricist -- maybe V.S. Naipaul, the bard of "third world nations," could have said something useful about Jamaica.

Anybody who listens to Marley after graduating college (where you have to pay tribute to this insipid sort of mult-cult) is either self-loathing or grandiose. As one of the other reviewers put it here, Jamaica's best musician remains Noel Coward, even if he didn't start off there. (And how depressed he would be by the cesspool the once-lovely island has become, in large part due to the "liberation" spawned by Marley's addlepated followers!)"

Grrrrrrr (this is me getting angry).

Now why did I do that to myself? I don't know, maybe because I'm a grandiose self-loathing graduate of a college? I guess the best answer is that I kind of have a sick fascination with reading opinions which I strongly disagree with. Try it. It's kind of fun.