How about those Millennials with their techno-screens, basement apartments, and participation medals? Here are ten reasons why Millennials are the worst generation of all the generations that have existed since the dawn of life:
1) Millennials are the most selfish generation of all time because they take selfies. If you look closely, the word self is right there at the beginning of the word selfie. In fact, if you were especially clever you would realize that all you have to do is take the E off the end of the word selfie add the letters S and H (as in “sh, you entitled millennial, you are not allowed to speak”) and you get the word “selfish.” Coincidence? I think not. If you look up the etymology of the word selfie, you will find that there is not a whole lot of information that you didn’t already know about it beyond the fact that it came into parlance sometime between 2002 to 2005. Why does the word selfie suck so much? Because it is a made-up word and made-up words are bad. Language should be static or at least glacially dynamic so that shit words like selfie do not get adopted. Furthermore, back in the day, if you wanted a picture of yourself you had to spend hours and hours gazing at the mirror and getting the proper proportions while you penciled in the lines. Then you had to mix your pigments just right as you gazed even more deeply into the mirror. Then, of course, you had to paint the whole thing. What do millennials even know about that painstaking process? They just lift up their techno-phones and clickety click them and then post the results on their snapograms.
2) Millennials are terrible because they received plastic participation medals. A day does not go by without some entitled millennial posting up a picture of themselves brandishing a plastic medal they received for participating in a track and field day back in the nineties. Unfortunately, due to the sugary cereals they consumed as children, millennials cannot differentiate between plastic medals that say “participant” and metal medals that say “1st.” Millennials think they are winners by virtue of the fact that they received cheap medals and ribbons that acknowledged that they were present at an event and took part in it. They are oblivious to the idea that when they raced or competed in sports, there were other millennials who were faster and/or better than them. Basically, participation prizes create individuals who cannot calculate ordinal numbers. Try this sometime: go up to a millennial and ask them what they did first that day. They will squirm and frown and look utterly confused because they have absolutely no conception of what first, second, and third are. Why? Participation prizes.
3) Millennials have too much self-esteem because their parents and teachers all told them they were special. Coddling children by telling them that they have value and deserve to be treated fairly is the worst thing you can do for them. It does not prepare them for the realities of the workplace, where they find out that they do not deserve to be treated fairly and that they have very little value. Parents and teachers really should have taken a page out of the play-books of your average Dickensian villain by telling the children that they are worthless and that no one will ever love them because they are just dirty gutter urchins. This way, when millennials do arrive in a workplace and are given an actual wage instead of a bowl of gruel, they will have the tears of gratitude in their eyes that being paid an actual wage warrants. In the immortal words of Mr. Bumble from Oliver Twist: “What have paupers to do with soul or spirit either? It’s quite enough that we let ‘em have bodies.”
4) Millennials are entitled brats. Millennials are constantly whining and moaning about “making fair wages,” “the high cost of living,” “inflated housing markets,” and “being treated decently in the workplace.” You never saw previous generations demonstrating for these sorts of things. If you examine history closely, you will see that corporations and business owners (peace be upon them) have always acted in the best interests of their employees without any other motivation than the sheer goodness of their big capitalist hearts. Where do Millennials get off wanting to have jobs and homes like their parents had? Previous generations were happy just to have LSD trips or start large-scale land wars. Not Millennials. They want all the opportunities and low cost of living that their parents and grandparents had without the requisite privilege. That’s too bad, because the previous generations earned those things by being born into it. It was sort of a birthright they were entitled to. Millennials, on the other hand, have no birthright beyond mockery for being snowflakes.
5) Millennials are responsible for terrible music. While previous generations are responsible for rock gods such as David Cassidy and Milli Vanilli, Millennials have only ever produced aural dissonance. Where is this generation’s equivalent to disco? When will they produce their Herman’s Hermits or their Baycity Rollers? Half past never, that’s when.
6) Millennials are horrible people because of technology. With all their bloggerating, snapgramming, instachatting, and faceskypering, Millennials have no idea what it means to talk with another human being using their mouth-gums to reach the other person’s ear-parts while their face-peepers are looking straight at one another. If you do try to speak to a Millennial directly in their face-parts, they will mumble something about personal space and then wander off to make a tweeter post about you. Prior to the invention of the internet, all communication was carried out in a face to face manner with conversational topics only ever ranging from the meaning of life and treasured memories. Prior to the advent of the internet, which only millennials use, telephones, the radio, and television were all seen as benign influencers that would have no ill effects whatsoever.
7) Millennials are the worst because they use strange text speak. From LOL (Loser Old Ladies) to LMAO (Let’s Make Adults Obey) to BRB (Be Rebellious Boys) and BTW (Bad Teen Way), Millennials use initialism to try to get their unscrupulous meanings past other generations. Furthermore, the continued degradation of the English language is under assault by the millennial tendency to use shortforms, to make up words, and to not write things in the manner in which an academic essay is written. So, for example, rather than saying “Thou art beautiful, I will tarry here until that glorious day upon which I will see thee again” a Millennial will type “U r a QT. CU l8er.”
8) Millennials are oversensitive little snowflakes. Boo hoo hoo, something homophobic, sexist, or racist was said. It’s not like homophobia, sexism, or racism are real problems in our world today. No other generation was ever offended by that kind of thing. If they were, they would have started social movements to oppose it. Language has no power. For example, if I am a judge and I call a woman “muffin” or “cupcake” because I believe she is an object, those words have absolutely no power over her unless she gives them power. So when I, as a judge, tell her that she was not actually assaulted or that if she were, it was because her clothes did not utilize enough fabric, she knows that I am doing it as an impartial judge who speaks his mind despite the current climate of political correctness. What is with Millennials and yapping on and on about respecting everyone? Gross.
9) Millennials like avocado toast, or something. If only young persons would stop buying avocado toast and expensive coffee, they could afford to be millionaires. Learn how to budget, ya goons.
10) Millennials are young. What really sticks in a lot of people’s collective craws about millennials is just how young they are. Millennials do not have nearly as much experience at life in comparison to the previous generations. They walk around with all their youthful skin and vibrant energy and full heads of hair like they are sooo young with sooo much to look forward to. Well, I have news for you, Millennials, Boomers and Generation X are working hard together to ensure that your future is nothing but one environmental crisis after the other. How about that for excitement?
Friday, May 11, 2018
Friday, May 04, 2018
Tuesday, May 01, 2018
Les Miserables: A Review
What can I write about this book that has not already been written by countless readers before me? What possible insight could I have that some academic has not already built up and then deconstructed (because that's what academics do, ammiright?) in a much finer and more eloquent manner than I could possibly even attempt?
The rich characters, the vibrant story-telling, the various themes and underlying philosophies - they've all been written up already. Some people like to retell the entire story in their review, but I always end up sounding like a five year old describing his favourite cartoon.
"And then Jean Valjean, he was a mayor, but before that, like, at the beginning, he was a prisoner - or convict, right? And then Inspector Javert, he's this inspector, okay? And he's after Jean Valjean, but Jean Valjean stole some candlesticks. But the priest, uuhh, oh yeah and Jean Valjean has a daughter, Cosette, but she's not his daughter and she's not in the story yet and then . . ."
See? That's just not copacetic.
I could complain about Hugo's overzealous descriptions of every goshdarn piece of architecture that even remotely figures in the story, but I won't. I'm not afraid to admit that I skipped a lot of that. Yeah, whut? I'm pretty much a gangster when I read the classics, skippin' irrelevant words like a badass. What you gonna do about it?
I briefly considered critiquing the translation, but that would either involve advancing beyond Beginner's French or pretending that I had advanced beyond Beginner's French. Not going to happen. Also, I really don't know which translation I read.
Then I remembered that one review I had read somewhere focused almost exclusively on the book's bindings. Yes! I can do this. I remember the book I read was a blue hardcover with gold lettering on it. And let me tell you, that binding was 100 per cent awesome. Not only did the pages stay in the book throughout my entire reading experience, but absolutely none of them were ripped, folded or torn in any way.
Big deal, right? Actually, it is. That book was a library book that had been in circulation since the late seventies - so nearly twenty years of the great unwashed masses pawing at every page of the book. And those pages were still turning like it was the first day that the binding had been cracked. Cracked, not split, you dig? Anyway, you could lay that book flat and turn the pages and they would stay open without you having to rest your fingers on them - that's how good the binding was.
Okay, I do remember some of the corners of the pages had been bent by some lazy fart who couldn't be bothered to get a bookmark (I mean, seriously, you can make your own bookmark in about two seconds - fifty seconds if you have arthritis or something).
Of course, it is not the fault of the binding that some lazy bloke (it was probably a man) had folded the corners on certain pages. And, of course, folded pages don't affect the binding at all. All this to say that the binding held up for twenty years quite well. That's a five star binding, baby.
Five stars!
The rich characters, the vibrant story-telling, the various themes and underlying philosophies - they've all been written up already. Some people like to retell the entire story in their review, but I always end up sounding like a five year old describing his favourite cartoon.
"And then Jean Valjean, he was a mayor, but before that, like, at the beginning, he was a prisoner - or convict, right? And then Inspector Javert, he's this inspector, okay? And he's after Jean Valjean, but Jean Valjean stole some candlesticks. But the priest, uuhh, oh yeah and Jean Valjean has a daughter, Cosette, but she's not his daughter and she's not in the story yet and then . . ."
See? That's just not copacetic.
I could complain about Hugo's overzealous descriptions of every goshdarn piece of architecture that even remotely figures in the story, but I won't. I'm not afraid to admit that I skipped a lot of that. Yeah, whut? I'm pretty much a gangster when I read the classics, skippin' irrelevant words like a badass. What you gonna do about it?
I briefly considered critiquing the translation, but that would either involve advancing beyond Beginner's French or pretending that I had advanced beyond Beginner's French. Not going to happen. Also, I really don't know which translation I read.
Then I remembered that one review I had read somewhere focused almost exclusively on the book's bindings. Yes! I can do this. I remember the book I read was a blue hardcover with gold lettering on it. And let me tell you, that binding was 100 per cent awesome. Not only did the pages stay in the book throughout my entire reading experience, but absolutely none of them were ripped, folded or torn in any way.
Big deal, right? Actually, it is. That book was a library book that had been in circulation since the late seventies - so nearly twenty years of the great unwashed masses pawing at every page of the book. And those pages were still turning like it was the first day that the binding had been cracked. Cracked, not split, you dig? Anyway, you could lay that book flat and turn the pages and they would stay open without you having to rest your fingers on them - that's how good the binding was.
Okay, I do remember some of the corners of the pages had been bent by some lazy fart who couldn't be bothered to get a bookmark (I mean, seriously, you can make your own bookmark in about two seconds - fifty seconds if you have arthritis or something).
Of course, it is not the fault of the binding that some lazy bloke (it was probably a man) had folded the corners on certain pages. And, of course, folded pages don't affect the binding at all. All this to say that the binding held up for twenty years quite well. That's a five star binding, baby.
Five stars!
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