Betting one's bippy should be a deadly sin.

”You bet your bippy!” What the hell was that all about? I didn’t get it then, I don’t get it now. The 70s were lame and there’s your proof. How fantastically lame was that tag line? My parents used it, whatever it meant. It was from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, by the way.
++++++++++++++++++

Hey, where were all the nostalgia fans when the 8 track was biting the dust? Come on, they had soul. You just couldn’t get that from any cassette. Except that the cassette outperformed the 8 track in terms of recordability, durability, fidelity and portability. But aside from all of that, the cassettes had no soul! Until, that is, CDs came along and essentially replaced cassettes. Next to CDs, cassettes are like the James Brown (Godfather of Soul) of recording media.

Yeah, the pre-recorded cassettes were never high-fidelity and would start to audibly squeak within a year, get eaten by a hungry car stereo, warp or accidentally get erased when passing next to a speaker magnet. If you wanted to hear a song again, you’d have to rewind and guess how far along you were. Yeah, those were the golden days, the salad days, the days of halcyon lore. The winds of change have destroyed a legacy. The sad end of the gilded age. Gone is an era. Sob. They had soul.

CDs have no soul. That is, until they are finally killed off by pure digital media. Then CDs will have a soul, I shall lament these days where I have to put 300 discs in a donut shaped wheel in order to get the amount of songs that I could store on one iPod that can fit in the palm of my hand and still have room for an actual donut. CDs are passing away with the winds of change, ohh, woe! The changing of the guard. The precious old things are now lost to this new age of cheap images and – what? I can download music without paying? Awesome. F—k those CDs, man. Old news. G’bye CDs, hellooo MP3s!

Also, no one ever lamented digital tape, which made a very brief appearance in the early 90s. What a piece of crap. All the disadvantages of a cassette and pricier than a CD. They could wear out, they could get mangled. You still couldn’t play song one then immediately skip to song three. You need expensive new hardware, and you couldn’t tape over them. Good riddance, digital tape, we hardly knew ye. While you’re there enjoying outdated media hell, say hello to RCA’s 12” video disks, will ya?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Vatican came up with a new list of the famed Seven Deadly Sins. Now they include drug abuse. I’m glad I got my drug abuse in years ago, long before it became a sin. I’m quite confused, though, on New Deadly Sin #6, which is “Excessive wealth”. This comes from the ornate and opulent Vatican, worth billions of dollars. NDS #5, “Contributing to the widening gap between rich and poor” should be observed by the church by refusing donations from people who can’t afford it.

I’m not saying that the NDSs are good things being called bad things, but the first seven were things that every human being had to contend with on a daily basis. Sloth, envy, gluttony, greed, anger, pride and lust. But I don’t see how “Creating poverty” or “Contributing to the widening gap between rich and poor” really affects too many people. Most of the world is already poor, and wishes that they were rich. Creating poverty and widening the income gap are essentially the same thing, anyway. No one creates poverty without the motive that they will benefit financially, either. So “Excessive wealth” is another overlap as well. Both “Creating poverty” and “Widening the gap” are macroeconomic shifts, and there are only a few dozen people in the world that could consciously do these things. Same goes for the New Deadly Sin of “conducting morally dubious experiments” (such as stem cell research). That’s just not a dark temptation that I’ve ever had to quell, although as a kid I mixed Pepsi with 7Up just to see what it would taste like.

The original seven deadly sins were accompanied by a list of seven virtues such as humility, discipline, generosity and a few others that don’t sound appealing and are thus ignored. The virtues were generally the opposite of the vices. Instead of pride, humility; instead of lust, abstinence; instead of anger, kindness (or maybe patience was supposed to be the match there); instead of gluttony, temperance; instead of greed, generosity; etc. I’m not aware of any virtuous list that we can point to in order to stay on the good side of the NDS #1, which is not to use birth control.

I think the Vatican would probably have been better off if they revamped the seven virtues rather than the deadly sins. Less comparison, since no one made a Brad Pitt movie about them. They could have included charitable giving in the virtues. Of course, that may already have been there in the list, and I just don’t recall it. Instead of stuff like “widening the gap between rich and poor”, they could have said “reducing poverty”. Instead of “excessive wealth”, they could have said “living modestly and sustainably”. Stuff like that. Positive stuff instead of negative. They should have hired me as their PR guy. Well, they shouldn’t have, since I’m not terribly good at that sort of thing. They should have hired ANY professional PR person, who almost certainly would have figured out that the list of new deadly sins would go over in most people’s minds like yet another nagging lecture from the nunnery.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

9/11 is a day that everyone talks about, but it doesn’t have a name, it’s just a date. The Fourth of July is technically called Independence Day (not to be confused with the movie). El Cinco de Mayo has another name, I think, as it is the day to commemorate some Mexican battle, like D-Day. So I took it upon myself to come up with a clever moniker for 9/11. Decades from now, when the term is commonplace, they will point back to us and mention that I coined that name. That would be, unlike Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest”, but is mistakenly attributed to Darwin. Or “Whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger”, which Goethe said and everyone credits to Neitche. We would be more like the guy who came up with the term “Y2K” who is … uh… Al Gore, right?

I think “Rememberance Day” might have the right spirit, but may be confused with Memorial Day, which in itself is confused with Labor Day. I’m thinking of calling it the “Seminal Historical Incident of Terroristic Activities That Turned America to Crusading and Killing”. Too wordy? Maybe if I just used the acronym SHITATTACK.

We could also direct the energies of the country to some constructive outlets for their celebratory energies on that day, such as the new tradition of beating people with non-western accents.
Smack, wham, boff!!
“Filthy Arab!”
“But I am Bangladeshi!”
“Whatever! Happy SHITATTACK Day!”
We’ll even give rise to the verb-ization of the term. “You’ve been SHITATTACKed!” Too bad there’s no money in it for us. Maybe the Sunday morning political talk shows would take us out for pancake breakfast. You bet your bippy they would.