I weep for this generation. I just spent 2 minutes explaining that "Washington" is the city and "DC" is the state, for the purpose of ordering a pair of shoes. *sigh*

That would be so funny if Washington state had a city named "DC."

That would be so funny if Washington state had a city named "DC."

Some bored Washingtonian probably spends stray hours contemplating that very thing.

I just had to share this picture of the chicken who lives down my street:

[link]

I'm at work so I haven't watched any of these videos.... Sucker Punch - The art, the poetry, the idiocy of YouTube street fights.

Cheap, ultraportable video technology has freed bystanders at street fights to do more than simply shout, "Fight! Fight! Fuck him up!" Now they can record the event for posterity, too. The result is a growing online video archive of informal fisticuffs. You can find these videos collected on Web sites that specialize in them—ComeGetYouSome.com, Psfights.com, NothingToxic.com, and others—or you can just go to good old YouTube and type in "street fight" or other evocative keyword combinations, such as "sucker punch" or "knock out." The videos that come up offer near-infinite permutations on the eternal street-fight drama of posturing, mayhem, and consequences.

The more of them you watch, the more familiar you become with certain recurring formulas: mean kid or kids nailing unsuspecting victim, drunk guy flattening drunker guy outside a bar, bully getting or not getting comeuppance, go-ahead-and-hit-me scenarios, girls fighting for keeps while male onlookers anxiously strain to find them hilarious, backyard or basement pugilism, semiformal bare-knuckle bouts, pitched battles between rival mobs of hooligans.

Some of the fights are fake, many are real, some fall in between. There's a lot of hair-pulling incompetence, but there are also moments of genuine inspiration in which regular folks under pressure discover their inner Conan. And, of course, there are a few very bad boys and girls out there who know what they're doing. (Some offer how-to lessons.) Watching fight after fight can grow dispiriting (look, another brace of toasted poltroons walking around all stiff-legged, puffing out their chests and loudly prophesying each other's imminent doom), but only when you have worked through a few score of them does the genre begin to amount to something more than the sum of its often sorry-ass parts. The various subgenres and minutely discrete iterations flow together into a cut-rate, bottom-feeding, mass-authored poem of force. Ancient Greece had its epic tradition, and classical Chinese literature had the jiang hu, the martial world; we've got YouTube.

I feel I need to share this with y'all [link]

You can thank me (or hit me) later.

I feel I need to share this with y'all [link]

That's fucked up.

DJ, you are not. right.

I weep for this generation. I just spent 2 minutes explaining that "Washington" is the city and "DC" is the state, for the purpose of ordering a pair of shoes. *sigh*

And I thought "Puerto Rico *is* part of the United States" was pretty bad.

But I have now shared and feel better now that it doesn't solely live in my brain.