This Week in Rage – 8/10/13

This Week in Rage – 8/10/13

This Week in Rage, a blog about the top three things that pissed me off this week:

 

Steve Harvey and Dr. Phil: I had a breakthrough the other day.  A real light bulb moment.  I realized that Steve Harvey is the black Dr. Phil.  Think about it. They’re both bald.  They both have those mustaches, which I believe is where they draw their power from.  I bet if you shaved their mustaches they would just collapse into a pile of dust like a vampire in sunlight.  And they’re always wearing suits – you’ve never seen either of them in a pair of shants.  Plus no one really knows what they do.  They write books, they’re on TV, they dispense a bunch of clichés disguised as wisdom that no one’s really interested in.  They both sit around and say things like “Well that dog just ain’t gonna hunt” and people nod like, “I guess so. I guess it won’t”.  There are no huge fans of either one of them yet they’re both billionaires.  None of my black friends love Steve Harvey and none of my white friends love Dr. Phil so it’s not a race thing.  Bottom line is that they’re the same dude.  I really think if we put them in a room together they’d explode.  Or maybe they’re just the same performance artist – a small Jewish man from San Francisco with great make-up.

 

Coaching Sonny’s Basketball Team and the Hollywood YMCA: The Hollywood Y – or as I like to call it, the Hollywood Why? – is a weird place.  If you ever want to see a homeless guy on an elliptical machine, someone working out in jeans and flip flops or a chick dragging her dog behind her on the treadmill that’s the place.  I was at this village of the damned because that’s where Sonny plays basketball and I’m the co-coach.  But this particular week I was flying solo, I had to take over coaching alone.  The only problem was that I didn’t know any of the kids’ names.  You know me, I don’t sweat the details. But I had to get everyone’s name down because a coach has to yell and there’s substitutions and whatnot and you don’t want to shout “Hey half-breed, you go in for future lesbian.”  But I made the mistake of expecting normal names like Mike.  Because that’s how you remember names, you associate them to other names in your life.  I work with five guys named Mike so that would be easy to remember.  I’ve got a couple Kevins in my life, Jimmy’s son is named Kevin, that would help me remember.  So I got on one knee, called everyone in and said, “I need everyone’s name.”  And here are the names, there are no alterations and I’ve not added or exaggerated for comic effect: Hudson, Declan, Devon, Finn, Harper, Jenson, and Dash.  Not one real name in the bunch.  Are there no more guys in America under 25 named Doug?  How am I supposed to remember Devon and Dash?  Not a Mike or Kevin in the whole group.  I ended up doing a lot of “Hey Jew-fro, get back on defense.”

 

The Stocks: You know I like the shaming part of society.  Shame is the glue that keeps our society together.  Without it we’ve started to come undone.  Just look around today at the deadbeat dads, dogs on planes, gum on the sidewalks and bare feet at Starbucks.  A big part of my plan to put the shame back in our game is public humiliation.  That’s why we need to bring back the stocks.  Back in the good old days towns would put the people in the center of the village and they’d have to bend ninety degrees and put their head and arms through that wooden thing and people would be able to see them in all their shame.  We need that today.  We could put Anthony Weiner and white NFL players who drop N-bombs in there and publicly shame them (though I’m not sure Weiner wouldn’t like it.)  This would work.  How likely would you be to put a booger on top of a urinal if you thought you were going to end up in the stocks?  Then, as I thought more about this plan, I realized how great it would be because today, just as in olden times, there were guys who like to fart. There was a definitely a Quaker Jimmy Kimmel or colonial Cousin Sal that would have gone into the center of town and blown gas in the shamees face. There had to be.  And that had to be bad gas too, those guys lived on beans and salted pork. I’m just saying there are some traditions that need to come back if we want to recover our society.

 

– Adam