During this time, whenever I am not studying, I feel like I should be. This very moment is an excellent example. But I have some ideas I need to share with you, in the hope that they may provide a nice little distraction during your own grueling exam period:
Michael Bolton has the iTunes Holiday Single of the Week. I thought he was just a joke from the movie Office Space. Oh wait, okay. The single is free. Yah Mo Get This.
The funniest sound recognized by college students nationwide: Those hard plastic cafeteria cups bouncing on the floor after someone accidentally drops them. Pop pop, pop pop, poppoppoppp. (The above picture is the first image to appear when you perform a google search for "hard plastic cup.")
It doesn't really make much sense that the sports media agreed on the term "Spygate" to describe when one NFL team is taping another team's signals. I mean, part of the reason Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon ordered a break-in to the Democratic National Commitee's office was to "spy" on the opposing party. The scandal was still named after the building in which it was exposed. Why not call what happened between the Patriots and the Jets "Meadowgate"? Even for Bill Clinton's major scandal, many journalists used a modification of Watergate that more specifically addressed the incident: They called it "Monicagate." If those reporters had taken the same approach as today's NFL analysts, that is, attached "gate" to the end of some vague description of the reprehensible action, they would have called the Lewinsky scandal "Sexgate." That's too much free advertising for one porn website.
Tell me if this sounds familiar:
"Uhhh ladies and gentleman, this is your captain speaking. On behalf of the entire crew, I would like to welcome you aboard Shmuz Airlines Flight 767 with non-stop service to Uzbekistan."
Now I ask you, in all seriousness: Would that sound familiar in a female voice? Do female captains even exist?!*
At least in my own experience on major commercial airlines, I cannot ever remember hearing a woman announce our cruising altitude and estimated time of arrival over that ubiquitous loudspeaker. Perhaps gender remains part of the criteria for certain positions on an airplane's crew, but that seems to be changing in areas outside the cockpit. There are now male stewardesses, for whom the politically correct term has become "flight attendants." This raises even more complex questions. We call female nurses "nurses" and we call male nurses "male nurses." Why can't "stewards" refer to the males that bring us those Mini-Me-sized bags of pretzels and "stewardesses" refer to the females that pour our ginger ale around those ice cubes that could sink the Titanic?
The truth is out there. According to data from American Airlines, of their 3,945 captains, 58 are female. Now it may be the case that I've never encountered any of that 1-2% of the demographic, but we musn't speculate. If anything, the fact that these seductive skippers do exist provides a more concrete explanation for why all captains sound the same. When the captains push in that button on the loudspeaker, there's some voice-altering technology at work, and all of them, whether male or female, all of them sound like a really generic guy who makes over-extended pauses with that back-of-the-throat "Uhhh."
Or, on second thought, maybe travelers just aren't quite ready to accept "the vaginapit."
Anyway, I sincerely wish all of you the best, especially if you're just trying to make it through the hell that you've created for yourself during finals week. Just know that many of us are going through the same thing and that you WILL make it. On the horizon for Shmuz Weekly, we're hoping to get more reader participation, maybe through contests, letters, collaborative articles, etcetera. If you have any ideas, please let us know, or post them on the facebook group. We should have more time to work on all this stuff over winter break. And hey, listen... [Until] I see ya again... Keep on truckin'.
* Thanks to my friend Nina for alerting me to this phenomenon.
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