Februrary 2014: I Will Not Miss You

Jay Leno left the Tonight Show earlier this week. Could've been yesterday but I have been inundated with reports about Sochi 2014 - most of them concerning a little thing called the Winter Olympic Games. Already, the biggest opponents have attempted to hijack a plane in order to put some heat on the organizers... the odds of some kind of crazy shit happening in the open (let alone the stories we won't hear till March or later) are high enough to keep everyone placing money on the most outrageous tragedies, disruptions, and events. The Vancouver 2010 luge death might end up looking like a mild sprain, when all is said and done in Sochi.

An entire unit of the Russian Army is patrolling the Georgia/Russia border, and the stuff those guys are getting up to is no doubt quite interesting and compelling, but their opponents have sworn to engage in the sort of chaos-terrorism that military action has not yet been able to completely prevent. I am not reporting this to be gleeful or glib, but dozens of years of military retribution have only managed to stoke the flames of resentment. Even the Cossacks have been called in. While the hijacker/bomb-threat guy is getting beaten up by security personnel and interrogated to within an inch of his life, and incarcerated in a post-gulag gulag, the games must go on. Bookies are refusing to take bets on terrorist activity, citing a worldwide surveillance apparatus and generally bad odds of anything major going wrong (the latter excuse seems questionable to me).

Surely they will, but there is more trouble than just the threat of violence and bomb blasts. There is also bad press, blistering social media output, and international confrontation. A major ideological schism has haunted the Sochi Olympics since last year, and that is the spectre of Russian homophobia, which is not quite so much a regional thing in Sochi. For a while, in late 2013, it seemed as if a few countries might boycott the games, but abandoning the athletes on human rights principles was ultimately considered unthinkable. I am not an expert and I have not been following the issue closely, but I don't think a single country ended up boycotting the games for the beaten and dead gays of Russia.

Hey MSN! Stop trying to compete with TMZ!

I know it's way stupid to always write about how stupid the internet is and how useless news is getting what with its stupid obsession with the rich, overexposed, and useless. Most of the time I visit real news sites intentionally and I read geo/envrio/legal/political/economic news with a smattering of art and culture stuff. I should be following all these things with beady eyes, but I can interpolate exactly how the world is doing during the three-month intervals where I burn out entirely on the idea of news. At times like this I pick up a little news from word-of-mouth or whatever I manage to scan on the internet.

So I check one of my many email accounts and there's that log-out page where MSN proves everyone right for ignoring it by pandering to whatever crowd who surf casually enough that they'll spend a half-hour reading about vapid 'news' stories and greasy gossip. Yeah, the species is in decline. But that's how the majority of human history is, so I'm not trying to be sensationalistic by saying that we're on a bit of a downward spiral. I mean globally, too. You can shit out your mouth about the West all day, but it's not the only place that's fucked, you dim-witted provincialist. But the West definitely deserves your vituperation.

Exhibit A:

 = unimportant
= trivial
= obvious, self-evident
= YouTube video


This is consumer news. These stories are all headline news. So, you know what? Fuck MSN. They obviously do not care: they've given up the fight entirely. They don't want to be relevant, competitive, or innovative. They could replace this tiny headline section with a Twitter feed and it'd be more interesting and newsworthy. Those dumb fucks.

In fact, they're mocking the very notion of headlines, which makes me angrier at them – they're trampling the newspaper when it's down with belittling meta-commentary like this. Let me consider how each of those four worthless stories may enrich a person's life:

"Will and Kate stun at lavish gala" : Obviously someone gave them a taser and then it was time for some plutocrat-on-plutocrat violence. People who read this story are likely to learn about things they will never properly experience. Fantasy escapism with a twist of a high-class sneer: "You really care about us, little people? Here, feed your imagination on our table scraps..."

"Miami Beach mayhem caught on video" : My original assessment was wrong. This will be the article that ends up being a link to YouTube and a small summary paragraph. The biggest part of the story is that someone was paid for the video and that someone was paid to write the article. Now I understand why the Huffington Post doesn't pay shit to her bloggers.

"Kid makes absolutely no sense" : This is impossible to anticipate. I'm not going back to see what the hell, but it's probably another stupid YouTube video. MSN makes absolutely no sense: if someone got paid for this shit work then all of America deserves its recession. Sorry, misery. You pieces of lazy fat shit should start farming in your spare time before Cargill takes over every last link in the food chain. The world used to love you.

"Incredibly Realistic Street Illusion" : Good to see MSN exporting work to Russian cyber-crime syndicates. Yes, I want to click that link, see a piece of shit of a video, and get a rootkit installed. Thanks MSN. You are exactly what you are, and if  Bill Gates had any way of looking down the hierarchy at this shit you're pulling, he'd give you a goddamn kick so hard. Or is this merely his way of taking away with the other hand?