In 2004 we were introduced to Crazy Frog. He had a pixelated penis, but in the year 2020, sixteen years on, we are finally allowed to see his flaccid genitals. Here is his picture.
Hello and welcome to my blog you absolute pricks. I know it’s been two weeks, but I actually have a legitimate excuse.
Have you been wearing your masks and practicing social distancing like a good boy?
I really hope so.
If this is something that you are struggling with, just do it and sit with the anxiety. No harm can come from it.
So in the pursuit of making money, I now find myself in a career that has impacted my ability to say whatever the fuck I want. It is also taking a whole lot of my time as it is something that I haven’t done, or even thought of doing before. I can’t tell you what it is, but there is a fair amount of intellectual property that I need to be careful not to use.
You will have also noticed that my social media and my work in the media has gone quiet. This is related to what I mention above. It’s like the fucking secret service lads. However, I have worked out how I can keep doing this, while doing my job as well.
I’m doing this blog on September 11th, three days after my wedding anniversary.
In 2001, while on honeymoon in my own bedroom, I watched New York get attacked, the attackers using commercial airplanes as weapons of war.
We had the radio on, me and my new bride, and we heard the report of the first plane. After turning the TV on and seeing the second plane hit the tower live, my dick went down as fast as the tower did.
You just had the sense that the world was never going to be the same ever again. My anniversary is a grim reminder of this shit.
Irrespective of your belief of this event, it is undeniable that those planes have changed your view of the world. Some say it was the US Government, others say it was Mossad, I believe that it was indeed Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, even though I will often joke about believing in the conspiracy stuff. The interesting thing for me about this is that Bin Laden has very deep US ties in regard to the Cold War with Russia. I think it was a revenge tactic by Al Qaeda for the US not delivering on promises that they made for the help against fighting the Russians. The US are cunts when it comes to keeping good on promises. They just did that same thing to Iran.
The biggest thing that the Twin Tower attack changed was the culture of irony. After those planes deliberately crashed, irony was instantly killed.
I grew up in the late eighties and nineties, and I remember exactly how it was. I was always an over thinker and even as a young fella I was pretty smart and aware of current affairs.
In 1988 there was a movie called Big. It starred a young Tom Hanks as a child who magically enters a grown man’s body. His childhood behaviour lands him an executive job at a major toy company and in the end he even manages to get the girl. Big is one of my favourite movies, and I think that it is the biggest predictor of how we will have been in our current era. I think I speak about this on a previous blog, maybe it was a Facebook post, I forget.
What Big symbolized was the end of the Yuppie culture and brought on Slacker culture. Yuppie culture was a culture of extreme capitalism among young men in particular. Think Wolf of Wall Street.
Slacker culture was the likes of Wayne’s World, Beavis and Butthead, Friends. The slackers did not give a fuck about money and posterity. All they did was have fun and express themselves through art and music. A life filled with utter irony and nuance that was dependent on the welfare of rich parents and friends. The entertainment itself was rooted in the fact that these characters had no realistic ambitions. Very different to the Yuppie it replaced.
Then 9/11 happened.
But before I talk about that, let me get the clerical shit out the way.
This blog is sponsored by you, the reader. This allows me to have full creative control of my content and not be swayed in any specific directions by advertisers. I have had advertisers in the past and I have been asked a few times to say certain things and touch on certain topics. However, I did tell them to fuck off.
As mentioned at the start of this blog, I am now employed and I will no longer push the Patreon as much as I have in the past. But I am forever grateful to those who do contribute every now and then. If you haven’t supported me financially, don’t feel bad. This is a system based on kindness, and you get exactly what the paid subscribers get in terms of the blog. Except for the books of course.
Right.
9/11 was the first thing in my experience of life that you could not make fun of. As soon as it happened it was off limits to all kinds of nuance or irony.
When I say irony, I don’t mean the Alanis Morissette irony. Like raining on your wedding day and winning the Lotto as a geriatric. I mean irony like in a Tarantino or John Woo movie.
Like when these directors used to put really upbeat contrasting music to extremely violent movie scenes. When Woo puts ‘What a wonderful world’ to a car crash scene, or when Tarantino plays ‘Stuck in the middle with you’ when they cut someone’s ear off. This kind of irony was actively never allowed again in film.
This may sound like bullshit to you, but America made sure of this by removing 164 seemingly happy songs off US radio. These songs could still be accessed, but radio and TV were not allowed to play them.
Some of those songs were:
Peace Train
Walk like an Egyptian
Ticket to Ride…….
Fucking loads of these kinds of songs.
Here is a link to all the songs that were banned in the States after September 11 2001.
This was done so that the footage of 9/11 was not placed upon these tunes to avoid the irony of the incident. The world was no longer a wonderful, peaceful place.
Even when the French refused to support the US in the invasion of Iraq, they changed the term French fries to Freedom fries. This is something a five year old would do. They eventually found no WMD’s in Iraq and Saddam was hung, but we don’t talk about that.
Those who were not in support of the Iraq war were instantly enemies of the United States, so no nuances were allowed. They always had the sympathy of 9/11 to fall back on, and because they were a world superpower, many felt compelled to join in their illegal war and war crimes.
I grew up in South Africa, and in South Africa there was never a divide between religions. After that incident, the gap between us really opened.
When I flew to New Zealand in the late 2000’s, I remember a hostess asking if I was Muslim and then stuck a green sticker on my seat. It wasn’t until I got my meal that I realised that it was only to mark that my food needs to be halaal. This was my paranoia about air travel. I still feel this every time I board a plane.
September 11th 2001 brought an end to the slacker culture.
The world had become more serious. The days of Beck singing “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me” or Nirvana saying “I feel stupid, I’m contagious” is long gone.
These ironic self deprecating style lyrics are no longer acceptable since 2001, and even music that contains humour is now classified as novelty. That moment has forced us to take life a lot more seriously and since then, everything has to be polarized and clear cut.
I know that this is a massive topic and it is impossible to grasp the magnitude of the whole event in a 6 minute read. So I only touched on how the event influenced the art of satire and nuance. But the reason I thought about that over the last few days, along with Crazy Frog’s dick, is that I wonder what kind of changes to culture Covid-19 will bring.
I imagine that travel will be changed forever, but I’m guessing it will majorly impact how we work.
I think zero hour contracts will become more popular and things like click and collect will become the norm. Social gatherings are forever tainted.
It is hard to tell what the zeitgeist of this era will be, but whatever it is, we are going to have to adapt.
This was confusing to write, but I hope it kind of makes sense.
I enjoyed doing it.
Have a good week and take good care of each other.
Now fuck off.
