The Age of Desensitization, Part 2

Ch. 20.2: Who IsTaking It Too Far Now?

Last spring, it was announced that Gunther von Hagens' BodyWorlds was coming to Edmonton. It was going to be showcased for 4 or 5 months at the Telus World of Science, and it was promoted in such a way that all people from Edmonton were required to attend, if they were not totally helpless, clueless, or penniless.

From the start, I had my mind pretty much made up about this sort of public display of the human body. I was reluctant to go to this show altogether. I just didn't understand why people (living people, that is) would be interested in pointing at, gawking at, and yes, even touching human body parts! Maybe it's because I do enough of that to living bodies? I don't know... (that is a joke, by the way). But towards early Fall, I went down and picked up my $28 timed-entry ticket so that I couldn't be criticized as one of those closed-minded ignorant fools that doesn't appreciate art, and (more importantly) to see if my reasons for not being thrilled about this idea of exhibit were the least bit justified.

It was a bloodbath. Torsos everywhere! Human flesh detached from its muscle detached from its skeleton detached from its organs. Some were intermingling with each other, others playing sports, and one even riding a horse?! I haven't seen much worse in some of the goriest of thrasher movies.

Okay, I'm full of shit. As usual. Why does he even write this crap? Actually, from an artistic point of view, this "exhibit" was very tastefully done. It was clean, informative, thorough, and just a little bit spooky. But like the Cormac McArthur's, "The Road", I just don't totally understand why it had to be done at all.

I am going to argue that the Human Race is already desensitized enough from anatomics. We see the human body in every way shape and form either from television, the internet, or if we are exceptionally unfortunate, the hospital. BodyWorlds was/is nothing more than a perverse way of using dead people to make a quick buck. Or a quick 28 bucks. Fine. The high ticket price for me to walk (not run) through a museum is probably necessary to ensure that quality of the exposition maintains very high standards - from the polished display cases holding the slices of brain, tumored lungs, and swollen hearts to the informational video on the plasticizing of a human body to the amount of energy & work it must take to pack up and travel around with hundreds of rubbery fragments of corpse-statues all around the world...I know that I would want my staff to be well compensated for, and my surroundings kept with a certain amount of cleanliness and respect if that was in fact my body/body parts they were lugging around!

It is my unpopular opinion that when it comes to the human body, we foolish ignorant commoners are on a need-to-know basis. As we can learn from Charlie Harper, it is a good idea to not skip out on our Grade 8 Health class. But besides that? Who cares. Sure, some of us will become LPNs, RNs, medics, doctors, and dentists. But this will forever be the minority of the population. Most of us will work in sales and just won't need to know about the goings-ons of the many bodily functions. We don't really need to know what part goes where, or how long or short some things are, or what kinds of things are generated or processed in different compartments of the body. I can say this now because I have been mostly healthy for all of my life, and therefore cannot easily empathize with the many people that have gone through some form of ailment or another. Even so. If I had been diagnosed with morbid obesity, for example, I could benefit from simply taking my doctor's advice to start leading a healthier lifestyle, without having to go to BodyWorlds to see what slices of human fat looks like around the muscle and nervous systems.

Today's kids grow fast enough as it is. They want to be all grown up and be independent, free from parental oppression. They want to be exposed to as much and as often as possible so that they can get a feel for what may or may not be good for them. This includes exposure to and comprehension of the human body. But there is a fundamental lack of understanding for these children who don't see this artwork as a previous functioning contributing human member of society. There is that definite disconnect. But it is the adults (teachers - since it will be mostly schools who will be taking hoards of immature groups of teenagers, and younger, to experience the BodyWorlds, without direct parental guidance) that will teach that free will has allowed these individuals to give up their bodies to art/science (I don't know which it is) just as they may do so for medical research. These two things are not the same. Sure, the soul may leave the body upon death (did I mention no BodyWorld statues were formally politicians?) But that doesn't mean that the body shouldn't be prepared in a more ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust sort of way. Different cultures deal with their dead in tons of different ways - none of which include preserving the corpse for public display. So what makes Von Hagen so special?

On my 3.5 hour tour of BodyWorlds (trust me, that's thorough), I had watched scores of children randomly bump around from display case to statue to other display case, tugging on mommy's arm, saying "What's that brown spot" and "Where is that guy's nose". The majority of people were well-behaved, but after a while you begin to understand that this should be an at least 14A rated exhibit. I wouldn't say that there are proportionately more immature mannerless children out there who don't know how to behave in public, but rather, there is just more numbers of them as populations grow. Some degree of maturity and knowledge about life, death, and respect is required to not ruin the display for everyone else. Never was this so more obvious then when I had reached the "baby" display.

This especially delegated room was fully equipped with warning signs saying "contents within this display may be sensitive to some to view". In it, the development of a fertilized egg into a fetus into a near-term baby were displayed in glassware, ranging in sizes of a pickle jar to something that would hold a ~10 lb baby. It contained over 30 deceased and preserved human beings from a few weeks, up to thirty some weeks old, complete with a mother who had died with child prior to birth.

I didn't last in that room for very long. It was somewhat emotional.

But it was art! It was science?! I forget...But as glad I am for being able to see it, I still do not think it is necessary to be seen. Not unless you are a training medical staff, or you can prove a certain level of maturity that shows that you will in fact benefit from seeing something as ludicrous as a muscle-less gymnast hoisting himself up on the ropes.

I also want to leave with you with the thought of where we might go from here, with respect to de-humanizing ourselves --- de-sensitizing us from the unnatural things in the world --- rap song after webpage after lizard-man at a time. A lot of progress made in the medical field will ask for us to hold onto our stomachs as we enter an age of stem cell harvesting and transplants. The ethical dilemmas and criticisms are numerous, but certainly we will benefit from that kind of technology! How could we not?! I remember back in 2001, we talked about the ethical debates of stem cell research, as I was such a good product of Edmonton Catholic Schools. All I really remember though, was thinking how cloning would be okay if they used it on Scarlett Johanneson. Or wait! That was David Letterman's joke just last week. But seriously. I wish I did know what was next! We all seem so ready to cave in and try anything, without sufficient benefit/cost analysis. I think maybe we should spend a little bit more time at least thinking about how we are going to re-sensitize our kids as our society seems so hell-bent on desensitizing them in so many ways, without even realizing it!

Time for dinner. Cow tongue tonight.

Sterilized & Sanitized: Clean Me More, I'm Dirty.

Chapter 14.

Clean Me More, I'm Dirty

Actually, I am a pretty clean guy. I shower and brush my teeth. I Wash my hands before eating maybe 8 times out of 10. And I bring my own cutlery to restaurants.

"what?"

Okay, may be not that last one. But that's my point. Soooo much emphasis is always put on how everyone is so damn' concerned for cleanliness that it is actually sort of turning into this crazy paranoia where you can't go anywhere without fearing what might have been there first...and what was left behind.

It reminds me of that little guy from Wall-E (Mo) that rolls around everywhere bleeping the words: "foreign contaminant, foreign contaminant". I wonder how much of this will come to be true once we get to the year 2743...

So I suppose a lot of this - like many of my postings - has to do with knowing when/where to draw the line. Sure, some public washrooms are just plain gross. Sometimes you might open the door, walk in 2 steps, then spin on your heal and walk right back out. It's just that bad. Other times, you might be just driven to the limit! and can't put things off any longer and before you know it, you're lining the toilet seat with the same TP that a total stranger was acquiring only minutes earlier from that same dispenser hanging on the wall, engraved with catchy phrases and phone numbers. Then again, if the bathroom isn't the one in a West Edmonton Mall food court or on the main floor of the ETLC or the McDonald's restaurant on 111th Ave, then you might actually even have to use a paper towel to work the soap dispenser, turn on a faucet, and openin' the door on your way back out.

Ketchup in restaurants used to be set on tables, ready and waiting for you to use as much or as little as you wanted to on your fries, eggs, steak. Nowadays, ketchup is prepared in the kitchen, and your little 30 gram ration is brought out alongside your meal in a little paper cup. And how awkward is that when you order ketchup with your steak!!

Keeping with the restaurant/food theme, I remember back in the day when plastic drinking straws weren't individually wrapped with paper sleeves. Are people really that much more dirty NOW then they were a decade ago that we can't even take from the same straw machine? Maybe so. I suppose it has more to do with (like everything else in the world) proportions of populations. More people total = more people dirty. Urbanization and population growth are once again the real culprits. Even with the better meds, sanitary products & services, advanced treatments, and various diagnostic tests, we are still getting dirty. So despite being told how nowadays we are a healthier species with higher longevities than ever before in human history, we still can't be trusted with our ketchup and we need paper sleeves on our straws. And no more pee-mints.

There is also this large wave of nu-hippies out there who are taking on this holistic approach. No whacky meds and everything au naturale. Dooood. Thaaaaat sooounnnnds revooooLUUUUUUtionarrrrrry! Stick it to the man, dude! Fuck the system!!! My yoga mat is actually made out of hemp! My kids won't ever have a immunization shot, because I believe in feeding them organic oranges and no caffeine! or Kraft products. Or beef. Or meat products at all, really. They will build strong immune systems and will become world leaders.

Buses. Specifically Edmonton Transit. A second home of mine between the years 1996 and 2008. They can be pretty unsanitary. I've seen everything from half-eaten sandwiches to half-drank beers to gum anywhere imaginable to vomit, spit, and worse. And that's just the driver! jk. But if this is the respect that patrons of Edmonton Transit are paying for the 2 dollar and 75 cent service that the cityis providing, it says a lot about (some of) the patrons themselves. My recommendation when taking Edmonton Transit: Full sleeves, jeans, knee socks, closed-toe shoes, gloves, and a hoodie with the hood up. and drawn tight. Not all bus-riders are overwhelmingly disgusting, but some of them you may prefer to not have coughing on, or rubbing up against you. Trust me, I was one of those very people.

So sanitation (on buses or anywhere) is directly related to health, and despite my criticisms of how a lot of the sterilization techniques seem overkill, they probably necessary (with no one to blame but ourselves).

But I guess as Canadians, we are really pretty damn' fortunate when it comes to our over all health. In comparison with our neighbors to the south, anyways. Michael Moore's Sicko pointed this out pretty explicitly. Also, we suck doctors out of places like South Africa, Bangladesh, Indonesia with pretty terrific promises of salaries and standards of life so that we have enough physicians to go around for our 33M people. We hope that "proportional populations" won't leave those countries with a healthcare deficit. Even if we already know that 95% of the World Is 3rd World. And thanks to Ralph Klein, the 3rd Reich errr what? Okay, the Third Way Health Care programme, you can be rest assured that all of your Big Oil money will get you into the doctor's office FIRST to scan for that tumour resulting from you sucking back all those petro/diesel fumes. Let's just hope that the doctor that you DO get (whether you pay your way, or wait and wait til your final moments here on earth) is actually a A- doctor instead of a C+ doctor!

My lungs right now are pretty clear. Other than actually being sicker than I have been for longer than I have ever been (~10 days now). But I had been exposed to second-hand smoke semi-regularly for 15 years until my Grandma passed away in '99 from lung cancer. Since then, I have been in virtually smoke free atmospheres for 10 years now. It was about 2003 when the No Smoking In Bars bylaw came into effect, so I only had 1 good year of going out to smoke-filled pubs n' clubs before that breath of death was taken out of the equation too. I enjoy my health. I think that bylaws like not smoking within 5 metres of a business entrance way is retarded since it is pretty damn' impossible to enforce. But we are making progress. Thank You For Smoking with Aaron Eckhart did a decent job of showing us all how tobacco lobbyists are in fact The Devil. I think that we've seen smoking being eliminated from airplanes, malls, restaurants, bars, and now: cars with children (law in Ontario) all within my lifetime (mid-late 80s for planes). We are getting cleaner, healthier, and maybe even happier? With this new found health, and our hemp yoga mats and untainted beverage straws for our diet coca-colas, maybe we will find some more time (more years in our life) to be doing more positive things with it. Finding cures for AIDS or MS or Lung Cancer, for example!!

So yes. Drawing that line. Always a challenge. I believe that being overkill really is necessary in this day & age (like, calculate a HUGE factor of safety), because there are just too many of those "100% Pure Contaminants" out there, who likely won't have the opportunity to sanitize or sterilize anything ever. It's a cryin' shame that even if a peanut shot is created for kids so that PB&J sandwiches might actually be allowed back into schools one day, one parent will likely be that "holistic hippie" and wreck it for everyone else anyways!

But safety first, eh?!

Good health to you.

My Favorite Movies

Ch. 32: The Necessity of Escapism, Part 2

Last time I dwelled on how people need to "escape this misery called life" and some of the ways that they can go about doing so. Mostly, this included basking in the niceties of going on vacation and consuming alcohol (to numb the effects of the stress of travelling).

This time though, I want to suggest one of the best alternatives to those two, and why these choices are soooo much incredibly better than drinking or vacationing.

Watch movies. Not just any movies. Happy movies. Not slapstick ridiculous "off the cuff" movies. Goofy movies. Not sexually provocative sleazy "get your hard-on with Angelina Jolie" movies. Romantic movies. Not chick flicks like the Notebook and most certainly not Brokeback Mountain. But heart-wrenching surreal movies that allow you to sympathize with, but not become overcome with emotion by the characters in the plot, kind of movies. If these "happy" movies that I have tried to screen out still leave you with thrasher/bloodbath flicks on your list, then I suppose I should just give up already. But what I am actually trying to get at here is that some of the best movies that a person could ever go and see arrrreee:

CARTOONS!

For a long time now, I have maintained that cartoon movies can be some of the best medication for a person in need of reprieve from the stresses of life. Nothing quite says "so long psychopathic horror-style murder by beheading" like watching Roger Rabbit getting dipped ears first into, well, the Dip. Alright, maybe that's a bad example seeing how inhumane that was for poor Roger, but not all cartoons were like that - growing up - or now.

Growing up, us kids had the privilege of watching a lot of Classic Disney movies play in theaters. I still remember watching Aladdin @ Gateway Cinemas when I was about 8. Movies like that appealed to kids' imaginations and dreams and also gave parents a sense of gratitude in that sexual undertones would be left out completely, simply for the benefit of us kids. Lion King: probably still one of the best movies made for kids ever, was the same way. Minus the word "sex" that was apparently written in the stars at some point or another...The success & popularity of Disney's movies through the 80s and 90s allowed for Edmonton weatherman Mike Sobel to run a very entertaining 2 hour Saturday Special on ITV called the Disney Afternoon for a couple of years! This is back when times were simple, and kids weren't all hopped up on sugar and crack. Outside of Disney, The Land Before Time (one), All Dogs Go To Heaven, and An American Tale were some real classics that enabled children to... be kids! These movies offered great entertainment value for children & parents alike and didn't require any sex or violence to do so.

When Pixar got humongous thanks to Toy Story, kids had the opportunity to reclaim their youth yet again. This ridiculous story of friendship and never giving up was a great break from some of the other movies I was watching at the time: Cape Fear and Primal Fear are the two that come to mind. Plus the new Toy Story ride in Disneyland, CA is pretty much the funnest thing ever. Finding Nemo - the movie & the ride - certainly didn't surmount to what Toy Story (1 or 2) offered. Cars was a good Pixar production, but mostly because of the Brad Paisley song "Find Yourself".

But then we kids got brains, apparently. The movie industry thought that us kids had to become more responsible for the lives we were living, and that simply understanding the importance of "The Circle of Life" or that "Beauty is Only Skin Deep" was not enough. Chicken Run made us all think twice about the repressed lives of chickens. Fern Gully was the first to bring awareness to some of the atrocities of deforestation of rain forest in 1992. The Bee Movie let Jerry Seinfeld show us how bees are just another dying species that we should beeee concerned for, as we continue to destroy their habitat. Happy Feet - Same thing. Madagascar showed us how inhuman and lonely zoo animals might be and how the animals vie to be "home". And most recently Wall-E projected what we might be in for as a human race, given the amount of waste we produce and resources we exploit. Thinking Movies. No sex, gore, or violence included.

I saw Kung Fu Panda with some friends and tried to convince them that it was The Lion King reincarnate, with its whole premise of having a reject overcome all odds to make things right. Little did I know at the time that Madagascar 2: Return To Africa was even more of a ripoff of The Lion King, where the lion in the movie had to "go back to challenge his uncle to take his place as king". Direct copy. Oh well. Still a great movie. I liked the penguins.

I have yet to see a number of cartoon movies - on the top of the list are Ice Age, A Bug's Life, and Ratatouille. Well, those are the important ones anyways!

So there you have it: A whole blog about how (non-violent, non-sexcrazed, non-gore) movies can be used to help you escape from some of the heart burning stomach churning realities of every day life, where enough violence, sex, and gore exist as it is! Cartoons. Oi. Sure, some of these cartoons might be "thinking" movies, but I would rather have my kids thinking than watching crap like "Jackass", "Harold & Kumar" (soo good), "Earnest Goes to Camp" or worse...

Also, "how is this better than drinking or vacationing" you might ask? Well, it's not, but how else would have I got you to read this far. God damn' my liver when it's thirsty! Time for a DRINK!!! (too sober to sleep).

The Top 6 Non-Cartoon Movies of My Youth: TMNT, Ghost Busters, E.T. Home Alone, The Goonies, and Short Circuit.

The Age of Desensitization

Chapter 20 Part 1.

The images that we are exposed to today from the various forms of media are changing the characteristics of the human spirit that make us, well, human. The TV is such a wonderful invention. It acts as an informant, educator, sedative, a baby-sitter... Pop culture icons and demons like Marilyn Manson and Lindsay Lohan both give us a way to escape our own reality by thinking "god, what must it be like to be them", as well as set roll models for our youth, keeping in mind that our youth is a lot older today than the youth of 2 or 3 generations ago. These heroes just do great things for our kids, don't they? Aside from TV, there is the internet. *sigh*...the internet...where do I even begin? Then there's music --- well today's most popular music is not quite Mozart now, is it? As for zines? Well Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition no longer provides swimsuits for their models, but rather, just applies paint. (I wish I was a painter).

There's an endless bombardment of bad news stories reported daily. Domestic violence, gang shootings, incidents on reserves, violence against defenceless animals, arsons, break-ins, whyte avenue stabbings, downtown muggings by groups of 16 year old girls...and this is just the stuff that we get to see between 6:00 and 6:10. From there, we hear stories of another dead soldier, 160 lives ended in another Pakistan earthquake, and then the genocides in Sudan. This stuff though, we don't usually pay as much attention to cuz it is NIMBY afterall. And really, who wants to hear about how many child soldiers were killed on any given day, or how many people died from AIDS? The Edmonton Sun is really not much different now than what I have heard what it was like 20 years agowith respect to some of its headlines and photos. There's nothing much else like looking at pictures of bloody car accident tragedies while we munch on our corn flakes.

Outside of the news but still on TV, we can thank Family Guy to finally take us to where The Simpson's brought us to 20-some years ago. Paris Hilton's BFF, the UFC Championships, Showcase, CSI (or any crime show) are just other examples of the ideas that we get entrenched into our minds as promoting acceptable behaviour when we watch them time and time again.

Movies like Saw, A Clockwork Orange, or Silence of the Lambs depend on the thrill that we get by watching other people being terrorized and brutalized. Needles, chainsaws, bodily penetration with various devices, ingesting human flesh, abduction of pretty girls...Movies just doesn't seem to have any limits/boundaries. SEX in the movies is nothing really new. Harold & Kumar showed us the art of "bottomless parties" whereas Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz were the first to give us our first glimpse of an alternative to "hair gel" on the silver screen. It was Knocked Up with Izzy from Grey's which incorporated both full male frontal nudity and a group of (typical) pothead delinquents who come up with the idea of documenting nude scenes of movie stars. Unfortunately for them, this had actually been done by Mr. Skin (in real life) already. Forgetting Sarah Marshall has some pretty provocative scenes that simply would have never been able to be shown to even 15 years ago. Stanley Kubrick, Nicole Kidman and our dear Mr. Tom Cruise filmed a movie about orgies. wtf.

Magazines are wonderful. How would I ever survive without having my girlfriend reading about those 10 New Ways to Pleasure Your Man?? Maxim is the magazine that you can be guaranteed that at least 1 of the group of students you are flying with somewhere together will be picking up. These magazines give us incredible imagery of the ideal way all people should look, how they should act. Even if the pictures are all faked (or digitally enhanced as they say). Magazine's made Hugh Hefner a millionaire because thanks to the amount of freedom one has in America to pay money for any kind of service, even if it means degrading oneself. If I was a teenager back in the 50s I would be pretty thrilled to see a naked woman any time I wanted to on a piece of glossy paper. But then someone got tired of seeing the same old tits & *ahem* legs time and time again so they came up with something a little more crude. (Try reading about Larry Flynt on wikipedia and try not to puke). There was something for everyone, yet the more a person grew accustomed to a certain thing, the more wild the stuff they would want to see next time. Other forms of literature like Harlequin Romance novels got people to thinking that even text could be brought to life with possibilities beyond even MY wildest imagination. Next thing you know it? Penthouse Letters. Things got crazier and crazier and now it's reached a point where men & women alike are soo addicted to pornography and living their lives vicariously through other people that it affects their families and their jobs. Which leads me to...

The internet.

15 years ago, the internet introduced us to a whold new world. We were connected. To our friends, our family, and to strangers. We know have facebook, myspace, youtube, and blogspot (where I try to corrupt your soul!) to pass our days by and to give us the information about anything we might want information about. Yet it isn't hard to be on the internet and get lost to something that can be incredibly desensitizing to the human spirit. Thank you Britney Spears. But seriously. Again, the images of the atrocities of war are at our fingertips. Sicker stuff that we would been totally unheardof in any other war in history, including beheadings as well as honest-to-life tortures in that little American naval base in Cuba. Personally, I would love to live life without the internet. My name is Ryan and I am an internet addict. It has corrupted, desensitized me to a degree I am certain, yet I am hopeful that I still know the difference between right and wrong. People just need guidance to learn the discretion and morality required to make appropriate, non-destructive use of their time reading/looking at/browsing the net. Brad Paisley wrote a fun song about how much fun it is to be online. Thanks, Brad, but let's try not to cross the line.

My argument for music desensitizing people will be weak. Whether it be Justin Timberlake's Future Sex Love Show posters plastered all over New York City subways and billboards, or the destructiveness in the lyrics on Cradle of Filth's hoodies "Your mother should have swallowed" or "Dead Girls Don't Say No", it's just all bad. I endorse the positive attitude of punk rock songs with respect to bringing down corrupt (all) governments and having strength through unity. And as if you know me you know, the rare country music love song is okay too. Thanks to digitalization of music around the world, kids spend countless hours behind the computer. It is non uncommon to see some of the largest Killswitch Engage fans at the show at the EEC standing no more than 4 feet tall. These kids just need to understand that this music can become just another vice that could be just as destructive to the human spirit as the many other sources of desensitization I mentioned.

With all of this media at our hands, and so much of it bad, it is not hard to understand how a young person could get into bad habits. But rather than talking about sex or violence, I want to talk about profanity. My friend Jen wrote a note called "I Fucking Hate Cats". In it she describes how swearing makes people sound like morons. I don't know if I hear more swearing being around civil engineers or at my part-time job working in the lumber yard. Either way, it's relentless. Fucking bullshit cocksucking mother fucker. Who says that?!?! And more importantly, what can we attribute it to? I have soo much confidence in my friend Jen to give us hope in a less belligerent more thoughtful next generation in the way she handles things. So I cannot put this all back on parents, because it is possibly the case that she too didn't have much of that kind of language in her own household growing up. I live across the street from 2 schools. If I am around home around lunchtime during the week, I can't help but hear 8 and 9 year olds SCREAMING the F word. Followed by the SH and a few B's. I have a pretty good memory and can say with a fair degree of confidence that life wasn't like that when I was that age. With that kind of language comes kids trying to act all grown up and having sex at younger ages too. So thank you Lindsay Lohan for sucking that guy off in your latest movie, and thank you Paris Hilton for letting that guy do his thing on your things. Thank you Michael Richards and Mel Gibson for your tolerance of minority groups and not being able to hold it together for your fans. Thank you George W. Bush for creating a war so that impoverished Americans can go and shoot a gun once or twice before they are killed, so they can be a little bit like their favorite war movie hero. Thank you Family Guy for letting us see the humour in cartoon babies getting sliced open with butcher knives while their fathers turn into pimps for a weekend, and thank you Mary for putting that goop in your hair to make it stand up like that.

Part 2 is going to be about something a little more interesting, I swear.

The Evolution of "HA"

flipper was a name of a hardcore band in the eighties. they came out with a song called "ha ha ha". unimaginably incredible lyrics are associated with this tune and i totally recommend checking them out. but the funniest thing has happened over the years since this band used this word so explicitly. namely msn and/or facebook.

HA! has become one of those incredibly overused words in languages all around the world. It is mostly commonly used as a way to respond verbally to funny things we witness. Other times it's used as a way to act conceited and say "So There! I told you so -- so HA!" But don't ever be confused with the alternative use of "ahhh!" which has an entirely other set of possible situations where it could be used to describe a sense of relief/enjoyment/enlightened understanding; or the abbreviated version: "Ah!" as in The Count's "Ah! Ah! Ah!" after counting from one to fourteen. HA! could never be used in this way shape or form.

The thing that gets me the most though is how web tools like chatting online or writing on walls, or even blogging has drastically change how much more people emphasize the sound of that word when they are actually saying it!

Just listen. People around you at work. School. Your family. Yourself. The enunciation of the "heh" and "ah" sound are unlike anything we've been hearing ever before. I used to joke how Canadians say "eh" while Americans say "huh?" (because they sound pretty clueless about most things) but now it seems The Whole World is just saying HA!

After all. Everything is pretty funny. That, plus thanks to the realization global warming, the know-it-all conceited Al Gores of the world are saying to us all: "We knew you were heading for a disaster like this, So HA! The joke's on YOU!!"

What can we do to end this overuse of this word? Perhaps invent a new word like "mraw!" or start using that Fozzie the Bear's "wakka wakka wakka!" Maybe we can all just choose to go offline. No more networking sites, no more being silly in emails, no more chatting on msn.

Maybe this is all just me, because all of the time I spend and idiotic things I say online. But I couldn't be easily convinced because in addition to this new emphasis on this damn' 2-letter word, I have noticed that people are starting to express them self as the do-er of an action. What I mean is that facebook's status updates are causing people to think in a way that they must now present them self as the new subject which is now doing some verb on some noun. I'd sure like to do some verb on some noun, but refuse to publish Just What That May Be online... So even off of facebook (which is actually seeing less of me these days), I find that people present themselves as explicitly doing something more and more often.

Well now that I have proven to myself how neurotic I in fact truly am, it's time to go update my facebook status. So HA!


This blog has been brought to you today by the letter S and the number 6.