Episode 46 - Rumor School

DING DING DING!  Everyone take your seats, spit out your chewing gum, and stop talking, because class is in session!  We are Tab and Buck, your professors for this semester, so prepare to take notes as we lecture on the following issues:

-Starting the Rumor MIll
-Basic Chick Clothing
-School Zones
-Unearned beards

The Bible says that a man who can tame his tongue can tame his entire body.  Loose lips sink ships.  Telephone, telegraph, tell a woman.  All of the little quips and saying that reference the speed and ease with which we spread gossip.  Worldwide, gossip is a trillion dollar industry.  Nearly everything we consume (other than food) is in some way related to gossip.  Tv, movies, sports, even video games, everything gets caught up in gossip.  And especially jobs.  One would think that when adults go to work to earn money, they'd be primarily focused on performing the task that secures the money, but you'd be wrong.  People get bored.  Jobs are boring.  Money is boring.  But gossip . . . gossip is salacious.  Juicy.  Addictive.  And, if you know how to sell gossip, you can become quite rich.  Hell, our show has had its own fair share of gossip.  Gossip is like a weed; it springs up on its own, unaided, and is extremely difficult to eliminate.  It's like Sisyphus, pushing the gossip boulder back up the hill; it's never ending.  Why, then, do some folks feel the need to nudge that rock back down the hill again?  I dunno, but they do it.  And then, as if they can somehow absolve themselves of the act, will carelessly toss on the disclaimer "Don't gossip about this".  Sure.  That's how that works.  And don't think about elephants while you're at it.  It's the first thing people are gonna do.  Gossip is a cultural uniformity, and speaking of uniformity . . .

The second installment of my "Basic Chick" series is the uniform by which you can identify a basic chick.  It changes, season to season, year to year, but it never fails that pretty much every basic chick you run across is going to have some slight variation on the same style.  In recent years, it's the trend of fur boots, yoga pants, and a thigh-length tunic with a bulky-yet-loose collar that, as many have pointed out, resembles a vagina.  But this isn't the first basic chick uniform; there have been many across the ages, and there will be many to come.  Social media, I suspect, propagates this, along with the fact that fashion designers have to keep dreaming up weird things to out-do each other, so the trends are just going to keep on coming.  And speaking of things that keep on coming . . .

Traffic should keep on coming.  Moving, that is.  Anything that slows down traffic is an impediment to western civilization.  It's a common topic on this show, and this week Tab narrows his focus on School Zones.  School zones were invented by hand-wringers who want the world to notice how much they're concerned about "the children".  Which children?  They rarely name specifics; it's just this amorphous concept of "the children" that people rally around.  We get it.  Kids are fragile and inexperienced.  You don't have to shove it down our throats.  School zones are silly because kids tend to be delivered to school by a bus or a parent.  They don't meander aimlessly on public roads like a pack of feral ghouls just waiting to be mowed down.  Schools tend to have driveways that separate the school building from the main road by a good hundred yards or so, and kids tend to actually be inside buildings or fenced in playgrounds while at school.  Why, then, should traffic be slowed down to a crippling crawl because children exist, safe warm and protected, a few hundred yards away?  It's silly and uncalled for, and speaking of things that are uncalled for . . .

Every man has his insecurities.  Every man tries to measure up, to compete for his place in the gene pool, by hook or by crook.  Well, one of the ways that some men try to cheat the system is by growing a beard.  Beards are a biological sign of virility and strength, but as modern life converts men into soft, doughy fractions of what their great grandfathers were, instead of actually being masculine or becoming masculine, many men are simply putting on a costume.  A faux masculinity, if you will.  It's not just beards, though.  It's anything that would look manly in a cartoon.  And when you see a scrawny weakling or a blorpy dough-boy wearing flannel and oiling his beard as it nears his belly, you know that these people are, in fact, cartoon characters.  Silly caricatures of the brawny powerhouses that they emulate.

We remember to listen to some very long voicemails from Angry Stove, and Sage fires back at his doppelgangar, plus Tab announces a new contest!  Is Uncle Buck a white supremacist?  You'll have to listen to this week's episode to find out!

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