tippity-bounce

After spending a couple of hours digging around YouTube yesterday, I posed a question to my friends on Google+ and Facebook about just what it is that makes Aspies (people with Asperger’s Syndrome or high-functioning autism) love The Price is Right so much. I got a variety of interesting responses, but I think I’ve been able to come up with my own explanation:

1) It's a huuuuuuuuge body of work (6000+ episodes, more than all series of Star Trek, Doctor Who, The Simpsons, Buffy, and BSG combined). It's also an extremely detail-oriented show with quite a lot of "moving parts." Consequently, there's a lot of stuff for Aspie brains to feast on: thousands of prizes and their prices, 80+ different pricing games (and the order in which those games are played), music cues, small set changes, hairstyle changes, even differences in the announcer's spiel at the start of the show. Just like if we're reading the phonebook or a street atlas, Aspies will never get bored classifying and cataloguing every detail of the show. All of this has led to one hell of a Price is Right fandom on the Internet, centered around golden-road.net, the unofficial fan forum. Many TPIR fans have uploaded their VHS recordings of old episodes (what young Aspie didn't record TPIR every day to watch after coming home from school?), with the result that there are now upwards of 100 episodes from the Barker era available in their entirety and for free on YouTube. Bob Barker and some of TPIR's staff have expressed admiration for the TPIR superfans at least since the early 1990s, calling them "Loyal Friends and True" and welcoming them to attend tapings. A couple of them have even gone on to work on the show. You can see the results of the devotion of the "Loyal Friends and True," and their sheer Aspie-ness, in the "Price is Right Timeline" hosted over on golden-road.net (http://golden-road.net/faq​/index.php/The_Price_Is_Ri​ght_Timeline). This 118,000 word document has chronicled every event and change in the history of the show, week by week. If you want to know exactly when the asterisks on the Showcase podiums changed color for the first time, you had better believe that information will be there.

...even though some of these things aren't Americanisms at all. Deplane (no. 5) is used in both countries and predates commercial air travel. Scotch-Irish (no. 13) is a perfectly acceptable genealogical term that means something decidedly different than Scots-Irish. And "where's it at?" is acceptable in a variety of English dialects both here and across the pond, since the "can't end a sentence with a preposition" rule is a load of crap anyway.

British English speakers are apt to dismiss any lexical feature they don't like as an Americanism. White speakers of American English often do the same thing, but blame it on African-Americans, on politicians they don't like, or on regional dialect. It seems curmudgeonly and wrongheaded to oppose language change, but everyone does it, even me--and I studied sociolinguistics in undergrad and am a firm believer in the danger of language prescriptivism and of trying to inhibit languages from evolving. Personally, what gets me is the use of obfuscatory business-speak and psychobabble. Issues instead of problems. Core competencies instead of skills. Leverage instead of use, as a verb. Interface. Touch base. Solutions. Even worse are the cutesy diminutives appearing everywhere: veggie, rezzie (reservation), sammie, EVOO, yummo/yummers, fro-yo, sesh (session), rela (relationship), adorbs, jeals/jelly (jealous), preggers, bestie, hubby, ciggie. You all sound like a bunch of children. Not everything has to be cute all the time.

...and let's not forget about good ol'-fashioned hyperbole. Orgasmic, foodgasm, amazing, cooked to perfection, transcendent, abundant, special, beautiful. Love where you just intend to like or enjoy. Hate where something moderately irks you. You call it expressive; I call it gushy. It's a variation on the "euphemism treadmill" by which toilet became bathroom became restroom. Mark my words, by the time I'm 50 it's going to be called something even more circumlocutory. How are we going to express actual intensity if all of our "intense" words have been reappropriated for routine feelings of slight pleasure and discomfort?

I was incredulous when I first heard the rumors, but it looks like they're true: Steak 'n Shake is coming to New York City, with a location in Midtown Manhattan right next door to the Ed Sullivan Theater. Just like when I heard the Neely's Bar-B-Q Upper East Side opening announcement that I discussed five months ago, I should be ecstatic, but I'm not. It's just more poaching of regional specialties to swell heads in the City of Big Egos. It was bad enough finding Garrett Popcorn on 34th Street just weeks after Macy's muscled its way into Chicago and wiped out Marshall Field's. What's next, Ted Drewes Frozen Custard at Grand Central Station? Voodoo Doughnut at Columbus Circle? Something definitely gets lost along the way when my favorite regional treats become little more than brand names in the middle of Big Apple touristland. 

Also, this announcement confirms what I've long thought to be the case: that Sardar Biglari, the 80s-style corporate raider who acquired Steak 'n Shake in a hostile takeover in 2008, has turned this beloved Midwestern institution into a silly caricature. Biglari has closed locations and cut hours, especially in small towns across the Midwest where Steak 'n Shake was the only non-fast-food establishment open past 10pm. At the same time, he's been opening up locations that seem like little more than publicity stunts, including the one in NYC and one inside a Las Vegas casino. He took the headquarters out of the Midwest and plopped them down in San Antonio, Texas, a city that didn't get its first SnS until earlier this year. He's taken some of the choice off the menu (gone are the more interesting shake combinations, as well as the customizable dinner platters) and given in to gimmicky food trends by introducing "steak franks" (ordinary hot dogs), dry, flavorless miniburgers, and a ridiculous thick-cut bacon that overpowers the classic steakburger. He even ripped off Culver's by adding a "Wisconsin Buttery Steakburger" to the menu. Soft drinks, which used to be served in real glassware, now come in hulking green plastic Coca-Cola-branded tumblers, while a junior-size milkshake comes in a humiliatingly cutesy plastic kiddie cup. To top it all off, a creepy, cultish picture of a smiling Biglari now greets you at the entrance to every restaurant, and there are rumors that the real china and table service will soon be dropped in favor of a "Five Guys"-type counter service format. Bah humbug.

My wonderfully talented friend Emily Crockett makes lemonade out of the lemons that are this atrocious piece from ThoughtCatalog.com.

The text is full of fail on the level of your average fanfiction.net or deviantart submission. It's bogged down with enough needless adjectives and gushy metaphors to fill Stephenie Meyer's entire oeuvre, and once again proves the old saw about how it's damn near impossible to write convincing sex.

Apparently, it's a sort of fundraising dinner unique to the suburban New Jersey county where I grew up. A bunch of people get together in a large room and gorge themselves on all-you-can-eat beef tenderloin, french fries, and pitchers of beer. The tenderloin is served on pieces of "Italian" bread, which are not eaten, but are stacked up on the side of the plate (the bread serves as a sort of "scorecard" to tally the number of slices of tenderloin you've eaten, and the most gluttonous individual at the end of the evening wins a prize). I had never heard of the beefsteak before today. Sometimes, it's combined with a sort of raffle called a "tricky tray," another unique-to-New-Jersey tradition which I had never heard of.

Wait...a...sec... obscure regional thing? (check) From a place I knew quite well? (check) Relating to food? (check) Why didn't I know about this before, and why did it take a couple of Brooklyn hipsters from Connecticut, of all places, to inform me?

It probably has a lot to do with my upbringing in Bergen County. I grew up Jewish with liberal parents in Upper Saddle River, a town that was overwhelmingly Christian and Republican. I attended a private school 25 miles away, kept to myself, and didn't play sports. I spent my weekends going into New York City, rather than hanging out at Garden State Plaza mall. My sister, who went to public school, had lots of friends in the surrounding towns, and played basketball and field hockey, may actually be a little more familiar with this tradition than I am. The beefsteak, as it seems, was (and still is) the bulwark of the Republican, Christian county establishment, the kind of people who hang out in Elks Lodges and keep people like Scott Garrett (New Jersey's answer to Paul Ryan) in power.

Above: Charlie Sheen strikes out in Detroit.

Well, it looks like Charlie Sheen's days of painting the Internet red with his tiger blood are over. The debut of Charlie's one-man show in Detroit started with him entering to a standing ovation, but as the 70-minute act dragged on, the crowd began booing and walking out. Maybe his act was lousy (certainly sounds like it), but I think perhaps the American public has grown tired of Charlie Sheen. We've gotten our fill of the guy after a few weeks of winning and Adonis DNA, just like we turn Saturday Night Live off before the last 30 minutes (or like we loved Seinfeld, but couldn't stand The Michael Richards Show or Bob Patterson).

If Sheen's Detroit bomb is any indication, I think his days of being an Internet Celebrity are numbered, and he'll go back to being washed up (again). You'll notice how long his popularity lasted: about three weeks, from his appearance on the Alex Jones radio show on February 24 to his replacement with other, sexier memes sometime around the middle of March. This Google Trends chart pretty much nails it.

What's interesting, though, is how prevalent this cycle is in American memetics. Whenever we become fascinated with something in pop culture, it seems to hold our attention for about three or four weeks, with rare exceptions. March Madness lasts a little under three weeks. Pop songs tend to stay in the Top 5 for about three weeks. The December holiday shopping season lasts a little more than three weeks, and attempts by retailers to start it any earlier have been met with accusations of "Christmas creep." "Dick in a Box" mania lasted for about three weeks at the end of 2006. 

Perhaps this means that the Internet Age finally has its counterpart to Andy Warhol's 15 minutes--an indication, maybe, of how long "viral" status actually lasts. I think I'll call this unit of virality a "sheen."  A more resilient meme, the Bed Intruder song, stayed around for about six sheens (with a one-sheen resurgence around the end of the year, when the top-10 lists come out). The infamous Rickroll had one-sheen reigns of megapopularity in May 2007 and April 2008, but managed to retain above-average popularity for a total of about 17 sheens.

What's the implication here? I think it's that if you go viral, you can expect your fame to last approximately one sheen (related: would Americans be more motivated to vote if political campaigns lasted one or two sheens, rather than the current election cycle that lasts over 20-plus sheens?) It's bad news for Rebecca Black--her video exploded onto the Internet on March 11, just a little more than three weeks ago. By next Friday, almost certainly, she'll be shoved aside in favor of the Next Big Thing, not to rear her head again until top-10 list season in December.

...but she'll be back, of course, in 2020, as a presenter on VH1's I Love the '10s*. Just you wait and see.

This is an awesome chart I found over at the data-visualization blog Information is Beautiful. It serves to situate all of the different types of nonmonogamous relationships on a sort of map, and is something of a reminder that there are many, many ways to have intimacy, and not all involve dyads or dichotomies. Too often, people think of relationships in terms of being "one or the other"--friends vs. lovers, open vs. monogamous, kinky vs. vanilla, cheating vs. fidelity, sexual vs. emotional. What I see here is that reality is a lot less "black and white" than that, and while the use of handy-dandy exclusive categories in which to sort our intimacy might be easier on our brains, there are as many different types of intimate relationships as there are people to be intimate with.