…and WOW! but makeup designed for traditional TV looks lousy in hi-def. John Kerry’s looking like a bad wax statue of himself.

I just saw a commercial for an upcoming Fox sitcom, one of those promos that’s an edited-down bit from one of the early episodes. Here, the situation was built around a humorous confrontation between (who I assume to be) the audience-identification character and her anorexic coworker. Because nothing says HIGH-larious!!1! like humiliating someone with an eating disorder.

Anyway, one of the gags had the protagonist saying to the anorexic something like, “It’s called food. We eat it, and we’re nice. You don’t, and you’re mean.” And the anorexic says, “Mean and thin! You always leave out the most important part.” Because, see, she has serious psychological problems, and that is teh_funny.

That’s all disgusting, but it’s not unexpected. Here’s what makes it weird: the protagonist and the anorexic are of similar height and build, and in the shots we see it looks like the protagonist might weigh as much as ten pounds more than the anorexic. Maybe five.

Sooooo…the one character is set up as an object of ridicule because she is fixated on being thin. But the character set up as an audience stand-in is no chubbier than the “thin” one. And we’re supposed to think it’s funny that some women are driven to destruction because of social constructions of body-rightness. Yet the character who is “righteous” is just as thin.

It could maybe work as postmodern satire if there were any sense of knowingness, but that didn’t at all come across. Hmph.

It sounds like almost exactly the opposite of what it means. The sound of the word conjures up a landscape of sickliness, specifically the kind involving severe stomach upset. The phrase “bucolic countryside” suggests to me withered trees punished by an acid green sky, streams choked with mud and garbage refusing any nourishment.

My allergies are pretty severe today, so I’m feeling pretty bucolic.

Comment here if you want in.

Dr. Who + Benny Hill + Eminem. No more need be said.

Bonus points for an extra-large helping of John Pertwee.

…just…wow. This is exactly the way the world is supposed to work.

Watching this week’s Eureka, where they exposited that a group of ten scientists had been in cryogenic sleep for eleven years (or eleven for ten years, TV usually doesn’t get my full attention). Hearing that, I thought, “Yup, get ready for some time-displaced culture-clash hijinks. These folks will have to get caught up on a whole eleven years of missed cultural history, having been shut away since way back in…”

And then I did the math.

“…1997!?!?!”

That’s, that’s, why that’s practically just yesterday, 1997 is! How could they have time-displacement wackiness with such a recent date?

But, yeah, ten years. The fact that it seems too soon for culture clash speaks less of the actual number of years passed and more of the fact that I’m kind of stuck back there myself.

This isn’t a new revelation. I realized last fall that Underworld’s “Pearl’s Girl” still sounds hot and fresh and contemporary to me, and that’s even older. If I had a lawn, I suspect I’d be about ready to start telling kids to get off it.

So here’s the thing that makes it really hard to relate to (even relatively) neurotypical people, as well as with people who’ve enjoyed relative success in their chosen fields, or in their interpersonal relationships, or in their something.

Nothing actually bad happened last week. In fact, some good things happened. In even more fact, a couple of extremely good, if small and fleeting, things happened. And nothing actually bad happened at all, really. There were some frustrating things, and a couple of disappointing things, but nothing registering strongly enough to stand out in memory.

And yet still, it was a bad week.

That’s the thing about neurochem disorders: You get the experience of feeling like your dog just died even though you never owned a dog. Pour that on top of various situational factors–about which more later, probably password protected–and you got yourself a Seven Layer Dip of Fugly.

So that’s why my recent habit of actually posting to the blog faltered over the last week. Will try to pick it up. In the meantime, read Fred Clark on the Republican attempt to brand Obama as the literal Antichrist.

On the few occasions I’ve mentioned Nice Guys here, there seems to have been a bit of confusion over exactly what’s meant by the term. In the comments to a post at Pandagon[1], I found a link to a comment on an article at US News & World Report in which a man’s complaint not only reveals him to be a Nice Guy but also serves as a convenient definition by example:

They have an off-the-chart sense of entitlement that makes them think they’re too good for most guys. The majority of available women are gunning for the 20 percent of men at the top, thinking they deserve no less. This leaves around 80 percent of men without choices, forced to be either alone or settle for someone (fat, ugly, plain) that isn’t their top pick.

Restated, the least desirable 80%[2] of men are forced to choose from among the least desirable 80% of women. To the Nice Guy, this is somehow construed as a tragedy and as evidence that all wimmenz is uppity bitches.

(Well, to draw out the obvious implication, the top 20% of wimmenz is uppity bitches. The other 80% are beneath consideration even as humans, apparently.)

The quote really is beautiful in its utter wrongness. It demonstrates the Nice Guy’s sense of entitlement, which is an obvious characteristic of Nice Guys, but it also shows his less obvious refusal to acknowledge women’s agency. Check it: the author is basically coming out and saying that of course men want women they find attractive, that’s just the natural order of things, but that women who want the same are heartless bitches.

Now, one thing I should make clear is that the quote above doesn’t represent a guy self-describing as a Nice Guy but instead the guy who self-describes as “I Used To Be A Nice Guy But”. The Nice Guy is the maggot, the author above is the fly. Nice Guys have the same attitude, which is why I think the quote can be used as representative, but its somewhat hidden by their most obvious characteristic, the “I pretended to be her bestest friend, and she won’t even have sex with me!” whine.

So that’s the thing to keep in mind about Nice Guys: they are not nice guys at all. They are the set of frothing misogynists who like to think of themselves as hopeless romantics.

[1] The internet is really one huge rabbit hole, yeah?

[2] For the Nice Guy, a concept like “the least desirable 80%” does seem to make sense.