Other Things David Stern Should Veto

The most hated white man in the league since Toni Kukoc

When sports journalists heard about the NBA Commissioner’s probably ill-advised decision to veto a trade that would’ve sent New Orleans point guard Chris Paul to the Lakers, they practically pooped themselves with rage, railing about the end of the NBA with an apocalyptic despair that would’ve made Harold Camping proud. When I heard about the NBA’s decision, all I could think about was the goodness that could be accomplished by extending David Stern’s veto power, trigger-happy finger, and ‘screw it, I don’t care if I ruin the seasons of three teams’ attitude into other walks of life. Here are the fruits of that aforementioned thinking:

1. Rick Perry’s Presidential Campaign
Here at Sherman Ave we love Rick Perry. Oh wait, no we fucking don’t. No one in their right minds could ever stand to be in the same room, much less vote for, that intolerable shitmuffin. It now seems utterly ridiculous that people as intelligent as Mike Murphy actually thought that Perry could win the Republican nomination. Well, they were about as wrong as Custer’s last words. If only David Stern had stepped forward in August to stop this embarrassing shitshow of a campaign from ever launching.

His dreams were crushed by David Stern. M. Night Shyamalan's should be, too.

2. M. Night Shyamalan’s ability to make movies
So The Sixth Sense was maybe kind of okay. But I dare anyone to make it through The Happening without puking in a biological attempt to reject the atrocity from staying with you. Shyamalan made only one or two movies that could ever be considered ‘good,’ and everything since then has been so unbearably atrocious that Shaymalan should be prevented from ever tainting our eyes with such heinousness again. Unfortunately, the good people at Disney (and by “good people” I of course mean “stupid fucktards”) just keep signing off on his movies. Let’s get Stern in there to crush them the way he crushed Chris Paul’s dreams.

3. No Shave November
I’ll be honest, this year I tried doing No Shave November for the entire month, to see once and for all if I could really grow a beard. I can’t. And I’ve got news for everyone else who has tried it: you can’t either. You do look like an atrocious hobo, though. Congrats. Scumbag Steve would be horrified by your hygiene. Now let’s please agree to never do No Shave November again.

4. New Rebecca Black songs

Rosa Parks' personal hero

Katy Perry has no regrets — only love — about going all the way tonight. I have the same feelings about Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” Yes, it’s horrible, and yes, it probably shouldn’t exist, and yes, it speaks to some very heinous problems at the base of our modern society, but god damn is it funny. I’m glad it exists, and those two weeks where everyone in America absolutely refused to talk about anything else were just awesome. I feel bad for the hypothetical children I may or may not give birth to in the future because they will never have the experience of waiting at midnight for the release of Harry Potter books or movies, and I feel bad for them because they will never have the experience of going to school on March 18, 2011 (the Friday after the song came out) when everyone everywhere was singing “It’s Friday, Friday, GOTTA GET DOWN ON FRIDAY.” For two weeks it was fun to laugh, at the insipid songwriting, at the random rap verse that doesn’t make sense, at the problems with modern celebrity culture, but then those two weeks were over and we all moved on. DIDN’T WE?????

Apparently not. Apparently the ARK Music Factory thought that when 268,000 people disliked the “Friday” video, that meant “we love this, give us more please.” I hate to be the one to break this to you, Patrice Wilson, but when 268,000 people disliked the “Friday” video, it means they didn’t like it. At first, Rebecca Black was sad and kind of funny. Now she’s just sad.

5. Bill O’Reilly’s book about Lincoln
The only thing more ridiculous than the sentence “Bill O’Reilly wrote a book about the Lincoln assassination” is the sentence “Bill O’Reilly wrote a book about the Lincoln assassination that wasn’t true.” Yes. We live in a fucked up world. And while I think we have all accustomed ourselves to Fox News’s ridiculous excuse for news coverage, we don’t need them fucking up history as well. That’s Ross Packingham’s favorite subject!

6. “Ultimatum” by Jeph Loeb
If you’re a normal person, then it probably doesn’t mean anything to you when I say that Jeph Loeb fucked up the Ultimate Universe, but he did, and it is an intolerable atrocity.

Something doesn't seem right...

Quick nut graf: shortly after the dawn of the new millennium, Marvel Comics attempted to reinvigorate interest in their brand by creating an offshoot label, dubbed the Ultimate Universe, where they relaunched characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men as if their 40 year history didn’t exist, and the characters had been created in the year 2000. It worked. The stories were great, and their modern reworking of occasionally anachronistic Sixties concepts had a huge influence on Marvel’s later movie adaptations.

But in the year 2008, Marvel executives handed the creative reins of the Ultimate Universe to Jeph Loeb. It seemed like a sensible decision, as Loeb had won acclaim writing Batman at DC Comics. But whereas Loeb had done well on Batman with a strategy of utilizing Batman’s colorful cast and intriguing antihero sensibility, his plan for Ultimate Marvel was a little more like “destroy everything and kill every character.” His miniseries “Ultimatum” was basically a giant shit all over the Ultimate Universe, whose comics had helped spike my interest in the medium and which I still give to people who mention an interest in comic books, and I can no more forgive him for that than Eddie Murphy can forgive SNL for making one joke about him once.

And most importantly…

My First Quarter Grades
More important than any of the other things combined. I must admit, I got so caught up in college heinousness this quarter that I didn’t exactly get Will Hunting grades. Sure, it’s not like I stayed up past 2 am sequestered in the library every night of reading week preparing for my Ancient Philosophy final, but if Stern could have some words with Morty re: my grades, that would be dandier than Sebastian Flyte.

If that isn’t a convincing reason for giving David Stern a time machine and being done with it, I don’t know what is.

Rebecca Black’s Hit Single “Friday”

Instant pop music sensation Rebecca Black, also a closeted intellectual social commentator

Some cultural commentators might say that Rebecca Black’s new hit single “Friday” is nothing more than an egregiously horrendous song created by an obscenely rich and untalented 13-year-old that is so obnoxiously deplorable, it has quickly conquered the interwebs. But I think we can all agree that it takes more than harrowing stupidity to achieve internet celebrity.

Rather, Black’s “Friday,” which has garnered over 3 million youtube views in only three days, is far more substantive than most listeners might think. Upon further analysis of Black’s hit single, music video, and ensuing internet kerfuffle, it is apparent that her ode to the greatest day of the week is far more sophisticated than the repulsively deplorable piece of crap it first appears to be.

This explains a lot

A brief examination of Black’s lyrics reveals the true genius inherent in her song writing. Black is able to slyly sneak a casual drug reference into a seemingly inane discussion on breakfast in her first stanza, crooning, “Gotta have my bowl.” Besides substantially improving her street cred (in what I can only assume is her local Bronxville middle school), Black also hints at the necessity of toking in order to get through the daily grind of modern life.

Rosa Parks had the same dilemma

Perhaps thanks to her extensive drug abuse, Black also poses the philosophical dilemma “Which seat can I take?” Her trenchant questioning of where a human being must sit when driving with friends raises the deeper issue of where any of us really sit in the cosmic order of the universe. Yet in accordance with the existentialist philosophies of her intellectual predecessors, Black actively transcends her facticity in life, freely and willingly choosing where she wants to place her philosophical seat in life. In a display of her fierce desire to delve into all issues, Black symbolically forces herself into the middle seat in an understated reference to her personal hero, Rosa Parks.

If you're Rebecca Black, then why are you white?

But Black’s most pithy insight into modern life comes in her bridge with the lines, “Yesterday was Thursday / Today is Friday… Tomorrow is Saturday / And Sunday comes afterwards.” Truer words have never been spoken. Her repeated declaration, “We so excited,” coupled with frequent staccato interjections of “Yeah!” from her peers (magical 13-year-olds who have mastered the ability to drive), also display a youthful joy and disregard of grammar rarely found within current popular musicians.

Patrice Wilson, a.k.a. “Random Black Guy who wasn’t invited to Rebecca Black’s party but drives around and raps about Friday anyways,” then adds his initially opaque, yet extraordinarily brilliant, rap verse to the song. Perceptively musing, “Passin’ by is a school bus in front of me / makes tick tock, tick tock, wanna scream,” Wilson’s verse is the perfect combination of “token rap within a pop song” and “why the fuck am I watching this” that Black needed to amplify her sound.

Seriously, besides age and alcohol consumed, is there really any substantial difference between Ke$ha and Rebecca Black?

But what makes “Friday” so brilliant is the interplay between its backing music and Black’s poignant lyrics. Although most music critics believed that pop production-quality peaked with Alpha Delta’s “Harry Fucking Potter,” “Friday’s” grating use of auto-tune over the same four plodding chords brings the genre to a whole new level. Black is clearly lamenting the current replacement of high art with the tasteless industrialized artifacts produced on a mass scale, in order to satisfy the lowest common denominator, by using her music to reflect the existing musical trends of the institutional propagation of musical homogenization, creative appropriation, and shitification running rampant throughout American culture.

Although it appears that Black’s single is an exceptionally terrible musical abomination, she covertly comments on the state of pop music and modern culture by mimicking the work of pop acts like Ke$ha, Miranda Cosgrove, and Katy Perry, rich and untalented women and girls who garner instant internet fame despite their appalling lack of skill. And there lies the surprising genius nature of Rebecca Black’s song: No matter how piss-poor the quality of her work is, Americans will eat this shit up. Tell us that something is hilarious and popular, and the video will be grafted onto our national consciousness for days.