The Good, The Bad, and The Hordes of Drunk High Schoolers: A Review of Lolla 2013

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

While this iconic line is best known for opening Charles Dickens’ famous novel, A Tale of Two Cities, few people realize that he originally used the phrase to describe his three-day drinking and drugs binge at the 19th-century Britain version of Lollapalooza, which I assume was headlined by Fleetwood Mac.

So here I sit miserably at my 9-to-5 job, wrecked after spending the last three days taking in everything my first music festival had to offer (except Steve Aoki, because fuck Steve Aoki).  I got up at 6:30 this morning to get to work, and I have a residual hangover that could slay a large family of oxen.  Looking back, would I do anything differently?

Yes.  I made horrible, horrible decisions this weekend.

Lolla was a blast, of course.  But wow, that place could not be more heinous.  So I guess it’s only fitting to reflect on this weekend by looking at both the positives and negatives of spending this weekend with my favorite 60,000

Hate a Random Country: Brazil

Here at Sherman Ave, we take great pride in our irrational xenophobic rants about seemingly random (yet indisputably heinous) nations. But in light of recent events, we have recently come to believe that Brazil is such a flaming conglomeration of fecal matter of a country that it deserves to be called out as the nation of jackasses it really is. Fuck them.

With God on our side, America conquered

For most of the world, the USA-Brazil Women’s World Cup Game on July 10th, 2011 was their first introduction to how abhorrently vile Brazil is as a nation. The play of the women from the Federative Republic of Brazil, the only country that could possibly be worse than a commonwealth comprised solely of FIFA referees, merely typified the country’s flagrantly inferior and odious nature. Instead of simply bowing down to America’s soccer superiority, even despite the USA Women hailing from a country that follows the sport with slightly more interest than the game of sky ball, the Brazilians instead decided to force the Americans to break out their overflowing reserves of defiance and tenacity in order to give the nation the athletic bitch-slapping it deserved.

In one shocking example of Brazil’s proud spirit of douchiness, Brazilian defender Erika faked an injury with only 6 minutes left in extra time, only to spring off her stretcher once a sufficient amount of time had been sapped from the clock and the crowd was sufficiently convinced of the Samba Queens’ astounding bitchiness (also leaving me wondering that if Brazilian women are so good at faking, then how much have all those sexy Brazilian women I’ve been cavorting with really enjoyed my love-making capabilities?). But Karma is even worse of a tramp than Brazil’s Marta, allowing Abby Wambach and Hope Solo to lead the man-down American team in a glorious come back that prevented the South American nation of 190 million wankers from thinking they were any better than the scum of the earth that they are.

The nations inhabitants, fleeing to a better country where they can make a living outside of the oppressive supermodel industry

But as any Brazilian expert knows, the country’s ass-clown nature extends far beyond the soccer pitch. The nation’s flag, featuring a celestial blue orb inside a yellow rhombus inside a green rectangle, totally blows. A South Sudanese child soldier could have designed a better one for his own fledgling nation. Their President, Dilma Rousseff, is a notorious twatmuffin who reminds me of a combination of Casey Anthony and a drilldo. Other notable fuckballs from the country include soccer superstar Ronaldo and dictator Getùlio Vargas, both of whom were pompous douchebags unworthy of the ground they walked on (they also ended sentences in prepositions to showcase their hubris). Even the country’s language displays Brazil’s absurd awfulness, seeing as Portuguese is really more like drunken Spanish than an actual language of its own.

To be fair, Brazil has produced some good in the world. But besides Brazilian waxing and Adriana Lima, I’m kind of drawing blanks. Otherwise, Brazil is nothing more than a country of dickwads determined to ruin the rest of the world and the 2016 Olympic games with their crime, poverty, and Jersey-like levels of shittiness.

UPDATE: We have recently been notified that, besides producing Brazilian waxing and Adriana Lima, Brazil was also responsible for producing the magnificent wonder that is Chenny Ng, hosting Ms. Ng for an important duration of her formative years. Sherman Ave regrets this error, as Chenny is quite possibly one of the greatest humans in the world, and can guarantee that whoever was responsible for this heinous mistake has been punished accordingly.

Let’s have a tweet for the Douchebags

Like this one!

So I have this thing. It’s not really a problem, per se, but it does sometimes get a tad bit annoying.

I’m just going to come out and say it: I’m attracted to douchebags.

I know it’s stereotypical and all that jazz, but I can’t help it. I can’t even explain, so you’re just going to have to trust me on this one.

HOWEVER, one douchebag I most certainly am not attracted to is Nir Rosen, the New York University fellow who resigned after tweeting offensively about Lara Logan’s capture and ensuing sexual assault.

As the news broke about Logan, Rosen, like any self-respecting person, took to Twitter, bemoaning, “It’s always wrong, that’s obvious, but I’m rolling my eyes at all the attention she’ll get,” and later adding, “She’s so bad that I ran out of sympathy for her.”

Not like she was beaten and sexually assaulted or anything...

Now, serious face for a second: this is not an OK move, whether it be on Twitter, verbally, or in a satirical article, perhaps like the one you’re reading. Sexual assault is not a joke, and neither is any sort of violence against women. Twitter may seem like a place for fun and games but, especially when you work for a prestigious university, you should be mindful that it does not mean you are free of culpability for what you say. Logan was doing her job in an extremely volatile area where she was at risk for serious injury. In no way should this ever be belittled.

But if I were Nir Rosen, I would totally handle it by writing an even more incendiary column for Salon.com. I would tell the world, “Hey! You think I’m a jerk? Well, what about now? I’ll show you jerk!” That would be a really good PR move. Seriously.

Exhibit A: the article, titled, “How 480 characters unraveled my career”:
“My tweets about Lara Logan cost me my job and humiliated my family. Here’s what I meant to say” began Rosen’s article. Rosen obviously decided that since he had already torched his current career, he should probably also ruin any shred of reputation he had left on the Internet.

But, as it has been pointed out to me by certain people in my life, I shouldn’t call people names on the Internet. So instead, I will point out the flaws in his argument and why, as a presumably educated and hard-working man, he should be beyond writing a petty article that doesn’t exactly apologize, and may in fact cause him more harm than the initial offensive tweets.

“It was a disgusting comment born from dark humor I have developed working in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Lebanon — and a need to provoke people.” Yes, because provoking people will always excuse your actions. Like this one time, last week, when I poked this guy with a stick and he got really angry and I was all like, “It’s OK, dude. I was just trying to provoke you!”

“Now, Twitter is no place for nuance, which is why I should have stuck to long-form journalism.” Yeah. Hindsight is always 20/20.

"Idiotic Tweet" = Idweet?

“Meanwhile, I have not seen any condemnation of the pure hatred, racism and vitriol that I’ve seen spewed all over the Internet in response to the Logan story.” We all know that shifting the blame absolutely always works. When I do something dumb, like make light of sexual harassment online, I usually just blame someone else for it and no one is the wiser.

“I hope that people will take time to read my work and understand that I have spent my career taking a lot of heat for defending victims of all kinds, not just Arabs and Muslims.” Nir, let’s have a talk. When you apologize, just apologize. Don’t apologize and then continue on saying why you shouldn’t have to apologize. It just seems insincere. And unapologetic. Which I think is the opposite this of what you want. Plus, after you prove yourself as an inconsiderate buffoon on the Internet, I’m really not that likely to read any more of your portfolio.

“And I hope Ms. Logan and other victims of sexual violence will one day forgive me for my terrible mistake.” OK, that one sounded genuine. Maybe you should have left it at that, Nir.

by Emily Ferber