The Fonzarelli Effect

The Fonzarelli Effect 

        When I served my time as a schoolkid in the seventies and eighties things were different. Parents weren't cool. There were no MILF moms and 40 year old dads in punk rock bands. Hell, in the entire frickin' universe there probably only 700-800 people tops who were considered "cool." And they had done extensive work to become so. Lunch boxes proved it. You got the wrong lunch box you took a beating. In 1978 it was Evel Knieval, John Travolta and The Fonz.

        What's my point? I'll tell you my fucking point. If you wore Chuck Taylors to school in 1978 it meant you couldn't afford blue Adidas with the three stripes and you took a beating. If you wore brown Toughskins to school in 1978 you might as well have ….  well, something bad.  You remember Toughskins from Sears. A fucking robot couldn't wear them out so what chance did you have to ever be rid of these monstrosities.

        What's my point? I was recently forced to attend an event at a "trendy" night spot. Everyone there was significantly cooler than me. I know this is true because they drank nothing but Pabst Blue Ribbon and wore the same awful military style black frame nylon glasses I was issued as a defenseless seven year old and wore until I was sixteen. More than this they  had managed to find a lost consignment of brown Toughskins somewhere at a forgotten torture facility and were sporting Old School Chuck Taylors. I suffered flashbacks and had to remove myself from the suarez before I started stabbing everyone in the jugular with the shards of an Appletini glass.

        What's your point, Thomas? I'll tell you. In 1978 I wasn't cool in my brown Toughskins, Chuck Taylors and black nylon military style glasses and neither are you in 2006. Pabst Blue Ribbon is horse piss and always has been. My father drank PBR for forty years and he's far from being one of the cooler people on the planet.

        So, The Fonzarelli Effect. What is it? As I mentioned in 1978 no one on the planet was cool. 700-800 people tops. And the rest of us accepted that. There was only one cool table and we weren't at it. When Dungeons and Dragons came out we played it. When Devo made albums we bought them. We were known as geeks, dweebs and nerds and treated accordingly. There were no television shows glorifying us.

        Flash forward to 2007 and of the 6.5 billion people on Earth roughly two-thirds of them are now "cool." Everyone gets it. Everyone has a cell phone and a blog and a My Space site. Pretty much everyone in the entire world is in a punk band and everyone else is a tattoo artist. Every trend is transmitted to everyone simultaneously so no one has to do the hard work of being an individual. Everyone gets it. Even the last examples of uncoolness on the planet, the nerds, geeks and dweebs are now hip.

        The Fonzarelli effect states that if everyone is cool no one is cool. Cool isn't the right lunchbox, awful pants, bad music and deluding yourself into thinking Pabst Blue Ribbon is a palatable beverage, cool is a T-shirt with The Fonz giving you the thumb and saying "AAAAAYYYYYY" just be yourself.  Cool is not getting that dumbass tattoo and looking to past generations for ideas and slogans and trends to steal instead of creating your own.

        You know what else isn't cool? Harley Davidsons. The entire biker culture. Not cool. It's a medival costume party for over the hill middle managers. Here are a few other things that aren't cool: lists, Hooters, Green Day, storm chasers, crocodile hunters, profilers, mobsters, gangsters, athletes, The Onion and Emmylou Harris. If you're on this list you ain't cool.

        When did everyone decide sharing a small part of a global brain and identity was preferable to living a large and adventurous life at the periphery of societal norms and standards? When did everyone become too clever for the room? Pin It

Adele and the Sounds of Hell

Tonight someone named Adele will win a boatload of Grammy Awards. Patsy Cline, Diana Ross and Bob Marley never won one. The Beach Boys, The Doors, Led Zepplin, and The Who never won one. But tonight someone named Adele will win a whole bunch of them. 

     The poet Dante describes a Hell where all manner of horrific torture is heaped upon sinners. The guilty are plunged into molten lava, devoured by beasts only to be devoured again, their skin is stripped from their bodies, they are impaled, crushed and wracked in every fiendish manner imaginable. Most of Dante's tortures were borrowed from actual crimes of barbarity inflicted upon non-Christians during the Inquisition. These are things people did to other human beings. It is rumored Hell sounds a little bit like this...

...but this humble reporter respectfully disagrees. I think it sounds more like this...

Am I being a smartass? No. Let me explain. There is one difference between the sounds in the first video and the second video. And that difference is soul. Those in Hell have soul. That's why they're there. They have bad soul, but they have it. But I find very little evidence of soul around me anymore. Walking down the street I rarely see the spark of soul in anyone's eyes anymore. Dead, sunken lakes of bottomless void is what I see. And the phenomenon of popular singers who caterwaul like beasts of burden being eviscerated by rusty kitchen utensils has been substituted for human beings who make sounds from the heart and soul. These are imitators of humanity. A style foisted upon us by shows like American idol, but first perpetrated by artists like Michael Bolton who would take a sledge hammer to songs by legends of soul like Otis Redding and just howl until your ears bled. Like parasites these artists share only the blood of those they feed off, not the soul. I remember the first time I heard Mariah Carey do that blood-curdling banshee cry that was passed off by tin-eared pundits as a seven octave range. Start by hitting the first of the octave. The trend continued through the nineties until it was rare for anyone to be able to discern shit from shinola anymore.


     Then American Idol happened. And culture died. It was murdered. By howling monkeys belting out fifth-rate versions of songs artists of previous generations suffered and died to make their own. But nobody seemed to notice. Eventually it didn't seem like their was anyone left capable of noticing. Or that those who could had merely given up in disgust. It was fake, forged, hollow, inane, soulless, saccharine garbage. And people ate it up. Worst of all, they insisted on labeling it exactly the opposite of what it was... soulful. To be soulful one has to have soul. It can be imitated. It can't be duplicated.


     Tonight one of these new generation of huxters will go home with a sackful of Grammy Awards. And for an award that has a history of ignoring the artists in each generation that stood the test of time and became treasured assets to our culture, that seems entirely appropriate. 


    The sounds of Hell. 

September 18, 2026 update: I'm not going to re-read this nonsense to see what I was on about, but ten years hence or so all I know is Adele is probably a lovely person and none of it seems to matter one rip anymore. 

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A List of My 16 Pet Peeves

My Pet Peeves

1) Fast rolling credits at the end of movies. Any other movie buffs annoyed by this? Part of the movie experience for me is knowing who did what on a movie from the director of photography to the supprting actors. But these days you have to go to IMDB to find out because the moment a movie ends we're zoomed off into an advertisement. Hate this phenomenon.

2) Baby talk. Even when directed at babies. Particularly wawa. It's fucking water mushbrain.

3) Left turns. There are very few situations in life where you absolutely have to make a left turn. So don't. Can you imagine the time that could be saved in the universe if certain dickwads would opt to go around a block instead of sitting in traffic to make their all important left turn. This is an example of why nothing works.

4) Crime scene investigators and profilers. I was curious to see what impact all these brilliant deducers of the human psyche are having on the solving of actual crimes so I looked at the statistics. And did you know if you commit a rape or murder right now you have a better chance of getting away with it than any time statistics have been kept? Profile that mother fucker.

5) The typing sound effect. Don't know why but when I hear that sound effect it drives me nuts.

6) When people say "to die for." Almost always they are referring to foodstuffs and I wish they would.

7) Lists. Listmania. Lists, man. Fucking lists. Here's an example. Every Sunday we get the rundown of the top ten movies as if movies are competing against each other.

8) Sammich. It's a fucking sandwich, idiot. Yes, I know a lot of these involve the butchering of language.

9) Alright, this one really gets me. Eddie Murphy was funny in 1983. He's made like seven movies where he plays like ten different characters aqnd every time black people lose their minds like theycan't believe make up effects have advanced to the point where a black man can portray a Jewish man or even a larger black man. But here's the actual peeve: when they have the commercial saying "Eddie Murphy and Eddie Murphy and Eddie Murphy..." we fucking get it already check out Lon Chaney and what he physically did to his face in Phantom of the Opera if you want to be impressed by make up effects.

10) I hate that look of anticipation in peoples' eyes just before the appraiser tells them how much something is worth on Antiques Road Show. Does everything in this society have to be reduced to a dollar amount? Some hillrod from West Virgini could bring in the first copy of Shakespeare's Folios and aside from the fact that he was holding a priceless artifact from our shared human experience all he would care about was if it was worth enough to buy a bass boat.

11) Men who use a billiards table as an excuse to grope women. Alright, so I've spent most of my life in barrooms but this one gets to me. Watch sometime. Every time a woman gets near a pool table some Chester the Molester believes it is his sworn duty in the Universe to make sure she knows how to shot properly, which always entails him sneaking up behind her as she's about to shoot. Don't be this guy. End this phenomenon.

12) The word poon-tang. Hates it. It may be the foulest sounding word in any language.

13) Ghost hunters, storm chasers... I despise charlatans. If you want to be recognized do something meaningful.

14) Joe Cocker and specifically that song "You Can Leave Your Hat On."

15)  Tryptophan. Every fucking Thanksgiving does every idiot in the Universe have to rehash the false fact that turkey makes you sleepy because of tryptophan. It's not the falseness of the fact that annoys me it's just the sharing of a brain that six billion people seem to have. Next year just don't say it.

16) Ok, here's where I get kicked in the nuts and I could easily avoid it by just not telling you that I think tattoo and punk and Harley culture is completely unoriginal and bothers the shit out of me. I hate it any time people get together and all dress the same and act the same and parrot the same words and phrases and then tell us how unique and bad ass they are. This extends to Witch culture and Satanists. Just excuses for unoriginal people to dress up and all act alike and talk alike and generally bother the shit out of us actually living unique lives. (I have to amend myself by stating that most of the actual unique people I know do have tattoos and piercings it's not the tattoos or piercings it's the culture that bothers me)

    So, there it is. A non-exhaustive list of my pet peeves. Now I expect you all to list your pet peeves. And not just me. Pin It