As a writer and singer, I am finding my way through words.
posted by Beth at 11:21 AM
Well, apparently, you can have multiple blogs, but you can't have multiple profiles. So this one will have to suffice for every site. My Finding My Voice persona says: My dream is to get paid to sing. That dream is slightly complicated by two things: 1) I'm not a big fan of singing in public, and 2) Not many people get paid to sing. I figure, I'll focus on 1, and then maybe 2 will take care of itself. In the meantime, I'm a writer and editor. Mostly, I write and edit for other people, but someday, I'll find a way to get paid to write solely what I want to write. Until then, here we are. I write what I want, and you, hopefully, read it. But even if you don't, it's still the ultimate ego-trip. My The Cookie Queen's English persona says: It's always good to have more than one dream. And one of my others is to open a bakery someday. A cookie bakery. Hence my blog The Cookie Queen's English, a chronicle of cookies ... and the occasional muffin ... and scone ... and ... . And craigslist is crushing my writerly soul, which, really, needs no further explanation, does it?
10 Comments:
Yup. Behind blood-sports, it's the vilest I know of. A real 'culture-gone-wrong' moment.
But is it worse than NASCAR?
I work for a certain, uh, sports network, that telecasts this, uh, competition. A few years ago, one of your anchors did a very funny piece about this and we decided to put it on his Emmy reel. I sat in the edit room, putting the reel together and every time the piece came on I had to hold a piece of paper in front of my face because the video makes me gag. There is something about we hotdog buns that makes me gag. When they're spread all over somebody's face, well, it makes me gag. Vomiting makes me gag. The editor laughed every time he played it back and I covered my face.
that's ... "our anchor"
and "WET hotdog buns"
Here, here, Mike.
As someone who edited a NASCAR publication for three years, Eth, I can say, unequivocally, yes, it's far, far, far worse than NASCAR. Yeah, the drivers are burning through fossil fuels, and I'm sure you can connect dots between burning gasoline and people dying, but hot-dog eating contests and the like are just gross and gluttonous. Eating is a fundamental thing we all need to do every day to survive. If we're so lucky.
And E, I can't watch this competition when it happens, let alone watch it over and over, so I totally get why you had to shield your view. Blech.
Eating is a fundamental thing we all need to do every day to survive. If we're so lucky.
Point taken, BUT:
1. Blowing through God-knows-how-much fuel to run auto races, weekly, is also gluttonous (my point).
2. If you want to confine the argument to food, Costco just sent out their monthly magazine and noted that EACH store discards about 1.5 tons of produce per WEEK.
Worse or better?
Gluttony = bad, I agree. And the hot dog eating contests are not my bag. But I find them to be symptomatic of a larger "we did it because we can" mentality that is not confined to the USA.
More on that story later at EM. (As in, it will show up some day on the feed.)
Well, Eth, burning fuel is part of the sport. A sport that takes place, almost exclusively, in the daytime.
What about stadium sports that happen at night? A lot of power is being sucked off the grid to light up those fields and run those arenas. Should we be criticizing those sports, too?
As for Costco, while I'd love for the company to find a way to donate food that's slightly past its prime to organizations that can still use it, maybe the Costco buyers need to adjust what they order for each store. Costco isn't throwing out food for the fun of it. It's throwing out food because people aren't buying it.
I do agree with the "we did it because we can" mentality of which you speak, but the U.S. seems to be more self-indulgent than any other country that's springing to mind at the moment.
IFOCE About Us page
So... guess gluttony is "part of the sport." :-)
BTW, I learnt more about the contest than I ever wanted to in the last 5 minutes, and was surprised to learn that this (and others) is an international contest, so the US isn't solely propping this activity up.
Anyway, whatever.
It's also interesting that perennial powerhouse (the only face I recognize in the promos) is a little guy from Japan. It doesn't seem to fit how I'm inclined to perceive Japan's culture at all. And it's not as if it's Rubin Studart v. pre-metamorphosis Star Jones or something. The contestants generally seem to be of average size. I'm not sure what the upshot of all that is... just observations that seem worthy of note.
But I agree... it basically amounts to giving the finger to starving people everywhere, especially when our country is going down the tubes quick. As bad as things are, we still got it good!
That sounded flippant and that's not at all how I meant it. I agree that the whole thing is both sickening and immoral.
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