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Last Week in Weird

2 January 2017 by Darien Sumner

Ain’t no rest for the wicked

Bumbling Bees loves you. You know that. And Bumbling Bees is good to you. Other web sites are phoning it in this time of year — wasting your time with boring retrospectives and "Best of 2016" lists, as though said lists don’t begin and end with the utter annihilation of Hillary Clinton. Well, you’ll have none of that here. We’ll be soldiering boldly onward into 2017, because the weird don’t rest, so neither do we.

And neither does Slate, which has just published the absolute worst opinion piece of the year. I know what you’re thinking: mighty bold claim for January second. Still and all, I am confident this piece will survive 363 days of challenges. It’s a piece about a big problem with self-driving cars. Now, let’s play a little game. Take a minute or so and think about what this piece could possibly be saying. What could be this big problem with self-driving cars? What mind-bogglingly stupid thing do you suppose Slate has chosen to ring in the new year? Think of the dumbest thing you can possibly imagine, and then check and see how close you were.

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Last Week in Weird

12 December 2016 by Darien Sumner

Olha, que coisa mais linda, mais cheia de graça

Rio de Janeiro has a bit of an image problem lately. Tourists getting murdered on the beach will do that to you, to say nothing of this year’s Plague That Will Destroy Civilization, the dreaded zika virus. Still and all, Rio’s newly-elected mayor has a bold plan that will restore the city to its well-deserved place as the crown jewel of Latin tourism. No, he does. Listen:

"Rio de Janeiro cannot continue treating its tourists as if they were an afterthought," Mr. Crivella, 59, told the audience, emphasizing the need to "shatter" Rio’s "negative image."

"This is something we need to discuss," he said.

You’re on to me, aren’t you. You’ve already guessed that this is going to be something absurd. Still and all, your humble narrator is willing to bet you aren’t guessing anything quite as absurd as the mayor’s actual plan, which is to pay reparations to tourists who are mugged while in Rio. Now, understand this: I don’t mean to say the mayor is setting aside a block of money to pay people who’ve been mugged recently, along with maybe some plan to reduce the muggings going forward. No, the plan is evidently to tell everybody "come to Rio! Sure, you’ll get mugged, but we’ll pay you back!" which I’m not a hundred percent sure is a good sales pitch.

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Last Week in Weird

5 December 2016 by Darien Sumner

You better watch out. You better not cry.

Ah, Christmas. That joyous time when all mankind comes together as one in love and merriment. Families put aside their squabbling, factions their differences, nations their wars, progressives their thought control, and we all link arm in arm and, in one voice, sing the worst song from How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The only negative thing even your humble narrator can come up with about all this — aside from that song, anyhow — is that it’s all a sack of rubbish. If anything, here in the year two thousand and whatever, people use Christmas as an excuse to kick their misanthropic crusades up another level.

In case you can’t quite see where I’m going with this artless lede, we’ll get right to it. Harvard University has given its inmates an early Christmas present: social justice placemats to bring home on break, so they’ll have easy access to disingenuous leftist twaddle when their less-enlightened family members need their idiotic ideas corrected. I promise I’m not making any of this up; the things even have the words "HOLIDAY PLACEMAT FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE" stamped on them in hideous block print. Here’s my favorite bit:

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Presidential Rankings #23: Jimmy Carter

9 June 2016 by Darien Sumner

We cannot resort to simplistic or extreme solutions which substitute myths for common sense.

Whatever else one has to say about the presidency of James Earl Carter Jr., one must admit that he was not a warmonger. A technocrat, yes; a utopian socialist, probably; a warmonger, no. The Carter presidency brought the United States as close as it has been to peace since the days of Herbert Hoover; sadly, with the cold war still raging and the Iranian people overthrowing the American puppet Shah, president Carter would find himself dragged into foreign entanglements all the same. Still and all, it was something close to peace, and that’s not nothing.

President Carter had the good fortune to be the first president since World War II not to inherit any military boondoggles in the far east. This was, in fact, part of the reason he won the election of 1976; as a relative unknown with no nationwide name recognition, he was at a steep disadvantage running against a sitting president during the bicentennial. However, the Carter campaign nimbly took advantage of president Ford’s two main areas of weakness: Watergate and Vietnam. As an outsider, Carter sold himself to the American people as a "reform" candidate who wasn’t enmeshed in any of the national political scandals, as against president Ford, who was still suffering from issuing the Nixon pardon two years prior. He was also able to tar Ford with the eventual final disgrace in Vietnam. In other words: Jimmy Carter ran on a "hope and change" ticket, spinning his inexperience and remoteness as a positive.

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