i spy things DC

Morning Intern!

How’s your spring internship in the big city?! Since it’s March, I assume you have now ceased bragging to all your little friends back home about how you  won this important assignment interning for the House of Representatives to finally realize, despite your oversized suit and stupid name badge, that all you do for 6 hours a day is print documents, arrange someone’s outlook calendar and stare at the wall (assuming you even have access to an outlook calender.) Only 2 more months to go!

But fear not.  I have found something that will take up 4 hours of your mind-numbingly boring day while simultaneously appealing to your now regrettable liberal arts major. It’s the Great Gatsby video game for NES (circa 1980s), and it looks like this:

Well done sport!

Click here to play the game

It’s wonderfully retro, free and available online. The game’s protagonist is Nick Carraway. Armed only with a fedora, you battle waiters, drunks, flappers and gangsters as you follow the green light to find Gatsby. It’s the Great Gatsby that F. Scott Fitzgerald would have never wanted ever. It’s perfect. So play it, before the hipsters kill it for all of us.

But now, it looks like someone needs to get back to work. That pile of constituent mail isn’t going to read itself.

Cheerio!

DCspy

I know, I know. This post has absolutely NOTHING to do with Washington, DC. But after the 14th straight day of having to sift through “funny” Facebook and Twitter status messages that reference one of Sheen’s drug and prostitute -fueled quotes, I am ready to quit reading.

As a blogger (even a conscripted one, such as myself), a common strategy is to see what is trending on Twitter. It’s a pretty consistent way of gauging which topics will have the most traction. That being said, admitting anything I have ever written was at all influenced by twitter is grounds for my own euthanasia. Anyway, much to my dismay, “#winning” and “#tigerblood” were at the very top of the list. Want an example of what one such person thought was pressing enough to share with the rest of the world?

Despite all logic and decency saying otherwise, thanks to Charlie Sheen, Twitter has actually become more stupid.

Look, I get that us white folks love quoting things more than we even love camping or Michel Gondry, but how have you people not learned the lessons of Dave Chappelle, those awful Budweiser “Wassup?” guys, or the countless other catchphrases that we killed before it? I hate to be the one to tell you this, but reposting “funny quotes” does not have some sort of transitive property – you won’t suddenly become funny because of it. If anything, it will have the opposite effect:

Yesterday an acquaintance posted a legitimately funny picture, with the caption “Winning”. I informed him that Charlie Sheen quotes have jumped the shark and his caption detracted from the post. He responded by saying “the phrase ‘jumping the shark’ had jumped the shark and should be retired.” I rebutted with this:

God, it’s absurd how much I owned him there.

At the end of the day, the same cretins that make these posts are to blame for them even existing in the first place. At best, Charlie Sheen is a sad drug addict that clearly has some very serious mental health problems and should be treated. At worst, he is a woman-beating sociopath that should be in jail. But, for some reason, the majority of Americans are so serially unfunny they’ve made the abnormally retarded “Two and Half Men” the most popular show of the past decade, causing Charlie Sheen to make $2,000,000.00 an episode to fund his own private whore island.

The best thing to do is to stop reposting his rants, stop watching his stupid shows and move on to something a bit more challenging. It will force him to get the help he needs, save me from wanting to annihilate everything and just maybe it will make you a little funnier.  Who knows, maybe pretty soon we’ll go back to intelligent commentary like this:

-IronCityspy

We’re equals, aren’t we 007?

In one of the best videos honoring International Women’s Day, Dame Judi Dench and Daniel Craig deliver a poignant assessment of challenges facing women’s equality. You should watch:

There are few things I care more about in this world than women’s rights. We have come far in the fight for women’s equality. However, despite our exceptional progress, challenges persist. Women continue to be vulnerable to domestic violence, rape and sexual harassment both in the United States and abroad. Honor killings are real. Women seek asylum. Caregivers are not given the support and recognition they deserve. In the workforce, women are  paid less and hold fewer executive positions. Single mothers fear losing their job in order to take time for their child, while new mothers fear the same for having theirs.

In recognition of International Women’s Day, take the time to honor of the women who inspire you. It is the least we can do.

-DCspy