#16) Japanese Dance Festivals

Japanese Dance Festivals are crazier than bat shit.

I realize that this is only my second post and it is also about the Japanese. We could have been a bit more economical and lumped Japan all into one category but that didn’t happen so you will just have to deal.

Recently I saw two performances of butoh, a uniquely Japanese style of modern dance developed post-war to help re-establish the national identity and hegemony of a defeated Japan. Or so they say. Do some digging and you’ll realize that the first piece of butoh was about the taboo of homosexuality and involved a live chicken.

Butoh is a style of dance that, like everything else Japanese, is not quite entirely unlike dance. Music? Check. Rhythmic movement to that music? Check. Naked Japanese men painted white and beating themselves rapidly on the head while shrieking? Check. Butoh has a lot of slow stress-poses as well, focusing less on what we regular people would call dancing such as rapid footwork or even a little pop-and-lock, and more on deliberate and intricate control of the body as a whole.

Which works well for the skinny Japanese but not so much for the sweaty hairy white men that were also participating, which just goes to show you that the Japanese are special people.



And speaking of Japanese dancers, in this same festival Eiko and Koma performed one of their classic pieces from a few decades ago entitled “Rust.” We here at TTACTBS have been thrilled that SYTYCD has been showcasing excellent and innovative talent from the contemporary dance world and we thought with the introduction of things like krumping and Bollywood to the competition, this season would be ripe for butoh. And what better way introduce the world to Japanese modern movement than to have two masters like Eiko and Koma perform a seminal piece of dance. Here we imagine how this conversation might go:

SYTYCD: Eiko and Koma, we would love for you to perform on our show.
E&K: We shall perform “Rust”, a seminal work in which we dance as if we were rust on a fence.
SYTYCD: Hmmm, rust you say?
E&K: We will not so much as dance as lean against a chain-link fence and move slowly towards each other for twenty minutes.
SYTYCD: Hmmm, with intricate footwork, perhaps?
E&K: Not really, since we will be upside down on our heads the whole time.
SYTYCD: Dressed as rust?
E&K: Naked.
SYTYCD: But the music –
E&K: No.
SYTYCD: No music?
E&K: The creaking of the fence beneath our creeping, naked bodies is out music.
SYTYCD: You’re crazier than bat shit.
E&K: Us?
Mary Murphy: Hot tamale train!

Bat Shit Hall of Fame - Running with the Bulls

The dudes in this photograph running from angry bulls during last week's Festival of San Fermin are crazier than bat shit.

So much crazier than bat shit that we feel its almost as useless to write about this craziness as it is to elaborate on the finer points of Michael Jackson because really, what are we telling you that you don't already know?

Well, the first thing we can share, having actually taken the above photo, is that semi-drunken men gather along the bull-running course at an alarmingly early hour for the 8 a.m. three-minute "oh-shit-fest" that is the actual event.

At around 7 a.m., the street is still littered with empty cups, beer bottles and spilled drinks and various and sundry shady characters, but then cops with berets ferret them away and a very traditional street-cleaning truck takes to the course to pick up the refuse to at least minimize the damage.

By minimize the damage we mean try to make it so that people don't slip on actual trash while they RUN FROM SEVERAL TONS OF ANGRY BULLS who had been sleeping peacefully until some asshole shot a canon near their heads and some dudes in green shirts decided to heard them along the course... Yeah. They make sure the people and bulls don't slip. Much!Except when that one did, throwing the crowd for a loop and eventually head-butting at a tourist with a camera. Thankfully, the bull wound up hitting the wooden beam in front of him instead of the actual tourist, who probably has a much cooler photograph than we do.

(This was captured on Spanish television, which the Spaniards thought incredibly amusing....)

The day we watched the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, some poor Irish sucker almost wound up getting a hoof on the lower spine. In the initial television footage, it looked like he had just become either paraplegic or dead. Later shots showed that his pants had actually been torn down, so what looked like his ass was actually the space just below his balls. Where the several-thousand-pound bull just stepped in a fit of rage.

Right where your spine should have been, dude. Wow. You should be prayin' to Jesus right about now.

If we need to go on about why this is in the Bat Shit Hall of Fame, perhaps you too should attempt the Running of the Bulls, and let us know how it goes.

If you really think about it, with their ubiquitous white clothes and red scarves, the people and city of Pamplona are crazier than bat shit too for hosting this thing, but God bless España.

#15) Political Apologies

Thinking that saying you're sorry for being an outright racist/bigot/sexist/asshole/pervert and thinking that absolves you for said behavior is crazier than bat shit.

However, politicians in the United States, in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Bill Clinton's mea cupla, seem to think that they can get away with whatever inane stupidity they want, as long as they apologize for it.

Take Kentucky Rep. Geoff Davis who issued a public apology to Senator Barak Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president this year, for calling him a "snake-oil salesman" and "boy." (Ouch. Asshole.)

He apologized! That's almost like he never did that! Great!

But being the narcissistic creatures they are, politicians today have upped the Apolog-ante on each other, and now they have to apologize for and disavow comments made by OTHER PEOPLE. This is our new favorite political smoke and mirrors game.

It's like when a friend's boyfriend back in the day started telling a story about "some n*gg*r" in front of another friend who was black. And she kept trying to apologize for him. But really, she wasn't the racist asshole.

Case in Point:

Recently Gen. Wesley Clark said the following on CBS news: "I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."

Guess what team? It isn't. No more than fighting in Iraq qualifies today's military to up and lead the country tomorrow. Being in the army qualifies you for a lot of things. Being the CEO of America isn't one of them.

Being older than Alaska and Hawaii and having served for many years in the United States Senate? Those things make you a viable presidential candidate. Having legislative and policy experience? Check! Having demonstrated electability to a national office? Check!

McCain, in a very crafty maneuver, responded to Gen. Clark by telling Obama he could apologize. Because that makes sense. Here's how the New York Times broke it down:

Mr. McCain, at a news conference in Harrisburg, Pa., said he thought remarks like General Clark’s were “unnecessary” and that the question of an apology was up to Senator Obama; but he added that the comments seemed to be part of a pattern.

“If that’s the kind of campaign that Senator Obama and his surrogates and supporters want to engage in, I understand that. But it doesn’t reduce the price of a gallon of gas by a penny” or do anything else to help Americans.

He added a moment later, “I know that General Clark’s comment is not an isolated incident. I have no way of knowing what involvement Senator Obama has in that issue.”

In what issue? In pointing out legitimate facts?

If we said something stupid about John McCain or if we were to say, point out that being able to juggle and whistle at the same time didn't qualify anyone to run Microsoft, it would be absolutely crazier than bat shit for Obama to have to say "I am Barak Obama, and I in no way endorse that bat shit."

#14) Chicken-Fried Bacon

Taking strips of cured pork fat and coating them in batter and deep frying them in crazier than bat shit.

Putting those strips of "chicken-friend" bacon into your mouth, chewing and swallowing is a feat on par with the kind of crazy exhibited by the dudes who win the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest.

This Texan has what has to be the artery-cloggingest restaurant in the entire world. It makes Popeye's look like health food. It makes the 45-million calorie Outback Steakhouse Bloomin' Onion look like celery sticks. It is evidence of a sick and depraved society in which anything goes and gluttony reigns supreme. It kind of makes us throw up in our mouths a little bit, and we thought that bacon made everything better. Fail!

Eating this crap is almost as bat shit crazy as smoking, but it doesn't make Hall of Fame because well, its pretty easy to stay away from Texas and if you happen to consume Chicken Fried Bacon on some weird Acid-flashback munchie binge, you can always purge and pretend that didn't happen.

Bat Shit Hall of Fame - Smoking

No matter how you dice it, smoking cigarettes is crazier than bat shit.

Bla bla bla freedom to do what you want with your body. Bla bla bla no link between smoking and cancer because the tobacco company said so. Bla bla bla. Stop being an asshole.

The arguments dished out by smokers about why what they're doing to their lungs isn't anybody else's business are crazy enough to land the entire practice in the Bat Shit Hall of Fame. Second, note, only to Michael Jackson.

Not only does smoking cigarettes give you lung cancer and kill you, it harms those around you with its noxious chemical sprawl. Cigarettes contain 4,000 chemicals, 43 of which are known to cause cancer and 400 of which are considered toxic including nicotine, tar, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde (what that frog in biology class was preserved in), ammonia (window cleaner), hydrogen cyanide (obvious), arsenic and DDT.

Delicious! Please exhale on my baby!

Even worse than killing you, smoking can make your life a living hell, like it did for Debi above, the subject of a 1996 California Department of Heath Services anit-smoking campaign.

After smoking three packs of cigarettes a day for 30 years, Debi had her larynx removed. The larynx is a very important organ in your body. Without it, you can't speak.

Debi also had a tracheotomy, meaning her body was so fucked up from 30 years of smoking that doctors had to CUT A HOLE IN HER THROAT so that she could breathe. In the picture above, Debi proves that addiction to nicotine is so strong that she's actually still smoking, exhaling the smoke through the hole in her throat. If that doesn't make you want to put your tongue in her mouth, nothing will!

Smoking also makes you look both old, because it gives you tremendous, cavern-like wrinkles, and stupid. There is a direct correlation between level of education and the likelihood that you're a smoker.

"Smoking prevalence was highest among adults who had earned a General Educational Development diploma (42.3%) and lowest among those with graduate degrees (7.2%)," the Center for Disease Control reports.

Also, you are probably poor. "The socioeconomic status of U.S. adults is inversely related to their likelihood of smoking," the CDC finds.

Since in America its the smart people who tend to be able to get their hands on the money (or a system of meritocracy that rewards itself, but that's a different story), it would make sense that smoking would be less common among the elite.

Smokers are therefore walking advertisements that they're both dumb and poor. Good job guys!

As we put smoking in the Bat Shit Hall of Fame we'd like to make one more point. The age-old Libertarian argument that since its your body, your life, you can do with it what you will, is crazier than bat shit.

Because guess who's going to be paying your Medicare bills when you're dragging an oxygen tank around because you've got Emphysema?

You're welcome.

#13) Super Pii Pii Brothers

Super Pii Pii Brothers is crazier than bat shit.

In Japan, there are two things that go virtually hand in hand: sexual hang-ups and video games. So it is not surprising that the Japanese would combine the two.

Walk onto any subway in Tokyo and you'll see businessmen either reading badly drawn fetish porn disguised as a "graphic novel" or glued to some virtual reality hi-tech video gaming system that is 7 years ahead of the U.S. and causes American fan boys to wet their pants at the mere thought of getting their hands on something their friends don't have because it is only available in the mythical Nippon. Whew.

Now I'm not a woman, so I don't the problems that come along with having to pee sitting down. Maybe all you women out there are secretly jealous that we boys can whip it out whenever we feel like it and just spray away. Maybe it's some sort of Freudian slip in your psycho-sexual development that causes these thoughts, if you even have them. Or maybe the Japanese are just more obsessed with bodily functions due to their hyper-repressed yet hyper-misogynistic culture that I can't even begin to understand, and have never bothered to try.

Honestly, I don't know.

What I do know, is that Strapping a remote control penis to your waist and trying to aim a continuous stream of virtual urine into fast moving toilet boils, all the while pretending that it "promotes good bathroom skills and allows women to experience for the first time the pleasure of urinating while standing" is crazier than bat shit.

#12) Tanning Beds

Paying for the only thing in the world that is free to all human beings everywhere and will be for approximately 3 billion more years is crazier than bat shit.

Sunlight does not cost money.

We'd just like to point that out first and foremost.

In fact, there are myriad ways that people across the globe have created to actively avoid sunlight and getting tan. However, white people seem to think that being brown is awesome, as long as you weren't born that way.

If you were, you realize the bat shit crazy of white people who then take it a step further and find artificial means of taking nature's great tanning bed in the sky and boxing it and packaging it and sticking a price tag on it.

It simultaneously proves that people will pay for anything while violating the basic economic principal that the cost of something is inversely proportional to its value. If something is rare, it is expensive. If something comes from the sky for roughly half of every single day, paying for it makes you crazier than bat shit.

That there exist "Tanning Salons" where people will exchange cash money for a few minutes laying in what basically looks like one of the creepy Genesis pods from Star Trek III is almost too much to wrap our tiny minds around.

Add to that the skin cancer factor, the premature aging factor and the fact that these people who go tanning are probably going to be the very same ones who use Botox to get rid of the wrinkles they've given themselves and you're nearing Hall of Fame status.

#11) Teenagers in Gloucester, Mass.

Teenage girls in Gloucester, Mass., are crazier than bat shit.

Apparently, groups of high school girls in the once-prosperous fishing town of Gloucester are getting knocked up on purpose. In droves. There were 17 pregnant students at the end of this school year according to this article in Time Magazine.

According to Time, girls were coming back repeatedly for pregnancy tests and when they got negative results, they were pissed. These 16 year old girls had some kind of hankering for self-immolation, and they were doing it by creating new human beings that would grow up depressed in the growing urban blight of Northeastern Massachusetts!

And it gets better! Several of these girls had made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.

Whatever happened to best friend necklaces and photo collages? Weren't those good enough? Heck, have a big lesbian orgy. Swap clothes. Anything else! Sometimes sharing is bad!

Time goes on: "Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head." [Emphasis mine.]

The city is now tasked with figuring out how it will approach giving birth control to teenage girls, although its questionable how effective that will be if they want to get pregnant.

The article continues:

"Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. "They're so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally," Ireland says. "I try to explain it's hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m."

This may have just gotten too depressing, so we're going to end this with some advice for the other, presumably non-pregnant ladies of Gloucester, Mass.

Ladies, please. Take a moment to think about what you're doing and go study. Studying may not be cool right now, but Massachusetts has some great colleges. Aim high. Get the fuck out of Gloucester. And by all means, stay away from R Kelly.

#10) Japanese Game Shows

Japanese game shows are crazier than bat shit.

Mostly because they combine both the weird perversions of the Japanese with a language most white people can't understand and antics you haven't seen since Double Dare.

The Japanese are masters of the Physical Challenge, which if you are over the age of 25, you know involves whipped cream, chocolate sauce, cherries, whiffle bats and a slide. Add to that the borderline comic hyper-sexuality of the Japanese and a touch of Hello Kitty and you've got yourself some quality television.

The first time I saw a Japanese game show I was in a pool hall in Washington D.C. waiting for a table and one came on the TV behind the bar. It was a dating show where two groups of men were competing for a chance to date a Japanese girl.

In one group, fat men had to try and climb up hill, almost naked, on a giant slip-n-slide covered with oil. In the other, skinny men with mattresses strapped to their bodies had to compete in a race while being blown back by a giant fan. It's simultaneously so un-PC and so accepting of everyone's limitations that it makes you smile in the way that the Special Olympics kind of makes you laugh a little bit on the inside. So precious.

This clip is even better.

In this one, Japanese women dressed in French Maid costumes take turns getting dizzy by spinning around with their foreheads on baseball bats and then bowling. Have you ever watched a dizzy Japanese maid try and bowl? We highly recommend it.

It's such bat shit genius that it makes American game shows look almost smart in comparison. Are you smarter than a fifth grader? Probably not, but at least we won't make you wear next to nothing and step on a giant scale on national television while you cry about how fat you are. Oh wait. We do that.

Bat shit.

#9) Thinking Fred Thompson Could Be President

Thinking that the guy who plays the D.A. on Law and Order could and should be elected President of the United States of America in 2008 is crazier than bat shit.

One of the first clues that the esteemed news media should have picked up on when they anointed Fred Dalton Thompson, a.k.a. District Attorney and King of All Things Inappropriately Folksy Arthur Branch, the Republican front-runner and Savior of America was the fact that he has an IMDB page.

Anyone that has an IMDB page should automatically be viewed with suspicion, and if your principal occupation for the last several years was playing the guy who showed up in the last two scenes of Law and Order and told off Sam Waterstone/A.D.A Jack McCoy? You make our list!

For one, no one that Red State would EVER be voted to a position of power in anything-goes New York City.

Guiliani (future post) may have traded Times Square's hookers for Disneyland, but it really remains the only city in America where passing a naked man with a glow-stick strapped to his penis who was singing N'Sync tunes on a bench in Bryant Park at 4 p.m. would just be viewed with vague suspicion, but no one would have a visible reaction. In New York City, you could be on fire, and the passers-by that actually did notice you would assume you were performance art.

Fred Thompson also always has crazy-eye. That kind of 1000-mile stare thing that makes you think that he's wondering what you'd look like roasting on a spit when he looks at the camera. For being in movies like The Hunt for Red October and the critically-esteemed Looking For Comedy in the Muslim World, he is surprisingly un-photogenic.

He's the anti-J.F.K. And dissing J.F.K. is like saying you support genocide or think its great that the New Kids on the Block got back together. Reeking of bat shit. Everybody loves J.F.K. Except Probably Castro (See Foreign Dictators).

Add to that the fact that - IN SPITE OF THE FACT THE HE WAS A UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM TENNESSEE (which gave us both Al Gore and Dolly Parton. Think about that for a second.) - when talking about American political issues, foreign affairs and oh, anything involving higher thinking, he sounded like a weird Regan montage put together by someone who didn't speak English, and you've got the point.

No wait! It's better! Fred Thompson was born in 1942. The picture above, courtesy of Wikipedia, is from 2007. Those are his children.