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| Martian sunset: Spirit at Gusev crater |
At the time Wert wrote the manifesto in July 2010, I had been reading Jalopnik for about four, maybe five years, and what I had found intriguing about Jalopnik was its mix of love for quirky cars not just the fastest or flashiest cars, articles highlighting unusual aspects of car culture, and the surprisingly intelligent comments section (Reductio ad Hitlerum didn’t apply, the comments usually got better the longer they went [That statement is accurate no matter how you understand it]) which could include quotes from anything from South Park to Shakespeare within the same comment thread.
When Wert published the manifesto the tone at Jalopnik had changed, some of their most popular writers had left, and the quality of the content had declined as they pursued a more mainstream audience (Whoo-hoo! An eight way comparison of mid-sized sedans with six cylinder engines and automatic transmissions, bring it on! [Oh, wait, that was Road & Track, and that's when I stopped reading it]).
Even the quality of the comments had declined, though Godwin still didn’t rear his tiny mustachioed head (note the lack of commas for clarification, then read that sentence again), and the point of the manifesto was a promised return to the “good old days” (see below).
My manifesto won’t be about returning to anything, but trying not to devolve into an SEO (Oh, come on! I told you what it meant in the last post!) obsessed, hashtaggerific, pee-pee soaked, heck-hole trying to engage an influential readership passionate to discover partnerships about brand synergy blah, blah, blah...
To that end, one of the things I don’t want to do is “listicles”, the hackneyed Internet content designed to compel you to read without actually providing real, useful information or requiring any real research.
And so, in a shocking about-face here are:
THE TOP FIVE THINGS THAT CONFUSED ME AS A CHILD
You won’t believe number
(press the generate button below)
[Am I BuzzFeeding wrong?]
1 Sundown
No, I didn’t think the sun would disappear and never come back, I just found the Gordon Lightfoot song confusing.
"I can see her lying back in her satin dress
In a room where you do what you don't confess"
Is this the bathroom maybe?
"Sometimes I think it's a shame
When I get feeling better when I'm feeling no pain"
Well of course you feel better when you feel no pain!
That's how it’s supposed to work!
Silly Gordon Lightfoot.
2 You can't compare apples and oranges
I first heard this in elementary school and I thought it was a trick question, because the answer couldn’t be that easy: they were both fruit, round, and given a choice I’d rather have chocolate; and weren’t those all comparisons. Now who really deserves a “c” in this class?
Maybe it was because we had a black and white TV, maybe it was because I’d seen and old black and white movie or maybe it was the black and white pictures, but when my beloved grandmother told me stories of her youth, in my childhood mind the events happened in black and white. Even when I was old enough to know this was obviously false, I had to consciously visualize the past in colour.
4 Neapolitan ice cream
I’d rather have chocolate. Why the hell are you wasting my time with the strawberry and the vanilla? And whose stupid idea was this anyway?
5 English singers singing with American accents
I’m the child of an immigrant, and I understood people from different places might speak with accents. I didn’t understand why my peers thought accents were funny, however. So, when watching, for example, The Rolling Stones (ask your parents) on the Ed Sullivan Show (ask your grandparents), I could hear Mick Jagger singing with a North American accent, but then when Ed goes to speak to him he speaks with a British accent.
What the actual fuck, mummy?
BONUS
Bidets
RELATED LINKS
Jalopnik Manifesto
Actually related video
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