Modern technology won't make you Ice-T; to quote a true working-class hero, you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see

The only way poseurs can offend is with their obscene lack of self-awareness.

The last thing anyone from the over-30 set who grew up on P.E. and NWA wants is to get in a twist over some wannabes. The second-last is to give said wannabes who feel it is high-larious to record a rap video with a chorus that includes "Fuck Queen's" or a gay slur any undue publicity.

Granted, you could point out the University of Western Ontario students shot part of their video in TD Waterhouse Stadium and thus would have had to get permission from school officials. Never mind that connotes giving tacit approval to insulting another Ontario university, the OUA Code of Conduct be damned.

The copycat response from University of Guelph students is probably worse, what with its what-grade-are-you-in homophobia. ("You would have thought I had fangs / Take the 'n' out and you just described the Mustangs" / " ... and Queen's, fuck you too / fuck you fuck you fuck you.")

Seeing a bunch of spoiled brats degrade a musical genre and insult the university two of my family members — my educator mother and engineer sister — attended is blood-boiling. You just know it's a matter of when until someone from Queen's will retaliate, even though some might argue the video response was posted 10 months ahead of time.

A little dollar-store cultural anthropology, kids: the great hip-hop came from a place of being an outsider, feeling excluded, be it due to race, class or intellectual sensibility. Those threads run through the rhymes of Ice-T, Chuck D or Eminem. Perhaps that's why the former two struck such a nerve two decades ago with teenaged white boys. It was also evident in the later work of that working-class hero who left us 30 years ago today.

Now you have these ciphers, who can quote the lines but have learned none of the meaning, mimicking it to validate their snobby, cliquey superiority. This is what the generation which is going to have to save the world, along with Xers, is wasting its time on? They want to do that, fine, but it's not exactly inspiring.

Every generation is entitled to a few years — or decades, in Boomers' case — of look-at-me preening. So it goes. Hopefully, millennials' gift of sharing its self-involvement so quickly and thoroughly will help them get it out of their systems relatively quickly.

Perhaps this is a live-and-let-live deal, it is protected speech, but it is fair to ask what it means. After all, OUA schools have taken a hard line with bad behaviour when it's convenient. In 2009, Guelph suspended senior quarterback Justin Dunk for one game for swearing on live television during a game against Western. How could what Dunk did, off the cuff during a game, be punishable while using the Gryphons logo in a rap that promotes homophobia is okay? Talk about arbitrary rule.

I saw this a few weeks ago but withheld comment. My student days are long, long past. There is enough burden involved with getting a degree, especially with runaway student debt

However, even as recently as the late 1990s, there was still this notion that post-secondary education was as much about cultivating some semblance of character and couth, not just the degree. Those qualities count for more in this life than any numbers on a transcript, especially when studies show a lot of those numbers are generated by academic fraud.

The bright side is most people have to learn this eventually. Some will make it tougher on themselves than others.

Can't spell 'U.S. in a lather' without U-s-a-i-n

Seeing a quote from Usain Bolt's father in the Jamaican media lays bare how the American media's ability to make much ado -- or Ato -- out of nothing.

"Usain was simply being himself, he likes to celebrate when he does well and there was no time he was trying to put down the other runners in the race." -- Jamaica Observer

Straight talk like that is the best way to hurl truth into the bourgeois -- more like boor-geois -- language of NBC's Bob Costas, et al., who tried to portray Bolt's celebration during the 100 metres at the Beijing Olympics as sacrilege. Sports On My Mind, incidentally, had a great spoof pointing out how Costas and NBC were rather selective about just whose celebration was deemed offensive, overwrought and a terrible example to children.

Usain was simply being himself. Of course, that's the problem, right, because a black man from the Caribbean, from a culture that doesn't "venerate humility one single bit," (to quote a SOMM commenter) flouts Bob Costas' concept of What Should Be.

Perhaps this should be left alone, maybe it seems too far removed from Canada, where you can just watch CBC and TSN, but it isn't entirely. There is a ripple of effect, or ripple of evil (hat tip to Lewis Black), with how Americans decide to present something to the world, since we in Canada are so saturated with U.S. viewpoints. The U.S. sets an example, for good or ill.

That's why it's so nauseating, every four years (it's more a Summer Olympics thing) to see Costas, et al., with their agendas. At a time when it seems like a lot of people have adopted Peter LaFleur moral relativism,* these smug little twits are trying to one-up everyone else, trying to wedge everything into their worldview.

That sends the signal that it's OK to be ignorant, to be insular, to not understand how it is in other countries. Costas can backpedal and butt-cover all he wants, but at the end of the day what matters is that his first reaction was to tear a strip off Usain Bolt for, well, being himself. He didn't act in the Bob Costas-approved manner of an athlete who's a visible minority, so it was bring out Ato Boldon is brought out to give legitimacy to NBC's crock-and-bull story.

Never mind that, on this end, more than a few associates have said Lightning Bolt has made their Olympic watching worthwhile. Records in the 100 and 200 metres; we might never see that again. At 6-foot-5, he might be a prototype for sprinters we'll see in in 2016 or 2020, or maybe he'll be a one-off and the 100 and 200 will remain being the domain of coiled, compact men. In the short run, he's been a one-man antidote to Michael Phelps fatigue and athletes, who quite understandably given the years of sacrificing and training it's taken to get to Beijing, are all-business and no-nonsense to the point of seeming like faceless droids.

He's also a reminder of how the Olympics, for all the excesses, for all the ills, for all the sports which shouldn't be there and for the others no one cares about for three years and 348 days in between quadreenials, for all the purple prose (present company included, so don't bother pointing it out), do act as a reminder that no country has all the answers. No one's way is the right way.

You might have been taken aback by Bolt's showing in the 100 because when you played minor hockey as a kid growing up in small-town Ontario, the worst label to have was that of a "hot dog," someone who rubbed it in after scoring a goal. However, as a late, great American named Bill Hicks said, just because you learned that, it doesn't make it true.

So long live Lightning Bolt and to hell with Bob Costas. He wears nice suits, he's got a voice that's sweeter than restaurant-quality lemonade and he's smarter than the average bear. All of that adds up to a nice, faux-erudite facade for a complete and utter boor, enabling Ugly Americans not to feel so bad.

(It's a wicked burn on the American media that Bolt ran down Michael Johnson, since as we know, the 200-metre record has been the Holy Grail for fast men ever since, well, Bob Costas decided it was in 1996.

Mac Gs World has a whole lot more on Bolt, including some speculation on whether the Nun Linga could knock the Souljah Boy out of circulation if there's a God in heaven, it will. Neil Acharya came through with the Jamaica Observer article.)

Related:
2008 Olympics: Triathlete Snowsill Demans the Games with Her Showboating Finish (Sports On My Mind)
Boldon defiant (Jamaica Observer)
Dad defends Usain Bolt's 100m celebrations (Paul A. Reid, Jamaica Observer)

(* This comes from a line spoken by the villain in Dodgeball, played by Ben Stiller -- "I'm not OK, you're not OK, but that's OK.)

Someone almost became a personal hero, too bad he/she's so shy...

The gauntlet has been thrown down for the Anonymous Commenters Hall of Fame.

This one is the total package of...

• Having an ax to grind about a single issue, long after everyone else has made their peace.
• Coming off as holier-than-thou.
• Making unsupported, ya-sure-you-are claims of social or professional status.
  
  (One would think a self-proclaimed Rapidz "insider" who claims a man's "wife probably has cancer from all of his second hand smoke and just the basic stress of living with a control freak" would at least nut up and put a name behind it.)
• Dehumanizing someone with an unflattering nickname.
• Run-on sentences that don't give a reader a chance to come up for air.
  
  See that key right above the spacebar? The one right below the the L, between the M and the period? It's a comma and it's wonderful.
• Statements that would get anyone using his real name sued for libel and defamation.

That's enough of an intro. The man who was the target of this attack deserves so, so much better.

I think the firing of The Bottle(Ed's nickname throughout baseball) was too late and if you are an insider with the team then you would know that Bottle was the seventh or eighth choice for manager. The team was thrown together in three weeks and the win loss record shows that. Bottle was a dictator that would not stop polluting his players lungs with toxic fumes on a daily basis and even on the road bus. The smoking police were notified and Bottle was given a choice. It sounds like some of Bottles Alcoholic friends from Liam's are upset to loose their drinking buddy. I've got news for all of you pro Bottle people. The guy was a self proclaimed alcoholic that only cared about how much attention he could get. But no one cared about him in Ottawa just like every other place he has ever coached. Bottle has one of the worst reputations in the "Bush leagues" as he calls them. He is only negative and a proven looser. His wife probably has cancer from all of his second hand smoke and just the basic stress of living with a control freak. Baseball was a Bottle had left in life and all he cared about but not for any positive reasons. His reasons for loving baseball were and are purely selfish because the only reason he is involved is to control people and feel as though his life and opinions matter which they clearly do not. This was Bottle's last job in baseball and no one else wants anything to do with him. He has burned every bridge he has ever crossed and now even a bridge to Canada. He insulted Canadian beer on a regular basis because he said it was too expensive. I think it was because he could'nt handle the punch compared to his watered down American crap beer. Just another reason why Bottle is a looser. I personally hope he lives the rest of his days a sorry old man who blew every chance in life he was ever given. If he did'nt loose his mortgage trying to finance his singing career maybe he would have a house to live in but now I think he may be checking into the cheapest old folks home the U.S. has to offer. I hope his liver shrivles up and fails. I hate the Bottle!!!!

Some would just delete that post-haste, especially given the case law in Canada with respect to third parties in cases of libel or defamation. Against better judgment (presuming it's not a trap set by a troll), it's going to stay up there. Consider this to be just like the scene from Fast Times At Ridgemont High when Spicoli said, "I don't know" and Mr. Hand wrote it on the chalkboard for posterity for all of his classes to ponder.

Who knows what possesses fully functioning adults to something like that about a 69-year-old man. Who knows who said it, and who knows what it says about the people running the Rapidz if it did spew from the mouth (or some other orifice) of someone of their acquaintance. Let's hope not.

Menatime, let it stand, as a monument to ignorance and that, oh, because's you're only venting on the Internet, that doesn't mean that you're actually a solipsistic little twit.