John Hodgman and the infinite mediocrity

I have been ruminating on the continued existence of John Hodgman and the role he plays in contemporary pop culture. I have been able to sum up my impression of him in the following way.
At any point in time, the comfortable middle class with a smattering of liberal arts education look to satisfies their urge to be edified, either for legitimate reasons or as a class reinforcing exercise of their leisure time. They will put up with an amazing amount of boredom in the name of edification. This stems from the belief that unmitigated emotion is crass or base, and that pleasure in particular is a dish best served cold. Thus feelings like anger, embarrassment, and sadness are distrusted and must be intellectualized (see This American Life). While this level of staid introspection suits emotional experiences like anger which are well-served by deep thinking, it is ill-suited to comedy. The result is a dry, almost puritanical version of comedy, usually referred to as 'humor', in which attempts at easy laughs are eschewed as below the 'humorist, and are replaced by more gentle humorous observations or humorous conceits embedded in intellectual subject matter. The humor is received with chuckles and knowing groans. These are responses, rather than reactions, a way to show solidarity with the uniformly middle- and upper middle-class and overwhelmingly white audience or simply a means of giving the needy-seeming humorist what he or she seems to want. The latter is a very typical reason for the laughter, since the audience typically respects the humorist rather than genuinely being entertained by him or her, and wants to win their respect by 'getting it'. Humor as such is essentially a social signalling device, and the sad, hollow laughter of recognition that it evokes are like the nocturnal ululations of bullfrogs: ephemeral, annoying, and ultimately pointless.
Notable practitioners of 'humor' are The Firesign Theater, Lily Tomlin, and especially Garrison Keillor (born, wouldn't you know it, Gary Keillor). In our own time the hottest star on the rise on the Chortlin' Circuit (I coined this term in this here blog post, by the way; feel free to use it but do credit me) is John Hodgman. Like Dave Eggers (whom I have never read) and others involved in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (of which I know nearly nothing), John Hodgman's stock in trade is old-timey phraseology. It would appear that we have the Simpsons to blame for this unbelievably restricted subgenre of humor. His aggressively uncharismatic persona and wry, obscure comedic bailiwick flatters his fans by acknowledging their specialness and broad frame of reference. Hodgman's book, The Areas of my Expertise, features the following subtitle

An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order by Me, John Hodgman, a Professional Writer, in the Areas of My Expertise, which Include: Matters Historical; Matters Literary; Matters Cryptozoological; Hobo Matters; Food, Drink, & Cheese (a Kind of Food); Squirrels & Lobsters & Eels; Haircuts; Utopia; What Will Happen in the Future; and Most Other Subjects; Illustrated with a Reasonable Number of Tables and Figures, and Featuring the Best of "Were You Aware of It?", John Hodgman's Long-Running Newspaper Novelty Column of Strange Facts and Oddities of the Bizarre

Now given what I've said above about humor, it is clear from the book title that, old-timeyness aside, Hodgman's book is relatively wacky and jokey compared to the work of the typical humorist. I submit that this is because, just as the majority of low-brow people gravitate towards the lowest of the low, so does the vast majority of middle-brow people gravitate toward the lowest of the middle. Hodgman represents the cachet of a McSweeney's without any of the challenging fonts, the feeling of superiority over belly-laughers that accompanies Garrison Keillor without the droning boredom. Hodgman's book is essentially the most respectable possible knockoff of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Who's riding who?

For my money, there is no fashion statement in the world (with the possible exception of pre-aged jeans) that says "I am an ignorant, attention-seeking social climber" better than the Ralph Lauren 'Big Pony' line of shirts with giant logos on them.

Here, Big Pony is being modeled by good breasted terrible actress Han Yeseul

I am not the type of person who cares a great deal about fashion. I have a simple aesthetic. I don't like clothes with logos or words on them and I don't like non-functional things (decorative belts, buttons with no buttoning function) and I hate false aging of clothes. These last two peeves fall under the basic category of decadence. What moves me about the Big Pony thing is that it cuts to the heart of what people want out of brands like Ralph Lauren. They want to tell the world that they are the type of person that likes/wears/can afford Ralph Lauren clothing. These huge logos allow them to broadcast this message in a more efficient, desperate way. I imagine that the wealthy people who wear clothing more expensive than Ralph Lauren snicker to themselves when they see one of these tacky logos bouncing towards them, thinking 'Who does this K-Mart shopper think she is?' but to me the real folly is in the tastelessness of the striving, the form it takes. The same goes for the Burberry tartan

And the abominable rainbow-colored Louis Vuitton bags
The thing is that the item itself is nothing, only the logo and the cache that goes with affixing that famous name to your totem pole. Here's an illustrative story. My mother knows that Korean ladies love brand name luxury items, so she went shopping in America for some gifts for my wife. She bought her a Coach handbag that was made of the same leather as the photo below
I read the advertising copy that came with it and was surprised to discover the history of Coach, that the leather was patterned after baseball glove leather etc. Anyway, my wife loved the bag but was surprised that it was Coach. Every Coach item she had ever seen sold in Korea had the Coach logo all over it thusly.
It's not even about the social climbing, because that's no sin. It's the tackiness that gets me. If you want to social climb, why not do it tastefully, at least that way you might actually social climb up, instead of climbing all over the bars of your cage like a monkey in a zoo.

It had to be told

So the peopele who bought the English school where I work originally came from an art school background, meaning that they are both art teachers and their first business was an art school. That means that they basically put all their effort into the interior decorating at the English school and none of it into, say, the listening lab they had promised everyone. This is the problem with being incredibly proficient at your job, my wife and I are totally taken for granted. It will be a sad day for them when we leave and they find that your average English teacher/manager will not stay late, will not do any unnecessary planning, and will not basically do their job for them, and, most worryingly, will likely not be a very good teacher.
Anyway, I am confronted with daily reminders that management care much more about what's on the walls than what's on the white board. Every day I come in to find a new piece of amateur-y artwork up on the wall and no work done on the listening lab. I tell you when I see schoolrooms in Afghanistan where there is nothing but a black board and a teacher I totally understand what it's like.
Anyway, the other day I came in to find what is certainly the most amateurish piece of work, but also the most disturbing, in a 'Who made this and why is it hanging on the wall?' kind of way.

Yeah, it's a picture of someone getting an injection in the can. Now that in itself is a little bit weird. First off many of the details are different from an actual injection room. Injection rooms typically don't have huge windows. I have rarely seen a bed in an injection room, and never been asked to lie fully face down to receive an injection. Typically the order is 'Lower your pants', the nurse gives you a few sharp slaps and shoves the needle in, pumps out its contents and you're done, and you didn't feel a thing.

This doctor is giving an injection while sticking his hand up the recipient's shorts. Just stop and look at it, like I am forced to every time I need to sharpen a pencil. Also note that someone has written the Korean word for 'whatevs', jeul (즐, or, if your can't read that, the English letters KIN turned 90 degrees clockwise) on top of the butt. With all of these glaring problems, how did this thing make the cut to go on the wall?

Ssangyong Automotive: Purveyors of Eye Poison (part 2)

Introducing the Ssangyong Kyron, another of Ssangyong's big puffy SUVs for people who don't know any better. I was actually planning to talk about the heinous Rodius next, but this little puppy caught my eye on my morning commute, and I had to vent at the aggressive ugliness being thrust upon me.
As the above profile view makes clear, the Aktyon is another in Sssangyong's slanty series of cars. This car sort of reminds me of a rabbit, actually.
The thing about these slanty cars is that the front of the car seems to be fading off into the fourth dimension like when the stranger in a strange land would disappear things. It looks like the back of the car is 20 feet closer than the front. Trippy.
I really like the above picture because it makes this car look like metric ton of cheap plastic and 'sporty' middle class aspiration.
But the thing that caught my ire today is the rear view of this car. It's like looking at a person with their eyes way too close together crossing their eyes while grinning.
Again, like the Actyon, a rear corner view of this car makes it look like a stretch limo, but with a little tiny rear window perched way up high on it. How they determined that people want to drive engorged tick-shaped vehicles is beyond me.

Jung Woo-sung, master of dirtstache

When I was a teenager I sought to hide my pimply moon face behind a beard that I thought would obscure my pasty shame. My father once sauntered up to me, derisively pointed to my bad teenage mustache and said "Better watch out for the cat, he'll lick that thing right off." Point taken. He went on to tell me the story of the early days of his own mustache, that he wore from youth into his fifties. His boss as a young man had deflated his attempts at manliness like this. "What did you ever do to deserve facial hair? Facial hair is for men, who support families and accomplish things, not for boys."
Apparently no one ever shared this wisdom with Korean celebrity and Hallyu star Jung Woo-sung, who persists in wearing the most pathetically manicured dirtstache around.It's not like it's just this one picture or one role that he played. He always wears that scrap of stubble on his upper lip. Sometimes it's been Brauned to an even stubble, and sometimes it's allowed to fully whisp off into obscurity, but it always persists, like Korea's characteristically metrosexual answer to the dirty sanchez.

Crass update: Hey, if you happen to work at a financial institution, do me a favor and check out my video resume, and maybe while you're at it, pass it on to whom it may concern.