Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Sorry, guys

Right off the bat, I’m going to admit that this post is not about monkeys. Hail to the Chimp is just my favorite fake Simpsons movie, and I needed a vaguely presidential-sounding title for this post.

My buddy Nick, the Official Philadelphia Correspondent for Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, is a teacher, and today expressed to me a concern that he didn’t have the knowledge of our nation’s presidents befitting a professional who could be asked a random executive-related question by an inquisitive young mind at any time. Thus was born the Presidential Challenge. Basically, we both agreed to grab a piece of paper, number it 1 to 44, and try to put all of the U.S presidents in order. No time limit, but no cheating! It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least.

Eh? Eh?

You can view my list to the right. I scored a 33 out of 44 presidents. That’s 75 percent! I think that’s pretty good, but I feel like a made a series of unforgivable errors along the way that unnecessarily hampered my progress. Here they are, in ascending order of egregiousness.

1) I forgot Benjamin Harrison. This isn’t terrible in itself, since all of those Reconstruction-era presidents are pretty forgettable. However, comma, I feel like as an American, it’s the least I can do to be able to name all of the presidents.

2) I forgot John Quincy Adams. I remembered Andrew Jackson, but not his mortal nemesis. And you’ll notice that I forgot the grandson of a president, and the son of a president. I probably couldn’t tell you one of either of those guys’ policies, but I should have remembered them as answers to trivia questions.

3) I forgot Grover Cleveland. Born in Caldwell! New Jersey’s president! The only president elected to non-consecutive terms! How could I not remember! I was seriously considering not even posting my list, because I didn’t want the whole wide Internet world to know that I forgot that Grover Cleveland even existed. But I’m bigger than that, precious reader. You deserve to know.

And because I love you, here’s that chimp I promised.

This most recent crazy wedding dance video is simply fascinating to me, for reasons that I’ll explain thusly. (Sorry for only including a link; the jamokes who posted this vid have lamely disabled the embed function.)

1) First, the facts. For those of you who haven’t clicked on the link and watched, we’re talking about a video of a wedding ceremony in Minnesota, where the 80s-shaded wedding party all dance down the aisle to Chris Brown’s “Forever.” The video was posted last week, and has proceeded to accrue ten and a half million views. People love this thing!

2) Second, the incredulous reaction. Ten and a half million views, for ANOTHER kooky dance-centric wedding video? Not to put

too fine a point

on things

but as a viral trope

the “quirky couple does an eccentric dance at their wedding” video

ranks somewhere between here and here. I understand that this latest installment puts a new twist on an old favorite (the dance took place during the ceremony! Not the reception! Innovation!), but the spirit is generally the same. As a society, are millions of us still able to be captivated by the same tired viral tricks? One of the benefits of the Internet, in this writer’s humble and myopic opinion, is its ability to deliver us fresh, original content (you know, like a magic show for a chimp). Has the wedding dance video become like, the procedural drama of viral video? The mindless, thought un-provoking pablum that we sit through because it’s familiar, simple, and comes to us at regular intervals? I think we can do better. (Like more chimps in human clothes!)

3) Getting your wedding party to perform a choreographed dance is alright. Would anyone else have been more impressed if this couple had decided to make a professional dance crew their wedding party? You know, turn it around a bit. Eff your friends, we want a good-looking dance. I might be the only person on the Intertubes thinking this. Fine!

4) I read a blog called Hipster Runoff. Carles, the weird and anonymous and I-hope-he’s-just-a-satirical-genius-because-the-alternative-is-terrifying writer of HRO had a fun post about this very video. Here’s a money quote:

Life is very hard for most white people, because they are ’so ordinary.’ Their expectations of ‘how things should feel’ are constructed by watching 80s, 90s, and 00s cinema. Mainly movies like bromances, romantic comedies, comedies, and miscellaneous ‘bad ass movies.’ They just need life to ’seem like a movie’ or something. Seems like average white people don’t understand the insignificance of who they are as ‘1 person’, and don’t accept that they are just part of a larger white mass. They fight against this feeling of ‘being ordinary’ by trying to construct meaningful moments that seem like they are ’straight out of a movie.’

Do with that what you will. Especially the quote marks.

5) Speaking of links, here’s a follow-up about the famous couple’s travails after the video became a runaway Youtube smash. Apparently, they were played like small-town rubes. Sad face. Also, feel free to click through for that rundown of wedding video celebrities.

6) The song in the clip is “Forever” by Chris Brown. If you’re like me, you probably said “Hey, this sounds familiar.” If you’re also like me, you don’t listen to the radio and aren’t really paying attention to the music in dance clubs, so you couldn’t possibly recognize the song from there. But if you’re like me, you watch a ton of TV, and you watched this video and were like, “Hey! It’s the gum commercial song!” These people danced down the aisle to the Doublemint jingle. Incredible.

7) Interesting choice of song to play a wedding for another reason. Lest you forgot, Chris Brown is the guy who did this, then this, and then this.

The whole thing is fascinating! Right?!