In Which I Invite My Readers to Unravel a Mystery of Great Cultural Importance Part 1

Once again, I spent this past Friday night surrounded by smart and gorgeous YUPBs. This time, we chose a small Moroccan-decorated Greek restaurant where the food was small but delicious and the house wine is made by...Wayne Gretzky. I got the feeling that the restaurant was having an identity crisis and they weren't the only ones. Several of us were having a "crossroad day" as well.

This night didn't stand a chance, do you see where I'm going with this? Everything was a little strange right off the bat.

After a couple of bottles and some appies, we decided that we should go to a place that was a little more happening where we could dance, do some shots and get our crayzay on. When we got there, one of the first things I noticed before we skipped the line (we're KIND OF A BIG DEAL- sorry, I have been waiting for an opportunity to get all Kanye West Caps Lock on yo' asses...) was a very tall girl in a very tiny outfit. Too tiny. I don't just mean that she was violating actual decency laws, this outfit was outrageously short AND unflattering. I wondered aloud to my friends why this girl's companions hated her. They must; otherwise, they would never have let her wear that out of the house. Poor girl. Whatever, though, that was not the point of the night, right? I went ahead inside and followed the girls to the bar.

I spent the next few minutes rooting through my stupid purse for bills and when I looked up, I had a definite WTF moment: 

Were my friends and I the only women in the bar wearing pants?

When did fashion shift to the pantsless variety?! Suddenly, I was swimming in a nauseating sea of doughy white, cellulite-laden thighs. There were dresses so short that I'm pretty sure that they should have been shirts and shorts so short that they barely escaped dimpled bum cracks. Ew, gross, I thought. How tacky (Speaking of tacky, fast forward a couple of hours to us in a cab, opening the door to a group of girls outside a bar and demanding to know where their pants are).

Okay, I decided to focus on something else and settled on the music (and the cheesy bouncer standing on a chair and waving his crotch around). I started noticing that most of the songs were strikingly similar, Cher circa 2000 kept coming to mind. You know, that song "Believe" where she sounds like a robot. I started to listen to the songs: Black Eyed Peas, Kanye,  Sean Kingston...all the same. Ah, the 808 (a synthesizer used in music production). That's what it was.

How strange that, all of a sudden, music sounds the same and nobody is wearing pants. I started to ponder this: could it be that it was not a coincidence? Could it be that the decline of pants popularity and the increased usage of the 808 in Top 40 music were somehow linked? 

But who would stand to benefit from such circumstances?

I am back from Vegas on Sunday. I will give you until then to enter your guesses. Stay tuned for part 2...

In which I invite Tyra Banks to Sit the F*ck Down and STFU

Dear Tyra Banks,

First off, I would like to congratulate you on parlaying your career as a model into a television empire. I applaud you for encouraging young girls to have positive self-image and for refusing to slink away in shame when pictures of you looking a little lumpy in a bathing suit surfaced a couple of years ago. Well done.

I admire your drive and ambition and I think that you have many qualities that qualify you as YUPB Icon candidate.

However, there is just something about you that rubs me the wrong way, and by "rubs me the wrong way", I mean makes me want to rip my ears off of my head and eat them whenever I hear you screech "FIERRRCE!" from my television. I don't know where it started, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that you do things like this:




Oh snap, see what I mean?

Anyway, I understand that you aspire to be the next Oprah Winfrey. Before you go chasing that dream (read:delusion), let me offer you some friendly advice:

Stop condescending to people on your show. You claim to be a champion of women, yet I have seen you purposely humiliate unsuspecting women on your show more than once. Case in point:you badgered Kim Kardashian about her sex tape even though she was there to talk about her reality show. I don't know where you and your mighty forehead get off being all judgemental and imperious; may I remind you, you posed in various states of undress in numerous magazines over the course of your career as a model. You took off your clothes for money. Kim made a tape of her sexay times with her boyfriend, which she was doing for free, not for profit. You do not have the moral high ground. Next:

Mastering the art of "smiling with your eyes" does not a journalist make. You do not have the training, credibility or intelligence to be anything remotely like Oprah. You do, however, have the training and intelligence to be a histrionic narcissistic hypergelast(see word of the week). And, let me tell you, you are excelling at that.

So, Tyra, it is for these reasons that I would like to cordially invite you to Sit the F*ck Down and STFU (Maybe you would like to do this in a journalism class. Couldn't hurt, just sayin'...).

Triple Snap,

Shabs