It's Official

It's official, it's been decided that I know "diddley-doo-wah" about pop culture. I was reading the "Ten Unsexiest Male Stars" list on AOL and I hardly know any of them. Eric Dane? No idea. Ditto for Phillippe Whomever or Whomever Hartnett, Pete Wentz, James "Is that your real beard" Blunt, Kevin Connolly, Brandon Davis and Pete Doherty. I have absolutely no idea who any of those prancers are. Wilmer Valderrama sounds a bit like a bull rider from Brazil, but I suspect he's a pop singer. Simon Cowell has something to do with the American Idol snore-fest. And Howard Stern is "that guy that curses on the radio". So that really leaves only one star, Ben Stiller, that I've actually heard of and could spot in a crowd!

I was going to scream bloody murder about how this was a waste of perfectly good time and bandwidth and all that, until it struck me that the time and bandwidth being wasted were my own, and voluntarily at that. So I decided to scale my snarling counter-cultural assault to a bland assertion of ignorance. James Blunt??? Eric Dane???? I'm sorry, were you talking to me?

In truth I don't want to know very much about pop culture. There are things that I like - Finnish death metal, for example - but I don't feel inadequate because I know diddley-doo-wah about R&B or obscure 1990s TV shows or the works of indie (pick one) rockers, directors, actors, writers, poseurs. Rather than feeling inadequate because I don't know who these allegedly unsexy stars are or can't seem to catch the wave of indie coffee-house kultur, I can gleefully devote my time and attention to other things entirely.

Such as?

Such as this: how come, when I was a kid, the country was known as "The Ukraine" but today it is known simply as "Ukraine"? When did that happen? Why wasn't I copied in the memo? If the Ukrainians are happier without the "the", I'm happy too, but someone's not keeping me informed. At least when I learned that Upper Volta had become Burkina Faso I learned it by flipping through an updated world atlas, but the "the Ukraine/Ukraine" business rankles because I think I learned it while reading a brief biography of Milla Jovovich, not the proper venue for a major geopolitical shift like that at all. Not that it was the esteemed Ms. Jovovich's fault in any way. Careful with those guns, ma'am.

(I blame the Germans for this - I spent most of my "formative years" reading books about the Eastern Front in World War Two, and most of those seemed to have been written by Germans like Paul "Einsatzgruppen B Vas Chust Followink Orders" Carrell and F.W. "Der Fuehrer Screwed Us All" von Mellenthin. They always seemed to say things like "On the 13th, our victorious panzer columns passed into the Ukraine as the schwerpunkt moved relentlessly east, carried on the clattering tracks of von Manteuffel's panzers." Given this sort of hyperbole, maybe I should blame the Germans. And I can't help but reflect when I read such things that in a very few years, the schwerpunkt is gonna haul ass to the west, carried on the clattering tracks of Rokossovskii's T-34s and IS-2s.)

I don't even want to be a member of the counter-culture. I think I'm generally happy inhabiting a strange cultural space all my own, as the preceding paragraph probably demonstrates all too well.

(And for heaven's sake don't get me started on the whole Belarus-Byelorussia-White Russia business, especially since I can't, right off the top of my head, remember whether Belarus went back in with Russia or not.)