Randomania: Ununoctium and Other Things

This may or may not be the start of a new feature here on the Blue Truck: random gleanings from the Intertubes, of no particular use to anyone but to pass the time with while desperately searching for the Escape key.




Today's subject is the brand-new element of Ununoctium - his friends call him Uuo because he has a half-life of only 890 microseconds - which was just added to the periodic table at square 118, somewhere south of the ghost of Paul Lynde. Wow, how things change - there were only 103 of those little periodic critters when your Head Trucker was in skool. Um, I think.

Despite his blue-blooded background as a member of the Noble Gasses - oh Mary, don't ask! - the modest Uuo is, like, totally hip in his skinny jeans, Wayfarers, and lumbersexual beard, and has an awesome tie-died man bun that's already the envy of his new neighborhood.  Although he claims not to mind all the wild polysexual rumors, Uuo refuses to be pinned down, saying only, "Labels are for canned goods."  Wow, so deep.

He's also a totally cool single dad, with a daughter named Livermorium.  I'm not making this up.  Hey, it's not much worse than naming a girl Madison or Taylor or even freakin' Noah, is it?   Besides, as we now know, gender is just an illusion.  So don't judge, okay?  Just stop it.

Anyway, with her adorable oscillating freckles and neon-aqua pigtails, she's the cutest little thing, only 53 microseconds tall, but already loves sushi and belly dancing and is a whiz at Mario Kart 8.  Did I mention she's finishing her Ph.D. in quantum physics next month, and was elected Most Popular at nursery school too? 

On top of all that, she loves growing organic, low-fat, gluten-free arugula in the back yard, which she gives away free to hungry Third World kids she meets while demonstrating for world peace at the United Nations.  In her free time, she's writing her first novel (about a transgendered, cross-species, time-traveling Kabuki actor's obsessive pursuit of Antonin Scalia) on her iPad Pro.  What a great kid, huh? Political commentators are already sizing her up as a potential favorite in the 2040 election.

Uuo is a very proud dad, needless to say: "I told her, all you have to do is just be yourself, sweetheart, and everything will naturally fall into place - she did the rest."


And you've done what with your life lately, bucko?

The Spornosexuals

Apparently, that's the new term for what used to be metrosexual, which is the old term for preening, self-centered party boy, too chickenshit to come out of the closet. 



Britain's Telegraph reports:

Not everyone is such a fan of the look or what they think it represents. The Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley, for example, claims the trend marks an “evolutionary step backwards” for men. “The spornosexual is really only interested in how they look to themselves – it is narcissistic. By toning and perfuming and recording every ripple with Facebook selfies, they’ve converted their bodies into their own masturbatory aids.”

An article in Vice earlier this year, published before Mark Simpson came up with the spornosexual label, read along the same kind of lines. In a piece headlined "How Sad Young Douchebags Took Over Modern Britain," the journalist Clive Martin wrote: “It seems to me that, in a kamikaze attempt to assert their masculinity, our young man of today has repackaged himself as an erection in a vest. . . . They’re the sad, lost children of the metrosexuals and the miners.”

Today's Quote

It’s great we live in a democratic society, but we’ve lost all sense of decorum and occasion. To be on Fifth Avenue is now about the same as being on the Coney Island boardwalk.

--"Shirtless Goes the City," The New York Times

 

 

Your Head Trucker has been saying the same thing for the last forty years, but nobody has paid me the slightest bit of attention.