Men, Vowels, and Ties

Sometimes I read these stories and think they're pure gold: whoever wrote them must be literally rolling in the money because everyone is paying him or her for just a line of their work to add spice and pizazz to something that would otherwise lose the reader's attention in the span of a few seconds. I wrote last week that John Hughes' work had that effect on me. This week however I found myself more than a little disappointed with one of the pieces we read. I'll get to that one after I rant about the genius of Barry and The Onion.

Barry's work on the male and female relationship is a definitely overexaggerated form of what I consider to be the major truth amongst all relationships: guys just really have no idea what is going on. Barry's ability to work this exaggeration into his short piece, and then his almost (not quite sure if it actually is) satiric response to women as for how to how to have a successful relationship with human males flowed together so well that I was once again laughing to myself at the innate truths of his work. Barry really exaggerates common stereotypical traits of men (such as distraction along a train of thought and lack of understanding of a relationship) and women (such as overworrying themselves into a disaster) in a way that hit the nail right on the head and allowed him to toy with our imaginations and do whatever cognitive shifts he liked.

The Onion seemed almost like a parody of America's willingness to help others and other nations jumping in. America the big policeman is here to give these people something they desperately needed, but were unable to obtain until America intervened and called for the intervention of others into the affair as well. In this case, Bosnia was missing some vowels (whether they were being hoarded by the government, or there was an economic crisis and shortage I don't remember). The last line about previous letters ending up in the hands of warlords really brought this into a satiric parody of America's current relief efforts. I truly thought that this piece was fairly funny as well.

The piece written by Sedaris however did not amuse me much. Perhaps my sense of humor is just not construed towards this type of writing, but the idea of dressing fancy and the ties and whatnot really just missed the mark with me. I found my self struggling to read all the way through it, whereas with the others before it I had been quite amused. I couldn't quite nail what it was this piece was missing, but I'll reread it later and find out if maybe I was just tired of reading at that point or what.

That's all I got for this one folks, hope that you can all find enough time in the day to have a good laugh or two!