Our Special Guacamolito Sauce

Before there was This is Why You're Fat, there was this, from SNL.



This is Why You're Fat, however, has fast become a parody of itself, much like Passive Aggressive Notes. They both remind me of the old America's Funniest Home Videos show, which started innocently enough, and then became a repository of staged and fake videos, people desperate for a chance at the prize money. "Oh no! That tree fell right onto that old car? Everyone act amazed and alarmed!" But who cuts down a tree next to an old car - with a camera rolling? Now it's just people desperate for a chance at ten seconds of notoriety on a fleeting website, creating fake funny notes or disgusting recipes.

I mean really, tempura fried cheesecake with whipped cream?

Grab a Shovel in the Shovel Ready Economy

Don't despair, out of work citizens. There are infrastructure jobs for the taking at Infrastructure-Jobs.com, or so this banner ad would have you believe. You'll be building bridges and highways and windmills and solar panels and electric cars and housing for the evicted people. Gonna be a fun time in the world very shortly. This is only one of many helpful sites where friendly marketers are setting up link farms to a bunch of other places, their white spaces crammed with Google AdWords ads.

But it's better than it used to be, or so I hear. In the olden days, when your grandparents and great-grandparents were out of work and looking for "infrastructure jobs," they didn't have some fancy websites where they could pick and choose. They just went down to the government shack by the vegetable stand near the railroad tracks and stood in line for seven days. When they finally got to the window, some mean government employee handed them a piece of paper and said, "Hop the next train to Reno and find a Mr. Williams. He will put you to work. You will be given one bacon fat sandwich per day and a ration of water. Job pays 25¢ a week. And if you don't want the job, you lazy bastard, there's 500 people behind you that do. And bring your own shovel, numb nuts."

The government shack was also adorned with encouraging posters. This was before we realized what was happneing in Europe; when we shared with the Nazis a mutual love for scary patriotic slogans, militaristic fonts and workers depicted as robotic wards of the state.