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Sorry, America, None Of These Things Are Sports* With the World Cup, Wimbledon, The Tour de France and some pretty good Major League Baseball pennant races all going on right now, why should anyone care about the World Hot Dog Eating Championship?*
* Warning: Gawker links

And, no, the bidding war for basketballer LeBron James is NOT a sport either.

Semi-Interesting Sidelight: Due to its only counting repeated phrases of 3 words or less, one of today’s Twitter Trending Topics is “Dog Eating Contest”.

When I was working as a sidekick to underrated L.A. radio legend “Sweet” Dick Whittington in 1977, I spent July 4th as part of the “Giving the San Fernando Valley Back(?) to the British” stunt; 64 hours from departure to return (because we couldn’t broadcast FROM there and had to run back to air the stuff we taped). We ‘hit the ground running’, so actual memories of the actual trip not committed to audio tape are permanently clouded by untreated jet lag.

But before the trip, I co-wrote a parody of the Declaration of Independence for the project we called “The Declaration of Proclamation”, my most successful comedy collaboration, and of the 3 co-writers, I contributed almost 55% of the actual jokes. We essentially went through line-by-line and deconstructed it, starting with “When in the course of humorous vents, it becomes necessary for one people to learn proper grammar and call him-or-herself ‘one person’ and break up the band which has connected him-or-her to the drummer who can’t keep a beat and the bass player who doesn’t even show up for rehearsal…”

Yes, I also contributed the wording “We hold these truths to be irrelevant” after we voted down “irreverent” as too obtuse, and I WISH I could remember the whole thing or had kept a copy, since I cannot recreate exactly how we made “all men are created equal” into a mix of intentionally awkward gender neutrality, subtle-enough-for-AM-radio reference to dick size and math joke using ‘greater-and-or-equal-to’”, but we (all male and college-age would-be comedians) did. I do recall it had a record number of hyphens for a piece written mostly for radio.

And being the representative of the show to a meeting of the San Fernando Valley Chamber of Commerce to bring the final caligraphed document to get signatures ala the original was mildly terrifying, but that was when I realized exactly what a beloved character Sweet Dick was in that massive suburb of the more massive L.A. metro area. Most of the leaders of a serious movement for the Valley to secede from the City of L.A. signed it, either unaware or uncaring that the whole stunt was parodying their cause. As well as three local elected officials, including a sitting L.A. City Councilman. Surreal.

Worth remembering: July 4, 1977 was one year after the orgy of American patriotism called The Bicentennial, and the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee (a year-long celebration ending with the 25th anniversary of her coronation in June 1953, which, coincidentally, my mother had been in London for, as a break from her year as an exchange teacher in Wales – she was one of “An estimated three million people lined the streets of London to catch a glimpse of the new monarch” and she did get a little Royal wave.)

On July 4th itself, a Monday and a normal working day in the UK, I made my most absurd side trip to Lloyds of London, the 300-year-old insurance exchange with which my insurance underwriter father had done business with for years, and which he offered to give me access to – how could I refuse. As I showed up with my little cassette tape recorder, my dad’s friend at Lloyds got the PR department to allow me to be the FIRST broadcast media person EVER to record audio inside the massive trading hall. When we returned to L.A. and the tapes were played, my 10+ minutes interviewing my dad’s friend at Lloyd’s was deemed boring (it was) and edited down to a formal greeting and 15 seconds of ambient trading hall noise (I sheepishly sent him the full tape).

So how are you spending YOUR Fourth of July holiday?

I realized that the preceding rambling blog post was originally intended to make a pithy comment about the latest Mel Gibson Act of Outrageousity, but I never got around to it. That’s one side-effect of getting most of the Hate out of my life; I can’t rant, I can only ramble.

Anyway, I’m actually somewhat amused by the fact that ANYBODY is shocked that Gibbers used the “n-word” in the process of insulting his Ex. The words “shocked that he could do even worse” than the 2007 incident actually perplexed me. That bigoted blathering he did then was directed at a cop, for goodness sake, and as drunk as he apparently was at the time, there was no doubt in my mind that he was capable of committing even greater offense in conversation with someone he was (a) close to and (b) had personal issues with, an his Ex certainly qualified on both counts. In fact, there are no doubt dozens of things he has said to her that were even MORE offensive/bigoted/insensitive/stupid than that, but were not uttered within range of a good microphone.

I look forward to hearing all about them.

Josh ‘Cortex’ Millard, part of the internet’s most moderating moderation team at MetaFilter recent twitterized: “Attention, people of the internet: we are aware that haters gonna hate. Please desist with updates re: haters hating.”

Of course, “haters gonna hate” is one of the most self-definingly stupid catchphrases of the 21st Century so far (and shows promise of making the Top 30 of the entire century, one of the reasons I’m somewhat relieved I won’t be living that long). This kind of turn of phrase is the reason I attempted a few years ago (failing badly) to popularize the acronym UGOTO, standing for “Uncanny Grasp Of The Obvious”, a quote the illustrious sportscaster and put-down artist Howard Cosell used in reference to one of his cliche-spouting colleagues (extra points to Howie that the target of that bon mot was O.J. Simpson, long before he became REALLY famous). “Haters gonna hate” is, at the face of it, a UGOTO.

But of course, nothing that stupid comes without an almost-equally stupid subtext. Since if you are the target of that phrase, the person blathering it is pointing out that you have been caught being hateful and therefore deserve being labeled, above all other identifiers (such as red-headed, systems analyst, diabetic, stamp collector, regular viewer of “CSI” and walks with a limp) as a HATER!

It really does fail rather badly as a put-down, especially since research shows that 98% of the people using it on others are identifiably hate-filled themselves (73% practicing even more Hate than the person they target)*. It’s one of the verbal attacks for which “I am rubber, you are glue” is appropriate in most occasions.

Then again, being a Hater is not such a terrible thing (as long as you also are red-headed, systems analyst, etc.). While it is one of the most destructive human emotional tendencies, it is also one of the most common. Everybody hates. Or maybe 95% of the human race do**. Those few that don’t are either insufferably smug, out of touch with most of reality or spiritually/philosophically/religiously devoted and disciplined enough to be totally irrelevant.

I remember one of the Top 5 Cringeworthy Songs of the 1970′s was all about the same subject, and, like every other song to sell more than a half-dozen 45s during that time, it has a video on YouTube.

Ladies and gentlemen and haters of all ages, I shamefully present Razzy Bailey’s unfortunately immortal recording: “I Hate Hate”. (Be warned: if you can not withstand 3 minutes of uninterrupted preachiness, do NOT click on the YouTube imbed).

If you’re like me (and are old enough), you just relived one of your seven worst moments of the ’70s.

A few years after that misbegotten record came out, I met a guy who, like me, was trying to break into radio whose last name was Hayter, spelled exactly that way but pronounced exactly the same as Hater. That was the worst name for radio I encountered during those years, and I knew other radio guys named Vanbenthuysen and Sakellarides.

Anyway, I admit to being a Hater, but that is no higher than #58 on the list of things I am, right between #57, Bullwinkle fan and #59, user of three pillows when sleeping. It used to rank much higher, but just in the last few years I found it to be a waste of time and energy that could be better used watching Bullwinkle cartoons for the 50th time. It is still not too difficult for something or someone I consider morally reprehensible to make me “get my hate on”, but I no longer hate the merely obnoxious or annoying. I’m kinda proud of that, but I’m not setting any goal to become spiritually/philosophically/religiously devoted and disciplined enough to be totally irrelevant. Especially since I am already totally irrelevant, and you know what? I totally HATE that.

* figures from a study made by somebody whose names I don’t remember
** figure pulled directly out of my ass