There are a lot of things I don't need to know, and the majority of them are pop culture related.
It's not like I'm sitting around in a hounds-tooth smoking jacket reading
Ulysses
and
spinning
The Velvet Underground on vinyl (
pre-
, obviously) with C-SPAN muted while I wait for the next
Frontline
to air. I won't front: I like all of those things, but our household plays its share of Katy Perry and
Rich Kids of Beverly Hills
(the latter I will, however, blame exclusively on my husband). We're not culture snobs, pop or otherwise.
But, there are some damn things the Internet force-fed into my unconscious while I was just trying to chill in a safe bubble of indie-lite St. Vincent and
Maron.
My consciousness of this fact erupted one evening when I proclaimed, with authority, that
Mel B. (formerly Scary Spice)
is Eddie Murphy's baby mama, but she didn't go ape with the name like
Geri Halliwell (aka Ginger Spice),
who called her own
daughter Bluebell Madonna.
Whaaaaaaa...t? True, I was 12 when the Spice Girls hit it large in the US. But, these events transpired long after I'd publicly renounced my
Wannabe
CD single and spent teenage summers lurking around pretending to avoid our only TV after my fabulous little brother discovered and repeatedly devoured
Spice World
on VHS. How did I know this stuff?
The Internet made me. More specifically, the inescapable stream of ubiquitous chatter dispersed among facts I actually do care about ensured my limited cognitive space runneth over with unsettling information.
What the eff else do I not know I know?
You can turn back now, but the Internet will still whisper these non-facts into your dreams...
• Avril Lavigne married Chad Kroeger, who is not even a Sk8r Boi, because they're both Canadian or something, and she got Lyme Disease, which is super terrifying and terrible in every way.
• The Boss' slammin' dad bod proves I am sexually attracted to at least one of my mother's teenage crushes -- in his current 65-year-old-form.
• LeBron James, apparently, sports entirely average endowment (which is fine already), but he has a great sense of humor, so it's OK even if it weren't.
• Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be comedians because all my heroes have turned out to be perverts and not even in the good way. (Actually, I'm glad I know this. But, please, please don't tell me if Bob Newhart sexually assaults someone.)
• Kristen Stewart is, or was, dating a girl, and people -- who apparently didn't watch Twilight and The Runaways in the same year -- were surprised to hear that.
• Anthony Weiner exists. Still.
• If you give a monkey a typewriter and an infinite amount of time, it will "almost surely" type the complete works of William Shakespeare. It will "with certainty" create 50 Shades of Grey.
• Alanis Morissette allegedly wrote "You Outta Know" about Dave Coulier, and even though it's never been factually confirmed, it still gives me mental images of Joey from Full House doing the secks. Which is incredibly disappointing seeing as how, when I was 12-years-old, Jagged Little Pill laid the foundation for my understanding of human sexuality.
• No, I don't know if it still counted as vegan when Alicia Silverstone fed her baby from her mouth, and yet I was forced to wonder.
• Al Gore invented the internet, but Price said it was, like MTV, "completely over" in 2010. So, you can blame this list of pop cultural diarrhea on the Culprit Formerly Known as the Internet.