Historically our assessment scales are used to quantify broader concepts, but Rob Fords complete inability to order the magnitude of his respective transgressions has created an imminent public need for my services. I should mention upfront Rob Ford is possibly not guilty of all of these, but it is important to establish a baseline.

  ***

Continue reading →

On the way back from Tim Hortons^TM I was almost run down by a short bus. Paratranspo to be exact. While I proved nimble enough to avoid it, the near miss was harrowing on several levels. Aside from the universal aversion to being run over, there was a flash awareness of the ancillary negatives of being laid low by this particular vehicle; the intolerable irony of my body being mangled by the chariot of the lame. And how I could feel their crippled shameful joy, that I might soon be amongst them…like a crew of damned and handicapable pirates (1) eager to pressgang me into eternal servitude, shackled to an oar.

Worse still, were I to die, was the awareness that the colorfulness of my death would fuel decades of sick humor amongst my friends and ill wishers (2). I could hear their smug, winking, conversations at my funeral:

“Oh did you hear how it happened? He was run down by a short bus when he darted across the street for no reason. Tragic that he couldn’t dodge a transport driven by a retard(3); some athlete he was.”

Then they would laugh and try and disguise it as a mournful sob.

The whole thing brought to mind how important it is to die in the least dignity stripping way manageable. As a courtesy, between friends, I present you the Ignominious Death Scale. That you might arrange your own demise accordingly.

Continue reading →

Earlier this morning a co-worker confessed that he was ashamed of a mistake that he’d made on his last call. When I pressured as to the exact level of shamedness he proved unable to quantify it. I dearly wanted to savor his sweet disgrace, but the lack of precise measure put me off my feed. It’s thus that I come up with an exact scale of shameful occurrence…that one might accurately convey how low they have fallen.

Continue reading →

At some point clarity lost its legitimacy to subtlety, and ironic disaffection and apathy became the cultural currency of the hip. Never having been hip, or subtle, it is hard to say when which gave way to what (which actually is hard to say), but the end result was irony becoming the key social moderator. About the same time reading became not so popular, which is a bit of problem when your locus of cool is a fairly slippery esoteric concept. What are the retro clad and bearded masses to do?

In an effort to keep the smug barista and spoken word poetry industry from grinding to a halt Beats Entropy is going to drop a little knowledge.

Let us define our terms:

Irony= when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect or contrary to some intrinsic quality (real or inferred).

Things entirely devoid of irony

It gets dark at night

Surrender is a word of French extraction.

Ugly people are often sad

Now I could get all fancy and suss out all the gradations of irony through a series of complex logical syllogisms, but we both know that sort of academic hokum proves nothing. The only legitimate method of exploring such a topic is a peer reviewed, toast backed, scale from 1-20. Let’s get down to business.

Continue reading →