The Internet is a wasteland — or, if you’re feeling more glass-half-full, a haven — for trolling, pandering, and self-aggrandizing, whether it be in innovative or particularly reductive ways. Every day there’s at least one or two obnoxious things that is deserving of our hate-click, and our temporary outrage only brings the unnecessary attention to such ridiculata. Yet we can’t help ourselves from promoting it, now can we? Join us in our rage, for each week we nominate the worst Internet-based events of the previous five days, and determine which of the nominees is, in fact, The Worst.
Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday, much to the delight of women and Canadians and Canadian women everywhere. It was somewhat expected (even if Munro herself slept in that morning because she’s the most chill Nobel winner ever) — so much so that on Wednesday night a parody Alice Munro account popped up on Twitter. While parody accounts are a dime a dozen, the one for Munro (which has since been deleted) is particularly annoying because it was the work of Italian journalist / jokester (same thing?) Tommasso Debenedetti, who has a penchant for clever hoaxes such as creating fake Twitter accounts. Very smart pranks! How many dummy GMail accounts do you think Debenedetti has started in order to create so many parody Twitters? I wonder if he needs a spreadsheet to keep track of them all. In any case, online performance art is stupid.
Meanwhile, Bret Easton Ellis is bitter that the Swedes aren’t down with bratty cocaine meta-fiction.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJl1PGoQZ4]
You know that thing when you find stuff stuck to your shoe and you don’t know what it is so you pick pieces off and then eat it while being on television? I know, what a nuisance. But that’s what happened on Wednesday morning to Connecticut meteorologist Scot [sic] Haney, who popped what he thought were Grape Nuts into his mouth. Turns out it was just cat vomit that he stepped in! Common mistake. Obviously, one who is prone to eating strange substances off of his shoe on television is typically given to sharing the news of accidental vomit-eating with such glee as if it’s, like, a fun, cool thing to do. Teens are crazy for Molly, and grown-ass men are munching on cat puke.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdS9pdiYF4o]
Look, courting is hard. It’s full of awkward interactions and second-guessing and self-hatred, and we’d all be a lot better off if we could accept that being alone forever is perhaps preferable to the notion that we might just find someone worth spending our time with after slogging through the wading pool of morons and jerks and people who don’t return our affections and people who are eager to a fault. On the other hand, this brave new world we live in has brought on flirting by way of excruciatingly embarrassing video selfies, which is what the gentleman above achieved this week when he inadvertently turned himself into a meme called “Starbucks Drake Hands.” Sadly, the Internet also allows us to shame others for wanting to show off their perfect jawlines, hair, and bedroom eyes.
THE VERDICT: It takes a lot to truly disgust me, but Scot Haney’s vomit-eating was Human Centipede-level gross. I can just imagine his house iscovered in half-digested Grape Nuts, which he is ignoring at the same rate that he’s pretending that cereal is cat food. Can we stage a rescue attempt? I am worried about that cat.