as/l/n/v

at times i miss show world…

…that was the entertainment section of the austin american statesman and i always knew i’d live a move if it had that code i used for the title next to it: as/l/n/v.

it stood for “adult situations, language, nudity, violence”. shit, i wasn’t even that kid – i was happy if we just had the first three!

we noticed “back during the ‘rona” (which is my term for the two months tattoo shops were shut down in texas because once i got back to work life, even though shit got worse in that regard, all felt normal again) that netflix now included a parental warning if there was “smoking”. not of anything illicit, mind you, just the shit that cost two bucks a pack in the nineties and costs eight bucks a pack now.

i know not every service adheres to that, though, because we’ve been watching mad men on imdb tv and there’s no warning about that at all.

but yesterday, before cheech & chong’s ‘nice dreams’ kicked off a mini marathon of their stuff (ending with hey, watch this which is them live in san antonio, and if you watch close, i’m about eight rows back from the stage) there was this warning on the screen:

you’ll notice all warnings are in title form (i.e. Only First Letters Capitalized) except that last one, “OUTDATED CULTURAL DEPICTION”, but that was humor then. it’s history, which despite everyone trying to rewrite it to fit their views, happened the way it fucking happened.

that happened. it was how frito advertised. for a WHILE. i don’t remember these ads, but i remember finding a green frito bandito eraser on the playground and adopting it for a while as a pencil topper (but i never used it to erase so i didn’t damage it).

and of course there was also the beloved…

although i’ve never heard anybody complain about them. sure, they were playing off some big cultural stereotypes, but they weren’t wholly inaccurate. and if speedy moved into a new neighborhood, he didn’t have to go door to door and tell his neighbors he was there, unlike…

but so goes life these days. what used to be loved and embraced…

is now despised and disgraced…

sometimes to the point of getting their own documentary about how it fucks with the culture…

if only there was one group that it was still okay to culturally stereotype. oh wait – there is…

my people aren’t whiny pricks. all you have to do is drink enough that you just don’t give a fuck because you’ve stopped feeling feelings! it’s worked for us for centuries…