The Pantheon Outcast

Suprisingly, I'm not going to mention the Oscars. I bet you thought I'd have something to say on the topic, but frankly, I just didn't care. As I saw a grand total of "zero" of the movies that had been nominated, I figured it was a waste of my time to watch a three-hour award show filled with self-congratulatory praise, smarmy, off-handed political commentary and in-jokes that end up falling flat but still eliciting a polite titter from the self-proclaimed royalty of America. All I know is that Best Picture was won by a movie that less that .135% of the world bought a ticket to see and Best Song went to a bunch of thugs whose members include an individual named "Crunchy Blac", (whose previous hits included "Where da Cheese At?" and "Knock the Black off yo Ass") and subsequently is the only Oscar-winning song in the history of the Academy to include the phrase, "Because a whole lot of bitches talkin shit." Who said art is...

Just to switch gears a bit from the impending bloody global battles that will soon be fought by armies clashing over whose invisible man is more worthy of exaltation, I thought I'd offer a stirring example of how the very foundations of American culture are quickly and forever being eroded into dust. I only hope the grammar police don't cite me for the previous quasi-run-on sentence or my indiscriminate use of "hyphenate modifiers." Last Friday, a group of students from the Holly Academy in Central Michigan was visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts , when one of the "next generation of educated adults" , weaned on a diet of overindulgence by his Gen-X parents, decided that a 1963 abstract painting by Helen Frankenthaler was the perfect place on which to park his moist wad of masticated Wrigley's. The painting, entitled, "The Bay" is valued at about a $1.5 million dollars and will need to undergo two weeks of delicate restoration to remove t...