There's been a furor about the emojis representing cheeseburgers. Here are the Apple and Google versions, courtesy of Emojipedia
The Apple version shows the more traditional arrangement of cheese on the patty, while Google has the cheese under the patty. All other companies that provide emojis with their phones or apps also have the cheese on top.
So here's how it played out:
SOCIAL MEDIA: Can you believe the Google cheeseburger emoji has the cheese on the bottom? That's so weird!
MAINSTREAM MEDIA: Get a load of this controversy over the cheeseburger emojis online! That would make a great filler story if we're having trouble filling...What's that? Mueller's started filling charges? Drop the cheeseburgers, we finally have real news!
FOX NEWS: Get a load of this controversy over the cheeseburger emojis online! That would make a great filler story if we're having trouble filling...What's that? Mueller's started filling charges? Get those cheeseburgers on the air! We need distraction, stat!
THE DAILY SHOW, COLBERT, SETH MEYERS, JIM JEFFERIES, ETC.: Can you believe that while the rest of the media was reporting on the Trump Administration going down in flames, Fox news was reporting on controversy over cheeseburger emojis? Why would they think that's important. But seriously, Google's all wrong, everyone knows the cheese goes on top.
ME: That Google burger with the cheese on the bottom looks familiar. <Looks up pictures of the most popular burger at the most popular burger chain>
The New York Times ran an op-ed piece saying that "be yourself" is actually bad advice. The reasoning is that if you are truly being yourself - rather than what others expect you to be - it will cause you to act on all sorts of impulses that will not be considered acceptable to others. Want to eat Cocoa Puffs in the bath right now, even though you’re hosting a dinner party? If you’re being yourself, you’ll do what you want to do.
The problem with this concept is that it considers your urges to be "you" while the judgement that stops you from acting on those urges is not you. To put it in Freudian terms, the id is your actual self, but not your ego or superego. Our to put it in Looney Tunes terms, the devil on your shoulder is you, but the angel on your other shoulder is not.
This seems to be a common way of looking at ourselves. We identify with our desires, while assuming our judgement is foreign. I’m not sure why we do that; after all, our judgement is something we have to work to craft out of our experience and values, while our desires just come from out of nowhere. But now that we can identify that “nowhere” as being genes bred for archaic tasks, you’d think that we’d start to cast a more skeptical eye on base urges, and see them as meaningless.
I guess the reason that we see self-constraint as foreign is that we generally get those principles from our families, teachers or spiritual leaders. So often, that voice at the back of our head sounds like someone else’s voice, rather than our own conscience.
I hope we can change this. I mean, I’m glad that the author of the article is against wildly inappropriate impulsiveness. But I think that we need to start taking ownership of our impulse control, and being proud of it. To put it another way, be yourself, as long as the “yourself” in question is not an unsupervised child.
Recently we saw a bizarre news story in which fans of the animated series Rick and Morty went crazy over McDonald's Sichuan Sauce (Sichuan? Szechuan? Supposedly "Sichuan" is the new accepted spelling.) The whole thing reached ridiculous proportions when a woman in Michigan traded a packet of the sauce for a 2004 Volkswagen GTI. I mean, I could understand a Golf, but a GTI?
If you haven't seen the whole story, here's what I've pieced together:
Back in the 90's, McDonald's briefly offered a Sichuan sauce for McNuggets (rumoured to be teriyaki mixed with ketchup) as a tie-in with the movie Mulan.
Recently, there was an episode of Rick and Morty that focused on an obsession with Sichuan sauce
McDonalds tried to get on board by offering limited-edition Sichuan sauce for one day
Perhaps they were trying to set up a Tickle-Me-Elmo style craze, but more likely they just greatly underestimated the popularity of Rick and Morty, and they didn't have nearly enough for the throngs that showed up, some after driving for hours.
Angry fans vented online.
I don't want to turn this into a kids-these-days rant, or more precisely, a young-adults-these-days rant. After all, Rick and Morty fits into a longish tradition of cartoons that drop into the sweet spot between children's programming that displays imagination and flexible reality, and the fertile subject matter of the adult world. And I’ve been through that too.
In the past I’ve mentioned Ren & Stimpy being popular in my early years of university. In my later years at school, Teletoon was starting up, and we wasted many hours watching Duckman. Unfortunately, it’s been largely forgotten, but if you've ever wished that Family Guy and South Park had ripped off The Simpsons’ cleverness along with its irreverence, then it was the show for you.
After leaving University and getting my Adulting Licence, I watched a few cartoons in the same vein, such as Undergrads and The Boondocks. But mostly I’ve drifted away from the genre. Recently, I've seen slightly childish adult geeks like myself making references to Archer and Adventure Time, getting that same enjoyment out of it. I do feel a little jealous.
So I actually watched a few episodes of Rick and Morty once it started getting big, and it was indeed a fun show. But it will take a while before I get to the obsessed level. I have no desire for collectable McNugget sauce, though I wouldn't mind a Mr. Meeseeks.
And that's where we get to the kids-these-days part: I can't imagine my generation going this crazy to try to get limited-edition Gritty Kitty brand kitty litter.
So I can't really explain the current obsession. It could be that adult-oriented animation has become a big enough pop-cultural force that it's now attracting a wider swath of society. Where it was once followed by a few bored students, it has now reached a critical mass where it even appeals to a number of extreme fans who will band together to do things others find strange, like swarming a fast-food outlet.
Or it could be that this is just another aspect of society's already crazy priorities. People have long paid ridiculous amounts of money for items of nostalgia. If you don't have money to spend on your obsessions - but you do have time on your hands - then spending a few hours waiting in line at McDonald's for your cultural touchstone makes more sense than spending thousands on a rare lunchbox. Fittingly, some of the more expensive items of pop-cultural nostalgia are old animation cels.
