Acceptable Craziness v. Unacceptable Craziness

My criteria is this: If you can’t avoid it, then it’s Acceptable Craziness (AC); enjoy it if you can. But the more easily avoidable it is/was, the more Unacceptable Craziness (UC) it is.

Here are some examples.

On the way into work this morning, I got lost. Now, not only do I work where I work, but I also grew up where I work — I work in a chunk of Michigan elegantly known as “Downriver”, where I lived for the first seventeen years of my life. (That I did this and still retained any intellectual interests whatsoever is another mystery for another time.) I used to deliver pizza Downriver, which means that generally, if you tell me an address I can get you anywhere from “at the right cross-streets” to “at the front door” without so much as glancing at Google. Yet, somehow, on the way in today, when I was almost there and thoroughly inside Downriver, I got lost, I mean really really lost. I missed a turn, okay. I recognized the next street; I turned the same way on it. I don’t often drive through the neighborhood I ended up in, but I have driven through it, and I knew precisely what direction I was headed in. Every street I passed, I recognized. Every landmark was familiar. Yet…I couldn’t get back onto my route to work! Twenty minutes later, I found myself driving the wrong direction on a major highway, screaming that this was crazy, just crazy that I was so lost in a completely familiar area. After that, I turned around and was able to get to work just fine, pretty much on autopilot as usual. Except that for the rest of the ride, everything familiar looked ominous and weird, as if it might turn on me any moment and get me lost again.

Crazy. But totally Acceptably so; it was Universe-dictated craziness, not human-masurbated craziness.

Now, for contrast, look at the whole hoopla over the non-mystery of “crystal skulls”. Crystal skulls exist and are pretty, generally. Most are small, as you’d expect of something difficult to make. They survive outside, so there are ones that exist which are several hundred years old, making an arguably badass antique to own, if you can get one. However, in direct contrast to the known and rather banal truth, this whole speculative controversy about crystal skulls is now infiltrating the airwaves (isn’t it funny that we had airwaves, then cable tv, but now we’re back to airwaves in the form of wireless Internet?).

Maybe crystal skulls are ancient Mayan artifacts! No, wait, that’s easily disproven. Well…maybe they’re alien, like the new Indiana Jones movie says! WE INTERRUPT THIS BROADCAST TO URGE YOU TO GO SEE THE NEW INDIANA JONES MOVIE. THIS INTERRUPTION WAS SPONSORED BY BURGER KING. You must know more! It’s vital! Maybe they’re here to stop the end of the world, and we have to gather all the different colors and put them together to form a SuperWeapon that will defeat the bad guys! No, wait, that’s the plot of that Phantom movie. I already saw that one. Points for Billy Zane in purple spandex, but if they put present-day Harrison Ford in that outfit, I’m suing somebody.

Look, the point is, thanks to Burger King or whatever, this long-discarded, barely-fringe-anyway hogwash about aliens and ancient Mayans who supposedly used rotary dremels to carve their crystal skulls (because we can tell that’s how they were made) and of course, are being actively suppressed by NASA and the CIA and the Illuminati and the Atlanteans (dammit, Namor!), has been all over the place, as if it’s news, or interesting, or relevant somehow other than to push The Movie. (Indiana Jones, not The Phantom, I suppose. Though if you like the idea, you should probably go watch The Phantom too.) Freaking NPR did a piece on it! (Though to be fair, they talked mostly about the rotary carving-tools.) And the sci-fi channel did this thing that wasn’t even a little justifiable as a documentary, but which it’s really, really fun to read this scathing review of here. (I also stole the awesome picture below from that blog, a blog I think I might have to keep reading now, because they scored a lot of win in just one article there!)

Crystal skull mania: Definitely Unacceptable Craziness. In fact, I’ll call it Extra-Unacceptable Craziness (EUC!), because not only could it have been avoided, but it was completely created on purpose so that someone could make (more) money off of America’s tendency to get fascinated with blazingly stupid ideas. (Crystal Skulls can now be added to the illustrious category containing such gems as Creationism, stopping immigration, “pride” bumper-stickers, shopping as a means of salvation, etc.)

Well, fun as it’s been, this write-up has to end…so let’s end with my favorite quote from the aforementioned Threat Quality Press article about the sci-fi channel’s abortion of a documentary on Teh Crystalll SKULLL ApocalypseOMG!:

“…apparently as long as you say, “according to legends,” you can make any outrageous claims that you want and not have to explain how you know (you don’t even have to say according to which legends, leaving the average layman to believe that “legends” constitute a single, consistent body of information that tells us accurately about Atlantis and the Chupacabra).“

…Which gives us a shortcut, then. Anything cited by reference to “legends” is almost certainly an instance of UC.

Also anything sponsored by Burger King.