September Useless Observations

Corbin Hicks
2 min readOct 6, 2021

Hey,

Somehow we’ve reached October in this very short but very long 2021. I don’t know how we got to this point, but we might as well finish up the year on a high note, and what better time to start than now? And by now, I obviously mean Useless Observations! The previous installment can be found here. Shall we?

UO #1: I spoke about this briefly before, but seriously, why does no one in the Mel Gibson movie “The Patriot” have an accent? Shouldn’t they have British accents or Southern accents or something? Captain Benjamin Martin in 1776 sounds exactly like Sergeant Martin Riggs in the late 1980’s. Something’s not adding up.

UO #2: The hook on M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” is so dumb. It’s like a child hitting all of the random sounds on a Casio keyboard. There’s random gun shots and cash registers opening and closing. Why was that song so popular?

UO #3: Speaking of popular, Travis Scott is the most famous non-famous person in history. How do you perform at a Super Bowl and marry a Kardashian and people still don’t know who you are? I feel like every two years, Travis Scott does something to try to become a household name, like perform in a steel cage on the Grammy’s with James Blake, and it still never works. His YouTube channel has billions of views and so something isn’t adding up here.

UO #4: I’ve never seen a standalone Auntie Anne’s or Sbarro’s. I’ve only ever seen them in shopping malls. How are those places still in business, when no one ever goes to the mall anymore?

UO #5: Alcoholics are typically addicted to beer, wine or vodka, because I assume they’re the easiest things to acquire. No one’s ever been addicted to Malort.

UO #6: Why does Uber ask you during your ride if you’d like to tip your driver? Why not wait until the ride is over before asking me that? I haven’t arrived at my destination yet.

UO #7: There’s no reason for the MTV show “Catfish” to still exist. Every phone has video chat capabilities, Skype and Zoom are free, and now iPhones can FaceTime with anyone even if they have Google or Android devices. Either it’s all staged or people do crazy things when they’re lonely.

UO #8: I’ve long thought that episodic weekly television programming was going to die out because of the emergence of streaming services and binge watching, but Twitter is saving the television industry. Everyone’s FOMO gets exacerbated by the feeling of being the only person on your timeline or friend group that isn’t watching a show live, and I think the networks are now leaning into this as a way to combat cord cutting and streaming.

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