The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Pictured above, from left to right, are:

• The August/September 2016 issue of Girls’ Life magazine, complete with headlines like “Fall Fashion You’ll Love”, “Your Dream Hair”, and “Best. Year. Ever.”, and
• the September 2016 issue of Boys’ Life magazine, splashed with the headline “Explore Your Future”.

Matt Frye, who took the photo at his local library, said:

A sad microcosm of what our society says being a girl vs being a boy means. With three girls to raise, this breaks my heart. I’ll fight like hell for my girls to not exist in this reality.

The owner of the Princess Free Zone has this to say about the photo:

Why I do what I do. Because this shit is real. And kids believe it.

Remember, teenagers read this sort of stuff as part of their attempt to figure out the world. When we present the world to them like this, we limit girls’ horizons, and set up boys to be Gamergaters.

Addendum

Michael Letterle makes this important observation:

Important to note that the two magazines are in no way related or affiliated.

Boys' Life is the Boy Scout magazine https://t.co/ziv4bS25GH

— Michael Letterle (@mletterle) September 1, 2016

Photo by Gary Singh. Click to see the source.

From now on, I’m going to refer to people as “cucumbers with anxiety”.

Alas, it’s not Vladimir Putin, Russia’s Thug-in-Chief and Donald Trump’s buddy, but Vladimir Putin, the West Palm Beach guy who yells at grocery store employees for reasons yet to be determined.

Here’s the arrest record, which shows that for all legal intents and purposes, his name is Vladimir Putin:

Click to see at full size.

For those of you not from Florida, Publix is a chain of great supermarkets that operates in the southeast US, a number of which are dressed up more nicely than your typical grocery store. The Publix where Putin had his little meltdown is in West Palm Beach’s CityPlace mall, and it’s a nice-looking one:

If you think that’s a pretty grocery store, check out the Publix in Surfside:

Many of the news stories I’ve seen make mention of the fact that Florida’s Vladimir Putin is not the “real” Vladimir Putin — as if one can be more “real” than the other, especially when the “real” Putin has become a caricature of himself. None of them seem to have made any attempt to figure out how someone without any apparent Russian heritage gets the name “Vladimir Putin”, or how it’s official enough to use in an arrest report.

Here’s a sentence you never expected to see: Vladimir Putin has dreads!

You may suggest that the West Palm Beach Vladimir Putin simply adopted the name as a way of appearing to be more bad-ass, but who’s to say it wasn’t the other way around? After all, if the Russian St. Petersburg — where Russian Putin was born — can steal its name from the lovely Florida city, why can’t the Russian President steal his name from a Florida Man?

Found via Headlines and Heroes’ Instagram account. Click to see the source.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sharknado brought its sub-B-movie studio’s revenues from $5 million in 2009 to $19 million in 2013. Remember this before automatically dismissing an idea for being too crazy without exploring it a little further.

I can get the best of both worlds with a red velour skull, on sale now at Michaels, which isn’t just for macrame owls anymore.

One of the Cooper Review’s many dead-on observations about office life.

There’s an entire category of young adult novels whose plots center around going on a no-fun vacation with the parental units, and hilarity ensues. If you’re a young adult novelist looking for a new twist on this tried-and-true theme, you might want to steal an idea from the 15-year-old whose parents forced her to vacation with them in Trent Hills, Ontario. Her novel solution to this problem was to call 911.

In case you were wondering what this horrible place looks like, here’s a photo:

I’ll admit that I’m a couple of decades past my teen years, and this view looks lovely to me, but to a teenager from Mississauga, a satellite city of Toronto, and Canada’s 6th-largest municipality, being stuck in a mall-free wilderness far from friends must’ve seemed like a circle of Hell.

While it was a completely inappropriate use of 911 and could’ve diverted much-needed police resources from a real emergency, the Ontario Provincial Police decided not to charge her, saying “This appeared to be a case of a teenager being a teenager”.

The police decided to leave it to her parents to dole out the appropriate punishment. My guess is that my teenage self would’ve begged the cops to haul my sorry ass to jail.