A Special Kind of Wrong

(Via via.)

I wish I’d come up with that title on my own, but the owner of the photo beat me to it.

And did I mention that you shouldn’t be reading this site at work? You probably shouldn’t.

Insert joke about blast points and accuracy. Via BoingBoing.

I have a special place in my heart for the Wrong that comes from the Land of the Rising Sun. While I’m sure there are all sorts of cultural cues I’m not getting, I also know there are some things that defy translation.

This, my friends, is one of them.

Warning: do not wear headphones when viewing this. Your ears will thank you.

‘Cause, hey, Wrong comes in many forms.

This morning, I powered through Warren Ellis’s debut novel, Crooked Little Vein. It is Wrong. It’s also quite right about something: that the Internet has taken all sorts of hidden facets of humanity and brought them, sometimes shrieking and against their will, into the light of public discourse. What was once freaky and weird is now commonplace. Yesterday’s strange (whether it’s blowjobs or clitoris piercings) is today’s normal.

However, there’s still room to shock people, and it’s not with the disgusting or vile. The world is too big, the future is coming too fast, and the Internet is too big for there not to be videos, pictures and other forms of media that make us take a step back, shake our heads and say, “Dude. That was just wrong.”

This is where I will file them, partly for later use, but mostly to see if I can blow Daryl Gregory’s mind. This whole thing started with a pho run at Worldcon ‘06. As we (Daryl, Andrew Tisbert, Jason Stoddard and I) drove back to the con, our bellies full of wonderful Vietnamese food, I put on William Shatner’s Has Been. I can’t remember why, but when you’ve got four science fiction writers in a hybrid car speeding through the industrial wastelands of Anaheim, hey, you need an appropriate soundtrack. And as Shatner bellowed the closing line of “I Can’t Get Behind That,” someone in the car, maybe Jason, but probably Daryl, turned to the rest of us with open-mouthed horror and said, “That’s just not right.” And thus was born A Special Kind of Wrong: bizarre stuff that just makes you shake your head. Dude. That’s just wrong.