Coinage: Hipster Garbage

My friend, Dave Bennet, posted on Facebook the following update: "Where the Wild Things Are. Boo. Hipster Garbage."

I had always wanted a pithy phrase to describe my antipathy towards Wes Anderson movies, and there it was! Hipster Garbage!

What, exactly, qualifies something as hipster garbage, of course, should vary from person to person, but I sense that everyone has a clear concept of what it means. It need not even be particularly negative. Some things that are clearly hipster garbage may have real value (for example, The Royal Tannebaums.)

My best (working) definition is:
Hipster Garbage (n.): a work of popular culture that displays some or all of the following characteristics: it is pointless, boring, and technically impossible. Yet hipsters think it is genius.

Wes Anderson is my quintessential hipster garbage auteur. Who are your favorite creators of hipster garbage? Bands? Movies? Books?

What? Slang? Yes.

Time to dust off the ol' "slang coinage" label - we have a doozy from Friend of Pickle MR, who refers to smartphones as "wonder killers." Granted, not a Pickle original, but it's excellent, and MR's mom apparently uses "Dundos" for Dunkin' Donuts, which is my top slang integration into the vernacular priority.

Coinage: CDS

Last night (a big party night due to the Threekend), Luvh and I and Company found ourselves out at a bar in Brooklyn that seemed to have attracted a surprisingly high number of douche-heads. The king of the douche-heads was a short stubbly guy with a backwards Yankee cap, clearly wasted, running his potty mouth (at volume 11), and intentionally bumping into people perhaps in hopes of starting a fight. He was so egregiously annoying we were seriously contemplating asking him “if he wanted to step outside.” (But after discovering that not a single one of us dorks had ever, in our entire lives, actually been in a fight of any kind, we decided against such a move.) As we were leaving the bar a few hours later, our douche king was outside doing his thing—smoking, cursing, and drunkenly pretending he was Rocky Balboa as he punched the air directly in front of other people’s faces while doing that stupid boxer dance (running really fast in place without lifting his knees, making him look like a coked-up chicken on a tread-mill).

This preposterous behavior prompted the following spontaneous coinage:

Luvh: “Dude, that guy is toxic.”
Peter: “He’s a straight-up Credit Default Swap.”

CDS for short.

So whenever someone is ruining the party atmosphere, bringing down the mood, stealing focus from the main event, but there is no good way to get said person “off the books”—that is, to leave the premises—that person reaches CDS status.

Coinage

Threekend. It's so good, you already know what it means. We won't have one till next month, so there's plenty of time to adopt.

Coinage: "Percent Late"

I'm completely incapable of being on time. And I'm not one of those people who deny the existence of a social obligation to be on time. I feel bad about being late. And still, I generally am. Still, I don't allot enough time for travel and parking. It's classic bad faith, cognitive dissonance.

Here's my latest rationalization, though, and it comes to you in the form of a coinage post. The social obligation of being on time involves not mere lateness but percentage late.

The formula for percent late is tardiness over duration of event. It's the benchmarking concept we late people have been looking for. Different genres of appointments have different acceptable percentages. On the extreme end of the spectrum is a house party, especially with aggravating factors of: very young (early to mid 20's) hosts and guests, large number of guests, and a BYOB provision - at such an appointment, you may be as much as 75-80% late without having done anything rude. On the other hand, a dinner party, especially if it includes parents and non-disposable plates and utensils, you've really got to get there by 5-10%.
[UPDATE: In Los Angeles, due to an extremely high local tolerance of flakiness, there are many social engagements for which 100% is acceptable, as in this town, saying you will be some place means nothing except that you are aware of the event.]

If you exceed the appropriate percentage late, you can always plead ignorance of the duration of the event - this is the beauty of the formula. You thought the dinner party with parents would last until 1am - that explains your arrival time, right? At least you remembered to bring wine.

If you are always 0-3% late then you are a punctuality nerd, and you are probably imposing on the hosts, who probably aren't ready for you yet.

Percent late is useful only for social appointments. Doctor appointments, you should be on time for, even though the doctor him/herself may be thousands percent late. Job interviews, you should be 5% early.

Here's a tricky one: five hour booze cruise. (Just as an intellectual exercise; The Pickle does not endorse booze cruises.)