Blah Blah 2012 Blah Blah New Leaf Blee Bloop Mud Wrestling.

Sorry I've been yadda yadda it was just that [YAWN!] (insert empty promise of more regular blogging here).

There! Now that that's over with, I can tell you about the thing I really wanted to tell you about, which is this:

As you can probably tell from the font and format, this is a Facebook ad. It has been shoved down my News Feed's throat for a couple of weeks now, though for the life of me I can't figure out why. But I might have a clearer idea of its relevance to my life if I understood what the hell it was advertising. I mean, they've employed the word "race" here, which means it's either some sort of speed-based athletic competition, or they're holding open registration for a new subset of humans which would ordinarily be determined by common heritable phenotypic characteristics/geographic ancestry/physical appearance/ethnicity*, but in this case will be determined solely by who gets in under the wire for open registration!

I'll tell you this much for free: I really hope it's the latter! Racial differences, whether real or imagined, define so much of our interaction in such a negative way, and people die every day in their name. It would be a massive improvement for humanity as a whole if we could all just sign up for whichever newly-made-up race we want to be. Then no one would be jealous of anyone else, someone's physical appearance would tell you nothing whatsoever about their racial affiliation,  and we'd all be far too busy inventing our own unique cultures to bother fighting with each other. And as the ad implies that there is a cap on the number of people who can be a part of this race, I'm guessing we could also cap all races at roughly the same number, thereby completely doing away with the concept of "minorities" altogether! We would all be equal! FINALLY!

...but it seems far more likely that this is, in fact, just an advertisement for some lame-ass trail running race that's been given a hefty helping of the oh-so-trendy messy/muddy obstacle course component that seems to be springing up all over the place. I never understood the appeal of that sort of thing, to be honest - it's bad enough being sweaty and nasty; why would I also want to be muddy and grimy? But this ad has cleared a lot of things up for me, as it chooses to advertise an allegedly serious athletic competition using a picture that makes it look like something between a wet t-shirt contest and some sort of bizarre solo mudwrestling exhibition. I still don't understand why anyone thinks this would be appealing to me, but I imagine there are a fair number of adolescent boys who'd love nothing more than to run a 5k through a field of writhing half-clothed women.

Sigh.

*Wikipedia for the win