1. Crocs – I’m happy to say that I’ve seen this trend slowly dying. I shouldn’t have to explain to anyone why these are bad. I don’t care how comfortable something is. Comfort doesn’t justify this trend being O.K.
2. Ed Hardy – I recently saw a man driving a car with an Ed Hardy air freshener hanging down. Nothing says “I’m a tool” like wearing a sparkly t-shirt with a skull on it.
3. Vera Bradley – It supplies superiority and grandmotherness all wrapped into one. It’s a difficult web you’ve built Vera, and it’s not good.
4. Awkward Tattoos – If you think the tattoo you got last week on your butt cheek is going to be your future wife’s favorite part about you then you’re probably mistaken. And ladies, if you think all the tattoos around your chest and stomach aren’t going to sag or stretch, then get ready for a pleasant surprise in about 20 years.
5. Uggs – I totally understand that your little footsies get cold in the winter. That is why prior generations created something called socks. It’s not cute to wear shoes that look like a large animal is attacking you from your feet up.
6. Fake Tans – A “healthy glow” is acceptable, but turning yourself orange or brown isn’t…unless you’re an Oompa Loompa. Having to explain a picture where you’re bundled up in a snow jacket with an orange/brown face is going to make you feel really stupid.
7. Ironic T-Shirts – If you wear a shirt that says “Cutie,” it doesn’t mean you are one. If you wear a shirt that says “FBI: Female Body Inspector” that means that women aren’t even going to get close to you. These are creepy and absolutely unacceptable.
8. Small Dogs – This may come as a surprise, but dogs are pets, not accessories. Now please leave your little Puggle or Smuddle or whatever hybrid creature you have in the safety of a small cage in your home.
9. Peekaboo One-piece Swimsuits – I’m talking about the J-Lo ones with cutouts on the side and in the back and under the boobs and right about the… Maybe I’m mistaken, but I thought the entire point of a one-piece was to cover yourself. Not even J-Lo can pull this off.
10. Skinny Jeans – The main issue that I have with skinny jeans is that the people who wear them aren’t skinny. The people who are skinny don’t even care about skinny jeans. Not to mention, they’re not the most flattering of cuts on anyone. One day your children will see pictures of us in skinny jeans and they will undoubtedly laugh at how bad you look.

I’m not condoning burning pictures of yourself if there’s any incriminating evidence of you with any of these perpetrators, but I am suggesting that you plan ahead.

P.S. I’m guilty of close to half of these sad trends. I’ll let you choose which ones.

The only reason I can decipher is that nobody is truly interested in verbal communication.

Now, this has been happening since our cell phones had the capability to text message. It is undeniably easier and at times more productive to just send a quick text confirming a meeting or a date. But, I’ve gotten entire stories via text message. I’ve had “one text” take up seven text messages. SEVEN.

Now that’s just unnecessary.

From text messaging, our anti-social eyes were opened to social networking sites like Xanga and LiveJournal where you can tell everyone (and I mean everyone) about what’s going on in your life. No need to write letter or call. All anyone needs to know is the URL and they’ll never have to actually talk to you again.

Social networking transformed from the traditional journals in the more complex MySpace and Facebook and then the world changed.

Three years ago in San Francisco at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc., in an attempt to “reinvent themselves,” an idea was born: to use SMS to tell small groups what you’re doing at the time.

Alas, Twitter.

Fastforward to now, every person in the entire world has a Twitter account. You can log on to see what P. Diddy (or whatever he calls himself now), Sarah Palin and Ellen DeGeneres are doing at this very second. All of your friends can tell you the food they’re craving and can even respond to direct messages from you.

What a wonderful world we live in where we can be as lazy as possible. Now we can know everything about everyone, but we won’t ever actually talk to them about it. Even if you’ve never met this person before, you can know everything about them, at least within 140 characters.

When ESPN started running the A-Rod Marathon, the crap hit the fan, so to speak. His stalker paparazzi, Selena Roberts, broke a story on Rodriguez testing positive in 2003 for a steroidal substance. A-Rod then admitted it, which was both good and bad.  He “came clean” and many people respected him for basically coming out and saying what most of America had suspected for a long time; anyone in professional sports can be suspect of taking a PED (performance enhancing drug). 

The bad side of that story was that Roberts rode this wave of ‘credibility’ and began fluffing up stories based on a foundation as solid as morning fog, and the media ate it up. Her actions clearly represent the rest of American media: any press is good press, which, if you’ve followed economic news lately, the press is notably guilty of overlooking most of the positive swings in the economy while emphasizing all the negative.

Then came the Manny Ramirez chapter in our 2009 Steroid Tabloid. He was caught taking his off-cycle product to help bring his hormone profile back into normal range. The MLB then threw the book at him for a 50-game suspension and having to “rehab” for a handful of games in the Dodgers’ minor league team. Now there is all this talk of his legacy and potential Hall of Fame inclusion being tarnished.

This brings me to my next point: the Hall of Fame voting system is crap.

There are no set standards for who gets in, or by what means. There is an expected emphasis on what was accomplished during each player’s career, but all the players who did very little in terms of stat accumulation that have made the Hall were put there based on things like character. Baseball purists say the Steroid Era has tarnished these careers and they shouldn’t be allowed in.

Let me make one thing clear: If the media hype and the average fan’s hunger for more home runs, story lines in the sport (like the Home Run Duel between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire), and just to see more exciting baseball (or any sport for that matter), the reason for taking the steroids disappears. But because in sport the main goal is entertainment, the clubs want players that produce. For the players it just becomes a matter of time. The longer it takes for them to reach a certain level in strength and proficiency, the less time they have in their career to make themselves matter.

So steroids are their answer. Major League Baseball and the individual clubs have long overlooked what they knew and kept quiet because it put money in their pocket. Sports teams function on a very basic principle: capitalism. And due to special favors in sports, teams can monopolize, which most other major corporations cannot.

It’s been known throughout history that athletes in Greece took things to enhance their performance. Not steroids in particular, but taking herbs that had stimulant properties was commonplace in historical text. Throughout the Cold War, the East German Bloc and the Soviet Union were big on steroids, making bigger, faster, stronger and much more aggressive athletes. Who’s to say that all of these Hall of Famers in sports throughout the ’60s and through ’90s weren’t taking any PEDs?

With that said, why now would we wish to penalize players who are doing, probably, what players before them had been doing? If steroids mean a player has compromised character, then why is Babe Ruth the most well-known baseball player to set foot on a field? He was a drunken adulterer.

I’d think according to society’s standards, that’s a bit worse than taking something to make you better at your job.

Sonia Sotomayor was born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents. Her father died when she was 8, leaving her mother to raise her. She graduated valedictorian in 1972 at Cardinal Spellman High School. She married Kevin Edward Noonan in 1976 and entered Yale Law School that same year. After graduating from Yale in 1979 with a J.D. she passed her bar exam the following year. Three years later, in 1983, Sotomayor and Noonan divorced. They had no children.

After being a lawyer for several years, Sotomayor was nominated on November 27, 1991 by President George H.W. Bush for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York after it was vacated by John M. Walker, Jr.

According to The White House’s Web site, “If confirmed for the Supreme Court, Judge Sotomayor would bring more federal judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any justice in 100 years, and more overall judicial experience than anyone confirmed for the Court in the past 70 years…”

Well, maybe you agree and maybe you don’t agree with The White House. The New York Times outlined some of Sotomayor’s “most notable court opinions.” She favors allowing lawsuits against companies performing state government functions like federal prisons. She believes that people who are medically considered disabled should be given extra accommodations. She found that the Second Amendment applies to only whatever the federal government decides.

As we know, she was nominated by President Obama to be the nation’s first Hispanic female Supreme Court justice. Because of this, everything she’s been doing is under scrutiny. She’s recently been in the news for…many things. The main issue that everyone has been discussing is her “racism.”

Self-proclaiming herself as a “wise Latina” has caused her to catch some serious slack. In 2001 at a speech in California Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Guess who’s getting mad about this? The white males are. I can’t say that this is racism. If anything, I would call sexist or maybe just confident. Undoubtedly there are issues you won’t agree with her on. Yet, the choice remains in the hands of the Supreme Court. As we await the decision, right and left-winged representatives continue to analyze her every move, both past and present.

Regardless, the nomination itself is a step in the right direction toward race equality in America.

The concept of the dumb blonde, a common stereotype placed on fair-haired women, continues to pervade society through today. Its origin, however, like many popular-cultural stereotypes, is clouded.

The 1925 Anita Loos novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (later used as source for a film by the same name made by Howard Hawks and starring Marilyn Monroe) featured the character Lorelei Lee, a beautiful but empty-headed singer.

While some look to this as the source for the concept, in fact, it might be far older.

Since the days of ancient Rome, women who took the time to lighten their hair have been looked at as “bimbos…without serious intentions,” according to a recent article in USA Today.

One explanation dates back to medieval Europe when members of the upper class tended to be darker-haired than the peasantry. This was because the lower classes spent more time outside in the sun. Since peasants were often considered less intelligent than the upper class, an association between fair-haired persons and a lack of intelligence surfaced.

Though origins of this negative stereotype date back hundreds of years, possibly millennia, the concept has gained momentum in recent years.

Numerous actresses of the 20th century have played characters labeled as “dumb blondes.” These include Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow, Suzanne Somers, and Goldie Hawn. Of course these films have only further brought the stereotype into the limelight.

The stereotype makes many think back to the 1960s with Hugh Heffner and his Playboy Bunnies. It’s true that the Bunnies were fashioned after the pin-up models of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, girls made famous based solely on their physical appearance. Perhaps this fact has carried some of the damaging weight in through today.

One of the most recent examples of this is the character Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, played by Reese Witherspoon. The film features the stereotype as the centerpiece of its plot.

With the notoriety this stereotype has gathered, serious concerns arise regarding its possible implications.

Many girls who are blonde cite the fact that since so many people are familiar with the stereotype they worry about how they are perceived by others, especially with regard to first impressions. Job interviews are an excellent example of this as some blondes say they are uncomfortable about their hair color in interview situations, specifically that they don’t want a potential employer to automatically judge them based on their hair color.

Some evidence suggests that men might be responsible for this common stereotype, according to a study conducted by the British Psychological Society in which 60 male participants and 60 female participants were asked to look at pictures of a female model wearing different colored wigs. They were asked to rate them for traits such as intelligence and popularity. The platinum blonde was rated as popular by both male and female participants, but as less intelligent by male raters only.

Certainly, and no matter what the origin, the dumb blonde stereotype makes it harder for blondes who must work against its often negative effects. As with most stereotypes, it’s simply unfair.