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There was a time a few years ago when I first launched TharpSter.Org where anything I wrote and published had to be done all in one sitting. If I had an idea, I had to sit down at the PC and knock it out immediately. An idea couldn’t be held in order to be written later on. I can assure you there was some pretty good stuff lost to abandon when they crossed my mind in the middle of the day while I was in the middle of the cube farm. Over the last year, I’ve managed to modify some of my techniques where my writing is concerned. Such modifications have allowed me to exploit all of the flotsam and jetsam that pass through my head on a regular basis.
Nowadays, I use an app on my phone which syncs up with a companion program here on my laptop. If I should get a flash of brilliance at any time of day, I just break out the phone, activate the app and capture the blog idea. Later on when I’m writing, I check my ideas and let the verbal brilliance flow. Easy as that.
It’s the existence of that particular list which puts us here today.
For sometime now, I’ve had one particular entry on that list: “Everything I ever needed to know about racial profiling I learned from Angry Birds.”
It makes for a wonderful subject matter to appear on the ole website, don’t you think?
Naturally, I haven’t fleshed that one out yet. Certainly I could make a case for almost all of the birds in that popular game and how they take on the stereotypical behavior of various races of people. Perhaps because the idea lacks the requisite creative wit needed to appear here on TharpSter.Org is the primary reason I haven’t devoted a whole lot of time to it.
Having just about relegated that idea to the Cranial Flatulence file from where hardly anything ever returns, I had moved on to composing poignant messages about voting responsibly and selling unique items on Craigslist.
Today, a small piece of that idea was resurrected.
Got a smart phone? Quick, get it out.
Now go to the Angry Birds app and activate it.
Got it? Good.
Now access game 8-2. I’ll give you a minute.
*waits*
Welcome back. I hope you didn’t get to enthralled with the game so much that you forgot about my blog.
Upon activating that particular game, you’re given the image of what the green pigs have done so that you can make an assessment on what you have to destroy. Make no mistake. Destruction is the key here.
That’s right people. You have to destroy a passenger plane and an air traffic control tower.
There’s no cultural taboo against destroying the occasional passenger airline, is there?
Once you’re given your mission objective of what to destroy, you’re then provided with the implements of destruction.
Your first bird is a yellow one. These little bad boys are good for accelerating directly into your target using velocity as a weapon. In my racial profiling analogy, I would have likened the yellow birds to the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II. Their efforts were instrumental in causing extreme damage on plenty of American watercraft.
The next two birds are white ones. I’m no fan of these ones. They’re generally slow and stupid, and are only good from dropping bombs. If you time the bombing right, you can usually get some benefit of the bird flying upward into a structure when it drops the bomb. Of course there’s no racial profiling there. White people dropping bombs have never really been demonized for anything, have they?
Your final bird is the black bird. This one can be particularly nasty because it’s capable of exploding either by timing after impact or by manual intervention. Naturally, there’s no stereotypical behavior of any race which can be characterized by the strategic placement of an explosive black bird.
Ponder that for a moment.
Okay, moving on.
So what type of reaction is warranted here?
It’s a forgone conclusion that I could give you a wide variety of responses to the lack of consideration which went into the design of this particular level of Angry Birds. I could use hyperbole to write a gag Onion-like news article which links the game to increased pat downs at the airport.
I could become righteously indignant about it and call for a boycott of Angry Birds.
I could take the approach that tells you to suck it up and get over it. Google “Angry Birds 8-2” and you won’t find a whole lot of articles calling attention to the perceived insensitivity of it all. Instead, you’ll find information on how to beat the level.
I could do all of those things, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll say this.
Nearly 10 years have passed since the tragic events of 9/11, yet even still I would like to think Americans at large are still just a tad bit sensitive to reminders which take us back to that day. Just to let you in on a little secret, I still shudder when I see movies like Transformers choreograph some of their battle scenes around the willful destruction of high rise buildings by flying planes through them.
More so, it’s bad enough that goofballs have tried to blow planes out of the sky by igniting explosives hidden in their shoes or underwear. Where is the entertainment value in simulating such destruction on a stupid game you play on your phone?
Update: 08/28/2011
The following appears on Angry Birds Rio on game 9-11. This particular level was just recently released as an update to the spinoff of the popular game.
This essentially explains why a lot of the hits this particular blog has received has been resultant of people searching out 9-11 Angry Birds.
I can’t believe any game would have you blow up a plane, albiet a wood block one.
This is mildly disturbing.