Never Do Anything Because Someone Else Is Better

Two pieces of sage advice hit my browser on Friday. First up, from Gawker’s feminist site Jezebel:

Apparently weddings are competitions now? This particular wedding was so geeky it had Batman and Iron Man (that’s two totally different comic universes, y’all), plus ninjas and medieval armor. No sign of the 6,979,231 other things deemed “geeky” these days, so really it shouldn’t be that hard to one-up this couple. Makes me want to go out and get married right now, just so I could combine retro video games, Star Trek, the TCP/IP stack, quantum physics, and designer board gaming into a single ceremony. Anyone with similar interests, a burning desire to win, and not necessarily any need for a lifelong loving relationship interested in collaborating? I think we could take the title.

Publicly mourning heroic figures, on the other hand, has been a competition ever since Matthew added an earthquake to the moment of Jesus Christ’s death on the cross, making Luke and Mark’s “darkness” sound pretty tame by comparison. So it’s fortunate that victory could be declared so soon after last week’s passing of South Africa’s greatest statesman and civil rights leader.

The winning status message was plastered across all 20 stories of the Texas hotel’s facade in bright lights: a glowing reproduction of the South African flag. A fitting tribute, to be sure, and one that might not have reached beyond city limits without the amplifying power of the Internet. With the need for posting influential quotes and heartfelt remembrances of the man to TwitFace thus eliminated, social media users the world over were free to honorably retire from the contest and go back to taking selfies and sharing provocative headlines without reading the articles.

Write whatever you like to try and win the comment thread below. Winner will be declared by a self-appointed judge and will award no tangible prize.