maxsitt:

joemande:

As you may have heard by now, Andy Rooney officially retired from his post as confused crank commentator of 60 Minutes. If you know anything about me, then you’ll know that I’ve obviously taken this news very hard.

Since 2007, I have obsessively curated a YouTube meme (SORRY TO BRAG!!!)…

The Andy Rooney Game is probably my favorite thing the internet has given me just below Google maps and above the Arab Spring.

I found Andy Rooney’s Common Nonsense at a book sale a couple years ago, and to this day it’s been the greatest purchase I’ve ever made. Mr. Rooney made cantankerousness an art. He elevated the mundane elements of the 1950s American Dream to such a high plane that everything of the past two decades, from Lady Gaga to touch-tone telephones, confused his old, senile, brilliant little mind.

Actually, it’s not fair to call Andy Rooney cantankerous, because it’s not what he complains about that’s fascinating. It’s how he lobs useless details left and right to craft his essays. Take this excerpt from Common Sense — literally, the first random passage I flipped to just now:

Although nothing really bad had happened to me last Saturday, I had an overpowering urge to do something nice for myself. I got in my car — which is always a comfort because we all think that going somewhere other than where we are will better our condition — and I drove to a clothing store I like. Once inside, I chose three colorful new short-sleeve shirts for summer and put them on a credit card so there was absolutely no pain at all.

Whereas other writers take pains to extract the most unique details from their lives, Andy Rooney chooses the least unique to make his points. He observes what the rest of us ignore, and that’s why he sounds like such a curmudgeon. He’s the only commentator alive who’s willing to point out universal truths that everyone else has pretty much accepted as universal truths by now. Yeah, junk mail is stupid, right? Thank God someone had the old, droopy balls to say it.

Sometimes, this brutal honesty, this absurd attention to the most useless moments of life, leads to astounding revelations. Like this throwaway idea — probably the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard:

Every day I’d get a terrible back itch below my left shoulder blade. I finally realized that when I was in the shower washing other parts, I stood with the hot water hitting me in the back below my left shoulder blade. I was washing the oils out of that one spot and making it itch. Now I keep turning in the shower. It wouldn’t be a bad idea if shower floors revolved.

No it wouldn’t, Mr. Rooney. It wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.