Or the Tale of Amber Lamps
Who is Amber Lamps? Amber Lamps is the vaguely cute, pseudo hipster girl in the background of the Epic Beard Man video. Or more precisely, Amber Lamps is the girl my co-worker is crazy about. Every day he comes in more wound up than the day before. “I have to find her,” he says. “I have to have her. She’s… my density (Density has popped me to you).” If you don’t know, Amber sits on a bus and watches the action unfold without a care in the world or seemly any interest at all. And for that she drives us crazy… there’s tribute songs and everything. But why? For her? Amber Lamps is a case of bus hot, bus hot in a spectacular way even, but bus hot all the same. Much like Einstein and physics hotness is only relative.
Physical attractiveness is based on comparison, this is exactly why cute girls have ugly friends. And in the vast spectrum of hotness, there’s bus hot, work hot, school hot, almost any kind of hot. In many circles, I’m considered sewer hot, as in surround me by various sewer dwellers (i.e. rats, alligators, Norton, ninja turtles, mole men) and suddenly I become very hot. And this scaling hotness is why fashion magazines have the inevitable ability to make women feel bad about themselves because suddenly they’ve dropped (through no fault of their own) one rung less hot. If magazines and media open up the channels of hot then conversely isolation decreases the channels of hot.
The bus is like a desert island, and once those doors close we are cut off from the rest of civilization. Take the movie Cast Away for example, isolation from humanity made a volleyball a wonderful companion. Now Tom Hanks never wanted to make sweet love to Wilson (at least, not in anything they showed on film) but they did become the best of bosom buddies. With no one to talk to an inanimate object becomes the best available companion. A hierarchy would go beautiful person > average person > ugly person > beautiful animal > ugly animal > beautiful object > ugly object. So, he’d rather talk to a dolphin than a cow, or the Mona Lisa than a volleyball, but given all that was available, the volleyball become the best available companion for Tom Hanks.
The bus works the same way. It offers similar possibles because Jessica Alba does not exist on the bus, therefor since Jessica Alba does not exist in the eyes of the bus, the next girl in line becomes the Jessica Alba and so on and so forth. Simply put, the average become cute, the cute become beautiful, and the beautiful become something other worldly, something that only internet meme’s can describe. Fig. A. 1 demonstrates the bus before the doors have closed with open access to the world. We can see everything for who they are. Fig. A. 2 demonstrates the closed bus system, notice the striking increase in beauty. However, the figures are not to scale, it should be noted that the ugly also become uglier. The bus is such a strange and wonderful world because of the already heavy concentrations of ugly, making those rare beauties so much more beautiful.
Follow up:
The Meme – A Widespread Inside Joke (an Outside Joke?)
Which brings us back to the case of Amber Lamps. Why has Amber caught the hearts of the internet if she is only attractive in a closed off environment? She’s basically a more obscure meme (a specialized meme) in the larger phenomenon of Epic Beard Man. So, how does bus hot then become hot on a global scale? How can Amber Lamps both be a localized hotness and a global phenomenon? When brought into the mainstream spectrum Amber should be seen for what she is. Yet, she’s seen as being more desirable than any mere bus hot girl. It’s because even though we don’t know Amber Lamps, we all know Amber Lamps, we all know girls that are sorta, maybe cute who won’t give us the time of day. Meme’s are interesting because they have aspects of both inside jokes and widespread appreciation. Obscurity on the internet is like a badge of honor, you find something beautiful and small and pass it on.
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> “Physical attractiveness is based on comparison, this is exactly why cute girls have ugly friends.” Umm, no, virtually every peer-reviewed study concludes exactly the opposite. Read some if you feel like it.
> “A hierarchy would go beautiful person > average person > ugly person > beautiful animal > ugly animal > beautiful object > ugly object” Umm… HAW!
Ya kill me, doc — why no love for average animals & average objects, you some hater?
And is your conversation with the world’s bestlooking earthworm there next to you really gonna be more satisfying than mine with my seatmate who happens to be an inanimate filthy old wrinkled $100 bill?
And Ms. Alba’s lovely face & lactating form & screaming baby do add appeal to that empty seat beside her, but you go on grab it, bro — folks in the back all look old & ugly but I can handle ugly for a minute, shit, maybe even listen in & find out why the hell Chris Rock & Martha Stewart & Tom Waits & Mike Tyson riding together on the G.D. A.C. in the first place, feel? Maybe next time you let me sit next to Miz Babymama & you sit back in boresville heheheheheheh
Okay, easy, doc, just playing… Sorry for those little cheap shots there, but we both know a few nitpicky minor logic errors can’t knock the broader overall reasoning behind your thesis.
Nope, what does that for you is your goddam hilarious total failure to work up a theory that even holds true for your own Exhibit A: THE GODDAM EPIC BEARD MAN VIDEO!
Because if you were right, doc, every single person on the bus should be crowding to get closer to Amber Lamps, due to the crowd’s collective subconscious acknowledgment of her status as the most compelling attractor on the bus.
However, because you are totally TALKING OUT YOUR ASS, the actual video reveals NOT ONE PERSON SAYS ONE WORD TO HER OR APPROACHES HER IN ANY WAY EVER!
doh!
In fact, your own analysis reveals Amber gained WORLDWIDE attention for her indisputable cuteness promptly upon being exposed to a WORLDWIDE audience, solely by virtue of her appearance in that video.
She wasn’t a web superstar until after the video hit — nor was she the slightest bit “bushot” before the video hit, because dig: if you watch the video again, you might notice that NEITHER THE FOLKS FIGHTING NOR FOLKS FILMING HAVE A CLUE SHE IS NEXT TO THEM BEING CAPTURED ON THE VIDEO!
Surely at least THEY should be noticing her, right? If your thinking wasn’t weak ballsweat, right?
again: doh!
HAHAHAAHAW ya kill me, Dr. Slapnuts PhD, ya crack my ass up! HAH-HHAHAW! I mean, yer friggin title even! Q. “What is BusHot?” A.”Dunno — something like BuShit?” HAW!!! HOHAHAHA! HOHOHAA!
HAAW!!
great laughs bro can’t wait to read your next socioanthropological epiphany
peace
If you could rank people on a percentile of attractiveness chart in both the local population (within college) and the broader population, similar to what this article proposes, you would see that most of the girls could take advantage of at least a 25% curve in their favor when chosing a boyfriend from within the school population. No, I don’t have a formal study, but it was extremely obvious to my friends (both male and female) and I.
Let me first say that Mssr. Lahey makes some excellent points — e.g., that a filthy hundred-dollar bill is more sexually attractive than an earthworm. (Although really, is it even necessary to state such a self-evidently truth? Why not hit W. Gnards with the old A = A while we’re at it?) And I have nothing but respect for his measured tone and judicious use of capital letters. Yet, I cannot help but notice a few niggling errors in his rebuttal that I can’t help but pick at. To whit:
1) That peer-reviewed studies of “exactly why cute girls have ugly friends” disproves the theory that attrative people are rendered relatively more attractive by being placed in an unattractive surrounding. First, of COURSE these peer-reviewed studies of cute girls (from such well-known and totally-not-made-up journals as “International Review of Cute Girls” and “Jugs”) suggest that cute girls do not surround themselves with unattractive girls to heighten their cuteness; these peers are unattractive girls. Cute girls rarely publish, as they are employed generally at teaching universities, where tenure is less slavishly tied to publication.
2) That W. Gnards’ theory is disproven by his own example “[b]ecause if you were right, doc, every single person on the bus should be crowding to get closer to Amber Lamps, due to the crowd’s collective subconscious acknowledgment of her status as the most compelling attractor on the bus.” Although Mr. Lahey accurately observes that a crowd will always immediately and irrestibly sexually harrass the most attractive person in that crowd, he forgets that the sensual experience we enjoy watching the video is not the same as that experienced by those on the actual bus — i.e., she may have smelled like salty garbage. This could prevent the otherwise unavoidable crush of humanity that would otherwise mob a relatively cute girl on a bus, pressing in around her until she eventually asphyxiated. Because this is how people act when they notice that an attractive stranger in a public place.
3) That everything between (1) and (2) is incoherent.
I mean, you had the option of simply deleting items 1 & 2 before you hit send, which would would have obviated the need for item 3 once nothing was left to beat yourself up over.
Of course, “everything between (1) and (2)” equals the net content of item 1 alone, so item 2 escapes being branded with the I-word. But it’s still gracious of you to alert us to the shortcomings of its predecessor by adding item 3.
And so what if deleting all 3 items would’ve still been the stronger option? Either way, I admire a man who owns up to his mistakes, and I thank you for the kind intelligent words that preceded your numerary debacle… and good buddy, this next drink is for you.
down tha hatch fellers hoooooooo