Reddi's essay from episode 813: Leg Pop, Trains, & Brownie Batter

I'd like to talk to you about the foot pop.  I'm kind of talking about a lot of things - maybe everything - but bear with me:

On the way home from work last week, I noticed a new billboard near my exit.  It's for Blue Bell Ice Cream's triumphant return to the Las Vegas market, after killing some hospital patients in Kansas with listeria in their institutional products 7 years ago.  I'd figured Blue Bell wouldn't have survived without rebranding after the DoJ went after their CEO for attempting a cover-up (in a case that still has yet to select a jury), but I have to tell you, I'm happy they didn't rebrand, as I've had enough experience working for shady employers to have learned first-hand that corporate cultures don't change all that much when just the one guy takes the fall.  Even when everybody's lookin'.

I'm happy to know exactly who they are, so I can still avoid them.  They'll be fine without me, given Vegas is back in their fold; this town's still more than happy with Firefly, after all.

The next day, I noticed a Walgreen's had replaced all their regular brands of ice cream with a full freezer of Blue Bell.  My initial thought: "What an odd culture, where the place trusted to dispense medicine will gladly sell out to the highest bidder without pause."  Almost instantly I remembered having the exact same thought during my earliest forays into skepticism nearly 3 decades ago, having observed full shelves of homeopathic cure-alls in my enlightened college town's pharmacies.  Indiana University has the largest medical school in the country, & we've known without a doubt for a full century that homeopathy does absolutely nothing, yet here we are, still catering to consumers' insatiable demand for quackery.

Which brings me to the foot pop.

Another advert on my daily trip home - this time in my current casino garage elevator, promoting the property's summertime outdoor options - features an attractive, young couple wearing swimsuits, standing in a now-ubiquitous social media pose, with her palm gently pressed possessively on his chest as she leans into him, one leg up, knee bent, flamingo-style.

The foot pop.

The history of the foot pop is less than a hundred years old.  Some speculate it was a satirical "Fuck you" to the film industry's Hays code of the 1930s, mocking a rule requiring cinematic lovers keep one foot on the ground.  Still, it didn't take off in pop culture until after Life Magazine's V-J Day In Times Square photo.  More an off-balance lean than a full "pop", the image inspired copycats for decades without explicit commentary until 2001's The Princess Diaries, where the precise meaning was finally defined.

I don't expect you can find any reference to the foot pop in art anywhere from cave paintings to the post-impressionists.  I've certainly tried.  It's not a natural thing.  It serves no sexual, evolutionary, bio-mechanical, or established emotional function.  It doesn't mean anything at all.  People do it for no reason other than they've seen other people do it for no reason.

...& still it seems to mean everything, until some asshole like me starts asking questions.

But there's zero chance it's going away anytime soon.  It unconsciously means too much to too many people now, & it takes ages to move the collective unconscious.

I think what I'm trying to impart here is more than a clichéd "Old habits die hard," or that change is hopeless.  It's exactly the opposite:  It's because actual change is measured not in years or decades, but in centuries & millennia, that it's imperative to ignore setbacks, put your goddamn foot down, & keep moving forward.