The news from the UK just keeps getting stranger and stranger, without getting any better. First the Llamas find a horrible story about the Cumbria Tourism bureau trying to lure more chavs to the Lake District by releasing a rap version of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” performed by some douchewad in a chipmunk suit. Now comes word of “‘crying clubs” in London, where overdressed men and women sit around feeling too sensitive for words, some of them with sooty, mascara-streaked tears running down their cheeks. (The clubs feature an attendant who chops huge piles of onions to induce the requisite teariness.) Victor Wynd, president of the Last Tuesday Society which hosts Loss, one of the more popular crying clubs, is happy (sort of) with the trend:

I don’t like parties where everyone has fun. I don’t want to dance and be cheerful, I’d much rather sit in a corner and mope as it’s what I’m good at.

The effete Londoners seem to have been inspired by the Japanese, who apparently are off on a national crying jag called the Crying Boom. Today in Japan, birthplace of the bushido warrior spirit, you can go into a bookstore and head straight for the Tear Book section, where the books are subdivided according to theme–tragedy, disease, nostalgia, stuff like that–and some of them are even rated according to how likely they are to make the reader cry. Meanwhile, American whiners can go to cryingwhileeating.com, to find pictures of people stuffing their faces while they cry about issues like “global warming” and “motivation problems.”

This ongoing emo-ization of our global culture seems like a seriously unhealthy trend. Among other things, it seems incompatible with enough guttiness for simple self-preservation, much less for accomplishing great deeds. The exploration of Mars will have to wait, I guess. But the cutting clubs are probably just around the corner.