Joke’s on Malibu.
MALIBU (CBSLA) — A sign posted along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu was drawing a great deal of attention and controversy Tuesday.
It reads: “OFFICIAL SANCTUARY CITY ‘Cheap Nannies and Gardeners Make Malibu Great!’ (Boyle Heights Not So Much)” …
“The sign was not put up by the city. It will be removed,” City Manager Reva Feldman said in an email to CBS2.
Troll level = master.
Amusing to think about who might’ve been behind this. Somebody who wanted to make a point and who had the time and tools to come up with a pretty realistic-looking sign. They even got the town and county logos right. (I’d worry about getting caught and hit with a copyright violation or some other collateral charge for misuse of a public seal).
Maybe the city will start asking Malibuians to report their neighbors’ suspicious nighttime garage projects.
Have the project funded by some disgruntled celeb, like The Edge from U2, whose eco-friendly hill side mega mansions (there were more than one) were rejected by the Malibu City Fathers.
“…not so much”
Did this enter common usage via Seinfeld? I have a suspicion it did. I don’t remember it being used pre-1990s.
That would make a lot of sense actually. Anyway, I moved back to the US in late 1999 and suddenly everyone was saying "not so much," and I was baffled.
Amusing to think about who might've been behind this. Somebody who wanted to make a point and who had the time and tools to come up with a pretty realistic-looking sign. They even got the town and county logos right. (I'd worry about getting caught and hit with a copyright violation or some other collateral charge for misuse of a public seal).
Maybe the city will start asking Malibuians to report their neighbors' suspicious nighttime garage projects.
Sabo?
Hopefully enough illegals take the sign’s word up for it. Time for rich liberals to taste some of the horror they inflict on the country.
-repeat abortions
-HIV poz intercourse
-Violent felons not being deported
-Consolidation of the banks as long as they give three cheers for the poz
-Chelsea Clinton as a serious candidate for the White House
-Enraging the far right, and thinking that they are all neckbeards that will never seek violence
-Mass Importing Muslims that won't accept Jewish or female leadership
-Gender integrated prisons
I think the city manager meant to say “It will be removed once one of our undocumented immigrants shows up for work.”
Did this enter common usage via Seinfeld? I have a suspicion it did. I don't remember it being used pre-1990s.
I’ve wondered about this too–a lot. It strikes me as a very Yiddish-ish construction, anyway…are you implying Larry David is behind this?
That would make a lot of sense actually. Anyway, I moved back to the US in late 1999 and suddenly everyone was saying “not so much,” and I was baffled.
Hmm… Steve lives nearby… is up late at night… creative…
(He should have toilet-papered Rob Reiner’s house while he was there.)
That would make a lot of sense actually. Anyway, I moved back to the US in late 1999 and suddenly everyone was saying "not so much," and I was baffled.
It would be great if it were David, but I doubt it.
Nice. A better verbiage suggested, free of charge: “Cheap nannies and gardeners make Malibu great! (So long as they don’t actually live here.)”
Brilliant, as the Brits would say.
Liberals are nothing if not masochists. We are talking about people that after all are OK with:
-repeat abortions
-HIV poz intercourse
-Violent felons not being deported
-Consolidation of the banks as long as they give three cheers for the poz
-Chelsea Clinton as a serious candidate for the White House
-Enraging the far right, and thinking that they are all neckbeards that will never seek violence
-Mass Importing Muslims that won’t accept Jewish or female leadership
-Gender integrated prisons
That would make a lot of sense actually. Anyway, I moved back to the US in late 1999 and suddenly everyone was saying "not so much," and I was baffled.
You’re right: it is a “Yiddish-ish construction.” My bubbe, z”l, said it, not all the time, but enough so that it was a “thing.” (She was the first generation born here.) The first time I ever heard anyone outside of my family use it was when I saw comic Gilbert Gottfried live, sometime in the early 1980′s.
That would make a lot of sense actually. Anyway, I moved back to the US in late 1999 and suddenly everyone was saying "not so much," and I was baffled.
You’re right: it is a “Yiddish-ish construction.” My bubbe, z”l, said it, not all the time, but enough so that it was a “thing.” (She was the first generation born here.) The first time I ever heard anyone outside of my family use it was when I saw comic Gilbert Gottfried live, sometime in the early 1980′s.
How about a Climate Change inspired hack? Elevation 16 (crossed out) 15 (crossed out), 13 . . .
Did this enter common usage via Seinfeld? I have a suspicion it did. I don't remember it being used pre-1990s.
Google n-gram bears this out. There has been a sharp increase in “not so much .” starting in 2000 (the period in the search string is meant to count the phrase only at a sentence end).
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=not+so+much+.&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cnot%20so%20much%20.%3B%2Cc0
Share this far and wide. It’s a perfect viral story but a disaster for The Narrative so national media is frantic to smother it. They know that when the mass of deplorables learns to frame the issue this way, they lose, bad. The CBSLA affiliate story is the ONLY citation I can find in Google News.
Amusing to think about who might've been behind this. Somebody who wanted to make a point and who had the time and tools to come up with a pretty realistic-looking sign. They even got the town and county logos right. (I'd worry about getting caught and hit with a copyright violation or some other collateral charge for misuse of a public seal).
Maybe the city will start asking Malibuians to report their neighbors' suspicious nighttime garage projects.
It’s delicious.
A couple of city officials said that the city did not put up the sign. No shit. Another said it was a prank. But no one from the city explained how the message behind the sign is wrong.
According to the news story, “The big question is who put up the sign and why.” That’s the “big question” only because they won’t discuss the actual big question. If they covered the Emperor’s New Clothes, the “big question” would be the child’s name and not the fact that the emperor is walking around naked and that the entire society is insane.
That would make a lot of sense actually. Anyway, I moved back to the US in late 1999 and suddenly everyone was saying "not so much," and I was baffled.
And also “It’s all good.” Suddenly it seemed as though everyone was saying this awhile back.
* Gone missing
* No worries
* At the end of the day
It’s too bad that almost all the really rich people are on the left. If I had George Soros money I would be re-settling Somali refugees in Malibu. There are rental and motel properties in Malibu, so I would start booking every vacancy as it comes open and transferring goat-herders to Malibu. I wouldn’t expect you would have any trouble getting the refugees to volunteer to move from Brainerd Minnesota to sunny SoCal. It would be worth every dime to see how many you could get wandering around the private beaches on any nice afternoon.
There are no private beaches in California.
Yeah, the city will take it down…right after they investigate this “hate crime.”
Did this enter common usage via Seinfeld? I have a suspicion it did. I don't remember it being used pre-1990s.
It seems to me the usage really exploded after it was notably used in Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie “Borat” in 2006.
The “Not so much” bit comes from Borat, not Seinfeld, although you are right, it is Yiddish-y.
I think Mike Judge lives in the ‘Bu…
great idea….If I had Soros money I would infest the Upper East Side and Brooklyn with thousands of Somali refugees , in addition to re-locating inner-city Blacks from Newark , Chicago, Baltimore and Philadelphia to Santa Monica and other elite “sanctuary” cities
We can imagine a kind of Camp of the Saints scenario inside white liberal enclaves that are being flooded by Somalian and Salvadoran internal refugees.
The Left keeps losing the Meme Wars.
I’m reminded of an order a friend of mine once heard while standing in line somewhere in Manhattan or maybe Eastern LI: “I’d like an everything bagel with not too much butter.”
A number of British expressions have entered American usage over the last ten years or so:
* Gone missing
* No worries
* At the end of the day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqxjRzzGn8k
You know, I could take all these new fangled turns of phrase and Britishisms, but the one thing that sets me off immediately is the uptalk phenomenon, especially when the speaker is a man. I can't take a man seriously after I hear him uptalk.
Update: AP ran a very terse dispatch, engineered to sound as bland as possible. No viral possibilities here, move along folks…!
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/2017-04-05/sanctuary-city-sign-in-malibu-called-prank-removed
“…re-settling Somali refugees in Malibu…It would be worth every dime to see how many you could get wandering around the private beaches on any nice afternoon.”
There are no private beaches in California.
Boyle Heights used to have a Jewish community, until they all left.
Correction: replace "until they all left" with "until they all fled".
The same thing happened in NYC where affluent Bronx Jews fled the Grand Concourse to seek refuge in CoOp City only in turn to be driven out by the same people they pledged eternal solidarity with!
If I had George Soros money, I would buy off enough politicians to end refugee resettlement and start sending them back to Somalia.
* Gone missing
* No worries
* At the end of the day
I knew an Australian guy who would say “no worries” back in 2000. That’s the first time I heard it. That “at the end of the day” crap is just corporate-speak and very annoying. I thought only mid-level managers like to say that and “yank my chain”, the blog “space”, “24/7″, “ping me on that”, “day one”, and lastly “I … want … my red stapler back… or I’ll, … I’ll set the building on fire”.
I remember when “ig’nant” was something only C.O.P.S.-level black people said to mean “racist”. I thought “heh at least white people know what that word really means”. As usual, I overestimated everybody.
Off-topic,
POC vs UK:
but the media covered it all up and so the original population were slowly cleansed one neighborhood at a time
same thing has happened in almost every western city for 50 years
one neighborhood at a time
That would make a lot of sense actually. Anyway, I moved back to the US in late 1999 and suddenly everyone was saying "not so much," and I was baffled.
No Yids Chez Olorin, but we do have one resident*** who studied Yiddish to the level of being able to read Forverts.
Ergo I don’t see why this hilarity-satori-inducing-level troll couldn’t be done by, say, a North Sea ancestry guy with genuine Finnish troll genes.

The sign is, by the way, one of the few most beautiful things I’ve seen in the moral coil so far.
Inspiring also as we prepare to troll the local “March for Science.”
Now that’s comedy.
***In re Residents:
* Gone missing
* No worries
* At the end of the day
I hate Anglicisms. So pretentious. I love the way Trump and Pat Buchanan talk. Or the way Steve Sailer writes. A good point made in a lowfaultin and funny way is triply good.
POC vs UK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1-tP_3dDrc
what actually happened was lots of rapes and lots of elderly people beaten to a pulp in street robberies
but the media covered it all up and so the original population were slowly cleansed one neighborhood at a time
same thing has happened in almost every western city for 50 years
one neighborhood at a time
As nationalists become stronger, we can trigger internal migration of this sort. That could be the knockout punch to the establishment. Imagine if local governments across “Red” America become controlled by hardcore ideological nationalists. Such a scenario is not far fetched as America Balkanizes. Measures can be taken to encourage diversity to leave those areas. As that happens, diversity will seek shelter in liberal white enclaves. This can create a dominos falling effect as areas under pressure from internal diversity migrations may flip to nationalism, further increasing pressure on the remaining liberal white enclaves.
We can imagine a kind of Camp of the Saints scenario inside white liberal enclaves that are being flooded by Somalian and Salvadoran internal refugees.
I think you are confusing “not so much” with the emphatic “NOT” joke at the end of a seemingly serious assertion, which was revitalized in Borat, but came to great popularity and usage during the Wayne’s World era from SNL.
* Gone missing
* No worries
* At the end of the day
Add, “My bad” to the list. Only started hearing that about 10 years ago. I believe that it is British in origin.
You know, I could take all these new fangled turns of phrase and Britishisms, but the one thing that sets me off immediately is the uptalk phenomenon, especially when the speaker is a man. I can’t take a man seriously after I hear him uptalk.
* Gone missing
* No worries
* At the end of the day
That one really is an invasive species. I work with some guys who can’t say more than 200 words without using “at the end of the day” at least once.
If I wanted to hear surfers talk, I'd have gone to the beach instead of a restaurant. Morons.
They should do something similar for Chicago: WELCOME TO CHICAGO “Black Lives Matter. Except those who are shot.”
* Gone missing
* No worries
* At the end of the day
Hyndeification?
Yeah, I was a Seinfeld fanatic and I don’t remember that line at all. Recently I saw a 2016 book titled Seinfeldia. Lots of background about how the show developed, but not a single reference to Lloyd Braun. Strange.
More POC vs UK:
https://twitter.com/polNewsNet/status/849275617635737605
It is merely an undocumented sign. It hasn’t committed any crimes, and it is doing a job that american signs don’t do. Why is the Malibu government so xenophobic? Some sanctuary city!
***** The merry pranksters have been duly denounced by our Malibu Komrades!
Malibu officials denounce prank ‘sanctuary city’ placard bolted to roadside sign
Los Angeles Times · 20 minutes ago
The sign sure looked official. It was posted on a shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu and declared: “OFFICIAL SANCTUARY CITY ‘Cheap Nannies and Gardeners Make Malibu Great!’ (Boyle Heights Not So Much).”
The blue and white marker even carried official seals of the city and the state of California.
The sign was first reported around 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, after someone bolted it to an existing marker at the city’s northern limit. Anyone speeding past might have thought officials were simply taking pride in their recent decision to declare Malibu a haven for immigrants who may face deportation for crossing the border illegally — a defiant repudiation of the Trump administration’s expanded immigration enforcement priorities.
Perhaps City Manager Reva Feldman will also explain what, exactly, is inaccurate about the sign?
Nice trolling. Not sure what material the sign is made out of, but it seems pretty well done. However, I’d have had the parenthetical text read “As Long As They Leave By Sundown.”
Signs are a pretty big deal. The black on yellow signs that appeared at rallies about fifteen years ago and are still widely used today were pioneered by a guy I know. They worked.
That made my day. Satire from the right can be wickedly funny.
Here’s one for a future prank. “Sanctuary City, because no one wants to mow their own lawn”
I detest that usage, especially coming from a UK luvvie type.
You know, I could take all these new fangled turns of phrase and Britishisms, but the one thing that sets me off immediately is the uptalk phenomenon, especially when the speaker is a man. I can't take a man seriously after I hear him uptalk.
No, “my bad” was unheard of in the UK last time I lived there but already common in American pop culture.
I thought he lived in Austin?
In North Jersey this is a perfectly cromulent construction
‘At the end of the day” was a cliche of British sportwriting in the 1970s. A heavily overused cliche, that is. It’s weird that it’s suddenly appeared on this side of the Atlantic.
I swear whenever I hear either of those words I want to retch.
Tipo:
Correction: replace “until they all left” with “until they all fled”.
The same thing happened in NYC where affluent Bronx Jews fled the Grand Concourse to seek refuge in CoOp City only in turn to be driven out by the same people they pledged eternal solidarity with!
Amusing to think about who might've been behind this. Somebody who wanted to make a point and who had the time and tools to come up with a pretty realistic-looking sign. They even got the town and county logos right. (I'd worry about getting caught and hit with a copyright violation or some other collateral charge for misuse of a public seal).
Maybe the city will start asking Malibuians to report their neighbors' suspicious nighttime garage projects.
Even if it was only up for 10 minutes and one person saw it, the pic was destined to go viral.
* Gone missing
* No worries
* At the end of the day
I associate ‘No worries’ very strongly with Australians, but it has spread to both Brits and Americans.
‘At the end of the day’ seems to have peaked and may now be pockmarking spoken English slightly less frequently, but I agree it has been a particularly pernicious and annoying infestation.
Another one that has plagued international English in recent years is ‘in a nutshell’. That cliche no doubt goes way back, but it suddenly burst out in virulent overuse about five or so years ago. It’s awful, awful, awful.
But nothing — no word, no phrase, no cliche — is responsible for even a fraction of the damage the simple word ‘like’ is inflicting on spoken English. I hope English can recover from its ongoing ‘like’ epidemic.
You know, I could take all these new fangled turns of phrase and Britishisms, but the one thing that sets me off immediately is the uptalk phenomenon, especially when the speaker is a man. I can't take a man seriously after I hear him uptalk.
‘My bad’ comes from pickup basketball, i.e. when a player blunders and then takes responsibility for the error by shouting ‘my bad’, meaning e.g. my pass was errant, I should have switched on that pick and roll, etc.
Amusing to think about who might've been behind this. Somebody who wanted to make a point and who had the time and tools to come up with a pretty realistic-looking sign. They even got the town and county logos right. (I'd worry about getting caught and hit with a copyright violation or some other collateral charge for misuse of a public seal).
Maybe the city will start asking Malibuians to report their neighbors' suspicious nighttime garage projects.
Even better troll would be to make a serious push to build low income migrant housing in Malibu, preferably next to the Malibu Farmers Market or the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine Temple.
Have the project funded by some disgruntled celeb, like The Edge from U2, whose eco-friendly hill side mega mansions (there were more than one) were rejected by the Malibu City Fathers.
I know people who can only use two adjectives: amazing and awesome.
I swear whenever I hear either of those words I want to retch.
The overuse of 'awesome' seems, mercifully, to have abated in recent years -- 'amazing' has eaten up quite a bit of its market share!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqxjRzzGn8k
“No worries” was endemic in coastal SoCal in the mid-’90s.
That’s like, hate speech against the single most important contribution of Malibu teenage girls to like, the English language and stuff?
I swear whenever I hear either of those words I want to retch.
The degradation of ‘amazing’ is so advanced I’m finding it hard to sing the famous hymn.
The overuse of ‘awesome’ seems, mercifully, to have abated in recent years — ‘amazing’ has eaten up quite a bit of its market share!
The overuse of 'awesome' seems, mercifully, to have abated in recent years -- 'amazing' has eaten up quite a bit of its market share!
“Amazing” is gayer than “awesome,” which is metalheaded.
True. It’s certainly more feminine. This fits in with the broad trend of pop culture standard-setters increasingly being girls or gay, with young straight males either keeping their heads down and their mouths shut, or being ignored (at best) or vilified by the media/academia/TPTB in general.
My BS radar goes off on phrases like these:
"have a conversation"
"questions or concerns"
"I'm so busy"
"facilitate"
and that's even before we get to the newer BS such as "intersectionality" wtf that means.
We can imagine a kind of Camp of the Saints scenario inside white liberal enclaves that are being flooded by Somalian and Salvadoran internal refugees.
very True, and this administration can certainly send all the recent Refugees to California and Seattle. Even the liberals in these areas will fight against it.
I very much dislike “No problem” as a response to “Thank you”. How about “You’re welcome”?
If I wanted to hear surfers talk, I’d have gone to the beach instead of a restaurant. Morons.
We used to do this at work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo.
My BS radar goes off on phrases like these:
“have a conversation”
“questions or concerns”
“I’m so busy”
“facilitate”
and that’s even before we get to the newer BS such as “intersectionality” wtf that means.
“No worries” was endemic in Crocodile Dundee, circa 1986.
[…] I suspect whoever did this also did this. […]