Entries Tagged 'Silly' ↓

Fate is a rollercoaster of improbabilities that twists through vistas of the unlikely and the mundane and the absurd before depositing you in the middle of an American Idol concert.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, that’s where I found myself this weekend, in a narrow plastic seat in front of a row of pre-teen girls, all equipped with screams that could slice through a person like chainsaws through butter. And there was much to scream about. David Cook, Syesha, Michael Johns — they were all there, and they all had to be greeted, sustained, and sent off with a more or less continuous assault of glass-shattering, ear-murdering scream.

And that was before the Archuleta event, which happened near the end of the evening. You could hear them preparing back there, limbering their vocal chords, downing energy drinks, kneading their throats. This was the main event. This was The One Who Must be Screamed At. Everything else was just a warmup.

And then he was there, rising out of the stage behind a piano, singing. Or I think he was singing. His mouth was moving, certainly, and his fingers were dancing across the keys, but all I heard was this hellish din, a million needles of sound piercing my skull and then my brain and then my soul, blotting out the world.

I did notice something odd, though, in the midst of all this torment. When Archuleta stopped singing and started talking, the screaming subsided, and seemed to attach itself to the cadences of whatever he was saying. So he’d say something like “Oh gosh it’s so cool to be here,” or “Golly gee how could so many awesome people be here to see me?,” or something along those lines, and at the end of every phrase the screams would burst forth, and shatter me to my knees, and then subside just in time for him to mouth the next goodhearted, inconsequential palliative. Really, most of the time, you couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the screamers didn’t seem to notice:

But that’s pure speculation. I’m sure he was saying very nice things. Plus, the torment definitely wasn’t eternal. It only lasted a couple of hours. So that was nice.

Back when I was a young pup, before the world decided that it needed “mice” and “keyboards” and “editors” and “compilers”, we programmed by burning tiny holes in ribbons of paper tape with magnifying glasses, and then feeding them into Mastodon, our 80-ton Difference Engine. Mastodon was installed on a small island in the South Pacific — which, sadly, sunk under its weight long ago. But that was a real machine! It used to take us three really sunny afternoons and about twelve reams of calculator paper to write a Hello World program, but it was worth it. It felt like we really doing something. We cherished our hello worlds back then. We’d feed them into Mastodon’s input receptacle — and then, about two days later, it would shriek and shake and belch a giant black cloud of smog and spit out a response tape with the words “Hello Wor” on it (there wasn’t quite enough memory for the whole thing). It was quite a thrill. We’d put on an 8-track and crack open a couple of Tabs and set up tables in Mastodon’s giant shadow and have a little party. Those were the days.

I understand that a lot of you whippersnappers have two and maybe three “monitors” on your desk these days. Pansies, all of you. First of all, a “monitor” is nothing more than a hopped up piece of illuminated, color tape. And not very good tape, at that. When you children “scroll” in your “browsers”, what happens to all that text after it disappears off the top of your “windows”? It’s gone, isn’t it? Well, we didn’t have that problem with tape. Tape doesn’t go away. I still have the output of my first Hello Wor program, somewhere among the 54 metric tons of tape I store in my basement. I have the output of every program I ever wrote, in fact. Where’s the first Hello World you ever wrote, child? Oh, you don’t have it? Oh, it fizzled into the ether after you turned off your “monitor”? Isn’t that a shame.

And that reminds me: ASCII. I’ve never seen such a wasteful standard. Back in my day, we didn’t have your giant, sprawling “bytes”. We didn’t need 8 bits, ok? We made do with what we called “mincing rabbit nibbles”, which had two bits, and two was all we needed to represent our alphabet — which, last time I checked, was the same alphabet that you greedy little bit suckers are using. Sure, we had to eliminate all the vowels, and all punctuation, and, yes, every one of our bits had to represent 6 possible letters, but they represented them proudly! They weren’t ashamed, and neither were we.

And another thing: bits. Whenever I hear one of you higher-language infants sneering dismissively about “ones” and “zeroes”, it makes my blood boil. Because, for one thing, if all you have to do to add two numbers is write “number + number”, then you’re not really programming, are you? You’re just banging on your toy language’s giant color buttons, squealing in delight when the right numbers come out. Well, you may get the same answers we did, and you may get them several orders of magnitude faster, with 3000% less code, predictably, without having to rewire any circuit boards — but you’re not programming. Try building an air traffic control system with nothing but holes burned into a world spanning piece of calculator tape. Then we can talk.

Also, I understand that your newfangled, 21st-century bits have two states. Back in my day, we didn’t need two, ok? Wasteful! All we had was zeroes. Sure, it wasn’t easy programming when you had no way of registering (or generating) state — and, sure, arithmetic operations were more exercises in probabilistic reasoning than “calculation”. But we managed! I’d like to see any of you wet-behind-the-ears adolescents writing one of your “E-MAIL” programs with just zeroes! Good luck with that. And, when the world runs out of ones, don’t come crying to us, ok? It’s not like we didn’t warn you.

My mom was (gently) admonishing me the other day for all the filthy language I use on this blog. I am, needless to say, mortified. I had no idea she was even reading this thing. So I will definitely be treading more carefully from now on.

However — it’ll be difficult to ditch the epithets entirely, given all of the impotent bitching and excoriating that needs to be happen here. So I’ve decided to go with a simple substitution scheme instead. Here are some early candidates:

I think these alternatives strike just the right balance between stridency and prurience. As a test run, I’ve run them through a typical 50s-era sitcom plot — a hapless father trying to put together his son’s new bicycle on Christmas Eve:

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me, but I think this is awesome. It’s going to usher in a whole new era of swearing. And I will be its king. Bow down before me, potty-mouthes!

… but Mr Heston is perhaps best known for his role in the 1981 masterpiece, Planet of the Ten Commandments, in which he first uttered those immortal words: “Let my people go, you damn dirty apes!“

When I first started working in DC, one of the first things I noticed was how nasty your average Starbucks customer is down here. You see it over and over again: the guy who stands in line oozing impatience, ostentatiously checking his watch, sighing loudly, staring daggers at helpless barristas. I was saddened by it. I was appalled. I was outraged.

Well, I have become that person.

Maybe it’s a desire to fit in. Maybe it’s the toxic effects of the hurly-burly atmosphere down here. Or maybe there’s been a latent Starbucks Asshole in me all along, just waiting to someone to come along and unlock it. Whatever the reason — I have zero patience for even the slightest delay these days.

One of the things I’ve discovered since my transition into Asshole is that there is a certain type of Starbucks patron who will always trigger one’s worst impulses. I call this person WPSP: Worst Possible Starbucks Patron. You know who I’m talking about. That glacial dawdling figure in line in front of you, sucking up vast acreages of time for absolutely no good reason.

You can spot a WPSP a mile away, and you will do everything in your power to get in line in front of them, knocking over old ladies and baby carriages and baby seals in the process. You will always fail, though. The cosmos does not favor Starbucks Assholes.

Here’s a profile of your typical WPSP:

General Characteristics

Usually a middle-aged woman with a fresh countenance, a kindly, open demeanor and a slightly ditsy, friendly, abstracted laugh. The kind of person who’d you love to meet outside the context of the line you’re standing in — but who, in that context, is the purest possible distillation of evil.

Drink Selection Methodology

Not so much a methodology as a kind of drawn-out exploration of options by committee — where the members of said committee consist entirely of the warring factions of indecision inside her head.

Worst Possible Starbucks Patron could be standing in line for an hour, with the drink menu in plain sight, possibly even talking over drink options with her friend (there’s always a friend). It doesn’t matter. Upon arriving at the register and being asked for her order, her eyes will widen in shock, and she will say something like: “Order? Me?” As if the whole notion of ordering a drink at an establishment whose sole purpose is to sell you a drink is so completely alien as to bewilder the entire field of human endeavor.

And then she will step back, and, with her hand resting lightly on her chest, stare up at the very large menu. She will say things like: “Oh, goodness! There’s so much to choose from!”, and “I wonder what a latte is?” and “Oh, I love cinnamon” and so on. These are delaying tactics. She is marking time until the decision engine in her brain chugs lugubriously to life, and begins the long winnowing process.

Pastry-Selection Methodology

This one is a killer, because, generally-speaking, WPSP wasn’t even thinking pastries when he walked in. At least with the drinks there was a vague background notion that a drink would be nice, so we weren’t starting from zero. But pastries … well, that’s a different world. A yummy world. In a display case. This is the point at which the demeanor of the Starbucks Asshole slips from annoyance into anguish.

Obliviousness

Another mark of the WPSP is her complete unawareness of the inconvenience she is causing you. The line could be stretching out the door and into the street. Three women could be giving birth behind her while a death metal Mariachi band plays Metallica/Sinatra mashups and soldiers exchange mortar fire with pan-dimensional hyper-intelligent Cthulu abominations. She is aware of none of it. Her entire attention is focused on the challenge of reducing the vast panoply of drink options available to her into that single, perfect choice that will bring total happiness and contentment to her corner of the universe.

Payment Method

This is perhaps the cruelest stage of all. WPSP has finally settled on a drink. WPSP has made his pastry selection. WPSP has completed the ordering process. You breathe a sigh of relief. You will soon be able to step up to the register and conduct the 15 second transaction you have spent the last quarter hour waiting for. He still hasn’t paid, of course - but, really, how hard can that be?

Well, all kinds of hard. There are three, and only three, scenarios here:

1. WPSP pulls out a swollen change purse from his bag and begins to laboriously count out the $6.32 he owes. He will have to sift through buttons and charm bracelets and old pictures and tiny desiccated rodent-balls to arrive at exact change. But he will arrive at exact change, by god.
2. WPSP pulls out a two thousand dollar bill and hands it sheepishly to the barrista. And then sheepishly asks for his change in ones, pennies, and deutchmarks.
3. WPSP pulls out a handful of half-used gift cards, and loudly announces how completely unaware he is of how much each one holds. So we’ll have to go through all of them, ha ha. Inevitably, twenty gift cards later, there is still a balance remaining, at which point WPSP will move on to option (1) or (2), above.

The WPSP experience is an exhausting time for Starbucks Assholes. I had one just this morning, and I’m still recovering. It’s enough to make one wonder whether life might be better for everyone if one would just stop being an asshole.

Huzzah, felicity, and joy … Fafblog is back:

“Screw this dump!” says Giblets. “This universe is old and fat and smells like smelling and Giblets is busting out!”

“Should we go over the wall or take the tunnel?” says me. I been diggin a tunnel.

“Nuts to the tunnel!” says Giblets. “What we do is we make like we’re sick. Then when God comes in to check on us we punch im in the liver an run out the door!”

“They’ll be on the lookout so we’re gonna need disguises if we wanna make it the resta the way,” says me. “If we bop Europe an Australia on the head we can sneak out in their continent costumes!”

The internets may now resume normal operations.

My work computer decided to freeze up and eat itself last night, and this morning it wouldn’t boot. I pawed ineffectually at it for a while, then broke down and called IT. I haven’t had to do that in a while, so it took me some time to track down their contact info. It turned out to be an 800 number. This was immediately troubling, but I dialed anyway, and sure enough … it was a call center.

We’d outsourced our own tech support.

I sighed, and resigned myself to the inevitable. Five hours and two calls later, my computer still isn’t working. But at least my ticket has moved down the chain to someone I actually share a goddam building with.

I was bitching about this to my brother, who wondered when corporations would start outsourcing their bathrooms facilities. It really isn’t all that far-fetched.

The furor over the iPhone’s $200 price drop continues. Now, there are all kinds of reasons to be mad about this if you’ve already bought one. I imagine I’d be pissed. But Gruber makes a good case for why you can’t really consider this unfair, and Lord Jobs did the right thing by offering a $100 rebate to all the early adopters he burned. So, really: this might be kind of bad for Apple in the short term, but I’m sure it’ll blow over soon. Coolness and beauty trump all, in the long run.

No, what I’m most worried about is the resurgence of the old “iSomething” trope. It’s seems to have risen from the dead and found its way into the op-ed pages of the Post. Today’s paper has a article called Poked in the i, with this subheading: If I were an iPhone owner, I’d be hopping mad. I’d be iRate.

Good lord people. The iMac was released in 1998. Haven’t you worked all of the iJokes out of your system yet? They’re not funny, ok? They were never funny, but they’ve now entered a realm of post-not-funny that we like to call Annoyingstan. Anyone who makes any fucking iJokes in the next couple of weeks gets instant citizenship in Annoyingstan. You’ll get a little bungalow next to Paris Hilton, right down the road from Suze Orman. You’ll have a weekly tennis game with Doctor Phil.

You don’t want that, do you? No, of course not. So please. Let’s try to weather this storm without calling it an iStorm, or referring to anyone’s iBalls, or having any brilliant iDeas. Ok? We can do this. We really can.

Everyone at work took a Myers-Briggs personality test last month. The idea was that the tests would help us understand each other, so that we’d all get along better and group-hug more.

Because there’s a definite lack of group hugging at my office. Also individual hugging. In fact, hugging is pretty much out, by order of HR. So really what the personality tests do is alert us to potential group hugs that will always go unrequited, because random hugging isn’t compatible with job retention.

I’m sure that sounds kind of frustrating to the layman. Really, it isn’t. The mere possibility of a hug, the ability to see the emotional hole where a hug should be, is enough to bring joy into a workplace. A weak sort of threadbare yearning joy, sure. But joy nonetheless.

None of this really applies to me, anyway. I didn’t take the test, so I’m not sure what I am. But here are the things I could be, according to Myers-Briggs:

• Introverted/Extroverted
• Sensing/Intuition
• Thinking/Feeling
• Judging/Perceiving

These are dichotomies. So I could be, say, an ISTF (an Introverted Sensing Thinking Judger) or an ESFP (an Extroverted Sensing Feeling Perceiver). But I cannot be an ISITFJ — because you can’t think and feel at the same time, obviously, nor can you simultaneously sense and intuit. You also can’t rearrange the letters. So, if I were an ISTF, I couldn’t go around saying I’m a FIST — sort of stomping around and roaring LOOK AT ME I’M A FIST GOD DAMN IT and pounding on walls and cars and stuff — because, first of all, that’s not what a sensing thinking introvert would do, and, second, the Myers Briggs people are joyless pedants who would sue me if I tried to improvise with their precious system.

But really, the system is silly. Honestly: what’s with all the dichotomies? Who the hell thinks OR feels? I don’t think I’ve ever had a thought that wasn’t tinged with some sort of emotion. And sense robbed of intuition is just as hollow as intuition robbed of sense. Bah.

I could go on. But I won’t, because it’s all very frustrating. Instead, I will invent my own personality test. I will call it the Vogue-Caterwaul Personality Test.

Here are the categories:

• Snorting/Guffawing/Chortling
• Singing/Caterwauling/Ululating/Gargling
• Liking/Loving/Lusting/Adoring
• Farting/Belching/Sneezing/Wheezing
• Waltzing/Vogueing/Flailing/Electric-Sliding
• Sipping/Gulping/Slurping/Sputtering
• Hating/Loathing/Despising

You’ll notice a couple of things about my system right off the bat. First, it’s awesome. Second, it’s got a lot more options. There are seven different categories, and they don’t limit themselves to piddling little dichotomies — we’re all about multichotomies here. And you can choose more than one of each multichotomy, if you want to. We won’t stop you.

So you want to be a Belching Shorting Vogueing Hating Despiser? Fine with me. Or maybe a Gulping Flailing Adoring Ululating Loather? Cool. A Wheezing Caterwauling Electric-Sliding Adorer? Whatever. A Farting Farter? Sure! I mean, you’re limiting yourself somewhat in that case, but if flatulence is what floats (or propels) your boat, that’s hunky dory as far as I’m concerned.

It’s all about grey areas. It’s about no boundaries. It’s about coloring outside the lines.

Because the caged bird isn’t singing. It’s screaming. It just happens to scream real pretty.

Don’t scream pretty, people. Vogue! Caterwaul! Despise! Adore!