Entries Tagged 'Silly' ↓

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!

I’ve been thinking about writing a memoir consisting of nothing but made up facts about my life. It’s a new subgenre I’m calling LIEterature, in which events are created to substantiate whatever points I’m trying to make about myself. It’s very similar to straight-up fiction — which is really just a bunch of lies dressed up as “stories” — except it has real bite: because this stuff is about me, and it really could have happened, even though it didn’t.

For example, that time when I crashed through the window of a burning building to save an old girlfriend from certain death … that was awesome. It had real action, real pathos, real excitement, and the fact that it never happened is kind of incidental. And how about that time when I fished a bag of drowning puppies out of the river and raised them into loyal Alaskan Huskies who ultimately saved me from a pack of wolves but died tragically in the effort? That’s really, really great stuff that never occurred. And there’s more. My life is rich with false memories. I’ve made and lost millions, been married six times, contracted epilepsy (and then cured myself with nothing but a strict regimen of meditation and sex with celebrities), started a chapter of Arsonists Anonymous (and then abandoned it after I got tired of the goddam meeting halls burning down), eaten a whole boa constrictor, invented a new color (Crellonge, The Color of Passion ^TM), started a new religion (Solopsismtology: Be Your Own God! ^TM).

I could go on. Sure, some people will say I’m “lying”, but really I’m just extrapolating, and I’m doing it for you. Would you want to read about my real life? Christ no. I sit in front of a computer for ten hours a day tapping out code, and that’s the exciting part of my week. Seriously, I’m doing you ingrates a favor.

Big news in the Web 2.0 world today. Google announced a new framework called Google Gears, which allows your web applications to save and retrieve stuff even when you’re not online. This online-only limitation has been a huge Achilles heel for the web app industry so far, and one of the major reasons that Google Apps — in its current form — has no chance of even denting Microsoft’s dominance in the office wars.

But it’s only a first step. It’ll probably be a year before the major vendors start pushing out viable disconnected web applications, and a couple of years more before they gain any traction in the market. There’s a better way. I call it WebAppetezier 1.0 (BETA).

WebAppetizer is a service that installs itself quietly on your machine, and then goes out and looks for all desktop applications that save and retrieve data locally. And then the magic happens — it modifies those apps so that they cannot save or load any data unless the machine is connected to the web. So your word processors, spreadsheets, photo editors, music players, etc won’t do anything useful unless you’re online. The data’s still there, just inaccessible. It’ll be exactly like using a web app, except much more annoying.

I’m a little surprised no one’s thought of this before, actually. It seems like an obvious solution — just a different way of looking at the problem, really. Mostly, people try to fix deficiencies in their products by making them as good as, or better than, the competition. Why not, instead, just make everyone else as bad as you? It saves time and effort.

Of course, this technique will only work for Windows computers outfitted with Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is an excellent delivery mechanisms for programs like this one — the kind that need to be installed automatically, without the user even knowing about it. Why bother all those busy people with details on how we’re making web applications a viable alternative in today’s industry. Just do it!

I see that Google just spent $3 billion to buy DoubleClick, another product that quietly does stuff to users that they don’t know about in order to make money for other people. I’d be willing to sell Google my product for a tenth of that price. Given the amount of money I’ll be saving them in R&D, development, and advertising, I think that’s a bargain.

I had a nightmare last night. I was locked in a room, writing a story. I was writing it on a PC, using Microsoft Word. There were no Macs in the room, and there were no other editors on the computer — not even Notepad. I had to use a PC, and I had to use Microsoft Word, and I had a deadline.

All that was nightmare enough, of course. But it was about to get much worse.

I was halfway down the first page when the window sort of stuttered and blinked and a little icon in the lower right hand corner swelled up until it was the size of the whole document. It had the body of a paperclip and the head of Jar Jar Binks. It was Jar Jar Clippy.

“Hellosa!” said Jar Jar Clippy. “Meesa think yousa writing a lettersa!”

“What the fuck,” I said, and clicked cancel. Jar Jar Clippy made a face and disappeared.

I kept typing. The wall in front of me turned into a giant clock, ticking implacably toward my deadline.

Jar Jar Clippy appeared again. “Greetsa! It looks like yousa making a postersa!”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, and clicked cancel. Jar Jar Clippy disappeared.

I was on page three before he appeared again. This time he charged out of the side of the screen and slammed into Word, pushing it halfway off the desktop. “Salutationsa! Why yousa keep making meesa go byebye?”

“I can’t believe this shit,” I said, and clicked cancel. Jar Jar Clippy didn’t disappear. I clicked it again. He didn’t disappear more.

“Now!” said Jar Jar Clippy. “Meesa think yousa writing an Italian sonnetsa! Meesa helpsa!”

“I don’t need help,” I said. “Please. Don’t help me.”

Jar Jar Clippy put a stunted paperclip arm to his lips and studied my first paragraph. “Hmm,” he said. “This bad! Yousa badsa writersa!”

“Alright, that’s it.” I brought up process manager and looked for the Jar Jar Clippy task. It wasn’t there. I did find something called “horrible-annoying.exe”, but when I killed that Windows shut down.

“Fuck. Fucking fuck fuck.” I rebooted the PC. When it came back up Jar Jar Clippy was sitting on the Start bar, tapping his paperclip foot in an unbearably cutesy way.

“Felicitationsa!” he said. “Meesa fixsa your badsa badsa term papersa!”

“It’s not a term paper,” I said. “And it’s not bad.” I started up Word. My story was gone, replaced by a bunch of horrible stunted prose that looked like it had been stitched together by a lobotomized cliche machine on crack.

“You bastard,” I said. “You Lucasized it. You Lucasized it!!!”

“No! Meesa bettersized it,” said Jar Jar Clippy. He put on a pair of unbearably cutesy paperclip reading glasses, and read:

The force is strong in all of us. That is why we must always respect the environment. The environment is full of good things, like air and water. Air and water are important. Trees are also important. The force runs through all of these things. Air and water and trees. Dirt too. Dirt is important. Rocks are important as well …

It went on in this vein for about ten pages. I flipped through all of them, looking for some trace of the original text. There was none. I took several deep breaths.

“Jar Jar Clippy,” I said, in the most reasonable voice I could muster.

“Yes sa!”

“Where’s the story I was working on?”

“Heresa!” he said. He jumped up and flew around the window, followed by a cape of twinkling stars.

“No,” I said. “The original article. The one that wasn’t about the environment at all.”

Jar Jar Clippy grew a pair of paperclip shoulders, and shrugged. “Gonesa.”

“Gone?”

“Sa.”

“Right.” I rubbed my face. “I’m going to kill you now.”

Jar Jar Clippy affected an exaggerated pout. “Yousa meansa.”

I picked up the monitor and slammed it against the desk until it shattered. Then I looked around for a sledgehammer. Luckily, there was one was leaning against the wall. I used it to smash the computer to pieces. I looked around for a woodchipper. Luckily, there was one in the closet. I fed the keyboards and mouse into it.

Then I sat down, and closed my eyes, and smiled. I took out a piece of paper and a pen, and started to rewrite my article, longhand.

After a minute, the little jar of paperclips on the edge of my desk began to shake. I stopped, and looked at it, a terrible premonition tickling the back of my mind.

A paper clip jumped out of the jar, and landed on my arm. It shook itself, and a little Jar Jar head popped out, gave me an unbearably cutesy wink, and bent over to study what I’d written. Then it looked up at me, and smiled. “Hellosa!” it said. “Meesa think yousa writing a grocery listsa!”

I screamed.

The following predictions have a guaranteed accuracy rating of 92.5%, on the Revelations/Nostradamus scale. Any deviation from actual events is not the responsibility of this blog.

Professional doomsayers finally become discouraged with the world’s steadfast refusal to end, and switch to a new Tivo-inspired slogan: “The Pause of the World is Nigh!” According to these Pausechatologists, The Pressing of the Cosmic Pause Button will usher in a billion billion years of Not Much Happening, after which everything will pick up and Proceed Pretty Much as It Normally Would Have.

Inspired by the merger-happy world of big business, the less-successful sports decide to merge, producing:

1. Ice Polo: This mixture of polo and hockey puts the horses on skates and replaces those polo mallets with giant hockey sticks, de-pansifying the sport of Polo even as it pseudo-gentrifies hockey. Goalies sit astride giant twitchy buffalo, and fights are allowed, but only after mid-game afternoon tea.
2. Soccer Bowling: Just like bowling, except the bowler (wearing giant lead shoes) kicks the ball down the lane, and the players on the other team stand in as bowling pins. The player-pins are not allowed to move, or duck, or do anything other than attempt to survive the bowling ball hurtling toward them. This will replace football as the most dangerous sport in America, though not as the most silly.
3. Big Bass Badminton: Badminton players turn their skills to the gentle sport of fishing, by luring fish to the surface with shuttlecocks and attempting to batter them to death with their little rackets. They repeatedly fail to do so. Marine biologists, using sensitive underwater listening equipment, record the first-ever instance of a bass laughing derisively.

The Zune, Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s iPod, continues to suck so much that each individual Zune’s giant freight of awfulness creates a gravity well of pure suckitude that consumes all iPods in the immediate vicinity and draws them into Microsoft Hades (otherwise known as Windows ME). This is according to plan.

Ford releases their successor to the Expedition, the Ford Leviathan, affectionately known as “Baby Elephant”. It has 45 cup-holders, each of them large enough to hold a two-gallon jug of milk, and gets -5 miles to the gallon, mostly due to the jet engines that are necessary to get it moving at highway speeds. It is large enough to generate its own gravity, much to the chagrin of drivers of smaller cars. You will often see a Leviathan lumbering down the highway with a couple of Mini-Coopers caught in its orbit, spinning helplessly around it.

The United States establishes the country of Punchingbagistan on a couple of small islands in the Pacific, then promptly accuses it of having weapons of mass destruction and invades. Victory is swift. The President’s ratings rise fifty points overnight, setting up a Republican victory in the presidential elections of 2008.

Under pressure from various arbiters of American moral purity, Las Vegas amends its slogan from “What Happens in Las Vegas, Stays in Las Vegas” to “What Happens in Las Vegas, Stays in Las Vegas, Unless It’s Naughty, In Which Case It Will Follow You Home and Dog Your Conscience Until You Break Down and Confess Your Sins to the Nearest Moral Authority”. In a related development, Las Vegas orders two million hectares of neon to redo all of its signs.