Maybe I'll Call It "Conceptually Iffy Tuesday"

It's Tuesday, and you all know what that means! It's time for a NEW WORD TO HATE! Like we've done so many* Tuesdays before, we take a look at a new word coined to represent a new idea - a new idea that is stupid and wrong and nobody needs and should crawl back into the muck from whence it oozed.

This Tuesday's New Word to Hate is... RINGBACK. First, the bad news. "Ringback" is not some kind of cute little lemur. It's not a new slang term for breaking off an engagement. It's not a horrible disease that leads to mysterious bulges under your coat during a debate. No, "ringback" is the latest pointless feature being added by the cell-phone industry, who, as it turns out, hates ALL of humanity, not just Sasquatch.

Allow me to explain, as I suspect, at this point, many of you are thinking: "Sasquatch? Where the fuck did he pull SASQUATCH out of?" But if you analyze the development of the cell-phone from a technological-evolution standpoint, you come to the inexorable conclusion that the cell phone industry is deliberately trying to make Bigfoot's life (or Bigfeet's lives, if they're a species and not just an individual who befriends the Six Million Dollar Man), a LIVING HELL.

First, you have the cellular phone itself - a phone you can, ostensibly, take anywhere and make calls. Sure, at first, reception wasn't that great in the woods, but that's why they're expanding coverage. With a cell phone, if you're in the woods and stumble across Sasquatch, you can call your friends and say "Holy SHIT, I just stumbled across Bigfoot!**" And then you hold up the phone and your friends can hear the mournful cry of the Sasquatch.

At this point, the cell phone companies realized that perhaps your friends might not believe you'd found Sasquatch, and so they started putting CAMERAS in the phones. Crappy cell-phone cameras have only two uses - Sasquatch snapshots*** and pervy women's changing room pictures. Note that showing people a blurry, dark, low-res digital picture on a two inch screen and saying "See? I took this with my PHONE! And I'm showing it to you on my PHONE!" is NOT a use. It's incitement to assault.

But thanks to the rise of Photoshop, and the general crappiness of cell-phone cameras, blurry digital pictures of Sasquatch were less than impressive. And this is why the phones now come with VIDEO CAMERAS built in. That commercial with the big, brown, hairy sports mascot? That's advertiser code for Sasquatch. Nothing in advertising is ever unintentional, people.<?p>

So at this point, I think the whole picture is dropping into place. The cell-phone industry is adding coverage and features in a systematic attempt to trap Sasquatch. As more and more cell-phone towers go up, there are fewer and fewer places where Sasquatch can hide, knowing that if he ventures out for a bit of fish or tasty human flesh (depending on your personal interpretation of Sasquatch), he might run into someone carrying a Motorola with built-in Avid video editing suite. And Bejeweled. Oh, and you can call people on it. A flawless theory, until the introduction of RINGBACK, which you may remember from before the rambling, column-padding Sasquatch aside.

Ringback doesn't affect Sasquatch at all, which means it exists solely to PISS ME OFF. The idea behind Ringback is it's like a custom ringtone. When one phone calls another phone, that phone makes a noise, and thanks to modern technology, that noise can be Ode to Joy or any one of hundreds of 50 Cent songs. Ringback operates on the same principle, except that the Ode to Joy or 50 Cent songs don't play on the receiving end - they play in the ear of the person calling you.

Yes, that's right. If I call your cell-phone, and you're a complete and utter weenie, you can pay your cell-phone company two or three bucks, and instead of the universally known and understood "Brrrrrrrt Brrrrrrrt" sound we've all been fine with hearing for decades, I'll end up hearing a tinny, AM-quality rendition of James Taylor's "Fire and Rain". On a related note, I have decided that technological advances have made the traditional telephone greeting "Hello" obsolete, and thus, when faced with a ringback tone, I will be replacing it with the more modern, hip, "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?"

I understand the ringtone thing. It's excessive and stupid, but it does keep every single person on the bus from going through their pockets at the same time when a phone rings. But all ringbacks do is make some person hear your shitty music. It's like a boombox, only instead of the general fuck you to the whole vicinity that a boombox represented back in the day, the ringback is a laserlike, focused fuck you to someone who, until the phone started ringing, actually wanted to talk to you.

So let's join together and reject utterly the "ringback" tones, and return cell-phones to their original purpose - fucking over Sasquatch.

* For values of "so many" equal to zero.

** If you actually have the presence of mind, atter stumbling across Sasquatch, to call it "Sasquatch" instead of "Bigfoot", then you're a pretentious prick and deserve to be eaten by a woodland man-ape or run over by a monster truck.

*** YOU ARE DUMB HAPPY FUN-TIME ACTIVITY CORNER: Say "Sasquatch Snapshots" five times fast!

You'll Never Guess Where I'm Calling You From

Memo to Sprint: YOU ARE DUMB.

On Monday, I extolled the virtues of science and technology, which, on average, has enriched and ennobled all of our lives over the centuries in ways that phlogiston, witchcraft, and orgones cannot complete with. The key phrase being ON AVERAGE. As anyone who owned a Coleco Adam can tell you, some pieces of technology should never have made it out of science's fecund womb.

Some technology solves problems we knew we had. Indoor plumbing, for example, solves the problem of Not Having Our Own Shit Everywhere, and I am eternally grateful to it. Some technology solves problems we didn't know we had, but we actually had.

I mean, when I was a tender young lad in my formative years, I never could have imagined that one day, I would need to instruct a box on my shelf to make a purely digital recording of a pay-cable talk show so that I could, the next day, transfer that digital recording over to a super-powerful "thinking machine", so that I could take that video, separate out seveal dozen frames of it, and string those frames back together in a compressed image animation format so that, using a packet-switched network of fiber optics, I could broadcast the image of a man picking his butt to hundreds upon hundreds of strangers. But science and technology solved that problem for me years before I knew I'd have it.

Which brings me, in a roundabout, space-filling way, to the fine people at Sprint, who have managed to solve a problem that nobody knew they had, because NOBODY HAD IT. They've invented a box that lets you use your home phones over Sprint's cellular phone network.

The last time I checked, HOUSES DON'T MOVE. Even so called "mobile homes" only actually move when they're picked up by a tornado and flung headlong across the Kansas landscape. So the biggest acvantage to cellphones, the thing we get them for, is completely moot. So why the hell would people want to do it?

It might e good for stutterers, actually. Cell phone technology has been a boon to the stuttering community, because the average person can't tell the difference between a wireless phone signal randomly cutting in and out and your average, non-Bachman-Turner-Overdrive-lead-singer stutterer. But the fact is, when I'm talking to the nice man who called me about my current vinyl siding needs, I can't have bits of words dropping out of sentences. It's 2004, goddammit. We were supposed to have VIDEOPHONES by now. And instead Sprint's spending its time making boxes that can barely handle audio.

Sprint wants you to think it's about cost. So did the local reporter from whom I found out about this device, which is odd, because the reporter then proceeded to outline a series of facts that, when taken together, show the box to be a complete fucking ripoff. But since I'm on a bit of a shaky moral high ground when it comes to "not reading what one is writing", we'll just move on to those facts.

You can, according to Sprint, convert your home to a giant cell-phone for just $20 a month, local and long-distance included. And as we all know, when a phone company quotes a price, that price is SOLID. There are never any catches or conditions that may suddenly send the real cost skyrocketing, right? Right.

You have to buy the box, of course. All it really is is some cell-phone hardware that plugs into your wall. Unlike most $100 cellphones, it doesn't have a screen. It doesn't take pictures or play Ja Rule songs or run crappy versions of Tetris or store phone numbers or calculate your tip. But it does cost a hundred bucks.

On top of that, you have to already be spending at least $40 a month on a Sprint cell-phone plan, whose allocated minutes the home phone also uses up. The plot thicks! And if you're buying a hundred dollar box to make cell-phone network calls from your home when you already have a cellphone that works JUST AS WELL IN YOUR HOUSE as this box will, "thick" is being too kind. And Sprint somehow expects the people stupid enough to go for their plan to be smart enough to hook it all up themselves and physically disconnect their homes from the phone system, too.

It is possible to save money with one of these boxes, though. I know this because the intrepid Star Tribune reporter found one! Guy's saving about ten bucks a month! That ain't chump change! Of course, he bought the converter box froma third company, not from Sprint, and just has it linked with a cheap AT&T cellphone account. Here's a hint. If your best example of a technology comes from guy who's not actually using what you're reporting on, maybe you should rethink your first paragraph. And your career choice, while you're at it.

Lobes, Yes. Frontal? Not So Much.

Fuck politics.

Politics wouldn't even be so bad if it weren't full of, well, politicians. Politicians like the speaker of the Minnesota House, Steve "My last name sounds like a secretion" Sviggum, who had the unmitigated gall to warn a liberal faith-based activism organization not to presume to speak on God's behalf. I can't blame him for not listening to his president, but since he said this in answer to a question about how he'd vote on the four main issues the activists cared about, he may want to invest in one of those sviggum-flushing ear-enemas they sell at the Walgreens.

And who needs the manufactured drama of politics anyway, when the common man is more than capable of manufacturing his own tiny, insipid, unnecessary dramas out of the stuff of everyday upscale life? Which is why I'm forced to issue the following memorandum to iPod drama queens YOU ARE DUMB.

Along with that comes yet another tip-of-the-fuck-you to Wired, who apparently have nothing better to do than to seek out the vaguely insecure and broadcast that insecurity to the world at large. It's a shotgun-approach to being ahead of the curve, because if one of these vague insecurities ever snowballs into a national phenomenon, Wired can point to it and say how clever they are. And that's how we get an entire article about people not wanting to wear iPod headphones in public.

Apparently, being seen in public with the trademark white headphones that come packaged with an iPod immediately identifies you as an iPod owner. This may be true. I don't know. While I spend a lot of time on public transportation, none of it is spent looking at the ears of complete strangers, trying to divine their brand preference. Nor do I spend a lot of time scanning the passersby, trying to see which of them might be trying to identify my personal electronics from two seats back. I must be the only one who doesn't give a fuck, though, because there are, by Wired's assertion, a growing community of "closeted" iPod users who want to carry around 20-40GB of music in their pocket, but don't want weirdos staring at their ears. Me, I've set up a custom playlist of text, and tagged it ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"It makes me feel individual to customize it," Godin said. "Even if its just changing the headphones. That's the irony of the whole thing. Most of the people who are Apple's biggest cheering section are people who go out of their way to wear what everyone else is not wearing and eat where not everyone else is eating. They're the kind of people who like to customize their life and feel like they're independent." - Seth Godin, who's put way too much thought into this.

Expressing your individuality through headphones does not make you an iconoclast. It makes you a self-obsessed prick. And, if I were a betting man, a self-obsessed prick with a fair amount of Polyphonic Spree on your hard drive. It's the classic Subculture Asshole Phenomenon, expressed in gadgetry instead of its usual havens of Internet message boards and convention hotel rooms.

Being a member of a subculture does not make you "special". When that subculture grows and starts merging with the culture, ergo, that does not make you LESS "special". And rebelling against the subculture's growth, running away, and starting a private club of one, raging against the white plastic machine, does not then restore your specialness. You're just wasting your own time and money and pissing the rest of us off at parties in the process. That's the other difference between iconoclasts and self-obsessed pricks. The pricks tell you in excruciating detail how they're being unique.

Of course, Wired being Wired, the only self-obsessed pricks referenced in the article are Godin, an "anonymous New Yorker", and a "friend" of Godin's in a story told... by Godin. I believe the friend in question lives in Canada, and thus, you would not have met her.

The rest of the article consists of fashion and trend experts, who are self-obsessed pricks who get paid good money to project their personal opinion onto the rest of the country.* They spent a lot of time reassuring Wired's readers that iPods were still cool and hip, even though you can buy them in Target now, and some people's co-workers are asking if iPods are appropriate gifs for children aged eight and nine.

The only possible valid excuse for ditching the iPod headphones comes from blogger Josh Rubin, who inadvertently provided it while trying to be a white-headphone booster.

"There's a whole white-cord subculture here in NYC. It's like an unspoken brother/sisterhood on the subways and in the streets." I'd swap out the headphones in an instant if I thought it would save me from Rubin and his ilk, who think we're part of some global shared experience because we own the same brand of gear. But why spend $30 or more on new headphones when shouting "Fuck off, technohippie!" is free, and sounds great?

*You know, put like that, I really think I should be checking the classifieds and figuring out how to fake a resume for trend consulting.

Pants, The Final Frontier

Memo to Richard Branson: YOU GO, CRAZY RICH MAN.

No sarcasm there. There really isn't a traditional "target" for today's column. For those who miss the excessively political tone of the last three weeks, allow me to point out that George W. Bush is a doodyhead. But on the subject of space tourism, there is no DUMB, except that I'm convinced that only two people have really seen the true potential for Richard Branson's new venture - Richard Branson, and me.

Here's the way it's officially going to work, on paper. Dick Rutan, who's currently trying to win the X-Prize with Spaceship One, is going to provide Richard Branson of the Virgin empire with a half-dozen ships based on the SS1 design. Branson would then offer, for about two hundred grand, a 90 minute suborbital trip into near-space, including four-minutes of microgravity, and a stunning view of the curved horizon of Earth.

Space tourism. It brings to mind the noble pursuit of flight, the pioneering spirit, the astonishing futures promised to us since the fifties by science fiction writers. The common man being able to go into space has been a lifelong dream of science nerds and space geeks for decades. But as far as I'm concerned, Richard Branson's "Virgin Galactic" is a bold new step forward in the arena of space-fucking.

The zero-G hump. Subject of late night horny nerd-speculation at SF conventions since the first horny nerds stayed up late at SF conventions. There's no way it hasn't already happened, of course. With 40 years of space travel, 20 of them including women, under our belts (as it were), plus the neutral buoyancy simulator at NASA, you gotta figure folks have made the alien with two backs more than once. But Richard Branson is poised to put the knocking of the moon-boots within the reach of the rest of us. Well, OK, the rest of us who happen to be wealthy bastards.

And I think he knows it, too. The clues are all there. First of all, he named his company "Virgin" in a bit of classic misdirection. I really don't think an insanely wealthy mogul who spends most of his time trying to cross oceans in balloons is an uptight prude, so it must be called "Virgin" to create a false sense of wholesomeness and purity for the eventual day when he'd be able to make the Mile High Club look like two middle-aged fundamentalists in their monthly go at the missionary position.

Look at the proposed flight plan. Ninety minute flight, four minutes of weightlessness. That means 43 minutes on the way up for Space Foreplay and Jumpsuit Removal, four minutes for the Three-Axis Mambo, and 43 minutes for drinks, smokes, apologies, wiping down the bulkheads, and regaining your composure for when you walk down the exit ramp and have to lie to everyone about the exhilaration of flight and the beauty of the Earth from space.

I know what you're all thinking. Four minutes doesn't exactly sound like a sexual marathon. But first of all, you're doin' it IN SPACE. If people get all kinds of bonus jollies from cars, elevators, or park bushes, I think having sex in SPACE ought to speed things along enough that four minutes for the actual act will be plenty.

Second of all, you're doin' it IN SPACE. Which means it's like fugu. It doesn't HAVE to be great, because it's IN SPACE. And from that point on, you can tell people you did it IN SPACE. Fugu is, from what I've heard, some seriously bland fish. But it can get away with it, because you RISKED DEATH by eating it. Once you've risked death for a meal, that meal tastes fabulous, no matter what it's actual flavor is. Same with the space-fuck.

And third, and most importantly, four minutes isn't anywhere NEAR enough time to exhaust the potential of the Tropospheric Tango. Which means plenty of incentive to scrape up another two hundred grand and try again.

That's the other thing. TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS. Sure, it's like the early CD players, which cost a thousand bucks and had just the two buttons. You spend that much on a trip into space, you're going to want to get more out of it than you could manage with a harness, an HDTV, and a DVD from the local science museum. For two hundred grand, you're gonna want to get yourself a piece of asteroid.

But for the clincher, we're going to have to turn to Mr. Branson himself. ACTUAL SPACEFUCKING QUOTE TIME!

"We hope to create thousands of astronauts over the next few years and bring alive their dream of seeing the majestic beauty of our planet from above, the stars in all their glory and the amazing sensation of weightlessness." - Richard Branson.

He's gonna "create" thousands of astronauts? Yeah, by conceiving them in orbit! And let's face it, the "stars in all their glory"? The "amazing sensation of weightlessness"? The only reason he can get away with these euphemisms is that the AP reporter at the press conference didn't hear the Official Porn Guitar playing behind the curtain.

And on the off chance you're STILL unconvinced... he's naming the first one the V.S.S. Enterprise. Come ON! Do I have to draw you a map? Enterprise? Kirk? Spacefucking? If there isn't a video on the Internet within seven days of the maiden voyage, then what tiny faith I have in human nature I'll have left at that point will vanish forever.

An Entirely Different, Unrelated Kind Of Bad Call

Memo to Techno-Pussies: YOU ARE DUMB.

Look, I'm no Luddite. I love all the things that capital-T Technology has given us, from the Game Boy Advance to the elaborate web of cameras, digital editing machines, satellite transmission, and digital video recorders that allow me to watch Andy Dick brutally abusing his stupid, annoying, pretty twentysomething assistant contenstants whenever the hell I want. Technology is great.

But like fire, the atom bomb, and the Segway, sometimes, technology can be used for evil. And not the good, clean, fun kind of evil, either. Sometimes, technology can be used to facilitate the most retarded kinds of social behavior, turning our everyday lives into a bad episode of Seinfeld or Sex In The City*.

For example, the cell phone.

Don't panic. You Are Dumb Dot Net has not been replaced by an episode of An Evening At The Improv circa 1997. Stay with me here. I promise you won't be hearing any trite ranting about driving with a cellphone, ringtones of the A-Team theme, how they're getting smaller and smaller, or any of that crap. I may be half-assing it after a long, tiring weekend, but I have more self-respect than that.

No, my ire today is reserved for a brand new service being offered by both Virgin Mobile** and Cingular: The programmable excuse call. Here's how it works. First, you must be a complete fuckwit. Second, you must own a Virgin Mobile or Cingular cellphone. Third, you must be willing to pay a small fee for being a complete fuckwit, and fourth, you must have gotten yourself into a situation that you may need to get yourself out of, i.e., you're going on a date.

So you put a date and time into your phone, and at that pre-arranged date and time, the cell-phone company calls your phone, provides you with a script and a ready-made excuse designed by, I kid you the fuck not, PROFESSIONAL LINGUISTS, so that you can leave your date in the dust if he or she begins discussing, say, what their character, a level nine dark-elf warrior mage, did when confronted with a cunning series of deadly traps last week. Or their fondness for Lyndon LaRouche.

It's enough to make Darwin weep, really. Is it not enough that we do not, at any given moment, need to worry about being eaten by a lion? Must we eliminate every last risk of consequences from our lives? Already, ten thousand people a month are using this service to escape the hours of drudgery and boredom that is their rightful due for agreeing to swing by Champps for a couple of drinks with Steve from the marketing department in the first place. With every passing month, we grow weaker and softer, and when the aliens come to harvest us for our juicy organs, I'll tell you this much. They're not going to give a fuck if your cell phone is ringing.

All of the above assumes, of course, that the service works, which, given the example provided, is a pretty big assumption. This service is much more likely to turn your life into a wacky sitcom moment than actually give you an out. In the example provided, the phone rings, the voice on the end instructs you to say "Not again! Why does this always happen to you? . . . All right, I'll be right there." You are then instructed to tell your obligation that your roommate is locked out and you have to go help him or her.

Seems simple enough at first, but this means, if you're planning to use this service, you must in no way shape or form mention your living arrangements during small talk, lest you reveal that you live alone, or under a bridge, or any situation that may not be then contradicted by your emergency escape call.

And since they provide you with any one of a number of completely random excuses, the contents of which you will not know in advance, you thus have to avoid saying anything at all about anything at all that might end up being contradicted in case you need your escape call. This will make you appear, to your date, to be a shifty, mysterious drifter with a lengthy criminal record, and force them to use their OWN cell-phone escape call to get away from you before you carve them up and store them in your fridge.

Eventually, all dates will become five-minute staring contests ending in simultaneous polyphonic ringtones, nobody will ever have sex again, and the human race will die out. Thanks, Cingular!

* Or, more simply, ANY episode of Seinfeld or Sex In The City.

** In the interests of full disclosure, I must reveal here that Virgin Mobile USA is in fact the company whose cell phone I carry around in a futile attempt to find a working signal somewhere in the Twin Cities metro. It's less an emergency communications device and more of an existential quest with a rechargeable battery. Whenever I look at it, it's searching for something it cannot find.

Thumbthing Thtupid

Memo to... OK, I honestly have no idea who to address the memo to today. But someone's fuckin' stupid.

I can't exactly call Kimberly Yeo dumb, because she turned an utterly useless skill into about fifteen grand. And I have yet to turn one red cent from MY useless skill in the past six months, so calling her dumb would reflect poorly on me.

I can't really call Guinness dumb. Not the beer, the world record people. They have a job to do. They have a specific mandate in this world. And this mandate not only does not require discretion, but it in fact demands a unique lack of discretion. They have a decades-old history of doing shit like this. It's expected of them.

I'd love to declare, in aggregate, the other 124 people involved, who, unlike Ms. Yeo, gained nothing from the experience except sprained thumbs, to be a gaggle of 'tardhood, but I really can't, because on any given day, any one of them could have come out on top.

I'm sorely tempted to call James Trusler dumb, 'cause I don't even know if he got money when he did it, but let's face it, to be walloped so heinously at something so trivial; to go from Grand Champion to Stuff On A Rock* in a matter of seconds, must already be so incredibly bruising to your ego that any further abuse I piled upon his head would be gratuitous and cruel.

I'm actually heavily inclined to fire all cannons in a massive broadside against SingTel, the Singapore phone company whose fault this latest incident is, but, as the existence of Mr. Trusler shows, they are not the first, and will not be the last.

So I'm forced to throw out a vague, nebulous net of rage that we live in a world in which exists a competition, with cash prizes, a world record, and Guinness certification on the line, for SENDING MOTHERFUCKING TEXT MESSAGES OVER YOUR PHONE.

As lame as the Olympics are, there are certain Darwinian survival traits rewarded with gold medals and cereal boxes. Yes, I'm familiar with rhythmic gymnastics and ice dancing, but overall, on the whole, being three tenths of a second faster than the guy next to you when being chased by a dinosaur** can convey certain useful benefits.

What, exactly, does being the world's fastest text messager get you? Even if you can type out "HLP BNG ETN BY DNOSR" into your phone in three seconds, you're still gonna get chomped before the authorities manage to figure out that means "Help, I'm Being Eaten By A Dinosaur" and dispatches a Rapid Deployment Anti-Dinosaur Team to your location.

For the record, Ms. Yeo was able to send the 160-character message in 43.24 seconds, making James "Pussy Thumbs" Trusler's previous record of 67 seconds seem like a wait at the DMV by comparison. The message? "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human." As you can see, they are attempting to artificially insert an element of danger in a failed stab at relevance.

The text message is already a borderline-irrelevent bit of technology. The ten-key entry for them, even more so. We're in the middle of a peculiar, short-lived bubble in which 23-year-old students in Singapore with fast thumbs can make fifteen grand in a manner nearly 10% less degrading than prostitution. Enjoy your moment in the sun while it lasts, Kimberly. But just remember that the higher you are, the harder the fall will be when someone shaves five seconds off your time thanks to a strict regimen of practice, diet, and crank. Who'll be LOLing then?

* Just officially acknowledging the Norm Macdonald homage here, to stave off the inevitable e-mail.

** I know this one too. Put down the hyperlink to paleontology.com and step away from Outlook, slowly.

OMG U R DUM LOL

Memo to, well, everyone. SPELL OUT YOUR DAMN WORDS.

It's now officially gone too far, you see. It was annoying when Prince did it in song titles, it was annoying when you did it in chat rooms. It's annoying when you do it in message board posts. It's probably annoying when you probably write it out longhand on paper. But, as I said when I started this paragraph, officially. Too. Far.

Nestle. The multinational candy conglomerate, not the verb. Just assume from this point forward that any accent marks that are part of the official registered trademark are present whenever I type "Nestle", because it's too damn early in the morning to remember ALT-codes, OK? Anyway, Nestle. Makers of the Crunch bar. As sponsored by man-mountain Shaquille O'Neil. Their new commercial features their relatively new tagline.

The new tagline is "Why be plain, when you can be crunchy?" That's how it is on their website, and their first Shaq spot. Their second Shaq spot, however, ends with: "YB Plain? When you can be CRUNCHY". Setting aside the punctuational... irregularities, we're left with a bit of a conundrum, that conundrum being, as usual, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?"

It's bad enough that they decided to use "YB" instead of "Why Be". Odds are, the guys working on Nestle's ad campaign are not one of the Two Acceptable Categories For Not Spelling Out Your Words, which I will get to in a bit. But they weren't even consistent! They spell out "be" in the second line, and completely forget you can, if you're going to be retarded anyway, replace "you" with "U". It's like the ad guy was typing the first line while suffering from some terminal disease, and wanted to make sure he finished the slogan before he died. But then, the doctors made a medical breakthrough halfway through "When", and he could live life to the fullest once again. It's an uplifting story. We're going to rewrite it for Valerie Bertinelli and pitch it to Oxygen for the fall.

There are, as I have already foreshadowed, Two Acceptable Categories For Not Spelling Out Your Words. These categories are based on sound reasoning. Specifically, that the time saved by leaving the "yo" off of "you" and the "ae" off of "are" is actually important and significant. "Important" and "significant" are, by the way, defined by me, not you, so I don't care how long it takes you to apply lip gloss. Sit down and shut up. You get to not spell out your words if and ONLY IF you qualify as:

DISABLED. And when I say "disabled", I don't mean "bad back" or "missing a leg" or "blind", because none of these things affects your ability to type *. I mean disabled so that you have to peck out words with a stick taped to your head, or puff out some elaborate code in a breath tube to make letters appear on the screen. You folks can spell stuff however you want, and that's fine.

TEXT MESSAGING. Not that you -should- be text messaging anyway. I'm hard-pressed to think of a situation where text messaging is the best way to communicate. But you seem to think you have to, and since you've only got the twelve buttons to cover the entire alphanumeric character set, we'll give you a pass. If you've got more than 12 buttons on your space device, though, tough shit. Spell it out.

At the risk of sounding like some kind of reanimated corpse from the dawn of prehistory, I was sending messages over modems back when all there were were 300 baud modems. 300 baud modems are like dialup. You know how slow dialup is? 300 baud is 187 times slower than that. At 300 baud, you could read your e-mail letter by letter as it transmitted over the wire. And you know what? We still spelled our fucking words out. You've got broadband, you've got keyboards with actual keys on them, you've got point and click interfaces. You have the 1.5 seconds you need to turn "u" into "you". So do it, fuckheads.

Especially if you're some 39-year-old marketing asshole at Nestle who wants to appeal to the youth demographic.

*If you've got your blind-dude voice recognition software set up to render your "are"'s as "r"'s, I don't care if you live in a world of perpetual darkness. YOU ARE DUMB.

Wired

Memo to Wired and music critics: YOU ARE DUMB.

I spent a lot of time last week poking fundies with a stick. Not too much time, of course, because I don't think there's such a thing as poking fundies with a stick too much. But a lot. So I'll try to lay off them this week, just for the sake of variety.

My task is made easier when people who should know better spout something so pretentious, so wanky, and simultaneously so clueless that it make my eyeballs boil with rage. And Wired came through in the clutch. Remember Wired? They've always been pretentious, but they used to at least be ahead of the curve. I distinctly remember reading in their pages about this new technique that would allow you to substitute words for domain names. This Universal Resource Locator, aka URL, aka the web addresses we've been using for years, got a short paragraph in one issue of Wired long before they became ubiquitous.

Now, Wired is a shadow of its former self, and their web version, Wired News, posted an article about a revolution, a revelation, a renaissance in the way people listen to music now. That innovation? SHUFFLE PLAY.

Yes, all of a sudden, music cognoscenti and critics are realizing that because of the shuffle play feature, when you play all the songs in your iPod or on your hard drive, you have NO IDEA what song is going to play next! Astonishing! I believe, even as I speak, that Arthur Conan Doyle is rising from his grave and, pen gripped in decaying hand, is penning a new story in which a legendary detective walks up to these people and utters the classic line of dialogue: "No shit, ME."

ACTUAL QUOTE TIME! ""I have seen the future, and it is called Shuffle." - Alex Ross, the guy who writes about music for the New Yorker, not the guy who dresses up his neighbors in superhero costumes, paints them, and wins awards. If that's "seeing the future", then I'm Nostradamus on steroids, 'cause I figured this shit out before I knew what a clitoris was.

"There is something thrilling about setting the player on Shuffle and letting it decide what to play next. The little machine often goes crashing through barriers of style in ways that change how I listen." - Ross again. What the FUCK?! I can only assume that, unable to find a new music writer, the New Yorker was forced, through occult science and necromancy, to imbue one of its old line-drawn cartoons, COMPLETE WITH OLD-TIMEY TOP HAT, to life. Who calls an iPod a "little machine"? Is Ross secretly channeling Thurston Howell III?

"Their music collection becomes a treasure trove full of hidden delights which the magic of the machine throws up at them. Some users feel that the machine intuitively understands them by giving them just the type of music they want to listen to when they want it." - the appropriately named Michael Bull, who lectures on media and culture at the U of Sussex. Since Bull fails to deride these people as superstitious morons, I can only assume that he's full of himself in at least two separate and distinct ways. Possibly three.

"This is a radically different way of encountering music and one I don't need to tell you is not possible in any other format." - Steve Bowbrick, columnist for the UK newspaper The Guardian, and a man I want to hit over and over again with a stick until he retracts this sentence.

And if that wasn't bad enough, Wired even managed to find an opposing viewpoint that was EVEN MORE PRETENTIOUS AND IDIOTIC. And they found it coming out of the cakehole of a marketing professor. Quelle surprise. "Personally, and I believe I speak for many old farts here, I appreciate listening to music, be it an opera or a pop album, in the sequence in which the artist decided to present it. Temporal order is an important element of how a work unfolds dynamically over time, an important factor underlying the aesthetic effect. Random shuffle pretty much flushes that down the toilet." - James Kellaris, University of Cincinnati. Kellaris then went on to explain the coherent, natural flow between "Who's Got My Back?" and "Signs", tracks three and four of Creed's 2001 album, "Weathered". That last bit may have just happened in my head. I'm not entirely sure.

When Rip Van Winkle* is telling you to wake up and get with the times, you are deeply out of touch and DUMB.

* EDITOR'S NOTE: This joke would also work using "Robert Van Winkle".

ClearPlay

Memo to Wal-Mart and ClearPlay: YOU ARE... eh.

See, this is exactly the type of thing that SHOULD send me into a spittle-flying, rage-filled polemic on the dullards and morons who infest society. But I just can't work up the anger. The whole thing is sad, yes. It's disappointing. But at the end of the day, it's like watching people walk the wrong way on the merry go round. You know they're not going anywhere. You know they're gonna end up getting a pole in the face. But they're only fucking themselves over, and they're idiots, so who gives a damn?

Here's your obligatory backgrounder: RCA has struck a deal with ClearPlay to incorporate technology into a new DVD player, to be sold for eighty bucks at Wal-Mart. The people at ClearPlay watch movies and create a set of instructions for the DVD player. The DVD player then mutes the audio every time someone swears, and skips ahead anytime there's nudity, violence, or sexual content.

Which is, admittedly, completely and utterly obscene. An affront to art. A crazed "solution" to the perceived threat of media filth. But you know what? If people really want to go to Wal-Mart, buy their ClearPlay player, and watch their fullscreen, butchered version of Lake Placid which, according to ClearPlay's own site, has had the "Blood and Gore" reduced from EXTREME to MILD, the viloence reduced from EXTREME to MINOR, the language, including Betty White calling people "cocksucker", reduced from EXTREME to NONE, and the sex reduced from, um... MILD to MILD... well, let 'em. I'm sure it'll be a big time-saver, as they watch the stirring tale of eight people who go to a lake, and the two people who leave the lake.

I mean, it's barely even worth poking fun at the ClearPlay site, which mostly deals with the software-only version that works with your computer's DVD-playing software. I can see where this would be a big move for ClearPlay, as there's a bit of discrepancy between the markets of "people with the technical savvy to watch DVD's on their computer" and "mouth-breathing reactionaries with their heads up their ass". The Wal-Mart deal is a MUCH better fit.

The fine people at ClearPlay do warn people that "due to the story nature of some movies, and because ClearPlay only uses legal methods to control the DVD decoding, you will notice some of the ClearPlay skips and mutes. However, most subscribers quickly become accustomed to them and find them much less interruptive than the language, nudity or graphic violence that has been removed.", which I'll admit, is one of the all-time great sentences ever featured on YAD. The claim that only some movies have story elements. The implication that if only there weren't pesky legal restrictions holding them back, they could do a much nicer job of filth removal. And the knowledge that frequent jump cuts, discontinuities, and missing chunks of story are much less troubling than a boobie to their target audience...

I could even mention the blatant hypocrisy coming out of ClearPlay, which states repeatedly that its service exists to deal with "PG-13 and R-rated content", yet manages to find objectionable things to edit out of such PG-rated kids' fare as the two Harry Potter movies, Big (was there "mild blood and gore" in Big?!), The Iron Giant, the Freaky Friday and Parent Trap remakes (the latter of which has had its blood and gore reduced from Minor to Mild), and E.T. (because apparently Spielberg didn't fuck his own movie up enough).

But you know, at the end of the day, this kind of technology is actually great. Because it allows these bluenose, uptight assholes with no clue about art or entertainment to further isolate themselves from the rest of society. And it allows them to do so in the privacy of their own homes. It'll be like there's an entire nation of people who only saw the TV edit of Blazing Saddles. Eventually, the cultural gap will grow wider and wider. In time, the people with these players won't even know that "Aliens" has killing or that "Shrek" has fart jokes. And then they'll try to interact with the society they've rejected, and they'll be like an Amish elder at MacWorld, confused and frightened by all the flashing lights.

I figure it'll only be a few years beyond that when they all become like John Travolta in the plastic bubble. They'll have isolated themselves from violence, sex, and profanity so much that they'll have no natural defense against it. And on that day, "fuck" will become a KILLING WORD.

And they probably won't even understand the concept of a killing word, because their DVD player skipped over that entire section of Dune. Hoist on their own retard.