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It's 7 a.m. and I've not gone to bed yet because tonight I discovered Jandek.
How? Blame Wikipedia's List of unusual articles. I have a million other posts to make, but Jandek just took up most of my night.
I might have to wait until the sun comes up, it's that creepy.
I'm not exactly in the 60 Minutes demographic. I do, however, watch the program on a weekly basis. I feel it's important; I feel it's part of being an American to watch the program.
I don't know if I'm going to watch the program anymore. Why? Tonight Steve Kroft brought me a story that was, in essence, a five-minute-long advertisement for Best Buy's Geek Squad, one of the most ludicrously unnecessary organizations in world history.
Let's go to the videotape. (Transcript can be read for yourself here.
Oh, and you'll need to click the jump since this is gonna be a bit long.
We are becoming slaves to our own technology – addicted to and dependent upon all sorts of beeping, flashing gadgetry that is supposed to make our lives easier. But it has become so complicated to set up, program and fix, that most of us don’t know how to do it, giving rise to a multi-billion dollar service industry populated by the very people who used to be shunned in the high school cafeteria: geeks, like Robert Stephens.
"It takes time to read the manuals. I'm gonna save you that time cause I stay home on Saturday nights and read them for you," Stephens says, laughing.
Let's be rhetorical critics for a moment and essentialize this story opening.
Technology is supposed to make our lives easier
Technology is complicated and actually makes our lives harder
People who understand technology are social outcasts
Reading is time-consuming
People who read have no social lives
So far, so... completely off-base it makes me want to vomit. Five assertions made, zero affirmed.
"You and the rest of the geeks," Kroft remarks. "There's millions of us out there across the country," Stephens says. And 12,000 of them work for Robert Stephens, the founder and chief inspector of "Geek Squad," the tech support company he founded 12 years ago while he was still in college and sold in 2002 to Best Buy.
If there's millions of "geeks," then you're not as marginalized as you're claiming to be.
All you, my dear reader, need to know about Geek Squad can be learned from this handy video. (I apologize that the #2 media market in the country hires illiterate anchormen.)
"It looks a little weird walking down the street, 'cuz people think we're gonna hand out bibles. But when you see like 20 of us walk into a bar and start you know ordering beers, it looks like an FBI raid," Stephens tells Kroft.
I thought you didn't have a social life! What's this going to bars business? GET BACK TO WORK READING FOR ME BECAUSE I'M TOO BUSY PARTYING ON SATURDAY NIGHTS TO READ!
"This stuff's irreplaceable. Your master's thesis that you've been working on for six years that you, that you promised yourself you'll back up next week, we have saved more MBA degrees in this country than anybody," he adds.
You've been working on your master's thesis for six years? I think you have a bigger problem than your computer.
Stephens says the company has become indispensable. "Because I don't think that the pace of innovation is going to slow. I don't think people realize the Internet revolution hasn't even really started yet," he explains.
What does that have to do with installing Norton Antivirus on people's Windows boxes?
A dozen years ago, when Stephens started the Geek Squad, most people used IBM computers, and primitive Microsoft software
I think people stopped using IBM computers about 25 years ago, but at least Kroft got the "primitive Microsoft software" part right. In fact, it's still primitive!
Today, thousands of products and providers allow you to watch TV shows, make phone calls, download music print color photos, and dictate letters without leaving your desktop, if you have the time, the patience, the aptitude, and the available brain cells to master yet another software protocol.
Yeah, I've been partying so much on Saturday nights I lost all my brain cells. Explain to me again what a "software protocol" is again?
"Microsoft made the operating system, some company in Taiwan made the equipment, you’re running software from a company in California, and now you're installing the driver for a digital camera from a fourth company. You know, what are the odds that all of these are going to work flawlessly together for all 400 million people who have PCs? Zip," Pogue says.
This is so ludicrous I don't even know where to start. What does the fact that The World Is Flat have anything to do with hardware working correctly?
Then again, I've never installed a digital camera driver in my life. Even my Agfa Clik! camera worked just fine with Windows Imaging, which came with Windows 98.
"Honestly, where do you go if you can’t get it work. People buy this stuff and then [get] dropped. Where do they go for help?" Pogue asks.
I dunno, Google?
"How hard is it for an average person to go into a store and buy a high-def TV set and come back and work it," Kroft asks. "I would say, in my client base, it would probably be less than five percent," Austi says.
Austi clearly has a client base consisting entirely of aliens from the planet Stupid.
Robert Stephens, of the Geek Squad, says more than a third of the wireless routers and modems purchased at Best Buy are returned because people think they are just too complicated.
That is a boldfaced lie.
New York school teacher David Barkhymer, who considers himself a bit of geek, fell into the last category: he spent three days trying to hook up his new 32 inch HDTV, plodding through menus and a manual that was almost certainly written by Korean engineers.
Beyond the obvious slight to Koreans, has Mr. Barkhymer considered simply hooking up his TV using the handy color-coded cables? They've only been standardized since, oh, forever. Green goes to green. Blue goes to blue. Red goes to red.
Perhaps he's color-blind. Or from the planet Stupid.
Dr. Donald Norman is an uber-geek – a professor at Northwestern University and one of the preeminent engineers in the country. He helped set the technical standards for high definition television in the U.S., but he had to hire a geek to set up his own TV.
Maybe he was just too BUSY.
"Absolutely not. No, it's not their fault. It's the damned designers of this stuff who have no understanding of real people, everyday people," Norman says.
YOU DESIGNED IT, IDIOT!
"Someone complained to me, ‘You'd need a degree, an engineering degree from MIT, to work this damn thing,’" Norman says. "Well, I have an engineering degree from MIT. And I couldn't work it."
That giant sucking sound you just heard was thousands of potential MIT applicants downloading applications to Stanford.
Norman says one of the problems is function creep, adding all sorts of features that people don’t want, don’t need, can’t use, and don’t even know they have. For every new feature, there has to be a new button. And they keep getting smaller and smaller, and harder to read.
Perhaps we didn't need HDTV after all.
You might get used to it if you only had one remote, but a collection is the standard. Pogue says, "This is I suspect the situation most people have on their coffee tables."
You can buy a universal remote now for a few hundred dollars, but you don’t even want to know how complicated it is to set up. Almost everything has a computer chip in it now, including toasters.
A FEW HUNDRED DOLLARS?
Then there’s iPod’s, cell phones and digital cameras, even dishwashers and refrigerators that need to be programmed.
I have never had to "program" any of those objects.
"Why do I need a computer in my refrigerator?" Kroft asks.
"Well, you don't. But you bought one that does have a chip, so you're on the cutting-edge. Just be glad that you didn't get the one that requires an Internet connection. There are three of those now," Pogue says.
What do they do?
"It's absolutely amazing. When you run out of something, it knows, and it creates a list for you. A shopping list. So you can even hook it up to, let's say, one of the online grocery store delivery systems, and you're in business," Pogue says.
It's AMAZING! Be glad you don't have one.
It’s enough to make you want get in your car and drive as far away as you can get from all this advancing technology, providing you’re not doing it in a Mercedes, Audi or BMW: all have elaborate onboard computer systems, that may require you to navigate a number of different menus just to turn up the temperature or to tune the radio, not something that is recommended while you are driving along at 65 miles an hour.
If you can afford an expensive car, I'm assuming you made your money being intelligent enough to drive it.
"Well, if you're buying a 50 or $60,000, or more, car, you don't want pedestrian-looking buttons. You want something sophisticated, and something that the average car thief maybe can't figure out,” Ray adds. “If have a seven-series BMW, you just can't hand someone the keys and say, ‘Oh, take my car.’ Well, they're not going anywhere with it. ‘Take my car. But, oh, you have to come to the tutorial first.’"
Looks complicated.
Right now, there is plenty of job security – every two months something new comes out and their whole job changes. You could call it the revenge of the geeks.
"The geeks are ruling the universe," Kroft remarks.
Maybe their first job as emperors of the universe could be to teach people to, i dunno, read?
For what it's worth, 60minutes.yahoo.com has all kinds of video related to this story, but I'm not going to bother linking to them, since they only work on Windows, and I think that's irony at its greatest: if we weren't living in a Windows world, this entire story would never have been made.
If you keep choosing Logan over Piz, I'm gonna quit watching the show. And very subtle of you to add Ms. Bell's anti-meat politics to the plot of the show, too.
Nice to see Mac get the hookup, though. Sometimes I think I'd much rather have a girl like her than Veronica anyway.
Ate fried ravioli at Jackson's with my parents
Attended one of the funniest shows in history, Jobsite's production of All The Great Books (abridged) and got awfully intimate with Mr. David Jenkins.
No, really, see? (Crappy scan upcoming)
Had breakfast at Perkins served to me by my adorable roommate Jennifer
Spent the day at Honeymoon Island with my parents
Nutted it up to go in the porn shop to buy Ralph & Meagan a home bondage kit
Ate lots of shrimp, drank lots of beer, plus some brandy, at the wedding shower
Lost in poker -- again -- to Ralph's cousin Alexis
Spent six hours at Ferg's watching football with Tina, A.J., and their temporary work friends Ellen and Cynthia (two of the funniest women I've ever met)
Talked to Rhiannon
Got absolutely no work done
It was a good weekend.
Seriously, if you haven't seen the latest (abridged) show, you have to go. It's that f*cking hilarious. My parents loved it.
Today ABC News and myriad other sources are asking if Fox's American Idol is "too mean."
"You look like one of those creatures that live in the woods with those massive eyes," infamous judge Simon Cowell told one "Idol" hopeful.
That's not that mean. These people got their 15 seconds of fame -- what more were they expecting? "American Karaoke" is probably the most insipid program in the history of American television, and I'm only being somewhat facetious in saying that, as Fox has certainly lowered the bar on numerous occasions... but the fact that nearly a third of American televisions were tuned in to the show's season premiere leads me to a handful of conclusions.
1. Americans like smack talk.
Americans have consistently proven ourselves to be increasingly milquetoasty, letting their words speak for what used to be their fists. Americans love the smack. Need proof? Let's see how many blog postings have been covering the increasingly-ugly love affair between Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell:
10,370 according to Technorati. Yes, a human being at some point wrote up the smack being tossed between the two huge losers more then TEN THOUSAND TIMES.
Americans love smack. They love heckling, too, as I found out during my weekly Tuesday night performance at the Hangout.
I had just finished my paean to a divorced woman with kids, Kid Things.
"Are you done?" a drunk man asked from across the room.
"When's Darryl coming back," asked an even more drunk woman sitting near me. (Darryl being the guy who I sit in for when he takes a smoke break.)
I asked drunk man if he would like to play.
"I don't know how to play."
"They what makes you such a f*ckin' expert?" I retorted, and then improvised a song to impress the brunette Croatian girl whom I was hitting on despite her being on a date, with a guy, who was sitting right there. My song expounded upon how much greater Macedonia, my homeland, is compared to Croatia. I don't quite recall the lyrics, though I do remember saying something like:
"In Macedonia we roast our lamb in hot lard,
In Croatia you find Drazen Petrovic in your yard"
...or something similarly uncouth. Oh, I was making a point here.
2. Americans love to see people more pathetic than them.
I am not saying Americans are pathetic; rather, I think we happen to be freakin' awesome. However, I think that the American television-viewing public perceives themselves to be pathetic. Thus, being exposed to even bigger losers than we think ourselves to be is, by reference, a self-esteem boost. It's my assumption that people use programs in which other humans are degraded as a kind of visual Prozac, and perhaps a bit of coke or speed too. (Americans love drugs, remember? We invented all the cool ones.)
Seriously, it blows my mind why people would rot their brains with such tripe when they could simply go to their local club on karaoke night and see people equally-as-talented and equally-as-rotten go at it, and with a smoky room (except in Ohio) to boot! After all, no matter whether it's the opening week or the final round of Idol, you're never going to see anything as entertaining as a dude channeling Joe Cocker.
Yeeeeeeah, okay, that was pretty unwatchable. But, hey, it encapsulates of what my last night consisted.
http://www.theolympian.com/112/story/60302.html
Gore's 'Truth' restricted at schools
FEDERAL WAY - The school board in this suburb south of Seattle has restricted showings of Al Gore's movie on global warming, including requiring that it be balanced with an adequate opposing viewpoint.
...it's a science movie. Didn't you people watch it?
The board also required Superintendent Tom Murphy to approve when the former vice president's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," can be presented.
You know, because he doesn't have anything better to be doing.
The decision was sparked by complaints from parents who said their child was taking the film as fact after viewing it at school.
...it's a science movie. It's not just fact, it's "Truth."
"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who doesn't want the film shown at all.
Chill out, Frosty. I can see why you'd be in denial about global warming (can this possibly be a real name? This is definitely an Onion article) but what do condoms have to do with a movie about climate change? And is all you want shown in schools people who are actual teachers? That really limits the multimedia opportunities.
Also, seven kids? Maybe condoms belonged in your school.
"The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is," Hardison told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."
*head asplode*
"We have to ensure that our schools are not being used to politically indoctrinate anyone," said board member Dave Larson, who with Barney and board member Charlie Hoff voted Tuesday for the requirements. None has seen the movie.
I'm glad they're fiating policy with an informed opinion.
"I am shocked that a school district would come to this decision," the movie's co-producer, Laurie David, said in a prepared statement. "There is no opposing view to science, which is fact, and the facts are clear that global warming is here, now."
Duh.
But Larson offered two opposing articles, including one by author John Stossel that said many scientists discredit global warming predictions. He also cited NASA and NOAA Web sites referring to debate and disagreement over climate change.
Ahhhhhahaha John Stossel -- this article went over the edge of cliche with this one. It must be fake.
The film also has been denied a showing at Tacoma's Remann Hall, a high school for juvenile offenders, where Principal Rue Palmer denied a teacher's request.
"YOU'LL RUE THE DAY YOU TRY AND SHOW THAT MOVIE," Palmer said.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the day I cried harder than any day in my life to that point, and, save for the day 19 years ago yesterday, the hardest I cried in my life.
And ESPN is making me relive it, right now, on SportsCenter.
I am, of course, talking about The Drive. I need to go to bed, because this on tv ... it's ruining what was a fantastic evening with a young woman of whom I've really very fond. (I'll write about it later. It was a four-page night, and it's 5:37am.)
Elway. I still want to punch him in the face.
When I was 21, I bought a house. It was an old house, and a small house, but it had lots of room and I spent the next three years making it a nice house. I tore out the carpet and restored the hardwood. I painted everything inside and out. When I moved to Florida, it looked something like this.
That thing to the left is the apple tree in my front yard. You can also see my arbor vitae along the alley side, and the bows above the steps and each window.
Two years to the day I sold the house, I happened to find myself in Zanesville, and I decided to drop by and see how my house was doing.
It broke my heart. I don't know what troubles me more: that they tore out my apple tree? The hedge? The bushes along the porch? That they tore out my front door and hastily replaced it with a steel one? That the bows are gone? That there's a nasty "BEWARE OF GUARD DOGS" sign stuck to the front of the house?
I think the fact the hedge has been replaced by chickenwire hurt me the most.
Here's a view from the back. I had about five trees of various species in the backyard, as well as a hedge that continued all the way from the edge of the house to the property line (from where this picture is taken). Note that all vegetation on the entire property has been torn out. Note yet another "BEWARE OF GUARD DOG" sign. Note the door (one with beautiful plane glass, the original door) in back has been replaced with yet another grey steel door. Note the enormous doghouse made of scrapwood and the crap on the back porch.
*sigh* What makes someone think they need steel doors and guard dogs at a house that looks like a complete piece of sh*t? I almost went knocking on the door to confront the people I sold my house to about their horrible treatment of it, but I was afraid of having a guard dog or two rip off my manhood.
People suck.
